Chương 9: Crater-Face

There had been a lot of crazy things happening in Jin's life ever since he'd been shoved into this new body in this new land. However, if he had thought that trying to pass the exam to become an inner disciple had been nerve-wracking, then he obviously hadn't truly considered what being taught by Elder Flower would entail.

If anyone had told him back on earth that he would be forced to fight an insane magical bandit by a teacher of his, he would have told that person that they read too many of those weird Chinese web novels. Obviously, the situation was completely ridiculous, and the only kind of tutor that would actually send out their pupil like this would be found in a story, not in real life. Nevertheless, despite all his doubts about the rationality and the likeliness of this occurring. Here he was.

standing in front of a large bamboo forest with shaking knees and holding his newly received jian in front of him. He looked back over his shoulder, at Flower. She was looking at him with a cool gaze. Ting, slightly behind her, looked incredibly glad to not be in his place. Jin took a step forward into the forest, glanced back again and saw that his two followers had also taken one step forward, Ting taking extra care to fall behind the Elder.

He took a step back, and Elder Flower raised an eyebrow, also taking a step back. She said that she would interfere in the battle if his life was in any danger, but she hadn't said anything about his limbs. Also how fast could she really move if a staff was already on a trajectory that was set to crush his skull? That didn't sound like a pleasant death. Mostly because he would be dead. Dying sucked, or so he'd heard. He didn't have any memories of how he'd gotten here in the first place. Maybe it had been by dying.

That didn't mean he wanted to do it again! Jin sighed and took a few deep breaths with his eyes closed. Maybe his behaviour was ridiculous? A lot of people, even back on Earth, had gone into battle with less of a safety net than he had. They'd been fighting for money, like the French, or for honour, like the English, in either case, they'd been fighting for something they didn't have. Maybe Jin was scared because his battle was useless.

It was a bit difficult to bring up the motivation to risk one's life because someone else wanted him to. Teaching moment? Wasn't this basically the purpose of Illusion Rooms? Wasn't sending him out like this denigrating the status of the sect product. This could only be referred to as bad marketing and brand destruction, no? Truly, Elder Flower was likely the nightmare of any marketing department. once you got past her amazing looks.

"Okay, Jin," the young man muttered to himself.

"You can do this, you can do this. I believe in you. Mama didn't raise no quitter." He started advancing again, sword pointing lightly at the front as he used his left hand to push away the bamboo twigs and leaves that were getting in his face. Occasionally Elder Flower corrected his trajectory with her words, but stayed unerringly several feet behind him. However, with each step, he cared less and less. He was quite frankly fucked with no way out. What exactly would Elder Flower do to him if he ran away?

Possibly execute him and call him a coward. Possibly ruin his reputation back at the sect. There wasn't really any chance of dying with her here right? That was the belief that he decided on for himself that day. The shadow of the bamboo forest hung ominously over Jin's head, making the atmosphere even more depressing than it needed to be. Even if his emotional state had become better during the last few minutes, his anxiety levels have been rising.

After all, after he decided that he was going to fight, he just wanted to fight. He didn't want to nervously look through the entire forest for his foe and get potentially ambushed. His eyes suddenly alighted as they made out a clearing waiting in front of him. Another nervous shudder ran from his body before he steeled himself. He could see through the dense foliage, a bit of brown sitting on a large rock. Doubtlessly his enemy. Should he ask her to surrender first, he wondered as he approached?

Wasn't that what everyone always did in shows? They offered their opponents the chance to get on their knees and receive a painless death? It never seemed to work. But maybe he should do as locals do in this case?

"Idiot, duck," a voice suddenly said from behind him after Jin had almost entered the clearing. It was Elder Flower's voice, so despite not knowing what that was all about, he threw himself to the ground. Just in time for a square piece of wood to come shooting out of the clearing through several bamboos which broke with deafening cracks, before shooting for where his head would have been. Then, what must have been the quarterstaff was retracted. It disappeared as quickly as it had come.

Jin stumbled to his feet into the clearing to face his foe. She was a slip of a girl that would never have seemed to be too threatening. However the staff that she held nimbly in her arms along with her ripped brown robe, unwashed and scuffed black hair going to her chin and dead eyes make him want to be anywhere but here.

"Any chance you would surrender to the authorities? Surely there's a rehabilitation process that could help integrate you back into normative society. Despite popular belief, corporal punishment doesn't scare off any other potential perpetrators," Jin said hopefully. An awkward moment descended on the clearing and he thought he heard the sound of a palm meeting a face from behind him.

The girl, for all her supposed madness, managed to give him a queer look before her eyes reverted to those of the seasoned psychopath. Dead like a dead fish with the only emotion inside them a murderous madness.

"Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool," Jin mumbled, as he raised his sword. His knees were shaking like leaves in a fart storm, which actually helped him fall to the ground again to dodge another extension of the quarterstaff. It was all happening a bit too fast, really. His opponent took 1/10th of a second to adjust the staff so the end was pointed at him, and in the next 1/10th of a second, the thing already filled his entire vision from its incredibly quick extension.

It seemed like she really liked aiming for his head, which made the job a little bit easier. But he shouldn't attempt to find a pattern in someone else's madness. It could just be a fake out after all. That was the thought with which Jin found himself stumbling to his feet again. Nervousness left his body like an expired aubergine. Quickly and violently. After all, nervousness and fear were only strategies of the organism to prevent its host from going into potentially dangerous situations.

Once that dangerous situation had already been entered, with no possibility of escape, it left. Only completely maladjusted people still felt nervous while in the middle of combat. This was the time for focus. So, when Jin stumbled to his feet, jian raised in a defensive posture, he was essentially a different person than the one who had fallen down a second ago. The girl wearing ripped brown robes seems to realise this as she intensified the tempo of her attacks.

The staff shot forwards, retracted, shot forwards, retracted. Jin ducked, weaved, jumped, batted away with his sword, dodged. It was an incredibly fast-paced battle that mortals back on earth probably couldn't have even kept up with. Unless, of course, they were trained soldiers or fighters or something. At this range, despite how it seemed like, it was actually Jin who had the advantage.

Because his mental properties were very developed, he found himself perfectly able to predict the trajectory of the staff, whenever it was aimed in his direction. This allowed him to start dodging before the attack was even initiated. And while all he had to do was dodge, the girl had to have been spending at least some amount of qi to expand and contract the staff like that. Unless of course, it was an artefact, but if that had been the case her bounty would have definitely been set to a higher amount.

Thus they entered a stalemate, one to Jin's advantage The girl seemed to realise this and paused in her attacks as if to consider. There was a slight sheen of sweat covering her face, and Jin similarly was starting to feel the physical exertion of the fight getting to him. It had only been ongoing for a minute or so, but the intensity of a life-or-death battle seemed to trump any other sport he had ever participated in.

Perhaps if he'd been more used to fighting in general, he would have used that short moment when his opponent deliberated to press forward and take the momentum for himself. However he wasn't, thus when the staff extended the next time, he simply dodged again. He wasn't thinking too much about the fact that the girl seemed intent on repeating patterns, until a length of bamboo that the extension of the staff had broken when he'd dodged it, fell unerringly on the top of his head from behind.

This distracted him just long enough for the girl to jump forward and swing her staff at him from a close position for once. Jin barely managed to raise his sword, vertically, putting his elbow at the flat of the blade to block the impact. The staff struck on the bone sword and his entire body quivered with exertion as he was unceremoniously pushed back and onto his ass. From there the girl pointed her staff at him and extended it again.

Jin had to do a very inelegant backwards roll with his butt in the air to avoid the attack. From there he jumped to his feet and had to block another extension, which threw him even further back. Their positions now reversed, Jin found that the girl was actually closer to Elder Flower than himself. However, if there was any hope of a switch of opponents occurring, it was dashed as the girl herself dashed at him again. It seemed like she wanted to kill him first before finding new victims. For whatever reason.

It was in close quarters that Jin was made painfully aware of the gap in ability. The girl was just better than him. When she swung her staff and changed its direction in midair, he could only awkwardly deflect the blow enough to receive a glancing hit, rather than a direct one. The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

Bruises started to accumulate on his body like flies on shit and as several attempts to gain distance failed miserably, he realised that he simply wasn't good enough to win this fight from a purely technical perspective. It also seemed to him that he was starting to flag earlier than the girl, who was sweating but still going strong. It was here that a lesson from his last life came in handy.

Elder Flower had said she would save him if he was ever in actual danger, but he still didn't want to get beaten to a bloody pulp before the actual decapitation strike came. If an amateur wanted to win a battle against a technically superior opponent, the amateur had to create chaos. Every master feared a real noob, because they could not for the life of them predict what the idiot would do next. In other words. Jin was going to do something stupid.

The next time that the staff came at him from his side, Jin, rather than dodging or parrying, stepped into the blow. The closer one was to the arms holding the staff, the weaker the strike. The hardwood hitting the left side of his torso still probably ruptured an organ or two, but it finally got him into a position where he could do something. He swung his sword with his right hand at the girl's neck causing her to dodge to the left. Right into Jin's raised left hand which grabbed her by the hair.

He then dropped his sword, grabbed again with his right hand and brought her head down to his raised knee for a very satisfying smash. And then he did it again, and again, and again. It was after the fourth time, when he felt a very satisfying crunch signalling a broken nose or a tooth, that the girl managed to swing her staff in a manner that allowed her to extend the tip straight into his ribs which threw him off her in a rather violent fashion.

He spun in the air several times and landed on his back with a sharp pain in his side. He got incapacitated from the sheer shock of his flying, which was thankfully reciprocated by the girl stumbling around confusedly with her staff held loosely at her side. One dainty hand was gripping her bleeding face. She removed the hand to glare at him and to enter a fighting position again and Jin almost lost his breakfast, lunch and dinner.

She didn't really have a face anymore, all she had was a caved-in ruin from which one eye was glaring at him hatefully, while the other swam down the side of her face to gather on the floor in a disgusting puddle of gooey liquid and blood. Had he done that? Jin wondered. He'd never hurt anyone before. Had it always been so easy? The girl raised her staff, and Jin was able to read from the trajectory that it would crush his face in return for what he'd done to hers.

He also knew at the same time that he couldn't dodge. Stabbing pain in his chest distracted his biology too much to escape in time. That was why he was grateful that a white line traced through the girl's neck from behind. A disfigured head flew into the air with a spray of blood and landed on the floor with a thump. Jin sagged in on himself, and let his head rest on the leafy ground as Elder Flower walked past the still-standing corpse of his opponent.

It was as she arrived at his side and kneeled down to inspect his condition, that the body finally collapsed in on itself like a puppet with its strings cut and fell first to its knees, then on the ground. The fall revealed a green looking Ting, looking at Jin and Flower from behind the corpse. She did not approach.

"I think she broke a rib and it's poking my lungs," Jin said with a pained voice while the Elder ran a glowing white hand over his body. The woman simply nodded in agreement.

"Seems like it," she said in a nonchalant voice as she looked down at him with a blank gaze.

"You," Jin coughed," happen to have any lung and rib repair potions in that pouch of yours?" Elder Flower raised an eyebrow.

"It's an expensive concoction. You could just walk it off." Jin grimaced at her shit sense of humour. At least, he hoped it was a shit sense of humour.

"If I walk up to the Mad Monks tomorrow looking like a corpse, they're going to think our sect isn't prosperous enough to take care of its disciples," he argued. A grin hushed over the Elder's face, and a small vial was raised to Jin's trembling lips. When had they gotten covered in blood? He drank what was given to him. It tasted very fresh, like a bushel of mint. Maybe with a bit of ginger.

"You did well," Elder Flower said gently from his side. Or maybe she didn't. Maybe, with how much he was losing it, it could have just been a dream version of her that said that"Most of our members aren't suited for combat at all. So I'm glad to see that the sect has gained another protector." Jin's last thought before he passed out went as follows.

'Bitch. What about me? Who's going to protect my ass?' Then everything went black. -/- Jin awoke while it was still dark out sometime later in the day. Or perhaps it was already the early morning of the following day. His eyes fluttered open and for a few seconds, all he saw was darkness. Then a small green light burst into existence in the air above him. He turned his head and was surprised to see that it was inner disciple Ting who was sitting at his bedside.

She looked calm, and reserved, but also glad to see him awake. He looked around and determined from the look of the walls that they were back in the tower. The outpost. Stone, stone. One chair, currently occupied. A bed of straw under his back. A nightstand. A glass of water. He raised an arm to get at it, and was surprised that he could do so. His other arm went to travel up his body, which seemed to be naked.

Jin blushed, as his hand went to explore the left side of his torso, where he'd gotten his rib cracked in the fight. The injury was gone. He breathed in deeply, and breathed out. No pain. Insane.

"What happened?" he asked very nonspecifically. Thankfully Ting was smart enough to know what he meant. She sighed, brushed aside a strand of hair from her face and met his eyes.

"After Elder Flower decapitated the divergent and gave you that healing potion, you passed out. I took you back to the tower and took care of you for a while. Then I went to the village to tell them that the threat had been resolved. After I came back the Elder told me to stay at your bedside for when you woke up. She said she needed to rest. It's not easy flying those swords around."

"I see, that's why we stopped here." Ting shook her head.

"Not really, from how I understand it. I think the point of leaving one day before your appointment is to prevent any amount of trouble delaying you. It would be disrespectful if you came late after all. It's better to do half a trip one day and the other half trip the other day. Also, the Mad Monks Sect is covered by a powerful array. You should try to arrive at the hour you're supposed to. They might suspect that someone else is knocking on their door if you don't." Jin sighed.

"I understand, there's still a lot of things I don't know," he said with a sigh.

"You were only recently promoted, right?" Ting asked. Jin nodded.

"A few weeks ago."

"Well, if they're already making you fight someone in real life, they must see potential in you," Ting said, perhaps a bit bitterly.

"What do you mean?" Jin asked, slightly confused.

"Is this normal?"

"Define normal. The thing about illusion Rooms is that the creator can only ever put in stuff that they themselves have experienced. How is someone who has never fought a life-or-death battle supposed to inject that feeling of danger into their illusion? They obviously can't, all their deaths have been simulated up until that point. The fear isn't there. It is this urgency, this knowledge of how war looks like, that one needs as an inner disciple to elevate one's illusions.

If you can only get the technical details right, and nothing else, you weren't made for the job." Jin turned his gaze away from the small woman and looked back at the ceiling. More stone. Of course, Elder Flower had described his fight as a learning experience, but it was only now that he fully understood what that actually meant. Sure he'd fought to the death numerous times in the illusion Rooms in the library. But, he'd never actually been afraid for his life.

Even right now, he knew that the Elder would save him if he'd made a mistake in the fight. Still, the danger had been elevated. Illusion Room cultivators created illusions. But, how can one create an illusion of something that one hasn't experienced? If you wanted to accurately confer to someone else the feeling of being burned alive, that meant that one had to experience being burned alive.

If one wanted to confer the experience of a life or death battle, that meant one needed to know how one actually looked like or felt like. Perhaps the way of the illusion Room cultivator was indeed more difficult than he'd imagined. After all, he'd thought that becoming a craftsman would ease him into a sedentary lifestyle. Little work and many pleasures. He now understood however that the product they created necessitated for them to suffer as well. Less than the suffering of a warrior sect, for sure.

They had to fight regularly, but still. Being an illusion Room cultivator apparently meant that he would have to experience a variety of sufferings to be able to create the perfect product.

"Also," Ting started.

"The borders are always stirring. Demonic cultivators always abound. Nobody is safe. Not really." Jin sighed.

"Thank you for taking care of me. May our sufferings be many, and our lessons bountiful." Ting showed a smirk at his weird phrase. How old was she? He wondered. Probably old enough to be his grandma twice over. She was cute though.

"May you survive everything life throws at you and come out on the other end stronger than before," she said, nodded at him, and left.

"Get some sleep. You'll need it," she said over her shoulder, before opening the wooden door and leaving him to a fitful sleep. Caved in faces and headless bodies haunted him that night.