“Where is my son? It is time for him to die.”
“Madam?!” The old nanny stood between the frail boy and his mother. Her withered hands clenched the hem of her faded dress. Screams of dying men and chopping blades filled the hallway, loud and close. “He’s just had one of his fits. The battle-”
“There is no battle.” The Madam’s eyes were red, her pupils barely pinpricks. “The Hongs managed to hire some Lay Brothers, which means someone in the Inner Court gave their approval. Our family is dead.”
“The guards-” The nanny slowly retreated towards the carved wooden bed. Madam lurched forward, the green brocade of her robe swaying madly in the yellow light of the oil lamps.
“The guards can’t last one move against cultivators. Steel sabers against flying swords- what could it be but a slaughter? The Hongs are slowed only by making sure they don't miss anyone. Time for me to do my last maternal duty.”
“But the Young Master is so small. He’s sick. He’s no danger to them!”
“He’s the heir. Rip the weeds out by the roots. That’s what we did to the Fengs. It’s what everybody does. By the roots, so they don’t grow back.” Madam stumbled onto the nurse, who caught her awkwardly. Not seeing the dagger Madam stabbed into her heart. Just feeling the sudden pain, then nothing.
“Rip them up by the roots. Sorry Nursie, but I always thought you were a spy. It doesn’t matter if I’m wrong. They wouldn’t let you off anyway.” She giggled. “Ah, if only I could see their faces after their ‘victory.’” She sat on the bed next to her baby. Just six years old, but he looked younger. Disease had ruined his body before he had left her womb, and he hadn't gotten better.
“Life has been Hell for you. You should have been born into a life of comfort, and haven’t known a day of it.” She pulled a grey pill from inside her sleeve. It reflected the light from the oil lamps with a soft metallic sheen.
“Here. Mother brought Baby a special pill. I’ll break it open for you, just a little. Into your mouth, yes Baby. Just suck on it. Just suck on it, and drift off on golden waves.” Her soft hand stroked the boy’s thin cheek. She murmured to him, half singing a prayer to ease him into the dark.
“I pray your next life will be peaceful. I pray that you will be healthy. I pray you never have another devil mother and demon father. I pray that you have no enemies. I pray-”
The door exploded off its hinges and crashed into the far wall, smashing oil lamps as it fell to the floor. The lamp oil spilled over the flagstones and carpets, spreading the fire. A spray of golden darts ripped through the room, burying themselves with dull thuds into the dead nurse and into the back of Madam. She fell across her baby, a little chuff of surprise as the air was knocked out of her. Then silence- the beautiful green brocade stained and ruined with blood.
“Check them!”
A rough man rushed in. The nurse was deader than dead, Madame’s eyes were already glassy and-
“I found the boy!”
“Finish him!”
“His mother already did.” There was foam pouring from the boy’s mouth. His eyes never blinked or moved, even as his mother died on top of him.
“Be sure.”
The man reached out with his knife but paused, hearing a rushing sound. Madame’s green brocade robe hissed into a roaring, white hot blaze. It caught on the bed sheets and raced for the heavy curtains. It wasn’t alone. The man looked back over at the fire on the floor. It was spreading wildly, bolting for the silk curtains and rushing up to the roof. He followed the trails of fire to big jars up in the rafters.
“Oh you spiteful bitch. RUN!”
He didn’t make it to the door before the house exploded in flames.
Nothing of the once elegant home could be salvaged after the fire. Serfs pulled the wreckage over to enormous many-legged garbage bins, which walked themselves to the dump and emptied themselves on the enormous piles. The serfs had explicit orders not to remove any bodies they might find. The Hongs felt the dump was exactly where those bones belonged.
A boy woke up in the trash. He couldn’t remember who he was or where he was, or why everything hurt. There was something round on the ground. He reached for it and saw that he only had a few fingers. He should have had more- he could see the bloody stumps where most were missing. His body was covered in blood and burns and everything was pure pain. The boy screamed. He screamed for a long time.
Once he had screamed his throat dry, the boy firmed up his guts and crawled off. He was so thirsty, he thought he would die. He had to find water somewhere. And he did. Stagnant and filthy in the ruins of an old clay pot.
Everything hurt. There were flies floating in that water. Bits of rotted cabbage too. It smelled diabolical. He wanted to vomit just looking at it. He hesitated, but he hadn’t seen any other water. It was vomit, or drink and keep it down. The boy teetered on the edge of the choice, and forced himself to drink. It was as disgusting as he expected. He had another mouthful. Everything hurt, but he was determined to live.
Days passed.
The boy lay on the ground, unaware that he was dying. Everything hurt. Everything always hurt. Doing anything hurt. His head, especially, hurt. He had a headache and everything went swirly when he tried to stand. But the boy had a treasure- a little black ball of soft metal that he could lick, and once he did that everything stopped hurting. He could just float in the warm waves.
His hand brushed idly over the trash covered ground, feeling the scraps of bone and bits of paper. His little hand swept right past the thin ring of bone that materialized right where his fingers should have been. Pinky, ring, middle, then the surviving index finger ran over the worn bone ring. The ring flipped itself onto the little finger and sank into the horribly thin flesh to merge with the bone below.
The boy didn’t notice. There wasn’t much left of him to notice. He had been spending more and more time lost on the warm waves. It was so much better than feeling everything his little body usually felt, and it meant he didn’t get hungry nearly so often.
From infinite chaos was born yin and yang. From yin and yang, the three qi were born, and from the three qi was born the five elements and from thence all of creation! And who was it that ordered the undifferentiated qi? It was the Old Master! Oh Child of Destiny! You have awoken me from mine ancient- hello?
There was an awkward pause.
Hello? Hey Junior, can you hear me? OOOIIIII! Child of Destiny, OOOOOIIIII!
The hallucinations had come. This one was odd, but they were always odd. The boy didn’t find it too bothersome. Better than when animals hunted him in trash heaps. Or when he tried to pee, or drink water, or do anything except lie quietly amongst the rotting trash.
There was a series of clapping sounds. They achieved nothing.
Alright. Let’s see what’s going on here, and why my starting budget was so… oh.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
This is usually the point where I say that I’ve seen worse. That always cheers people up, knowing that some other bastard suffered more. But I haven't. Condemned by the merciless Heavens, oppressed by cruel Fate, that’s normal, that’s fine. Fiancé left you, your clan got exterminated, someone stole your precious whatsit- all fine. Normal, even.
This is sick.
This is why I got such a high exchange rate- I’m going to dump everything I earned over two hundred years into this kid in a day. In ten minutes, even. I got screwed. Not as bad as this kid, but…
There was an ethereal sigh.
I’ll take it as an investment. And really, what’s one itsy bitsy intracranial hemorrhage? Practically nothing, amirite? Plenty left over to fix… to fix…
Can you please stop revealing new, horrifying, chronic conditions? You aren’t supposed to have all of them.
The boy drifted on the warm waves. He was feeling a bit nauseous now, but his magic treasure would make him feel all better again.
Sudden shift in brain chemistry… what are you licking? Hey kid, what the hell is that thing in your hand?
The boy gave it a long, wet, lick.
Don’t you lick that! Don’t! Don’t you lick that, you naughty boy! No! Bad! Drop it! I don’t care if you are six, don’t eat things you find in the trash! You still aren’t hearing me. DAMN IT!
Spending my savings here on what? A heaven defying cultivation method? Bestowing Nine Dragons Meridians? A natal sword? No! I’m spending it on draining some edema, coagulating the torn blancmange of your brain, knotting the macramé of your sheared axons and dendrites. Did you get your head kicked in? This wasn’t a one-time thing. In addition to everything else wrong with you, you have both CTE and boxer's dementia. Were you a shaken baby or something? You are six years old. Malnourished, under developed and six.
This world did you dirty, kid. But you aren’t alone now. Everything gets better from here, I promise.
A particularly enlightened monk, one who had begun to cast off their mortality and truly ascend to the infinite, might have noticed filaments of dark gold winding through the boy’s brain, stopping the bleeding and repairing torn membranes. It was an incredibly delicate job, equaling or exceeding the healing provided by the most powerful of spells and talismans this side of true Immortality.
It also, gently, knocked the boy out. This next bit would be unpleasant.
Lead poisoning and opium addiction. For at least a year or two, maybe longer, and in freakish quantities. Unreal damage. Your nerves are fried. Fried! You weren't getting any iron to begin with, and now you are stuffed full of lead. I don’t even know how you got hooked on opium.
Golden energy traced through the neural pathways, healing what should never have been damaged, repairing what should never have been broken. If the boy had been conscious, and if the voice hadn’t temporarily blocked a number of important nerves in the spinal column, he would have been in absolute agony.
Alright. With this you are just a maimed, malnourished, underdeveloped kid with a number of chronic skin diseases, some hereditary illnesses, a weakened immune system, severe burns that are also infected, kidneys that are about boxed, you have a fungal infection in your lung, and not to put too fine a point on it but I’m noticing some problems with the development of your lets just call them primary sex characteristics. Also you have myopia, you are color blind, have awful muscle tone and the bone structure of the deeply, profoundly, ugly.
But hey, at least leukemia and pancreatic cancer are going to make sure that you don’t have these problems for long.
I fixed the epilepsy for you, along with the nerve damage and physical symptoms of addiction. So that's something.
You must have one Hell of a Heaven-toppling destiny for Fate to land all this on you. And I don’t have nearly enough energy to fix all of this. Or even most of it. Or even just the cancer.
The dump wasn’t ever really quiet. Things shifted around, and it was a promised land for all sorts of animals. The boy was in a reasonably out of the way place, but hardly secure. There was almost nothing more the voice in the ring could do for him. There was a ghostly sigh. There was one more thing it could do- going all in on this obviously failed gamble. It teetered on the choice for a while. There was another ghostly sigh, and an electrochemical prod woke the boy up.
Listen closely, I don’t have much time. I’m transmitting a set of exercises and breathing techniques to you. They won’t let you cultivate, but they will let you digest the energy in your food better, fight infection better, and clean out toxins from your body. They will also keep the cancer in you from progressing… much. But since you don’t know what that is, don’t worry about it and just practice.
Practice every day. You will get stronger, feel better, you won’t hurt as much. If anyone asks what you are doing, tell them you are imitating animals to gather their strength. That tends to stop questions. I’d avoid people entirely, if possible. I’ll talk to you again once you are stronger, but it won’t be for years. But you will feel me. Because I am with you. You aren’t alone any more. You were never trash. You will soar.
The voice faded away, leaving only the lingering feeling of a warm hug.
The boy tried to work up some spit. His mouth was terribly dry for some reason. Eventually, he managed a single word. “Grandpa?”
He lifted up his treasure to take a lick, then spat hard. For some reason, it tasted very bitter now.
The first time the boy tried to do the exercises, he only managed the first of the ten forms. His malnourished body and withered limbs couldn’t stand the new strain. He had to find some not too rotten or wormy bits of vegetables to eat and regain some of his strength. Usually, eating like this gave him horrible stomach aches if it didn’t make him fountain at both ends. He didn’t care. He was just that hungry.
And then… nothing bad happened. He looked around, wondering if there was something special about the vegetables. There didn’t seem to be- they were just mixed in with the rest of the trash. Since he had a bit more energy, he did the exercises again. Stronger this time, but he still only managed the first form. Some kind of gunk surfaced through the pores on his skin. He ignored it. It was a bit smelly, but there wasn’t much of it.
The first time he managed a complete set of the ten forms, he could feel Grandpa hugging him. He could almost hear Grandpa whispering how happy and proud the boy made him. It was the single greatest moment of his life so far. He knew he wanted to make Grandpa proud again.
So he kept practicing. Eating rotting garbage. Digging up grubs with his one good finger on each hand. Drinking water collected in puddles and bits of broken pottery. He learned to move low, to stay crouched in the shadows. He was too weak to fight anything bigger than a mouse, so he had to be stealthy and careful enough to find a mouse in the trash heaps.
Sometimes, when the sun got too hot or there were dangerous animals moving around, he would crouch under a heap and look up at the blue sky. His eyes were blurry, and it was hard to make anything out too far away, but he could lose himself in that blue. Wondering what it would be like to be a bird.
One day, he saw people that sort of looked like big versions of him close to the dump. He crept over towards them, curious. Hopeful. Maybe they could make the hurting stop. It always hurt to move. It hurts to do anything. It would be so nice if they could help.
“AHH! Unclean beast!” One of the big people scooped a rock off the ground and threw it hard enough to rip open the flesh on the boy’s shoulder. “Go away! Scram! Come on, you throw rocks too.”
“No need, it’s run off. What do you think it was? Some kind of diseased monkey?”
The boy hid under a mound of rotting rags and broken furniture, clutching the bleeding wound. He could feel something bubbling up in him. Something that made him clench his teeth and want to hurt those big people. Made him want to throw rocks at them! The loneliness howled around him, devouring him. The pain and isolation and fear all gathered to drag him into the dark.
But then he felt Grandpa holding him, and thought he felt an old hand caressing the back of his head. He couldn’t hear Grandpa’s voice, but he thought he heard whispers of calm, of comfort. Promises that, one day, no one would be able to hurt him. It was okay to acknowledge the pain, but trust that one day, the pain will pass.
Right now, everything hurts. The rock throwers hurt him very much.
The boy broke down and cried. Every action he took had a hidden calculation- how much energy will this cost? How much pain will this cost? He put up with this life, but that too had a cost. The cold dark was always there, always pulling on him. Promising oblivion.
Soon enough the tears ran out. Everything hurt, but he was still furiously determined to live. He wanted to make Grandpa proud. And there was something even below that thought. Some ember that refused to be extinguished by tears or put out by the cold.
The boy patted himself off and started moving. It had been raining for most of the day for the past few days, and he had quickly figured out that the trash piles tended to collapse without warning. He didn’t want to be buried alive. He would have to make a little shelter for himself out of the more solid scrap. He didn’t know what Monsoons were. He just knew he wanted to live.
This continued for the next four years. Monsoons came and went. The trash was piled up, then rotted down. But the boy remained. Still gorging on trash, feasting on mice and lizards and cockroaches, choking it all down with the naked will to live.
As the years slipped past, the boy started to understand why Grandpa said the forms were modeled after animals. The low crouch of the Bright Eyes, the tall stretch of the Green Stripe Scaley, the little hops of Big Ears. Each movement reminded him of an animal he saw around the garbage heap. He slowly grew strong enough to hunt them.
Missing fingers on both hands meant it was hard to grip a weapon, so he resorted to snares and traps. It took a lot of experimentation, but that was fine. He had nothing but time. Snares and traps meant he didn’t have to move much. It hurt to move, so he learned to be small and still. Just another piece of trash on the heap.
A Big Teeth Hunter came into the garbage dump as the sun set. They usually moved in packs, but this one was alone. The boy saw that it was sick, foaming at the mouth. He hid as best he could in one of his little nests, snares and traps set around him. The boy had been hunted by beasts before. And the Big Teeth Hunter, sick or not, was very good at finding prey.
It found the boy in minutes. It jumped over the pits, broke through his snares, and was only stopped by the last-ditch scrap fence the boy raised from the ground. The beast snarled and barked, trying to bite off the hands and few remaining fingers holding up the fence. The boy knew he couldn’t hold out long.
In a fit of desperation, he shoved the fence into the beast’s face, confusing it. Using the distraction, he hopped on the Big Teeth’s back, slipped an arm around its neck, and choked.
The boy had grown up starving. He was more than just small for his age- he was stunted. The Big Fangs could handle the weight. What it couldn’t handle was the strength in those thin arms. Tendons like cords popped out of slim, but highly functional, muscles. All the boy had to do was hang on and squeeze. So the boy lay on the stinking, piebald grey fur, and squeezed until the animal stopped moving and the breathing stopped and he couldn’t feel the blood rushing through it any more.
He felt Grandpa hug him. Grandpa was so proud of him! The boy decided to celebrate with a meat feast.
Ah, no, please don’t. The wolf is very sick. Rabies isn’t something a little exercise routine can fix.
“GRANDPA!”
Hahaha, I told you I would be back. Yes, you can call me Grandpa if you like. Or Grandpa Jun. But I don’t think I ever learned your name.
The little boy nodded.
So. What is your name?
“I don’t know, Grandpa. Maybe “Go Away?”
Huh?
“That’s what the people say when they see me. They yell “Go Away!” and they throw rocks. I have to stay far away. They are good at spotting me, and are very strong.”
It sounds like you don’t have a name. Would you like me to give you one?
“Yes!”
Tian Zihao. That’s a good name for my grandson. You are going to shake the world, my boy. And it starts today.”