For the first time in a thousand years, there was thunder in the temple.
Hidden inside the heavy terra-cotta barrel at the back of the practice hall, eleven-year-old Malao flinched with every BOOM, every CRACK! Thunder inside their compound could only come from one source. A dragon. A very angry dragon.
Malao shivered. According to legend, dragons controlled the wind and the rain, the lightning and the thunder. Stay in a dragons good graces, and your crops would receive enough rain for a bountiful harvest; anger a dragon, and your crops would be washed away—along with you, your house, and your entire family. Push a dragon too far, and it would deliver a special kind of storm, smashing everything it could with its powerful tail, igniting everything that remained with its fiery breath.
A dragon must be the reason Grandmaster had made Malao and his four “temple” brothers—Fu, Seh, Hok, and Long—squeeze into the barrel. Grandmaster had told them they were under attack by soldiers, but Malao knew men alone could never defeat the warrior monks of Cangzhen Temple. The attackers must have formed an alliance with a dragon. What could those thunderclaps be but the crack of a dragon snapping its enormous tail?
A dragon lashing its tail reminded Malao of his older brother Ying and his chain whip. Ying had left Cangzhen in a rage the year before, upset because he had been trained his entire life as an eagle but had always wanted to be an all-powerful dragon. Swinging his chain whip was the closest Ying had ever come to having a dragon tail of his own.
Malao shivered again. Ying had vowed to return to Cangzhen to punish Grandmaster for training him as an eagle, but Ying was no fool. He would never attack Cangzhen and its one hundred warrior monks unless he was guaranteed victory. And for that to happen, he would have to have acquired power beyond that of mortal men—
Oh, no! Malao thought. Maybe Ying has figured out a way to transform himself into a real dragon! Maybe he has grown scales and a tail and—
KA-BOOM!
Malao raced through the moonlit treetops, nervous energy driving him deeper and deeper into the forest. He had to put as much distance between himself and Cangzhen Temple as possible. Ying had returned— and was more dangerous than ever.
Malao leaped off the gnarled arm of an ancient oak and soared through the night sky.
He landed on the limb of a young maple and paused. He was lucky to be alive, let alone to have escaped uninjured. The same was true for his brothers Fu, Seh, Hok, and Long. Cangzhen Temple was in ruins, and its warrior monks—Malao's older brothers and teachers—were all dead.
Malao began to tremble. The thunder he had heard was a devastating new weapon called a qiang. With the twitch of a single finger, a soldier with no training at all could now kill a kung fu master. Ying carried a qiang, and with it the power of a dragon. Still, that hadn't been enough for Ying. He had carved his face and filled the grooves with green pigment. He had forked his tongue and ground his teeth and nails into sharp points. Ying now looked like a dragon. A crazy, vengeful sixteen-year-old dragon.
Malao shuddered and grabbed hold of a thick vine. He pushed off the slender maple and swung feetfirst toward a large elm.
“Scatter into the four winds and uncover Ying's secrets, as well as your own,” Grandmaster had told them. “Uncover the past, for it is your future.”
Malao released the vine and somersaulted onto one of the elm's upper limbs. Why did Grandmaster hide only us five? he wondered. What makes us so special?
Grandmaster had provided only one clue. He'd said that Malao and his four brothers were linked to each other, and to Ying. Malao guessed it had something to do with the fact that all of them, including Ying, were orphans. Still, that didn't explain much. It wasn't like any of them could have had the same parents. They were all too different.
Malao glanced down at his small, dark hands. He was a monkey-style kung fu master, nothing at all like Fu, the oversized, over-aggressive twelve-year-old “tiger,” or Seh, the tall, secretive twelve-year-old “snake.” He differed even more from Hok, the pale-skinned, logical twelve-year-old “crane,” and Long, the wise, muscular thirteen-year-old “dragon.”
Malao sighed. He missed them already.
A twig snapped and Malao froze. He glanced around but couldn't see anything from high in the tree. Cautiously, he swung down to the elm's lowest limb for a closer look. He peeked through a clump of new foliage and his heart skipped a beat. This part of the forest looked awfully familiar. His plan had been to travel in a straight line away from the temple, but he'd always been really bad with directions—
Another twig snapped.
Malao crouched low on the large limb and held his breath. A moment later, he saw a soldier on patrol. One of Ying's soldiers.