Edition note: An independent English rewriting of the Chinese argument, shaped for English-language readers.

Feng Tiannan wants Zhong A-si's vegetable plot. When the farmer refuses to sell, the local strongman accuses his young son of stealing and eating a goose. Officials imprison the father. To prove the dead child's innocence, someone cuts open his body before a crowd at the Northern Emperor Temple. There is no goose inside. The mother goes mad, and Feng's men later kill the remaining family members. Five lives are destroyed for a piece of land. The goose never appears.

Hu Fei is a young traveler with no connection to them. He weeps on the temple floor and begins pursuing Feng Tiannan, a chase that lasts through much of the novel. He cannot recover anything for himself: the farm is not his, the dead are not his relatives, and no victory will return the child. That absence of private interest is precisely what makes the pursuit so difficult for everyone else to understand.

Feng first offers money and property. Hu refuses. He then relies on official protection and martial allies. Hu continues. The cleverest defense uses face: distinguished figures unknowingly swear brotherhood with Hu and then publicly ask him to forgive Feng. To reject their request is to insult the new bond by which the jianghu recognizes him.

Finally Yuan Ziyi, the woman Hu loves, pleads with him. She argues that Feng bears him no personal grudge; Hu is interfering only because he saw injustice done to strangers. That sentence identifies the novel's central fault line. Most moral accounts begin with what belongs to me—my family, injury, school, or debt. Hu's action begins with something he witnessed and cannot make unseen.

He wavers because her request matters, then refuses. Jin Yong later wrote that this pursuit was the thing he most wanted the novel to contain. Threat, profit, reputation, and affection are the currencies by which ordinary social life negotiates. A person who accepts none of them cannot be managed through exchange. Hu Fei offers no theory for his resistance. He only remembers the opened body of a child at the temple.

Based on the Sanlian Bookstore edition of Jin Yong's The Young Flying Fox; later revisions differ in some details.