Chương 14: Hollow Bell Technique

Lin Che got home by four, placed his keys in the little dish they kept by the shoerack, and went straight to the kitchen. He placed the paper package from Hu Baolin on the counter whilst he turned on the tap and filled the kettle. Then, he reached for the cabinet to his left and brought out some honey and turned on the kettle. He unwrapped the paper and smelt the dried leaves, which were curling at the edges where they had been cut.

They had the scent of something faintly medicinal, but mostly just stank of forests and the colour green, despite their pallor. Hu Baolin had told him to use two leaves per cup, add honey, and not to do it on an empty stomach. Whilst the kettle worked itself up, he took out his phone and pressed play on the video.

The man sat cross-legged in his usual position.

"The Hollow Bell Purification Art," he said, "begins with a question most practitioners don't think to ask." He placed his hands on his knees.

"What does your body actually feel like from the inside? Not your Qi, but your body." Someone wheeled a smartboard into frame, making the video seem more like a university lecture, which contrasted with the martial-looking background. The screen showed images of the human body in multiple layers, showing the external flesh, the internal muscles, and the nervous system.

"Think about your tissue, and the breath moving through your lungs, and the weight of your own limbs. Most people, when they turn their attention inwards, immediately look for their Qi, and call that internal awareness. But Qi is not the body." He stood up and tapped on the screen, advancing the presentation by one slide.

"The body consists of billions and billions of small cells, and they each look different." Multiple slides of histological images followed, which really meant nothing to Lin Che. Some were bone, others were fat, and the rest were specific cells from organs and the immune system. To him, they all looked roughly the same.

"Your cells are not Qi, but they make you who you are. Most techniques conflate Qi with life, which, whilst inaccurate, is mostly correct for practitioners. But those who do not cultivate cannot sustain Qi in their bodies, and it merely flows in and out of them uncontrolled. Would we say they go through multiple periods of lifelessness within one day? Of course not." He lowered his hand.

"The first stage is called settling. Before you can identify what doesn't belong, you have to establish, with complete certainty, what does. You run your full circulation, that is to say, the Liuhe Breathing Method if you are following traditional pathways, and after the loop is stable, you don't look at your Qi. Look beyond it."

"Scan the body in sections. Head, throat, thorax, abdomen, and lastly, your limbs. At each section, simply register the baseline. Log everything that you see and feel. What does this section feel like when nothing is wrong? What does it feel like when injured? What changes? What is the texture of everything?"

"You will do this for a long time before it becomes useful. The settling practice is not exciting; might even feel torturously boring at times, but you must familiarise yourself with the normal state of your body. It will feel like sitting quietly in a room you already know. That is exactly correct. You are memorising the room so thoroughly that, when a single object is added or removed, you will know it without looking." He paused and looked at the camera, before the video faded to black.

The kettle finished a moment later, and Lin Che poured the water over the leaves. He then added the honey — more than Hu Baolin had specified as he wanted the drink to be more palatable. He gave it one minute to steep before discarding the leaves and carrying the mug out of the kitchen.

Shen Yue's office door was closed, which settled the question of where to practice. Lin Che went to the living room and placed the mug on a coaster on the coffee table and sat down on the floor using a pillow he had stolen from the sofa. He picked up the mug and drank. The honey definitely helped, providing a couple of seconds of sweetness before the leaves made themselves known.

It wasn't painful as Lin Che had assumed, but instead felt more like filling his mouth with thousands of tiny needles, or drinking pure liquid stinging nettles. The itchiness started at the lips and moved down his tongue before spreading across the soft tissue of his inner cheek and soft palate. Still, the sensation was very bearable, so Lin Che wasted no time in running all six harmonies of the Liuhe circulation. The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

Once his Qi flowed in a stable manner, he tried to do what the man had described: he looked past the Qi at the body beneath it, starting from the head and working downwards. He registered the burning sensation in his mouth as foreign and localised, and noted that the rest of the throat was unaffected. He ran the settling scan again and again and again. It was, as advertised, not exciting, and felt akin to watching paint dry.

But, after an uncountable number of loops, he began to see beyond the forms of this painting known as his body, and could discern the brushwork beneath the images. He could feel the distinction between the baseline of the body and the intrusion of the compound in his mouth much more clearly. He kept going. By the time the sensation in his mouth had faded, the "room" of his body became increasingly more familiar, and he was starting to know where things were. Lin Che opened his eyes.

The mug was empty and the afternoon light had begun its transition into evening. He got up, picked up the mug, and went back to the kitchen, ready to fill the kettle once again.

Tucked away in one of the cupboards, Lin Che found a tall metal flask with a rubber seal designed to keep liquids hot. It even had a compartment to store the tea leaves, so it served as the perfect vessel for this training. Whilst the kettle was heating up again, he played the second video, which was considerably shorter than the first.

"The settling practice will reach a point," he said, "where the baseline is established. You'll know because the scans will stop feeling like searching and start feeling like confirming." He folded his arms.

"When you reach that point, the second stage begins: recognition."

"Recognition is not something I can fully teach, because the image that makes it work is yours rather than mine. What I can tell you is what it needs to do. You need an image of an environment that has become inhospitable through saturation, being so completely itself that there is no available space for anything else." He was quiet for a moment.

"Think about what you already know. You've seen this principle somewhere — everyone has. Find the version of it that your mind understands best, and use that." The kettle finished, and Lin Che poured the water into the flask and added a substantial amount of honey to his beverage. He thought about what he already knew which was inhospitable.

He thought about environments that rejected what didn't belong through simple incompatibility, and his mind moved to chemistry, which he had studied to a passable standard, but forgotten most of. He thought about eutrophication — a topic he'd learnt parts of in both chemistry and biology back in school. An ordinary pond slowly accumulates nutrients beyond its capacity to process them.

On the surface, algae bloom in response, covering the entire pond, and, beneath the bloom, the water becomes something else: oxygen-depleted, and chemically hostile to everything that had previously lived there. Species vanished because the environment had become irreconcilable with their existence. He looked at this image for a moment, and it was not pleasant. Still, it was accurate and it was what he had first thought of, which was what the man had said to look for.

He sealed the flask and went back to the living room.

Down on the floor, Lin Che ran the settling scan again, registering the baseline of each section with a sense of confirmation like the man had mentioned earlier. Head, throat, chest. Abdomen, lower back, limbs. Then, he poured the contents of the flask into its cap and put it to his lips. The focused, insistent burn across the soft tissue of his mouth returned immediately, and he sensed the physical changes manifesting within him. He turned his focus towards the image of the pond and algal bloom.

He held this image firm in his mind and ran the scan again and again, and imprinted the image within his very construct. It was a faint engraving of his being, like tracing a line in pencil, but each loop added another layer of graphite and made the image more visible than before. He kept going. By the third cup from the flask, his improvement was noticeable enough that he could separate his body from the toxin in his mouth, firmly rejecting it and losing all sensation of itchiness.

The border between his body and the poison was so heavily defined, that the poison, having nowhere to latch onto, simply dissipated and left with his breath. The itchiness stopped, but the inflammation from his prior attempts remained, as the technique was not centred on healing the body. Lin Che was ruminating on this very matter with his eyes closed and flask behind him, when he heard Shen Yue's office door open. The footsteps made their way from the hallway down into the living room right behind him.

He heard the soft sound of the flask being picked up and the cap being unscrewed. He opened his eyes.

"Don't—" he started. But his mouth was, as it turned out, considerably more swollen than he'd expected. What came out was not a word so much as a general indication that a word had been attempted. Shen Yue, who had already poured a measure into the flask cap, simply looked at him with curiosity around the sound he'd produced instead. She drank it.

The response was immediate as she turned her head to the side and deposited the entire mouthful back into the cap with an expression Lin Che had never seen before — one of pure and unambiguous disgust. She set the cap down on the coffee table.

"That," she began.

"Is not tea." Lin Che opened his mouth to respond, but the words still couldn't come out. She looked at him for another moment before putting two and two together.

"Hu Baolin," she said. He nodded.

"You know, poison really isn't required for learning. That myth was debunked years ago." Lin Che closed his eyes and simply sighed.