The Road To Guantao

— Clop. Clop.

— Rustle. Rustle.

Every time a hoof came down, dry leaves crumbled beneath it.

I held the reins and looked around me. The trees lining the road had turned in a riot of autumn color, and a cool wind burrowed in at my collar, more bracing than cold.

Autumn had come in full.

Good.

I liked the ease of it. At Blood Sand Plain there was no telling when or where an enemy might spring out, so I kept my nerves on edge the whole time we moved. Let the tension slip and you might die. Admiring the scenery was out of the question.

So the ease of the moment landed all the harder. The cool wind and the wide-open view put me in good spirits.

— Neiiigh!

As if it felt what I was feeling, the horse gave a light cry. I stroked its neck and took hold of the spear hung at its flank.

It would take about seven days to reach Guantao, in Hebei Province. Just the right stretch of time to drill spearmanship from horseback.

I braced my lower body and set the spear moving.

— Whum! Whooosh! Whum!

The iron spear made a heavy sound. The forms were the same Lan, Na and Zha as always, but the force behind them was not. If the wooden spear was a darting swallow, the iron spear was a great ox.

I went on swinging it from horseback.

— Whooosh! Whoooosh!

Heavy.

Unlike the wooden spear, what came back through my hands had weight in it. A little more than I could comfortably carry, but not past handling.

I’ll need more training.

There was one way to solve it. Work the body to ruin until the iron feels as light as the wood. Then I would handle the iron spear exactly as I handled the wooden one.

Even as I stood now, the second-rate martial artists capable of beating me could be counted on one hand. A man would have to be at the far end of second-rate to be a match for me. Not because my martial talent is outstanding, but because my weapon is the spear.

They say a hundred days for the spear, a thousand for the saber, ten thousand for the sword. Which is to say the spear can be learned that much faster.

But being easy to learn does not make the spear any less lethal than the saber or the sword.

If anything, the spear is stronger than either. The reason is its length.

An inch longer, an inch stronger.

Those words were an unchanging truth. The spear’s reach was longer than a sword’s or a saber’s. You can run a man through before his sword or his saber ever touches you. I had lived it myself: the enemy’s weapon never reached me, and I tore into him one-sidedly.

A killing weapon carried to the very height of unfairness.

That is the spear.

Once I could handle this iron spear at will, there would be no match for me among the second-rate.

The voice came, and a subtle change ran through my body with it. The numb ache in the hand gripping the spear was gone.

I gave the spear a swing.

— Whum! Whum!

Lighter.

It moved more easily than it had a moment before. Not yet light enough to lift one-handed, but lighter. An ordinary man probably wouldn’t have noticed the change at all. But I had swung a spear tens of thousands of times, and I could feel it. The spear had unmistakably grown lighter.

And my legs feel easier too.

In riding a horse, nothing matters more than the strength of the lower body. How much you have trained it decides how well you handle the animal. A horse’s back pitches without letting up. To hold your balance and stay on top of it, thigh and waist strength were essential. A man short on lower-body strength will have his legs shaking after an hour in the saddle.

But my legs were firm now. My lower body took in the shock of every step the horse took without my having to think about it.

So this is what ‘handling the horse and spear becomes easier’ meant.

Nothing at all got in the way of swinging a spear from a horse’s back. Exactly as the voice had said, horse and spear alike had genuinely become easier to use.

A memory from my past life came back. How I had suffered at Blood Sand Plain trying to get on terms with a horse. It took hundreds, thousands of falls before I could handle one at all. In this life I had acquired that horsemanship the instant I heard the voice.

A genuinely uncanny thing.

With my past life’s memories behind me, I had expected the feel of it to come back easily enough. But to become this practiced? That alone would have taken a good few days at the very least, and for a rider’s muscles to settle into place, it would have taken until the journey was over and I was on my way home.

A voice had skipped the whole process of mastery in an instant. The awkward posture was corrected, the creaking muscles grew strong. Days of grinding, solved at a stroke.

I like it.

The corner of my mouth lifted without my meaning it to. While other men walked, I ran.

No. I flew.

Every scrap of effort came back several times over, and there was real satisfaction in that. A fullness I had never once felt in my past life.

This is fun.

Was this what the talented ones felt? Being paid back more than the sweat you put in felt really… not bad.

No. It was a joy and a pleasure.

These days I feel a great many things I never knew in my past life. The way my chest fills past the brim at my father’s praise, the way my heart warms when I talk with my mother, things like that. And the thrill of growing, like now, is the same. I wanted to keep on feeling them.

So I can’t stop.

I am going to grow stronger than this. Past second-rate to first-rate, and if it can be done, further still.

And so my house, my family, and in the end my own fate.

Whatever storms come, I will see that none of them is swept away.

For that, the only answer was training, and more training.

Even a road of a thousand li begins with a single step¹. Today’s thrusts would gather into a spear that would one day pierce anything.

I took a fresh grip on the spear.

The sun was already going down by the time I turned in at an inn. I filled my belly, took up the spear again, and went straight back out, heading for a deserted open lot I had marked on the way in.

The cool air of the autumn night went deep into my lungs.

Up to now I have drilled the fundamentals — Lan, Na and Zha — into my body.

Now it was time to move on to the next stage. I would train Lan and Zha first. Lanzha had three applied movements.

I set my stance and built an imaginary enemy in front of me. One of the countless enemies I had seen at Blood Sand Plain appeared. The one with a sword came at me.

“Hup.”

I drew the breath in and extended the spear.

— Whum!

A heavy tearing of air split the night.

It’s not a simple thrust straight ahead. I thrust as though shoving the shaft from the inside outward.

Outer Circle Spear.

A movement weighted toward pushing an enemy back or securing distance.

Then I set my stance again. This time one with a saber appeared, and I dropped the spear tip low. The enemy charged, aiming the saber in his hand at my legs.

I struck outward with the spear.

— Shwak.

The dead leaves lying along the spear’s path went flying. The blade, swung as though sweeping the ground, went clean through the enemy’s ankle.

Low Outer Circle Spear.

A movement that guards my own lower body while attacking the enemy’s. It was effective for fouling an enemy’s movement and breaking his stance.

Another imaginary enemy appeared. An axe this time. I raised the spear high, and the phantom drove in on my right and brought the axe down.

— Fwoom!

I turned the spear in a circle to the right, and the enemy’s axe struck it and bounced away. The blade, thrown upward as it beat the attack aside, drew a half-circle through the air and came straight down on the crown of his head. The one who had taken my blow vanished in an instant.

High Outer Circle Spear.

A movement that beats an attack aside and uses that force to counter.

Outer Circle Spear, Low Outer Circle Spear, High Outer Circle Spear. These three were Lanzha, the combination of Lan and Zha. The heart of Lanzha is to shove an enemy’s attack outward to make space, then drive into the gap before it closes.

There was no need to think it through in my head. My body would remember.

I went on swinging the spear.

— Whum! Shwak! Fwoom!

Past a few dozen swings the sweat came down like rain and I was fighting for breath.

It hurt.

My muscles must have reached their limit; the hand holding the spear shook. But I didn’t stop the spear. Because I know better than anyone that pain which cannot kill me makes me stronger.

Only somewhere past a hundred swings did the voice finally ring inside my head.

“Haa— haa—”

I lowered the spear and let out a ragged breath. I was soaked in sweat from head to foot, and the cold night wind cooled the heat off my body. It was bracing.

When I started, the sun hadn’t even set; now the moon was up in the sky.

Has it gotten this late already?

I hadn’t noticed the time passing. But I couldn’t stop here. Hearing the voice means I have grown stronger, and not checking the result at once would hardly be the bearing of a true martial artist.

I set my stance again and swung.

— Whooosh! Shwak! Foom!

Everything came more naturally than it had a moment before. One movement joined smoothly into the next. If I had to put it into words, it was as though the spear were finding its own way. It was the finest of differences, but I could feel plainly that it was better.

It felt like a waste to stop there.

A little more, then.

My body was screaming and I had never felt better. I wanted to feel it a while yet. Under the night sky, taking in the strength of the moonlight, I went on swinging the spear a good while longer.

Six days passed. Every day I rode and drilled mounted spearmanship, and at night I trained Lanzha. It was a forced march, but I woke each morning refreshed. That was thanks to my internal and external arts coming into harmony, which had strengthened my meridians and my muscles. On top of that, a full circulation of true qi through the Azure Dragon Art took most of the fatigue away, and even the punishing daily training came easy enough.

A mountain came into view up ahead.

Over that mountain and I’m in Guantao, then.

Half a day at the outside. I was turning over in my head what to do once I reached Guantao when a wind came up.

— Whoooo.

It carried a familiar smell.

“…”

A smell I had breathed plenty of in my time. No, more than that. A smell I had breathed until I was sick of it and knew far too well.

The smell of blood.

I wondered if some animal had died, but no. It was thicker and stronger than that. This was not one or two beasts’ worth of blood. Nothing short of a good ten men dead put out a stink that fierce.

I pulled the reins around and followed it.

Before long a gruesome scene came into view. Several carts lay overturned, their cargo scattered about, and some twenty bodies and dead horses were sprawled around them. It looked as though a merchant company passing below the mountain had been hit by a band of bandits.

Bandits, was it?

There was no sign of anyone about. They had made their haul and gone, by the look of it.

Spear in hand, I kept my guard up and walked the horse slowly forward. I heard its hooves splashing through pooled blood.

As I looked the scene over, I found something odd. A trail of blood led in under one of the overturned carts. The mark of someone dragging a body.

Something’s there.

No accident could ever have left a mark like that. Someone had deliberately laid hands on the bodies; that much was certain.

There was something deeply suspicious about that overturned cart. Perhaps an enemy was hiding under it, or perhaps it was some kind of trap. Or both. There was no telling what might happen, so it needed checking.

This place was a battlefield. On a battlefield, carelessness is death. Walking past an unknown without checking it was no different from leaving an enemy at your back.

I drew up my internal energy.

— Vwoom.

The Azure Dragon Art’s true qi, drawn up from the dantian, ran round my whole body. Internal energy settled faintly into the iron spear. Being only newly arrived at second-rate, I still can’t load it in fully. Even getting this much onto it was more than other men would dare attempt.

I gripped the spear tight and kicked the horse’s flank.

— Neiiigh!

The horse kicked off the ground and broke into a run. Thanks to the mounted spearmanship I had been drilling, my posture was perfect. The instant the horse grazed past the cart’s flank, I twisted at the waist and swung.

— BANG! KRRRACK!

The cart’s top boards shattered like a sheet of paper. The iron spear tore the top away as though splitting a rotted trunk, and the corpses piled over it were flung off in every direction.

I hauled on the reins and brought the horse around. A blood-drenched shape came into view inside the broken cart.

It was a person. Stiff with terror, trembling all over.

I leveled the spear at the stranger and asked.

“Who are you.”