Growth

— Whooosh! Fwish!

Every pass of the spear blade tore the air, and the heavy sound of it rang across the courtyard. I drove the point at the imaginary enemy in front of me.

— Shhk!

The spear shot out dead straight and ran him through. I steadied my breath and drew it back.

I can feel it clearly — my internal and external arts have been brought into harmony.

The spear moved as naturally as my own limbs. Lan, Na and Zha, the fundamentals, were second nature to me now, and Lanzha was coming under my hand as well. I was growing far stronger than I ever had in my past life, and a thought came to me out of nowhere. What would it have been like, if I had been this strong back then?

At the very least, I would not have been helpless.

When my father died, when the house fell, I could have put my own strength behind it somehow, and if I had, the weight on my heart might have sat a little lighter. The bitterness of it had me turning the spear over in my hands.

“Hooo—”

I let out a short sigh. I had done plenty of regretting at Blood Sand Plain. Is that not exactly why I repeat the same training every day, so that I never have to regret anything again? I was growing strong quickly, but I had no intention of settling for it. I wanted to be stronger than I was now. For that I needed to go back over my last fight, and I called up the battle at Guantao against the Red Headband Hall’s deputy boss.

He was strong, all right.

His martial prowess sat at mid second-rate, and he had trained in demonic arts on top of that. To come away from demonic qi without an internal injury, a man needed prowess at least a cut above his opponent’s, which put the bar at the far edge of second-rate. I had only just crossed into second-rate. If I fought him, I was certain to lose. And yet I fought him for a good long while, a man whose martial prowess stood above mine and who had trained in demonic arts besides.

There were two reasons. The first was that I used the spear for everything it was worth and never gave up my distance. The second was my house’s heart method, the art I had trained in.

Thanks to the demon-subduing property the Azure Dragon Art carries.

Every time his hand met my spear, the Azure Dragon Art’s true qi burned away the demonic qi working its way in. That the house’s heart method carried a demon-subduing efficacy was something I had long known; in my past life I fought no small number of demonic-arts men at Blood Sand Plain, and the art’s true qi had done its work well enough back then too.

But this time was different.

This went past merely holding the demonic qi off. The true qi answered every last thread of it that tried to get in and swallowed the stuff whole, the way a starving beast falls on prey. The force behind it was far stronger, far more overwhelming, than anything in my past life.

Why?

I drew the spear back and sank into thought. The martial arts I had trained in were the same. Past life or present, I had learned my house’s heart method and its spear art, and there was no chance the verses themselves were wrong; in either life I had them memorized without a single particle out of place.

And yet the force was different. Nothing about my training had changed, and still the result had. I had to find the reason. I was not about to let it pass unexplained.

On a battlefield, it’s the small things that decide who lives and who dies.

One man tied his bootlaces carelessly, trod on them when the time came to run, and lost his head for it. Another could not be bothered with a loosened seam in his armor, and a stray arrow found that exact gap and killed him. Variables had to be cut down as far as they could be cut. That was the lesson ten years of rolling around Blood Sand Plain had driven into my bones.

I turned over the differences between my past life and the present.

Is it because I’ve come into my attainment at an earlier age than in my past life?

In my past life my eyes did not open to the martial arts until after they dragged me to Blood Sand Plain. By the time I had thrashed my way into a harmony of internal and external arts, purely to stay alive, I was already close to thirty. This time I brought them into harmony before I was even twenty.

It came down to the vessel.

In my past life I only began gathering internal energy after my body’s prime had already passed. I had to force stiffened meridians open, and turbid qi piled up in the process, so the circulation of qi could only suffer.

But now it was different. In the season when vitality runs highest, Doctor Yu’s help had brought me to the best state I could be in.

It was the difference between setting a brush to paper decades old and yellowed to rot, and setting it to fresh paper. Rotted paper tears before it can even take up the ink, or lets it bleed where it pleases; fresh paper accepts the brush whole, exactly as it falls. The starting points were different, so the density and the purity of the power held inside could only differ as well.

But.

This alone isn’t enough.

Good physical condition on its own could hardly explain the Azure Dragon Art’s efficacy, which had refused the demonic arts entry outright and burned them away.

I stared into empty air. The thing that cannot be seen and yet certainly exists, that cannot be touched and yet is heard. The greatest difference between my past life and this one was whether that voice existed at all.

Every time the voice came, I grew stronger. It was not merely a matter of force increasing; it pulled forward, in a single stroke, the fruits of training that would otherwise take thousands of swings of the spear or a body worked to ruin. And it was not only the body. Internal energy was the same.

That was the voice that came every time I ran the Azure Dragon Art. Just as it said, the internal energy gathering in my dantian was clean and clear beyond any comparison with before. If my past life had been muddy water, this was lake water you could see straight down through.

It was perfect refinement.

Internal energy gathered so pure it held not a single speck was not something the Azure Dragon Art could manage on its own. I had trained in it for more than ten years in my past life and had never once met with anything like this. The capacity had almost certainly come from the voice.

I’ve stumbled into a tremendous fortuitous encounter.

The corners of my mouth went up before I knew it. Thanks to the voice, my body was not the only thing that had grown; the quality and the nature of my internal energy had strengthened as well. That purity, plainly, was what had driven the Azure Dragon Art’s native demon-subduing power to its limit.

Body, technique, and internal energy besides. The voice was making an ideal martial artist of me.

I gripped the spear shaft tight.

With this strength…

I could protect my family. No, I would go further than merely protecting them.

My father’s death, my brother’s wound, the fall of the house. Every tragedy I had lived through because my strength fell short, I would not allow a single one of them in this life. For that I could not settle; I had to throw myself harder into the training and build strength.

I closed my eyes and kept digging into the fight with the Red Headband Hall’s deputy boss. The memory of that day came up sharp again. The heavy shock travelling up the shaft, the Azure Dragon Art’s true qi answering the demonic qi pouring off him, all of it replayed inside my head as vividly as the moment itself.

The instant the demonic qi moved to work into my body, the Azure Dragon Art answered. Like a dragon breaking up through a storm into open sky, it burst out of my dantian and burned the demonic qi away. The internal energy that surged up explosively burned it off and ran through my meridians without check.

Wait.

Something was off. Having burned the demonic qi away, the true qi had run wild, all but bolting, and its flow differed subtly from the verses of the Azure Dragon Art as I knew them. By rights it should have passed the Qihai acupoint and flowed on to Guanyuan. But the true qi that day had gone in a different order. It had reached out first to Zhongji, not to Guanyuan.

I had been running the heart method in a way that departed from the verses.

And there’s nothing wrong with it.

Ordinarily, moving true qi in defiance of the verses ended with an internal injury if you were lucky, and with qi deviation if you were not¹. But the true qi turned without a single blockage. No, it ran far more naturally than the original verses ever had. Like a stopped-up watercourse bursting open and the floodwater pouring through, the flow of qi grew explosively faster.

My heart started pounding. The instinct came over me that I had just made a great discovery.

I may have found a lost piece of how this heart method is run.

Nothing else explained it. I had run the heart method differently from the established form, and the qi had no business flowing without a block. Failing that, it would mean I had raised the heart method a stage higher myself… and for a man who is no Grand Master, the odds of that ran no better than finding a needle in a desert.

Best to check first.

I sat down where I stood and settled into a cross-legged seat. Eyes closed, I drew the energy up out of my dantian and, departing from the established verses, let the true qi run from the Qihai acupoint to Zhongji.

— WHOOOOSH!

The true qi tore along the acupoints. The flow met no trouble at all; it went on along them without a block, as though this had been its own road from the start.

Certainty came over me. What I had just worked out suited the Azure Dragon Art better than the old way of circulating it.

I gave my body over to that flow. The true qi went round the meridians of my whole body like floodwater through a broken bank, and the fine acupoints that had been blocked nearby opened anew. My body heated up, and strength welled in me.

I finished a full circulation far faster than the original Azure Dragon Art ever had. The voice rang inside my head.

“…!”

My eyes flew open. The voice had said something new.

Until now, everything I had heard while training the heart method had been about my understanding of internal energy rising and its quality improving. This time was different. It was wording I had never once heard, and I wanted to know how much I had grown.

I took hold of the spear at once, and the weight of it came into my palm like a heavy lump of iron. I stood in the middle of the courtyard, closed my eyes, and drew the true qi up along the new path I had just realized.

— WHOOOOSH!

The internal energy surging up from my dantian raced along the meridians all the way to my arms. Not a thread of it caught or scattered on the way. I had never particularly felt anything catching before either, but the newly learned way of circulating the Azure Dragon Art, together with the internal energy that the voice’s capacity had strengthened, was on another level entirely. I had only to think it, and at the turn of my will the internal energy moved at once.

Light.

The iron spear had not grown lighter. The internal energy had spread evenly through my whole body, into the hand on the spear, the wrist, the shoulder, the waist.

I swung the spear lightly.

— Whum!

The iron spear, heavy until now, had turned light in my hands. To put it with a little exaggeration, it felt like holding the wooden one.

“Hah!”

With a shout I drove the spear out.

— Thwip!

The spear tip stretched out in a straight line without a tremor. It was a simple thrust, and yet its speed and its force were beyond comparison with before. A clean Zha, with nothing wasted in it.

Oh, that’s good.

Feeling like this, I could have swung it dozens of times more without tiring. The sense of having grown stronger settled in me all over again, and a smile spread across my mouth.

I drew the spear back and set my stance again.

— Whooooosh.

A wind blew, and a pear blossom petal fell.

— Whirl! Whish! Fwap!

Lan, Na, Zha. The three actions unfolded in an instant, and the spear tip split the falling pear blossom petal.

— Snick.

The white petal that had been drifting in the air came apart. What had been one petal fell to the ground in eight pieces.

“…Hooo.”

I let out a long breath and drew the spear back.

So it can be done.

The sensation coming through my grip was electric. I had put the spear out on a hunch that it might just work, and I had not expected to actually pull it off. It came of the new way of circulating the Azure Dragon Art, and of the internal energy the voice had changed. A running of qi with no waste in it, efficient. That was the true force of the new Azure Dragon Art. Keep growing like this, and by about the time I turned twenty I could comfortably be a first-rate martial artist.

Then I can protect my family with my own hands.

A resolve that had been vague now sharpened until it felt near enough to close a hand on. But it was too early to be satisfied. Everything I had gained today, I had to make my own.

It was fine. The day was not over yet.

I raised the spear again.