Of his elders' scheme, Yin Zhiping knew nothing.
Had he known, he would certainly have stopped them.
He wanted the Innate Art, yes—but the Innate Art was not the only road.
There was no need for them to go begging anyone over one method.
Back in his own small courtyard, Yin Zhiping let out a long breath.
The Xiangyang expedition had paid richly—and weighed heavily.
He had been the leader. The senior brother. Responsible for every junior brother under him.
Every one of them hand-picked by him, second-rate realm at minimum, able at least to keep themselves alive.
And mercifully, every one of them had come home breathing.
"Senior Brother? Are you back?"
He gathered his drifting thoughts. Someone at the gate—and by the voice, it was his junior brother Zhen Zhibing.
"I'm back. Come in."
Yin Zhiping and Zhen Zhibing got on well. Both had bowed to Qiu Chuji as master; Yin Zhiping had even taught the man on their master's behalf.
Though only three years older, Yin Zhiping had been the actual source of everything Zhen Zhibing knew—martial arts and letters alike.
For that, Zhen Zhibing had always revered him as he would a teacher.
"Senior Brother, next time you must take me. The thought of all of you killing enemies on the battlefield while I sat on this mountain, useless—it ate at me the whole time."
The Zhen Zhibing who had never met Xiaolongnü was the Quanzhen Sect's model Taoist, three virtues out of three: fine talent, fine temperament, fine principles.
"Rest easy—there will be chances enough. The Mongols didn't come resolved to win this time. When they come again, Xiangyang will be a far harder field. Next time I'd drag you along even if you begged off."
Yin Zhiping sat and poured two cups of tea, one for each of them.
"Senior Brother, let me, let me—where's the sense in a senior pouring for a junior?"
Zhen Zhibing hurriedly rescued the pot from his hands, filled Yin Zhiping's cup first, then his own.
On the whole of Mount Zhongnan, only the pot in Yin Zhiping's courtyard was kept steeped with actual tea at all hours—hot or gone cold, no one fussed.
Everyone else's pots held plain water.
"Driving off the Mongols bought Xiangyang a year of quiet—two at most.
But our own ground here enjoys no such geography as Xiangyang's. Given the court's strength, if the Mongol army dares come, it will dare to win. So rein in the disciples: stay on the mountain unless there's real cause to leave.
We defend what can hopefully be defended. To stand a wall you already know will fall—that isn't defense, it's dying for nothing. It isn't worth it. You understand?"
Yin Zhiping wasn't speaking idly. The Mongol tide had already set; it waited only for the order to roll into the Central Plains.
Xiangyang was easy to hold and brutal to take. Rather than bleed armies against it, take everything takeable first.
In their place, Yin Zhiping would have done exactly the same.
It was also why, in the original story, Guo Jing had needed to travel to Mount Zhongnan in disguise, with Yang Guo in tow.
Guo Jing's name sat high on Mongol lists. Discovery would have meant very bad odds.
And it was why, later in that story, Huodu and Daerba could fight their way into the Quanzhen Sect with such ease.
By then, the sect already stood on Mongol-administered ground.
As for why the Mongols never dealt with the Quanzhen Sect outright—likely they were wary of its name as the ancestral court of the Tao.
Rulers understand one thing well: do not ignite the people's fury.
The Quanzhen Sect's standing among the common folk had always been superb.
The people below Mount Zhongnan, above all, had lived long years under its care.
"Senior Brother... why? Why can't we defend it?"
A fog had settled over Zhen Zhibing. All of it was Song soil. To simply hand it over?
"The tide of the age!"
Four words were the only answer Yin Zhiping could give.
"Then the people at the foot of the mountain—they'll suffer all over again, won't they?"
Zhen Zhibing's mind leapt to the villagers below—people who sheltered in the sect's shadow and lived tolerably well by it. If things went as Senior Brother said, wouldn't those lives be torn up root and stem?
"Our Quanzhen Sect can still keep one patch of ground safe. And so long as the Mongols aren't fools, they won't grind down our Han commoners for sport."
Yin Zhiping knew this much: whatever else he was, Kublai was no fool.
"One more thing, Zhibing. The forbidden ground on the back mountain—stay away from it."
He might as well drop the hint while he was at it.
He was here, after all. It would be wrong to change nothing.
In another life, uncounted readers had cursed Yin Zhiping and Zhen Zhibing both, in language as ugly as language gets.
Yin Zhiping trusted himself not to end up prostrate at Xiaolongnü's hem. Zhen Zhibing, he did not trust.
Hence the thought: if the meeting itself could be prevented, so much the better.
"You mean the Tomb of the Living Dead, Senior Brother? Quanzhen disciples are forbidden entry—I've never once forgotten. Only... why bring up the forbidden ground at all? Senior Brother, surely you haven't—?"
Zhen Zhibing was staring at him in dawning horror—as if his senior brother had broken the sect's rules, entered the Tomb, and disturbed the senior who dwelt within.
That someone lived in the Tomb of the Living Dead—someone bound deep to their founding Grandmaster—was no secret to third-generation disciples of their standing.
"I have never been in. Calm down. It was only a reminder—and pass it to the other juniors while you're at it: no one is to trouble the elder on the back mountain in her seclusion."
Yin Zhiping smiled it away, while a voice in his head muttered: never been—good, good. Besides, Xiaolongnü is still a child right now. Going would accomplish nothing anyway...
They talked a while longer, and Zhen Zhibing took his leave.
He knew his senior brother was fresh off the road and needed rest; he'd only meant to look in, not linger.
Watching his junior brother's figure disappear through the gate, Yin Zhiping thought: more discipline still needed there. Forbidden means forbidden. Do not go.
He sat a while—and then remembered his old mountaintop.
His own small world. Many knew of it; almost no one went.
Up there, he could empty himself. No interruptions—just clouds rolling and unrolling at the sky's edge, sun climbing and falling—until body and mind rinsed clean.
The thought was the act. He begged a chicken off the back kitchen, slaughtered and cleaned it, and made straight for the summit.
What Yin Zhiping could not know was how far this small impulse would reach into everything that came after.
The mountain path was steep and unfriendly; one wrong step could mean a fall of ten thousand zhang.
But he had walked it into his bones long ago—and a Golden Goose Art at proficiency 100 made the climb no harder than level ground.
Except that when he crested the summit, something was different.
Someone had claimed the place a step ahead of him.
Was sitting, in fact, on the stone stool Yin Zhiping had cut for his own convenience.
A woman. Even from behind, breathtaking—and dressed, like Yin Zhiping himself, all in white.
The wind ran strong up there; her skirt-hem swayed with it. She was watching the setting sun.
Sensing someone's arrival, the woman turned her head slightly.
What kind of face was that? Yin Zhiping could only conclude that his entire stock of vocabulary was unequal to describing it.
Lit by the dying sun, she might have been an immortal maiden strayed into the world—dust refusing to touch her, celestial air trailing off her like mist.
Years of cultivating the Tao—and the heart—pulled Yin Zhiping back from the daze in short order. And his first coherent thought was:
It's over. Guarded against everything, and it got me anyway...