Chapter 03 – Not So Ordinary

Under the rays of the late afternoon sun, at the edge of a wide clearing in the sparse forest…

Shen Jian ran full speed at the tree in front of him. When he reached it, he placed his foot on its trunk and, by sheer momentum, proceeded to run up the tree.

Reaching a significant height in mere seconds, Shen Jian just barely missed the whoosh of wind that passed below him as a set of giant antlers slammed into the tree he was climbing. At the same time, he stabbed his sword into the tree trunk.

Hanging from his sword’s hilt as if it was a tree branch with his feet on the trunk, he focused for a moment on the dazed giant deer below him. Then he put strength into his feet and blasted off the trunk with his sword pulled out and held in his hand.

Not a moment later, the boy hit the deer’s head sword first, the blade tip going right between its eyes and deep inside.

A few seconds later, the trembling deer slumped to the ground. Shen Jian kept his sword in its head for a few seconds more before he yanked it out and leaped back.

After confirming his kill, he let out a sigh of satisfaction. He bent down and used some leaves to wipe the blood off his blade before putting it in its sheath. He stretched his hands above his head and closed his eyes as he relished in the feeling of a job well done.

The thrill of the hunt was something Shen Jian had come to love since his very first experience with the boar. The feeling of his life being on the line, the adrenaline surging through his veins, his heart beating like a drum… Although he wouldn’t call it euphoric, it was something near to that.

Shen Jian hoped that he didn’t become a reckless battle junkie though. He wanted to have fun with his life and constantly seeking out ways to potentially kill himself was not the healthiest of lifestyles.

Opening his eyes, Shen Jian looked at the giant dead deer on the ground. He circled it once before he cracked his knuckles.

Then he went in front of its head, grabbed its antlers with both hands and started to drag it towards the village.

Shen Jian had noticed long ago that he was stronger than what a person his age should be. Now almost at the age of ten, he had gone far beyond that and was even stronger than multiple full-grown men put together.

He was not entirely sure of the reason for such strength either. Somewhat obviously, it was related to the physical training he’d done while growing. His bodily impurities had even been ejected after all so it wasn’t too much of a surprise that he was strong.

That is, while keeping in mind that he was in a strange cultivation world and not plain old Earth.

The reason for his uncertainty was because he didn’t think he’d done anything particularly special in his training. Surely, there were other children who were either forced to train by their parents or trained by themselves when they were young. Perhaps they trained even harder than him.

Did all such children have strength like his?

He didn’t know. And at the moment, he had no way to find out either.

Shen Jian reached the village just as the sun was beginning to set. Dumping his cargo near the edge of the village, he walked straight towards a middle-aged man who was scratching his chin as he stared at the animal the child before him had just brought.

The man chuckled as Shen Jian reached him. “Amazing as always.”

The child covered a yawn as he pointed with his thumb at his catch. “Can I leave him to you, uncle?”

The old hunter smiled and nodded his head. “Of course, same as always. I’ll have someone send your portion to your house.”

Stopping another yawn from escaping his mouth, Shen Jian nodded and waved his hand. “Thanks, uncle. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

The man laughed as he patted the boy’s head. “Yes, yes. I’ll see you tomorrow, our little strongman.”

Little strongman. Shen Jian tried not to cringe as he hurried away from the scene. It was the nickname the villagers had given him after seeing how abnormally strong he was for his age.

Shen Jian himself however found the name to be unbearably lame. He didn’t like it.

But he didn’t make a fuss about it either. His mind was that of a grown man despite his stature and he wasn’t the type to cause trouble just because the nickname given to him was lame.

Or at least, that was what he told himself whenever he heard someone call him that.

Reaching his home, he let himself in while shouting out, “I’m back, mother!”

“Welcome home!” A replying shout came from inside before his mother came into sight.

With her black hair in a bun, amber eyes that he inherited from her and a smile on her face, his mother Shen Qi was definitely a pretty woman but sadly not the most youthful as evidenced by the wrinkles starting to appear on her face.

“What did you do today?” She asked with a smile as she came forward and gave him a hug.

Flustered from the intimate contact, Shen Jian put his hands around her for a moment before he faux struggled out of her hold and looked away. “I got a male deer today.”

Mother Shen clapped in excitement. “Oh, well done! The antlers will be useful for medicine and should fetch a good price with a merchant.”

Shen Jian tried not to roll his eyes. She always said the same thing whenever he caught a deer and he’d caught them many times before.

But well, he wouldn’t bring down his mother’s excitement. Compared to his previous life’s mother who was always on the brink of fainting from stress, having a mother who was satisfied with her life and happy most of the time was a boon.

As usual, he let pass the moment of regret he felt whenever he thought of his previous life’s parents.

“Oh!” His mother suddenly exclaimed “Do you have time tomorrow? I was planning on cleaning and reorganizing the storage cellar. Can you help me, Jian?” She asked with a smile.

“Of course.” He replied immediately. It wasn’t every day that he had a chance to look through the storage. The one time he’d tried to do so alone, he’d almost gotten swallowed by the cobwebs down there.

“Mm! Then tomorrow after breakfast.” She nodded happily and sneaked in another quick hug before she left the room.

Shen Jian shuffled for a moment and tried to ease the flustered feelings he felt. Although his personality had changed a little from his past life, he was still a bit of an introvert and open expressions of intimacy left him slightly uncomfortable.

He was still much better than his previous life though. Perhaps because of his mother’s clinginess, he was significantly more relaxed with hugs and such than before where he would hurriedly find ways to break out of the embrace in the fastest way possible.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Shaking his head, he made his way towards his room with random thoughts of what he would find in the cellar tomorrow.

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The cellar of the Shen house was nothing grand. It was simply an underground room that no one entered most of the time and had thus built up an immense amount of dust and cobwebs. Buried under all of those cobwebs however were a random assortment of wooden crates, wooden barrels and many other small boxes.

“Are you ready?” Mother Shen asked, holding a broom as if it was a spear.

“Yes!” Shen Jian replied, dual wielding two feather dusters.

By mutual agreement, Shen Jian and his mother first decided to clear out all the dust in the room. Thankful for the fact that the door to the cellar was outside the house instead of inside, the two of them tied a cloth around their mouth and nose and proceeded to clean the entire room.

For a few hours, thin clouds of dust poured out of the cellar door accompanied by the sounds of occasional coughs.

Once the cleaning part of the work was done, the two then started to organize the jumbled assemblage of items.

Shen Jian took this opportunity to see if there was any hidden treasure in the pile of junk. But perhaps as expected, he didn’t find any such thing. Most of the things in the room fell into the category of sentimental junk and not very interesting.

Thankfully however, his mother was there to tell him stories about many of the things they found.

“Oh! I remember these sandals!”

“Is there something special about those shoes, mother?”

“You see, one day when I was younger, I was with my friends on a path next to the river. It had just rained the day before and the path was muddy. Because of that, I slipped and fell.”

“Into the river?!”

“Oh no, dear. I just fell on the ground. But my right sandal went flying into the river.”

“Both of them are here now though.”

“Yes. You see, those days were around the time when your father was doing very silly things to get my attention. And when my sandal fell into the river, your father just so happened to be nearby.”

“Ah. Then he dived into the river to get your shoe?”

“He did! He took off his shirt and dived into the river gallantly like he was rescuing a drowning princess. And in just a couple minutes, he came back up with my sandal.”

“Ooh!”

“But in the process, he seemed to have lost something himself.”

“… Hmm?”

“Yes. Your father pulled himself out of the water with my sandal in hand. With water dripping off him, he walked towards me triumphantly and held it out to me with a big smile on his face. But…”

“But?”

“The stitches of the old pants he was wearing seemed to have snapped off when he was swimming and he hadn’t noticed.”

“… Oh no.”

“So there he stood. In front of me and my friends, holding out my sandal with not a shred of cloth on his body and absolutely no shame on his face.”

“…”

Shen Jian buried his face in his hands, trying and failing to suppress the second-hand embarrassment he was feeling while his mother laughed heartily, undaunted by his trembling shoulders.

In an effort to get away from the image in his head, Shen Jian dived back into the storage, seeing if he could find something to distract him.

Unexpectedly however, he did find something interesting. Tucked away at the bottom of a wooden barrel was what seemed like a small fabric box.

Reaching in and pulling it out, Shen Jian found himself looking at a brocade box. Although the colour of the fabric had faded, he admired the dull green background and nearly faded silver flower motifs on it.

He tried opening the box but for some reason, it wouldn’t open.

Not wanting to break the box with excessive strength, Shen Jian walked to where his mother was to see if she knew anything about the box.

“Mother! Do you know how to open this box?” He called out to her.

Shen Qi looked up from where she was and observed the brocade box he held out to her. Taking it in her hand, she was confused for a long moment before her face became one of realization.

“I remember this…” She mumbled softly.

“What is it?” Shen Jian asked curiously.

“It’s something my mother passed to me some time before she passed away.” She said, her face in a daze.

“Grandmother?” He was slightly surprised. Shen Jian had never seen his maternal nor paternal grandparents before and somehow, that fact had slipped his mind for all these years.

Mother Shen nodded. “Your father’s parents passed away a couple years after we married because of the many injuries they’d had as hunters. But my mother and father had me very late into their marriage. Even then, my father died just before I was born. My mother only gave birth to me after settling down in this village when she was in her late thirties.”

“This village…?” There was something implied there that he caught on to.

His mother nodded again. “My mother came to this village with a merchant when she was pregnant. After settling down here, I was born and grew up in this village. Maybe because of the late pregnancy, she became very weak after that and just when I was in my teenage years, she also passed away.”

Shen Jian scratched the back of his neck. It was uncomfortable to hear of his grandparents dying one after another.

“But…” She smiled all of a sudden. “Mother had always insisted that I give my child my family’s surname, Shen. It was good luck that your father not only accepted that condition but also changed his surname to mine. That doesn’t usually happen, you know?”

Realizing that she had gotten off topic, she shook her head and looked at the box again.

“This box…” Mother Shen started again. “… was something she personally gave me just before she passed away. I remember her telling me there was some medicine in the box that I should take if I’m ever very sick.”

“Medicine?” Shen Jian was confused. Why store medicines in a brocade box? The box even looked expensive.

“At the time, I hadn’t actually checked what was in it because I was too lost in grief over my mother’s death but… I remember her telling me there was some secret latch to open this…” She fiddled with the box, poking around the hinges before she exclaimed softly “Yes! Like this!” After hearing a click from the box, she opened it slowly.

Immediately, Shen Jian’s nose caught a strong smell. It was a peculiar mix of a herb-like smell and something artificial that he’d never smelled before.

When he looked at the box held in his mother’s hand however, he was shocked. He and his similarly shocked mother stared wide-eyed at the contents of the box.

Within the box, upon a soft dark cloth laid three bright green pills side by side, each about an inch in diameter. They had a faint shine to them along with a very faint trail of fragrance wafting from them.

“Are those-?” Shen Jian muttered in disbelief.

“Pills.” Shen Qi whispered reverently.

Something Shen Jian had learned from the village doctor was that civilian medicine, despite usually being moulded into small balls, were not called pills. They were simply called medicine.

Pills however referred specifically to the wide variety of medicines and supplements created by alchemists. They were distinguished from the common medicine by the faint shine they had over their surface, as opposed to normal medicine which tended to look like a rough ball of dough. And that was without considering any other more spiritual indicators it had.

To cultivators, pills were common consumables that they used all the time.

To civilians however, they were miracle drugs and luxury goods that were traded for high prices in cities and civilian establishments.

They were most certainly not something one expected to find in a storage cellar of a house in a remote village.

“Was grandmother a cultivator?” Shen Jian asked once he’d gotten over his shock a little.

“I… I don’t know? She was always normal as long as I’d known her.” Mother Shen replied in a faint voice.

They were silent for a moment, just staring at the pills in the box before Shen Jian noticed something and spoke out.

“There’s something under the cloth.” He said pointing at the edge of the cloth where something shiny was visible underneath.

Nodding, the mother put the box on her lap gently and slowly rolled up the cloth, taking great care not to even shake the pills on top.

Upon lifting the cloth, the two found themselves staring at a small token made of… jade? Shen Jian wondered if the shiny deep green gem-like material was jade.

Inscribed on the token was an image. The image had a large sturdy-looking mountain in the centre. To one side of the mountain, there was a fire raging towards it. On the other side, there was a tidal wave crashing towards it. Below the mountain, cracks that seemed to represent earthquakes or fissures were spreading towards it. Above the mountain, clouds loomed with two bolts of lightning striking down towards it.

In the middle of it all, the mountain remained pristine and sturdy, standing tall through it all.

Shen Jian and his mother stared at the token blankly. With no words inscribed to explain anything, neither of them had any clue what the token represented.

The boy and his mother looked at each other speechlessly. They had no idea what to do with this discovery they’d made.

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In the end, the Shen mother and son decided to stash the brocade box upstairs in Shen Jian’s bedroom in a small hidden spot. Initially, mother Shen wanted to give the pills to her son since it was no secret that he wanted to enter the world of cultivation but Shen Jian refused.

According to Shen Jian’s grandmother’s instructions to his mother, the pills were to be consumed only when someone was sick. He inferred from those instructions that the pills were healing or curing pills meant only to treat wounds or sickness. As such, they wouldn’t be useful to Shen Jian who did not have any such sickness but instead wanted to just cultivate.

As for the jade token, Shen Jian had several ideas but couldn’t verify any of them. Referring to his previous life’s knowledge on novels, the jade token could possibly be used for identification, to store martial arts techniques or could even be used as some sort of communication tool.

He didn’t know. He could only wait and hope to find out in the future.

For the time being, Shen Jian eagerly anticipated his tenth birthday. There were only a few months left and he almost couldn’t wait to begin his cultivation attempts.

He had patiently restrained himself from experimenting for so many years. And now he was almost ready to begin.

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Far in the distance, a giant bird flew in the sky. In its path lay a towering mountain.