Free Return of Condor Heroes by Jin Yong Page A

a curse and started to walk away. The boy quickly said, “Father, father where are you going?” The man gave out a great laugh and said, “Good boy, come, I’ll teach you a method to rid your body of poison.” The boy walked over to him. The strange man said, “You have contracted Li Mochou’s “Soul Freezing Silver Needles” poison, it is quite difficult to cure this poison.”
    He then passed on the words of circulating air and the method to practice it, the head must be below the legs, so the blood will flow the opposite direction, the poison will eventually flow out from within the body. Since he is a beginner, he can only remove a few drops of poison every day, but within a month, all the poison would be removed from his body. The boy was extremely clever, and he absorbed everything and memorized it. He then followed the method and indeed, the numbness decreased. After a little while, small drops of black blood seeped from his fingers. The strange man was pleased and said, “Good! You don’t have to practice anymore today, I’ll teach you something new tomorrow. Follow me.” The boy was startled, and said, “Go where?” The strange man replied, “I am your father, wherever a father goes, the son of course follows.”
    As he said this, the air was filled with the sound of eagle calls; the two large eagles were approaching. The strange man looked at the eagles, and hit his head as he frowned, searching for something in his mind. Suddenly, he seemed to have found what he was looking for, his face changed and shouted out, “I won’t see them, I won’t see them!” As he said this he took a stride; the stride was extremely large, and by the second stride he had moved over ten feet. After a few more strides he disappeared into the mulberry forest. The boy shouted out, “Father, father!” and tried to follow.
    He eventually wound up at a willow tree and suddenly he felt a gust of wind behind him, as the eagles flew over from behind him and started to descend. From behind the willow tree out came two people, a male and female, the eagles stopped behind the two. The male had dense brows and large eyes, a broad chest and waist, he was about thirty years of age, and his top lip had the beginnings of a moustache. The woman was about twenty six or twenty seven years of age, she had a beautiful face, her eyes sparkled, and looked at the boy a few times and said to the man, “Who do you think that boy looks like?” The man turned around to the boy and replied, “You say he looks like somebody?” as he said these words he stopped.
    The two people were Guo Jing and Huang Rong. That day they were at a restaurant searching for news of Huang Yaoshi, when they suddenly saw flames far away and after a while, a person in the street hurriedly said, “The Lu’s mansion is on fire!” Huang Rong shivered as she remembered that Jiaxing’s Lu’s mansion belonged to Lu Zhanyuan, a fairly famous person in the wuxia world, and although they had never met, she had admired the name. In Jianghu many people had mentioned that Jiangnan has two Lu mansions. There are countless Lu mansions in Jiangnan, the two that the Wuxia members mentioned were the Lu mansion by the Tai Lake and Jiaxing’s Lu mansion. For Lu Zhanyuan to be mentioned in the same breath as Lu Chengfeng, he was surely not an ordinary person. After asking a few questions, it turned out it was Lu Zhanyuan’s mansion that was being burned. The two hurried for the site but once they got there, the fire had died down, the mansion had been burnt down to the ground, a few bodies where found at the scene but they were burned beyond recognition.
    Huang Rong said, “Something strange may have occurred.”
    Guo Jing asked, “What?”
    Huang Rong replied, “Lu Zhanyuan is a fairly famous name in Jianghu, his wife Yuanjun is also a heroine of this generation. If the mansion caught fire, how come no one managed to escape? The only explanation is that an enemy of theirs had