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To expand his fan base and investigate this new market, Adam bade a temporary farewell to Hong Kong and moved to Taiwan. During this time he occasionally went back to Hong Kong for short periods to film HK-TVB series. His visits to Hong Kong were limited by his commitments in Taiwan.
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The ’Zu-Warriors of the Magic Mountains’ of 1983 is an adaption of WanZyuLauZyu’s well-known work and is set in the NgWu Period of Chinese history, a time of much upheaval and many invasions by northern horse-riding tribes. The film traces the progress of the hero swordsman, Ting Yin, played by Adam, as he attempts to save the world. But, while he is doing this unfortunately becomes possessed by the Blood Devil. Ting Yin is now caught between action and intention. He has to avoid unleashing violent blood-shed among the underworld triads, while involuntarily committing hellish crimes because of his demonic possession. The challenging task given to Adam in this film was to play one character who constantly switches between two personas. On the one hand he is the righteous swordsman and on the other the Blood Devil. Included in the cast were Lam Ceng-ha, Yun Biu and Sammo Hung and to add to this star-studded cast several Hollywood stunt specialists were parachuted in during post production providing unprecedented visual effects and Mouhap (a film genre involving swordsmen and certain moralist conduct codes) ambiance to the Chinese-speaking film industry. The film ended up a box-office sensation. At the time Adam was already a top-rank TV star, but he went out of his way to train with Master Ma Yuk-kei for this production and practiced swordsmanship for two hours every morning, come rain or shine. Such was Adam’s high expectations of himself and relentless tenacity.
