"Senior Brother, I never thought it would be this chaotic down the mountain..."
Five days since they'd descended.
In those five days, Yin Zhiping's party had seen with their own eyes the chaos of a dynasty in its twilight.
The land at the foot of Mount Zhongnan was comparatively fortunate: with the Quanzhen Sect there, common bandits and robbers steered clear of jianghu sects like theirs.
Tragedies like the one that had destroyed Yin Family Village were rare within Mount Zhongnan's bounds—when the Quanzhen Sect learned of such things, it moved to clean them out.
But the farther they traveled from Mount Zhongnan, the more what they saw and heard exceeded imagination—crueler by a hundredfold, a thousandfold.
One word: chaos!
The common people were homeless and scattered, either fleeing or on the road to fleeing. Many, pressed past all endurance, had turned bandit themselves, buying their own survival with other men's lives.
Yin Zhiping understood them. Which was why, whenever he came across them, he dealt with them.
Men who had thrown away their conscience—the Tao's gate would not take them. All that remained was to send them west to the Buddha's gate, and let the Buddha persuade them to lay down their butcher knives and become buddhas on the spot.
At this rate, once the Buddhist ranks hit full headcount, surely they owed Yin Zhiping a medal of thanks at the very least!
Li Zhichang sat toasting himself by the fire, chewing dry rations.
Tonight there was no village ahead and no inn behind, so the wilderness would have to do.
"This is what an age of chaos is. There's not much we can do—we manage what we see. Beyond that... we're powerless."
Yin Zhiping had achieved a heart like still water. However much he resented the rulers of this dynasty, he knew he could change nothing.
"But, Senior Brother—the foreign tribes are watching like wolves, and they haven't even broken through yet, and it's already this bad. What if..."
Li Zhichang couldn't finish. What came next bordered on treason—but he truly could not understand how things had come to this.
"You want to say: what if Xiangyang falls, and the Mongol cavalry rolls across the plains unchecked, straight for the heart of the realm. When that day comes, under a foreign race, our Han people will suffer far worse."
Yin Zhiping finished the unspoken words for him, his face unchanged.
Li Zhichang's face, on the other hand, looked rather ugly. That was exactly what he hadn't dared say, meaning for meaning.
"You're not wrong. But have you considered? The Song court is already rotten through. They sit high in their halls chasing their own pleasures, utterly indifferent to whether the people live or die. Even without a foreign invasion—how well do you think the people would fare?"
Li Zhichang's expression changed completely. He had no idea why his ever-measured Senior Brother Yin would say such things. If the court heard of it, it meant the headsman—and it could drag the whole Quanzhen Sect down with it.
"Senior Brother Yin, guard your words!"
Yin Zhiping glanced at Li Zhichang, who was sweating with alarm.
"Relax. The court has no attention to spare for the jianghu right now. They need jianghu men to hold Xiangyang for them. Why else do you think Hero Guo—a martial artist with no rank—can move whole garrisons of Xiangyang's troops?"
Having said it, Yin Zhiping had no fear of it being known. He was certain that even if his words reached the court's ears today, they could only hide away and rage impotently. They would do nothing. Afterward they would simply pretend not to know.
Because right now they depended on Guo Jing—and on the Great Song's jianghu. And all the world knew of Guo Jing's ties to the Quanzhen Sect. So they could only swallow their broken teeth.
"Then by your reasoning, Senior Brother—us, all these jianghu heroes, Hero Guo and Chief Huang themselves—what meaning is there in holding this Xiangyang at all?"
A few short sentences had left Li Zhichang reeling, a cold current shooting straight up his spine. His entire view of the world was tipping over.
"Meaning? How could there be no meaning? What we guard is not Xiangyang's walls, and not those who feast in their high halls. What we guard is the backbone of ten million Han people—the destiny of the Han. So long as our backbone is not broken, then even if Xiangyang falls, even if the foreign tribes enter the Central Plains, the day will come when we drive them out again."
He knew history. That was why Yin Zhiping could define it so.
A dynasty at its end; a new order waiting to stand. Breaking before rebuilding was the best road left—however much suffering the passage was fated to hold.
But this land would only ever have one master: the children of Yan and Huang!
Li Zhichang bowed his head in thought after Yin Zhiping finished. Around them, the fellow disciples who had been listening in wore expressions of every shade.
"Enough. It's late—get some rest. Zhiye, Zhitong, take first watch. Rotate every four hours."
The topic had grown heavy, and Yin Zhiping had no wish to continue it.
Before tonight, the brothers following Yin Zhiping to Xiangyang had believed they went to defend home and country, for the sake of the numberless common people at their backs. That was not wrong.
Only, these past days' sights had taught them that even without any invasion, the people were already living in fire and drowning water.
In the end, they simply hadn't walked enough of the world.
Some of them had traveled the jianghu with Qiu Chuji or the other Masters before—but at the sight of the Seven Masters' age and bearing, anyone with functioning eyes gave them a wide berth.
Three waves of bandits in five days was, frankly, a bit much.
The refugees they had passed were countless; Li Zhichang and several disciples had already spent every coin in their purses on dry rations and handed them all out.
"Understood, Senior Brother!"
"Yes, Senior Brother!"
Wu Zhiye and Qian Zhitong nodded their assent.
The others found places to rest. Yin Zhiping leaned against a tree and looked up at the stars. This was his own first sight of the age's chaos too. All he could say was: it beggared imagination.
The old horrors—children traded to be eaten, tree roots gnawed, bark stripped—had been things he'd heard of but never seen. They'd been abstractions.
Only having seen it did he understand: this was a world where people ate people. "In prosperity, the people suffer; in ruin, the people suffer"—the line described exactly what lay before him.
In moments like this, Yin Zhiping felt grateful all over again that Qiu Chuji had saved him, had taken him as disciple, had given him a place to stand in this broken age.
His thoughts drifted. A great bank of dark cloud slid over the crescent moon. A light wind brushed past, and a thread of unease stirred in Yin Zhiping's chest—the feeling that something would happen tonight.
He couldn't name it or trace it. Heaven's disaster or man's, he couldn't tell. But tonight would not be quiet.
Sleep was out of the question. Yin Zhiping rose, meaning to look around.
"Senior Brother? You're not resting?"
His movement had caught Li Zhichang's attention.
"Sleep. I'll take a look around."
The unease kept swelling. Something that could make him—an Innate—uneasy: if it was heaven's disaster, nothing for it but to protect himself as best he could. If it was man's, only two possibilities. An Innate-realm enemy. Or an army in force.
They were deep in the heartland; no army could appear here. Yin Zhiping's guess was an Innate-realm enemy.
Of course, if the feeling was wrong, so much the better...
One full circuit later, Yin Zhiping had found nothing amiss. Only their own twenty-one souls anywhere nearby.
He had just decided he was overthinking it and turned back to rest when a strange sound rose in the night—like someone talking.