Chương 8: Chapter 7

The last strip of sunlight disappeared behind the jagged ridgeline of Crimson Peak, and the mountain immediately seemed to remember that it hated him. Cold rolled down from the higher slopes in long, cutting drafts, slipping through the uneven gaps in the walls of Ling Tian's shack as though the rotten planks were merely a polite suggestion. The thin tunic hanging from his shoulders did almost nothing to stop it.

He sat cross-legged on the packed dirt floor, hunched slightly against the wind, watching what little warmth the day had left drain from the room. Somewhere outside, the pine trees groaned beneath the evening breeze. Somewhere much farther down the mountain lay Hua City, full of people, cooking fires, noise, filth, gossip, and several probable narrative disasters he had no intention of involving himself with.

Up here, there was only him, a collapsing shack, a small pile of groceries, and a cultivation manual with a confirmed body count. Ling Tian reached toward the splintered table beside him and picked up a chipped piece of flint. It took three strikes before a spark caught the blackened wick of the oil lamp. A weak yellow flame sputtered into existence, shrank dangerously, then steadied into a miserable glow that illuminated perhaps half the room and insulted the other half.

The fuel was some low-grade rendered animal fat the original Ling Tian had purchased months ago. It burned reluctantly, producing a thin ribbon of greasy black smoke that curled toward the ceiling before spreading through the shack. The smell reminded him of rancid cooking oil mixed with scorched bone. Ling Tian wrinkled his nose and shifted the lamp a little farther away. He had once complained about cheap scented candles. He would like to formally apologize to the entire candle industry.

Night settled completely over Crimson Peak. The darkness here was different from anything Aditya had known. Yogyakarta had possessed darkness only in the most technical sense of the word. Even at two in the morning, there had always been something glowing somewhere: convenience-store signs, headlights sliding across apartment walls, phone screens in neighboring windows, fluorescent lamps hanging above roadside food stalls. The city had breathed constantly around him. Motorcycles growled through distant streets.

Someone played music too loudly. A television murmured through a thin wall. Dogs barked at absolutely nothing. During the rainy season, water hammered against corrugated roofs with enough force to drown out thought entirely. He had spent years considering most of those sounds irritating. Now he would have paid an unreasonable amount of money to hear one badly modified motorcycle pass outside. The thought arrived before he could stop it, followed by memories with sharper edges.

His mother moving around the cramped kitchen after dinner. Ceramic plates clinking together beneath running water. The smell of fried shallots, garlic, chilies, and sweet soy sauce lingering in the air long after the stove had been turned off. The cheap exhaust fan rattling uselessly above the cooking area. His own voice complaining from another room that the smoke was getting everywhere while making absolutely no effort to help. Small things. Mundane things.

The sort of details no sane person expected to miss until they had been dropped into another universe and given a house where the walls failed their most basic contractual obligation. Ling Tian stared at the lamp flame. The silence pressed harder. He was twenty-five years old. He was also ten. Both facts were true, and neither was particularly useful at the moment.

The mind inhabiting the body had memories of university lectures, quarterly reports, rent payments, online shopping, office gossip, and wasting entire weekends reading badly translated cultivation novels. The body itself remembered hunger, cold winters, a mother dying slowly in bed, a father never returning from the mountain, and nights spent listening to wind scrape branches across this very roof while wondering whether there would be enough food tomorrow.

Those two collections of memory did not always fit together cleanly. Tonight, in the dark, they crowded closer than usual. Ling Tian exhaled slowly. He needed work. Not because anything urgently required doing. He needed work because sitting alone in a dark mountain shack while contemplating the total destruction of his previous existence was the sort of activity that led to emotional outcomes he did not currently have the time or food reserves to support.

A sufficiently complicated problem could keep the mind occupied. Preferably one involving numbers, systems, risk assessment, and something he could become annoyed at. Fortunately, he possessed exactly such a problem. Ling Tian reached inside his tunic and withdrew The Way of Natural Harmony. The old book looked even less trustworthy beneath the sickly yellow lamplight. Its leather cover had dried and cracked with age, the corners softened by years of handling. Dark stains marked one side. Some were dirt.

Some were sweat. Some were blood. He placed it carefully on the floor. The original Ling Tian had died because of this book. That fact deserved a level of professional respect. He had already proven earlier beside the waterfall that the first stage of the technique worked. Spiritual perception was real. Environmental Qi was real. Earth, Wind, Water, Fire, and the softer pulse of life within plants were not metaphors invented by primitive people attempting to explain weather.

They were measurable phenomena, or at least phenomena his mind could consistently distinguish from one another. That was valuable information. Unfortunately, the manual responsible for teaching those phenomena appeared to have been written by someone violently opposed to clarity. Ling Tian opened the cover. The binding crackled. Several pages shifted dangerously within the spine, held together by dried glue and prayer.

He leaned closer to the lamp and began reading from the point where the cultivation instructions transitioned from sensing Qi to actually drawing it into the body. Five minutes later, his expression had become deeply hostile. Ten minutes later, he wanted to find the author. Not to thank him.

"Condense the morning dew within the lotus of the soul," Ling Tian read quietly, following the faded characters with one finger.

"Let the spirit rise as the untethered crane and ride upon the breath of the mountain. Gather the wandering streams beneath heaven, swallow their fury, and anchor them within the silent ocean beneath the mortal vessel." Stolen story; please report. He stopped. The lamp crackled. Ling Tian read the passage again. It did not improve.

"What lotus?" Silence.

"What crane?" The mountain declined to clarify. Ling Tian rubbed both hands down his face. The problem was not that the text contained no useful information. It clearly did. Someone, at some point, had successfully cultivated using these instructions, or the technique would not have survived long enough to be copied and handed down.

The problem was that every functional instruction had been buried beneath three layers of poetry, cultural assumption, and terminology that apparently expected the reader to already know what they were being taught. There was no glossary. No diagram. No index. No numbered sequence. No warning section.

No description of what a meridian should feel like when functioning correctly, how much Qi a beginner should attempt to absorb, what symptoms indicated excessive internal pressure, or what the reader should do if something began tearing inside their chest. That final omission seemed especially relevant. Ling Tian stared at the bloodstained cover.

"If a company back home sold industrial machinery with this manual, the lawsuit would become a historical event." The anonymous author remained unavailable for comment. He continued reading. The phrasing grew worse. The practitioner was instructed to "embrace the ten thousand breaths without preference." Another section told him to "allow heaven and earth to mingle freely within the mortal stream." A later passage described the Dantian as "an ocean without shore, awaiting all rivers beneath heaven."

Ling Tian's eyebrow twitched. There it was. Possibly. He leaned closer. The original Ling Tian had taken these words seriously. Literally, even. The boy had sensed the elements around him, opened himself to them, and attempted to pull them inward simultaneously because the manual had described natural harmony as a state in which the forces of heaven and earth coexisted without rejection. A beautiful philosophical concept. An absolutely horrifying operating procedure.

Ling Tian found a piece of charcoal near the lamp and dragged over a thin scrap of wood that had broken from the table weeks earlier. He began making marks across its surface, constructing the closest thing available to notes. He could not afford to damage the manual itself, and paper was apparently expensive enough in this world that using it for rough calculations would constitute a financial crime. So splintered furniture would have to become his research notebook. He started translating. Not the language.

He understood the characters through the body's residual memories. The problem was translating mystical terminology into something his brain could actually use.

"Lotus of the flesh" appeared repeatedly when describing points where Qi entered or left the body. Meridian gate, then. Biological access point.

"Silent ocean" consistently referred to an area below the navel where refined Qi accumulated. Dantian. Storage reservoir.

"Wandering streams" referred to ambient energy.

"Guiding the river through the channels" was internal circulation.

"Tempering the banks" appeared to describe strengthening the meridians through repeated exposure.

"The storm rejecting the vessel"— Qi deviation. Ling Tian paused over that one. He scratched a harder mark into the wood. The more he worked, the less mystical the text became. Not simple, exactly. Nothing involving invisible energy entering human organs deserved that word. But patterns emerged. Repeated metaphors pointed toward repeated functions. The poetry was still annoying, yet underneath it there seemed to be an actual system. Input. Transport. Refinement. Storage. Circulation. Adaptation. A process.

Processes could be audited. For nearly two hours, Ling Tian sat beneath the smoking lamp and dismantled the manual line by line. Whenever two passages appeared contradictory, he compared them to the sensations he had experienced at the waterfall. Whenever the author described an element emotionally. Fire as hungry, Earth as patient, Wind as unbound, Ling Tian translated the language into behavioral characteristics he had personally observed. Fire Qi radiated aggressively and carried heat.

Wind Qi moved quickly and changed direction with little warning. Water Qi accumulated momentum and pressure. Earth Qi remained dense, slow, and exceptionally stable. He did not know whether his conclusions were correct. That distinction mattered. He was not discovering universal laws. He was establishing provisional working assumptions based on one day of observation and a book written by a dead poet with no apparent respect for workplace safety. Still, provisional assumptions were better than blind faith.

Eventually, he reached the question he had been avoiding. Why had the original Ling Tian died? Not philosophically. Mechanically. The answer existed somewhere inside the body. Ling Tian set the charcoal aside. His fingers had gone stiff from the cold. He flexed them slowly, then straightened his spine and closed his eyes. The dead boy's memories were strange. Ordinary memories surfaced as broken images, emotions, smells, or fragments of conversation. Physical trauma was different.

The body remembered pain with horrifying precision. A twisted ankle from years ago might no longer exist clearly in conscious memory, but certain movements still made the muscles tense before thought became involved. The original Ling Tian's death had happened only days ago. The body had not forgotten. Ling Tian slowed his breathing and searched. He found it almost immediately. Heat exploded inside his chest. His eyes snapped open, but he did not move. The sensation was not real. Not now. His lungs were intact.

His heartbeat was stable. The shack remained cold. His nervous system simply remembered otherwise. Ling Tian closed his eyes again. He went back. The phantom pain returned, sharper this time. A ten-year-old boy sat beside the waterfall with this same manual open across his knees. He was exhausted. Hungry. Frightened. His father had died. His mother was already gone. Auntie Mei's charity kept him alive, but only barely. Every story he had ever heard taught the same lesson: cultivators mattered, and mortals did not.

Cultivators flew above cities. Cultivators killed beasts. Cultivators lived longer, ate better, and could decide the fate of people beneath them. The boy had possessed one cultivation manual. One chance. Of course he had rushed. Ling Tian felt the moment spiritual perception opened. The world bloomed around the child exactly as it had for him beside the waterfall. Earth beneath. Water ahead. Wind across the skin. Fire from the sun. Then came the mistake. The original Ling Tian had not filtered anything.

He had opened himself. Completely. The memory hit Ling Tian like a physical blow. Water Qi surged first, drawn from the enormous waterfall only meters away. It entered with crushing momentum, dense and cold, flooding pathways that had never carried even a thread of spiritual energy. Wind followed immediately, fast and cutting, slipping through whatever channels opened first. Fire came next, dragged down from the sun-warmed air and stones. Three distinct energies. One unprepared body. No control. No sequencing.

No upper limit. Ling Tian's hands curled against his knees. The phantom sensations shifted from discomfort to agony. The meridians in the boy's arms and torso had stretched under the influx. Water Qi packed the narrow pathways with dense pressure. Wind Qi moved faster, forcing itself through gaps that had no room to accommodate it. Fire Qi reacted violently to both. Ling Tian did not know whether Fire Qi literally attempted to vaporize Water Qi. He did not yet possess enough knowledge to make that claim.

But the effect inside the body had been close enough to make the distinction academic. Heat spiked. Pressure followed. The Wind Qi intensified the instability, moving through the overloaded pathways like compressed air forced into damaged piping. The meridians expanded farther. Then one tore. Ling Tian's breath caught. The memory supplied the sensation with obscene clarity. Something inside the abdomen split. The pain was white. The boy panicked. And panic made him do the worst possible thing. He pulled harder.

Some instinct, perhaps desperation, perhaps the manual's instruction to "hold harmony against all disruption," made him attempt to overpower the instability by drawing in more Qi. More Water. More Wind. More Fire. The first damaged pathway ruptured completely. Another followed. Internal pressure climbed. Blood entered places blood was not supposed to enter. Ling Tian severed the memory. His eyes opened. He bent forward sharply, one hand braced against the dirt while the other clutched his chest.

Air dragged into his lungs in short, ugly breaths. Cold sweat coated his forehead despite the freezing shack. His stomach rolled hard enough that for several seconds he genuinely feared he might vomit up what little food he had eaten. He stayed that way until his body understood that it was not dying again. Slowly, the phantom pain faded. Ling Tian sat upright. The lamp flame flickered beside him.

"Okay," he whispered. His voice sounded rough.

"That was educational." He wiped the sweat from his face with his sleeve. The autopsy was complete.