The Hundred Battles Prison Diagram

My grandfather was the Great Yong's General Who Pacified the North. He guarded the frontier for thirty years and killed seventy-three thousand barbarians. But one of his own shot him in the back, and his head was hung above the city gate. The day I was thrown into the death-row prison, the back of my head was split open, and blood pooled across the floor. At night, moonlight spilled in and fell on the countless knife marks covering the wall. They had been carved by generations of prisoners before they died, with their fingernails, their bones, and their final breaths. The marks came alive. Like countless little snakes, they burrowed into my mind. Only later did I learn what it was called: the [Hundred Battles Prison Diagram]. The obsessions of everyone who had died in this cell lingered on that wall. Every night, I had to be beaten to death dozens of times in my dreams before I could learn even a move or two. There was a hunchbacked old man in the prison who passed me half a bowl of wine through the bars every day. He would say, “Drink up. You'll be beaten again tomorrow.” I didn't know who he was. I only knew that everyone who tried to kill me in prison ended up dead. Three years later, I walked out of the Heavenly Prison, only to find even more people outside who wanted me dead. Every last one of them, I sent down to keep my fellow prisoners company. People asked who the old ghosts in the diagram were. I told them, “They were my masters, my brothers, the only ones in this world who never thought me stupid or tried to take advantage of me: the dead.” What they taught me was enough to last a lifetime. Three years in prison, three thousand ways to die, all to find one way to live. The Hundred Battles Prison Diagram, awaken! That's more than enough to send every living enemy of mine down to join them.