THE SMILING PROUD WANDERER by Jin Yong

Meditation Part 3

Knowing very clearly that he shouldn't be still thinking about it, but the Fujian folk song sang by Yue Lingshan kept wafting around his ears. Linghu Chong felt great pain in his heart. In frustration, he picked up his sword and chopped and slashed toward the rock wall like a mad man. Feeling a stream of inner energy rising from his abdomen, he thrust the sword out, the posture and the way he used his energy happened to be just like the move taught by Madam Yue – Unrivaled and Unmatched, The Thrust of Ning. With a piercing sound, the sword surprisingly went into the rock wall all the way to the sword handle.

Linghu Chong was astounded. He knew too well that no matter how quickly he had advanced his Kung Fu skills in the last several months, it would still be impossible for him to jab his sword into the rock wall all the way to the handle. That would require putting superb inner energy onto the sword blade so that the blade could be jabbed into a rock as if the rock was a rotten piece of wood. Even Master or Master-Wife wouldn't have such magical skills. He stood there as if he was in a trance, then he pulled at the sword handle and drew the blade out when he suddenly realized from the feel with his hand: the rock wall was only a very thin layer of rock. It was empty after about two or three inches deep – there was a cave on the other side of the rock wall.

Linghu Chong's mind was now filled with curiosity. He lifted his sword and thrust again. "Clank!" This time the long sword broke in half. It turned out that because he didn't use enough inner energy, the sword couldn't even penetrate a two or three inches thick layer of rock. He spilled out a couple swears and then picked up a big rock from outside the cave. This time he used all his might and threw the rock at the rock wall, which smashed the rock wall hard and produced some vague echoes from behind the rock wall – apparently there was quite some spacious room behind it. He smashed the rock against the rock wall once again, and this time with a loud bang, the rock went through the rock wall and landed on the floor in the other side. Loud bangs kept rising from the other end as the rock rolled on the floor.

The discovery of such a secret cave drove all his depression and worries completely out. He picked up another rock and started smashing again. Soon, a hole big enough for his head to go through appeared on the rock wall. He widened the hole some more and then climbed in with a lit torch. Inside was a narrow corridor kind of pathway. Suddenly, he broke into a cold sweat as he looked down. A skeleton lay still on the ground facing down right next to his feet. This scene was far from what Linghu Chong had expected.

He calmed himself down a bit and thought, "Could this be a tomb? But why would the skeleton lay on the floor facing down instead of lying facing up? And this narrow corridor doesn't look like a tomb corridor either."

He looked down at the skeleton again. The clothing on the skeleton had rotten into dusts. Two huge axes lay on the ground next to the skeleton, shining as they reflected the light from the torch. He picked one of the axes up. It was very heavy, at least over forty pounds. He raised the axe and chopped it at the rock wall by his side. "Clank!" A big chunk of rock was chopped off. He was stunned.

"This axe is too sharp to be a normal axe. It must have belonged to a senior master in the Martial World as his weapon." The spot where the axe had just chopped by looked very smooth, almost as smooth as a Tofu Cube being cut by a knife, and there were many chop marks on all sides of the corridor. He thought about it for a short moment and was stunned by his conclusion. He walked down the path a bit more with the torch raised high, only finding axe chopping marks all over the cave. He found himself stupefied.

"So the pathway was actually made by chops from this man using his sharp axes. Right, he was taken prisoner in the middle of the mountain, so he tried to use his sharp axes to dig a way out of the mountain. But he fell short of success and died exhausted with only inches from breaking out. Alas, he was certainly very unfortunate."