Where the Sun Sets, the Wanderer Breaks  A reflection on Ashes of Time

Fists and blades, blurred and swift. The desert, vast and desolate. When the film ended, what lingered was nothing more than a quiet desolation, the kind felt by a wanderer stranded at the edge of the world as the sun bleeds into the horizon. I remember, as a child, the tales of assassins and swordsmen filled me with longing. The timid, rule-bound ordinariness of the real world struck me as contemptible. And yet, when the credits rolled, the thought that struck deepest was this: perhaps I am Ouyang Feng.

The moment Ouyang Feng laid eyes on Hong Qi, he said to himself: *I know this man could make me a great deal of money, but I don't like him.* And still, what he did was simply take him in, without a word, and wait quietly for him to leave. When a woman came to him with her plea, he turned away with cold indifference, nudging her, step by step, toward ruin. Ouyang Feng believed himself born under a solitary star, and so had understood from boyhood that the surest way to avoid being rejected was to reject first. His cowardice was, in its own way, a form of arrogance. And because of it, those who loved him also sought their footing in the game of love, until, through all the entanglement and confusion, they drifted further and further apart.

Out in the desert, a tangle of loves unfolds across fragments of memory and encounter. Murong Yan, or is it Murong Yin, is consumed by a love for Huang Yaoshi that has curdled into hatred. Huang Yaoshi pines for Ouyang Feng's sister-in-law, a longing he can never voice. The blind swordsman, Hong Qi, the woman who seeks vengeance for her brother: each carries their own karmic wound, their own inescapable trial.

Perhaps Ouyang Feng's vigil in that desert, amid all its deceit and stillness, was always a kind of reckoning. He witnessed what the blind swordsman was willing to sacrifice just to see once more the peach blossoms of home. He saw in Murong Yin the entanglement of jealousy and love. He saw Huang Yaoshi's weakness, his irresolution. Maybe it was precisely those raw, piercing truths about the human heart that allowed Ouyang Feng, at last, to make peace with himself. Two years later, he returned to White Camel Mountain and took on the name: the Western Venom. That was Ouyang Feng's trial and his life. But where, I wonder, does mine lie?

For a long time, I had little patience for fragmented, formally experimental storytelling. From Cortázar's fiction to the avant-garde literary experiments, they always felt to me more like feats of technique than of feeling. There is, I think, a fundamental risk in that kind of storytelling: the more scattered a narrative becomes, the more it can lose the force that straightforward telling preserves. That, to me, had long felt unacceptable. But watching this film, I began to understand. Reality itself is so full of detours. Human emotion carries no fixed itinerary. Where, really, is the so-called linear? *Ashes of Time* showed me that some stories are never meant to be confessed in one long, unguarded breath. Their beauty and their romance live precisely in their ambiguity. And besides, when feelings arrive in torrents, sometimes only a far more intricate net can hope to hold them.