Flower Stealing Master

What made this sword art feel unlike anything of the human world was this: among the most celebrated sword arts of the age — whether Dugu Qiubai’s Nine Swords of Dugu, the Duan clan of Dali’s Six Meridian Divine Swords, Wudang’s Taiji Swordplay, or even Song Qingshu’s own self-created sword qi — every single one, with or without a physical form, ultimately came down to physical attack.

This art was different. It struck directly at the opponent’s yuanshen — the primordial spirit.

And against it, no physical defence in existence would mean anything. By Song Qingshu’s current measure of the martial world, there was not a single master alive who could protect themselves against it. They could only stand there and be cut down.

That said, the art was not without its flaw. Deploying a yuanshen strike meant leaving one’s own physical body entirely unguarded. If a third party attacked the body at that precise moment, the result could be the annihilation of both spirit and flesh.

‘Even with that glaring weakness, this art is still absurdly broken. Against a single opponent? Undefeatable.’ A cold sweat had crept over Song Qingshu as he studied it. If anyone ever used this technique against him, his only hope would be to use his movement arts to escape the attack’s range in the fraction of a second available — otherwise, there would simply be no other path but death.

The art had seized him completely. He wanted more — but this chamber only contained a portion of it. He made straight for the third chamber.

The moment he stepped inside, a sharp wind swept past him. Three old men in close-fitted robes were moving through the space at extraordinary speed, each running as though his life depended on it. Their movement was so swift it set the entire chamber stirring with air. Yet even as their feet flew, they talked — and their voices were perfectly composed, their breathing entirely undisturbed. The depth of their internal cultivation was immediately evident.

“This poem, ‘The Ballad of the Hero,’ was written by the great poet Li Bai,” the first elder was saying. “But Li Bai was the Immortal of Poetry — not of the sword. How could twenty-four short lines conceal the ultimate principles of martial arts?”

“The one who created this art,” said the second, “was a grandmaster of martial arts without equal in all of history. He merely borrowed Li Bai’s poem as a vessel for expressing his transcendent achievement. We should not be too rigid — too slavishly beholden to the surface meaning of the poem.”

“Brother Ji’s point is well taken,” said the third, “but this line — ‘yín ān zhào bái mǎ’ — without Li Bai’s poetic imagery, I cannot see how to approach it at all.”

“Indeed,” said the first. “More than that — I believe it must be read together with the line in the fourth chamber, ‘sà tà rú liú xīng’, before it can be properly understood. In interpreting poetry, one must never read a line in isolation — and the same principle applies to researching martial arts.” [G: The two lines under discussion: “yín ān zhào bái mǎ” — “a silver saddle gleams upon a white horse”; “sà tà rú liú xīng” — “swift and fleet as a falling star.” Both are from Li Bai’s Xia Ke Xing.]

Song Qingshu was quietly puzzled — if these three were discussing martial arts, why not sit down and talk it through? Why this endless breathless circling? The answer came a moment later. “Since you claim to have grasped more from these two lines than I have,” the second elder was saying to the first, “why is your movement art no better in practice? You still can’t catch me.” “Can you catch me, then?” the first retorted with a laugh. The three of them were running faster and faster now, robes streaming, tracing a continuous ring around the chamber — yet the distances between them never changed. Their cultivation was evidently matched so evenly that none could gain a step on the others.

Song Qingshu suppressed a laugh. What a trio of loveable fools. Three more poor souls who’ve completely lost their way. He left them to it and turned straight to the wall.

His attention settled at once on the carving of a horse — head raised, in full gallop, cloud-mist swirling under its hooves as though it were running through open sky.

He tried the same approach as before, tracing the animal’s momentum in his mind — and felt nothing. His inner breath stayed perfectly still. ‘Whatever this chamber holds, it’s different from the first two.’

He looked again, this time at the cloud-vapour under the horse’s feet. Each bank of mist seemed to be surging forward, pressing against the stone as though straining to burst free. He stared at it for a moment — and his inner breath surged up of its own accord, his feet seized by an urge to run.

‘So this is a movement art.’ He felt a flicker of disappointment — he’d been hoping for more of the sword art — but caught himself. If even the sword arts of the Supreme Mysteries Scripture were that extraordinary, the movement art could hardly be anything less.

The three elders had moved off to another chamber. Song Qingshu recalled the sensation of that inner surge, let it rise again, and ran.

He lost count of how many circuits he made before the shape of those cloud-masses had fixed itself in his memory. He let out a quiet sigh. This movement art was also incomplete — it would need to be combined with content from other chambers before the full picture emerged.

But even from what he’d learned so far, the defining characteristic of this technique was already unmistakable.

It ignored gravity entirely.

Movement arts in this world all defied gravity to some extent, of course — men could leap dozens of feet in a single bound, run as fast as racehorses; by the standards of his previous life, such things were unimaginable. But those arts shared a common principle: they overcame gravity through speed. By the physics of his previous world, this made sense — move fast enough and a stone can skip across water. The movement-art masters of this world could leap fifty feet into the air and walk on water — but only because of speed.

Ask one of those masters to walk slowly up a sheer vertical wall, one careful step at a time, or to stroll across a lake’s surface at a leisurely pace — that would be utterly beyond them.

The movement art within the Supreme Mysteries Scripture, however, could genuinely allow a person to ignore gravity in all circumstances, moving through any environment as though on level ground — like the Nazgûl’s horses in The Lord of the Rings, which could climb a perfectly vertical cliff face one steady step at a time.

‘No wonder people online used to argue that Shi Potian was the strongest fighter in all of Jin Yong’s novels. The Supreme Mysteries Scripture is utterly broken.’ Even with all his composure, Song Qingshu felt his mind reel.

What he didn’t know was that in the original novel, though Shi Potian had absorbed the Supreme Mysteries Scripture, he had done so in a fog of incomprehension, with no foundation in martial arts theory to build on — meaning what he’d truly grasped was actually less than what Song Qingshu was drawing out right now.

Take the sword art: Shi Potian had intuited that it made him feel as though an invisible supreme blade was in his hand, emanating sword qi in every direction. Formidable — but nowhere near the true heart of the Twenty-Third Sword, which was the yuanshen strike. Take the movement art: Shi Potian had grasped the ability to cross hundreds of feet in a single step and tread through empty air. Impressive — but still a considerable distance from truly nullifying gravity.

Driven by the urgency of learning the rest of the sword art and movement art, Song Qingshu moved from chamber to chamber without pause.

Twenty-four lines in Xia Ke Xing — twenty-four stone chambers, each with its own diagrams. He went through them one by one, absorbing what each wall had to offer. In his short yellow servant’s jacket, he was beneath the notice of the assembled masters who had spent years on this island puzzling over these chambers. They took him for a tea-boy, nothing more. He was perfectly content to remain invisible in the corner and quietly plunder every divine art the chambers had to offer.

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