Chương 36: Stress-Testing (My Ribcage)

Time skips to the early morning. The sky is still dark, the stars fading slowly into the grey of pre-dawn. The sect is silent, not even the servants have risen, their quarters dark and still. The disciples are fast asleep, dreaming whatever dreams young cultivators dream. I stand outside my quarters, breath misting in the cold air, watching the sky lighten. My mind is still full from last night—the breakthrough, the assessment, the weight of what she's becoming. I need to clear my head before the day begins.

That's when I see her. Ling'er is already in the training yard, moving through stretches with the fluid grace that's become natural to her. She's alone, unobserved, her concealment relaxed for once. In the grey light, she looks like a ghost; a small figure moving through forms that shouldn't exist, her breath misting, her feet silent on the packed earth, not even leaving marks on the snow despite carrying pockets of iron sand in her robes. She's preparing the grounds for today's training.

Setting out weights, marking distances, doing the work that usually falls to the early-rising servants. She does this every morning, I realize. Before anyone else wakes. Before anyone can see her being anything but ordinary. I walk toward her. She doesn't look up, but I know she senses me. The Sacred Cosmic Bone sees everything.

"You're up early," I say.

"I like the quiet." She finishes her stretches and turns to face me. In the dim light, her eyes are brown, ordinary and unremarkable.

"Before everyone wakes up. Before I have to be... small."

"How do you feel?" I lean against a training post, watching her.

"Really. After last night." She considers the question, her head tilted.

"The threads..." She looks at her hands.

"I can see them clearer now. Further. I can see the connections between things that used to be invisible."

"That sounds exhausting."

"Sometimes." She smiles, small and honest.

"But mostly it's beautiful. Everything is connected, Master. The mountain, the stream, the disciples sleeping in their beds. Even the stars." She looks up at the fading sky.

"I can see how they're connected to us. How we're all part of the same thing." I don't know what to say to that. I'm a mediocre cultivator with a cheat skill and a lot of borrowed wisdom. She's talking about seeing the fundamental nature of reality.

"Spar with me," I hear myself say. She blinks.

"Master?"

"Spar. For real. No holding back." I push off from the training post, rolling my shoulders.

"I need to understand exactly what you're capable of now." She hesitates, her hands clasped behind her back.

"Master... I might hurt you." I snort. I suppose she needs some encouragement that I won't break.

"I'm Foundation Establishment too. Fifth Stage, same as you. And I've been training for forty years. You've been training for two months. The gap is—" She moves. I don't see it. One moment she's twenty feet away, her hands behind her back, looking like a child caught in a thought. The next her fist is an inch from my chest, stopped just short by sheer will. The wind from the punch alone makes my robes billow. My hair whips back. The training post behind me creaks. I didn't even see her start to move.

"—still significant," I finish weakly. My life flashed before my eyes. Not my Earth life; this body's life, forty years of mediocrity and struggle, flashing past in the instant before impact. I see the previous sect leader's face. I see Feng as a boy. I see the first time I cast the Gaze, the text floating in my vision. She withdraws immediately, her hands dropping to her sides, her face a mask of concern.

"Master? Are you okay? I didn't mean to—you said no holding back—I was trying to be careful—" I'm not okay. I'm standing in a clearing, having just been thoroughly humiliated by a twelve-year-old I've been training for less than three months. My heart is pounding. My robes are still settling from the wind of her punch.

"... Again. Full speed this time. Hit me." She hesitates.

"Master, I don't think—""That was an order." She looks at me for a long moment, searching my face. Then something shifts in her eyes, that gold-brown light, that ancient awareness—and she moves. I try to block. I really do. I've been training for forty years. I know how to read a strike, how to shift my weight, how to flow with an attack. But she's not where I expect her. Her fist is already past my guard, already connecting with my chest, already transferring force that I can't absorb. I fly backward. Twenty feet.

Thirty. I hit the kitchen wall hard enough to shake the building, and from inside I hear pots clattering, pans falling, Old Chen's cooking implements cascading to the floor like a waterfall of metal. I slide down slowly, my back scraping against the stone. Nothing's broken, she pulled the punch at the last instant, I can tell, but everything hurts. My chest aches. My shoulders sting. My dignity is in pieces somewhere on the ground. I lie on the cold stone, staring at the ceiling of the kitchen porch.

"Master!" Ling'er is there instantly, her small hands gripping my shoulders, gold eyes wide with panic.

"I'm so sorry! You said hit you—I didn't mean to—are you okay? Did I break anything? Can you feel your legs? Masterrrr!" She cradles me in her arms, howling to the sky. I can't help but think this must look similar to The Pietà statue. A hallmark of comic book covers.

"I'm fine," I wheeze.

"I'm fine." She watches me carefully, like she's not convinced I haven't sustained brain damage. I probably look like it, laughing in her arms, covered in kitchen dust, a twelve-year-old hovering over me like a worried mother. I stand, stretch, test my ribs. Sore, but nothing cracked.

"It seems like I will not be enough to measure your new capabilities. Let's do some proper assessments. I need to know what you can actually do. Techniques, speed, strength, endurance. All of it." We slip away from the sect as the first light of dawn touches the mountain peaks. The disciples are still asleep, the servants not yet stirring. Ling'er moves beside me, a shadow in the grey light, her footsteps silent on the frozen path.

We find a clearing a mile from the sect, far enough that no one will hear or see, close enough to return before morning practice begins. The ground is hard with frost, the trees bare, the air sharp in our lungs.

"Start with strength," I say, settling onto a fallen log.

"Show me what you can do." If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. She finds a boulder. It's massive; easily the size of a car, half-buried in frozen earth, covered in moss and lichen. I would need qi reinforcement to move something this size. She walks up to it, wraps her arms around it, and lifts. The boulder comes free with a sound like tearing stone. She holds it over her head, steady, barely breathing hard.

"Without qi," I note. She nods, lowering it carefully.

"I can do about this much without reinforcing."

"With qi?" She closes her eyes, and I feel the shift. When she opens her eyes, they're gold. She touches the boulder with one finger, and it jumps. Not rolls. Jumps. High enough that she has to step back to avoid it, hanging in the air for a moment before crashing back to earth.

"More than that," she says.

"But I don't want to break anything." I make notes, converting in my head Strength Assessment: Baseline: 5, 000 lbs With qi: Estimated 10, 000+ lbs The second test: Speed.

"Run," I tell her.

"From that tree to that tree. Fast as you can." She settles into a crouch. I raise my hand. Drop it. She moves. I time her with my qi sense, tracking the blur of her passage. My mind reaches for comparisons—a galloping horse, a falling stone, a memory from my past life of something impossibly fast. Nothing matches. Until I remember.

'A peregrine falcon. The fastest animal on Earth.' She's running that fast. On the ground. Without wings.

"With qi," I say, and she does it again. She's a blur. Less than a blur, actually; something my eyes can't track nor comprehend, can only register as a disturbance in the air. She could cross the clearing ten times before I finish blinking. Her reaction time is even better. I throw a pebble at her back, and she catches it without looking. I throw another, and she plucks it from the air without seeming to move. Speed Assessment: Baseline: 100 meters in 2. 1 seconds With qi: 100 meters in 0.

9 After that, her elemental manipulation. Starting with fire. The clearing warms as she raises her hand. Dragon-flame blossoms in her palm, not orange or red, but gold edged with white, ancient fire that seems to look back at me.

"Sustain it," I say. She holds it while I count breaths. A hundred. Two hundred. The snow melts in a widening circle around her. The trees at the clearing's edge begin to steam. She could hold it longer, she says. Indefinitely, maybe.

"Maximum heat," I prompt. She turns to a boulder—the same one she lifted earlier—and releases a focused stream. The stone doesn't crack. It melts. Iron deposits in the rock glow white, then run like water. In the time it takes me to draw ten breaths, the boulder has a hole through its center, the edges still molten. She can shape the flame too. Dragons, shields, weapons, all flickering into being at her will, holding form, following her commands.

"Range?"

"As far as I can see, if I focus. But it's weaker at distance. For real fighting..." She measures with her eyes.

"Ten body lengths in a wide blast. Twenty if I make it narrow." Fire Assessment: Sustain: Indefinite Heat: Over 1000°C Range: 25-50 feet Control: Can shape flames into constructs The next test: Water. We find a stream, still flowing despite the winter freeze. Ling'er kneels beside it, touches the surface, and the water rises. A stream's worth. More. She lifts enough water to fill a small pond, spiraling it above her head, a column that catches the dawn light and scatters it into rainbows.

She divides it into separate spheres—a dozen, two dozen—each one rotating independently, each one under her complete control.

"Freeze it," I say. She focuses, and the temperature drops. The spheres crystallize, one by one, until she's surrounded by a halo of ice. I pull out my Frost Manual notes, comparing.

"Cold enough to freeze skin on contact," she reports.

"Maybe colder. I haven't measured." That's colder than anything I've produced without using Frostbite. Colder than I can produce, even now. My specialty, with the Azure Frost manual. She's better at it than me. I should feel humiliated. Instead, I feel something like joy. Water Assessment: Capacity: A stream's worth, maybe more Freezing: Cold enough to freeze flesh Pressure: Her water saw can cut through stone Earth. We return to the clearing.

Ling'er stomps, and the ground rises; a pillar of packed earth taller than most buildings, shaped as it forms. She stomps again, and another pillar rises beside it. A third. A fourth.

"I can feel through stone," she says, pressing her palm to one of the pillars.

"As far as a long throw. Maybe more if I focus. Movements, weight, the shape of things below." She softens the stone with a touch, her hand sinking into it like water. Pulls it free, and the rock hardens again behind her. For projectiles, she flicks her wrist and a dozen small stones launch from the ground, each one aimed at a different target. They hit with enough force to crack bark, to chip stone.

Earth Assessment: Power: Can raise pillars taller than three men Sensing: Can feel through stone for the length of a long throw Manipulation: Can soften rock, shape it, harden it Control: Fine manipulation of multiple small stones For wood, Mei Lin's herb garden is our next stop. The plants are still sleeping, their leaves curled against the cold, their roots deep in the frozen soil. Ling'er kneels among them, her hands hovering above the beds.

"Watch," she whispers. The plants grow. Sprouts lengthen into stems. Stems unfurl into leaves. Leaves broaden, darken, thrive. In a few dozen breaths, a week's growth has passed. In a hundred, a month's. Ling'er pulls her hands back, and the plants settle, their new growth green and healthy. I stare at the garden.

"How are we going to explain this when Mei Lin wakes up?" Ling'er looks at me, then back at the plants.

"Maybe... she'll think they were always this big? And we just didn't notice?" We both know that won't work. We'll think of something.

"The plants talk to me," she adds, almost as an afterthought.

"Not words. Feelings. Warnings. They tell me when the soil is dry, when pests are coming, when they're happy or scared." Wood Assessment: Growth: Can accelerate growth a hundredfold Communication: Can sense plant emotions, basic warnings Constructs: Can create living vines, barriers, bridges Control: Can maintain multiple plant interactions To test her metal affinity, I give her another piece of raw iron from the mine; unworked, unshaped, still bearing the marks of its extraction.

She holds it in her palm, and it begins to change. The iron softens under her touch, flowing like clay. She shapes it into a blade; small, simple, perfect. Then into a ring. Then back into a lump, then into a dozen tiny spheres that orbit her hand.

"I can sense metal now," she says, her eyes distant.

"Deep. The mine has more veins than we know. Deeper than we've dug. Richer." Metal Assessment: Manipulation: Can shape unworked metal with touch Sensing: Can sense metal deposits as deep as a long throw Reinforcement: Can strengthen existing metal structures Control: Fine manipulation of multiple small pieces"All together now…" This is what I've been waiting for.

"Combine them," I say.

"Show me what you can do when they work together." She raises her hands, and the elements come. Stones orbit her like moons, coated in flame, leaving trails of molten light. Armor grows from her skin; vines reinforced with metal, rooted to the earth, shifting and flowing with her movements. A flame flickers in her palm, blue-white and hungry, contradicting everything I know about fire. She's combining three elements. Sometimes four.

And she's creating new combinations while she watches me—not planning, not thinking, just doing.

"How many combinations?"

"Fifteen that I've practiced. More that happen on their own now." She pauses, considering.

"When I fight, the elements just... find each other. The right tool for the right moment." Synthesis Assessment: Combinations: 2-3 elements, sometimes 4 Mastery: 15 practiced combinations Instinct: Creating new combinations during combat We watch as the first hint of sunlight rises from the horizon. Then, we head back to the sect as the servants and disciples stir. Back home.