Chapter 9 — Full Playlist

The kitchen light was on.

Shen Yue was at the counter with a glass of water and reading something on her phone. She looked up when he came in, but only for a brief moment before her eyes returned to her screen.

“Your location,” she said. “Give it to me 24/7.”

“Right.” Lin Che reached into his pocket for his phone. It slipped out of his fingers and avoided his drunken lunge to catch it, landing on the kitchen floor. Shen Yue shot a gaze of killing intent — nothing major, more akin to the annoyance one felt towards a mosquito.

“Sorry, I didn’t expect you’d be home,” he said. “I was out with a friend.”

“I can see that.” Shen Yue turned off her phone and placed it on the table. “You were attacked two days ago and started cultivation training right after. And instead of carrying on with that, you came home drunk.”

“It was one friend and we went to karaoke.”

She raised an eyebrow. “What’s his name?”

“Xu Fang.”

“Xu Fang won’t keep you from getting killed.” Shen Yue picked up her phone and left the kitchen. “Pick up your phone,” she called from the hallway.

Lin Che picked up his phone, quickly checked it for any signs of cracks, and went to bed.

***

He woke up on Saturday with a headache that felt like a light had been beamed through his eyelids overnight. He lay still for a moment, before stumbling over to the kitchen sink to chug a couple of glasses of water. Lin Che decided to cultivate, reasoning that it was essentially a form of meditation, and meditation was meant to help with hangovers.

He went to the living room, sat himself down on the mat, and closed his eyes.

From the other side of the wall, he could hear voices and music coming off from a television. From outside the window, he could hear the hum of passing cars and occasional bell rang by cyclists warning pedestrians to move out of their path.

Lin Che wasn’t sure why he bothered trying. The Qi scattered before it could move even an inch.

He opened his eyes and looked at the wall.

Shen Yue walked out of her office dressed in a suit, a folder in one hand, and a cup of tea in the other. Intermittent pulses of Qi coming from the living room caught her attention, so she set her folder down on top of the shoe rack, and entered the living room to see a sighing Lin Che.

He turned as soon as he felt her presence nearby. “How do you deal with the noise?” he asked.

“What noise?” she replied, pushing a strand of hair behind her ear.

“When you cultivate. The neighbours, outside, everything really.”

“My office has a sound array,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “It seals the room completely. You can use it if you want.”

He waited to see if there was more to say, but Shen Yue’s lips were covered with a steaming mug.

***

Despite his many lifetimes, Lin Che had never entered this room of his house. It’s not like he wasn’t curious about it or anything like that, but simply because he believed people needed some privacy and listening to his wife’s singular demand of not entering was not a difficult ask of him. Arguably, she would have never known if he had entered, but that thought just didn’t sit right with him.

The room was slightly larger than his bedroom, which felt like a bit of an insult to him, but all the stuff in it certainly required the space. Shelves ran along two walls from floor to ceiling with binders and loose folders and printed reports and bound documents of all types in some organised mess. There was clearly a system of sorts to it, but the kind that only the creator could possibly understand.

The desk in the far back had a laptop, a cup full of pens, and a notepad. Surprisingly minimal for the state of its environment.

Along the right hand side, cleared of everything else, was a mat sized for one person, which reasonably was where Shen Yue would cultivate.

She came in behind him and set a small candle in a ceramic holder at the head of the mat. She clicked her thumb and middle finger, and a spark lit the candle.

“The scent helps with Qi circulation,” she said. “Don’t inhale the fumes directly.”

It smelt like pine resin and lavender.

“I’m going to my uncle’s,” she said. “At the gathering last night, I brought up the mannequin attack to him, and he agreed to provide resources for self defence purposes.”

“Shen Bowen?” asked Lin Che.

“Yes. The one who arranged our marriage,” she said, the word marriage still not sounding right to either of them. “I’ll be back in the afternoon.”

She walked past the threshold of the door before pausing in the corridor. “The silencing array activates when the door is closed.”

He couldn’t even hear the door close: there was a complete absence of noise. It was just the sound of his breathing and the faint burning of a candle.

Lin Che crossed his legs and opened his phone.

The foundation video was still pulled up, but it was good practice to rewatch things until they stuck. He fat thumbed the full screen button and opened up the video description, which he had missed this entire time.

Full series linked below.

He looked at this for a moment before clicking the link.

It was a playlist of unlisted videos all by the same man in that garage-dojo-looking background of his. The titles were all progressions of the Liuhe Breathing Method, so Lin Che enqueued them all before starting his warm up.

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He closed his eyes and ran the foundation circulation twice. He still struggled to guide the Qi past his shoulder blades, but the movements came much easier, and the Qi persisted for much longer than usual. He wasn’t sure if this was due to practice or the candle in front of him, but he would have placed his money on the latter.

Still, he focussed on what went wrong, and pressed play on the videos once he had his goal in mind.

***

The man sat cross-legged with his hands on his knees and got straight into it.

“Second harmony,” he said. “Form and breath.”