Avenge the Grievances and Slay the Eight Tigers

Synopsis: During the Ming dynasty, the Wang family was a family of scholars. After their fortunes declined, they turned to farming. A local bully from the neighboring village coveted the Wang family’s ten mu of fertile land and repeatedly blocked their water supply, picking fights and framing them.

One day, as the Wangs were diverting water to irrigate their rice seedlings, the Jiang family blocked the channel. The Wangs confronted them, and a fight broke out. In the end, the Jiang family’s eight brothers, known as the Eight Tigers, beat the Wang couple to death.

The Wang family’s only son, Wang Ting, returned from an errand to find his parents murdered and their blood staining the rice paddy. He grabbed a large cleaver and was about to take on the Jiang family, but the villagers held him back, warning that he was outnumbered and should first go to the county office to report the crime and seek justice.

Several elders from the village accompanied him to the county office to report the murder. But the corrupt official had taken money from the Jiang family and threw Wang Ting out.

With nowhere else to turn, Wang Ting followed an old man’s advice and decided to study at Maoshan. He said goodbye to the villagers and, at eighteen, set off alone on the long journey to Maoshan, carrying his family’s murder as a burden of vengeance.

He walked and walked for almost a month. On a mountain path through a dense forest, he encountered a striped tiger. A deep channel separated them. The tiger saw him, let out a roar, and immediately leaped into the water to swim across.

Terrified out of his wits, he could barely move, let alone run. Suddenly, a hand reached out from behind and dragged him up the mountain. A burly man in his fifties shouted to the person pulling him, “Get him up there! I’ll handle things here.”

The tiger was almost at the bank. The man raised a large bow and loosed an arrow. It struck the tiger squarely in the eye. The tiger roared, flipped onto its back, and drifted downstream with the current, belly up…