Long Xing is the youngest of the nine children of the Long family, and most people pass over him without ever meaning to. Precisely because of that, very few know what he did in the hours when no one was watching him.
To Long Xing himself, his life stopped belonging to him long ago. It belongs to the person who redeemed him, and for her he would give everything…
As the ninth of the Long children, Long Xing trained by a road unlike that of the other eight: he did not pour himself solely into the family’s own Long sword art, but studied in secret the manuals the Long family had captured over the years from its sworn enemy, the Bastion of Mó.
He folded the Bastion’s martial arts into the Long family’s golden blade-aura with real cunning, and what had been a blazing gold, bright enough to flood the whole sky, turned into a dull gold threaded with strands of the Bastion’s dark Sha-Chi. The great virtue of that aura was concealment. It could be released in silence and fly in silence, showing itself only when it was already at an opponent’s body, and it treated most defences as though they were not there at all, so that an enemy had nowhere to run.
Background
Power is a tower that goes up into the clouds. Most of those who climb it have neither the strength to reach the top nor the temperament to hold what they gain, and so they end their lives shut fast inside it.
Perhaps because his elder brothers and sisters had already taken every advantage there was to take, Long Xing — ninth of the Long — was poor with words, had nothing outstanding about him, and had no wish to contend with anyone. As he saw it, rising above the crowd, and all the wealth and rank that came with it, was for the most part never going to be his.
Even so, he did not give way at every turn merely because he was the youngest of them. Quite the opposite: he never sought anything for himself, but if someone set out to bully him or provoke him, he struck back at once. That was how the youngest son of the Long family kept his footing inside a house of such name.
So it was that when a few of his elder siblings in the clan went out of their way to make trouble for him, Long Xing argued his case against them on the spot and fought back with everything he had.
And in the middle of that quarrel the person fated to change the whole course of Long Xing’s life appeared: his second elder sister, Long Yijue.
Long Yijue first shouted the provoking Longs down where they stood, then came and planted herself in front of Long Xing alone.
It was the first time Long Xing had ever stood that close to this sister of his, the first time he could look Long Yijue in the face from so near. To him she was far beyond the reach of a sullen, strange creature like himself: she was a brilliance like the high sun, bright enough to put every one of the Longs, for all their fine bearing, into shadow…
Even if she turns on me now and scolds me, I will not have a word of complaint — so Long Xing thought to himself.
And then Long Yijue parted her lips. But what Long Xing heard was not the scolding he had braced for — the one for a boy who showed no respect to his elders. She left him one line only:
The strong make themselves strong. That is simply how it should be.
Not long after, slipping away from a banquet, Long Xing came upon Long Yijue again — this time as she was burying her mastiff. He could see that before its neck had been wrung, the dog had been coughing up blood, its organs swollen.
Long Yijue told him that she had fed it half a pastry without thinking anything of it. She spoke of it with the same composed, upright look she always wore, but Long Xing still caught a small trembling that would not leave the tip of her slender forefinger.
It was the first time Long Xing had ever cursed his own slowness with words so bitterly; he could not even find a way to begin a sentence of comfort.
What he counted a mercy was that the dusk seemed to hide his clumsiness, and that his sister — rarely enough — talked with him at length. About how the clan’s affairs should be handled, about what she had learned from her training, and about the great ambitions she held for the years to come.
As for Long Xing himself… he was afraid that anything of his own was too ordinary and too small to speak of, and being as inward as he was, he could not open his mouth at all. Long Yijue never asked. Perhaps she had long since seen through the shy exterior to the feeling kept behind his eyes; perhaps she simply did not care.
Watching Long Yijue in the gathering dark, alight with life, Long Xing felt more and more that his sister was a burning brilliance that could cut through the vast grey of the world. And what could a useless creature of the shadows like himself ever do for her?
After the mastiff was poisoned, Long Xing watched his sister grow a little thinner. But he understood in his heart that incidents of that kind would never be an obstacle to her… and would not be her last obstacle either.
So it is said: at the top of that tower of power, no one can keep clean hands. Every clan head of the Long before her was the same; so were the emperors, generals and ministers of how many dynasties; no one escapes it.
But apart from his sister — radiant, and without peer in martial skill — who else was fit to sit as head of the Long family?
To bring about the future his sister held in her heart, Long Xing made a private resolve and found himself a new purpose: to be a shadow, a shadow belonging to his sister alone. Whatever she wanted, he would set before her with both hands.
After that, Long Xing began quietly studying some of the Bastion’s finest martial arts, and in the end worked them into the family’s golden blade-aura to real effect. Leaning on these arts taken from an enemy, he could at last carry out for his second sister the work that could never be brought into the light.
As Long Xing saw it, these things would be his secret alone, and afterwards would lie in the shadows with him forever.
He swore that while he lived, Long Yijue’s radiance would stand forever, never touched by a single stain.
In the twelfth year of The Order, Long Xing followed Long Yijue in the assault on Xinglong Manor. But in the final battle Long Wu proved the craftier: he read Long Xing as the fatal weakness in his second sister’s position, and turned on him at once. Long Xing died there, and his second sister perished together with Long Wu after him.
Dying, Long Xing looked ahead with no strength left in him. Through the blur he could make out his sister, still fighting Long Wu and his wife, and he hated himself — hated that he had been no use after all, that he had not been able to help her.
If there were a next life, and he could be of more use in it, could help his sister a little more, that would be enough. Long Xing closed his eyes.