The vow to pasture cattle and sheep beyond Yanmen Pass

The vow to pasture cattle and sheep beyond Yanmen Pass is the future Xiao Feng and A'Zhu plan together, and its collapse marks the loss of both their life as a couple and the hope of escape from revenge. Repeated as a promise of horseback travel, hunting, and shepherding beyond the frontier, it first offers Xiao Feng a home in which he can protect someone rather than pursue an enemy; after A'Zhu dies, the same words become the life he can no longer reach.

The promised life beyond the Pass

The promise takes shape as Xiao Feng and A'Zhu travel toward his revenge on Duan Zhengchun. At a farmhouse, they buy rice and two chickens, and Xiao Feng tries to reassure A'Zhu, who seems troubled. He proposes that, once he has dealt with his enemy, they ride north beyond Yanmen Pass, hunt, pasture cattle and sheep, and never again cross into the Central Plains. The plan is not merely a place to go: it is a life organized around companionship and a deliberate departure from the violence that has defined Xiao Feng’s immediate purpose.

That imagined future is already in tension with the revenge that is supposed to precede it. Xiao Feng had sworn to kill Duan Zhengchun’s entire family, but, having encountered Duan Zhengchun’s personal loyalty, he decides that responsibility should rest with the person who committed the deed, not with the whole family. Even as he holds to the plan to confront Duan Zhengchun that night, the decision marks a restraint that makes the life beyond the Pass seem possible: vengeance may be narrowed, and the couple may leave the cycle behind.

A'Zhu asks him to postpone the confrontation for a year and take her to the frontier first. She fears that separation will last much longer than a short interval and wants them to have a year together before he risks seeking revenge. Xiao Feng explains why he will not wait: Duan Zhengchun’s Dali family has many skilled fighters, including practitioners of the Six Meridians Divine Sword, and delaying could mean facing them in Dali under worse circumstances. His answer exposes the cost built into their plan. The promised pastoral future depends on a revenge mission that A'Zhu cannot persuade him to abandon or defer.

A promise made intimate

Xiao Feng’s resolve shifts when he considers what the future would mean to him personally. He says that if he were alone he would risk his life against the Dali family without hesitation; now that he has A'Zhu, he wants to care for her and remain with her throughout his life. In this exchange, the vow beyond the Pass becomes more than a reward waiting after revenge. It changes how he values his own survival: his life matters because it is bound to a shared future.

As A'Zhu leans against him, Xiao Feng imagines them riding across the frontier a month later, hunting and herding without fearing an enemy’s attack or living with anxiety. His vision brings the promise into the present as a source of quiet and warmth, but it remains a projection, not an accomplished journey. At the same time, Xiao Feng remembers that he has yet to repay the man in black who saved his life at Juxian Manor. Even in this intimate moment, obligations from his past remain unresolved beside the future he hopes to build.

The promise returns when A'Zhu, gravely ill, asks Xiao Feng to look after her younger sister, A'Zi. She imagines that, after she recovers, she and Xiao Feng will still go beyond Yanmen Pass, and wonders whether her sister will join them. Xiao Feng answers that A'Zi will surely go with her elder sister and brother-in-law. The exchange folds A'Zi into the imagined household and gives the promise a further purpose: it offers a place not only for the couple, but also for the sister whose future worries A'Zhu.

The vow's collapse

A'Zhu does not recover. After her death, Xiao Feng carries her body to a grave and begins to cover it, stopping short of covering her face. As he looks at her, he hears in memory her promise to ride beyond Yanmen Pass, hunt, herd cattle and sheep, and remain with him for life. The words had been spoken less than a day earlier. Their closeness in time makes the reversal stark: the future that seemed near is now inseparable from the grave.

Xiao Feng kneels beside the grave for a long time, unable to cover A'Zhu’s face. At last he rises, gives a long howl, and pushes the remaining soil over her. The action completes the burial and the separation at once. The promise has not simply been delayed by grief or changed into another destination; in Xiao Feng’s understanding, the life it named is gone. His outward movement resumes, but the shared future no longer accompanies him.

From private hope to frontier question

After leaving A'Zhu’s grave, Xiao Feng travels north, following signs A'Zi leaves to guide him toward Duan Zhengchun. He drinks heavily and eats little; the promise’s destination does not end his pursuit or turn his journey into the peaceful departure he had imagined. Later, in the snow, he reaches the Jurchen encampment, where the Jurchen chief HeLiBu’s son, AguDa, welcomes him as an honoured guest despite the conflict between Jurchen and Khitan. The encounter places him among people whose identities and loyalties cross the very divisions that shape his own life.

When Khitan forces attack the Jurchen, Xiao Feng hesitates over which side to help. He does not want to harm his own Khitan people, yet he intervenes to protect the Jurchen, disarming and driving off Khitan attackers without killing them. The frontier he once pictured as a place to live beyond the Pass is thus also a contested zone, where kinship, political allegiance, and immediate human need do not align neatly.

The contradiction becomes explicit when Xiao Feng later sees Song captives taken by Liao troops. He recalls that Song soldiers also capture Khitan civilians and recognizes the retaliatory cycle in which Liao raids, called Beating the Grass Valley, provoke Song raids called Beating the Standing Valley. Rather than treating the captives as spoils, he releases them and urges them to move away from the border. He then reflects on how language, food, and shared humanity persist across the divisions used to justify raiding and retaliation.

These later scenes do not fulfill the vow or establish that Xiao Feng returns to the pastoral life he and A'Zhu imagined. Instead, they deepen its meaning by setting its private hope of peaceful living against a frontier repeatedly organized by violence and divided identity. The cattle and sheep remain part of an unrealized future: a promise that reveals what Xiao Feng wanted to protect, and whose loss accompanies his growing recognition of the human cost of the conflicts around him.