Tian’s earliest memories were of rot and decay. Crippled, weak, stupid, constantly sick, constantly hurting, the scraps decomposing in the hot sun were all he could eat. That, and whatever little animals or bugs he managed to catch. Food was eaten raw. Fire was unknown to him. It was a world of slime and stench and the sort of soft, awful textures that truly unpleasant semi-solid substances use to cling to flesh. The ascetic life of a cultivator was sheer joy and luxury compared to his junkyard days. The trash heaps had trained him to endure.
But even they couldn’t have prepared him for this.
The black substance seemed to be squeezed out of every scrap of him. It came from his bone marrow, his flesh, guts, his eyes. It was wrung from his veins and juiced from his lymph nodes. He convulsively voided himself. Everything that was in, had to go out. The tarry black fluids were forced out of his pores, out of every microscopic sliver of skin he had.
It was more than just the smell. It was the sensation. It was the way it spread over his skin and smeared against his clothes. How suddenly everything was wet and cold. He wanted to tear his clothes off, but every touch of his hand intensified the disgusting sensations. He was trapped in a prison of rough silk and linen and his own sense of touch.
Not to worry, this is perfectly normal for quite a lot of cultivation methods. It’s called a “Black Day,” when all the various impurities in your body are forced out, leaving you more pure and spiritual in nature. Usually happens during the early body refining days. Given that you already had an incredibly pure body, this is a frankly surprising amount of filth. But that just goes to show what a great Sutra you are practicing.
Tian wanted to scream, but that would mean opening his mouth and risking a backflow. The best he could manage was a sort of keening noise through clenched teeth, but even that was too much. His lips scraped against the defiled fabric, dragging some of the viscous fluid back into his mouth with them.
He simply did not have the words to describe the sensation in his mouth. Violating, perhaps. Disgusting wasn’t nearly strong enough.
He had a moment of lightheadedness- of becoming a sudden, violent explosion, a firework in the sky, or a shooting star. At the core of that feeling there was a dreadful emptiness. It was a brittle, fragile feeling, as though he had been drugged and knew it. He couldn’t live as a firework. An explosion only lasted a fraction of a second. It was a thing without substance. He needed whatever he was missing.
Oh. Oh damn. Fingers crossed for traumatic amnesia?
The explosion collapsed. The fire burnt out, the light vanished, the air turned cold. A vacuum formed. The process went in reverse.
The sensation of having everything return, pulled from the fabric of the suit, forcibly yanked back through every pore and orifice…
Some time later Tian regained consciousness. To say he recovered might be too much.
“Never again. I’m never cultivating that… evil thing… ever again. Never ever. Not even for one second. Nothing good comes from heretics. I was crazy to try this. Crazy.”
Do you want the good news or the bad news?
“I can’t take any bad news right now, Grandpa. Only good news.”
Jump. Don’t use Light Body, just jump.
Tian did. Then he frowned, and started working through his usual Thunderous Palm practice routine, shifting into calisthenics and Gourmet. “I’m stronger? But not exactly? What am I feeling here?”
You are stronger. A little heavier. I neglected one of the most fundamental things about yin-yang arts. And you did too, kiddo. There is no such thing as ‘pure’ anything. Anything that gets too pure is liable to shatter. You need both.
From what I can tell, the art grabbed ahold of your body, wrung out as much yin essence as it could manage (which was a hell of a lot thanks to your natal and immortal qi) and used it to refine your body. In the meantime, the qi inside of you was refined by the pure yang essence. Then the energies recombined in a balanced way, so they would be stronger and more stable.
Best news of all, it won’t be doing that all the time!
“Grandpa, if you didn’t know it would do that the first time, how do you know it won’t be doing it all the time?”
Grandpa Jun went silent.
“It’s running all the time now isn’t it?”
Only as long as you draw in significant amounts of qi. So. Anytime you cultivate. Which is most of the time. Look on the bright side- instead of smelling like a cholera outbreak at a diaper testing facility, you now smell wonderfully of lotuses with just a hint of truffle underneath the floral notes. And I can’t help but notice that you have some of the best skin on the base, with delightfully strong, supple tendons and fascia. Those brittle bones you grew up with are now a long distant memory. Also, you will now hit like a runaway wagon and your palm arts are going to be downright diabolical with all that yin refinement, but let’s not dwell on the trivialities. Better get back to the base. I hear a bell ringing.
Tian ran back into the depot. A squad of True Disciples came flying in on their swords, landing hard. One stumbled and crashed into the dirt. Tian could see blood and corruption on all of them.
“Doctors, we need doctors!”
“MEDIC!”
“I’m here!” Tian leapt into motion, pressing paper talismans on festering curses with a flex of vital energy while trying to figure out where the leaking was coming from. “Is there anyone who can’t make the walk to the hospital?”
“Sister Wang, she-”
“Got it.” Tian rushed over to the woman lying in the dirt. He could see blood leaking from her ears. A quick talisman to slow any curses, a quick check that she was breathing and that her neck wasn’t broken. Safe enough to move, for a given value of safe. He scooped her up in his arms. She was almost half again taller than he was, but a cultivator’s strength has little to do with the size of their muscles. He ran for the hospital building. The doctors were already waiting by the door.
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Tian had learned not to offer any information about the injured person to the doctors. Apparently, Earthly Person senses weren’t remotely keen enough to pick up on all the actual problems lurking. His ‘help’ wasn’t helpful. His job was to stabilize, provide first aid, then get them through the door for the real doctors to take care of.
He resented the condescending treatment at first, but got over it by the end of the first day. The doctors weren’t being jerks for no reason. They were overworked. They didn’t have nearly enough help for the number of patients they had to treat, which meant that they had, at best, minutes to teach, not hours or days. Or years.
Earning the title of Doctor in the Ancient Crane Monastery wasn’t dependent on cultivation, but it sure helped to have decades worth of training and experience. Tian was still learning how to bandage wounds properly, or reduce a fracture in the field. Figuring out what subtle poison or curse had entered the body during a fight? Impossible. An overworked doctor had shoved a couple of thick manuals into his arms, muttering something about deducting the cost from his merits and told him to self study.
The merits never got deducted. Tian was still trying to figure out all the characters the manuals used, let alone what the words meant in the order they were placed in.
It was ten minutes of frantic work getting everyone stable and into the hospital that was barely a hundred yards from where the squad landed, and another four hours working as an orderly, running and fetching for the doctors. Nobody died. Apparently no one would be permanently disabled either. This could count as a good day in the hospital.
“Little brother, is Sister Wang-”
“She will be fine. Just let her rest peacefully.” Tian tried to smile politely at the worried squadmates. It was hard telling an Inner Court Disciple to back off. The status difference was enormous, and Tian was acutely aware that it would be easier for them to accidentally kill him than to leave him alive on purpose. But it was the job, so he put on the smile he had practiced and was polite but firm.
“Is it that bad?” One of the Inner Court disciples had a look of creeping horror on his face.
“Is what bad? She’s going to be fine.” The smile vanished. These people weren’t following the script, so no smile for them. Inexplicably, they all relaxed.
“Oh, good, good. You looked like you were trying to put a good face on something too terrible to mention.”
“She is going to be fine. You can talk to her in two hours. Until then, with the greatest respect, please leave. You are too healthy to be in here.”
“Still working on that customer service mentality, Little Brother?”
“Pardon?”
“Customer service with a smile?”
“I’m sorry, Martial Uncle, I don’t follow.”
“You know, when you go into a shop and you get greeted with a smile?”
“Go into a shop, Martial Uncle?”
“A shop. Where you buy things.”
“Buy things, Martial Uncle?”
It was an open question who was giving whom a stranger look. Then one of the squad members chuckled. “Come on guys, we’ll get some food and let Sister Wang rest. Maybe we can cultivate that level of immortal detachment if we try hard.”
They didn’t always go that smoothly, of course. Sometimes, things got out of hand. Like later that afternoon, when a different squad came in.
“What do you mean, you can’t tell me? That’s my Brother, you understand? My Senior Brother!”
“I’m sorry, True Disciple. He is still receiving treatment, so I don’t know anything useful, and even if I did, the rules are I-”
“FUCK the rules, you tell me right now or I will claw your damn- let go of me. Let go of me!”
“You’ll kill him! You’ll kill him! Calm down!”
“Brother Long! Brother Long! I’m here Brother Long! I love you! Don’t give up! I love you!”
“You have to be calm, sister. They are treating him, you have to calm down.”
“How can I be calm? How?”
Tian knew when to shut up and let his seniors sort it out amongst themselves. It usually only took a minute for the disciplinary squad to turn up, but they were overstretched and understaffed too and a Heavenly Person could do a lot of damage in a minute. Killing him would only take one second. But this was the job, and he wasn’t allowed to hide. So he stood there and was firm but polite and hid the fact that he was scared as hell.
Time grew disjointed. Tian had never much cared about the passing of days. He kept a vague eye on monsoon seasons and reckoned that was good enough for both the junkyard and the temple. It got worse at Depot Four. The constant stress, being woken at odd hours, constant fear of being killed by his own sect mates… they all broke down his sense of time. He didn’t know how long he worked at the hospital once his courier job ended. Weeks, certainly. Months likely. Then one day, Hong Liren barged into him outside the hospital.
“Idiot Tian.”
“Brain Damaged Hong.”
There was a tightness in the corners of her eyes that Tian now recognized as damage. She wasn’t bleeding. But he had been trained on this.
“Can you drink tea without hurting yourself?” He asked.
“What?”
“Can you drink tea without hurting yourself?” He said it quite slowly and carefully. As far as he knew, her brain damage had never been treated.
Tian started miming drinking but she batted his hands away, rolled his eyes and said “Yes, obviously. Idiot.”
“Good. I will make you a cup.”
“Why?”
“Because.”
He set up a little table and a couple of cushions on the dirt road next to the hospital. Hong was sputtering some nonsense, but he wasn’t going to listen to the ravings of someone who thought they were a swan. The tea set was brought out, and with a great deal of care, a cup of green tea was served. They were new leaves, and he wasn’t entirely sure if he had been ripped off when he traded for them.
Eventually Hong settled down and drank the tea. He poured another cup. He didn’t chat. He didn’t have the knack for it. Hong shifted around, then laughed softly.
“I killed someone today.”
Tian nodded. It was a pretty ordinary thing around here. It wasn’t even the fortieth time she had killed someone, and those were just the ones Tian knew about.
“Not a heretic. A… former brother. He had abandoned his squad in the middle of a fight. Just completely lost his courage and ran. Not a spell or a curse or anything. He had been warned in the past repeatedly about spreading defeatist rumors and lowering morale. There were numerous instances of him misappropriating Monastery supplies that had been issued for missions. But really, it was cowardice in the face of the enemy that led to the death of four good brothers and sisters. That was the thing.”
It sounded to Tian like she was repeating things she had heard. Hong Liren didn’t talk like that.
“He was an Outer Court disciple, and the evidence was overwhelming. Marital Uncle Chen pronounced the sentence as soon as the facts were recorded, then told me to use my Sin Cutting Saber. You get a saber when you join the Disciplinary Squad. They make us practice using it. Cuts and chops. Not for actual fighting, though. Uncle Chen only needed a single spell to force the coward to his knees and bend his neck. One chop.”
She was staring into the tea now, seeing memories. “One chop. I had practiced. I always practice very hard. I don’t want to let down people’s expectations of me. One chop, and his head rolled in the dirt. The blood shot out… I don’t know how far. Many feet. It stank.” She finished her cup, and set it on the table.
“That was the worst cup of tea I ever drank. The water was too hot, the leaves were steeped for too long, and are they even tea leaves? Because you are exactly the person I would expect to steal grass trimmings and use them for tea. Next time I will bring better tea.”
Tian nodded. “Next time.”
“We have a mission together.”
“We do?”
“Yeah. Tomorrow. Be at the gate at dawn. We are going on a raid.”