A Bond Undone (Legends of the Condor Heroes #2)

by Jin Yong

Over the years, he had collected – often by force – many pretty girls to serve as his concubines and had taught them kung fu in his spare time.

They claimed they had to stop us from murdering innocent people, but I knew they just wanted to lay their greedy paws on the Manual.

She lowered her head and her voice began to falter. Unmarried young women did not openly discuss men to whom they were not related.

“Did he kill them?” she pressed on. “No . . . For a woman, it’s a fate worse than death. You’ve heard the saying, ‘Grave is the loss of chastity, trifling is the loss of life’, right?”

IT WAS now the first half of the sixth lunar month. The people south of the Yangtze used to say, “On the sixth day of the sixth month, duck eggs cook under the sun.”