From the first chorus of steel against steel, Jun knew that his latest opponents were no ordinary brigands.

A Crimson Tiger fell as Viperfang tore through his gut, littering blood and shredded innards onto moss-laden stone. The grunt was only one of many that guarded the lowest gate upon Moonwatch Hill. Soon enough, more of the dead man’s mates rushed down the stone steps, with jians and qiangs held aloft in muscular arms. Frenzied warcries ravaged hardened throats as the brigands set upon Jun, as contemptuous of him as he them.

As Jun cut the Tigers down, one by one, his contempt for them was marred by grudging respect. Over the years, he’d grown used to winning fights purely on the strength of his reputation. Most anyone, when faced with the prospect of Jun Ze the Fearless Bladesman storming into their midst, would lay down arms without a fight and find the nearest coach headed out of town.

Not so, these Crimson Tigers. These were fierce warriors, imbued with an ancient battle-lust passed down from the first king of Temasek. Where Jun was fearless, these Tigers were relentless. They charged at him without so much as flinching, even as their fellows were torn asunder before their eyes.

These men had courage and skill, Jun could give them that. Yet no amount of courage nor skill could match what Jun had: certitude.

Jun Ze fought with the certitude of a man who could never die. He fought with the artistry and instincts honed from a lifetime of testing and overcoming his limits, of pushing himself to and past the brink—again and again—knowing that he could never die. None else throughout the Four Seas had come as close to death as often as Jun had, then lived to die another day.

His was a style uniquely his own: an eclectic mix of tactics that had saved his skin along with techniques aped from countless fallen foes. He danced with lethal agility, channelling the serpentine predators of his homeland. Viperfang played the dutiful partner, guiding Jun through his movements as surely as he wielded its killing edge. Copperhead Cut into Python Thrust into Cascading Venom. The sequences left a trail of blood and flesh in their wake. Corpses and dismembered limbs rolled off the stone steps and down the hill.

How many had he killed? Surely enough to have stemmed the tide of death-wishing brigands. But not so, these Crimson Tigers. They kept coming and coming, their blades as sharp and throats as lusty as when the fighting had begun.

Past the second gate now. Higher up the hill and closer to the enemy’s heartland, the opposition became ever fiercer. These were no longer grunts but seasoned veterans of cruelty and war. They too had boasted their fair share of death-defying acts throughout their infamous careers.

The battles dragged on. The nicks and cuts accumulated. Jun was forced to once more push himself to and past the brink—and became stronger for it.

By the time Jun reached the third and final gate, the sun had sunk low enough to paint the sky an ominous indigo. His arms too felt the strain of a thousand clashes against steel and bone. This latest quest had proven to be more of an ordeal than he’d anticipated. Thankfully, the stream of Tiger men had finally slowed, giving him hope that only a handful of enemies yet remained.

Moonwatch Hill, the townsfolk had explained, was home to an abandoned temple, now commandeered by the disgraced war hero Shadu Meng and his gang of loyal followers. As Jun crossed the third gate atop the hill, the temple came into view, and so did the five men still left to defend it.

Jun strolled casually toward the temple, taking the time to wipe Viperfang’s blood-drenched edge against the inside of his elbow. This was to be his toughest test yet, and he preferred to face it with a clean blade.

The final five Crimson Tigers cut impressive figures, distinct both from their underlings and from each other. A Monk wielding a quarterstaff. A Dancer armed with shuangdaos. A Giant with an axe that was as tall as his person. A Hunchback that spun a meteor hammer in his bony hands.

Of course, there was also Shadu Meng himself, seated upon the steps that led into the temple proper, a sinewy phantom that had haunted a hundred battlefields before this one. His weapon of choice was a jian: a rather unremarkable specimen that had reaped the morbidly sardonic nickname Harvest.

The leader of the Crimson Tigers sneered as Jun approached, showing none of the worries nor even anger of a man that had lost 295 of his followers in one bloody afternoon. For his eyes were on the bigger prize. He knew that what could be won from his enemy would be far more valuable than the men he’d sacrificed.

“Bladesman,” Shadu called out by way of greeting. “Your breaths are more than a little ragged. Don’t tell me that the great Jun Ze could let a few staircases wear him down.”

“Slaver,” Jun answered in between his admittedly ragged breaths. “You need not worry for my health. For I need but the space of a dying breath to crush the likes of you.”

“Bold words, as befits a man of your reputation. Which is just as well…”

With a flick of Shadu’s chin, his four generals spread out into a pentagon, with the leader himself making up one of the points. The Tigers now had Jun surrounded, closing off all angles and trapping him within a formation of death.

“… For I’ve a mind to put that reputation to the test. Let’s see how long you’ll last, Fearless Bladesman, before you’re on your knees begging for your life!”

The pentagon closed in, inch by jangling inch. Jun raised Viperfang into the Asp Coil Stance, with the calm certitude of a man who knew he could never die. A man who knew that this impossible fight would be just another chapter in the endless legend of his life.

Suddenly, a gust of wind. And carried by that wind, something of a velvety texture landed on Jun’s cheek. Something small, delicate, pink. The petal of a plum blossom. Soon enough, his entire vision filled with the things, whipped into a frenzy by the caprice of spring breezes.

Jun froze. He glanced down at his feet and saw for the first time that he stood on a field of knee-high grass. Slender filaments arched toward the darkening sky. Feathery foliage rustled—nay, rippled—in the wind. Silvergrass.

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Jun’s stance broke completely. But he nevertheless allowed himself a moment to look up. Sure enough, hanging over the temple and yet suffused with an eerie twilight redness, was a crescent moon.

The Hunchback was the first to attack, shooting the end of his meteor into the cloud of plum petals. Jun dodged, just barely, and lost his footing in the process. The Giant then stepped in to punish this lapse in concentration, throwing down his axe in a wide deadly arc. Jun rolled out of the way, with the desperation of a man who was suddenly and profoundly terrified. He winced, feeling the ground quake where his head had been an instant ago.

“What’s wrong, Bladesman?” Shadu mocked as he circled in formation. “Where’s your bravado gone? Crush me in the space of a breath, isn’t that what you said? At this rate, you’ll need—Bladesman? Where do you think you’re going?”

Jun didn’t answer. Couldn’t answer. For he’d already resheathed Viperfang and broken into a sprint.

Angry remonstrations and jangling weapons followed him, but he paid them no heed. For in his battle-plagued travels, Jun had also learned to run faster than the wind—faster than death itself. It was a skill he’d relied on less and less as the years wore on, but he gave his full energy and focus to it now.

To his escape. To his first defeat in two decades—and only the second surrender in his life.

For Jun Ze the Fearless Bladesman had finally found the place where he was destined to die. And with it, he discovered anew what it meant to be afraid.

***

Night had well and truly fallen. The streets of Temasek agitated with an energy that was a little leerier, a little more unpredictable than its daytime bustle.

Jun, for his part, tried his best to blend into the local scene. No small task, given his soiled clothes, dishevelled appearance, and eyes that jumped and darted at every sharp sound, every sudden movement in his peripheries. His mind raced all the while, reliving the circumstances of his humiliating defeat and contemplating his next actions.

Only after he’d fully descended Moonwatch Hill did he realize that one crucial component had been missing from the scene of his demise: a maiden who was to swoon in his tired arms. If he’d caught onto that fact earlier, he might’ve overcome his initial shock and finished the fight. Too late now. The opportunity had passed him by, and he had no intention of going back for a rematch.

He’d calmed down enough by now to realize that he had options. If he really thought about it, the Snake Goddess’s riddle had been oddly specific, requiring four separate conditions to coincide. There were any number of ways for him to circumvent these criteria. He could try again in the daytime, or on nights when the moon was a little fuller. He could wait for the Crimson Tigers to leave Moonwatch Hill, as they surely must from time to time. Better yet, if he simply adhered to his lifelong rule of never holding a maiden in his arms, he could fight amidst plum blossoms, silvergrass, and crescent moons to his heart’s content without ever having to worry about death.

He knew all this, but he also knew that it was all for naught. There was no coming back from this. From the humiliation. From disappointing the townsfolk. No, he knew that his quest in Temasek had failed, utterly and irreparably. He knew that the only option left to him was to retreat and never return.

He knew this with the certitude of a man who’d stared mortality in the face… and flinched.

If he was quick and quiet about it, he could sneak back into the inn, retrieve his belongings, and steal away before anyone saw him. For in his battle-plagued travels, he’d also learned to jump over high fences and break through windows. It was a rather unbecoming skill he reserved for the direst of predicaments, of which this was certainly one of them.

Jun scurried to the back of the inn, jumped over a fence, and broke through the window to his room. He felt around in the darkness for his trusty travel bag, one he’d won from a card game with a blue-eyed foreigner, and began to blindly repack the contents of his itinerant life.

So focused was he on his task that he’d failed to notice the presence of a second occupant in the room, whose shadowed silhouette now stirred in his peripheries.

“Mr Bladesman?”

Jun jumped, hand instinctively reaching for the hilt of Viperfang. Then his senses attuned to the daintiness of the silhouette, and the fragile youthfulness of the voice that issued from it.

“I’m sorry, Mr Bladesman!” Lili the orphan girl spoke with a sleep-streaked slur. “I tried to wait up, but you were gone for so long. I swear I didn’t mean to fall asleep…”

Jun’s dao hand slowly dropped to his side, but he remained lost for words. His heart thundered against his chest as though he’d just sprinted up the side of a hill—as though he’d just run away from a deadly battle. All because he’d been caught unawares by a dainty orphan girl!

“You… you’re not mad at me, are you, Mr Bladesman? I only wanted to know if my brother was alright. Is… is he alright? Where is Dawei? Isn’t he with you?”

One unexpected side effect of Jun’s travels was that he’d become a terrible liar. Any muscle was prone to atrophy if left unused. And after two decades of disuse, his tongue failed to weave a lie that would be of comfort to both him and the girl. So, he did the only thing he could think to do, and told the truth.

“I’m sorry,” he spoke in a stranger’s voice: strained, fading, mortified. “I failed. I fought my way to the top of Moonwatch Hill, but that was as far as I got. Shadu Meng and his four generals yet live. And I wasn’t able to free the captives. I… wasn’t able to free your brother.”

He expected an outburst then. Expected the girl to scream, hurl insults, wake the whole township with the news of Jun’s sorry retreat. Lili did none of that. Instead, she cast her gaze to the floor, staring with eyes that were vacant with sorrow beyond her years.

Somehow, the silence was worse. Jun winced and recoiled. He was deathly afraid of the girl’s silence, of her judgment, for reasons that weren’t entirely clear to himself. Reasons that scratched the edges of long dormant memories.

“I’m sorry,” he said again, then stood. But as he turned toward the window, the girl’s silhouette shifted in his peripheries once more.

“You’re just like all the rest.”

Lili’s words came out almost as an afterthought, barely above a whisper. They weren’t directed at Jun, nor at anyone else in particular. Merely an observation: a truth derived, accumulated, and manifested from a lifetime of disappointments indistinguishable from the rest.

Jun nearly reached for her then. Nearly offered lies of comfort made toothless from years of disuse. But the moment of hesitation was enough for the silhouette to shift again, this time away from and out of his peripheries altogether.

Jun stood a while by his lonesome, his senses filling with Lili’s fading footsteps. Then he climbed over the window and back into the dead of Temasek’s night.

As he trudged away from the township and toward the port, a breeze rustled his hair and made him look up in the sky. The crescent moon had followed him here, long after he’d descended Moonwatch Hill. Now washed clean of its erstwhile redness, the moon shone with the radiant glint of a sharpened blade. And its radiance—its purity—woke in Jun long dormant memories.

He’d spent so many years frightened of the moon that he’d forgotten its serene beauty. But it wasn’t just the moon’s beauty that he recalled. For it’d been a night just like tonight, lit by the blade of a crescent moon and jostled by the caprice of spring breezes, that he lost what was dearest to him in all the world.

Jun Ze held the moon in his memories, until his vision of it blurred, clouded by tears that fell silent and unbidden.