Chapter 40- Six Turns

Senior Redmane was a thoughtful old bird. He waited until Tian left that special state, then returned silently to the depot. He arranged for some of his brothers to sit with him on the back patio of the hospital until he entirely returned to himself. He was more or less functional by dinner time, but silence was coming easy today.

It was a floaty sort of feeling. Like he was utterly connected to everything around him, but was having trouble thinking anything about it. Chopsticks seemed impossibly complicated, but he managed his spoon after carefully watching the people around him.

Everything tasted so much. It wasn’t broken down into boiled chicken and coriander and gently warming vegetables. It was The Soup. Soup was enough of an idea all on its own. The endless ocean of Soup, overwhelming his ability to abstract or deconstruct. The notion that there might be other, different Soup, or that he had enjoyed Soup before and might again in the future, simply did not occur. There was no space for those thoughts to occur.

The feeling finally completely faded away when he returned to the barracks and saw Brother Fu’s empty bed. “I wish I could share this with him. I bet he’s experienced it at least once. All those words, all that fighting with ideas, the books, trying to wrap complication around an idea so big, so simple, humans can’t manage it.”

“Mortals can’t. But we are cultivating immortality, little brother. Now you know why the words “enlightened,” and “enlightenment” get thrown around so much. Why our most ancient and sacred texts say that the dao which can be spoken is not the true dao.” Brother Su rested his hands on Tian’s shoulders. His smile seemed very kind tonight. Tian hadn’t realized he was speaking out loud.

“That’s why I’m here. Moments like this.”

“No. It’s all the other stuff. Really, it is. I know you wrestle with yin and yang a lot. All this, everything you have seen and done and been through, every choice you made, everything you studied, every thought you had about everything you saw, it all builds up. You are so young. Everything is so shocking, so new. It’s all accumulation. It all builds up, settles, gets broken down and compacted and from that accumulation comes a sudden burst of life. A new thought. Immortal and free.”

“Yang growth from yin accumulation. A single explosive moment, brilliant, but fragile. It can’t last forever.” He looked around the barracks and saw the smiling faces of his brothers from the West Town Temple. Fewer now, but still there. Hearts unbroken. Their care for him so plain.

Tian bowed to his brothers. He didn’t have the words to wrap the emotion in. His heart felt too big for his chest. He could only offer them what he knew. He bowed, and they laughed, straightened him up, and embraced him. He didn’t cry. He was fourteen now. Much too old to cry. Even if he really wanted to.

The feeling had faded by the time he woke, but he could feel that he wasn’t quite the same person as he was this time yesterday. He dropped into the lotus position on the back patio of the hospital and watched the dawn rise. Cultivating with the sun, and trying to place his emotions on his body. The tarry ball of hate was still there, but much smaller, much more… fragile, perhaps. Though he sensed something dreadfully hard within it.

“Grandpa?”

Your hatred of the heretics originally was an emotional response to pain. They hurt you by hurting the people you love the most. So you hate them. Then you started hating the sect, or aspects of it anyway, as you learned more and more about it. It all seems so phoney, right? So much lies, so much stupid cruelty. Then you learned more, and things got more and more complicated, and people were still kind to you in the middle of all that cruelty and, in the end…

“I couldn’t hold it all. But instead of breaking or going crazy, I poured it into the sky. And the sky poured itself into me.”

Basically. You didn’t stop hating the heretics. But now, buried under that instinctive emotion is something tested. You have verified to your satisfaction the things you truly despise about them. Same with the things you don’t like about the sect, and the things you do like. You have heard the phrase Dao Heart? You are forging yours.

It wasn’t quite the way they expected, but the Discipline Squad still gave you the best possible answer for your humiliation. Transcendence. You will still be just beginning your immortal journey when even the dust of that Li animal has broken down into nothing.

Tian snorted at that. “Grandpa, just why the hell is the sect such a mess? None of this should be run this way. I don’t know what the right way is, but this has to be the wrong way.”

Operational confusion due to a lack of leadership focus.

“I understood all the individual words, but not what they mean in that order.”

It’s an entirely sincere religious organization that runs a protection racket while also maintaining a vast network of other businesses and administrative functions to pay for their religious and military instruction. The people at the very top have no urgency to do anything since they are going to live for centuries and millennia, the people in the middle know they aren’t valued much, and the people at the bottom are doing their best to live good lives. Everyone has a lot of things to do, and they contradict each other all the time. Welcome to Immortal Sects. It’s a damn mess. Fun fact, Ancient Crane Monastery is considerably better run than many I’ve seen.

“That feels impossible.”

Not at all. Nobody’s offered you a job as an experimental medical subject in exchange for a trivial number of contribution points, and you have even been given free arts. That’s huge. That’s amazing. On that point, you really should read what Doctor Pei gave you. It’s spicy.

“Spicy?” Tian was absolutely sure books didn’t taste spicy. He gave it a sniff. It smelled like paper and medicinal herbs. He considered licking it, and concluded that someone, somewhere, was definitely watching and he would never live it down.

“Demon Pulling Art? Didn’t Doctor Pei say this was a medical art?” Tian muttered and opened the old volume. He couldn’t help smiling a little. The herb smell was pretty nice.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

In the days of old, before the Book of Golden Prescriptions was published or the Treatise On The Nine Phases was compiled and even the Essential Manual of Human Physiognomy was unknown, the ancients believed as their ancestors did- that sickness was caused by demons. Relying on the shamanic teachings, they found ways to heal the sick. Lacking a true understanding of medicine, their methods were unreliable. However, I, Kong Long Tian have managed to transform poison into medicine and have transformed ancient error into modern wisdom. Treat poison and sickness as a demon. Drive it from where it hides in the body, pull it through the veins, and force it from the patient.

“This… honorable ancient… didn’t read the instructions on how to write introductions, did he?”

Clearly felt that modesty best suited people of modest intellect and modest achievements, yes. Keep reading.

Tian did. The diagrams were instructive, even if the text was cryptic.