As the fourth son of the Long family, Long Lie was a born martial fanatic. He had no interest at all in any of the learning by which the Long built and tended their holdings; day after day he did nothing but hone his swordsmanship.
Yet a thorn was always lodged in Long Lie’s heart, and that thorn came from his brother…
Born the fourth of the Long, Long Lie had loved tempering his martial skill since childhood. The path of sword aura he pursued was that of huge, heavy sword aura: swung, it could literally split hills and shatter stone, and it broke through any defence that called itself unbreakable as though there were nothing there to break.
His greatest killing move was to condense a colossal golden blade-aura, then drive it with the Sha-Chi inside his body and charge forward, man and blade as one, with a momentum terrible enough to smash through anything in its path.
As a descendant of the Long main line, Long Lie might even be called lucky: for a boy born to love the martial, the family could supply every training method he wanted and every tonic that roots the constitution and feeds its source, enough to carry him steadily forward on the martial road.
And among the nine children of the Long family, Long Lie was truly an oddity — from first to last he had no interest whatsoever in the seat of clan head.
As the first house of the Wulin by common consent, the Long family never neglected the teaching of its children.
The Long family’s holdings were vast. Beyond ordinary Wulin business, the family had a hand in commerce, smelting, transport, taverns and inns, and a dozen other trades besides.
Only rites and law, music and dance, poetry and letters, numbers and arts — none of these ever fell within Long Lie’s interests. Powerful martial skill alone was the aim his heart had chased since childhood.
Before he was even old enough to begin training, Long Lie would trail after the family’s instructors, watching them practise their arts.
He would even mimic his elders’ moves in his small, unformed body; there was no form to it at all, and it made the elders smile.
“This boy will be fine material for the martial arts one day.” An elder said it offhandedly, stroking his forehead, and the words sank deep into Long Lie’s heart. From then on, to become the true foremost warrior of the Long family was the wish he carried.
But that wish, though he spent his whole life on it, was one he never reached. All of it because of his younger brother — Long Wu.
Long afterward, Long Lie would still sometimes remember: once or twice, he and Long Wu had slipped past the servants and crept up onto the courtyard wall to spy on the family’s disciples at their training…
Both times, it seemed, ended with an elder catching them; and even under punishment the two would shift the blame back and forth, each insisting the whole idea had been the other’s.
But days like that would never come again. It all began to change, most likely, from the moment the two of them started training together.
Perhaps in martial arts talent truly does matter more than diligence. From the day Long Lie and Long Wu trained together, Long Lie could feel plainly that Long Wu’s gift for the martial was far above his own. They learned the same moves, and in the end Long Wu always performed them better; and Long Wu never did as Long Lie did — soaking in the training yard from morning to night. To him a flawless move seemed inborn, not worth praising at all.
What truly set envy, and then hatred, growing in Long Lie was the attitude of the Long elders. Ever since the two trained side by side, the elders praised only Long Wu, calling him the hope of the Long and a genius such as an age produces but once. Long Lie could not make sense of it: his own attitude toward the martial art was far more serious than Long Wu’s, his training far more industrious. So why was it that not only did Long Wu’s strength pass his own with ease, but Long Wu also stood in front of him and took every honour for himself? A seed of hatred and envy began to sprout deep in Long Lie’s heart.
Before long Long Wu had learned every martial art the Long family treasured, and then he left the training yard. To Long Wu, martial arts were only one means among many for getting what he wanted — far from being all of him.
Watching Long Wu’s back as he walked away, light as cloud and cool as breeze, Long Lie burned with resentment. He swore to himself that one day he would beat this brother of his, and smash that sickeningly serene smile off his face for good.
In The Order’s tenth year, something great happened in the Long family: the clan head, Long Tairan, died suddenly and strangely, and before he died he had named no successor. Long Wu, a strong contender for the headship, then declared of his own accord that he would leave the Long family’s main compound and live for a time in his own private residence, Xinglong Manor, and go on looking into the truth behind the old clan head’s death.
None of it had much to do with Long Lie, who only felt that his chance of beating Long Wu had grown even smaller.
And yet the chance Long Lie had dreamed of day and night came suddenly, in The Order’s twelfth year.
That day, Long Lie’s second elder sister, Long Yijue, sent men to his quarters and stated her business without preamble — she wanted Long Lie to join her in a night raid on Xinglong Manor, to kill Long Wu.
By the messenger’s account, Long Er had already laid her plans and drawn away the strongest man at Long Wu’s side; that convinced Long Lie all the more that this was the great chance to face Long Wu, and he agreed on the spot.
That night the second, fourth and ninth of the Long brought their deathsworn up in secret and ringed Xinglong Manor, while the three of them entered the manor under the pretext of a visit, with a servant or two at their backs. Then, in the middle of talk with Long Wu, they struck. And so a civil war inside the Long family began, there in the rain.
For the fourth son, this was the chance he had waited for all his life — the chance to prove himself. Yet the end of it was that he lost again, beaten by Long Wu’s sword; and the price of that loss was his own life.
“How did we ever come to this — brothers turned against each other…”
In his last straits he saw, dimly, someone standing tall and fair as jade, radiant as of old, sighing out those words.
Yes — why had it come to this? For all Long Lie’s unwillingness, for all his regret, what he had wanted at the very beginning was only to win, just once…