Quickly conquer the martial arts world, and let your fists dominate the heavens!

By daybreak, Chen Zhan had already crossed the border between Beijing and Tianjin.

Along both sides of the main road, there were inns for carriages and horses, one after another, which specialized in serving the passing carriage drivers and porters.

Chen Zhan chose a small restaurant, left a gold leaf, and led away a young mule, along with an old covered wagon.

The shopkeeper bit the gold leaf between his teeth, glanced at him and the person wrapped in his arms, and didn't dare to ask any more questions.

The carriage was lined with a thick layer of dry grass and weighed down with two cotton quilts.

Chen Zhan put Li Qingsu inside, took out a small porcelain bottle from his pocket, poured out a small healing pill, dark red, about the size of a fingernail, which was a healing item made from mineral medicinal materials through slow fire.

He pried open her teeth, fed her the medicine, and then poured half a bowl of warm water over her mouth.

Li Qingsu was too badly injured and had already fallen into a coma.

More than half a month of torture had been suppressing the old gunshot wounds. There were three bullets that had not been completely removed, and the internal organs inside had been damaged by the shock, leaving the body and blood depleted to the core.

The Lesser Rejuvenating Pill can keep you alive, but it can't restore your vital energy; injuries need to be healed slowly.

Carrying a seriously injured person, Chen Zhan could not walk fast.

Li Qingsu couldn't go through mountains and forests with him; the ride was too bumpy. He couldn't take a train either, as there were checkpoints all along the Pingjin Railway. Images and maps from the city were sent to various stations along the railway, all in search of an escaped female prisoner.

They could only take a cart, traveling along country roads, covering dozens of miles a day, slowly heading south.

Chen Zhan sat on the carriage shaft, loosely gripping the reins with one hand. The blue mule's four hooves clattered on the frost-covered dirt road.

The carriage was covered with straw, and the bumpy ride had removed most of the straw. Li Qingsu curled up in the quilt and slept soundly.

She woke up after walking for most of the day.

The light inside the carriage was dim. She stared at the hole in the roof for a while before recognizing the driver's back.

"Brother-in-law." The voice was soft and dry.

Chen Zhan glanced back at her, tied the reins to the wooden post on the carriage shaft, turned and went into the carriage shed. He helped her sit up against the haystack and gave her a couple of sips of water.

"Lie down first."

Li Qingsu leaned against the grass to catch his breath. The effects of the Lesser Rejuvenation Pill were taking hold, and some of the deficiencies in his body were replenished.

However, she was still covered in wounds. She tried to pull the blanket covering her, but she didn't have the strength. Chen Zhan noticed this and helped her lift the blanket to cover her wounds.

The two remained silent.

Chen Zhan didn't ask any questions. Li Qingsu's breathing was still unstable, and he coughed occasionally, sounding weak and listless.

The two traveled for about two days. Chen Zhan had a Great Rejuvenation Pill, but Li Qingsu was too weak to take it, and her own strength was insufficient. The Great Rejuvenation Pill would overwhelm most people if they took it.

So she ate another small pill.

This time it's much better; I can speak continuously now.

The events of fifteen years had been weighing on my mind for too long, and I took the opportunity along the way to gradually reveal them to the outside world.

The year Chen Zhan left, the Chinese Alliance had just been established, and boxers from the north and south united as one, with everyone feeling hopeful.

Later, the Japanese invaded, and during the eight-year War of Resistance, wave after wave of people from the League went in, filling up Shanxi, Chahar, and beyond the Great Wall.

“Xiong Hanshan is gone,” Li Qingsu said. “In 1941, he led people to fight guerrilla warfare in the Taihang Mountains. They were bombarded by the Japanese mountain artillery, and their bodies were never fully recovered.”

Chen Zhan's eyes sharpened. Xiong Hanshan was one of the earlier followers of his. Both of them came from Xingyi Quan, and they became friends after a fight.

"Yes, to die for one's country is a worthy death."

“Huo Diange is gone too.” Li Qingsu looked at the ceiling. “He died of illness in his thirties. His injuries hadn’t healed in the past few years.”

"Where's Cheng Yong?" Chen Zhan asked.

Li Qingsu shook his head.

"Where is Sister Hua?"

He still shook his head.

"In 1934, Cheng Yong was betrayed in Jinan. Sister Hua went to break him out of prison, but they failed. The two of them..." She couldn't continue.

Chen Zhan didn't speak, holding the bowl, looking out of the car. The harvested fields stretched to the horizon, gray and endless.

“Li Yao lost an arm.” Li Qingsu’s voice lowered. “Bai Wu also lost a leg. Now he teaches boxing in the liberated area. Those who survived are all dead.”

Each and every name belonged to someone who was close to him back then.

Chen Zhan's usually calm heart was stirred by some ripples.

fifteen years.

When he left through the boundary, everyone was still alive, in their prime, full of vigor and ambition. Fifteen years later, when he returned, some were dead, some were crippled, and most had withered away.

After the car had traveled for a while, he suddenly remembered someone.

Where is Gong Er?

Li Qingsu leaned against the grass and smiled slightly: "Second Miss, you're still in Nanjing."

Chen Zhan did not ask any further questions.

There's no need to ask anymore.

Li Qingsu looked at the person driving the carriage.

My brother-in-law's face is still the same as it was more than ten years ago, without any change. The three sisters have all changed a lot, but it's as if time has stopped on my brother-in-law.

She couldn't quite describe the feeling in her heart. Leaning back against the haystack, she slowly drifted off to sleep again.

The next day at noon, the intersection ahead was blocked.

A mud wall stood across the main road, behind which was a village. At the intersection, half of the road was blocked by large carts and abatis, leaving a gap for people to pass through.

A dozen or so men carrying guns guarded the breach, dressed in a motley collection of clothes, with white cloth strips wrapped around their arms; they were a returning militia.

In recent years, whenever the Nationalist army came, landlords' militias would follow them back to their villages to settle scores, collect rent, arrest people, and seek revenge, even more ruthlessly than the regular troops.

At the intersection, there was a pile of corpses that no one had claimed. They were the bodies of people who had been beheaded for "collaborating with the Communists" a couple of days ago, and they were left there for public display.

Chen Zhan drove the mule cart to the front of the gap and stopped.

The leader of the returning militia squad walked over, his gun poking at the carriage curtain.

Who's in the car?

Chen Zhan hunched his shoulders, rubbed his hands, and said in a country accent, "Sir, it's my wife. She has tuberculosis. I'm sending her back to her parents' home... We can't afford to treat her anymore. She'll have to go back and wait to die."

The squad leader used his gun to lift the curtain and look inside.

There was a woman wrapped in the haystack, her face pale and her breath faint. She looked like a dying patient. Just as he was about to lower the curtain, he noticed a dark red seeping out from under the blanket covering the woman.

blood.

"Lift it up." The squad leader's face darkened, and he pointed his gun into the car. "Consumption coughing up blood under the covers? Do you think I've never seen a gunshot wound before?"

Several members of the returning militia surrounded them, and a burst of gunfire erupted.

Chen Zhan sighed, got off the carriage shaft slowly, and made a gesture as if to approach with a forced smile.

As he approached, he raised his hand.

He struck the squad leader on the neck with a palm strike, breaking his neck bone. The man went limp and fell silent.

Before the returning villagers could react, Chen Zhan had already entered the crowd.

Without weapons or guns, one palm strike is all it takes to slit throats, break necks, and shatter temples. The strikes are swift and accurate; a dozen people can't last more than a few breaths before they fall one after another at the intersection.

Not a single shot was fired; the speed was too fast.

The last one turned to run, but after taking two steps, Chen Zhan picked up a pebble from the ground and flicked it. The pebble went in through the back of his head and came out through his forehead, and he fell down next to the pile of corpses in his own yard.

The intersection fell silent. Chen Zhan dragged the corpses of the returning militia members one by one into the sorghum field by the roadside, covered them with cut stalks, and led the mule cart across the gap.

At the foot of the village wall, two villagers who had been captured to pick up corpses were squatting. Seeing this scene, they trembled and huddled in the corner, too afraid to move.

Chen Zhan glanced at them and said something.

“The dead have nothing to do with you. Just tell the truth. My name is Chen Zhan.”

The two villagers nodded vigorously.

Inside the carriage, Li Qingsu, who had woken up sometime earlier, weakly asked, "If I kill someone, won't it implicate those..."

“A group of returning migrants died at their own crossroads, and no one stood up for them,” Chen Zhan said calmly. “You should rest and recuperate.”

As dusk fell, in the middle of nowhere, a lamp came into view hanging on a pole.

The large inn.

The inn in the north was a large courtyard with half a livestock shed and the other half a dormitory-style guest room, with hay piled up in the middle.

The courtyard was crowded with cart drivers, porters, traveling merchants, stragglers, and refugees seeking lodging. The snorting of mules and horses, the shouts of men, and the smoke from the stoves all blended together.

Chen Zhan asked for a small room at the back of the house, drove the mule cart into the yard, carried Li Qingsu into the room, settled him on the kang (a heated brick bed), and then went to the kitchen to get food.

Inside the kitchen, several tables of people were drinking gruel with pickled vegetables, chatting animatedly about important events in Beiping.

"...The Bureau of Investigation and Statistics, the headquarters of the Military Intelligence Bureau, was trampled to the ground overnight. The walls were knocked down, and a couple hundred people died. They said a jinx had come..."

"Hey, that's nothing. On the Pingjin Railway outside the city, the special train carrying military pay was hijacked by bandits. The hundreds of thousands of taels of silver were all divided up by the gang, and the entire escort was killed..."

"The city has posted reward notices, with pictures and images. The reward for capturing a notorious assassin and a female communist who escaped is a house..."

Chen Zhan carried two bowls of porridge out of the kitchen, listening to the legends told by the traveling travelers, and returned to his hut.

Li Qingsu developed a high fever at night.

The poison penetrated her wound, causing her to burn bright red. She was sometimes lucid and sometimes delirious, muttering incoherently, calling out "elder sister," "younger sister," and other names that Chen Zhan didn't recognize.

Chen Zhan stayed by the kang (a heated brick bed).

He can't use his true energy or transfer his qi and blood, so the easiest methods are useless now, and he can only use the most rudimentary ones.

He asked the shopkeeper for some ginger, boiled a bowl of strong ginger soup, and fed it to her spoonful by spoonful. He then took a cloth, dipped it in cold water, and applied it to her burning forehead, changing it again and again.

He placed his palm against her back and gently and slowly pushed her blood through her meridians, gradually diverting the stagnant blood and qi and forcing the poison out.

I didn't sleep a wink all night.

As dawn approached, Li Qingsu's fever subsided somewhat, and he fell into a deep sleep, his breathing becoming even.

Chen Zhan breathed a sigh of relief.

Just as he breathed a sigh of relief, his heart suddenly tightened.

A faint, menacing aura seeped in from the darkness outside the courtyard, carried by the night wind.

The shop's porters were not skilled in martial arts, but the newcomer was a trained fighter whose murderous intent had already been detected by the divine will.

There was more than one; they spread out outside the store, blocking several directions.

Chen Zhan disappeared into the house.

He stood outside the house, pressed against the wall.

The murderous intent outside gradually subsided, and several people scattered in the courtyard, their footsteps extremely light and even, indicating they had practiced.

Ordinary hotel guests wouldn't notice anything amiss.

After listening for a while, he realized that the people outside weren't after him.

Their footsteps, the places they stopped, the directions they stared in—all were off-center, none of them pointing towards his small, secluded room.

The murderous aura in his mind bypassed him and pressed down on the other side of the courtyard, next to the row of large communal sleeping quarters.

Chen Zhan did not make a move.

Li Qingsu slept soundly on the kang (heated brick bed). His fever had subsided, and his breathing was even. He didn't want to cause any further trouble.

Other people's business is none of his concern.

He reached out and pried open a hole in the window paper to look into the courtyard.

Behind the haystack, in the shadows at the base of the wall, seven or eight people were squatting or leaning against each other.

They were dressed in ordinary civilian clothes, but they all carried weapons on their waists, and held pistols and knives in their hands.

The first man, a tall, thin man in his thirties, stood with his hands behind his back and gestured with his chin toward the row of large communal sleeping platforms. Several people then dispersed and blocked the doors at both ends of the platforms.

The leader, a tall, thin man surnamed Lei, was a skilled henchman of the Central Bureau of Investigation and Statistics (Zhongtong) in Beiping.

They went unmarked and unassuming, carrying out a clandestine mission.

Inside the dormitory, in the innermost corner, against the wall, sat an old man and a child.

The old man was in his early sixties, thin and frail, with deep, dense wrinkles on his face, the result of years of exposure to the elements.

The little one was a teenager, eight or nine years old, nestled in the old man's arms, clutching his clothes, his eyes wide open, staring at the doorway.

The old man had sensed something was wrong long ago.

His name was Tan Yan, a native of Cangzhou. Everyone in and out of the trade called him Master Tan. He was startled awake in the middle of the night. The men who surrounded him had heavy footsteps and were skilled in martial arts. There was more than one of them.

There's no way out.

He pressed the child further into the corner, then slowly stood up, pulled out a long blue cloth bundle from under the bed, and untied it layer by layer.

Inside was a single-edged sword.

The knife is no longer new; most of the paint on the scabbard has peeled off, and the cloth wrapped around the handle is worn shiny. This knife has been with Tan Yan for forty years, and it has carried countless darts and killed countless people.

He grew up making a living as a security escort.

But that bowl of rice is long gone.

The escort business began to decline in the late Qing Dynasty.

First the trains opened, then the ships started operating, and later the cars appeared. Goods traveling north and south could be loaded onto trucks and ships and arrive in a few days. Who would still hire a group of people carrying knives and guns and riding mules to escort them step by step?

Later, banks and post offices started offering remittance services. When business people needed to send money, they could simply write a receipt and the money would travel thousands of miles away without needing to hire someone to escort the real gold and silver.

The most profitable job for the escort agency was escorting "silver goods," and once that was cut off, the entire business was ruined.

With the increasing number of guns and cannons and the growing number of police patrols, the skills of those who used knives, spears, and sticks in the martial arts world became worthless in the face of fast guns.

One by one, the security escort agencies closed down.

Huiyou Escort Agency, the largest escort agency in Beiping, was the brand of the Song family of Sanhuang Paochui. It was one of the eight major escort agencies and had been traveling all over the country for over a hundred years. It disbanded in the first year of the Republic of China.

With the loss of the security escort agency, Li Yaochen, a renowned bodyguard from the agency, set up a martial arts teahouse in Tianqiao, making a living by teaching martial arts and performing for a living.

There's also Wang Wu's Yuanshun Escort Agency.

Wang Wu was Tan Yan's fellow townsman from Cangzhou, and his single-edged sword was famous throughout the capital.

Back in the Hundred Days' Reform, Tan Sitong often secretly plotted important matters with others at the Yuanshun Escort Agency. Later, a ruthless figure emerged in the capital, stormed into the palace, and did something that greatly pleased the people.

Several security escort agencies were also implicated.

In the year of Gengzi (1900), the Eight-Nation Alliance entered Beijing. Wang Wu led his men to attack the church, but they were surrounded and he was shot dead outside the front gate at the age of 56.

Yuanshun Escort Agency disbanded, and later Wang Wu's apprentice turned the agency's courtyard into a mule and horse inn.

The security escort agency was converted into a mule and horse inn.

The inn where Tan Yan is sitting now is no different from the one he used to be at. (End of Chapter)