A sudden snowstorm continued on and off for several days.
The educated youths at the Logging Camp said their farewells and scattered.
Having already moved down to Kaoshan Village, Lian Youming did not stay with Liu Danaodai. Instead, he chose an unoccupied earthen house, seeking some peace and quiet alone.
The old man still had not woken from his qigong dream. Who knew what technique he had picked up from the newspapers or television? Every night at midnight, he burned incense and prayed, shrouding everything in smoke like a spirit medium performing a ritual and making an awful fuss.
Outside the window lay an expanse of white. The cold wind howled, making the window paper flap incessantly.
Ever since eating that fierce tiger, Lian Youming barely felt cold even without heating the kang bed or lighting the stove. It was nothing like last year, when he had nearly frozen to death and suffered terribly.
He paced casually around the room, training his lower body while slowly raising his arms. His hands swept and gathered, sealed and closed, as he began pondering the Unusual Force the strange man in the fortress had used to strike pressure points with his fists.
He kept feeling that the man's method of spreading force from a point across an area, striking once to hit every muscle and bone in the body, had some connection to Coiling Silk Force.
The Coiling Silk Force the Mountain-Guarding Old Man had taught him spiraled inward. When the force was concentrated into a single point within the fist, its penetrating power was tremendous. A punch would not knock its recipient backward; instead, its force injured the internal organs through the chest and abdomen, like an immensely heavy hammer.
Thinking of the many applications of Coiling Silk Force, Lian Youming could