It was useless to protect the chick, as it had no idea of your existence.
An injured sparrow that couldn’t fly had no right to recognize its own, it couldn’t even speak; who would know what worth you had?
Mo Li, with a cold face, sent the dejected sparrow back to the mountain spirit cave, telling it to rest and heal. It shouldn’t come out unless it was fully recovered.
It turned out that a doctor’s threat worked just as effectively on the dragon vein of Feihe Mountain. The dragon vein obediently stayed home to recover, and it seemed it wouldn’t appear until it could fly faster and higher again.
The dragon vein was so well-behaved mainly because it overheard what Su Li said to Mo Li.
Su Li firmly believed that his sword reminded him that Feihe Mountain was the place where he could truly master his swordsmanship and ascend to the peak of martial arts. After resolving Ayanpuka’s matter, he intended to retire there.
Mo Li had to inform him that Ayanpuka was already dead.
Su Li: “…”
The swordsman was dumbfounded on the spot.
Once he came to his senses, he broke out in a cold sweat but realized this was actually a good thing.
Now, he wouldn’t have to struggle with the balance between gratitude and being used. With the person dead, those tumultuous, complex emotions would slowly settle.
He could eliminate the bad parts and remember the initial act of kindness. Only a dead person wouldn’t make any more mistakes, and grievances would be written off.
If Ayanpuka were still alive, Su Li wouldn’t be sure if he would waver.
The wavering wasn’t about his stance, but if Ayanpuka asked him to fulfill a dying wish or even spare a life, Su Li might struggle to stay firm.
Yet Su Li knew that Ayanpuka was highly capable, even with his martial arts destroyed and severely injured. As long as he had a breath left, he could still stir up trouble. Such softness couldn’t be afforded, and such help couldn’t be given. Knowing this was one thing, but when the time came, that gratitude would cut through him like a sharp blade.
In a certain sense, Ayanpuka had succeeded. He had nurtured an exceptional master and firmly controlled him.
Mo Li, of course, didn’t think like Meng Qi, believing that Su Li’s mind was influenced by the foolish sparrow.
What kind of person someone becomes depends on their upbringing, the people they meet, the books they’ve read, and the teachings they’ve received.
Su Li was twelve when Ayanpuka saved him. He was literate, but that was all; he couldn’t learn much more from books. Since Ayanpuka was also raised by “someone” after being saved, he understood deeply that when a child grows up with extraordinary abilities and ventures into the outside world, they would quickly change, develop endless desires and ambitions, and realize they had been used. That’s why Ayanpuka had meticulously arranged Su Li’s future.
Living as a reclusive assassin, Su Li’s pursuit of martial arts left him focused solely on his sword, indifferent to wealth and women.
Beauty was just bones, and no amount of riches could be taken with you after death. Only the sword in his hand was real.
Many in the martial world believed in this, though few truly lived by it.
Ayanpuka merely shaped Su Li into such a person, and Su Li deeply believed it.
Now that Ayanpuka was dead, the final chain binding Su Li to the mortal world had broken. He was eager to pursue his martial path, with no interest in the trifling matters of the three kings of Chu and Qi dynasty.
Because the Xiliang people had previously left clues about his origins, Su Li was still willing to investigate.
So Mo Li returned the sparrow, and Su Li stayed behind to continue following the clues, agreeing to meet at the edge of the reed marshes.
Two days passed, and when Mo Li saw him again, he was surprised to find Su Li looking somewhat dispirited.
“How is it? You didn’t find any clues about your origins?”
“I did find something…”
The swordsman let out a deep sigh.
Ayanpuka had indeed baited Meng Qi and the others with something significant.
Su Li’s parents were indeed from Feihe Mountain, but long ago, due to the poverty of their mountain village, they couldn’t sustain the family with the food from fishing, hunting, and farming. So, Su Li’s parents decided to leave the village and try their luck in the county town, hoping to find some work.
In Su Li’s memory, his family was poor. His father worked in a mill, and his mother took on sewing and laundry work for others. The family, along with a dozen others in similar circumstances, crammed into a large courtyard on the outskirts of the county, the most rundown place, with sewage flowing and low houses packed with landless poor.
Years later, Su Li returned to the place, but after much effort, he couldn’t find anyone who remembered his family, and naturally, he didn’t know his parents’ ancestral home, where they were from, or if they had any other relatives.
People came and went so quickly there, with new arrivals every month, and every month people would die from illness, exhaustion, or hunger.
Unlike the mountains, where one could easily find a plot of land to bury someone, the area around the town was full of farmlands. Tenant farmers who died might not even have land to bury their bodies, let alone the poor, whose bodies would be thrown into the wilderness.
The burial ground was layered with coffins and corpses, but most were just wrapped in straw mats and discarded there.
If the county magistrate had been competent, the burial ground wouldn’t be like this, and the people wouldn’t be left with unburied bones. However, the governance in Jingzhou was corrupt, and martial artists avoided the burial ground unless they practiced dark arts. It wasn’t about courage but rather that lingering “evil energy” could lead to illness.
When Su Li was five, one day, his father didn’t come home. There was chaos at home for a while, and his mother returned with red eyes, crying all night. A poor family had only one pot, sometimes borrowing even firewood. They couldn’t afford mourning clothes or extra fabric for them.
He didn’t even know how his father had died—maybe from exhaustion, or perhaps he was run over on the road.
His biological mother couldn’t support herself and a child, working endlessly, and returning home wasn’t an option. Without travel expenses, they’d starve on the way back.
So she sold herself to a dyehouse as a slave.
The dyehouse work was grueling, and there was no rest, sweat pouring constantly.
A kind dyehouse owner might show compassion for the workers, but many smaller dyehouses would simply buy slaves. The cost of buying a person was only three months’ wages, but they could work them for three to five years.
Every winter, slaves in the dyehouse would fall ill one by one, weakened and sick, and within a few days, they’d die. At the same time, winter was the hardest season for the poor, and many who couldn’t survive would sell themselves to the dyehouse. They knew what fate awaited them, but without becoming slaves, they wouldn’t make it through the winter, and their families would starve.
When Su Li was seven, his mother passed away too.
She gripped his hand tightly as she died, her emaciated, shriveled face full of fear.
It was only much later that Su Li realized that the dyehouse was the only place where his mother could find a way to survive. Where else would allow her to bring a child who couldn’t work? Although she sold herself, she didn’t even get the money from it; it was all spent bribing the dyehouse foreman, convincing them to turn a blind eye to her splitting her own food to feed her child.
The dyehouse gave the slaves very little food, and with the foreman further skimming off the top, the daily rations were not enough to feed an adult woman, let alone a child as well.
His mother’s body quickly gave out. She didn’t even survive three years in the dyehouse.
This woman had initially planned to endure five years of hard labor in the dyehouse. By then, the child would be ten, old enough to be treated as a small adult in a poor family. She could try to sell him as an apprentice to a shop or to work as a servant in another household. The child wasn’t bad-looking when he was little; he was sure to find a way to survive.
The dyehouse foreman was greedy, but if it wasn’t for the fact that the child could be sold for money when he grew up, they wouldn’t have allowed her to keep him with her for so long.
But she passed away too soon… she was afraid to die, and even more unwilling.
She fought for her life all night, clutching her son tightly, and finally, on a snowy morning, she passed away.
Her body was carried out, and that night, the dyehouse foreman called in a slave trader.
In just that day and night, Su Li hadn’t even had a sip of water.
When the slave trader took him away, he was actually grateful because the trader not only agreed to buy him but also gave him a piece of bread.
It was that piece of bread, eaten when he was on the verge of starvation.
The slave trader sold Su Li to Jingzhou, where at the time, the powerful Han family had a sixth-generation-only child who was spoiled beyond measure. At just six or seven years old, this child had tormented the family’s servants to the point of suffering. His personal servants were all bruised and battered. The Han family directly bought ten boys from the slave trader and gave them all to the young master to do with as he pleased. Household servants competed for favor by trying to get close to the young master, but when he got angry, it was the newly bought slaves who bore the brunt of his wrath.
Su Li’s body was covered in scars, not because he was bullied the most, but because he lived the longest…
No matter how severe the injury or how long the fever lasted, he always managed to pull through.
But the harder he was to kill, the more the young master beat him without restraint. When he whipped the other slaves ten times, he would whip Su Li fifty times.
Other servants, emboldened by their positions, also kicked and beat him.
Eventually, Su Li couldn’t get up anymore and spent his days recuperating. He lived next to a dark cellar, and whenever the young master got bored of studying and needed an outlet for his temper, he would bring people over to beat Su Li because beating the others might kill them, but beating Su Li wouldn’t, thus sparing the elders from nagging.
When the beatings lost their appeal, the young master turned to burning and cutting with dull knives.
No one spoke to Su Li, and he gradually lost the ability to talk much. He didn’t know how much time had passed, nor did he understand why he was still alive—
He stayed with the Han family for over five years, but it felt longer than the decades he lived afterward.
The day Ayanpuka appeared, it snowed heavily, much like the day Su Li’s father disappeared, and like the day his mother passed.
This man from Xiliang, who claimed the surname Fei, appeared under the guise of being from a noble northern family in exile.
He brought with him a prized horse and came to do business with the Han family, who controlled the warhorse trade in Jingzhou.
That day, Su Li crawled out of the cellar and clung to the low window, looking at the sky. Ayanpuka immediately saw that this child, as thin as a skeleton, had excellent potential for martial arts.
Su Li rarely thought about what happened next anymore.
By now, the Han family no longer existed—prey caught by Ayanpuka wouldn’t survive. The people of Xiliang wanted to set up their operations quietly in the city, and without toppling the entrenched powers of Jingzhou to stir up chaos, it would be difficult for outsiders to gain a foothold.
The swordsman touched the scar on his face. He had long forgotten what that young master looked like, only vaguely remembering his voice. He had gone back to look for the Han family and the dyehouse. He found that the Han family was gone, and the dyehouse had changed hands several times, now turned into a brocade weaving shop. The foreman and the original owner were nowhere to be found.
Now, there was only one way left to seek his family, and that was the martial elder Ayanpuka had mentioned who had saved his mother in the mountains.
Su Li had little interest in his origins. Both his parents were dead, and he was focused on mastering the way of the sword.
If it weren’t for these recent events, Su Li wouldn’t even have thought to visit the mountains near Jingzhou.
Following the clues left by Ayanpuka, Su Li found a fishing village and an old man who could vividly recount all the superstitions about the mountain god. The village neither built a temple nor carved proper statues of the god, and this old man had a son who had left home many years ago.
The old man didn’t know whether his son, daughter-in-law, or grandson were dead or alive, as they had parted ways long ago and never reunited.
The old man chatted with others in the village about the mountain god, claiming that life was better now with the mountain god’s protection than in his younger days, never mentioning his son. Su Li, not daring to reveal himself, forced the local priest in the mountain god temple to ask around, and the old man suddenly broke into tears.
Yet, just as quickly, the old man turned around and insisted that with the mountain god’s protection, his son and grandson were surely fine.
Looking at his expression, it seemed like if anyone suggested they were dead, the old man would roll up his sleeves and fight them.
“He holds considerable respect in the village. Though he can no longer fish, he has enough to eat and wear, and a young man he once took in cares for him…”
Su Li felt deeply conflicted. He couldn’t dare reveal his identity, and in his current state, he couldn’t recognize his family either.
Moreover, many families had parted ways, never to reunite, just like this one.
But this old man’s daughter-in-law had been pregnant when she slipped while foraging in the mountains and was knocked unconscious on the hillside. When the villagers found her, they thought the baby couldn’t possibly survive, yet both the mother and child were fine. A few months later, the baby was born safely.
The story was so strange that decades later, the villagers were still talking about it.
“So, who exactly was the person who saved my mother?” Su Li was deeply troubled.
Mo Li thought for a moment and hinted, “Perhaps there was no such ‘person’ at all. As your grandfather said, it could have been the mountain god’s protection. People with unusual meridians aren’t uncommon.”
Su Li suddenly became sharp when he needed to be, remembering how Mo Li had diagnosed the hidden injuries in his body at their first meeting, even asking if there were mountains near his hometown. Clearly, Mo Li knew something.
Mo Li led the swordsman into the reed marsh.
The reed marsh was an excellent place to hide; ordinary people wouldn’t be able to enter, and the villagers living inside refused to leave.
“Rice, flour, oil, salt… there’s plenty of stock, and they can grow their own grains and vegetables. It’s more than enough to feed a few people,” Meng Qi said, pretending to have been there the whole time, greeting them as they arrived.
Su Li didn’t pay any attention to the trembling villagers, looking around with great satisfaction at the environment.
As for the marsh’s rainy, humid, and sunless conditions? For an assassin used to living in underground tombs, was that really a drawback?
“This is a prescription.”
Mo Li handed over a few sheets of paper.
“…I’m sick?” The swordsman took them, confused, then remembered his miserable past of being chased by Mo Li to take prescriptions.
He shivered and quickly said, “I have no money.”
Meng Qi, suppressing a light cough, said slowly, “It’s the villagers here who aren’t in good health. Look at them, do they seem like they can go out and gather herbs? You’re focused on mastering your swordsmanship, so naturally, you’re not interested in farming. If someone washes your clothes and cooks for you, wouldn’t it be perfect for you to run out to fetch salt or medicine when they run out?”
Su Li thought carefully and realized this made sense.
However, there was still a huge problem—
“I don’t know the way out.”
Qimen Dunjia was no joke. Meng Qi could look at a map once and find his way, even explaining the path to Mo Li afterward. But the swordsman didn’t have such abilities. After listening to Mo Li’s explanation for a while, the path still looked like a jumble of nonsense to him.
Mo Li: “…”
You don’t know the way, and yet you think this place is perfect?
The swordsman calmly explained that in ancient times, martial arts masters who went into seclusion would bring provisions, block the entrance with a large stone, and drink rainwater or dew dripping from the cave ceiling. This was called “closing the death gate.” They wouldn’t come out until they had a breakthrough, even if it meant dying inside.
By comparison, the reed marsh had food, drink, and shelter. What wasn’t good about that?
Mo Li was speechless.
Meng Qi rubbed his chin thoughtfully, then summoned the boy who always wanted to run away.
“Do you know the way out?” Meng Qi asked.
The boy shook his head violently, unwilling to admit it.
Mo Li, feeling exhausted, realized that earlier they had asked the swordsman how he dared stay without knowing the way, and now they had to ask the boy how he dared try to leave without knowing the way either.
After a while, the boy realized that Meng Qi and the others were different from the Xiliang people. He hesitated and stammered that his father had drawn a map for him before he died, showing the way out of the reed marsh. However, since he hadn’t had the chance to use it, he wasn’t very sure of it.
Hearing this, Mo Li frowned, knowing that the Xiliang people had altered some of the waterways, filled in parts of the land, and planted many trees to make the marsh’s terrain align with the Qimen Dunjia formation. Even if the boy’s map was accurate, it couldn’t be used now.
“Don’t worry, doctor. In three months, someone who knows the way will naturally come here,” Meng Qi confidently whispered to Mo Li.
Mo Li was puzzled at first, but then he understood: “You mean the dragon vein of Feihe Mountain?”
“Exactly. Once that silly sparrow heals, it will surely fly here to find Su Li,” Meng Qi said, looking serious but with a hint of amusement in his eyes. “The only thing we need to worry about is that Su Li might mistake it for wild game and roast it for dinner.”
Mo Li laughed, “That’s impossible.”
When the sparrow and Su Li first met, the look in their eyes was almost like heaven and earth colliding.
No, no, wrong words—it was more like a bird returning to the forest, a wanderer returning home.
“Su Li might not, but what about these villagers?” Meng Qi pointed out, gesturing to the boy. Using a slingshot to shoot birds shouldn’t be a problem, right?
The mountain people who had fled into the marshes mainly relied on fishing and hunting wild ducks for meat.
Sparrows were small, but they had plenty of meat.
Mo Li was torn. At that moment, Meng Qi added, “And what if Su Li, while practicing his sword, falls into madness? If he keeps feeling that the sparrow gives him a strange vibe, what if he gets the wild idea to sacrifice it for his sword? Sacrificing a sparrow to the sword to commune with the spiritual energy of heaven and earth—after all, the sword is what matters most, right?”
Mo Li: “…I don’t believe a word you say.”
Thus, Mo Li had no choice but to rack his brain and come up with a theory about how all living things had spirits and how fate brought them together, to “trick” the swordsman.
“You’re saying that sparrow has a fated bond with me?” Su Li asked, bewildered.
“Fated… to be your friend.”
Mo Li inexplicably felt a toothache but could only say “friend.” Father and son? That was impossible. He couldn’t bring himself to suggest the sparrow become the swordsman’s beloved pet either.
Even though, to others, having an expert martial artist with a clever sparrow perched on his shoulder was clearly a pet.
Su Li, unaware of the complexities involved, shook his head and said, “I see that the sparrow is very close to Doctor Mo. As the saying goes, a gentleman doesn’t take what another cherishes.”
Meng Qi’s face changed abruptly.
What nonsense are you spouting?!
Author’s Note:
Jumping sand rat: What cherished one? It’s not that, don’t say nonsense!
Mo Li: This bird has a fated bond with you, to be your friend.
Swordsman: In the stories, the martial arts masters hiding in the mountains always have giant eagles that know martial arts.
Sparrow: …Wah.
Wailing, feeling rejected by its child.
——————
Ayanpuka, to the swordsman, was like that slave trader and that piece of bread.
To say he wasn’t grateful would be impossible because survival is fundamental. However, a person’s life is complex, mixed with interests and ambitions. Even saving someone can have a motive. But putting the motive aside, it was indeed a rescue.
Before, Ayanpuka, when he thought Mo Li was the dragon vein of Taijing, had mocked Meng Qi, saying that bringing a dragon vein out into the world would sour even the deepest affection. Ayanpuka was thinking of himself here. His gratitude and kindness toward Mount Anahduo had faded once he “understood” after leaving the mountain—no longer a naive child.
——————
Swordsman and Feihe Mountain are about to leave the stage.
