Chương 19: "A haze of pain and progress"

Ch 19: "A haze of pain and progress" One-Eye and Zhen stared at each other for a long moment, then the towering hare lunged. Zhen let the blow catch his shoulder at a deliberate angle. The impact drove him back three steps, rattling his teeth. The blocked gate shuddered again but held, but at least it confirmed that his theory about how to unblock it was right. It wasn't enough. He needed to map the exact sequence if this was going to work.

Another qi-empowered strike hammered into his ribs, and Zhen gasped as the air left his lungs.

The gate trembled, weakened slightly, and through the pain, Zhen used the Eye to track the impact as the qi from the blow flowed through his body and resonated through his bones and meridians. But the pain was worth it as the pattern needed to remove the blockage came to him. Chest. Ribs. Solar plexus. Those three points needed to be struck from the outside in sequence if he was going to destabilize the blockage enough to remove it. Simple enough. The problem was surviving long enough while it happened.

The older hare pressed forward, sensing weakness as its younger kin swarmed in support. Zhen backpedaled, hammers deflecting what he couldn't dodge, but he still took hits, and blood ran into his eyes. Then Chul was there. Charging in to put herself between Zhen and One-Eye. She moved before he directed her. Her hooves flashed out, catching a lunging hare mid-leap. She wheeled, placing herself between Zhen and three others, teeth bared. Chul understood what was needed.

Weeks of training together had forged an instinctive understanding between them. She could anticipate what he would do and react without his direction. One-Eye charged and Zhen shifted left. Not far enough to dodge completely, but just enough that the massive paw caught his chest rather than caving in his skull. Qi entered the gate at an angle and the gate cracked. One down. Chul drove forward, scattering the lesser hares and creating a corridor that encouraged One-Eye to follow.

He took the bait and bounded after her, predictable in his fury. Zhen stepped into his path and planted his feet. The next strike hammered his ribs, exactly where he needed. This time the qi that punched into him swirled through his meridians, picking up speed until it drilled into the crack in the gate. The blockage groaned, ready to shatter, and Zhen let out a moan of pain. One more blow straight to the solar plexus would do it, but he wasn't sure he could take it. There was no time to second-guess himself.

Chul wheeled back, driving One-Eye into position, and Zhen dropped his guard completely. The ancient hare's eyes gleamed. It reared back for a finishing blow, and the massive paw crashed into his solar plexus. No subtlety here. One-Eye's qi-powered shockwave smashed directly into the blockage and the gate exploded open. Lightning sparks of pain tore through Zhen's meridians as qi flooded from the Qihai gate, through the newly opened gate, and into the Mingmen gate in a roaring surge.

With the loop complete, his dantian pulsed from the inflow of qi. New meridians exploded open, and qi saturated his muscles and sinews.

"Focus! Expand your dantian!" Shuo's voice cut through the roar in his ears. Zhen didn't need to be told, and he was already drawing ambient qi inward. His dantian swelled, drinking in power. And still he fought both his own body and the giant hare. This was nothing like when he broke through his first two gates. That had left him barely able to move, but the opening of this gate had invigorated him. One-Eye struck again. This time Zhen caught the blow on crossed hammers and held.

The creature's good eye widened as Zhen shoved, sending the hare stumbling backward. Then Zhen moved and, for the first time in his battle, he took the offensive. His hammers crashed down. The first hare never saw the strike that caved in its skull. The second tried to flee but Chul's teeth found its haunch, dragging it back into range. Zhen's hammer finished it. They carved their way through the pack in minutes. The Eye showed Zhen the hares' flaws, and his new qi-enhanced strength exploited them without mercy.

Chul ranged beside him, preventing him from getting flanked. She knew that Zhen had this under control now, and her movements were an extension of his own intent. Three hares fell. Five. Seven. Within minutes, only One-Eye remained. The ancient creature stood its ground, scarred, bleeding but defiant. Zhen raised his hammers ready to finish it. Shuo's warning to leave one to allow the tribe rebuild stayed his hand. Instead Zhen locked eyes with the alpha hare.

For a moment One-Eye held his gaze, then his ears flattened. He dropped to all fours, that fierce intelligence recognizing a superior predator. He turned, limping toward the far side of the valley, putting as much distance as possible between himself and this new threat. Zhen lowered his hammers. His chest heaved, but the qi circulation kept exhaustion at bay. Three gates open. Five more before he had the minimum needed for the trials to enter Cloudstone Peak.

Blood covered Zhen's tunic and matted his hair to his skull. Every breath pulled at his bruised ribs, and his fingers trembled as reached over to grip the nearest hare's corpse. The creature outweighed him, but his newly qi-enhanced muscles dragged it across the churned earth toward the tree where Shuo perched. He stopped beneath the branch and looked up. Shuo descended in a light hop that barely disturbed the grass. His economy of motion made Zhen's hard-won victory feel clumsy by comparison.

Zhen hefted the carcass and dropped it at Shuo's feet.

"Fresh meat. That's what you wanted right?" A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation. Shuo rubbed his palms together, eyes gleaming.

"Excellent. Now that wasn't hard at all, was it?" Shuo then turned to Zhen with a frown.

"And why aren't you saturating those new meridians with qi before they wither? Just because you beat some cute bunnies, doesn't mean you can slack off." Steam rose from the stew pot as Zhen sat cross-legged on his bedroll, his needle and thread working through the tears in his tunic. The fabric was still wet after he had washed out the blood, and he knitted it back together stitch by stitch. Across the fire, Shuo stirred the stew with a wooden spoon.

The scent of braised meat, wine, berries, and spirit herbs filled the clearing. Back at One-Eye's valley, he had carved away choicest cuts from the hare and discarded the rest for scavengers.

"That third gate, Shanzhong," Shuo said, not looking up from the pot, "is notorious. Targeted combat opens it faster than meditation ever could. Most cultivators still spend months grinding away at it with qi, of course. Why take the risk? But the elites know that putting themselves in a very specific fight is one way they can get ahead of the rest. Young sect scions are sent out on expeditions with a team of experienced cultivators to protect them just so they can open Shanzhong. You?

Thirty minutes, a mangy horse, an irritable hare and you're done." Chul looked up with an affronted expression at the 'mangy' description, but chose to maintain a dignified silence as she continued to eat spirit grass. Zhen knotted off a thread and bit it clean.

"While I'm grateful for the help, would it be too much to ask for some warning before you throw me into situations like that?" The stirring stopped. Shuo tilted his head. He tapped the spoon against the pot's rim as he thought about it.

"An excellent and reasonable request," he said finally.

"But yes, it would be too much to ask." The spoon swung up, pointing at Zhen like an accusatory finger.

"The sooner you understand that a very important part of why you're here is to amuse me, the better. I've spent seventeen years hiding from the Folded Shadows while occasionally babysitting your parents, pretending I couldn't crush mountains. Do you have any idea how boring that was?" Shuo turned back to the stew, stirring with renewed vigor.

"You want warnings? Preparation? That's not cultivation, boy. The world won't send you a letter before it tries to kill you. Neither will I." Zhen threaded his needle again, suppressing a wince as the motion pulled at his ribs.

"So I'm entertainment."

"Obviously. You're also not entirely incompetent, which makes you tolerable rather than merely tedious. Now finish your mending. This jugged hare won't stay hot forever, and you need to eat before we work on clearing out that third gate properly. I say 'we'. I mean you." Zhen bit back a reply and focused on his stitching. And so the next few months blurred together in a haze of pain and progress. The rhythm became familiar. Wake before dawn. Ride. Train. Meditate. Repeat.

That rhythm was broken every few days when Shuo called on him and Chul to fight whatever he decided would best serve Zhen's education. All that agonizing effort was worth it as Shuo's training pushed him to crack open gate after gate. By the end of the first month, he had opened his fourth spirit gate. The Eye of Xiezhi revealed a complex lattice protecting the gate. The flaws were obvious all over it, but dismantling it out of order would lead to the blockage becoming impossible to unpick.

He spent three days in meditation. The first day was spent using the Eye to determine the sequence in which each strand needed to be cut, and then the next two were spent severing each thread one at a time with focused qi. The fifth gate demanded darkness. Toward the middle of the second month, Shuo led him into an underground cave where no light penetrated, and the air tasted of minerals and ancient earth.

Zhen sat in that absolute blackness for two full days, drawing in the dark-aspected qi that saturated the stone around him. The gate itself was aligned to light, and only by smothering it with sufficient darkness could he create the pressure needed to force it open. By the end of the third month, the sixth and seventh gates had fallen. Each was a different puzzle that the Eye helped him to solve.

He had transformed into a verified Seven-Gate cultivator, rapidly climbing toward the threshold expected of the elite candidates who aspired to gain admittance to the Cloudstone Peak Sect. Just one more spirit gate before he would earn the right to compete for entry. But he knew that just one more gate would not satisfy him. These months had opened his eyes to the true scale and scope of cultivation.

Eight open spirit gates were the minimum, but if the elites, the Heavenly Fifteen, entered the sect with fifteen open gates, then that was his real goal. But opening spirit gates was only half his training and, with the Eye, in some ways it was the easier part. The harder part was the physical training. Shuo attacked his footwork with an intensity that bordered on the obsessional, demanding that Zhen learn to use his qi-empowered muscles properly.

They drilled movement across open ground, through dense forest, over loose stone and mud. Both with Chul, and alone. Zhen learned how to shift his weight to empower a strike, how to stop his body telegraphing his intent through the angle of a shoulder or the set of a hip. The Eye allowed him to read those signs in others easily enough. Learning to conceal them in himself proved far harder.

"Your hammer draws back too far before you commit," Shuo said one evening, catching Zhen's wrist mid-strike.

"Anyone watching knows exactly when you'll move. Again." They drilled until Zhen's strikes came without warning. While the Eye could help him to spot his own mistakes, only hard, repetitive work would train those mistakes out of him. Chul trained alongside him. She learned to read his movements, to cover his blind spots without command. The horseshoes of Moonlight Steel never lost their edge, and the minor healing runes kept her sound through every brutal day.

The flash when Chul had used the Moonlight Steel Horseshoes against the hares came ever more frequently as she fought. She had managed to work out how to temporarily suppress the concealment runes, and when she did so, her kicks were far more powerful. As they traveled deeper toward the heart of the empire, the landscape continued to change. They crossed a wide, slow river on a stone bridge unlike anything Zhen had seen before.

The arch sat lower and wider, built to bear weight that would have collapsed the narrow wooden spans near his village. On the far bank, flat paving stones replaced packed earth. He had heard tell that this was what roads looked like in the empire, but he had never thought he would see them. Massive estates replaced the modest farms near his village. These were working estates, fields laid out in strict lines and barns that could shelter hundreds of cattle. The people wore different clothes.

Lighter fabrics, cut with patterns Zhen didn't recognize in colors that suggested a dye trade his frontier village had never seen. Shuo was still careful to stay away from people as much as possible so Zhen just watched from a distance as they passed. He was careful not to stare and draw attention, but he was intrigued nonetheless. This may still be the empire he grew up in, but everything felt foreign.

"How much longer before we get to the sect?" he asked that night as they made camp. Shuo was staring back down the road and he turned round with a frown on his face.

"How long? With those horseshoes, that horse of yours is faster than I thought. We're making good time, so unless something unexpected comes along, we should get there well ahead of the trials. Another seven months to Cloudstone Peak territory. Then you'll see what real civilization looks like." That night Zhen had just dropped off to sleep when his eyes snapped back open. He lay still, not sure what had woken him. Then he heard Chul's quiet nicker.

Months of traveling and fighting together had taught him to read her language. He knew every sound she made. The pleased snort when she found good grazing. The irritated stamp when Shuo's presence annoyed her. This was a warning. Zhen didn't sit up. He didn't even change his breathing beyond the slow, controlled breath of Elementary Pulse. His training with Shuo had taught him not to give away the element of surprise. Let whoever, or whatever, watched think he still slept.

He didn't need to see the threat to know it was there. As he lay listening, he became aware that the nightly chorus of forest insects had dropped into a suffocating silence. His fingers drifted silently toward the leather-wrapped handles of his hammers. Whether this was another of Shuo's unannounced trials or something far more sinister, Zhen was ready. His hands closed around his hammers, and he waited.