Chapter 14 — The Xuanyuan Dragon-Taming Art

When the first ray of sunlight struck the valley, the stone gate before Wei Zhao, without the slightest warning, suddenly gave out the clatter of hidden machinery and slammed shut with a thunderous boom.

Once the gate had closed, Wei Zhao went up to it again; but this time, no matter what he did, the gate stayed perfectly silent, showing no inclination whatsoever to open.

It seemed the eight lines carved on the first stone stele had not lied to him: once this gate shut, it truly could not be opened again, and the next opening would have to wait five full years.

Though Wei Zhao felt a faint pang of disappointment, at least the box holding the secret manual was in his hands; everything else could wait until he got back and studied it.

"Xiaoyi, are you all right?" A familiar voice sounded behind Wei Zhao. He turned and found that Old Man Wei had appeared at his back without his ever noticing.

"Damn it, old man, were you trying to kick me to death? Dropping me like some flying acrobat from a mountain that high — do you really take me for Superman?" Wei Zhao thought of his fall from the summit the night before; even now his bones still ached dully.

"Well, you're not dead, are you?" Seeing that Wei Zhao was unharmed, Old Man Wei felt a genuine surge of relief. Though he had acted calm throughout, he had in truth been anxious. After all, Wei Zhao had fallen from such a height, and although the boy's body had been steeped in the medicines he had prepared, Old Man Wei had not been at all sure it would be enough.

"Not dead — near enough." Wei Zhao hesitated over whether to tell Old Man Wei what he had seen and heard, but after a moment's wavering he decided to lay the whole matter out exactly as it was. Old Man Wei, after all, had seen much and knew much.

"Old man, yesterday I went into that cave..." Wei Zhao said, pointing to the stone gate of the cave not far behind him.

"Mm..." Old Man Wei had already seen the box in Wei Zhao's hands and knew he must have gone into the cave the night before. Still, hearing Wei Zhao admit it with his own lips gladdened him. At least the boy did not treat him as an outsider — his years of raising Wei Zhao had not been wasted.

"And then..." Wei Zhao, unsure what Old Man Wei meant by it, went on to tell him everything he had seen and heard inside the cave, and finally held out the box before him: "This is that box."

"Keep it yourself," Old Man Wei said mildly, glancing at the box.

"You don't want to look?" Wei Zhao was baffled. Something so extraordinary — how could Old Man Wei act as if it were nothing at all?

"Looking would be no use," Old Man Wei said, shaking his head.

Wei Zhao had a great many questions, but Old Man Wei's manner — "don't ask me," "do as you please" — left him swallowing his words.

Together with Old Man Wei, he made the difficult climb back home through the side path at the bottom of the valley. Old Man Wei fell onto the bed and went straight to sleep, leaving Wei Zhao alone, clutching the box and staring at it, eye to eye.

Since Old Man Wei showed such utter indifference to it, Wei Zhao had no choice but to study the contents of the box himself. He set the box on the battered Eight Immortals table and began to examine it.

The little box was made in an antique style, like the wooden boxes in which imperial edicts or elixirs had once been kept in the palaces of old. It was not locked, however; once Wei Zhao undid the clasp on top, the lid opened easily.

Wei Zhao's eyes went wide, his breathing quickening. At last the lid was open, and inside lay a silk scroll.

He lifted the scroll out, and there, at the bottom of the box, he saw a jade pendant. He quickly picked it up and held it under the lamplight to examine it closely.

The jade was of excellent quality, but very strange: carved upon it was a design resembling a totem, along with characters Wei Zhao could not read — certainly not seal script. This pendant and the writing on the scroll clearly belonged to two different systems.

This struck Wei Zhao as odd. By rights, whether in the cave or on the scroll, the writing had all been of one kind; only this jade pendant was the exception.

Later, Wei Zhao also asked Old Man Wei about the pendant, but Old Man Wei did not know what it was for either — indeed, when he saw it, an expression of profound astonishment came over his face.

Far more astonishment than he had shown when he saw Wei Zhao bring a box out of the cave.

In the end, Wei Zhao could only rely on his own reasoning and guess that the pendant was meant to aid in practicing martial arts, and so he kept it on his person ever after.

Wei Zhao carefully unrolled the scroll, only to feel a faint pang of disappointment. The scroll was thin, holding nothing but a single piece of silk.

Still, Wei Zhao had read those martial arts novels and understood that a formidable manual was not measured by the number of its words; the Nine Yin White Bone Claw that Mei Chaofeng practiced could be written out on a single piece of human skin. So it was with a heart full of eager anticipation that Wei Zhao began to read the scroll.

The five large characters "Xuanyuan Dragon-Taming Art," written in seal script, immediately leaped into Wei Zhao's eyes. The same script, identical to the characters carved on the stone tablet in the great hall of the cave.

Beneath the five-character title, however, ran a line of small text: First Stage — Heavenly Silkworm. Then came the body of the text: "Mortals are as ants; how can one alter the great Dao and hold the fate of all living things in his grasp..."

Wei Zhao swiftly scanned the main text. The first stage was further divided into three levels—early, middle, and late—but this single page of the scroll contained only the first stage of the Xuanyuan Dragon-Taming Art.

Of course, Wei Zhao was not so foolish as to think that this Xuanyuan Dragon-Taming Art consisted of only a first stage. If there was a first stage, there must surely be a second, and a third.

As for where the remaining scrolls were, Wei Zhao had no idea. Perhaps behind the stone door at the back of the great hall, perhaps somewhere else entirely. But before anything else, he would have to finish cultivating the first stage of the Xuanyuan Dragon-Taming Art, and only then make other plans.

Though the introduction to the Xuanyuan Dragon-Taming Art that preceded it was obscure and hard to grasp, the cultivation process that followed was written in great detail, complete even with diagrams of the human body's acupoints for reference—no difficulty at all for Wei Zhao, who had practiced martial arts since childhood.

At that moment Wei Zhao gave it no further thought; he simply began to cultivate according to the first stage of the Xuanyuan Dragon-Taming Art, the Heavenly Silkworm scroll. And it was precisely because Wei Zhao was still young, with no misgivings in his heart, that he believed mastering a rather profound skill would let him defeat Old Man Wei. It never once crossed his mind to wonder whether cultivating such a thing might clash with his present martial arts, or whether it might even send him into a fatal deviation.

It was only many years later, when Wei Zhao looked back on it, that he realized he had cultivated the Xuanyuan Dragon-Taming Art mostly because the name of the skill was so ferocious—a skill that could even defeat a dragon had to be formidable indeed. Though by then Wei Zhao also knew that what he had cultivated was not a martial art at all.

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Old Fish is here again to beg for recommendations. Thank you, everyone.