Chapter 418 — Peerless in Brush and Ink

In those days Zai Fu was a madman — domineering, invincible, lonely — and brimming with learning besides, not the coarse brute he is now. He was as good with the blade as he was with books; the poems he wrote were bold and unbridled, and he himself became one of the great talents of his day.

His blade art was called the Heaven Blade, and so was he. Every one of his moves was rich with poetry, an outpouring straight from the heart, free and utterly exhilarating.

If Yincan Village were ever to hold a contest of literary talent, the Deaf Elder would rank first and he second; for all that he had gone raving mad and could not open his mouth without cursing, he had been the most celebrated man of letters of his age.

By then he had challenged nearly every master alive; even Ban Gongcuo, that Great Venerable of the Loulan Golden Palace, could only hide meekly inside the Golden Palace and dared not show his head.

He was full of ambition and satisfaction; apart from having one troublesome disciple, his life was already complete. Of course, that disciple was no small matter either — his name was Ba Shan, and men called him the Tyrant Blade.

Forty years, fifty years — wind and rain in darkness, and never a second meeting. Clouds pass before the eye; crosswise and lengthwise, a boundless sliver of sky.

Boast not: after the hero's calamity comes the people's wish. Gaze round on sea and sky — all the road walked, all the road in smoke.

Zai Fu created the Crosswise and Lengthwise, a Boundless Sliver of Sky, and by him the school of combat arts was carried to a height never known before. In those days many in the martial world studied the blade; the school of combat arts became the mainstream, overshadowing spellcraft and the divine arts of the sword.

It was then that Zai Fu could no longer hold himself back, and raised his blade against the heavens. He was not a man of Imperial Preceptor Jingping's stamp: what the Imperial Preceptor sought was reform and change, while what Zai Fu sought was simply a good, clean thrill.

"After I created that move, I tried it out at once. That one cut sliced the sky open."

Zai Fu danced his blade, and the art he performed was precisely the Crosswise and Lengthwise, a Boundless Sliver of Sky; he put no power into it at all, merely running through the move once.

He sheathed the blade and stood, his face strange; he steadied himself, as though recalling his own mad years: "And then I saw a bizarre sight — the sky had split open, and beyond the sky there were no stars. I was very cautious; I did not go up at once to look, but sought out several like-minded friends, all of them masters of the arts of calculation."

Shen Mu's heart stirred slightly. Zai Fu, cautious? He had always had the most explosive of tempers; when something came up he would simply put his head down and charge, swinging his blade.

"That temper was only a false front Grandpa Tu deliberately put up. Anyone who believed him a reckless brute is probably dead by now," Shen Mu thought.

"So I drew my blade a second time and cut at the sky, while my friends of calculation measured its thickness and its height. But this time something went wrong."

Zai Fu fell silent; after a moment he said bleakly, "Those friends of mine died. In the crack I had cut in the sky there appeared an eye — a huge eye, a monstrous eye. When that eye looked over, I felt my soul shudder, as though it would be dragged out of my body; but my flesh was exceedingly strong, and the beating of my heart pressed my primordial spirit down. My friends could not press theirs down. They..."

The corner of his eye twitched, and he fell silent again.

"I did not immediately charge up into the sky to seek the owner of that eye. I carried my friends' bodies to their homes, settled their families, and buried them with all honor."

Zai Fu stared blankly into space: "I knelt and begged their families' forgiveness. One of those friends was my sworn elder brother; his wife was a good woman, but she gave me a slap across the face. Then she said to me, 'Get out. Go as far as you can, and do not take revenge.' I knew what she meant — if I went for revenge, I would surely die. But I went all the same."

He smiled and said to Shen Mu, "My friend, my brother, died for no reason at all, and died because of me. How could I not take revenge? A man stands eight feet tall, all sinew and muscle, with heroic spirit in his breast and a great blade in his hand — why should he not take revenge, why should he not speak straight from the heart? My sister-in-law cherished me and did not want me to throw my life away, but my blade and my heart are upright and unyielding: a debt of vengeance must be paid! So I took up my blade alone and went up into the sky. Heh heh. Lots of people say I am a madman, don't they?"

Shen Mu nodded silently.

Too many people had called the Heaven Blade a madman for raising his blade against the sky. The Heaven Blade had slain his way up into the heavens and done battle with the gods; the sky was dark, thick with black clouds, thunder crashing on every side.

That battle was described by the people of the time as the strongest of all combat artists, the Heaven Blade, having been possessed by devils and challenging the heavens; later generations passed it down almost as a myth.

The Heaven Blade was cut in two at the waist, his blood spilling down upon the mortal world; from then on the school of combat arts had no strongest one, yet it still flourished. Then Imperial Preceptor Jingping rose to power; because the school of combat arts loved valor and bloodshed and killed at the slightest provocation, the Imperial Preceptor challenged the entire school, slew many of its renowned elders, and from that time the school of combat arts declined.

"I killed my way up into the sky. The sky is only this thick..."

Zai Fu pinched thumb and forefinger together — three inches thick at most.

Shen Mu did not know whether to laugh or cry. That the sky was a hundred thousand li high and three hundred zhang thick was something he had calculated together with Xu Shenghua, Wang Muran, Lin Xuan and the others. Zai Fu was often careless and offhand, and being a poet besides, he loved to exaggerate; three inches was only his figure of speech.

"I fought my way up into the heavens and saw many strange formations."

Zai Fu gazed blankly at the sky: "The sky is only a line wide, and inside it are many formations that run of themselves, exceedingly intricate, taking the shapes of the sun, the moon, the stars, the rivers of stars and the constellations. I was mad with rage then; I thought this damned heaven was all a fake, and those poor old ox-noses of the Daoist sects were still reckoning the stars of the celestial circuit day after day, and all their reckoning came out false in the end. And the common folk still bowed to the sun and the moon every day, worshipping these things. I wanted to hack it all apart, smash it to pieces, and see how you would fool people then. And then..."

And then the Heaven Blade met the gods — the gods who guarded those false heavenly bodies.

The Heaven Blade did battle with the gods, was cut in two at the waist, and fell.

His lower half was seized by the Shaman Venerable, and along with it the severed hand of one of the gods; later Shen Mu stole them back, and they are in Zai Fu's keeping even now.

"I never met the owner of that eye, and I could not avenge my friends. I was crippled, ruined."

Madness showed in Zai Fu's eyes, yet his mind remained steady: "I had no face to go back and see my friends' families, no face to see my sister-in-law, and no face even to die — those friends are watching me..."