Chapter 35 – First Class

The cohort arrived on the twelth day of frostfall.

The lead rider dismounted first and introduced herself as Shu Lian before her feet hit the ground. She appeared to have been around Commander Xu’s age, late twenties with a solid build and her hair was cut short. She shook road dust from her sleeve, looked at the training ground, and made a hum of approval.

The next two riders came down without fanfare. One had a scar across his chin, the other looked at the river path toward zone two.

Then the fourth rider came down and he launched himself off the horse with an acrobatic vault and landed lightly on his feet.

“This is bigger than I thought,” The young man said. He appeared to have a little older than me, maybe he was around Hao’s age, and he wore an everpresent grin on his face. “The garrison said it was a village school,”” He turned to Shu Lian. “Did you know it was this big?”

“Dian Lu…” Shu Lian said in a warning tone.

The boy seemingly ignored the tone and turned to face me. “Are you the instructor?”

“I am one of them. My nam is Pei Liang,” I introduced myself with a courteous bow.

“I’m Dian Lu.” He said it like I might have been waiting for the information. “I’m ready to start!”

Shu Lian closed her eyes briefly. “He has been like this for the entire journey. I apologize.”

“Three weeks of unimagineable torture,” said the man with the chin scar.

“I was just enthusiastic,” Dian Lu said. “The roads are long and someone has to keep the morale up.” He looked at the impact walls again. “So where do we learn how to punch holes through fences?”

I looked at him and gave a heavy sigh. Of course there was going to be one over zealous student.

“Zone one,” I said.

He followed my gaze to classroom that had been set up, the building with the seats arranged inside in clean rows.

“You’re redirecting me,” he said.

“I’m answering the question you asked. Zone one produces the foundation that makes everything else possible. Which makes it the strongest.” I kept my voice level. “You can test that conclusion if you want.”

He looked at me, perhaps sizing me up to see if I was even qualified to tell him what to do.

There is only one way that a person like this will understand, I thought.

I turned toward the house and raised my voice. “Pei Hao.”

Hao appeared in the doorway. He read the scene in one look and made his way over to me with a hospitable smile gracing his face.

“Zone three demonstration,” I said.

Hao walked to the center of the zone three ground, turned to face them, and pressed his palms together in front of his chest.

He stomped.

His foot generated a deep concussive thud that carried through the ground and up through the soles of every foot standing on the training ground. The packed earth under Hao’s foot cratered inward, dismantling under the weight of his strength.

The cohort went quiet. Shu Lian had both hands down at her sides, her mouth agape in shock. The man with the chin scar uncrossed his arms and his eyes were wide. The man that was still mounted on the horse had to steady his steed, and Dian Lu had his mouth open.

Hao stepped back from the crater and put his hands behind his back.

I turned to the cohort.

“My brother has been training under zone one principles for three years,” I said. “He has also been a cultivator since he was fifteen, which means his capacity is considerably higher than any of yours.” I looked at each of them in turn. “If any one of you attempted that technique in the state you are currently in, your leg would be severed from your body.”

Nobody spoke.

“Zone one,” I said, “is where we fix that. It is not optional.”

I looked at Dian Lu. “Zone one starts in the classroom, I’ll be with you in a moment.”

Dian Lu walked to zone one without looking back, as did everyone else.

The first session ran smoothly.

I started with names and self-assessment, which told me more than any intake document.

The man with the chin scar was Chen Wei, thirty-one, eight years in the garrison’s eastern company. His cultivation habits were conservative, controlled, and consistent. His restriction was in the gallbladder pathway, left side, which he hadn’t noticed because the compensation had become second nature. He would be the hardest to retrain because he was the most convinced he already knew what he was doing.

The next practitioner was a young man named Lu Li, he was twenty-three years old and he’d joined the garrison two years ago from a contracted farming settlement north of Lanyu. He was the quietest of the four and the most precise in his self-assessment, which suggested either good training or good instincts. His foundation was the cleanest in the cohort, but his weakness was that he had never been taught to push past his own caution.

Shu Lian’s assessment confirmed what her bearing had already suggested. Her technical development was genuine, well-structured meridian flow, and good output control. What she was missing was the layer underneath precision: the awareness of what the body was doing when she wasn’t actively directing it. Her cultivation was all intention, no listening. The danger with that was she could have pushing herself beyond her limits and end up with a terrible backlash without knowing it.

Dian Lu was last.

His foundation was a problem and a promise simultaneously. The raw capacity was the highest in the cohort, possibly the highest I had assessed outside of Hao, with the dense qi volume and channel width of someone whose body had been preparing for cultivation before his mind caught up to it. What he had done with that capacity was build entirely in one direction, output, all the qualities that made someone dangerous in a fight and catastrophic in an unsupported application. His awareness of his own channels was almost nonexistent. He knew what he could produce. He had no idea what it was costing.

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“Your large intestine pathway,” I said. “Feel the right side of your abdomen below the ribcage.”

He put his hand there and winced at the pain. “It feels tight.”

“Every time you push force output past a certain threshold, the pathway backs up.” I looked at him. “Where does it go?”

He thought about it. “My right shoulder. After a hard day of work it aches for days.”

“In the long term it will cause damage to your shoulder that no amount of training will fix.” I kept my voice even. I didn’t want to sound like I was lecturing or talking down on him, I just wanted him to cultivate safely.

He took that in. When he spoke, the eagerness had narrowed. “How long to clear the restriction?”

“One week, maybe two.” I looked at the chalk lines. “Which is why zone one is not optional.”

He nodded.

I ran them through the five principles twice, then had each of them trace their own primary meridian loop with two fingers and describe what they felt.

Chen Wei gave a competent answer and missed the gallbladder issue entirely, which confirmed it was invisible to him.

Lu Ling described his loop in more detail than I had asked for, which told me he had been wanting someone to ask.

Shu Lian gave an accurate description and watched me afterward to see if she’d gotten it right.

Dian Lu described his loop and then stopped mid-sentence when he hit the restriction, looking at his own hand as if it had done something unexpected.

By the second hour, Shu Lian had stopped waiting for me to confirm she was correct and started genuinely listening to what her own body was telling her.

Dian Lu had found the large intestine restriction and was sitting with his hand on his abdomen, working through the kinks of his pathways.

Chen Wei was doing the work correctly. That was as much as I could ask of him in the first session.