A teacher came to Loess Town. His surname was Baili, and he was so gentle that even three-year-olds dared to pee on his desk. He always kept his right hand tucked into his sleeve. When the townsfolk asked about it, he told them an old injury had left it that way.
Then the bandit king, who had retired three years earlier, was cleaved in half. The cut was smooth as a mirror, its edges rimed with an eerie black frost.
Someone saw Mr. Baili standing beside the corpse that night. The moonlight stretched his shadow long, like a blade.
The next day, a scar-faced man appeared outside town. He drew a dark red iron spike from his sleeve and looked toward the schoolhouse as he said, “I’ve waited for you for thirteen years.”
From then on, a pursuing shadow and a blade that refused to leave its sheath joined the windswept sands of the northern frontier. Old hatred was as hard as iron, and fresh snow as sharp as a blade. Two men whose remaining years had been consumed by the same fire stood like monuments amid the ruins. This is not a story about revenge. It is about two men who no longer wished to live, learning once more, amid each other’s ruins, to sit on the doorstep and wait for the skies to clear.
The hardest thing in the northern frontier is not iron. It is the soil that can still grow grass after the snow melts.
