Chương 23: Holy Land (2)

Lin Che looked around at the walls next to him, then turned to the closed off entrance behind him. His phone was still in his pocket, no longer smashed and left somewhere on the floor in this labyrinth, and there were no dog-like beasts chasing or attacking him. He was completely uninjured. He sat himself down and leaned against the back wall as reality set itself in. He had died and was not reborn on the first day of his wedding.

On the one hand, he had cause for celebration, in that everything he had done so far — all the connections he had made with other people and progress he had made — everything carried over and was now permanent. On the other hand, he was currently stuck in a pocket dimension with monsters trying to murder him in who knows how many chambers populated the zoo. The second life lasted about forty minutes.

He'd gone right at the first junction this time, which led to a series of smaller chambers branching off a longer corridor, all empty. Each chamber had been fitted with the same heavy wall rings, and the final one contained a sleeping creature. He mapped the rough blueprints of the place in his notebook before hearing the tapping of claws somewhere behind him. He ran, only to arrive at another dead end slightly different to the one from last life.

This time it was a single sealed door rather than two, and there was much more room for him to fight, which meant that the encounter lasted much longer than before as he had space to dodge. Lin Che redirected twice, got the creature against the wall a couple of times, and was doing reasonably well until it called out and its friends arrived. His vision went black, and he was on his third life here. He thought about his options, as rushing in towards certain doom was certainly not the answer to his survival.

Lin Che opened his phone and went to the folder. If entry into the chamber was restricted to those at lower cultivation levels, surely being one stage higher would make the entire pocket dimension a cakewalk to pass through. At the worst case, he would get magically kicked out of the chamber and return to life on Earth. He found the Swallow Returns pdf and opened it. He had read the early sections before, but had avoided reading the intermediate and advanced sections as he had not yet reached that level.

Another reason for that was because he didn't want Shen Yue to notice if he made too much progress. He read them now. The intermediate stage of Swallow Returns to the Nest requires the practitioner to understand that reaction is not the objective — dissolution of the gap between stimulus and action is. The body does not react to the world. At the intermediate stage, the body and the world are continuous. The reaction is not faster, and it is not separate.

He read the sentences again, before pocketing the phone to save on battery. He closed his eyes and ran the all six harmonies of the Liuhe Breathing Method and simply sat with the idea for a long time in the chamber he was in.

In his third life, a mix of inspiration and boredom led him to exploration once again, as Lin Che wished to see the fruits of his meditation before it drove him to insanity. He found one of the creatures alone in the second chamber off the right corridor, still asleep. He approached it slowly, running both Liuhe and the Hollow Bell, and he spread his attention evenly across the whole room, the way his eyes had once rested on the wall behind the coin. The creature woke up when he was two metres away.

Lin Che didn't think it's going to go left, but his body was already angled right before the lunge completed. His arm came up, and his palm connected with the back of the creature's skull, which drove it down and forwards rather than sideways. It hit the floor instead of the wall. It was up again in less than a second, but it was rattled. And rattled creatures were not immediately calling for their companions, instead trying to reorient. That window was enough.

He channeled his Qi into his hands and broke its neck on the third redirect. He dragged it behind the chamber door as best as he could manage and then continued. Unfortunately, dog-like creatures have heightened senses of smell, and, as Lin Che began his walk back to his entry point, a pack of five mauled him to death.

The fourth life resulted in starvation. This was unexpected but, in retrospect, completely obvious. He had been doing well, mapping the locations of four creatures and even dealing with two of them without any external blood loss, adding to his rough sketch of the facility's first two sections. He had found a source of water: a thin channel of something flowing, which he drank on the basis that dying of dehydration was worse than dying of whatever else might be in it. But there was nothing to eat.

He had not eaten since the morning — a rice congee that Shen Yue had made before they'd left for the clan residence, where he was offered food and regrettably rejected it out of humility. His body was running on congee and tea, neither of which were filling enough nor provided much energy.

By the time his vision started going grey at the edges, he was sitting cross-legged in the left corridor at the sixth harmony trying to get the Hollow Bell to do something useful about the caloric situation, which it was not designed for and could not do. His hands were resting on his knees and he was very cold and somewhat light-headed. The pdf text came back to him: the body and the world are continuous. He was hungry enough that the boundary between his own animacy and the rest of the world seemed to thin.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there. At some point before the darkness came, something in the Hollow Bell circulation shifted rather dramatically. The technique was all about knowing yourself and being hostile to the external environment, which granted things like poison immunity and defences against certain arts. But what if you were the external environment? What happened then? So long as you knew yourself and the external environment.

So long as you had an external mapping of sorts. What was the difference? Breath? He had about as much as that left as the room itself contained. Lin Che tried to dissect through this line of reasoning, but death came first before any answers.

The fifth life was a relief, as he was no longer hungry and back to his original, unharmed state. He sat down immediately and scribbled the mapping of the room in his notebook. He then tried to find the thing that had shifted, and it was there. He hadn't imagined it — hadn't just been hallucinating from hunger, which he suspected to be the case. The Hollow Bell technique was running differently now. Differently enough to be called something else entirely.

The boundary between himself and the external environment was something he could now break down and reform at will, with his Qi no longer dispersing into the atmosphere once separated from his body. Instead, it stuck near him and could be manipulated as readily as though it were inside his own body with a range of approximately two metres. Something in the dying had consolidated something in the practice, and the affinity between Swallow Returns and the Hollow Bell had skyrocketed.

He scribbled down in his notebook: Repeat the starvation loop. Don't die to the creatures — waste of time. Cultivate until the body gives out.

He ran nine more lives of deliberate starvation. They were not entirely deliberate, as he fought when he had to and was getting better at not having to. His stealth was improving, as he and the room slowly merged into one, and he had mapped enough of the facility to know which chambers were occupied and in what numbers. He moved through the corridors without running any circulations, limiting his Qi and externally releasing it as a halo above him to provide him some warmth.

The halo was simply something of his own whimsy to keep him sane. He killed twelve more over nine lives, all isolated and dealt with quickly and quietly. They were not complicated creatures, instead being rather consistent. If he had to explain it to someone, he would say they had the exact same combat patterns, as though each creature was hard programmed to lunge left upon waking.

Each starvation loop added something small, with the Hollow Bell running smoother and providing Lin Che with finer control over his Qi — hence the halo. He could compress his Qi into his external environment, even place more externally than internally to no negative effect, but he could not figure out what else to do with it. He had, of course, tried to use it to attack, shouting Magic Missile! to himself as he shot spears of his Qi towards the wolf-creatures.

But his Qi flattened upon contact with them, and he was sure that tickling them with a feather would have caused more damage. He wrote down his thoughts and notes between loops, before eventually coming to the pdf's final section. That moment came in his fourteenth life. He was sitting in the left corridor — his corridor, he had started to think of it, since he always came back here — with the Liuhe running all six harmonies and the Hollow Bell at the deepest it had gone.

He turned his phone on and read the final section of the Swallow Returns pdf. Full completion of the Swallow Returns technique is not marked by a specific exercise or milestone, but by the absence of a characteristic the practitioner will have noticed throughout training: the slight lag. Not reaction lag — that has dissolved since entry into the intermediate stage, but rather the supervising lag.

The part of the mind that watches the body form and evaluates it is overridden, effectively allowing the practitioner to run on autopilot, just as the swallow returns to the nest. He turned the phone off. Lin Che thought about the starvation loops and sat very still. Somewhere in the facility, the not-wolf howls kept on coming regularly and slowly.

Whatever was in the central section beyond the far junction was not aware that something was currently sitting cross-legged in the central corridor with its eyes closed and hands on its knees whilst watching the supervising part of itself become very quiet.

He wasn't sure what he expected. He had broken through stages before and each had come with a recognisable shift. The Swallow Returns completion didn't feel like an arrival, but more of a subtraction. Something that had always been present was now absent. He opened his eyes. He wasn't sure when, but he had moved back to the first chamber — presumably he had died and simply not noticed.

His body was running on autopilot already, which is why he was sitting against the wall instead of standing up at his entrance spot, and why he hadn't noticed until just now. Thankfully, it seemed he could toggle this with a simple thought, which meant he was not constantly sleepwalking across the facility or living through fractured moments of consciousness. He stood up and headed for a chamber where he knew one of the creatures was in its resting phase.

It was awake when he got there, as Lin Che did not bother suppressing his presence, which meant it had sensed him earlier than usual. It was already oriented towards the door when he entered. It moved first. Lin Che dodged right. It was up in less than a second. It lunged again. And again. And again.

Each time, Lin Che was somewhere other than where the lunge had been aimed, each and every time the creature's momentum was redirected rather than opposed, resulting in several cracks in the stone ground he had previously thought was indestructible. He wasn't tired, nor was he breathing hard. He was, he realised, not fighting. He was not there. The creature was throwing itself at a location that kept not containing him. He ended it on the next lunge, cleanly, and stood in the chamber for a moment. Then he heard it.

The fight itself had been almost silent, well, as quiet as one can be when shattering bone on stone, but it was much quieter than his first attempt. The creature did not have a chance to summon its allies before it had met its demise. But from somewhere deeper in the facility, the sound had changed. It stopped being intermittent. It was continuous now, and it was closer. He felt something in his sternum and lungs spreading across his hands and skull.

The Hollow Bell technique felt larger as Qi distributed itself uncontrollably through his channels and flesh. Lin Che kept his eyes open throughout the process and came to discover that he was surrounded in what was essentially a cocoon of Qi with a two metre radius. He understood, from Shen Yue's offhand comments about what breakthroughs felt like, that this was one. He had broken through the Qi condensation stage. The sound from beyond the far junction got louder. Lin Che started walking.

He could deal with the wolves now. The other thing — whatever was making the continuous sound — he would have to find out about shortly.