Chapter 10 – Two Villages Away

“The Prefect’s cultivators are strong. They can punch through walls, but they’re nothing more than weapons being guided by someone else.”

Hao sat across from me on the hillside, the crater between us like a period at the end of a sentence. We’d been talking for an hour. I’d laid out the cultivation principles, the meridian system Mother had taught me, the village assessment, the timeline, as well as the looming threat.

Everything except the transmigration.

He didn’t need that, and I wasn’t sure he’d believe it anyway.

“So what are you saying exactly?” Hao asked.

“I’m saying that they’re hammers to a nail, and we need to build that a hammer can’t break.”

Hao looked down at the crater. “And you want to build that something.”

I nodded. “I want to give this village the tools to not be a nail.”

He was quiet for a while. The stars had come out fully now, sharp and cold above the ridge.

“The prayer sign,” I said. “Show me how you found it.”

Hao held up his hands, palms flat together, fingers aligned. “It started by accident. Three years ago, I was angry about something — I don’t even remember what — and I pressed my hands together the way Mother does when she prays. The pressure helped me focus and it gave the feeling somewhere to go instead of everywhere at once. I started experimenting and found that if I held the sign and breathed a certain way, I could push the energy where I wanted it to go.

“The stomp,” I said. “Is that the only application you’ve developed?”

“I can push it into my hands to make my grip stronger, and once I managed to move it into my legs and I ran faster than I’ve ever ran in my life, then I threw up in a bush.” He said it casually, the way someone described a failed cooking experiment.

“I haven’t figured out how to sustain anything for more than a few seconds. It’s like holding water in your fists. The harder I squeeze, the faster it leaks.”

*He’s describing qi dissipation without the vocabulary for it. The energy disperses because he has no meridian awareness. He’s brute-forcing qi through his body without using the channels designed to carry it. Like pouring a river through a garden hose.*

“What if I told you there are pathways in the body specifically built to carry that energy?” I began. “Channels that run from your core to your extremities, that would let you move qi with a fraction of the effort you’re spending now?”

Hao’s hands lowered. “I’d say tell me everything about them.”

I did.

I told him about the twelve mai, the way they connected to organ systems, and the pressure points where they surfaced. I pressed the lung mai point on his wrist and watched his eyes widen when he felt the warmth travel up his arm along a line he’d never known existed.

“You feel that?” I asked.

Hao nodded. “It’s like a groove and the energy wants to move along it.”

“That’s because it’s supposed to. You’ve been pushing qi through raw muscles. These channels are the infrastructure your body already has. You just didn’t know they were there.”

He pressed the point himself. Then the heart mai point. Then a third one on his inner elbow. Each time, the recognition hit his face.

“How long have you known about this?” he asked.

“About a week. Mother taught me.”

“Mother.” Hao made a face. “She knew.”

“She and Father both. They were hiding you.”

Hao pressed his palms together again in the prayer sign and closed his eyes. I felt his qi stir, but this time it moved differently. It was guided by the awareness I’d just given him, flowing along the lung mai with a coherence that made the hair on my arms stand up.

He opened his eyes. “It’s easier. Significantly easier.”

*He integrated the meridian framework in thirty seconds. I spent three weeks learning to sense the boundary and he absorbed the concept and applied it.*

“We should train together,” I said. “I can develop the theory and principles and you can test them. We can build a curriculum together.”

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Hao nodded along with my words, but he was curious about something. “Are you doing this just for us?”

“For the village. Eventually.”

Hao looked down the hillside at the cook fires below. Forty-six households now. A hundred and ninety-something people eating dinner, unaware that the two boys on the hill were negotiating the future shape of everything they knew.

The next twelve days moved fast.

Hao and I trained every night on the hillside, an hour after the village went quiet.

I guided him through the twelve meridian pathways one at a time while simultaneously deepening my own practice. The gap between us was staggering and I stopped pretending otherwise. Where I spent twenty minutes coaxing qi to move through a single mai with the consistency of a leaking faucet, Hao could flood all twelve in under a minute once he knew the routes. His volume was absurd. His control was getting better by the day.

But the principles held. Every technique that worked for him, I documented. Every observation about qi behavior, I tested against my own weaker but more precisely monitored cultivation. The prayer sign, which I’d adopted as a focus tool for my own sessions, worked for both of us. It concentrated intention and created a physical anchor for our Qi to go.

I filled twelve bark sheets in those twelve days. Breathing patterns for initial qi sensing and meridian activation sequences, starting with the lung mai because it was the shallowest and most accessible.