Wanli Pengcheng

Eagle Man

A lean, hardened old man draped in a tattered straw cloak woven with eagle feathers.

Strange as he looks, his martial arts are vast and profound, and his bearing is extraordinary, the mark of a true master. Yet for some reason, at his age, he is still unknown to the world.

Biographies

He was once a man from the stories: the Head of the Bodhidharma Hall of Songshan Temple, Dharma name Juekong, counted among Wulin's Ten Greatest Experts.

Chan Master Juekong mastered seven of the Seventy-Two Arts, and above all he was most skilled in the External Skill of Dragon Claw Hand.

His martial arts were no less than those of his Senior Brother the Abbot.

High in station and great in virtue, he seldom walked the Jianghu. After the age of fifty, he resigned the seat of Head, traveled far to Six Paths Gorge in Xiangyang to challenge the Mud Cult's Heavenly King, and afterward vanished without a trace.

When he surfaced again, he had already returned to lay life and taken the name Eagle Man.

Seeking fame, he entered the world and roamed the Jianghu, yet no matter how busily he moved about, the name Eagle Man never spread.

He still wandered the borderlands between Song and Jin. Word had it that he would aid the wicked, and after some skirmish or other he would pour cold water on the victorious Song soldiers with a lecture, earning their resentment.

Old as he was, he acted with plenty of hot blood. The heroes of the Central Plains would not befriend him, yet among the commoners of both nations he was well liked.

He loved wine, but his tolerance for it was not much.

Many years ago, someone slipped a legendary novel, The Tale of the Curly-Bearded Guest, into the Scripture Repository.

The young monk Juekong happened to read it, and his heart surged. He yearned for the heroic spirit described in the book and threw himself into martial arts.

Alas, he had been a monk at Shaolin Temple since childhood, knew nothing of the world, and was steeped in Buddhist teachings of abstaining from killing and keeping far from greed, anger, and delusion, from love and hate and meeting. Much as he wished to go out into the world, he could not get past the barrier he had set for himself. When the itch grew unbearable, he could only work through a few sets of Vexation Fist to relieve it.

His body was beyond the world, but his heart had fallen into it. He endured several cycles of seasons, and even as Head of the Bodhidharma Hall he gained nothing but emptiness.

Then came the time when the Old Demon Cult, the Supreme Bliss Cult, ran rampant. The young hero Long Yuan called the heroes together, and Shaolin answered at once. He was there for the great occasion, and in that battle he made a mighty name for himself; the Head of the Bodhidharma Hall astonished all present.

After that battle, Songshan suffered grievous losses. The Abbot's Power scattered to nothing; free of attachment, he only grew more devout in the Buddha.

The remaining monks were moved by him and returned to their original intent one after another, casting aside martial learning and other small arts of strengthening the body to press bravely onward in the great Scholarship of the Buddhist Dharma.

Only he was left, still restless from the lingering heat of that battle.

Unable to see through his attachment, he resolutely resigned the seat of Head and traveled far to the Mud Cult Headquarters at Six Paths Gorge, where he sat down with Heavenly King Che Xuanyuan to debate principle and contest martial arts. He never expected that a lifetime of Buddhist practice could not persuade another man, and that instead he would be enlightened by this mortal, seeing clearly the bias at the bottom of his heart.

He sat in a daze for several days and at last resolved to return to lay life. What a pity that when he wanted to grow his hair long, most of it had already fallen out.

He remembered The Tale of the Curly-Bearded Guest that he had read years before, wove the eagle feathers he had gathered over many years into a straw cloak, and so Wanli Pengcheng, newcomer to the Wulin, began to make his way through the Jianghu, completing his youth.

Notes

• Called Old Master Wanli by Ruixing, he serves as her sedan-chair bearer together with the vanished .
• He once visited Solitary Cloud Mountain and told Rui Sheng the story of Long Yuan's great battle with the .
• He once fought the for over a hundred moves without a victor.
• He has a chance to appear during the siege of the Tang Clan, saying he comes to redeem a ten-year promise.
• He studied Buddhism in the first half of his life and has old ties with Zhao Huo, so he holds back. Even so, take one slap from Senior Wanli unprepared and your head will twist three times around as you ascend on the spot; his holding back amounts to roughly easing off from four turns to three.^[1]
• He is on friendly terms with . Seeing Nangong Shen's worried frown, he thinks it looks just like Nangong Heng in his youth, and so decides to lend a hand.

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1. Facebook－Original Bird Bear 2022/5/28 ↩︎