Chapter 37 — Impromptu Road Trip (3)

In the twin room beside Lin Che, two occupants lay in their beds with a lamp on a night stand in between them. It was positioned such that its placement was equally inconvenient for both occupants, being just barely out of reach for either of them.

“So,” said Mingzhe. “Why are we here?”

“Road trip. Bouldering at the end, too, supposedly.”

“Xu Fang.”

Xu Fang put his phone face-down by his pillow and exhaled deeply as he prepared himself for what he was about to say.

“Lin Che is going through something,” he said, being careful with his words. “His mother called me about a week ago. Apparently—” He paused again. “He was supposed to get married today.”

Mingzhe rolled over to his side to make eye contact with Xu Fang. The lamp was in the way, so his eyes were instead assaulted by a warm, yellow light, but the thought was there.

“And then, clearly, none of that happened, because instead he showed up at my door this morning and asked if I wanted to go on a road trip.” Xu Fang buried his head under his pillow, muffling his voice as he spoke a bit quieter. “I’m not going to ask him about it,” he continued. “That’s not — that’s not how he works. He’ll get to it when he gets to it, and pushing him before that point is just going to make him shut down entirely.”

Xu Fang pulled himself out of bed and tapped on the lamp a couple of times, causing it to brighten, get dimmer, and change to a harsh white, before finally turning off. He crawled back into bed in the darkness.

“So for now,” he yawned. “We drive and sing terrible songs and hope he opens up to us.”

Guo Mingzhe remained in silence for a while, before switching positions to lay on his back once again. “That’s fair enough,” he said. “Though I’ll say, for whatever it’s worth — I didn’t exactly have much warning about any of this either.”

“I know. I’m sorry about that.”

“I met the man ten minutes before I was sitting in that van.”

Xu Fang raised an eyebrow. “Ten minutes?”

“He knocked on my door, and I opened it to find a complete stranger standing there ready to throw hands.”

“Lin Che throwing hands? That’s got to be the most unbelievable lie ever,” quipped Xu Fang.

“Well, I’ve been working on a new technique for months, as you know. It’s all I ever talk about now,” he sighed. “And then this man knocks on my door, and I think — fine, let’s just see. Let him try a move.”

Xu Fang remained in silence.

“He didn’t need one,” said Mingzhe. “I didn’t even last a single move. Couldn’t even react.”

“I didn’t know,” said Xu Fang, slowly, “that Lin Che was—” He frowned, mentally flicking through their old conversations. “He’s never mentioned anything like that.”

“He told me he’d help me improve,” said Mingzhe. “Said this trip would do it. Something about getting stronger rapidly.” He shook his head slightly. “He didn’t elaborate, so I have no idea what that means in practice, but I figured, given what I’d just seen — I believed him.”

Guo Mingzhe waited in silence for a while as Xu Fang was lost in his thoughts. Eventually, however, he could hear his friend snoring beside him and decided to capitulate to his fatigue too.

***

Next door, the snores were making themselves known through the wall.

Lin Che stared at his phone screen and got to work.

The shared folder containing the Shen Clan archives loaded slowly on his phone, which he expected was to do with the slow wifi provided by what had turned out to be the cheapest motel around.

He scrolled through the archives methodically, despite having seen all the entries in his last life. This time, however, he paid a bit more detail, now building a mental map of the terrain of all the Shen Clan beginner techniques. After about twenty minutes, he closed the browser and picked up his bag. From the front pocket, he pulled out a small notebook and a pen.

In the centre, he wrote Liuhe Breathing Method and drew a circle around it.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

From there, he began drawing branches outward — each one a technique that either derived from the Liuhe foundation or complemented it at a later stage. He labelled each branch in small characters and even smaller characters where the progressions forked.

The page looked less like a diagram and more like a true mapping of cultivation progressions. He held it up to check the overall shape, and added the two lines he had previously missed. He set it down on the duvet and looked at it for a long time.

The question wasn’t which techniques were the strongest — no, that was the wrong way to think about it. The question was always which techniques would suit the person learning them.

After all, you could hand two people the same manual and get different, albeit similar, results depending on whether the method fit them.