Poetry Chants, Saber Howls – Chapter 23
by Little PandaA Youth Takes a Master as the Years Deepen; Adrift in Two Places, Each Longs for the Other (Part 4)
Time flew; in the blink of an eye, more than two months had passed.
Zhao Yao had walked the jianghu for a long while without turning up a single thread of news about Su Ying. Left with no alternative, she returned to their temporary dwelling on Yunxian Mountain and told Ling Cheng: “As of now, Su Ying and you are both wanted criminals of the imperial court. It’s entirely possible she’s gone to ground somewhere under an assumed name — and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. If we don’t know where she is, it naturally means the court hasn’t laid hands on her either.”
The words were meant to comfort, but they held some real truth, and Ling Cheng could only let her heart ease.
After a night’s rest in the little cabin, Zhao Yao began testing Ling Cheng’s martial arts the next day. Though Zhao Yao had been away from her side all this time, the thought of vengeance had been burning in Ling Cheng’s fighting spirit — whether or not anyone was watching, she dared not slacken by a hair. Rising before dawn each day to drill her saber, she had improved considerably beyond before. At first Zhao Yao nodded again and again, but before long her brows knit faintly and her expression gradually turned grave; she said nothing, only fixing Ling Cheng with a long, steady gaze from her beautiful eyes.
Ling Cheng stopped and asked, puzzled, “Where did I practice it wrong?”
Zhao Yao’s face was solemn. “You’ve been training the Avici Saber Technique1?”
“I didn’t use a single move from the Avici Saber just now — how did you tell, Master?” Ling Cheng admitted it readily, without a trace of the flustered guilt of one caught out. “A while back I was rummaging in your room and found a book with the four characters ‘Avici Saber Technique’ written on it. I guessed it had to be that saber style you mentioned before, so I tried practicing it — and sure enough it hurt just like you said, Master, like my whole body was on fire… But, but I can bear it!”
Her expression was firm, and her words were firmer still.
“I’ve been at it a whole month now, and I’ve borne every bit of it.”
The Avici Saber Technique was colossal in power — once mastered, nothing could stand before it. From the day it first appeared in the world, over the span of centuries, countless people had fought over the manual, and countless had obtained it, yet no more than two or three in ten ever truly mastered it — precisely because very few could endure the agony of training it. For one so young to possess such grit genuinely impressed Zhao Yao, but she let none of it show; if anything, her gaze grew only sharper.
“I didn’t ask you whether it hurts. That manual is my property. You rifled through it at will — you even trained the art recorded inside it. Did you ever ask my permission?”
Zhao Yao was a woman who loved to laugh; even facing enemies, her smile — proud or free-spirited — never left her face. Ling Cheng had never seen her so severe and cold, and she faltered. “But… but you already took me as your disciple, didn’t you? Why can’t I learn your martial arts?”
One could hardly blame Ling Cheng for thinking this way. She had, after all, been born into a house of power. Given Ling Bingzhong’s former standing, even as an official who served clean and never once took a bribe, the wealth he had accumulated still dwarfed what any common family could imagine — and Ling Cheng had grown up generous by nature. Whatever the house held, she would hand it over to share with friends without a moment’s hesitation, never stingy. Just as she had once taken the family’s possessions as hers by right, she now took it as equally self-evident that there was nothing in her master’s collected manuals she couldn’t read or practice.
Only then did Zhao Yao laugh again — a cold, mocking laugh. “Oh? Then by the same logic: I took you as your disciple, I am your master — so should you obey me in everything? If I told you to go down the mountain right now and cut down the first stranger you meet, would you agree? If I told you to forget your parents’ deaths from this day on and abandon revenge forever, would you be willing?”
Ling Cheng’s mind blanked at this, and she gave no answer.
Zhao Yao pressed on. “It seems you wouldn’t — you’re not willing. You and I may be master and disciple, but we are still two different people. My thoughts can’t be forced on you, and you needn’t obey my every word. But by the same token, my martial arts have nothing to do with you. Only when I permit you to learn may you learn; only when I permit you to use what’s mine may you use it. ‘To take without asking is called theft’ — have you never heard that saying?”
Stubborn as Ling Cheng was — once her heart settled on a thing, no one alive could bend her, not even a teacher she revered — she was no unreasonable child. The moment she grasped that the fault truly was hers, she stood stunned a while, guilt flooding in, and then apologized without the least hesitation: “I’m sorry… I, I never thought of it that way…”
Zhao Yao cut her off. “No need to apologize. What’s done is done — you bear the responsibility for it. You now have two choices.”
“What choices?”
“The first: I cripple the martial art you’ve trained.”
“How do you cripple a martial art?”
“Simple. Sever your meridians2 — isn’t your martial art crippled then?”
Ling Cheng went white with alarm. “Then… then I could never train anything else, either?”
“Not only that. There’s a fair chance you’d be paralyzed afterward — unable to move, never walking again. But no matter. Since I’ve taken you as my disciple, I’ll naturally provide for you the rest of your life. You’d spend it flat in bed, true, but you’d never want for food or clothes.”
The last of Zhao Yao’s anger had finally melted away; she said all this with a beaming smile.
Ling Cheng heard it out and shuddered, shaking her head again and again. “And the second?”
“The second: you fight me with the Avici Saber Technique. Beat me, and I’ll allow you to keep training the art in that manual from now on.”
However miraculous the Avici Saber might be, Ling Cheng had trained it for barely a month — how could she match Zhao Yao, with more than twenty years of internal power and martial arts ranked first under heaven? She was hardly one to undervalue herself, but she had at least that much self-knowledge, and she shook her head as before. “I definitely can’t beat you.”
“So you’re choosing the crippled meridians?”
“No — of course not!” Ling Cheng could no longer tell whether Zhao Yao was joking or meant it in earnest, and she panicked further. “If… if I promise never to train it or use it again, won’t that do…?”
“No.” Zhao Yao’s tone was iron. “Of these two choices, you must pick one. If you truly can’t choose, then I’ll choose for you: fight me first. Win, and you keep training the saber art. Lose, and I sever your meridians.”
The words had barely left her when her right hand turned and the hilt filled her palm; a blade of light swift as lightning was already rising before Ling Cheng’s eyes. In that hairbreadth instant of life and death, left with no way out, Ling Cheng’s saber hand flew up — and out came a move of the Avici Saber, catching Zhao Yao’s edge. The first strike carried no true force, and Ling Cheng barely held it; an instant later the second blade fell straight for the crown of her head, on the very verge of splitting her skull in two — when Ling Cheng abruptly saw that Zhao Yao gave everything to attack and nothing to defense, as if offering an opening: one diagonal slash, and she might cleave Zhao Yao across the waist.
Though the move she had just been forced into had already lit a fire inside her, searing through every limb and bone, by good fortune the “flames” had not yet spread — still extremely faint; she could fully endure them, and fully keep striking.
She did not move.
She stared, blankly, at the gleaming blade that had come to take her life, and did not move a hair.
The white light crossed swift as a falling star — and the edge stopped a half cun3 above Ling Cheng’s head.
The blade stopped; the person stopped; only the long wind across the mountain went on rustling without pause. Zhao Yao studied Ling Cheng’s ashen face, surprise threading her gaze. “Why didn’t you strike to kill me?”
Seeing that Zhao Yao truly meant to stay her hand, Ling Cheng let out a long breath — only then realizing she was soaked head to toe in cold sweat — and then found the question a strange one. “I’m the one who did wrong. Why would I kill you?”
The counter-question stopped Zhao Yao for a breath. Then she smiled like a spring breeze, her face finally blossoming open like flowers in the third month, and she slid the saber back into its sheath. “One reason I forbade you from the Avici Saber was, it’s true, that I didn’t believe you could bear the pain of training it. But beyond that, there is a weightier reason. Of those who have trained the Avici Saber Technique from ancient times to now, the majority became fiends — steeped in evil, bloodthirsty beyond restraint.”
“But you’re not a fiend.” Ling Cheng’s voice came out muffled. “If you don’t want me training this saber, I just won’t train it anymore. You don’t have to lie to me.”
“Which is why I said ‘the majority.’ The Avici Saber Technique’s origins are murky — it’s said to have been written by a prodigy of the former dynasty, and it has circulated the jianghu for centuries. In those centuries, plenty of people seized it, but those who kept their original nature after mastering it, and didn’t slaughter at whim — they were vanishingly few.” Zhao Yao went on. “At first no one could explain what was happening, so they named it the ‘Ghost Saber,’ the ‘Demon Saber.’ But its power was undeniably real, and those who coveted it never stopped scrambling for it. Then one day, a young saber artist came into the manual by luck and coincidence. The man’s heart wasn’t bad — he was simply impulsive and quick to fury, forever coming to blows over a single ill-matched word. But fight as he might, so long as the other party had done nothing monstrous, he never took a life. Until he trained this Avici Saber — and suddenly found he could no longer govern his own temper in a fight. Anyone who slighted him in the least — even knowing full well the man’s crimes didn’t warrant death — he would feel the killing urge rise of its own accord, and he would kill.”
The further Ling Cheng listened, the deeper her alarm, half believing and half doubting; she tried to slip in a question, but Zhao Yao gave her no opening, pressing straight on:
“Little by little, the man became the target of every arrow in the jianghu — its acknowledged fiend — and hosts of righteous masters closed in on him together. Strong as he was, two fists, in the end, cannot beat a hundred hands. Gravely wounded, he broke free of the encirclement, and before he died he sought me out — not only placing the Avici Saber manual in my hands, but telling me, one by one, everything he had felt after training it. I was younger then than I am now, and I didn’t believe in such devilry. Hearing him out, I insisted on training the Avici Saber myself — to see whether it would claim me too.”
By this point Ling Cheng was shaken to her core, but Zhao Yao’s voice paused there at last, and she finally got a word in, repeating: “But you didn’t become a fiend…”
Zhao Yao smiled. “When I kill a person, it is only because I judge that they deserve to die. What can truly rouse my anger is one thing alone: the great villains beyond all pardon, who have ruined countless innocents. As for the world’s slanders — I have never once taken them to heart. I don’t care; I don’t mind; and so, naturally, I don’t rage. And you…” She paused again, her gaze drifting over Ling Cheng, still carrying a faint puzzlement. “Just now, you didn’t strike to kill me. That tells me there is not a shred of resentment toward me in your heart.”
Understanding came to Ling Cheng by degrees. “Only someone with no resentment or hatred inside, who doesn’t burn or rage, can escape the Avici Saber’s grip. Otherwise — even a single sliver of a grudge, even knowing the other person’s crimes don’t warrant death — you still can’t hold back the killing blow?”
Zhao Yao said, “I was about to sever your meridians and make a cripple of you for life. And you truly felt not half a grain of resentment toward me?”
Ling Cheng said, “But I was the one who did wrong first. What you said just now — my Father and my Mother used to say the very same to me: ‘What’s done is done — you bear the responsibility.’ How could I hate you over that?”
Once again the words had tumbled out before she thought, in a tone so matter-of-course that it made Zhao Yao’s puzzlement look like the strange thing instead.
Zhao Yao smiled. “Do you know why I suddenly agreed to take you as my disciple back then?”
Ling Cheng shook her head.
She had wondered about this for a long time.
“Your nature isn’t bad — but you burn like fire, far too extreme, even obstinate. Every kindness repaid — and every grudge… repaid down to the smallest glare. Left without a teacher, one careless step onto a crooked path, and who’s to say the jianghu wouldn’t gain another great fiend. Though…” Zhao Yao went on smiling, and reached out to smooth the tangled hair from Ling Cheng’s brow. “Now that I’ve seen this much, perhaps it was I who didn’t understand you well enough. Since you’re already training the Avici Saber Technique — so long as you don’t fear the hurt and can stand the pain — then train on. Whatever you don’t understand, you may ask me.”
Footnotes
- 阿鼻刀法 | Abi Daofa | 'Avici Saber Technique'; Abi is the Chinese transliteration of Avici, the deepest of the Buddhist hells, whose torment continues without pause — a classical byword for unending agony.
- 经脉 | Jingmai | The meridian channels of traditional Chinese medicine, conduits believed to carry qi and blood through the body; wuxia fiction treats them as the vessels of internal power, so severing them ends a martial artist's cultivation.
- 寸 | Cun | Traditional Chinese unit of length, roughly 3.33 centimeters or 1.3 inches, used historically to gauge everything from blade lengths to acupuncture points.
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