The “Shanxi Ten Thousand Treasures Lotus Gathering” is a major martial arts event mentioned several times in the latter half of the radio version of White-Browed Hero. It took place thirty years before the story's timeline. Given that fourteen supreme martial arts experts were selected there, the gathering must have been a grand affair, with many great masters in attendance. Expanded and turned into a book, it would surely make for a thrilling story.
However, fellow reader Zhang Xuanguo finished writing it before I did. With such a fine work already out there, I had to find a different path. Fortunately, White-Browed Hero has a companion work, The Gathering of Heroes: Dragons and Tigers. Though that book begins with the Eighth Prince's Arena, it often refers to earlier events, such as the Yanwang Stronghold and Dieyun Peak, showing that it does not discard the preceding story. Moreover, in the sequel, the “Witty Old Man” Zou Huachang does not appear at the Eighth Prince's Arena, the “Four Elders of Spring and Autumn” are still alive, and the story ends with Kunlun Monk's defeat at the hands of Ouyang Puzhong. These details suggest that Dragons and Tigers is largely a second adaptation based on the storytelling text of White-Browed Hero. It likely carries over the original's account of two “Three Saints Lotus Gatherings,” held more than forty years and thirty-one years before the events at Yanwang Stronghold. Taking the lower end of “more than forty years,” the Three Saints Lotus Gathering would occur at the same interval as the “Dragon Gathering” in Dragons and Tigers, which holds a Tiger Gathering every five years and a Dragon Gathering every ten. The first book also explicitly says that many characters crossed paths at the Three Saints Lotus Gathering thirty-one years earlier, and that it took place around the same time as the Shanxi Ten Thousand Treasures Lotus Gathering. So I venture to combine the two and try to bring the grandeur of this martial arts assembly to life. Set before The Gathering of Heroes: Dragons and Tigers, this is The Prequel to Dragons and Tigers.
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