At first, Xia Ya Leiming had agonized over the old geezer's appraisal of him for a long time.
With his none-too-impressive education, all he knew was that "creative" sounded like a compliment. But "die with his eyes still open" sounded like a pretty bad thing to be.
The old geezer had been thoroughly irresponsible about Xia Ya Leiming's schooling. The upshot was that when Xia Ya Leiming flipped through the yellowed, crumbling books the old man had left behind, he could just barely recognize eighty percent of the characters — and of those, understand no more than half.
Even so, the old geezer had forbidden him to touch his book collection, and Xia Ya Leiming had taken no shortage of beatings over it. He could only sneak a look when the old man was passed out drunk.
The books' contents were mostly words like "cavalry," "disengage," "flanking maneuver," "encirclement," or else operational plans, how much baggage to haul and how to haul it, the various ways of deploying troops on different terrain — riverbank fighting, open-plain battles, canyon ambushes, and so on and so forth.
At first, Xia Ya Leiming took these for war stories, the same as the legendary battle tales the down-and-out bards in town told. Later, though, he noticed a difference. At the very least, the contents of the old geezer's books were nowhere near as exciting as the bards' tales — you could even call them dry and dull.
Twice Xia Ya Leiming had screwed up his courage and gone to ask the old geezer about it. The first time, the old man simply beat his head swollen with a stick, and it stayed swollen for three days. The second time, the old man was dead drunk; he didn't hit his head, but kicked him flat on his back, glared at him, and cursed, "Back when I led troops, if I'd come across a disobedient little brat like you, I'd have had you chopped down..."
Fine. So according to this old geezer and his drunken ravings, he had "once" been a famous swordsman on the continent, and had even "once" been a general who led troops.
Was any of it true?
At least Xia Ya Leiming knew one thing: a general would never be so poor he couldn't afford a drink. And the old geezer could only drink the cheapest black rye swill — harsh, and sour on top of it. Even that little liquor money was scraped out from between his teeth.
"If he's a general, then I'm the Emperor," was Xia Ya Leiming's conclusion.
But still... as for the appraisal of my axe skills, was the old geezer praising me or cursing me?
Luckily, he no longer had to agonize over it.
Because one day after those words were spoken, the old geezer died.
In the old geezer's own words, he died very "creatively."
When Xia Ya Leiming came back from chopping firewood, he found the old geezer lying face down on the ground, already gone. He had died on the way — he had climbed down off the bed and crawled toward the cabinet where the bottles were kept. Unfortunately, he was too old and too weak; he gave out halfway there, and even at the end his hand was still stretched toward the liquor cabinet.
In that respect, the old geezer had been quite a character; even the manner of his death was characterful to the point of absurdity. Because the old geezer had no idea that the bottle on the cabinet had long since been empty — there wasn't a single drop of liquor left in it.
Xia Ya Leiming buried the old geezer.
He buried him behind their crude house that let the wind through from all four sides, in a hollow he found behind the slope; he dug a pit and filled it in with some dirt and stones. But when it came time to set up a marker, Xia Ya Leiming ran into a problem — absurdly enough, after all these years, he didn't even know the old geezer's name.
Before he was eight, he had called him "Dad." After he was eight, he called him "the old geezer." As for what the townsfolk called him, it was "the old drunk," "the old bastard," and the like.
He sat at the grave all night. Then Xia Ya Leiming sighed, split a piece of wood, and carved a crooked line into it:
"The old geezer lies buried here. May his soul rest in peace."
He ran into town and sold the most valuable thing the family owned — that beat-up old axe — for three coppers, and traded those three coppers for a bottle of liquor.
A bottle of liquor for three coppers was, without question, the most "upscale" liquor Xia Ya Leiming had bought in all these years.
But he poured the whole bottle out over the old geezer's grave, watching the liquor soak down into the dirt, and didn't drink a single drop himself.
It was dawn before Xia Ya Leiming, frozen stiff all over, finally got to his feet. He stood before the grave, looked at that wooden marker, and in his eyes was something he could not put into words.
"Well, old geezer, you're gone. Now it's just me."
The first problem to solve was filling his belly.
He could, after all, count himself a professional hunter. No — he could say without the slightest exaggeration that he was the finest hunter within a few hundred li around.
At thirteen, he had gone up the mountain alone to chop firewood and killed a starving bloodthirsty mad wolf with the beat-up axe in his hand. That kind of wolf was a low-grade magical beast that lived out on Wildfire Plain; in an attacking state its hide could turn harder than a turtle's shell, its teeth could bite a hunter's spear in two, and it was quick on its feet.
But that time, Xia Ya Leiming had taken the wolf's head off with a single axe stroke.
One easy swing.
The truth was that at the time, thirteen-year-old Xia Ya Leiming had been so frightened he nearly wet his pants. When the wolf lunged at him, he had practically lost consciousness; by pure instinct, he swung the axe out in the stance he had practiced a thousand times.
And then... he felt a rush of hot blood spatter across his face. When he opened his eyes, there on the ground in front of him lay a snarling wolf head, severed at the neck, while the wolf's body was behind him.
It took him quite a while to come back to himself at the sight, and then came the excitement.
So... I'm already this good?!
But after he carried the wolf's carcass back and excitedly told the old geezer about it, the old man was not pleased. He was displeased for two reasons. The first: "You practiced that long — if you couldn't even kill one little snot-nosed wolf, you might as well go ram your head into a block of tofu and be done with it."
And it was the second sentence that was the old geezer's real reason for flaring up:
"You idiot, do you have any idea that once you chop a wolf's head off, the pelt is worthless?! That pelt could have fetched two silver coins — three months of liquor for us! Now it won't bring a tenth of the price!!"
The old geezer was right.
That time, when Xia Ya Leiming carried the wolf into town, quite a few people came up eagerly to ask the price, but the moment they saw the ruined pelt, nobody was interested.
In the end that pelt never sold at all. Xia Ya Leiming simply made himself a fur coat out of it, and he and the old geezer ate the wolf meat for days.
Ugh... no more thinking about wolf meat.
The bloodthirsty mad wolf's meat was awful, with a sour, rank stink to it, but to Xia Ya Leiming — a day and a night hungry and frozen stiff all over — it was still an irresistible torment.
Even so, Xia Ya Leiming decided not to go up the mountain to hunt.
He didn't want to be a hunter.
Young people always have plenty of fantasies. He wanted to go out and make his mark.
At the very least... in his view, finding work as a hired hand in town beat holing up on the mountain and living out his whole life as miserably as the old geezer had.
Go into town, find a job — even if it's just running errands at a cart shop. Who knows, with this strength of mine, maybe a mercenary corps will take a shine to me and make me a low-level squire.
His stomach was growling and his hands and feet were cold as ice, yet Xia Ya Leiming was still thinking with his heart full of grand ambition.
Without the axe he was used to carrying, Xia Ya Leiming dug the blackened fire fork out of the stove, stuck it through his belt, put on that wolf-pelt robe now riddled with holes along with his straw sandals whose soles were nearly worn through, and, carrying the hope in his heart, walked down the mountain.
This was Xia Ya Leiming's first step out into the wider world!
As the legends the bards told would have it, it ought to be called "the wheels of history beginning to turn."
Yet when our protagonist walked down the mountain, not only was there no damn "wheel" — his shoes had worn clean through, and on top of that he was so hungry he was seeing stars.