Xinyang is both a waypoint and a wound in Xiao Feng’s search for Duan Zhengchun: the signs he follows bring him back to the city where he and A'Zhu once visited Madam Ma, and from there toward the Ma family residence in a winter storm. Its streets and outskirts are not merely a setting for pursuit. They make the past physically unavoidable, turning Xiao Feng’s route into a return to the circumstances he associates with A'Zhu’s death. Elsewhere, the name also appears in an account of Liao’s strategic position against the Song, linking the novel’s intimate grief to its larger political geography.

The City in Xiao Feng’s Pursuit

After leaving Duan Zhengchun and the others, Xiao Feng follows the marks A'Zi has left to guide her father. For several days he travels from dawn until night, drinking heavily and eating little. At first he pays so little attention to the country around him that he unexpectedly finds himself back in Xinyang. Although he could catch up with Duan Zhengchun by pressing on for another day or half-day, he has not pursued him at full speed: with A'Zhu dead, Xiao Feng cannot settle on what vengeance or life beyond it would mean.

The snowbound return brings that hesitation into focus. In town, Xiao Feng sees the character Duan written in charcoal at the foot of a wall, with an arrow pointing west. The sign is practical evidence of A'Zi’s trail, but it also summons the memory of walking with A'Zhu to Madam Ma’s house west of the city to sound her out. Looking back, he feels that each step on that earlier visit had brought A'Zhu one step closer to death. Xinyang therefore marks a painful overlap between the present search and the investigation that preceded her fatal injury.

The Trail to the Ma Residence

Xiao Feng follows A'Zi’s fresh signs west through worsening weather. Some are cut into tree bark; at the newest marks, resin has not yet congealed over the scraped places. The trail points toward Ma Dayuan’s house. Its destination puzzles him: he wonders whether Duan Zhengchun has learned that Madam Ma framed him and is going there to settle accounts. Xiao Feng also recalls that A'Zhu mentioned Madam Ma shortly before she died and that A'Zi heard her, but he cannot see how that name alone could identify this particular woman.

The uncertainty restores the alertness Xiao Feng had lost in grief. Rather than go straight to the house, he takes shelter in an abandoned shrine, shuts the door, and sleeps for six hours. He emerges in the second watch, then approaches the Ma residence carefully. From behind a tree he sees Ruan Xingzhu and A'Zi concealed to its northeast, and Qin Hongmian and her daughter hidden to the southeast. Snow has settled over all four women. A dull light shows through a window in the east wing, while the house itself remains silent.

Xiao Feng draws the women’s attention away by breaking off a branch and throwing it eastward. As they look toward the sound, he slips beneath the east-wing window. The boards covering the windows make entry difficult, but he times a palm strike to coincide with a gust of north wind. Wind and palm force break the board together, concealing the sound from the watchers outside and from anyone within. Looking through the crack, Xiao Feng is dumbfounded by what he sees. Xinyang’s trail has thus brought him from a remembered visit to Madam Ma’s house to a concealed, tense encounter at the same residence.

Memory, Grief, and Confrontation

Xinyang’s westward signs draw their force from the contrast between a route once shared and one now followed alone. Xiao Feng remembers going with A'Zhu to Madam Ma’s house, but the present journey is guided by A'Zi and shadowed by the knowledge that A'Zhu died after the events of that inquiry. The city’s charcoal arrows and the fresh cuts in the trees are clues, yet each also reopens the question of how the past led to her death.

That remembered visit belongs to a larger reckoning with Madam Ma. When she curses Xiao Feng, she recalls seeing him at the Hundred Flower Gathering in Luoyang two years earlier, standing beside a yellow peony. She says he looked past her as though she were an ordinary woman, and that his failure to notice her was the slight she could not forgive. This recollection makes her grievance personal and specific; Xinyang, where Xiao Feng and A'Zhu later went to question her, becomes the place where his memory of the investigation meets the resentment behind Madam Ma’s actions.

Historical Geography and Political Stakes

Xinyang also appears in the novel’s account of the territory and military balance between Liao and the Song. The exposition explains that Liao’s control of the sixteen prefectures, ceded after Shi JingTang declared himself emperor, gave it strategically valuable ground for incursions south. The Song fought for generations to recover these territories without success; their position, rather than any simple disparity in soldiers or equipment, left them at a marked disadvantage. In this broader account, Xinyang belongs to a landscape shaped by contested borders and military access, rather than solely to the local geography of Xiao Feng’s pursuit.

The juxtaposition gives the location two distinct narrative scales. In the personal plot, Xinyang is a city of remembered steps, winter signs, and a house watched under heavy snow. In the historical frame, the conflict over territory helps explain the strategic conditions under which Liao and Song confront one another. The city’s significance lies in this double placement: it anchors an intimate return to loss while also participating in the novel’s wider map of political and military pressure.