THE SMILING PROUD WANDERER by Jin Yong

Healing Part 5

"Oh," Yilin hummed. "Then how about your fellow apprentice brothers and sisters?" She originally wanted to ask, "Do you fool your little apprentice sister Lingshan?" but for some reason, she was afraid to put the question forth so boldly.

"Well, that depends on who it is, and what it's about," Linghu Chong said with a smile. "We apprentice brothers always play jokes on each other. If we don't fool people, there would be no fun!"

"Even with apprentice sister Lingshan? You fool her too?" Yilin finally asked.

Linghu Chong had never thought about this before. He frowned and thought for a while. Throughout his life, he had never fooled her on important issues. So he said, "For important things, I will never fool her. If we were just playing together, then of course there would be some fooling and joking."

In the White-Cloud Nunnery, Yilin's Master did not laugh much and enforced every strict nunnery rules. The apprentice sisters also maintained cold emotionless expressions most of the time. Although fellow apprentices cared for each other, very seldom would one tell a joke, much less play jokes on each other. There were quite a few young and vivacious secular girl apprentices under Uncle-Master Dingjing and Uncle-Master Dingxian, but they rarely joked with the nun apprentices. She spent her entire childhood in loneliness and lived a quiet life. Other than breathing exercises and martial arts training, all she did was to drum on the wooden fish and read Buddhist scriptures. When she heard Linghu Chong talking about the fun among Huashan apprentices, she longed for it.

"It would be really fun if I could go with him to play at Mount Huashan," she thought. Then she figured, "After all the major disturbances I caused this time, Master surely wouldn't let me out again once we get back to the nunnery. Playing at Mount Huashan would only be wishful thinking. Even if I did go to Mount Huashan, he would be accompanying his little apprentice sister all the time. I don't know anyone else, who's going to keep me company?" A sudden sadness came over her; tears almost rolled down her cheeks.

Linghu Chong did not notice. He stared at the waterfall and said, "Little apprentice sister and I are working on a set of sword arts that will have moves working along with the falling water. Apprentice sister, do you know what the purpose is?"

"I don't know." Yilin shook her head. Her voice choked, but Linghu Chong didn't notice that either.

"When we fight somebody," he went on, "if he has a good level of inner energy, then the fierce inner energy is released along with his punches or weapon slashes. The inner energy, although invisible, will knock our swords away. When little apprentice sister and I practiced our sword skills in the waterfall, we assumed the power from the falling water to be the inner energy from the enemy, so we not only had to block the enemy's energy attack, but also tried to redirect his own inner energy back at him."

"So were you able to get it done?" seeing that Linghu Chong was in high spirits, Yilin asked.

"Nope! Nope!" Linghu Chong shook his head. "It's so hard to create a new set of sword arts! And we couldn't really create any new moves, just modifying some of the Huashan Sword Art moves we had learned from the Master to thrust in the waterfall. Even if we did come up with some kind of new ideas, they were just for fun; it would be useless in a real fight. Otherwise, why was I beat up so badly by Tian Boguang?" He made a short pause while moving his hands about slowly. "I just thought of another move!" he said happily. "After I recover from my wounds, I can try it out with little apprentice sister."

"What's the name of this set of sword arts of yours?" Yilin asked gently.

"I really didn't want to have a new name for it, but little apprentice sister insisted on giving it one. She called it 'Chong-Ling Sword Art,' because it was created by both her and me," Linghu Chong said with a smile.