Senior Brother Su pressed his palms flat together, like a spearhead parallel to his heart. “AWAKEN!” He roared loud enough to make Tian stumble backwards and shake his head to clear the ringing.
The peasants jolted from their stupor. It all got very messy. Tian didn’t know what to do with screaming, weeping adults. There were a lot of them too. Fortunately, Brother Sun did know. It started with a loud clap. “Attention!” There was a charm to his voice. Tian didn’t know how the Senior Brother did it, but the tone and vibrations of his voice seemed to grab the panicking mortals like fish hooks, yanking their eyes over to him. Silencing them, if only for a moment.
“I am surnamed Su, a Lay Brother of the Temple of the Ancient Crane in West Town. You were kidnapped by a heretical cultivator known as Bloody Cleaver Wang. Wang was killed by us. You were rescued by us. You do not owe us any additional sums or services for your rescue. You must, however, leave this place. You will find a village if you follow this trail. Leave now, so that we may purify the evil in this place.”
To Tian’s quiet amazement, that was enough. Something in the voice and manner compelled unquestioning obedience in the peasants. They ran up the road as fast as they could. Senior Brother Su watched them go, then turned to Tian.
“And that’s that. I’ll take a quick run through to kill those hornets and tidy up anything valuable you might have missed. After that, you will join me in cleaning up.”
“We are going to… clean? Why?” Tian hastily added “Senior Brother?”
“Do you want this cave haunted by malevolent ghosts and infernal imps?”
“I do not, Senior Brother.”
“Then we must clean. But don’t worry, it’s not as complicated as you think.”
Soon, Tian was called into the bloody chamber. There was a scorch mark above the door where the huge nest had been. “Broke bastard. You got his pouch?”
Tian handed it over. Su looked through it, scoffed and tossed it back. “I’ll take one crystal for accompanying you on the mission and for equipment costs. The rest is for you. He really didn’t have anything. I checked his whistle.”
Tian noticed that Wang now had several more holes in him than he had previously.
“It’s well made, but it’s just a bone whistle tuned for insect command. Utterly mundane. As for the cleavers- just well made steel. Not even a hidden manual or cryptic treasure to his name. Honestly, he’s a disgrace to heretic cultivators everywhere.”
I agree. Utterly disappointing, though you have learned a lot. Grandpa Jun made being disappointing sound like the most profound moral failure imaginable.
Tian didn’t really know what to say to all that. Brothers Su’s usual smile returned, a little wider this time. “Don’t worry about it. You will see what I mean eventually. Now. Speaking of seeing. You see all this ritual furniture? The chains, the carved pattern in the floor, the special human kennels? It’s all got to go. Both to prevent yin spirits from emerging, and to prevent some desperate peasant from copying this in the hopes of becoming immortal.”
Tian nodded. This was a sort of bath, after all. Bathing in the blood of another to seize immortality made a certain degree of sense. Not a very big degree, because if it worked, everyone would be doing it. But a degree.
“Not that it ever bloody works. Get it? Bloody?”
“To be honest, Brother Su, I’m not really in the mood to laugh right now.”
“No, I suppose you aren’t, Junior. You get used to it. Remarkably quickly. Shockingly quickly. It all just becomes a chore. Here, let me show you how we destroy all this.”
It wasn’t complicated. Everything was ripped out of the walls and tossed into a heap in the middle of the room. Unpleasant work for a boy with a broken collar bone. Brother Su scattered a few big pinches of an orange powder over everything, and put another pinch in his hands.
“You will have noticed how your cultivation method talks about breath a lot. You have probably felt qi coming in like wisps of cold, dense air.” Senior Brother Su looked over at Tian. “Because at our level, the Earthly Person level, that’s essentially what qi is. Energy dense air. And we don’t have a good way to project it out of our bodies. Just not enough density of energy, and until we can transform it to Immortal qi, it just sublimates back into the atmosphere when it leaves our bodies. Yet another reason we mainly use vital energy for our arts.”
Tian nodded. That matched what he had been told. It also explained why most of the martial arts used in the Temple relied on weapons. Even something like his Thunder Palm required physical contact, and the penetrating force had terribly short range.
“Flying swords are specially designed tools, and can really only “fly” short distances once you reach Level Nine. You dodged an arrow there- they are the most expensive tools in the Temple armory for that exact reason. Two hundred merit points.”
Tian winced. His rope dart only cost ten.
“So. How do we ignite this Steel Burning Powder then? Normal flames won’t even warm it up.” Brother Su looked at Tian expectantly.
Tian thought quickly. When Grandpa asked him questions like this, the clue was usually in the conversation they just had. Fire won’t do it, can’t make qi light it because qi turns back into air when it leaves the body, qi actually is cold air at their level… and fires need to breathe. He remembered Grandpa saying that. Fire is like an animal- feed it and let it breathe and it will grow.
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
Could two cold things make a hot thing?
“I’m sorry if this sounds stupid, Senior Brother, but do you blow on it? Somehow?”
“Not stupid at all, Junior. Exactly right. Good to see you were paying attention. The key is to intentionally exhale a qi-rich breath. The qi mixes back with the normal air almost instantly, but for just long enough, you can have a little pocket of more concentrated qi air. It takes a bit of practice, but it’s not a secret art or something. I’ve put the powder in my fist with a little hollow area around it. Just a quick puff-”
Bright white flames shot out of his fist and Brother Su quickly flung the lit powder onto the trash heap. The rest ignited quickly, and soon the whole heap of wood, metal, bone and blood was burning. The temperature in the cave rose from cool to unbearably hot in seconds.
“Out- this is too hot for you. It’s uncomfortable for me too!”
When they were outside again, Brother Su continued his lesson. As though he hadn’t just set a place of human butchery on fire.
“Specially refined metals, I’m told. The Steel Burning Powder, I mean. Never had any interest in being an alchemist or refiner myself. Basically, it’s the old five element progression. Qi is notionally not elemental at all, but to the extent that it is, it is air aligned. And air, as you well know, is a subset of wood.”
“I’ve never understood that, actually.”
“I’ve never understood that actually Senior Brother.”
“Sorry, Senior Brother Su.”
“Keep on it, you are getting better. I don’t understand it either, but it is plainly true. It’s a cycle- Earth generates Gold, which generates Water, which generates Wood which generates Fire. And fire, once exhausted, returns to ash and dirt. Earth, in other words.”
Brother Su squatted down and drew a pentagram in the dirt, marking each angle with a character and connecting them clockwise with arrows. It made sense. He then put smaller arrows connecting different symbols, generally also going clockwise but skipping a stop. Water to fire, fire to gold, gold to wood, wood to earth, earth back to water. The cycle of elemental generation and restraint. Simple, yet according to the books Brother Fu had forced on Tian, infinitely complex in their permutations.
“If all five elements were present and in balance, it would be stable. But water is missing when we blow on the Steel Burning Powder. By adding qi to the specially refined metal, we trigger a cycle of generation without water’s restraint on the fire. We need to provide the Wood, that is the Air, that is the Qi, to make up for the absence of Water to generate it. And since the Fire element is being fed unrestrainedly, it sets the powder on fire. And the powder is made to burn very, very hot and refine ordinary materials within it down to earth.”
Tian smiled a little at that. It made sense. Something about how tidy it was appealed to him. It was like he could control it now that he understood it, and that made it good. Somehow. Even if people spent thousands of years learning to really control the five elements and really understanding them. At least this little bit of foundational knowledge was safely locked away inside of him.
A five-rock rule, maybe. Like what Grandpa taught him in the junkyard. And once he understood it, he could use it to understand other things. Do more things. Tian felt a sudden stab of gratitude towards both Senior Brother Su and Senior Brother Fu. This must be why they kept trying to teach him things. So he could go further and do more. Then the gratitude drained away, as fast as it came.
“Senior Brother, did… Senior Brother Fu…”
“You have it backwards.”
“Pardon?”
“You think this was a test that was set up by me or Brother Fu. It wasn’t. It’s a high risk, high stress situation that had a high likelihood of revealing any hidden character defects or flaws, but we’d never rely on a one-off high stakes test like that to determine whether someone lives or dies. Well. Almost never. Not with a freaking kid, at any rate. Although, and I need you to understand this, if you had done something to get those people killed, I absolutely would have let you die of your own foolishness. There is a difference between summary execution and refusing to rescue, even if the result is the same.”
“Oh. That's good to know, Senior Brother.”
Brother Su sighed. “Rules to govern a group. They are the only way anything gets done, and in a moral system, they are the greatest protection of the weak. Our rules require a certain level of moral behavior, and it’s strictly enforced. You're not alone anymore, Junior Brother. You haven’t been for a while now. Time to learn to live in society.”\
On his way back, Tian stopped off in the bushes and picked a big handful of berries. Instead of eating them, he carefully wrapped them up in a fold of cloth and stowed them inside his robe.
“Goosefancy Berries, Junior Brother? They are edible, but don’t taste very good.”
“Yes, Senior Brother. I know. It’s for a gift.”
“EH? YOU? Who? Who are you giving a gift to?” Brother Su jumped in front of him, looking alarmingly interested.
“A sick person, Senior Brother. I’m trying to live in society.”
—---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tian felt that he had assembled enough medicine. He borrowed some paper, ink and a brush from his disbelieving senior brothers, and set out to write a letter.
Dear Sister Hong,
This is my first letter. I am Tian Zihao. I don’t know when my birthday is, but I think I’m twelve. I think you are also twelve. Do you know your birthday? I know the next spar is coming up, and I am worried that your head is too sick to fight well. Sick people should stay in bed. But your seniors probably won’t let you stay in bed, so I will make you better.
I am sending you medicine. What you do is you mash up the frog brains and berries and leaves in a big pot or a hole in the ground, then you fill it with water, then you stick your head into it and boil it all so the medicine can get in and fix your brain. You boil it with willpower. That is how medicine works. If you want webbed toes so that you can be more like a swan, maybe you could boil your feet too. It might work.
Don’t let them trick you with pills. Pills are full of impurities like metal, and you can’t eat metal, or we would eat our woks. Do not eat a wok, no matter how sick your brain is. You can’t eat woks. You will break your teeth, and broken teeth hurt really, really bad.
Please write me back. I have never gotten a letter before. If you don’t know the three hundred characters, that’s okay, I think a lot of our seniors don’t either. I see them practicing sometimes, and their handwriting is very messy. Just do your best.
Tian Zihao