Chapter Ninety-Nine: Recruitment

"So then you actually fought them?" Dong Jianguo frowned at Chen Ding'an. "And Chen Hao fought them too? Those people really don’t sound like decent folk, do they? They even made a move on a child."

Chen Ding'an shook his head. "They weren’t the ones who picked a fight with Chen Hao. It was because they were outnumbered, and that brat took the initiative to attack them."

"In fact, they had already been quite courteous, trying their best to ignore Chen Hao altogether. But perhaps they underestimated him at first. Early on, someone on their side suffered quite a loss at Chen Hao’s hands.

"In the end, they were so thoroughly harried by him that they had no choice but to send one man over to keep Chen Hao occupied.

"Even then, that fellow never used his full strength against Chen Hao. He only tried to tangle him up as much as possible, so Chen Hao would have no chance to come help me.

"The reason Chen Hao looked so miserable was simply that their strength could not be underestimated. Every one of them was skilled, not someone Chen Hao could handle at his present level.

"If they had wanted to hurt him, Chen Hao would probably have been knocked down long ago."

"Hmm... If even you ended up like this, then I suppose they really weren’t ordinary." Dong Jianguo nodded. "But since they never intended to injure Chen Hao, it sounds like they still had some principles. They shouldn’t be bad people, should they?"

Chen Ding'an nodded in deep agreement. "Exactly. I thought of that too. In fact, not long after we started, I could already tell a little from the way they fought.

"They were skilled enough, but from their techniques alone I could tell they must be the kind of men who were broad-minded and upright. They had many excellent opportunities to strike by surprise, yet they disdained doing so. Instead, they fought me openly, blow for blow, using only expansive, straightforward martial arts.

"You have no idea how much I enjoyed that fight!"

"If you already realized they weren’t bad people, why did you keep fighting them?" Dong Jianguo asked, puzzled.

"Ah..." Chen Ding'an sighed. "A worthy opponent is hard to find. How much harder, then, to find several who can match you evenly?

"Maybe any one of them would have fallen quickly if they had fought me alone, but together they could contend with me on equal footing. I hadn’t had such an exhilarating fight in a long time.

"Before this, I exchanged a few moves with Elder Hall Master Murong at Shaolin Temple, and that got my blood up, but I never got to work it out properly. So when such a rare opportunity came along, of course I wouldn’t let it slip by. I had to fight to my heart’s content."

"And they just indulged you like that?" Dong Jianguo still couldn’t make sense of it.

"Stranger still, they seemed to have the very same thought as I did. They clearly saw what I meant, but they still had no intention of stopping." Chen Ding'an said.

"This..." Dong Jianguo thought for a moment. "They were obviously heading for the Shaolin Inner Martial Hall, and when you blocked them and dragged them into a fight, they didn’t seem anxious at all. Instead, they were quite happy to keep playing along with you. Then it’s obvious, isn’t it? They came to Shaolin Temple for a martial exchange.

"And because they ran into you, an unexpected expert, they got excited and decided to spar with you?"

Chen Ding'an nodded. "That was my first thought too. I must have misunderstood them before. Once I saw they meant no harm to Shaolin Temple, I stopped speaking to them so harshly and started treating the fight as a proper martial exchange.

"That fight left me in exactly this state..."

"So what happened later? Why did you all stop fighting? And after the fight, what else happened?" Dong Jianguo asked curiously.

"Naturally, everyone got tired," Chen Ding'an said, lighting a cigarette. "We’d been fighting for a long time. I had traded blows with each of them, and by then we had all gained a rough understanding of one another. Fighting that long made everyone exhausted, especially me. After all, they were taking turns, while I was the only one fighting the whole time.

"So after a while, we all sat down and rested where we were."

"What did you talk about?"

Chen Ding'an took a deep drag and slowly exhaled the smoke. "I was the one who spoke first during the break. We had already fought, so it was a case of becoming friends through combat, and it was much easier to talk things through. There was no longer that initial testing and probing.

"What I cared about most, of course, was why those people had come to Mount Song. Even if they did not mean Shaolin Temple any harm, it was still strange for so many capable martial artists to come all this way.

"This time, they did not hide anything. But their willingness to explain their purpose wasn’t because we had become close friends. It was because they seemed to have taken a liking to my abilities and wanted to recruit me!"

"What?" Dong Jianguo was startled. "They wanted to recruit you?"

"Didn’t see that coming, did you?" Chen Ding'an said with a smile. "Not only you, even I didn’t expect it. I thought they had merely come to Shaolin Temple to exchange techniques with martial experts and use Shaolin Temple to make a name for themselves.

"From their clothing, they looked very modern. They didn’t seem like disciples of any martial arts clan, so when I questioned them, I assumed they were people from some big city planning to open a large martial arts school.

"But they actually wanted to recruit me. That didn’t fit my guess at all. What kind of school would come all the way to Shaolin Temple to recruit a martial artist?"

"That is interesting. Someone actually wanted to recruit people from Shaolin Temple? What was their aim? What were they recruiting for? To be martial arts coaches?" Dong Jianguo said with interest. "And where exactly were they from?"

Chen Ding'an shrugged. "I don’t know. As for their identity, no matter how I asked, they refused to answer. They said that if I agreed to their invitation, they would naturally tell me who they were and why they were recruiting people.

"But if I refused, then they would not tell me any of that.

"At that point, there was nothing I could do. They weren’t bad people, and I had no grievance against them. During the fight, they were very courteous. They had not come to Shaolin Temple to do anything wicked; they only wanted to recruit monks.

"I couldn’t exactly beat the truth out of them, could I?"

"Then what about their names?" Dong Jianguo asked again. "You must know those, at least. They couldn’t have refused to give you even their names, could they?"

Chen Ding'an nodded, then smiled again. "They didn’t hide that. They told me very straightforwardly. But their names were truly interesting."

"Oh?" Dong Jianguo raised a brow. "Interesting how?"

"All of them had the surname Xu, and their given names were actually numbers," Chen Ding'an said cheerfully.

"Hm?" Dong Jianguo didn’t understand what he meant. "Numbers?"

Chen Ding'an spread his hands. "What’s so hard to understand? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven!"

"What?" Dong Jianguo looked completely baffled. "Their names were One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven? What kind of ridiculous names are those?"

Chen Ding'an waved a hand. "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven was just an example. Anyway, I didn’t remember clearly who was who. They weren’t arranged very neatly either. Some were called Three, some Eight, and some Twenty-Two. That was roughly the idea."

"How many were there in all?" Dong Jianguo frowned. "It’s obvious they were hiding their identities! And you didn’t notice that? You actually believed them? Who would ever give their children names like that?"

Dong Jianguo looked at Chen Ding'an as if he were an idiot, but Chen Ding'an didn’t seem to care.

"Of course I understand what you mean. At first, I thought the same thing—you might say I suspected they were trying to fool me. But that kind of deception was really too clumsy.

"So I challenged them on it, but the expressions on their faces and the explanation they gave made me believe they weren’t lying."

"Oh?"

"After they said those names, their expressions were very helpless, almost embarrassed. They told me that the reason they all had the surname Xu and names made of numbers was that they were all orphans, all raised by a man surnamed Xu.

"Because that man had adopted too many children and was himself rather lazy, he simply gave all those orphans numbers as their names, just for convenience."

"Damn..." Dong Jianguo nearly swore. "There’s really such a thing? You’re sure they weren’t talking nonsense and lying to you?"

Chen Ding'an nodded without hesitation. "I’m sure. The helplessness and bitterness in their expressions when they spoke about it were absolutely genuine. Besides, if they really wanted to conceal their identities, why would they choose names so easy to make people suspicious of them?

"If they had bothered to think a little and made up a couple of proper names, I never would have noticed anything wrong."

"Damn it." Dong Jianguo was speechless. "The world really is full of strange things.

"But if they all have the surname Xu... and they all know martial arts, then their skills must be related to the person who raised them.

"And since they came to recruit people, it was probably on that person’s orders.

"They knew where the Shaolin Inner Martial Hall was, and they were able to fight you to a standstill, so the person behind them must be quite famous.

"But why have I never heard of any martial artist in our country surnamed Xu who adopted a large number of children? Have you heard of one?"

Chen Ding'an kept shaking his head. "I don’t know either. I’m planning to go back and ask the old man to see whether he has heard of him."

"Mm, that makes sense," Dong Jianguo said with a nod. "Old Master Chen knows quite a few martial artists. Maybe he’ll know something."

Chen Ding'an stood up and stretched. "All right. That’s everything I had to say. I fought with them, then I fought with you, and I’m soaked through with sweat. I should go take a shower. Right, I didn’t bring a change of clothes, so I’ll borrow yours. I know where you keep them, so there’s no need to trouble a disabled man to fetch them for me."

With that, he turned and walked, as if long familiar with the place, straight toward Dong Jianguo’s bathroom without looking back.