Volume 2, Chapter 79 – Farewell

When his family met disaster, Lian Feng was only five.

It was thanks to the advantage of that small body that, at the critical moment, he’d chosen to hide inside his mother’s slit-open belly, forcing himself deeper in despite the terror and nausea. Only that way had he survived the hands of those thugs.

He could still remember every minute and every second of what had happened. He remembered those men coming back to check, noticing his mother’s stomach was slightly swollen and laughing among themselves, saying, “Now that’s two lives with one corpse”—one of them even drove another sword into her abdomen for good measure.

That thrust had pierced straight through Lian Feng’s chest, and he’d blacked out under the pain and fear. He only woke again in the deep of night.

Then, naturally, he crawled out of his mother’s womb. His body, his face, even his hair were smeared with his mother’s blood and flesh; his small frame looked like some little ghost. Even he couldn’t tell whether what streamed down his face was blood or tears.

I was reborn in that moment.

Lian Feng had told himself that many times.

The old Lian Feng—the ignorant, willful, sometimes slightly spoiled child—was already dead. When he was “delivered” from his mother’s body in that form, he knew he was destined to walk a bloody road.

At first, he thought he was supposed to live for that mission. But he soon discovered that wasn’t how it worked at all.

Forget seeking out his enemies for revenge—he’d suffered immensely just trying to do the simplest, most basic thing: stay alive.

At the bottom of Great Yu, there were a tremendous number of poor refugees and drifters. In that layer of society, even adults couldn’t guarantee they’d be safe tomorrow, let alone a not-quite-six-year-old Lian Feng. Naturally, he had to endure more hardship, shed more blood and tears, just to keep struggling forward.

Along the way, he’d been a child slave.

When he tried to escape, he’d collapsed half-starved by the roadside, only to be casually scooped up by a passing caravan, given a little food and water, then sold off at the next stop to local gangs, who broke one of his legs and sent him out to beg.

When he was a little over seven, he resolved to break the gangs’ control. Banding together with a few other child slaves, he made a run for it, and almost had his throat torn out by a wolfhound. He still remembered how he’d grappled with that beast in the middle of the night, rolling with it into a foul drainage ditch. The moment before he scrambled back onto the bank, he had truly thought he was going to die.

Later, he heard that of the child slaves who’d fled with him that night, he was the only one who’d survived. The gang had gathered a large group of men to surround and kill him, but for some reason, all of them had dropped dead by that very ditch, their skins flayed from their bodies.

The whole town had been in an uproar, everyone saying it was a Demon Pool at work, that the gang’s behavior had been so twisted and violent even Heaven couldn’t stand by and had stepped in to punish them.

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Thanks to that incident, Lian Feng had enjoyed a short spell of relative peace. But to keep his belly full, he went to work as a medicine boy at a roadside pharmacy.

A medicine boy—that was a test subject. Some pharmacies and pharmaceutical companies would rotate out their old stock and develop new drugs. But the effectiveness of those drugs needed to be tested, and that step required volunteers. Only those with nowhere else to turn were willing to do it.

Lian Feng was relatively lucky; he took medicine for two years and didn’t die. The few prescriptions he’d tested had apparently been fine. He’d received a payout on the contract when he turned ten, and in exchange for giving it up, he entrusted the pharmacy’s owner to send him to a big city to live.

The “big city” meant a circuit city.

Great Yu’s Nine Provinces contained thirty-six Circuits, and the circuit city was the lowest administrative unit officially recognized by the state.

Lian Feng had heard adults say since he was small that circuit cities were a hundred times safer than scattered towns and villages. Not only did you not have to worry about monsters and Demon Pools; gangs weren’t as rampant inside, and even people as poor as baseborn drudges would be recruited by great households to do work that, while constantly called low and dirty, at least provided enough for food and clothing.

Reality was definitely different from the stories. After coming to the Chilong Circuit, Lian Feng had asked around everywhere and never once heard of any great household willing to take in a drifting child like him.

But it was definitely better than the places he’d stayed before! The Roads Directorate came regularly to the lower districts to ladle out porridge, and on holidays they handed out scant measures of rice and flour.

Refugees and poor folk could also choose to sit outside various Jobs Directorate offices, waiting for employers who needed hands to pick workers out; at the very least, it was a way to scrounge a meal.

Competition for that was fierce too. If Lian Feng hadn’t been lucky enough to be taken under the wing of a group of men who did carpentry, he’d never have been able to compete. No employer in their right mind would pass over able-bodied laborers to hire a scrawny boy.

And so, Lian Feng scraped by in the Chilong Circuit.

Most days, he followed his sworn “big brothers” to wait for jobs, doing carpentry, hauling work, that sort of thing. Once they’d earned some money they bought food and drink, then at night they all squeezed together in concrete pipes to sleep.

Compared to the years of fleeing and struggling before, these days were already pretty good. But Lian Feng was still unwilling. He dreamed of getting out of this situation, of climbing higher.

Why?

Because life like this was just too hard.

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Lian Feng wasn’t afraid of hardship. If his only goal had been survival, he would have been satisfied with this kind of life. He would have felt that muddling along like this until death was just fine.

But he still remembered his revenge. He found that the intensity of the work was simply too high—his big brothers could at most shield him enough to bring him into the team, but they couldn’t take on every task for him. He had to work with the intensity of an adult to convince employers to keep him on. After work every day he was so exhausted he didn’t want to move at all; any ambition or desire for revenge seemed hollow and pale in the face of that fatigue—at this rate, he had no way to take vengeance on anyone.

He had to change. He had to find a way to climb up and into a different environment.

That was why, in his heart, Lian Feng felt deeply grateful to have become a disciple of the Shenming Sword Dao.

Having walked all this way over the grindstone of hardship, he knew very well that this world didn’t work in such a way that, just because you were willing to throw away your dignity and kneel and beg, you’d receive what you wanted in return. More often, even after you gave up your dignity, you still had bad luck, still suffered, and on top of that you were mocked even more.

That was just how this world was.

Which was exactly why the life he had today was so precious.

And exactly why the Shenming Dojo, which was willing to accept him and treat him as a person, seemed so pure.

“Master and Senior Brother Ma are both good people.”

“I absolutely can’t drag them down over my own business.”

He glanced back once at the tall flight of steps and said that to himself.

No one had noticed him leaving today because Lian Feng had used the excuse of going out to buy supplies.

This task had originally been handled by Xu Shu, but now that Xu Shu’s status had risen, the job had been passed down for the disciples under him to take turns doing.

It was a job that had to be assigned to someone, because the dojo wasn’t what it had been. There were now dozens of mouths to feed and clothe on a regular basis; if they didn’t plan their procurement and only bought things when they happened to remember, they’d never keep up.

When Lian Feng heard about it, he went to Ma Yue and asked to take on the buying run.

The first few times, Ma Yue had gone with him. Later, seeing that Lian Feng picked goods and haggled better than he did, and that with the disciple’s robe on, most gangs wouldn’t dare provoke him, Ma Yue gradually stopped accompanying him and let him go on his own.

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But the accident had started with one of those buying trips.

On his last run, when he arrived at the vegetable market, Lian Feng passed by a grain-and-oil store and suddenly heard a voice—one that sounded almost exactly like the man’s voice he’d heard while hiding in that belly.

He stopped dead on the spot, then slipped inside pretending to buy rice and oil. At a glance, he saw a black-clad man at the counter and the half-missing left ear on his head.

It’s him!

Lian Feng’s eyes went bloodshot in an instant.

The duck-voiced man with the mangled ear… it was this man who had killed his mother; this man who had laughed at the end, walked over, and driven another sword into his mother’s belly!

The man seemed to sense something and turned to look this way.

Lian Feng quickly turned his body to the side, pretending to inspect a bag of rice, and didn’t draw the man’s attention.

After the man left, he specifically asked the grain-shop owner and learned that the man’s surname was Deng, his accent was probably from the north, and he and a group of others had rented a house to the east of the market. Every so often, they came by to buy grain.

“Been about half a month, I’d say,” the boss had told him then. “Who knows what they’re here for. I don’t want to know that much!”

After getting a rough idea of where they lived, Lian Feng took several buying trips that deliberately passed by the east road by the market. Finally, one time, he caught sight of “Mangled Ear” coming out of a small two-story house with a yard, stretching in the sun with a sword in his arms.

He quietly memorized the house’s address, then went back and started packing his things, plainly intending to leave without saying goodbye.

It had been no easy thing to find a place like this to settle. Here there was a strict master, a stuffy Dao Lord grandpa, senior brothers and sisters who treated him like a younger brother, and he could practice and train in sword arts every day, improving his skills… Of course Lian Feng didn’t want to leave.

But he didn’t dare stay.

All he knew about Mangled Ear was that his surname was Deng and that, when he’d eavesdropped on their conversations, they’d mentioned “Zhengwo Dao”. Beyond that, he didn’t know anything.

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He didn’t know where they’d come from. He didn’t know why they were lingering in the Chilong Circuit. He didn’t know how long they’d stay, and he didn’t know where they’d go after they left.

Lian Feng felt this might be his only chance. If he missed it, he’d regret it for life.

“If I stay at the dojo and train for a few years, maybe I’ll be stronger than them.”

“But by then, where would I even find them? What if they die at someone else’s hands—who would I take my revenge on then?”

That was exactly how Lian Feng saw it.

He understood what Bai Shengju had said—that talk of not going astray, of not taking a crooked path, had been sincere, for his sake, one hundred percent correct.

He accepted it. He’d been genuinely moved and had resolved to listen to Dao Lord Grandfather, not to let down their kindness.

But…

But…

“But I really don’t have time…”

He clenched his fists, took one last look at the high steps as if trying to burn the dojo buildings hidden behind them into his memory, then turned resolutely away with his sword on his back and stepped out to flag down a car by the roadside.

“Where to, little brother?”

The driver’s gaze lingered on the white disciple’s robe he was wearing; his tone was quite courteous.

“Head north first.”

Lian Feng frowned and tossed the words out.