Chapter 50- Cutting to the Heart of Things

Use your needle! Forget the light body technique, use Heavenly Swallows and jab at the cuts.

Grandpa Jun sounded urgent. Tian didn’t question it. The needle dropped into his hand and the art circulated. The needle collided with the tearing metal qi with a sharp chime. The qi broke. The tiger made a chuffing noise and sent three more. Tian blocked another, but the two coming high and low forced him to step off his spear-nest and onto a glave rising from a nest of halberds tucked into a tall grass of pin-sharp spikes.

Tian wanted to make a snarky comment about the idiocy of practicing a throwing dart art with stabbing. It’s just that he couldn’t seem to catch a moment to get the words out. Besides, it was actually working. The tiger’s qi was unholy-sharp and the only way his dart was going to survive was if Tian poured metal vital energy into it. And not just pouring it in, he had to pour it in just the right way. It had to circulate. Rigid, sharp, and filled with a circulating energy. The shock of the impact transmitted through the metal and into his body. Absorbed and dispersed by his flesh.

It didn’t take long for Tian to reach the ragged edge of his focus and endurance. Every move had to be perfect. A lack of perfection was no different than death. His focus had to be total, yet divided between movement and defense. The synchronization of breath, intent, motion, the circulation of energy, all had to be flawless.

The damned tiger was laughing. It would make little chuffing noises and send extra claws whenever he made a mistake. Tian couldn’t decide who he hated more- the tiger for punishing him, or himself for making the mistakes.

Sweat dripped into his eyes. How long had it been since he really sweated? Even the runs through the desert hadn’t tested him like this. Metal generating water. Hah.

He blinked hard, trying to keep his vision sharp. Something clicked. Something in that moment, that gesture, clicked.

Metal overcomes wood, but it also reinforces it. Wood gives flexibility and resilience. Water is flow, the birth of energy. His feet danced across daggers and axes as an elemental diagram formed in his mind.

It begins in spring. Wood rises from the cold earth, drawing on the stored water and nutrition, rested. Reaching for the fire of the summer extreme yang. Flexibility, resilience, growth, reaching for inspiration, for joy and spontaneity.

His needle shifted its movements slightly. His hand absorbed the impact more gently, and returned to place more sharply. His steps were vigorous. Precise but daring.

Yang reaches its peak in late summer, the time of earth and the beginning of the yin phase. Growth changes over to reproduction, the yielding of fruit and the harvesting of grain. Earth was still missing from his arts. He would soon have it.

Then comes autumn, the last of the harvests as the energy slowly condenses and returns to the ground. Metal chilling in the nights. The sharp air piercing through the summer heat, cutting down the plants who have given everything they had to the next generation. Not destroying them, returning them to the earth to nurture what comes next. No room for error now. The starving time would be on you soon.

Tian’s motions were sharp. There was a hidden richness and warmth to them. It was a precision born of someone who cared about what came next, not from a need to destroy what was already there.

Then winter, the cold water seeping into the ground. The necessary death and stillness allowing energy to gather before the birth of spring. The condensation of autumn’s efforts. Whether it was a slow death or a time of healing was down to that preparation. Because either way, winter would absorb everything it was given. Water accepted it all. Water flowed.

Tian flowed too. His coordination reached a new height. There was no distinction between attack and defense, between advance and retreat. He was the center of the wheel, the pivot on the balance arm. Ragged breaths slowed and came under control. His steps slowed. Still precise, but unhurried. He moved where he had to, and only if he had to. There was a restrained power to his movements now.

Soon he could stand still under the bombardment of qi cuts. His dart traveled high and low, but it didn’t miss. Tian stood stably on the razor’s edge. There was a pause in the storm of cuts. His hand shot forward, the dart flying like a diving swallow towards the tiger. The tiger chuffed and caught the dart between two long claws.

The White Tiger flicked the dart back at Tian so fast, it vanished from sight. No matter. Tian snagged it from the air with a casual grab as the metal qi in the room dissolved. The guardian was defeated. Tian paid it no mind. He was already dropping into lotus, determined to preserve what he was feeling in his mind.

How long had people been telling him everything was connected? That nothing was all one thing, that it was about a balance of all the elements? Yin and Yang gave birth to the elements, yes, but the elements were an endless mystery in their own right. The interactions contained literally infinite subtleties. How could they not? They made up the whole damn universe! And they made up him.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.