He was only ten when he was brought back to Dragonbend Academy. That was the age for running wild and going wh…
He was only ten when he was brought back to Dragonbend Academy. That was the age for running wild and going wherever your feet could take you. Instead, he was holed up there.
The more he thought about it, the more it annoyed him. He had already done the hard part. He had lured away the trafficker named Ma, gotten those children out, and led them along the river. If they had just kept moving, they could have reached safety in a few days. He had talked the whole way to keep them from crying, joked until his throat went raw—and in the end, a man named He appeared and took them all off to this supposedly better place.
And yes, Dragonbend Academy was fine. The food was good. The rooms were good. It was also painfully boring!
So he immediately started looking for a way out.
During lessons, he bent over his paper and drew maps instead. Before long, he had the whole academy laid out in his head and was already thinking through the best way to sneak away. While the others trained, he climbed onto the roofs and watched the clouds and the mountain ridges, trying to judge which direction he should go once he was free. People were always telling him he couldn't sit still. In his heart, he only thought one thing: the world was far too big to spend a lifetime living in one place.
That winter, he found his chance. He stole a horse and rode off alone. He made it a fair distance, too—until he came across a village struck by disease. He couldn't just leave it like that. Maybe he understood too well what it meant to be trapped with nowhere left to go. In the end, he turned back and went to Dragonbend Academy for help. By the time he returned, both he and the horse were worn thin. He had already prepared himself to be punished. Instead, He placed a letter in his hand and told him another path had been arranged for him.
Before they parted, He told him: "Go. The world has its fair share of what's clean and what's foul. You ought to see both for yourself."
He left in high spirits, quick and light on his feet, and tossed back only one bright shout: "Farewell!"
That was how he joined the Wayfarers, and at last won the life he had wanted—the freedom to walk the world on his own two feet. From then on, people called him Bingshen.
But that kind of life did not last. Before he had gone far enough to really know the world, he was sent to Toilgrain Barn to wait for someone.
He waited too long. So long that all the noise around him seemed to pour straight into his head without end: merchants shouting prices, women weeping, children crying, hoofbeats pounding down from the north. He was nearly frantic, but he still had to stay where he was. So he started drawing. Roads that might still serve as retreat routes. Passes that might still be defended. Troops that would arrive too late... The more he drew, the whiter his hair became. In the end, even drawing was no longer enough. If he wanted to know the land, he had to go out and see it for himself. So he set off for the Hutuo River. And when the person he had been waiting for finally arrived, he barely cared anymore. Fine. Take the map. Let that be the end of it.
It should have ended there. But all along the road, people kept stopping him, people with nowhere left to run—old men, women, children.
Every time he pointed one group toward safety, another gathered around him. Every time he told himself he had to leave, someone else begged him to show them a way out. He couldn't bear to do nothing and leave them out to die. Just a little farther, he kept thinking. I'll get this group through, then I'll turn back. I'm fast. I can still make it. So he kept going. And by the time the last group had been settled, everything was already lost.
Zhongdu Bridge had fallen. The academy was gone. Even He—the man who had always seemed to know what to do—was dead.
And in the end, Bingshen was the one left with nowhere to go.
What clean and foul was there left to speak of in a world like that? There was nothing in front of him but ash.
He returned alone to Moonlit Knoll.
That was the very place where he had once left Dragonbend Academy behind. If he had not left back then, would things have ended differently?
The rain came down in sheets. He shut his ears, closed his mouth, and stopped moving. Since there was no answer to be found, then he would walk no farther.
So he stayed there, and the rain kept going. Until one day, someone came.
He didn't look up at first. And yet before that person, even the pounding rain seemed to fall in silence. Only when his long hair was cut away did he finally look clearly and understand. The road to Zhongdu Bridge that he had failed to take had been taken by someone else in his place. And when that person left, they told him to go back out into the world—just as his old teacher once had.
The parting he had regretted all his life had, in the end, led him to this meeting on the road.
When the rain finally passed, the wind rose behind him on Moonlit Knoll, as if gently urging him onward.
Why shouldn't a man become the wind? The wind has no fixed home, and yet everyone who comes and goes can still feel where it has passed.
So he chose to walk again. This time, he would go where the wind went, and open a road toward a better world.
And this time, instead of farewell, he said only, softly, in his heart: Till we meet again.