Return of Condor Heroes (47 page)

Yang Guo lead the bull forward and caught up, under the cloudy skies, he saw her eye glistened and knew that she was up to something. He climbed onto the back of the bull. The girl’s right leg pushed up and she lightly flew up onto the bull’s back, sitting in front of Yang Guo. She thought, “My donkey is gone, riding on this bull won’t be bad.” She kicked the bull hard in the side. The bull felt pain and dashed forward quickly. The girl chuckled and suddenly elbowed backward with strength, hitting Yang Guo in the chest. Yang Guo called out ‘Ai Ya!’ and rolled off the back of the bull.

The young girl was extremely pleased and thought, “You little scoundrel, you suffered at my hands in the end.” She poked the bull in the side and the bull hurried forward even faster. She suddenly heard the calls and shouts from Yang Guo, and the voice was just behind her, she turned her head to look around and saw him holding tightly onto the bull’s tail, his legs in midair. He was towed in the air by the bull and his face was full of dirt and mud. Tears flowed from his eyes; he was extremely frantic but he still held onto the bull’s tail tightly. The young girl had no other ideas and so raised her saber aiming to slash down at his arm. She suddenly heard a clamor; the bull had reached a little town.

In the crowd of people the bull had nowhere to go and stopped. Yang Guo wanted to tease the young girl and see her angry face; he lay on the ground and called out, “My chest hurts, you’re beating me to death!” The town’s people all gathered around and asked why.

The girl was going to take this chance of being surrounded by people and slip into the crowd and escape; but she didn’t foresee that Yang Guo would pick himself up and hold onto her right leg. He called out, “Don’t go… don’t go!” Yang Guo called out, “She’s my wife; she doesn’t want me and beats me.”

A person said, “A wife beating her husband, what is the world coming to?”

The girl’s eyebrows raised and she kicked out with her left leg. Yang Guo clambered up to the side of a burly man and gave him a push; the kick landed on his waist. The burly man shouted, “Little Bitch, kicking people?” He raised his massive fist. The young girl held the man’s elbow and used his strength to fling him away. The hundred kilo body flew into the crowd, causing the people in the crowd to scream and shout, making quite a scene. The girl used all her strength to pull free but how could she when Yang Guo was holding on with all his life? She saw that another five or six people were coming up towards her, adding to her problems. She could only lower hear head and say, “I’ll take you away, quickly let go.”

Yang Guo said, “Are you still going to beat me?”

The young girl said, “Fine, I won’t!” Yang Guo loosened his hand and stood up. The two of them rushed out of the crowd and headed out of the town. They heard shouting from behind. Yang Guo had managed to hold on to the bull.

Yang Guo laughed, and said, “People say that the wife cannot beat the husband.”

The young girl angrily said, “Stupid Sha Dan [Dumb Egg]! If you keep on talking this rubbish, saying I’m your wife and what not, just watch me cut your head off.” She raised her saber as she said this.

Yang Guo held his head and jumped to the side and pleaded, “Miss, I won’t say it anymore.”

The girl said, “Look at you, even an ugly old hag wouldn’t marry you.” Yang Guo laughed foolishly and didn’t reply.

Now, the sky was dark, the two stood in the unkempt land; they turned around, and saw smoke from cooking rising up from the town and both felt hungry.

The young girl said, “Sha Dan, go to the market and buy ten buns.”

Yang Guo shook his head and said, “I won’t go.” The young girl’s face turned angry and she said, “Why not?” Yang Guo said, “I won’t go! You are tricking me to go buy some buns so you could sneak off.” The young girl said, “I said I won’t slip away so I won’t.” Yang Guo shook his head. The girl curled up her fist wanting to hit him but he quickly jumped to the side. The two of them ran around the bull like they were playing hide and seek. The girl was lame and it wasn’t easy for her to move. She saw the boy tripping up in front of her crying and shouting out, yet, although she possessed lightness kung fu, she was still unable to catch up with him.

The girl was furious, she thought about her martial arts, yet for some reason, she had allowed an ugly and smelly country bumpkin Sha Dan to stay on her tail. She had no way to escape, it might be said that she was incompetent. Yang Guo had made himself so much like the character he was supposed to be that when the girl failed three or four times to kill the Sha Dan, she was not suspicious. She followed the main road south and she saw that Yang Guo was holding onto the bull and catching up. She thought that she must find a way to kill him unexpectedly. In the short time it takes to cook rice, the sky had become even darker. She saw an old and run down stone house; it looked abandoned and thought, “Tonight I’ll sleep here and when that idiot is sleeping in the middle of the night, I’ll kill him with one slash.” She walked towards the house and entered, dust entered her nose, the chairs and tables were broken and it appeared that this house was deserted long ago. She cut some grass and wiped a long table clean; she lay on the table, closed her eyes and rested. She saw that Yang Guo hadn’t followed her, and called out, “Sha Dan! Sha Dan!” She didn’t hear a reply and thought, “Could it be that the fool knows that I was going to kill him and left!” She wasn’t concerned with it, and after a while she fell asleep. Suddenly the smell of cooking meat entered her nose. She got up and went outside. She saw Yang Guo sitting in the moonlight holding a piece of meat and opening his mouth to bite into it. Before him was a fire, on top of the fire was an array of branches, meat was roasting on it, the smell of it floating towards her.

Yang Guo saw her come out and laughed, and said, “You want some?” He picked up a roasted piece of the meat and threw it towards her. She caught it with her hand and looked at it, it was a shank of meat, and she was hungry and started to eat it. Although it had no salt, it was still tasty. She sat by the fire and politely ate the meat. She first tore the meat off the shank, and then placed it into her mouth slowly, but she saw Yang Guo munching noisily, annoying her. She was hungry so she turned around and looked away from him. When she finished her meat, Yang Guo gave her another piece.

The young girl said, “Sha Dan, what’s your name?”

Yang Guo said, “Are you an angel? How do you know I’m called Sha Dan?”

The young girl laughed and said, “Ha, so your name is Sha Dan. Where are your parents?”

Yang Guo said, “They’ve been dead a long time. What’s your name?”

The young girl said, “I don’t know. Why are you asking?”

Yang Guo thought, “Since you won’t say then I’ll anger you.” He said brashly, “I know, you are called Sha Dan too, that’s why you won’t say.”

The young girl got angry. She got up and punched him in the head and scolded, “Who said I’m called Sha Dan? You are the Sha Dan.”

Yang Guo cried out and covered his head and said, “When someone asks me what I’m called, I say I don’t know so other people call me Sha Dan; since you don’t know, that means you are a Sha Dan as well.”

The young girl said, “Who says I don’t know? I just don’t want to tell you. Do you know that my surname is Lu?”

This young girl was the little girl who was picking lotuses in Jiaxing’s South Lake, Lu Wushuang. When she was plucking flowers with her cousin Cheng Ying and the Wu brothers, she broke her leg. While Madam Wu was helping to set her leg bones back together, Hong Lingbo arrived to take their lives, so her leg bones weren’t set properly. When it healed, her left leg was shorter by an inch or so. Because of this she walks like a lame person. Although her skin was not white, she was still beautiful. When she was grown up she was even more so, but because her leg was lame, she was hateful.

When Li Mochou killed her parents and took her away, she was going to kill her but when she saw the handkerchief on her neck she remembered Lu Zhanyuan, and so she did not kill her. Lu Wushuang was clever; she knew that her life was hanging on a thread now that she was in Li Mochou’s grasp. That witch goes and comes like the wind; she would not be able to run away, so she pretended to be obedient and tried to please her. Eventually the urge to kill the ‘Scarlet Serpent Deity’, who kills without blinking, calmed down. Sometimes Li Mochou remembered the hurtful events of the past and would summon Lu Wushuang and shout at her for a while. Lu Wushuang would put on a pitiful face and limp along. When Li Mochou saw her sorry look and after shouting at her and getting rid of her anger that would be it. Lu Wushuang pleaded to stay with her, and because she was just a little girl, Li Mochou did eventually allow her to stay. She buried her thoughts of revenge for her parents in her heart. If Li Mochou asked her about it, she pretended that she had forgotten all about them. When Li Mochou and Hong Lingbo were practicing kung fu, she would stand to the side and pass over swords and towels, tea and fruits, concentrating on the practice. She already had a decent foundation, when she watched them practice she noted everything, and when Li Mochou and Hong Lingbo went out, she would secretly practice. She would normally try to get in Hong Lingbo’s favour. Later Hong Lingbo took advantage of the mood that Li Mochou was in and pleaded on behalf of Lu Wushuang. Eventually she became her disciple. A few years passed, Lu Wushuang’s kung fu improved every day, but Li Mochou was still suspicious of her so did not teach her the most advanced skills. Even the intermediate skills were not passed on. Hong Lingbo took pity on her and would give her some pointers in secret. Although it couldn’t be said that Lu Wushuang’s skills were high, her skills were not low either. That day when Li Mochou and Hong Lingbo went to the tomb to search for the “Jade Heart Manual”, Lu Wushuang noticed that they did not return for a long time, so she decided to escape and go to Jiaxing in search of news of her parents. Although she saw with her own eyes Li Mochou seriously wounding her parents, she had not seen them die; there was still a glimmer of hope. She held onto this glimmer of hope and went to find out the truth. Before she left, she thought she might as well go all the way, and took Li Mochou’s book, the ‘Five Poison Codex’; it was a copy of a list of poisons and their antidotes.

Her left leg was lame, and she hated those who looked at it. One day in an inn, two Taoists looked at her leg and she immediately shouted at them. The two Taoists did not have good tempers, so after a few words they used force and they started to fight. With her curved saber, she cut off their ears and agreed to meet them at Wolf Valley the next day.

That day when Li Mochou took her away and headed north, she and Yang Guo met each other at the entrance to the cave. They were both young, their faces had now changed; they weren’t able to remember their encounter of years ago.

Lu Wushuang was full after she finished the second piece of roasted meat. Yang Guo used the light of the fire to look at her face, “Where on earth is my Gu Gu? If the girl in front of me was Gu Gu, and I was roasting meet for her, wouldn’t that be wonderful?” He was deep in thought, and stared at her as if he was mad.

Lu Wushuang thought, “I’ll endure your disrespectful stare for now; I’ll kill you later in the middle of the night.” She then returned to the stone house and slept.

In the middle of the night, she quietly got up; she went outside and saw Yang Guo by the fire not moving. The fire had gone out long ago. She went over to him and slashed him with her blade across his back. Her wrist suddenly shook, it started to ache; she couldn’t hold onto the saber and let it go. She felt that the place she slashed across was like metal or stone. She became extremely frightened and leapt away, and thought, “Could it be that Sha Dan has reached the state of being impenetrable by blades and spears?” She moved away tens of feet, but Yang Guo had not chased after her. She turned around; he was still by the fire, not moving an inch.

Lu Wushuang was suspicious and she called out, “Sha Dan…Sha Dan, I have something to say to you.” Yang Guo did not reply. She took a careful look, and saw Yang Guo’s body had formed a circle, it looked extremely strange, she boldly went over and saw that it did not look like the body of a person, she stretched out her hand and touched him, it felt like the clothes were placed on top of a rock. She grabbed the clothes and lifted up; indeed there was a large rock below. Where was Yang Guo?

She stood there for a while and called out, “Sha Dan, Sha Dan!” She didn’t hear a reply so she listened carefully; there seemed to be a snoring noise coming from the house. She went over there quietly and saw Yang Guo sleeping on the table that she had just slept on. His back towards her and he was snoring loudly in a deep sleep.

Lu Wushuang was angry, and didn’t even think about how he ended up sleeping on the table. She immediately leapt forward raising her saber, and pierced into his back.

The saber’s tip had plunged into flesh but she didn’t feel any resistance in her hands. She heard Yang Guo snore a few times and then said in his sleep, “Who’s scratching my back, don’t, don’t, I’m scared.”

Lu Wushuang turned pale, her arms quivered, thinking, “Is this person a demon?” She turned around to run but her legs didn’t listen. She then heard him say, “There must be a mouse on my back trying to steal my meat.” He stretched out his hand to his back and took out a lump of meat, and threw it onto the ground.

Lu Wushuang finally breathed out and understood, “So that Sha Dan put the meat on his back and just now I stabbed into that, I’ve just suffered a fright for no reason.”

She had failed twice to stab him and she hated him even more, she clenched her teeth and quietly said, “Rotten Sha Dan, see if I’m able to kill you this time.” She dashed forward and raised her saber, then slashed down across his back. In the midst of the snoring, Yang Guo turned his body, the saber slashed down deeply into the wood. Lu Wushuang circulated her chi around her hands trying to remove the saber. Yang Guo pretended he was having a nightmare, “Mum, mum, the little mouse is biting me.” His muddy legs shot out, the left leg striking Lu Wushuang’s ‘Crooked Reservoir’ (qu chi) pressure point on the side of her body, his right leg landing on her shoulder sealing the ‘Shoulder Well’ (jian jing) pressure point. Those two points are two of two of the body’s important pressure points. When those legs came out, of all the places to hit, they hit precisely those two places. Lu Wushuang wasn’t able to move, she stood there, becoming a support for his legs.