He was the best loved son of the last head of the Long family, and countless people in the Wulin of that day were certain that the house’s climb to an even greater glory would be his work. But brothers have quarrelled since the beginning of brotherhood, and in the great houses such quarrels are ordinary enough; and Long Wu, for all his brilliant gifts and unmatched cunning, was in the end swallowed by the waves of history.
Long Wu was born with a gift for the sword far beyond the ordinary. Yet where most of the Long trained in countless slender strands of golden blade-aura that blot out the sky and hide the sun, Long Wu preferred to end a fight with a single blow — the plainest, most direct swordsmanship he could manage. Silent until the moment comes, as the saying goes; and when it comes, one strike, one astonishment.
Long Wu’s own blade was called the Imperial Zenith Sword. As its name suggests, it was extravagantly ornate, and yet, like a true dragon, it struck awe into ordinary people at the mere sight of it. With that sword behind him, Long Wu built on the Long family’s existing martial art and created a killing move of his own: by flooding the Imperial Zenith Sword until the Sha-Chi brimmed over, he could in an instant condense a giant golden blade and drive it from the sky straight down through the crown of his target’s skull. Its force could shatter any defence, and most opponents, crushed under the weight of Long family Sha-Chi, would feel the will to resist or to dodge drain out of them from deep inside, and would simply accept their death.
In the end, though, Long Wu set more store by the power of momentum and of position — of the board, and the situation laid out on it. The move had come to him as no more than a passing impulse, and in his own view he might well live out his whole life without ever having cause to use it. Then came that fateful night of rain…
As the fifth son of the Long family, Long Wu was born with a gift far beyond the ordinary, and that gift showed itself in everything: in martial arts, in the running of a great house, and in the sweeping game of alliances and stratagems. All of it declared that he was the master the Long family had been destined for.
Long Wu admired the heavy, dense golden blade-aura, and for that reason he had a good deal to do with his fourth elder brother, Long Lie, from childhood on; the two of them often trained together. Yet the root of the disaster was planted precisely by Long Wu’s own excellence. Before long it was Long Wu’s brilliance that cost the diligent Long Lie the notice of the clan elders: every word of praise went instead to the brother who was more gifted and improved faster. As the years went by, Long Lie’s jealousy and resentment grew with them, until at last the two went their separate ways.
Grown to manhood, Long Wu stood at the height of his reputation abroad. He was courteous to men of worth, always warm and unfailingly well mannered, and as a strategist he was resourceful, skilled at beating the unorthodox with the orthodox. At home he had Long Mingyu — of a cadet branch, yet by then the finest fighter in the Long family, and his study companion since childhood — as his closest confidant; and he was deeply favoured by his own father, Long Tairan, head of the Long family. Every resource flowed his way, whether the old clan head tilted it there by design or not.
His own name had long since ceased to matter to him. In the Wulin of that day, everyone — whether or not the respect came from the heart — addressed him as “Lord Long Wu,” and everyone believed that one day Long Wu would take from the old clan head’s own hands the Golden Dragon Token: the token that stood for the whole of the Long family, and could command every last member of the Long family.
Long Wu was not so dulled by the endless praise around him as to lose his head. On the contrary, he knew perfectly well that the other brothers and sisters who shared with him the name of the “nine children of the Long family” would never stand by and watch him rise above them. So he had long been quietly laying a way out, against whatever sudden turn no one could foresee.
In a certain year, Long Wu saved the life of a swordsman of high skill. The man felt the debt deeply, and swore to follow no will but Long Wu’s. Seeing this, Long Wu gave him the name “the Qilin,” and then settled him out of sight in Baihe Township, north of Xinglong Manor, the residence he kept outside the clan compound.
Long Wu asked nothing else of the Qilin but this one thing: if some day a person came to his door with the Golden Dragon Token and a child in swaddling, then the Qilin must raise that “infant” — Long Wu’s own son — together with whoever had brought him, and under the boy’s leadership restore the Long family.
When Long Wu came of age he married Gongsun Xiaofeng, daughter of Grand Secretary Gongsun at the imperial court. The match was in part a political alliance between the Long and the Gongsun of that time, but what grew between Long Wu and Gongsun Xiaofeng was not entirely the sad fruit of such an arrangement. There was indeed no love of man and woman between them; what they had was closer to the mutual encouragement of two people who walked the same road and understood each other. They shared a single goal: to remake the Wulin of their day with their own hands.
Perhaps everything Long Wu showed the world was a mask from first to last — a mask held in place for the sake of his own ambition. For though the Long family was then the foremost of the great orthodox houses, abroad there was the Bastion of Mó, long entrenched in the north as the leader of the unorthodox path and forever clashing with the Long; its lord, Mo Tian, was a match even for Long Mingyu. Beyond that, a new and mysterious power — The Order — was trying to build a law of its own for the Wulin. And at home the nine children of the Long family schemed and fought among themselves without pause, their quarrels slowly sharpening.
And so the Long family went on holding the whole Wulin in its grip, out in the open, amid all that splendour of full bloom and roaring fire.
In the tenth year of The Order, Long Tairan died suddenly and inexplicably. The quarrels among the nine children of the Long family flared up at once. Because the old clan head had died without warning and left no will, Long Wu announced before them all that he would take the Golden Dragon Token into his keeping for the time being, but would not ascend on that account. He would move out of the Long family’s old compound and take up residence in Xinglong Manor, his own house outside it, and there, with Long Mingyu at his side, he would go on searching out the cause of his father’s death. Until the truth of it was brought fully into the light, he would never take the seat of clan head.
In the eleventh year of The Order, Gongsun Xiaofeng conceived, and the following year she gave birth to a boy. Long Wu was glad to have one more card in his hand; but with the situation as tense as it was, he said nothing to the world of the fact that he now had a son.
Yet not long after the child was born, the Bastion of Mó was wiped out overnight by The Order; not one soul in the whole of the sect survived. And his second sister seized the moment to play The Order’s game and draw the tiger down from the mountain — deliberately letting slip clues to the truth of Long Tairan’s death, and so drawing Long Mingyu away from Xinglong Manor.
Then one night of rain, his second sister came to Xinglong Manor in person, with Long Lie and his ninth brother, to pay a call. But in the middle of the courtesies the three of them drew their swords at once, and the deathsworn they had hidden in the dark around the manor came pouring out together, meaning to slaughter Long Wu and everyone with him where they stood. Even so, Long Wu did all that was in his power, and in the end got his only child out of Xinglong Manor, while he himself died together with his wife and the killers who had come for them.
To die together with one’s enemies — that, perhaps, was the last thing Long Wu and his wife could do for the child, once they had already sent their people running into the night with him.
Where the Wulin would go from there, no one could say. Long Wu had spent half a lifetime laying his plans, and in the end he never lived to see how they turned out.