Ancient Sword
Ye Yanbu
On the shore of the North Sea sat a tall mountain that was topped with snow year-round, along with howling winds.
At the foot of the mountain in a secluded cave lived a young swordsman.
The young swordsman had lived there for seven years. Four years prior he began his martial arts training with his master. He had had some martial arts training before that, and because he trained diligently he made much progress in those four years and became his master’s favorite student.
In the summer of the fourth year, his master called all the disciples together and told them of his plan to retire and live in seclusion in a foreign land. No longer would he be involved with wulin affair of the Central Plains, and since the students had completed their training, they could leave the mountain. There was much discussion among the students, and then they packed up their things, made plans for what to do once they had left the mountain, then bid farewell to their master and each went his own way. Only the young swordsman had acquired the chivalric ambition to help the people who suffered from some injustice, and so he felt his martial arts was not good enough yet. He couldn’t yet face the world outside the mountain. He thought about it for some time, and at night once the others had left he knelt before the cave entrance where his master lived and asked to stay with his master and continue training.
His master didn’t respond. The dark of night gradually crept into the stone cave and silence reigned for most of the night. When it was almost light, his master finally sighed and said, “Ai, I’ve been in the Central Plains for decades taking on students and never found one who was promising. I had thought to go abroad and live the hermit’s life. I did not expect that before I left I would meet someone with such diligence. Alright, there’s no need for me to take my school’s swordplay manual and secret map with me. Come inside.”
And so his master led him to the deepest recesses of the cave and reached into a crack in the stone wall and took out an antiquated cloth bundle. He set the bundle on the table and solemnly bowed to it three times, then placed the bundle in the young swordsman’s hands and told him, “From this day forward you are the twenty-sixth disciple of our school. Inside this is the Mount Zhen Swordplay Manual. Don’t show it to anyone. I see you have innate intelligence, and so I can pass this on to you.
“After I leave, practice it, and with your natural talent you will master it, two years at the soonest, four at the latest. On the other side of that cloth is a secret map from our school’s founder. You must study it carefully. If fate is on your side, you will come to understand its secrets, which one else up to now has been able to penetrate, and you will be able to find and ancient sword. A mystical, ancient sword that can cut metal and break jade, with an edge so keen it can slice through iron like it was clay, worthy of a disciple of our school.”
The master looked up and saw it was light out, then continued, “The time has come. We part ways here. Take care of yourself. The future of the school from now on depends on you.”
The master stood and walked toward the mouth of the cave without looking back. The young swordsman was shocked, but his master had already reached the mouth of the cave. The young swordsman cried out in panic for him to stay, but the master kept on, determined, and finally vanished in the deepest dark of approaching dawn, leaving behind only the chaotic wind among the meridian between night and day, whistling and whirling without end.
For the next three years, the young swordsman strictly observed his master’s instructions and trained diligently alone on the mountain. He woke up sharply at the beginning of the fifth watch every day and climbed alone to the snowy summit and sat down and circulated his qi for a while, then sprang to his feet. In the morning he took the ten-mile path down the mountain and did odd jobs for the villagers to make a little money so he could eke out a meager existence.
After a simple lunch he went back up the mountain and spent the whole afternoon absorbed in practicing his swordplay. In the evening, back in the cave under the feeble light of an oil lamp, he read through the swordplay manual over and over and pondered the secret map. Some of those winter nights, when it was especially cold and the fur blankets he got from hunting were not enough to keep him warm, he would howl and shoot to his feet and run out of the cave and practice his school’s martial arts in the middle of the strong wind and whirling snow. Every time, by the time he finished he no longer felt the cold, and on that harsh terrain he achieved a oneness with nature.
For three years the young swordsman did this, until he was thoroughly skilled in each of the moves in the swordplay manual. When he practiced them each move smoothly followed the next without interruption. He was confident that if he was met with an opponent, that raging, surging, relentless swordplay would force any master to keep to a tight defense. And once he had stifled that opponent to the farthest limit, he would unleash the final move in the swordplay manual. The move involved jumping up and utilizing one’s downward momentum to strike directly at the opponent’s vitals. The opponent would not be able to avoid it. There would be no option but to parry it head-on. Of course there was a disadvantage in resisting from below, so even if his opponent were stronger than he, he would still come out the vitor with no problem.
Just as he mastered his swordplay, the young swordsman had a sudden epiphany regarding the secret map he had pored over nearly a thousand times. He boldly postulated that the four small continuous images running from top to bottom, left to right, were actually four different things. By simplifying it into a four-line mnemonic rhyme, he came up with:
Moon dredged out of the sea
Birds sing and flowers sprout
The night of three and five
Rabbit ears point it out
He still hadn’t unraveled the secret of the location of the sword, but he figured he ought to go out and have a look around anyway, try his luck.
The young swordsman left the mountain. He sealed off the mouth of the cave, and with the swordplay manual and secret map on his person, he set off alone for the vast nearby desert to search.
For half a year the young swordsman searched nearly the whole desert until finally he wandered over to the southwestern part of the vast desert. It was an arid, desolate area, not a person in sight. The terrain rose and fell erratically. There were recesses filled with glittering grains of salt, glaring sharply white under the intense sun. The young swordsman was soon out of water. Dying of thirst, he blearily climbed up hill dotted with broken rocks, and when he reached the top and discovered a hollow filled with a deep spring, he lurched quickly toward it, forgetting to consider if it might be a mirage or not.
Luckily, the spring was real. It lay quietly among the bare rocks and yellow sand in a perfect crescent moon shape. Next to the spring, weeping willows and saltcedar grew in abundance, and he caught the heady scent of blooming wildflowers. The young swordsman fell down at the edge of the spring and began to drink in ravenous gulps, starling a flock of birds which spread their wings and took off, where they circled the little pool high overhead.
Once the young swordsman had drank his fill, he cooled off and his consciousness slowly returned to normal and fatigue set in. Contented, he lay under the shade of some date palms and fell into a deep sleep.
When he woke it was already approaching night, the cloudless blue sky beginning to dim. Under the vault of heaven, among the desert, the parched survivor felt deeply the loneliness of being a swordsman. He stood and walked to a high point at the edge of the oasis.
The dark crescent moon of water at twilight rippled from the evening breeze coming off the desert. He looked around in all directions and there was nothing but huge sand dunes for miles. The dunes to the west were backlit by the setting sun, their outlines indistinct, tier upon tier, stretching even further into the horizon. The undulating desert before him made the young swordsman think of the billowing waves of the sea to the east where he lived, made him think of his childhood. He nodded, thoughts and feelings rising as he said to himself, “No wonder the desert is called the ‘vast sea’…”
He stopped suddenly in the middle of his thought. He spun around and once again studied the crescent moon pool that was about to be swallowed up by the encroaching night. Under the glittering stars, he bent his knees and knelt in the sand still warm from the day’s heat. A sudden thought made the young swordsman think of the secret map and the line “Moon dredged out of the sea”. Perhaps it meant not a moon-shaped island in the middle of the sea or a large lake, but rather it referred to a moon-shaped pond in the middle of the vast desert sea, one brimming with birds and flowers!
The young swordsman recited the last two lines of the mnemonic rhyme and jerked his head up, noticing that the stars were out and it would be full dark soon. He tried to remember what day it was, but he just wasn’t sure. He had been running around so long he couldn’t even remember what day it was, but this was certainly the final piece of the puzzle. “The night of three and five” obviously referred to the full moon on the night of the fifteenth of the month, so if he wanted to figure out the last two lines he had to know what day it was today.
The young swordsman suppressed his intense eagerness and quietly returned to the edge of the pool. With his martial arts skills it was no sweat to catch a greylag goose that was resting at the water’s edge. He killed the bird and had it for supper, then sat in the sand that was already ice cold and fixed his eyes on the sky.
The moon was out now, and the young swordsman saw that not only was the moon in its first quarter phase, it was just beginning that phase. At first he was disappointed because that meant he had to wait by the pool for several days before he could solve the puzzle. But when he dropped his head in boredom the moonlight reflected off the water caught his eye and he realized he might just be in extraordinary luck.
The young swordsman was on the northeast bank of the pool and from his vantage point the crescent shape of the moon and the pool were quite similar; both curved at the same angle. The crisp, dry air of the desert made the sliver of moon slightly more discernible, and the jade hare in the Toad Palace appeared faintly. The young swordsman now realized the meaning of the last line of the secret map’s mnemonic rhyme: didn’t “Rabbit ears point it out” refer to the ears of the jade hare acting as a marker when the moon was full, pointing relative to the crescent moon pool? The young swordsman was so happy he ran about, shouting with joy, startling the aquatic birds asleep in the reeds and stirring up the heady aroma of the moonlit flowers.
Several days later, the young swordsman placed rocks at each point of the pool’s crescent and formed an arc with the stones connecting them to complete the shape of a full moon, and every day he placed a stone as a market on the bank in the corresponding location with the position of the jade hare in the moon. During the day he hunted and picked fruit to replenish his food stores, and at night he adjusted the stones along with the gradually waxing moon, wholeheartedly waiting for the inevitable, fateful night.
Finally, the moon was full. That night was especially beautiful, the pre-midnight breeze intermittently rustling the vegetation, the shadows on the sand cast by the trees swaying along with it, while silver light off the surface of the water shimmered. Late at night the breeze stopped, moonlight sprinkling gently off the pool. The leaves stopped their rustling, everything serene and still. There was no sign at all that this was the only moist, animated area among the desert, and that outside this oasis was a harsh, arid desert without a trace of anything.
The young swordsman used the next few days to dig, using crude tools he had fashioned. He selected to locations, corresponding to where each ear of the jade hare pointed, at the outermost edge of the full moon shape he had marked out. He believed that compared with the waxing and waning of the moon, these two spots were the only places within the range of the moon’s circle during the night of the fifteenth of the month, so they must have special significance.
The jade hare’s right ear pointed to a spot on the sand that was moist, and when he dug there water bubbled forth. He went on digging for a while, but he didn’t find anything, so he climbed out of the sandpit and mustered up all his remaining energy and started in on the other spot he had marked.
This time the situation was completely different. After excavating a fair bit of sand he hit rock, and since his tools couldn’t break through rock he could only expand his pit until he found the edges of the stone. Suddenly he discovered that the inner side of the stone went straight down, and was perfectly smooth, as if it had been cut and polished. It was certainly not naturally formed like that. He was overjoyed. As he was feeling around on the stone with both hands, he unconsciously pushed with sudden force and a long straight slab of stone fell without a hitch, revealing a trough underneath, revealing a piece of faded silk.
The young swordsman extended a trembling hand to uncover the silk, but as soon as he touched it the silk disintegrated and was stirred up and carried off by the night breeze and sent blowing into the air. The young swordsman knew this was an ancient object that had been there for hundreds of years, causing the material to break down over time. He held his breath, and when the dust cleared, by the dawn’s early light he saw what looked to be an extremely ancient sword laying in the stone trough.
The young swordsman was honest and sincere. He respectfully kowtowed to the ancient sword, then he gingerly picked the sword up, in its scabbard, with both hands and held it to the morning desert light and drew the sword.
The ancient sword was dark gray, simple and unadorned, yet dignified, giving one the impression of one who is inwardly wise yet outwardly clumsy. There were two ancient characters inscribed near the hilt that he could not read, likely the sword’s name. The young swordsman held the sword out and focused according to the teachings that had been passed down to him, unifying his mind, concentrating on the sword’s qi, then he shouted and gave free play to his school’s swordplay, practicing each move in turn.
With that ancient, mystical weapon in hand, the young swordsman felt his moves were particularly fluid, each move progressing smoothly and free from encumbrances, from start to finish, like river water returning to the sea, flowing incessantly. When he leapt up, performing the final move, he simply felt that he and the ancient sword had become one, the essence of his school’s martial arts culminating here.
The next day, the young swordsman bid farewell to the tiny oasis. It was a secret between only he and the founding master who had buried the sword here. He had been here for less than half a month, but he already knew every blade of grass by heart. The young swordsman was reluctant to leave. He put the secret map into the stone trough and carefully put the cover stone back in place, and he filled in the pit he had dug, then he went to the crescent moon pool and bathed in it, then readied himself and set out.
Two months later, the young swordsman arrived back in the Central Plains. All along the way, he went from the desolate, uninhabited desert, across the parched grasslands, through the civilized regions of bustling cities and over farmland spread throughout the countryside; from wilderness in which only the wind whistled, through pastures where oxen lowed and horses whinnied, to the cities brimming with the babble of men; and from areas outside civilization with only the naked laws of nature to abide by, step by step into bustling human society, where the law of the jungle reigned, where the fittest survived, draped with the ever thickening cloak of hypocrisy.
The young swordsman felt this was the place to launch his aspirations, the place where he could righteously defend the weak. At first he held fast to the principle of listening more and speaking less, going all over the place doing odd jobs for people and listening to people pour their hearts out.
He gradually came to realize there was a local tyrant who went by the moniker “Venomous Dragon of the Central Plains” and that he was the most common source of the suffering of the good-natured common people he tyrannized. The young swordsman recorded every complaint and lament he heard in a notebook. One evening, under the lamplight in a little in, while reading through the complaints and wicked deeds of Venomous Dragon in his notebook, he decided the time to take action had come. He drew the ancient sword and carefully rubbed it with oil, preparing to take up this ancient mystical sword and eradicate the evildoers of the world.
Several days passed. One night, under a waning moon, at the fourth watch, the young swordsman arrived on time at Venomous Dragon’s lair at Soaring Dragon Mountain Villa. He paid no heed to the booby traps all around the mountain villa, and after many agonizing screams, near and far, he calmly and proudly stood in the center of the mountain villa’s expansive courtyard. There were storm lanterns hung high all over the place, casting his pale shadow in a circle around him.
An aura of death suddenly surged within the mountain villa. Dark shadows swayed from every location as several men suddenly jumped out from behind the young swordsman, their broadswords and short spears thrusting as they struck at him one after another, all without saying a word. The young swordsman unhurriedly brandished his sword, flickering silver light, and spun around and fell several men with one strike. The men around him suddenly drew back for a moment, but the murderous atmosphere thickened. The great doors of the main hall slowly opened and twenty or so people filed out with nary a word and lined up in a row on either side and stood there. Lastly, a short, fat middle-aged man with a cloak draped over his shoulders appeared. His face was not discernible under the dim light, but he gave off an intimidating aura all the same. The man said calmly, “You sent a provocative letter and sure enough kept your appointment, coming alone. I really admire that. But I don’t know why you insist on being so hard on me?”
The young swordsman tossed aside the ordinary bluesteel sword he normally used with his right hand, and with his left he took a notebook out of his robe and raised it up. Venomous Dragon’s men drew back sideways; only Venomous Dragon remained standing rock-firm. The young swordsman said scornfully, “There are things I will not do, so if I do something there must be a reason. I will burn this book before your grave so you can read the items recorded within.”
Venomous Dragon raised his right hand and someone came over at once and removed his cloak for him and handed him his broadsword. He drew the sabre and held it aloft, then suddenly unleashed a string of obscenities before brandishing his sabre. This was his typical way of distracting his opponent. The young swordsman already knew all about this, so at the same time that Venomous Dragon drew his sabre, he drew the ancient sword and attacked just a split second before his opponent, taking the initiative.
Everything went according to the young swordsman’s expectations. His lightning-quick swordplay forced Venomous Dragon on the defensive. The young swordsman was getting better as he went along, his sword natural and fluid like flowing water; as soon as his first move was finished he was following up with the next. Venomous Dragon was busy dealing with each attack and was forced to block two sword strikes in a row with his sabre, violating the conventions masters used with each other when exchanging blows.
The young swordsman was at once proud of his careful planning and his school’s remarkably profound swordplay, and also was suspicious of the fact that Venomous Dragon’s broadsword had not sustained any damage. But once he struck, they had each been fast, so he didn’t have time to think about it. Soon, Venomous Dragon’s sabreplay began to show itself insufficient. The young swordsman took the opportunity to shout and leap abruptly into the air, performing his finishing blow.
Venomous Dragon turned pale with fright as he felt an overwhelming force appear out of the blue. There was no way for him to avoid it. Out of desperation he had to concentrate his strength as he held his sabre level to block the blow, fighting like a cornered animal.
There was an indescribably loud screech of metal on metal and the two of them suddenly separated, one of them dropping heavily to the ground, spasming twice before lying still; the better part of the other one’s right sleeve was stained with blood. Though he no longer held his broadsword, he at least avoided death, still standing.
There was a brief moment of silence. The moon was sinking and the stars were dim. A startled swallow flew off into the sky. There was just one desolate cry and at the same time wave upon wave of cheers flooded from all corners of the courtyard. A few of Venomous Dragon’s trusted followers sobered up from their shock and ran over to bandage his wound and hand him back his broadsword, and he was inundated with a stream of flattering words.
In the midst of the thunderous applause, the young swordsman died on the dry, hard-packed earth. There was a deep, horizontal cut along his forehead. Aside from the blood pouring out, one could see the white of his skull and his brain matter. In his right hand he still gripped tightly the severed ancient sword. As for the end that had been cut off, it had been knocked off and flung who knows where.
Venomous Dragon’s men eventually came over and stood around the body of the young swordsman. A short, skinny old man with a grizzled bears was the first to stoop down and check the body. It took some doing, but he managed to wrest the young swordsman’s fingers open and remove the broken ancient sword from his hand. He was about to toss the broken sword on the ground when he noticed the two seal script characters inscribed near the hilt. He squinted his old eyes to get a better look and blurted out an “Aiya!”, then took the sword and ran over to Venomous Dragon to show him.
His trusted followers made room for him and the old man held the broken sword up in both hands and said respectfully, “Chief, please take a look at this, these two ancient characters say ‘Jinglu’!”
“Oh?”
“A long time ago, the Xiongnu chief had a precious sword called ‘Jinglu’.1 Later it fell into Han hands in the desert and was lost. This is probably that sword. It’s an antique from the Qin-Han period.”
Someone shot in at once, “Chief’s martial arts is superb, he has superhuman strength, what’s all this about precious ancient swords? It was just cut in half with one stroke…”
Venomous Dragon waved his hand to shut him up. He stooped over and examined the sword carefully, then suddenly he threw back his head with wild laughter, his laughter penetrating through the first rays of morning light, bringing everyone’s talking to a halt. Once he was done laughing, Venomous Dragon patted the old man on the shoulder and pulled him closer and spoke to him in a voice only the two of them could hear. “It’s fine, Grandpa. That kid’s martial arts was really something and he must have been diligent to be able to find this sword. It’s just that he forgot how much metal smelting and forging techniques have improved over the last thousand years.”
Note: This is my translation of a short story I found on the internet years ago. There was no author name listed, just “author unknown”.
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