Yin Zhiping did feel gratitude toward Ouyang Feng—which was why, in that joint attack with Guo Jing, he had eased his hand.
That sword-stroke had done no more than break skin. No wound of any consequence.
Its real work had been to frighten Ouyang Feng into flight.
"Zhiping. Ouyang Feng is not a good man. His evils were many, and a nature like his does not change. Mad or not, your master does not believe he has been reborn a new man. You understand me?"
Qiu Chuji's admonition came slow and weighted.
Ouyang Feng's old crimes had earned him hostility on every side—madness notwithstanding.
The five surviving Masters shared it in full.
What they feared was Yin Zhiping being taken in—falling for some trick of the old venom's.
"Your master is right, Zhiping. Ouyang Feng is no good man. You know our accounts with him are closed—so let him alone entirely."
Wang Chuyi added his own word of caution.
Yin Zhiping was the hope of the Quanzhen revival. None of the five wanted to see him step wrong on Ouyang Feng's account.
"Master, Martial Uncles—set your hearts at ease. Your disciple has his own clear ledger."
Yin Zhiping understood their worry perfectly.
Ouyang Feng had done too much evil in the jianghu, made too many enemies.
Anyone so much as brushing against him inherited the world's contempt.
Take Huang Rong in the original story: already cool toward Yang Guo as Yang Kang's son, and then the boy revealed the Toad Skill. The moment she knew he was connected to Ouyang Feng, she would not keep him on Peach Blossom Island—and so Guo Jing had to carry him off to the Quanzhen Sect.
That was what prejudice weighed.
Yin Zhiping knew good and evil resisted tidy sorting. To the Quanzhen Sect, to Guo Jing and Huang Rong, to nearly all the jianghu, Ouyang Feng was a villain.
To the departed Ouyang Ke, he had been a good father.
Different ground, different eyes, different verdicts.
"So long as your own ledger is clear. And what do you mean to do next?"
Qiu Chuji trusted his disciple.
"Master, your disciple wishes to ask you plainly: was the Grandmaster's Innate Art ever passed down?"
Yin Zhiping had turned it over, and chosen the direct road.
Qiu Chuji, Wang Chuyi, Sun Bu'er, Liu Chuxuan, and Hao Datong looked at one another. Not one of them had expected the Innate Art to come up.
"Zhiping—what brings the Innate Art to your mind? Since your Grandmaster's death, only the Southern Emperor, Lord Duan—Reverend Yideng, as he now is—holds that art. It was never taught to us, nor to your Grand-Uncle Zhou."
Qiu Chuji explained—and wondered, as he did, where the question had come from.
"Only curiosity, Master. Coming down the mountain this once, your disciple saw Hero Guo's Eighteen Dragon-Subduing Palms and his Nine Yin arts; saw Ouyang Feng's Toad Skill; saw the Esoteric Sect's crowning Dragon-Elephant Prajna Skill besides. It set me thinking of the Grandmaster's Innate Art."
He could hardly say the truth outright: that the Quanzhen arts no longer kept pace with his strength—that closing the distance to Guo Jing and Ouyang Feng required a method or technique of the first rank.
For the sake of his elders' faces, he wrapped it soft.
But which of those five old foxes wasn't a sieve for subtext? They heard the meaning under the words perfectly well.
They simply couldn't help. At Yin Zhiping's standing, the Quanzhen Sect kept nothing from him anymore.
Every method, every manual in the sect already lay open to him. The Innate Art had genuinely never been passed down.
The subject closed there, by wordless mutual consent.
But Qiu Chuji had gone thoughtful. The matter of methods had lodged in his mind.
Everyone in the martial world knew how much a first-class manual was worth to a practitioner.
That was exactly why the Nine Yin Manual's emergence had once set the entire jianghu ablaze.
His disciple, Qiu Chuji knew, had seen the gap between the Quanzhen arts and the supreme ones—hence the question.
And that was a failure of his, as the boy's master.
Yin Zhiping wasn't especially disappointed. He'd braced for the answer.
If the art existed, wonderful. If not—then the plan moved to acquiring the Nine Yang Divine Art.
The Nine Yang Divine Art had been created by the Wine-Fighting Divine Monk. After his drinking contest and martial debate with Wang Chongyang, the monk had read the Nine Yin Manual—and from it created this art in which yin and yang complete each other.
He had then hidden the work inside the Lankavatara Sutra at Shaolin, where the sweeping-monk of the Scripture Pavilion, Jueyuan, would one day absorb it.
Of every divine art in this world, it was the one Yin Zhiping judged most obtainable—and in no way inferior to the Nine Yin Manual.
Men called it the first internal cultivation method under heaven.
"Master, your disciple wishes to remain on the mountain a while and consolidate. This journey brought great gains; they need settling. After that, I will go down and walk the world again."
That was the plan as stated. In truth, "walking the world" meant one destination: Shaolin—and a way into the Scripture Pavilion, and the Nine Yang Divine Art out of it.
The Shaolin of this era, with the world in upheaval, had sealed its mountain and withdrawn.
In troubled times, the Bodhi asks after nothing, while the Old Lord shoulders his sword to save the world; in fat years, the Buddha's gate greets its incense-guests, while the Lord of the Tao retires to the hills.
Not one word of it wrong.
Yin Zhiping thought little of Shaolin's conduct—but of Shaolin's martial arts, he remained frankly covetous.
"All martial arts under heaven come out of Shaolin"—an exaggeration, certainly, but not an empty one.
The Seventy-Two Consummate Arts earned their name. And the Muscle-Tendon Changing Classic and the Marrow-Cleansing Classic were divine works you couldn't buy at any price.
Yin Zhiping withdrew to rest. Qiu Chuji watched his disciple open the door, step through, turn, close it—watched him vanish from sight—and sat in silence.
"Senior Brother. Should we set the disciples to tracing Grand-Uncle Zhou's whereabouts? As I recall, he knows the Nine Yin Manual."
After so many decades as martial siblings, they could each guess most of what moved in the others' chests.
Wang Chuyi knew exactly how bad Qiu Chuji felt, so he floated the suggestion.
"No, Junior Brother. Our master's command stands: no Quanzhen disciple may cultivate the Nine Yin Manual. A master's command is not to be defied."
Qiu Chuji shook his head. Find Zhou Botong, by all means—but learning the Nine Yin Manual was another matter. That prohibition had been Wang Chongyang's dying order.
"Then we seek out Reverend Yideng—see whether Master's Innate Art might be traded back."
That was Hao Datong's thought.
Laughable, in its way: the Quanzhen Sect's own art, and they would have to barter with outsiders to recover it. The story would raise snickers wherever it traveled.
But as things stood, it was the best road any of them could see.
"Good. The moment we have Reverend Yideng's whereabouts, all five of us go together—let the sincerity be seen."
"With the Reverend's breadth of heart, he will surely agree."
"Zhiping with the Innate Art added—he'd hardly be less than Master himself, no?"
"Perhaps the blue will out-deepen the indigo it came from."
"Let us do this only after Zhiping has gone down the mountain. I fear his thoughts would run wild otherwise."
Sun Bu'er, the woman among them, thought one careful step further—to how Yin Zhiping would feel.
"Well said! Our martial sister has the right of it. Zhiping has always honored his teachers—he could not bear to watch us bow and beg on his behalf."