Tian sat happily to lunch. There was fish soup, a big bowl of white rice, plenty of pickled vegetables, some stir fried bamboo shoots and all the warm water he could drink. Paradise. His hand hesitated between chopsticks and spoon, then swooped down. It would be the soup! A big gulp- a little sweet, the clean fish taste coming through and the subtle warmth of ginger and scallions. And that tingle on the tongue… what could that be?
Was it curse energy? Perhaps a nefarious scheme to poison the whole base? He sniffed the bowl. No, just a hint of cumin, peppers and prickly buckthorn berry. He tried the pickled radish. Crunchy, sweet, acidic, sour. Delightful. It seemed that for all the evils in the world, lunch was still a place of blessings and happiness.
Even after all this time, cooked food had never lost its wonder.
The day passed in what was to become a steady routine. A little mindful cultivation before breakfast, eat, work out, cultivate, bind his first dart, lunch, work at the hospital, study, then on to the tea and socialization circuit. He found that he couldn’t really manage talking to more than two or three people in a day, but they usually seemed happy to see him. Tian had no idea why. He spent his whole time asking questions.
Naturally Auntie Wu and Sister Li were special, and the two were frequently bombarded with tea or snacks. The look of gratified outrage on Auntie Wu’s face was quite something when she did the math on how much of his money Tian was spending on tea, wine and snacks.
“Tian, as a senior, I appreciate your care. Also as a senior, did you know I can buy enough tea to make a life sized statue of myself and still have change out of an hour's income? And I mean good tea.”
“Being the quartermaster pays that well? Should I get a job here, Auntie?”
“No it doesn’t and absolutely not. What makes the job lucrative is graft and if you can’t even bring yourself to collect tips for your hospital job, then large scale logistics are really not for you.”
“Graft?! Auntie Wu, what-”
“Settle down, settle down. I get audited annually, there is nothing that goes on here that the Monastery doesn’t know about.” Auntie Wu chuckled wearily. “You may, at some point, have wondered how it is that even a wealthy city-state like Black Iron Gorge could possibly stand up to the resources of not just one, but several kingdom dominating sects? The reason is that Black Iron Gorge is run by a small cabal of extremely powerful heretics, and can concentrate their resources on trade and the military. They really don’t do anything else, so they don’t spend money on anything else.”
“I can see how that would help, but I feel like the numbers can’t add up.”
“Tian…” Auntie Wu visibly struggled to condense what she wanted to say into something digestible. “Consider the structure of the sect. You have the Monastery up at the top of the mountain. Anything they make stays up there or gets traded on a one-to-one basis with other sects at a level we can’t even perceive. From a logistics perspective, they are irrelevant. Then there is the Inner Court.” She tapped her nose.
“We are the actual infrastructure backbone. We provide the overwhelming majority of the weapons, clothes and other supplies for the war. But how do we do it? Some of it comes from farms and traders owned directly by the sect, but far more of it comes from those mortal, or Earthly Realm, families of Inner Court Disciples. All those family businesses. And then below that, we have what we get in rents and the like from the mortals, collected by the various temples and convents across the Broad Sky Kingdom. This includes the “Incense Money” offered every year by the Kingdom itself.”
“Alright?”
“Does that sound complicated? Lots of places for things to get lost, orders to be misinterpreted or ignored, theft, rat infestation, rot, landslides washing away roads, intrafamilial wars? Inconvenient pregnancies, bankruptcies, famines, mites, blights, rots, rusts, hoof disease, river blockages, banditry, theft by officials disguised as banditry, embezzlement, inefficiency and incompetence?”
“Um. Yes, Auntie Wu.”
“And that’s just off the top of my head. Ensuring a timely delivery of replacement protective suits by awarding the production contract to one consortium and the delivery contract to another consortium and the escort work to a third consortium and each of them offers me a percentage kickback, and better rate, to land the contract, well. As long as the Monastery is getting what it needs at the quality it requires at the price it is willing to pay, then there is no problem.”
“That seems… like another point of inefficiency, Auntie. Sorry, I’m not trying to be rude, I just don’t understand.”
“It is inefficient. It’s not at all how things should be done. But it’s how things have been done for tens of thousands of years, so here we all are. Go study, Tian, and keep some more of your money in your pocket. You are definitely going to want it down the road.”
Evenings were the always delightful dinner, then more studying, more cultivation, and sleep. The meditation helped. He didn't wake up in the night quite so often. It still happened, though. Despite that, he found he was fairly content. The number of his brothers getting hurt dropped significantly, and the number who died hit zero for months on end. The warfront really had shifted away from Depot Four.
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Cultivating his darts was a real exercise in patience. The problem wasn’t that he had to bind his first dart at the exact same time every day. The problem was that Imperial Heavenly Swallows would flat out stop working if you tried to push it longer than the allotted time. The manual was very clear- push it too far, and you would break the developing bond in the dart, forcing you to restart. In the worst case, you might even destroy your treasured dart.
Tian spent each practice session carefully running through the cycle, and once he got nicely settled into the groove it was time to stop. Over and over- get into the rhythm, feel the circulating energy, the blood stops feeling so weird between his hands and… stop. Time to rinse off the blood.
That was merely the prelude, a round of snacks before the full meal of frustration that was the second stage of binding the dart. Tian got Brother Wong’s assistance in finding the exact spot marked on the diagram. It was considered one of the easier darts to bind. One of the later ones had him stab himself in an accupoint at almost the exact same spot, but in the back. How he was going to manage that without two mirrors and detachable arms, Tian didn’t know.
Under Wong’s careful supervision, Tian pushed the dart all the way inside his flesh, completely hiding it under his skin. His beating heart just barely tap-tap-tapped the softly rounded side of the dart. Not daring to hesitate for even a second, he started circulating his vital energy according to the energy map provided by Imperial Heavenly Swallows. Sixty six minutes of highly focused effort later, the dart popped out of his chest of its own initiative.
“Here, drink some water. You are sweating like crazy.” Brother Wong handed him a cup, and Tian drank it in a single gulp. Wong refilled it and Tian drank it again. “How did it go?”
“No problems, exactly, it’s just hard. And feeling the dart tapping against the side of my heart was… different. You have to focus like crazy. I’ve never seen something so complicated!”
“Heh. Sounds like good training to me, junior. But since I have you here, and since it’s relevant, why don’t you run me through each accupoint on each of the twelve primary and eight extraordinary meridians, starting with the Life Gate and working your way around?”
Tian gasped on the floor for a moment, drank a third cup of water. There were hundreds of acupoints. “Yes, Brother Wong.”
“Don’t fret too much. This is just the basics of the basics! Wait until you start learning about the disagreements.”
“Disagreements, Brother Wang?”
“Our bodies were made by nature. Medicine is made by humans trying to understand nature. We generally are some degree of wrong, even when we are mostly right. So I can tell you what I believe the Life Gate is for, and what it does, and I can tell you what the doctors here generally believe, and I can show you some books that say similar things to what we believe that you can study with the happy, certain knowledge that what you are learning is just the tiniest piece of a vast puzzle and you will spend the rest of your life finding out how incomplete your understanding is.” Brother Wong smiled down on him.
“Yes, Brother Wong. Brother Wong?”
“Sorry, Tian, I can’t have you posted to the front lines. From the Life Gate and working all the way around. Quick quick, I haven’t got all day.”
Sixty-six days later, the dart smoothly emerged from Tian’s chest and fell into his open palm. It looked the same as it had ninety-nine days before, but there was no chance Tian could ever possibly lose it or mistake one dart for another. It would be like mistaking your finger and a stick.
The feeling had steadily grown- the sense of having an extra appendage but feeling it in a numb, dull way. On the ninety-ninth day of the refinement, something snapped into place. His vital energy flowed into the dart unimpeded and circulated through it before returning to him. The feeling was almost uncomfortably familiar, as though he was being reacquainted with something he had always had, but somehow forgot.
“Grandpa did I just… make new meridians? Or, I guess not, but-”
Close enough. Strictly speaking they are just energy channels that you have embedded in the dart. They wind through the structure of it on a microscopic level. That is, the channels are so small, you couldn’t possibly see them with your eyes. You can only feel them with vital energy and qi. And speaking of feeling it, that one pockmark in the brick over there has been looking at you very disrespectfully for months now. Grandson, how long will you endure this humiliation?!
Tian saw the brick Grandpa was talking about. It looked like the back wall of the hospital had been damaged at some point, but the damage was too small to be worth repairing. It was about twenty feet away. He had to squint a bit to really see the spot.
“Well, as a proud son of… hmm.”
No, no. This kind of thing needs momentum. “I, Tian Zihao, am not one mere ants can gaze upon. Leave your offending eye, and I may let you crawl away with your dog life!”
“I’m not saying that, Grandpa.”
Peh. No respect for the classics.
Tian whipped his arm forward. He immediately knew he would miss. As Heavenly Swallows circulated, he could feel the dart’s path through the air. He could sense where it was going to land. Even the timing was perfectly grasped.
Shame to miss his first throw. If he could just nudge the dart a bit left… He poured his qi into the art. It really did feel like he was trying to blow on it from across a big room. But it was just enough. The dart curved left, and buried itself in the middle of the hole in the brick.
Tian fell onto his back, looking up at the blue sky and fighting the urge to giggle wildly. Just that little nudge took most of his vital energy, but that was fine. He definitely wasn’t using it well. It didn’t matter. He had a new capability. A new weapon, a new proof of strength. Something that wasn’t gifted to him. Something he earned through his own merits and his own work.
He flexed his will, trying to call the dart back to his hand. It didn’t so much as wiggle. He laughed, walked over and ripped it out of the wall. You would never spot it if you didn’t already know it was there. A quick wipe with his fingers, and it was immaculate once more.
Still chuckling, Tian knelt down to cultivate. It had been a good day so far. Two hours later, when he broke through to Level Six, he was prepared to call it a great one.