In the second year of Linde, heavy snow blankets Chang’an. Cheng Yaojin has been bedridden for seven days and is near death. His eldest son, Chumo, keeps watch by his father’s bedside. Gazing at his father’s hand, thin as a withered branch, he recalls the glory of years gone by. Unexpectedly, Cheng Yaojin survives the crisis. When he wakes, he insists on having the spear he put away nine years ago. There is a crack in its blade, and he wrapped its shaft by hand on his seventieth birthday, wearing his palms raw without complaint.
Chumo carries the spear to his bedside. Cheng Yaojin gazes at the light on its blade and suddenly remembers Mount Beimang in the second year of Wude, and his old friend Pei Xingyan. He murmurs that in his dream, Xingyan, his armor soaked in blood, urged him to leave. He recalls how Xingyan died all those years ago, an enemy spear piercing his own body and blood splashing across the blade. When he snapped the spear and killed his foe, the iron broke with a crack like frozen tiles shattering, a sound he would never forget.
When he finishes, Cheng Yaojin raises a trembling hand and grasps the shaft. The hand that once drew a bow and slew enemies, strong enough to tear cowhide apart, trembles only because of age, not because the spear is heavy. Holding it, he is swept away by his thoughts. Sixty years have passed in the blink of an eye: from a young man of a prominent family by the Ji River, to a cavalryman at Wagang, a warrior in the Prince of Qin’s household, and finally a hero of the Lingyan Pavilion. After a lifetime with a spear in his hands, a question suddenly comes to him: did the spear make him who he was, or did he make the spear what it was?
Snow falls again outside the window. Cheng Yaojin closes his eyes, still holding the spear, and sinks into a long dream. In the dream, it is winter in the ninth year of Kaihuang, shortly after the Sui dynasty is founded. He has just learned his own name and knows nothing of the world. All he knows are the snowstorms of the twelfth lunar month and the sound of his mother sharpening a spear by lamplight.
