Chapter 06 – Accepting Reality

The local epidemic continued to run rampant for another few weeks. Many more villagers died without any way to save them.

Despite searching, no one could any set pattern among those died and those who survived. The illness seemed to kill both young and old indiscriminately. And yet, some young and old did recover from it as well. The reasons for either of them was almost impossible to guess.

Eventually however, nearly three months after the whole incident had started, things started to settle down.

Many died. Many survived. Many were unaffected by the ordeal entirely.

Regardless, everyone grieved in unison.

Shen Jian sat on a chair in the main room of his house, staring unblinking at the pot on the table in front of him.

His parents’ ashes.

He didn’t remember cremating them. He didn’t remember what even properly happened after he woke up to their deaths on his birthday. All his memories after that day were filled with a haze, as if he was a bystander in his own life.

Shen Jian had cried. He had cried himself to sleep for many days and nights in a row, stuck in a perpetual state of grief and loss.

More than a month had passed since then. Now his eyes were all out of tears, his mind felt dull and slow. He existed in a state of just living. Mechanically feeding and watering himself every day, not feeling well enough to do anything else.

He slept. He slept a lot.

Shen Jian was depressed.

In his rare moments of lucidity, he pondered on his own attitude towards death. While he had felt and still did feel almost indifferent towards his own death, it was startling how much the death of others affected him. Both ways had the same result, that he would never meet those people ever again. And yet, one of the two still felt significantly more miserable than the other.

Just like now. As he sat and stared at the pot of ashes in front of him, he would occasionally wish that it was him that took their place, that they didn’t deserve their death.

At other moments though, he felt a burning anger. Towards himself. For it was he who brought the source of their death to their house. If he hadn’t brought the toxic meat, his parents would still have been alive and well.

Thoughts of self-harm would appear once in a while, the remnants of his conscience struggling to hold them back.

Such thoughts would pass his mind every now and then. But after so long though, all of those thoughts went away, leaving bitter emptiness in their place.

A sudden knock on the door disturbed the quiet atmosphere of the house.

Shen Jian raised his head and stared dully at the door. A part of him was expecting another bleeding heart that wanted to ‘take him in’ and care for him in his parents’ place like the last few people who’d visited.

Another knock resounded. He sluggishly got up and went to the door and opened it slowly.

An awkward looking teen a few years older than him stood. He looked at Shen Jian and scratched his cheek. “Shen Jian, um…”

The younger child looked at him silently.

The teen let out a fake cough and started speaking. “Could you, um… could you please hunt a beast for us? My mother wanted some meat. We’ll pay, of course! It’s just… no one else…”

Shen Jian could tell just from looking at the teen that he was from one of the rare few families that didn’t have any victims from the illness. A tinge of anger and envy coloured his mind but it disappeared just as quickly.

The teen’s incoherent babbling was cut off as Shen Jian closed the door. The teen stood silently for a few seconds before his shoulders slumped. “I guess that’s a no…”

But before he could leave, the door opened again and Shen Jian came out with a pack on his back and his sword on his hip. Without a word to the teen, he locked the door and proceeded towards the sparse forest.

The teen still stood in place, confused. “Is that a yes then?”

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Shen Jian went hunting. His first kill was nothing special. His movements were mechanical, practised. His body moved as if on autopilot, dodging the giant deer’s attack with ease before his sword slashed and stabbed efficiently. Within a minute, the beast was dead, bleeding from a stab hole in its head.

After dumping it near the village, he went back into the forest again. He found a doe this time. And it was just as aggressive as all the other beasts in the forest.

As he idly dodged the beast’s attacks, a strange fiery feeling rose in his chest. His mind started to get heated, and he felt delayed frustration and stress fill his body.

After he dodged the doe’s latest attempt to stomp him to death, Shen Jian suddenly sheathed his sword.

Then he reared his hand and outright punched the beast in its snout.

The beast was clearly startled, evident by the way it backed off for a moment. But he didn’t give a single moment of rest.

Pouncing towards the beast with vicious energy, Shen Jian let loose an uppercut that hit the beast’s lower jaw. Taking advantage of its dazed state, he climbed up the beast’s back and wrapped his legs around its neck as much as he could.

Then he proceeded to punch the doe’s head again and again.

His fists, stronger than any non-cultivator had any right to be, pounded into the beast’s skull. Even as the animal bucked and spun, he didn’t stop punching it repeatedly.

At some point, his fists became bloody. The doe’s struggles slowed, its feet stumbled as if drunk. Moments later, it crashed to the ground.

But Shen Jian didn’t stop punching.

“Aaaaaaaahhhhhhh!!” His mouths opened in a long cry as he hit again and again and again-

He stopped. His fist had not connected with the beast. It had connected with the ground.

He had punched the beast’s jaw off.

Breathing heavily, feeling like he’d exerted himself more than expected, the scent of blood and gore reached his nose. His mind truly alert for the first time in a long while, Shen Jian looked at his surroundings and the mess he’d made.

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

He let out a long breath.

Getting off the beast, he began to pull it back towards the village. Once there, Shen Jian passed it off to the harvesters who were busy with his earlier kill. They peered at the deformed snout of the beast, then at his still bloody fist. None of them said a word.

Reaching home, he cleaned himself, made himself a light dinner and went to bed.

He woke up covered in oily black residue.

He sighed.

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Perhaps because he’d punched away all his built-up stress, perhaps because he finally gave his body some exercise or perhaps because he woke up with ejected impurities again after a long time, whatever the case, Shen Jian felt somewhat ready to spend his day properly once more.

He was still depressed, of course. He still felt the urge to just curl up and close his eyes. But he still forced himself to move regardless of it. Even though he felt unmotivated, his recently reawakened logical mind told him how bad it was to return to that state, to those thoughts.

Thankfully, the subject he planned to immerse himself in was something he’d been waiting to do for almost a decade now.

Cultivation.

Just thinking about the fact that he would truly set foot onto the path of mysticism and martial arts got him excited. After all, though he’d already transcended the realm of human normality with his abnormal strength, the path of cultivation was something else entirely. It was something more… magical.

It was enough to give his mind the strength to move forward once more.

Unfortunately however, he knew that the first step on this path was one of excruciating boredom.

Meditation.

Because even with all his otherworldly knowledge, the most basic step in this process usually tended to be meditation, during which one would first sense, then work to absorb and accumulate whatever mystical spiritual energy lingered in the air.

Though all of that was just experimental conjecture.

Regardless, he committed himself to that process.

Since he no longer had any set schedule to follow aside from his own – he suppressed the twinge in his heart at that thought – Shen Jian chose a peaceful day in which he went to the back of the house where he sat cross-legged on the ground, his hands laid loosely on his thighs.

With the gentle morning sun’s rays washing over him, a few clouds moving across the sky providing the occasional shade, he closed his eyes and started to focus on his breathing.

And within mere minutes, Shen Jian… fell asleep.

When he woke up, the clouds were all gone and the high noon sun was bearing down on him unbearably.

He pursed his lips, annoyed.

A beautiful day went to waste.

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Unexpectedly, Shen Jian’s first obstacle on his path was not sensing the energy in the air but to actually put himself into a state where that was even possible, the state he named ‘meditation trance’.

In other words, he needed to learn to meditate.

He was rightfully annoyed by this disruption. Mostly because he felt he’d wasted some time because meditation was a skill that he could have learned by himself even before he was ten.

But then again, he’d promised himself not to experiment in any form and meditation was still one of those forms.

The only experience he did have with it was from his time when he was a baby who couldn’t move on his own. Back then, the sheer boredom had made him fall into long bouts of introspection and self-thought, an offshoot of true meditation.

Nevertheless, he set himself to learn meditation. Every day after his chores and duties, he would sit cross-legged in a lotus position on the floor of his house, his eyes closed, trying to regulate his breathing and focus on it.

It took a long while. His first few efforts were failures because he’d fall asleep in the process. After he learned to keep himself awake, he struggled to focus on only his own breathing without any errant thoughts.

This second step felt especially difficult because his mind was still plagued by thoughts of his late parents and his memories with them. More than once, he’d ended up with tears in his eyes because he’d strayed from his meditation and fell into past memories.

It took months to get himself into something even resembling a proper mindset. It was difficult to instil such mental discipline into himself but he still succeeded.

In the process, his grieving mind was slowly transitioning into accepting reality for what it was. That his parents were truly gone and he needed to move on.

One way or another, Shen Jian finally became proficient enough in meditation that he focused on nothing but his breath. And with more practise, he began to focus on nothingness itself.

Months after he’d first began, he finally entered a state where he felt he could begin to make some progress towards his desired path.

The next step was to sense the mystical energy that he hypothesized was everywhere around him. Since this was the first true step to what he considered the supernatural, he didn’t quite have any idea how to go about this step.

The only thing he could do was continue to meditate, extending his mental and spiritual senses out blindly in the hope of being able to find something.

In a surprising turn of events, he found something relatively quickly, in merely a few days. He perceived what seemed to be something almost gas-like flowing around him, an ethereal and invisible companion to the air itself. It gave him a strange feeling, as if it embodied the word ‘neutrality’.

Though excited and a bit perplexed, he curbed his feelings and moved on to the next step, to absorb the energy into himself.

He stumbled onto another obstacle. Because the energy simply refused to move. No matter his thoughts or mental exertions, the energy flowed on its path peacefully without any changes.

Thankfully, this was an obstacle that didn’t last very long. After two weeks of waving his mental limbs and setting his mind to an inviting state, the energy slowly began to move from its path. Slowly, he learned to gradually nudge the energy towards his body, coaxing it to enter him.

The first time the energy entered him, Shen Jian felt like his senses opened up. For a fleeting moment, he felt like he could perceive his own body in its entirety.

Sadly, it didn’t last. Just as he moved the energy into his body, it continued to move without stopping and left his body.

The mystical feeling he’d felt was gone, along with the energy. Instead of feeling strengthened, he felt oddly weakened, as if he’d ran around until he’d exhausted himself.

Shen Jian felt confused and irritated. Not knowing what to do, he decided to give up for the day and continue the next.

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His following attempts did not have any success either. Though he could guide the energy into his body, he couldn’t make it stay in his body. It always dissipated after some time.

He’d tried to devote some mental power to keep it inside by nudging it in circles within but that didn’t serve any purpose. After all, with the focus he was giving to keeping the energy, he was literally unable to do anything else. Even moving around was impossible without letting go of the energy.

At one point, he suspected that he was storing it in the wrong place. Instead of keeping the energy in his chest, he moved it into his belly. The main reason for this was his otherworldly knowledge pointing to the possible existence of a so-called ‘dantian’, an apparent core where the energy could be stored.

It didn’t work. The energy continued to dissipate.

He tried to compress the energy. He reasoned that perhaps compressing lots of energy in his dantian would permanently bind it into him.

It still didn’t work. The energy still continued to dissipate.

Shen Jian didn’t know what was the problem. If his knowledge of cultivation novels was true, then if he was successful in binding the energy to himself, he would rise a level in his cultivation similar to how a video game character would rise from level 1 to level 2. In most novels he’d read, cultivation was similarly organized into levels.

However for some reason, he was unable to raise his level of cultivation. Every time he brought the energy into himself, he was able to ‘peek’ at the first level of cultivation but he was unable to enter it.

He didn’t know what he was doing wrong.

Days passed. Weeks passed. Months passed.

Shen Jian continued to fail.

Even after almost a year after his parents’ passing, he was still unable to even place the first step on his desired path.

With each successive failure, his motivation began to crumble. The excitement he’d had at the beginning waned and he felt more and more bitter.

Shen Jian slowly fell into depression again.

At some point, he started to think of giving up.

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As the setting sun’s rays gradually turned the sky red, high in the sky just below the clouds, a large sword flew.

Upon the sword stood two people. One was a tall man with a middle-aged appearance and a few grey hairs among the predominantly black mane. Wearing a grey robe, he looked average in most aspects.

Behind him stood a young girl of around 12 years old, clinging to his waist and trying not to look down. With her black hair tied in a ponytail and green eyes squeezed shut, the girl was clearly not comfortable with the method of travel.

As they continued to fly through the sky, the man suddenly frowned. He flicked his hand and a flat circular jade token appeared in his hand.

He peered at the token for a long moment before his eye twitched. His eyes flickered to the girl clinging to him and pursed his lips. He let out a sigh.

“Change of plans.” He suddenly spoke.

“Huh?” The girl was startled and looked up at him.

“There is a small problem in the sect at the moment. Bringing you there right now will put you in danger.” He said without any inflection.

The girl was stunned. “Then… then what do I do?”

He didn’t answer her immediately. Instead, his eyes scanned the ground below. Under the red sky, he soon spotted a village situated between a two forests of varying densities.

The speed of the flying sword slowed as the man observed the village for a while. Then he nodded decisively “This place will do.”