Chapter 42- Hell is What You Make of It

Tian fell towards the burning lake of acid, doing his best to go slow. His best wasn’t very good. He made his body as light as he could manage, but it was a long way from being as light as a feather. He fell belly first, stretching out his arms and legs like a bat, hoping his robes might catch a little of the air and slow his fall. It didn’t really work.

His mind raced as he thought through his plan. “Plan.” Maybe more like a “pln.” It was all based on his bare understandings of utterly, impossibly profound cosmological and medical concepts. It was like trying to perform surgery after reading the Table of Contents of an introduction to anatomy. On the other hand, it was better than giving up entirely, so he’d go with it.

Tian felt the air getting colder and denser as he fell. He knew it was only a couple of seconds, but it felt longer. Like the air was shifting from gas to liquid despite the blue-green flames dancing over the waters below. At the last moment he twisted to hit the water feet first. His seniors had been very clear on this- if you do fall in the water, make sure you land feet first. You could survive two broken legs, but you couldn’t survive a crushed skull, and you never know what’s under the surface.

He just wished he had learned how to swim. Not that it was going to make a difference.

Tian crashed into a lake of freezing acid. The tiny bones in his feet shattered, his ankles broke, his fibula, tibia, patella, femur, all shattered. The joints with his pelvis ripped apart, stabbing up into his guts, ruining the flesh and damaging the dantian. The force sheared away the organs inside his body, making them pulp against each other, against his shattering ribs, and his broken spine. His brain took a violent blow. Somehow he retained his wits.

He was in the belly of a demon. A sadistic and cruel death would be entirely fitting. Infernal interference was the only reasonable explanation for Tian becoming fully paralyzed yet experiencing each and every sensation of pain his ruined body experienced.

And then the acid set in, and with it, the ruinous yin qi.

What was yin? Half the universe. But in the belly of a demonic bird it was despair. It was depression and regret so total, it didn’t even permit suicide. There could be no escape from this pain besides death, and your death was beyond your control. There was only stillness. Only dissolution.

This is why the centipedes fought so viciously when they fell, Tian realized. They had to drive themselves, stir up all their fury to combat that endless apathy. But the end is always the trasheap, the midden. The place where all the waste goes to rot.

The effect was a sort of sublimation of pain. Tian knew that every bit of him, inside and out, was in agony. He knew that this would kill him in moments. He knew that he was submerged in acid, being dissolved with terrible quickness. The cold froze flesh so totally, it forcibly rotted away his muscle and tissue. Tian didn’t know the word ‘sublimation’ or that water could be made to evaporate by extreme cold. He was falling apart. He was dying. He was helpless. He couldn’t stir even a finger, and the cold was invading his body. It was even freezing his meridians.

“There is no growth without yin, no birth without yang. Pregnancy is yin- the fetus accepts the blessings of the mother’s body and accumulates all it needs to be born. It also accumulates luck and fate.” Brother Wong’s words drifted through his mind.

“Birth is yang. You need both in balance. The five elements, yin and yang. Enormous concepts. Enormous. But you have been immersed in them since before you were born. Since the moment of your conception, yin and yang combined. Immense grandeur, the secrets of heaven and earth, Sun and Moon mere embodiments of these supreme principals- all found in your parent’s bed. All found in you, and me, and every blade of grass, every rock, every breath of air.” Brother Wong smiled one of his sharp, pointy smiles.

“Now, can you turn that theory into something practical?”

“My parents tossed me into a garbage heap, Brother Wong.” Tian didn’t answer the old man. He had just nodded, and got back to tying purple thyme on the long strings in the workshop to dry.

“They saw my face and hated me. They threw me in the trash, and never once came looking for me. Or worse, maybe they were the rock throwers. Am I supposed to be touched by all this? Because I can’t really thank my mother for all her ‘gifts,’ can I? The only thing I can thank my parents for is giving birth to me. But after they threw me in the trash, I can’t say they gave me life. Life is something I fought for. Even after Grandpa Jun found me, life is something I took for myself.”

There wasn’t much of Tian left. His body was almost more of an outline around his nerves and brain now. Even his dantians and meridians were corroding. They might be pressed by the acid, but the three elixir fields endured. In the lowest dantian, a few fingers below Tian’s navel, a fierce light still flickered. Mysteriously, the storage rings didn’t shift from where his fingers should have been. Neither did Grandpa Jun.

“I took life for myself, Brother Wang. I don’t know why I live, but I still want to soar. Brother Fu. Grandpa. Watch me fly.” Tian’s mind was fraying, lost in pain and despair, but not gone. He still had a spark of will left in him. That little irreducible fraction of fight that pain or and sickness and loneliness and fear never managed to eradicate. And it was enough to begin his counterattack.

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“After winter comes spring.”

The Advent of Spring was one of the supreme arts of Ancient Crane Mountain, created by the first disciple of the Ancient Crane herself. How could it be something simple? The art revolved through the ruined meridians and stimulated the breath of prenatal qi that burned brightly in the lower dantian. It drew in the yin qi, cold and ruthless, and warmed it.