Flower Stealing Master

Song Qingshu had read the original The Swordsman of All Swordsmen and knew that the annotations — and the poem’s verses themselves — were all a red herring. In the source novel, a gathering of the most brilliant minds in the martial world had spent decades poring over these walls and gotten nowhere, while the secret was ultimately cracked by the illiterate Shi Potian without him even realising what he’d done.

Knowing that, deciphering whatever martial arts lay within would be far easier.

He hadn’t planned on lingering — but the Isle of Heroes’ arts were said to be without equal in the world, and walking out of such a treasury empty-handed felt like a genuine waste.

‘I’ll take a quick look. If it costs too much time, I’ll leave it.’ His mind made up, he turned his full attention to the wall.

He couldn’t recall the details of the source novel clearly enough to retrace Shi Potian’s steps. He only remembered, vaguely, that the secret had nothing to do with the annotations or the poem’s surface meaning. So he set all of that aside and focused on the carved characters themselves — on the strokes.

Years ago, at the Sword Tomb, he had studied the few dozen characters Dugu Qiubai left behind, finding that every single brushstroke moved like a blade, and from them he had grasped Dugu Qiubai’s sword-intent. He tried the same approach now, examining each stroke of “Zhào kè màn hú yīng” carefully — and found them entirely ordinary. Nothing remotely resembling hidden sword-intent.

Song Qingshu frowned, and his gaze drifted to the illustration beside the text — the young scholar carved into the stone. He studied it for a moment. The sweep of the figure’s right sleeve as the hand extended struck him as unusually graceful, and he lingered on it. Then, without warning, something stirred at the Yuanye acupoint beneath his right rib. A thread of warmth moved along the Gallbladder meridian of Foot-Shaoyang, flowing toward the Riyue and Jingmen acupoints.

His heart leapt. So the key to this first chamber lay in the illustration, not the text.

He looked more carefully. The lines forming the figure’s robes, face, and fan — every single stroke carried a sense of flow and connection, each leading into the next. He followed that current, and felt his own inner Qi begin to move along the same path.

He was both startled and elated. Because of the Heavenly Devil Flower’s poison, his true qi had been locked into near-total stillness for weeks. Yet here, following the routes traced in this illustration, he could actually set it in motion — haltingly, yes, but moving. From nothing to something was a difference that could not be overstated.

He located the source point of the illustration’s brushwork and began practising from there. The style of these strokes was unlike any calligraphy or painting he had ever seen — the sequence of the lines ran in directions that defied all convention. Had Song Qingshu not read the original novel, he might never have spotted it. In any normal work of writing or illustration, strokes run top to bottom and left to right, with the occasional upward hook or rightward curve moving obliquely. These carvings, however, were full of perfectly straight strokes running bottom to top and right to left — directly contrary to the natural grain of brushwork. Strange and awkward by any conventional standard. Song Qingshu kept his certainty steady and followed them without the least confusion.

Now he finally understood why, after decades of study by the finest minds of the martial world, not one person had ever cracked it. They could all read. And because they could read, their instincts led them to process the strokes the way writing is supposed to go — it would simply never occur to them to trace the lines in reverse.

The illustration comprised eighty-one strokes in total, running in this inverted order. With his current level of insight, and knowing the method of entry, Song Qingshu cross-referenced it against everything he had ever learned — and in roughly the time it takes an incense stick to burn, he had absorbed the entire diagram.

‘Back in the day, the Eastern Heretic, the Western Venom, the Southern Emperor, and the Northern Beggar spent decades on the Nine Yin Scripture and only half understood it. Wang Chongyang mastered it in ten days. And now I’ve learned an entire diagram from this isle in a single incense stick’s time. I wonder who deserves more credit.’ He set the thought aside and returned his attention to the scholar figure.

He began to reason it through. Li Bai’s Xia Ke Xing had twenty-four lines — so there were twenty-four stone chambers. Master all twenty-four, and one would presumably complete the Supreme Mysteries Scripture, the most mysterious art in all the Jin Yong canon. This first chamber — the “Zhào kè màn hú yīng” chamber — contained what appeared to be a breathing method and internal cultivation technique vastly different from anything in the mainstream tradition: unusual qi-circulation pathways, hidden acupoints that no orthodox system acknowledged, all of it carrying an air of the esoteric and arcane. Had Song Qingshu not known from the source novel that Shi Potian had survived practising it, and had the Heavenly Devil Flower’s poison not been choking his meridians so badly that this technique was one of the only things that could move his qi at all, he would never have dared run it so freely.

His understanding was sharp enough to make the assessment quickly. Within the Supreme Mysteries Scripture, this opening section likely served the same role as the general prologue of the Nine Yin Scripture — a foundational key that introduced the hidden acupoints and special meridian routes upon which everything else would be built. Master this first, and the rest of the scripture would follow.

And right now, with his inner energy locked away and every corner of the isle presenting a potential threat, the Supreme Mysteries Scripture might be exactly what gave him a fighting chance.

‘Each chamber takes about one incense stick to learn. Twenty-four chambers — that won’t take long at all. Better learn them first and think later. The Supreme Mysteries Scripture’s method of circulating qi is entirely its own thing — it might not only give me a means of protecting myself, it might just be the way to drive the Heavenly Devil Flower’s poison out entirely.’

His mind was made up. He slipped quietly out and made his way to the second chamber.

Wú gōu shuāng xuě míng — “the Wu blade, frost-bright and gleaming.”

Song Qingshu was a grandmaster of swordsmanship. One glance at the second chamber’s wall told him that what was carved here was a sword art — and a profound one. The stone was dense with text, hundreds and hundreds of characters, and scattered among them — visible only to someone who knew what to look for — were twenty-three strokes whose shape was unmistakably that of a sword blade.

These sword-strokes ran in every direction: horizontal, vertical, slanted, sweeping. To any literate person they were simply parts of written characters. But to Song Qingshu’s eyes they resolved into twenty-three swords — long and short, some pointing upward, some down, some tilted as though about to take flight, some sweeping sideways as though about to fall.

He studied them one by one. At the twelfth sword, the Jugu acupoint on his right shoulder grew suddenly warm, a coil of heat stirring to life. By the thirteenth, it had moved along the meridians to the Wuli acupoint. By the fourteenth, it had arrived at Quchi. With each successive sword it grew stronger, welling up from the cinnabar field in continuous waves…

By the time he reached the twenty-third sword, Song Qingshu’s expression had gone extremely peculiar.

This sword art…

He currently carried within him the essence of the Five Sacred Mountain sword styles, the inherited sword-intent of Dugu Qiubai, and the finest teachings of the Wudang and Emei schools combined. By any reasonable measure of swordsmanship in this world, there was only one person above him — that mysterious, unfathomable Ah Qing. So he had not come into the second chamber with any great expectation. He’d thought to use it simply as a cross-reference against his own learning, and to see whether it might help force the Heavenly Devil Flower’s toxin out.

But having studied this art through to its end, Song Qingshu realised at once that this was not a sword art that belonged to the human world at all. If he had to find a comparison — it reminded him, startlingly, of the Twenty-Third Sword, the supreme technique of the Sword Saint in the manhua Wind and Cloud, which he had read in his previous life. [G: 风云 (Wind and Cloud, also known as Storm Riders) is a landmark Hong Kong manhua series by Ma Wing-shing 马荣成, adapted into a popular film and TV series. The Sword Saint 剑圣 within it possesses a legendary technique called 剑廿三 (the Twenty-Third Sword), which transcends conventional swordsmanship entirely — it is said to strike not at the body but at the soul, and exists beyond the boundary of what martial technique can normally reach. Song Qingshu’s comparison here signals that what is carved in this chamber is similarly beyond the scope of anything in the orthodox martial world.]

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