Chapter 46 -Misfortune

Faraway Wan

Their little band followed Ye Baiyi into the mountains' labyrinthine paths. After winding around for quite a while, they came upon a forest.

As soon as he laid a foot into it, Zhou Zishu's entire body tensed up. He couldn't have said what danger hid amidst the trees, but a sense of imminent crisis seized him.

Wen Kexing, who'd been chattering away all along, also clammed up. Even Ye Baiyi's face turned grave; the man in white made stops now and then, proceeding with extreme caution.

Zhang Chengling was the only one who sensed nothing amiss. In fact, the boy was congratulating himself in secret since it seemed he was getting the day off.

His shifu held him by the arm with his thin but firm hand, the heat from his palm warm enough to radiate through Zhang Chengling's thick, cotton-padded winter vest. It made him feel very safe and he obediently let himself be pulled along with quiet joy blooming in his heart.

Ye Baiyi mumbled under his breath nonstop and halted on occasion to draw diagrams on the ground with a twig. It intrigued Wen Kexing at first and he went to have a closer look. He found out soon enough, however, that the complex computation only gave him a headache. He retreated to the side, to stand shoulder to shoulder with Zhou Zishu.

"Don't you want to have a look at what he's doing over there?" he asked the other man in a low voice. Zhou Zishu's reply was full of self-awareness:

"What for? I wouldn't understand, anyway." He frowned before adding with a likewise lowered voice, "Thing is... the scouts I sent here were expert engineers, who were also masters in the cosmic calculation. I wonder why none of them could find the Marionettes Manor."

"Didn't you say that you had someone map out the area?" Wen Kexing asked.

"Yes, but when the cartographer came back with more people to find the Manor using the map he had drawn, not a single one of them returned."

Wen Kexing threw a solemn glance at Ye Baiyi's crouching silhouette and made his voice even lower.

"If even... were defeated by this place, do you reckon the old glutton can be relied on?"

Zhou Zishu was about to speak, but before he could say anything, Ye Baiyi stood up and turned to them.

"The rest of the journey is treacherous," he said in a stern voice. "If you do not wish for death, tread where I do."

He shot a look at Zhou Zishu who was rubbing his nose and added with a sneer, "Masters in the cosmic calculation, huh? With a useless leader like you, how could any of your subordinates be anything other than fat-headed rice

tubs1?"

With that, he walked off.

The remaining three's facial expressions turned odd — anyone who had witnessed Ye Baiyi descends upon food before hearing him disparage others as "fatheads" or "rice tubs" would have felt the same.

But as eccentric as the man was, putting Zhang Chengling aside, the two adults present knew to differentiate the important from the trivial. They both took off after Ye Baiyi at once.

As he was led along, Zhang Chengling glimpsed bones from various animals by the side of the track they followed. There were more and more of them, and the boy felt that the place was eerie indeed. After they traipsed on for a while longer, he spotted human skeletons which were all decapitated.

The sight terrified him. He addressed Zhou Zishu in a trembling voice.

"Shifu, why would the person we're looking for want to live in a place like this?"

Zhou Zishu tilted his head to cast a glance at him.

"How would I know? It takes all sorts to make a world I suppose."

Zhang Chengling hopped over a thighbone with caution and couldn't refrain from questioning his shifu again.

"This place is so hidden and has so many traps around it that each step is dangerous. Wouldn't the person who lives here be afraid of losing their own way home whenever they wanted to come out? Isn't it just like putting mouse traps under one's own bed?"

"Mousetraps under one's own bed?" Zhou Zishu inquired back, intrigued.

"One time, when I was small," Zhang Chengling said, "mice got into my room and we couldn't catch them even after trying everything. So I put two mouse traps under my bed before I went to sleep. It turned out, I forgot that I had left them there. I stepped on them when I got out of bed the next morning and it broke my toes."

Wen Kexing overheard them and burst out into giggles with a snorting sound. Zhou Zishu sighed. Then he spotted that Zhang Chengling was about to take a wrong step because he was so engrossed in his storytelling, and he hauled the boy back.

"Shut up and watch your steps. Do you want to die?"

Zhang Chengling bit his tongue while Zhou Zishu went on in a frosty tone, "And don't judge others by your own standards. How many people on earth do you think are as stupid as you?"

Wen Kexing joined the conversation then.

"There aren't that many reasons for people to hide," he said to Zhang Chengling in a gentle and patient voice. "Either a person thinks they have foes who want to hunt and kill them, so they have to bury themselves somewhere where no one can find them..."

"Somewhere like the Devils' Valley, perhaps?" Zhou Zishu cut in. Wen Kexing glanced at him.

"If you want to put it that way... well, yes," he replied.

Zhou Zishu seized the chance to question the man further.

"Ah. So, what unforgivable misdeed did the Valley Master commit back then for him to be driven to the Devils' Valley?"

Wen Kexing didn't mind his opportunistic interrogation.

"You mean me? But I'm a special case," he said in a boastful tone. "I did nothing wrong yet ended up there without a clue as to why. To this day I still wonder how a good person like me managed to live amongst a bunch of devils for so many years. Just like the lotus flower, I'm truly someone who has 'grown out of the mud yet remains

unsullied ', and who is 'by clear ripples pure yet does not my charms flaunt '."2

Zhou Zishu snorted and said nothing; it went without saying that he took everything the guy said as pure bullshit.

Wen Kexing heaved a sigh.

"A-Xu, you hurt my feelings, you know — Kiddo, you tell me, do you think I'm nice?"

Zhang Chengling's admiration for that elder whose kung-fu was as good as his temper, and who moreover would tell him stories, knew no bounds. He nodded at once, his head bobbing up and down like a pestle pounding garlic.

Wen Kexing was almost moved to tears. He patted the boy on the head and exclaimed with a poignant sigh, "Children always know best. They have a conscience and know how to differentiate good from evil. If you're nice to them, they will remember it. Unlike a certain someone ... Alas!"

Zhou Zishu kept quiet. Although they were both men who commanded other men, Wen Kexing's circumstances certainly differed from his. They were even different from those of someone like Gao Chong.

Gao Chong led a bunch of people who deemed themselves upholders of orthodoxy. He could use the word "righteousness" to rally his troops and confine them to self-imposed limits.

Even though he had headed a pack of, essentially, murderers and snitches, the people who joined Skylight were men who willingly agreed to sell their lives to him and the Emperor. The full might of the imperial throne backed his former organization, and since its inception to this day, nobody except him had dared challenge it.

The Devils' Valley, however, was vastly different, as the lot within it were fugitives.

Those people were comparable to a swarm of vile, poisonous insects who'd been crammed into a narrow and cramped jar to massacre one another as their only way to get through. It was a place that teemed with a million evils, and was only when one died could another life. With no morals and ruled by the survival of the fittest alone, anyone who emerged from it could be likened to the gu -insect-king of legend — the last standing survivor of a savage struggle between venomous creatures that concentrated within its body all the poisons of the

competitors it had devoured.3

Wen Kexing was good at pretenses. So good, even Zhou Zishu sometimes confused him for an ordinary, talkative man.

To his side, the devil himself continued to explain life to Zhang Chengling.

"And if the person isn't hunted by foes, then there is another reason for them to hide from others. That would be, of course, a broken heart. They know they will never again lay eyes upon the one person they wish most to see, so they'd rather entomb themselves in a place like this. That way, in due time, they may find comfort in telling themselves that if their special person isn't with them, it's only because they can't find their way in."

He exhaled a light sigh before he went on.

"If one day your Shifu is no longer around, I too might find a place like where we are now to retire. Otherwise, whenever I go out, I would see the many beauties prancing on the streets, only to find that the one who suits my heart best is not amongst them anymore. Wouldn't it be quite sad then?"

"And here I thought you wanted to live and die with me," Zhou Zishu gibed. "I did say that, but you didn't believe me," Wen Kexing bantered back.

"Just like... Just like Yu Boya shattering his zither?"4 Zhang Chengling chimed in from the side. Both men's faces went blank at the same time.

Zhang Chengling peeked at each man, in turn, not knowing what was wrong with what he said. It took a while for Wen Kexing to speak again.

"'No one left in the world to comprehend From Mountain Rises the Waters Scend'," he recited in a soft voice. "Yes, you could say that... But then, not quite."

He threw Zhou Zishu a look, but the man averted his gaze, so Wen Kexing fell into a hush. He caught up with the man wearing white and heeled him.

Suddenly, Ye Bayi's strides faltered. He came to a standstill to listen to his surroundings with rapt attention while holding up a hand, signaling for the other to stop.

"Be quiet," he ordered in a low voice.

Zhou Zishu's grip on Zhang Chengling's arm tightened. Immediately afterward, all four of them looked down at the same time. The ground beneath their feet was shaking, and a loud, unidentified humming sound echoed in the air.

Wen Kexing shot Zhou Zishu a look that meant "Told you the glutton isn't reliable, but you didn't believe me", but Zhou Zishu had no attention to spare him because, in the next second, a blast of energy surged up from below ground. The mountain quaked, and the earth seemed on the verge of splitting; the four of them vaulted into the air as one.

With Zhang Chengling in his hold, Zhou Zishu stepped on a branch from a large tree to gain leverage, but the branch snapped and fell off under the mere tap of his foot — as if it were fake. Zhou Zishu inwardly shuddered in alarm; he twisted in mid-air and tried anchoring the point of his shoe to the tree trunk, but again, in a split second, the entire massive tree collapsed in a resounding fracas.

Zhang Chengling buried his face into his shifu 's chest. Out of nowhere, he recalled a line his school tutor had once taught him — "Lean against the mountain, and the mountain will fall; lean against the tree, and the tree will

sprawl"5.

The proverb was true! As the other saying went "when one does not listen to one's elders, free of charge are the disasters"6.

The entire ground caved in as if an ominous mouth had gaped open in the earth, ready to devour everything and everyone. Zhou Zishu used the last momentum he had gained from stepping on the tree trunk to leap over fifty feet away. He had barely regained his footing, and hadn't yet had time to exhale a breath, when he scowled — in a blink of the eye, Wen Kexing and Ye Baiyi had disappeared!

Then, there was a sudden nothingness beneath his feet, and he felt himself plummet toward the darkness below. Zhou Zishu understood why the other two had vanished at once. He only had time to shield Zhang Chengling by cradling him into his arms before obscurity engulfed them.

The patch of ground he had stepped on was a trapdoor. It had opened up and had now closed itself again.

The pit into which they were free-falling seemed bottomless. Reckoning that they'd crash to their death if he did nothing, Zhou Zishu gathered his qi in a sharp breath and struck with his palm at a protruding stretch of the cliff below. The force of that blow couldn't have been measured; it blasted a crater into the rock wall. Stone debris and lumps of earth flew everywhere but it decreased their downward velocity quite a bit, and Zhou Zishu seized the chance to kick the wall using the Unbound and Untracked qing-gong technique that was unique to his clan.

His figure seemed to suspend itself in mid-air as if glued to the vertical rock face.

But then, Zhou Zishu realized that he had overreached, forgetting that his stamina nowadays had gone to seed. With a big kid like Zhang Chengling in his clutch on top of that, the effort made him gasp for breath as his qi faltered. He was inwardly cursing when the patch of rock he had pulverized shook again: before he could react, a

blade sprung out from a wall crack at a horizontal angle, only failing to transform them into a skewer of tanghulu7 by a near miss.

They both jumped in fright, and Zhou Zishu had no choice but to release the grip in his foot; they reprised their free fall.

Fortunately, they were near literal rock-bottom. Zhou Zishu landed on his feet and released Zhang Chengling. By chance, he also still had the small fluorescent pearl he had already used whilst trapped in the cavern with Wen Kexing. It provided a dim source of light that let them see around.

...Though Zhou Zishu wondered at his affinity with dark tunnels. Had he offended some shrewmouse or mole in a former life to be condemned to their fate?

At that moment, Zhang Chengling spoke up.

"Shifu ..." he began.

"Shush," Zhou Zishu uttered in a whisper. "Be quiet."

But Zhang Chengling was so scared his voice jumped up a pitch. "No... Shifu, look...!"

He didn't need the boy pointing. Zhou Zishu had seen it too — in the cramped rock chamber they found themselves in, a pair of glowing eyes were staring at them from not far away.

Zhou Zishu raised the fluorescent pearl and got the full picture of the thing: it was a giant python snake, its girth as thick as a man's waist — it was eyeing them with a covetous gaze whilst flicking out its forked tongue.

As the sayings go, "out of the frying pan into the fire" and "it never rains but it freaking pours". Zhou Zishu licked his lips and tasted what it meant to be so goddamned jinxed even water would stick between the teeth while

taking a swig.8

What's more, for some unfathomable reason, unmitigated terror made Zhang Chengling turn into a right chatterbox. His voice jabbered on in Zhou Zishu's ear:

" Shi ... Shifu, I... I've heard that pythons can move around really fast; so fast that a normal person can't evade them at all; and... and maybe because they have bad teeth, when they eat people, they'd first squash the person flat; if... if you get caught by one and it coils around you, you'd get strangled to death before every bone in your body gets crushed and your insides get squeezed into jelly, turning you into a flabby skin bag with only goo inside. Then, it will swallow you in one gulp because you'd have become so easy to digest..."

Zhou Zishu reached for his "Baiyi" sword at his waist. "Shut. Your. Mouth!" he growled through gritted teeth.

Thereupon, amidst Zhang Chengling's cries for mom and dad, the snake raised its head, and, as fast as lightning, it struck.

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Notes

1. Insult translated literally. A "rice tub" means someone who eats a lot, implying

incompetence because they do nothing but eat.

2. Lotus is associated with purity due to its self-cleaning leaves. The "lotus effect" has been explained by science since, and the physics behind it is quite amazing.

3. Gu is a half legendary poison allegedly prepared by putting venomous insects in a jar just like ZZS describes. The 'insect king is then collected for its poison. Note that Chinese traditional taxonomy differs from the western one, and the word that I've translated as "insect" also includes other creepy creatures such as snakes and scorpions, etc. It could be translated as "crawlies". I like this allegory a lot.

4. Refers to the famous story of friendship between Yu Boya (also known as Bo Ya) and Zhong Ziqi. Bo Ya was proficient at the zither, and when he met Ziqi by chance, he was amazed by his ability to understand the pictures he wished to paint with his music every time and became friends with him. (that I've translated as "Moutain Rises and Waters Scend) are two pieces authored by Bo Ya that Ziqi correctly deduce were evocations of mountain highs and flower waters? Upon death Ziqi's death, Bo Ya was so chagrined, he is said to have broken his zither while saying the line Wen Kexing later recites — with no one left to understand his music so well, he felt that there was no use for him to keep his instrument.

Although there are debatably homoerotic subtones in that stories, it's usually understood as an example of exalted, platonic friendship between two men (Chinese lit. has many of those, arguably more so than in western cultures). This also explains why WKZ says that his feelings for ZZS aren't the same as that of Boya for Ziqi. (A.k.a. his feelings aren't platonic.)

5. idiom translated literally. Usually adjoined with"Relying on Earth or Sky can't beat relying on the self". This means that external succor is bound to fail so one has to be self-sufficient.

6. colloquial saying translated literally.

7. skewers of candied hawthorn, sweet and sour, and a traditional treat sold by street

vendors. Associated with every Chinese kid's childhood.

8. The original sayings are: "a blessing never comes in pair, and misfortune never comes singly. translated literally.