Su XingHe

Su XingHe, called Mr Intelligent and the Deaf Mute Old Man, is a respected martial artist whose history is revealed through his disciples rather than through his own appearance in these scenes. His silence is not simply a disability: it is bound up with the betrayal by his younger martial brother Ding ChunQiu and with a pact that has kept him alive. Though he has dismissed his disciples and has not seen them for years, they continue to honor him as their master, making loyalty to Su a force that Ding ChunQiu cannot easily extinguish.

Identity and Reputation

Su is known across the martial world as the Deaf Mute Old Man, and as Mr Intelligent. When two messengers invite Duan Yu to a chess gathering at Lei Gu Mountain, the invitation names Su XingHe as its host. Duan Yu accepts, while the messengers communicate through gestures; Zhu Danchen explains that Su is a prominent Central Plains expert, both deaf and mute, with exceptionally high martial arts skill. The gathering therefore presents Su at once as an intellectual figure associated with chess and as a formidable martial artist.

The name Mr Intelligent draws comment because Su’s disability appears to set limits on hearing and speech. Zhu Danchen describes the title as an assertion that Su’s intelligence and skill with writing can surpass other people’s hearing and debating. That explanation makes the name more than a playful contradiction: it captures the unusual public identity through which Su is remembered, even by people who have never met him.

At Xue MuHua’s refuge, XuanNan and others recognize Su as the Deaf Mute Old Man and recall a widely known account: his disciples and followers had their eardrums pierced and tongues cut so that they too would be deaf and mute. Xue corrects them. Su’s disciples were deaf and mute only during the preceding ten years, and Su himself was neither born deaf nor mute; Ding ChunQiu drove him into that condition. The correction replaces a grotesque rumor about a master imposing disability on his followers with a history of a personal attack and a deliberate protective strategy.

The School and Its Fracture

Su is the senior of the two disciples taken in by their Grand-Master; the other is Ding ChunQiu. Their martial arts were originally on a par, though Xue MuHua says that one eventually became somewhat better. Su’s attention later widened beyond martial arts: he learned music and the zither from their Grand-Master. This distinction survives in the identities of his own students, among them Kang GuangLing, the zither player, and Xue, known as a physician. Their different pursuits testify to the broad learning associated with Su’s school, even as Ding’s presence makes that inheritance dangerous.

Su’s eight disciples were expelled from the sect, yet they continued to call themselves the Eight Friends of Hangu, commemorating the time Su taught them at Hangu Pass. Xue explains that outsiders knew them for their eccentric habits, but did not know that the eight belonged to the same school. To reduce the danger that Ding would kill them together if he returned to the Central Plains, they scattered across the world and met only once every two years. Their separation is thus both a consequence of the conflict and a practical means of surviving it.

The danger became immediate after Ding sent a disciple to ask Xue to treat a monk. Xue refused, in keeping with his insistence that anyone seeking treatment ask him properly and with his unwillingness to help one of Ding’s followers. Knowing Ding would eventually come after him, Xue staged his death, placed deadly poison in a coffin, and hid his entire family in an underground cave. His account shows the same threat shaping both the disciples’ scattered lives and their methods of concealment.

The Disciples’ Loyalty

Ding tells Xue that Su has already informed him that the eight were expelled and are no longer his disciples. Xue does not accept this as a reason to abandon Su. Fan BaiLing acknowledges that Su did expel them, that they have not seen him for years, and that Su refused to receive them when they came to pay their respects. Yet their respect has not diminished. Fan holds Ding responsible for leaving them as wanderers with no sect to depend on, and insists that separation cannot erase the bond between master and students.

Ding offers his own explanation for the expulsion: Su feared that he would kill all eight, and cast them out to preserve their lives. He presents this as proof of Su’s affection, while disparaging him as too indecisive to accomplish anything. The account lends a painful double meaning to the expulsion. It deprived the disciples of their place in the school, but may also have been Su’s means of keeping them beyond Ding’s reach.

Ding presses the disciples to state whether they still consider Su their master, knowing that an affirmative answer may cost them their lives. The seven disciples present, with the seriously injured Shi QingFeng left behind in the cave, answer together that although they were expelled, the master-disciple relationship is eternal and will never change. Their reply turns Su’s apparent isolation into a test of allegiance: the disciples do not need renewed recognition from him to preserve the tie.

Conflict with Ding ChunQiu

The loyalty to Su brings Ding’s older betrayal into the open. Xue condemns anyone who would deceive and destroy a master, while Ding points out that Su had agreed not to kill him so long as Su remained mute. Ding treats the pact as a license to threaten Su through the very people he once expelled to protect. He sets out a sequence of punishments: if Xue refuses to treat the monk, Ding will kill his fellow disciples one by one and ultimately kill Su. Xue understands that accepting would help Ding, but refusal could cost the lives of his companions and master.

Ding’s threat makes the consequences of Su’s silence concrete. Although Su is not present in the exchange, his survival is the final stake in Ding’s ultimatum, and Xue’s attachment to him determines the decision. Xue yields and agrees to treat the monk, asking Ding in return to leave his friends, fellow disciples, and master alone. Ding readily promises to spare them. The bargain shows Ding exploiting the bonds Su’s school has preserved: Xue’s loyalty is not a weakness of feeling, but the means by which Ding forces him to act.

Su’s character is therefore drawn through a series of absences and contested explanations. His title suggests intelligence that exceeds ordinary speech; his history reveals a gifted martial artist silenced by betrayal; and his disciples’ refusal to disown him shows that expulsion has not ended his authority over them. In the conflict with Ding, the master’s continued life depends on the same enduring loyalty that his school’s forced dispersal was meant to save.