The West Town Temple had five hundred and twenty Senior Lay Brothers at the peak of the Earthly Person realm. Apparently that was the way it was organized- you were a novice until you had cultivated to the first level of the Earthly Person Realm, and then you were promoted to Lay Brother. You were a lay brother until you reached the Heavenly Person Realm and became a True Disciple. Most people just left out the word ‘Lay.’ It got redundant fast.
Tian was, of course, the Little Brother or Junior Brother. Or more often, just Junior or Tian. He was the only person in the temple still in the double digits, age wise, so it seemed fair to him. Plus everyone was much taller than he was. It was reasonable to call him little.
He was expected to refer to everyone as Senior Brother, or if they were friendly, Brother and their family name. It seemed odd to refer to people so much older as brothers, but there was a very simple logic to it. As far as the Sect was concerned, they were all the same generation of disciple.
Want a higher status? No problem! Just become a True Disciple and enter the Inner Court. Your generation would advance, making you a “Martial Uncle” or “Martial Aunt”. What’s more, you would have the possibility of earning the rank of an Elder. And Elders could cover half the sky with one hand, entrusted by the sect with heavy responsibility.
He learned a lot. Especially since his seniors were terrible gossips.
Tian was quite capable of sitting very quietly and very still, preferably behind rocks, pillars or in dark corners. Sometimes lying on the roofs or on rafters, if practical. It was easy to ignore him during the heat of practice as one might ignore a sleeping cat next to a sandbag.
A senior brother would wander over to chat with the senior brother Tian was watching. They would share the latest news from around the Temple and the town. And a mysterious world slowly emerged.
It didn’t take long for word to get around about the new, and only, Novice. He might be a bit ugly, and it was a bit disgusting looking at his hands, but he was even tempered, ignorant as a newborn duck, and listened closely when you told him things. It was hard to dislike him, even if their aesthetics rebelled against the idea of a mutilated cultivator.
Blindness, perhaps, could be accepted when matched with playing a zither or cultivation of a sublime medicinal art. A one-armed swordsman could find favor. A mute diviner would have a queue of clients stretching around the metaphorical block!
An ugly kid missing most of his fingers? Pity shaded into contempt, moderated by the sheer age of the senior brothers and the fact that the boy was simply likeable, in his idiotic way. He should have been ignored, or quietly bullied. And yet, somehow, he was capable of driving the Brothers tasked with his education into a state of nervous exhaustion.
“Senior Brother, what is a contract?”
“Senior Brother, why do we need vital energy to do things?”
“Senior Brother, what is better, young cabbage or old cabbage?”
Senior Brother, why is it a problem if you slept with your brother’s wife?”
“Senior Brother, what is a wife?”
“Senior Brother, do we need to polish the tops of the beams holding up the roofs that much? I keep finding other senior brothers up there all the time.”
“Senior Brother…”
Still, it was a temple full of old foxes, and they quickly found ways to manage him. First was that, unless he had a question, Tian absolutely would not approach someone. Not a single person had a casual chat with Tian. As long as you distracted him with a task, he wouldn’t ask awkward questions. He was happy to work, though it was a little awkward watching him puzzle out things. He tended to worry at problems, crouching in a shady corner and frowning as he thought them over.
And his puzzling would often lead to more difficult questions.
“Senior Brother Jing… I keep hearing about vital energy, spiritual energy and qi, and apparently I have all three already, but I need to gather vital energy and turn it into the qi I already have… it doesn’t make sense.”
“Good question. This is quite a deep subject, and I don’t think anyone in the Outer Court is a real expert, let alone in our West Town Temple. But I can explain the basics.” This from a senior brother who looked like he beat tigers to death with other tigers. Quite soft spoken despite the large scar running from his hairline to his chin.
“Qi touches everything, is in everything, passes through everything. It is one thing, qi, but it’s also a lot of things. That is, there are lots of different types of qi. You could think of it as a type of energy that fills the world. Anyway. The world is filled with chaotic qi. That sounds scary, but it’s not. It just means it’s not been filtered out and separated into more immediately useful sorts of energy. Imagine you were cutting apart an animal for meat while saving the hide, the bones, the claws and teeth, draining the blood for eating later- you get it.”
Tian nodded.
“So inside your body there are three elixir fields, also known as the dantians. Each has its own name and function, but right now, we are concerned with the lower dantian. One isn’t better than the others, and low-middle-high just points to where they are in the body. As Earthly Person Cultivators, we can’t really make use of the middle and high dantian beyond what our bodies do naturally. And they do operate naturally, since the day you were born. So don’t worry about them. You will naturally learn about the other dantians when it’s necessary.”
“Okay, Senior Brother.”
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The brother tapped Tian’s belly a couple of fingers below his belly button. “This is where it is. Draw a line two or three fingers below the naval inward, and up from the very middle of your crotch. Where those lines intersect is your lower dantian. Also known as the golden furnace.”
The senior brother rubbed the back of his wide head looking a little awkward.
“You will have to ask Brother Wong or Senior Brother Fu for all the details, but… The lowest Dantian takes chaotic qi and transforms it into vital energy in your body. It’s the home of your vital essence, and the qi you inherited from your parents. Ah… sometimes called natal or pre-heaven qi.”
“Alright…?”
“So what is vital energy, and how is it different from qi generally? It’s the energy your body uses to get stronger. It’s what it uses to stay healthy. It is literally the source of physical power, sexual potency… don’t worry about what that is for now… and it warms and nourishes the meridians and the organs for the whole rest of the body.”
The big man moved his hands awkwardly, trying to explain simply something he had understood intuitively for a hundred and fifty years.
“All the qi that are transformed and refined by the middle and upper dantian have their origin here. When we talk about arts, we are talking about ways to harness that vital energy and divert it to another purpose than nourishing the body and the qi. Fighting, usually. It’s also why cultivation arts are insanely precious.”
His big eyes looked inquisitively at Tian.
“Because the other arts spend energy, but cultivation gathers energy.” Tian smiled. He had put it together, and felt very satisfied.
“Very good, junior! Now just spend the next century or two filling in the details.” The big man chuckled, rubbed the back of his head and strolled away. It looked like he was taking normal steps, but Tian noticed he was moving as fast as a diving bird.
The second trick the brothers found to distract Tian was that Tian enjoyed martial arts a lot. They were the only thing that saw him voluntarily leave his dark corners. Unfortunately, the arts favored by the Temple were sword arts and fist arts. How do you teach those to a kid missing most of his fingers?
“Palm arts are the most suitable for you. Tricky to master, of course, but quite powerful. However, to truly make use of them you need to be able to circulate your vital energy and, frankly, have a significant degree of compatibility with yin qi. Which we generally don’t test for.” One of the senior brothers said.
“Apparently you have to check some organ functions that are a pain to spot. Beyond my knowledge. Anyhow. You are still a mortal. Cultivate to the fourth level of Earthly Person cultivation, and then we can get you started on the Thunderous Palm Technique. Eh… at Level Thee we can pair you with a weapon art so you won’t be completely helpless.”
“Brother, how many levels are there in the Earthly realm?” Tian asked. He had heard people talking about different cultivation levels, but he didn’t know how it worked. It sounded like the first proper cultivator ‘realm’ was ‘earthly’ but he didn’t know what those terms ment. Or ‘level,’ for that matter.
“Nine, but functionally ten.”
“Huh?”
“It’s more polite to say “Pardon?” if you don’t understand something.”
“Pardon?”
“Wait, do you not understand… you know what? I’m going to ignore that. The reason we say ‘functionally ten’ is because after Earthly cultivation, or Earthly Person Realm more formally, is Heavenly Person Realm. Sometimes we call it a stage, but it’s all the same thing. To reach the Heavenly Person Realm, you need to create a single breath of immortal qi. You will learn more about how that works later. For now, you just need to know that the key issue is a single question- what exactly is immortal qi?”
Tian blinked at the senior. “I don’t know.”
“Me either.” The senior Brother shook his head. “I wish to hell I did. We all do. Basically every Brother still in the Temple is Level Ten. You can cultivate steadily, and even if you aren’t very talented, you will eventually reach the peak of Level Nine. You can purify your vital energy, strengthen your meridians, hone your cultivation art to a fine point… but it won’t get you across the line into the Heavenly Person Realm.”
The Senior Brother looked tired.
“You have to understand something of immortality. You need to have that spark of enlightenment to evolve the fire in your middle dantian, and convert vital energy into immortal qi. And that’s the tenth level. Standing on the precipice of immortality, desperately trying to see through the mists.”
“That sounds incredible.” Tian stared at the senior brother, his eyes wide.
“It is. It is also a tragedy.” The senior brother shook his head. “It is a test of fate- how can one demand a revelation? It can only be chanced upon, not sought.”
Tian nodded seriously. Then waited.
“So… what is a palm art?” Tian brought the conversation back to where it started, unable to endure the silence and the senior brother staring deeply into the sky with his hands clasped behind his back.
“What it sounds like- striking with the palm. What is sometimes called soft, or internal, martial arts. Your fighting with elbows and knees would be called a hard or external martial art- something to tear muscles and smash bones. Internal martial arts destroys organs. But obviously the range is much shorter, the useful target areas are much smaller, and developing the penetrating force that makes the arts effective requires vigorous vital energy or qi. Not very popular when fighting on the Southern Border, but quite popular amongst the people of the rivers and lakes.”
The senior brother could tell that Tian wasn’t following. The senior brother walked over to a wooden post wrapped in thick leather.
“Now, I can kick this thing in half, but I wont for the purposes of demonstration. Just… this is hard martial arts-” He gave the post a kick that was so loud, the sound bounced off the white plastered walls of the courtyard. “And this is soft martial arts.” He slapped the post, but the sound was muffled. Tian reckoned he could have made a way louder slap.
“Did you see?”
“Yes, Brother. I watched closely.”
“You watched, but didn’t see. Give the post a kick.”
Tian took a little hopping step towards the post and then spun around, his heel coming up over his head to lash into the leather pad.
The whole top of the waist thick wooden post went flying and landed in a cloud of splinters.
“I. Um. I didn’t mean to do that?” Tian shrank back.
The senior brother roared with laughter. “No, but I did! The yin arts destroy from within, yang from without. But even within a yin art are yang principles like the penetrating force, and within yang arts are yin principles like relaxation. Masculine and feminine in balance; all creation and destruction arising from this principle.”
“Which is which?”
“Eh?”
“Yin and yang, which is which?” Tian asked.
“Yin is the feminine principle, yang the masculine one.”
Tian looked at the exploded stake. “I can see why you keep women away from the Monastery.”
“What? We don’t. They have a convent on the other side of West Town, but it’s still part of the Monastery. We just run the town administration here because the mortals get weird if the women run it.”
“Huh.”
“Scared of mummy?” The big man grinned.
“Who?”
“Mummy? Your mother?”
Tian shrugged.
“Tian, do you not know your mother?”
“I do not.”
“Your father?”
“Not him either.”
“I am…” The senior brother's voice trailed off, looking awkward. “Well. In a way, a fairly horrible way, you could view your misfortune as a blessing.”
Tian forcefully controlled the urge to say “Eh?”
“Pardon?”
The senior brother’s face twisted into a bitter smile. “Seventy years is a respectable mortal life. Eighty with good food and good fortune. The most blessed might barely see one hundred, though they won’t be much more alive than dead. And you will live, unless you die from accident or violence, at least two hundred years. You have a strong wood affinity, right? So even without breaking through to Heavenly Person realm, you could live to two hundred and twenty without too much trouble. You could bury your great, great grandchildren in that time, never mind your parents.”
The senior brother looked down at the shattered stump. “That, too, is yin. And from that yin, I was born, as were my siblings and many, many other things. Nevermind. You will slowly learn all this. Go see Senior Brother Fu. He has something for you. Something very good.”