Flower Stealing Master

Chapter 1122: Danger Returns

Seeing Song Qingshu make no move — only stare at her with that peculiar expression — Xiao Longnu realised what he had been thinking. Her voice came out distinctly unamused. “Where exactly did your mind go? I meant to wrap your outer robe around a log while there’s still time, so it looks like I’m carrying you on my back and draw the pursuers away.”

Song Qingshu knew perfectly well he had misread the situation — yet somehow having it confirmed still produced a faint, irrational disappointment. He shook it off quickly. “But wouldn’t that put you in danger?”

Xiao Longnu shook her head. “With my Qinggong, losing them won’t be difficult.”

Only then did Song Qingshu remember that the Ancient Tomb Sect was celebrated throughout the martial world precisely for its Qinggong. He pulled off his outer robe and held it out to her. “Then I’ll trouble you.”

Xiao Longnu offered the faintest smile. “You’ve saved my life more times than I can count. What is this by comparison?”

Xiao Longnu had devoted herself since childhood to the cultivation that stills all emotion and desire; her expression was habitually composed, distant, almost without feeling. That sudden smile was like winter ice cracking open into the first warmth of spring, flowers blooming all at once across a face of snow.

Noticing Song Qingshu staring at her with an intensity that bordered on impolite, Xiao Longnu’s composure developed a slight, involuntary fissure. “I’m going.” She gave the words as an afterthought, bundled his robe around a piece of wood to roughly approximate the shape of a man being carried, and leapt out of the cave.

Song Qingshu went to the entrance and watched from a distance. Xiao Longnu deliberately let herself be spotted by the pursuers, then led them off at a run in entirely the wrong direction.

“I hope she’ll be all right.” He went back inside, and found, without Xiao Longnu, that the cave felt somehow diminished — as if colour had quietly left it.

He sighed, and for want of anything better to do sat cross-legged again, attempting once more to gather the true qi scattered through his body. Every method he tried yielded nothing.

Crack!

A faint, brittle sound. 

Song Qingshu’s eyes snapped open toward the cave entrance.

“Brother, all the others went after that woman — what are we doing over here?” A complaining voice. 

Song Qingshu felt his pupils contract. He had not expected anyone to come this way at all.

“What do you know?” The responding voice was full and resonant — clearly a skilled practitioner. “There’s a saying: make the real appear false, and the false appear real. That woman may well have been drawing everyone away with a ruse. I asked the men who were hurt earlier — from their description, the cave should be somewhere around here.” 

Song Qingshu would not have given such a man a second thought on an ordinary day. But now, with his inner energy entirely inaccessible, even this was an opponent he could not match.

“Brother really does see further than the rest of us!” A third voice chimed in.

Three of them. Song Qingshu felt a jolt of cold in his chest. He couldn’t manage one — let alone three. He tested his qi again. Predictably, nothing.

‘If only I had a sword in my hand…’

The thought had barely formed when Song Qingshu’s eyes caught something and sharpened. When Xiao Longnu had driven the soldiers away earlier, she had struck their wrists and sent their weapons clattering to the ground. Several had been left behind in the cave.

He picked up a sword with a good balance to it, and felt the faintest steadiness return to his nerves. In the original tale, Linghu Chong had been stripped of all inner energy by the warring alien Qi within him, yet at the Temple of the Medicine King he had still managed to blind more than a dozen skilled fighters with a single sword. A blade in his hand was at least something.

The difficulty was that Song Qingshu’s swordplay was more classical in nature — its genius lay in the precise angle and timing of each strike. Previously, with his inner energy intact, those choices had produced effects that seemed almost miraculous. His eye for the sword remained unchanged, but without inner energy his speed and reaction time had both fallen sharply. He could not rely on the same devastating results that Linghu Chong’s Nine Swords of Dugu produced.

This was not to say his swordplay was inferior to the Nine Swords of Dugu — only that the Nine Swords of Dugu made fewer demands of its practitioner, retaining considerable power even at low inner energy levels. Song Qingshu’s swordplay was more austere, more absolute, and accordingly it required more — a foundation of inner energy below a certain threshold, and its full potential simply could not be reached.

I survived the worst of it. If I die now, of all moments, that would be truly galling.

The three men outside were clearly not without skill. He had swordsmanship and no inner energy against three capable fighters — the odds were poor.

Then, fretting in the half-dark, his eye fell on something at his feet: the pool of blood he had coughed up earlier, still faintly luminous with that strange golden sheen.

An idea came to him at once. He took out Xiao Longnu’s Jade Bee Needles — they had already been used, so most of the bee venom had been spent, too little to pose any real threat. But the pool of poisoned blood on the floor was right there.

Song Qingshu carefully dipped the needles into it, then pressed them point-up into the earth at the narrowest point of the cave entrance, low enough to catch anyone who stepped through without watching their feet. The idea had come from Yang Guo — in the original Divine Condor Heroes, Yang Guo and Li Mochou had used exactly this method to slip the pursuit of both Monk Jinlun and Ni Moxing, and in the process had crippled Ni Moxing’s legs permanently.

Xiao Longnu’s Jade Bee Needles were admittedly not as lethal as Li Mochou’s Frozen Soul Silver Needles — but now, dipped in blood laced with Jinbōxún flower poison, their killing power likely exceeded even those.

“Found it — the cave is here!” The three men had located the entrance.

“Everyone be careful. There may be traps inside.” The man in the lead, plainly cautious by nature, raised the warning immediately.

Song Qingshu’s heart sank. He had counted on them being less careful than Monk Jinlun and Ni Moxing. Instead, these three nameless guards were somehow more meticulous.

“Needles on the ground!”

“Careful!”

“Brother really does think of everything.”

The three guards entered the cave with deliberate, watchful steps. Their dress marked them as not belonging to Li Kexiu’s forces — they were Moqi’s personal attendants.

Song Qingshu sighed inwardly. Men who had spent years at Moqi’s side had likely done enough underhanded work to make them sharper than ordinary men. Best-laid plans, and all that.

When they made out Song Qingshu clearly in the dimness of the cave, all three stopped — then broke into laughter. “That ba$tard Zhang Quan was worried we’d steal his glory, so he deliberately packed us off to the back — and look what fell into our laps instead! Ha!”

The Zhang Quan they mentioned bore the nickname “Wind-Chanting Swift Sword” and served as the head of Moqi’s personal guard — a man of some reputation in the martial world south of the Yangtze. He and these three had never gotten along. When the hunt for Song Qingshu began, Zhang Quan had deliberately sent them in the opposite direction to keep them out of the glory. Instead, by pure accident, they had stumbled onto Song Qingshu themselves.

Song Qingshu regarded the three of them and sighed, “I didn’t expect you to find me all the same. Might I ask your honoured names? Let Song here at least die knowing whose hands took him, and not go to his grave a confused ghost.”

The man in front was broad and powerfully built. With a promotion of three ranks and ten thousand taels of gold almost within reach, his mood was exceedingly fine. He grinned openly. “Gladly. We three are known in the trade as the ‘Tianmu Three Heroes.’ I am Xiong Da—”

He gestured to the man beside him, thickset as a bear with a jaw full of stubble. “This is Xiong Er—”

Song Qingshu stared at the last man, who had a distinctly weasel-like cast to his features. “Don’t tell me your name is Guangtou Qiang.” [G: Xiong Da and Xiong Er — “Bear One” and “Bear Two” — are the two bear brothers from the beloved Chinese animated series Boonie Bears (熊出没), whose comedy foil is a logger named Bald Eagle (光头强, Guāngtóu Qiáng, literally “Bald-Headed Strong”).]