Er Xin was left far behind after less than a day, and soon, open fields became dense forests - poplars, pines, and the odd pear tree all intermingled to form a dense woodland surrounding them. Above, the canopy loomed like hungry beasts - below, the road had long seen disuse, grass poking up from breaks in the hard-packed dirt. The way-posts they passed had been ill maintained, if maintained at all. They were heading further into the wilds than Xiao Fan had ever been, and further than she had ever imagined she would go. It was exciting, in that strange distant way many of her emotions were, like her body was feeling what her mind could only dream of.
However, near the day's close, the cart began to head down a forest trail with a notable incline - and in the distance, a tall outcropping of stony hillside loomed. A waterfall trickled from its peak down into a body of water yet unseen. Xiao Fan had since abandoned her lax posture, now sitting upon the rice, rather than laying. All around her, nature seemed more foreboding than it ever had, but fear was absent from her body. Zhichao Tingfeng seemed trustworthy; surely they were going to the right place, wherever that may be.
It took an hour more, and they arrived at their destination as the sun set. There was a break in the trees, a circular clearing, large enough for a hamlet yet too small for a proper village. If anything, this was just as likely to be a bandit camp as anywhere else, or so she thought. And yet, there were structures, not mere tents or shacks. Some structures, anyways. The rest of them were mere debris.
Within the clearing sat a grand hall, with paper-windowed walls and beautiful, dark timber framing. It looked ancient, older than either of the two people on the cart combined, and there was a certain majesty to its venerable nature. It was surrounded vaguely by other, smaller buildings, some long and wide, some small and thin. Everything shared the same sort of make: walls of strong timber or, for smaller buildings, brick, with ceramic tiles forming the rooves. Each was decorated with ornate etchings, even the smallest building, the wooden support-posts engraved to resemble dragons near the top, birds in the center, and tigers near the bottom.
Every doorframe had a yellowed paper slip attached, Taoist calligraphy in cinnabar ink yet to wear away from the age of the place, or the elements.
The rest of the buildings - the majority of them, in truth - were rubble. Beautiful woodworking and masonry left in piles, the ashes of fires long burnt forming as burial mounds for the structures' hearts. These bore no fulu, unlike those that remained, but something still spoke of a kind of reverence in their untouched state. To be undisturbed for so long, after it had obviously been years since this place was destroyed... A chill went down Xiao Fan's spine.
Zhichao Tingfeng spoke up for the first time since they left Er Xin, not turning back to address his new student, but focusing his eyes towards the great hall in the center. The only other sound as he spoke was the falling water nearby - they were at the foot of that stony hill, and an otherwise placid lake was the end of the water's descent.
"Welcome to our temporary home, meimei. This place was once a great school for people like us - sadly, there was a fire, and it was abandoned. So it's ours now." The way he said this all only furthered Xiao Fan's unease, but she took a deep breath and let it roll free in an understanding sigh. She had so many questions, and Zhichao Tingfeng seemed like he was withholding something from her... But it wasn't the time. She had to force herself to wait.
The xia pulled their ox-cart in front of the temple, hopping from his seat and hitching the beast of burden to a well-used hitching post. Xiao Fan followed suit, hopping off the cart and gazing around in a mix of worry and wonder. A martial school. To see one in person was a rarity few could ever achieve... To train at one, albeit with one master and with the school in disrepair, was even more infrequent. Zhichao Tingfeng beckoned for her without looking, clearing his throat, simply expecting her to oblige him. She was compelled to and did so obediently, if only to keep herself from focusing on her surroundings.
He gestured towards the great hall: the walls of wood until waist-height, then transitioning to panes of paper. Some of the paper panes were punched out, or beginning to fall, or ripped; even still, it held an undeniable aura of authority. "Go in. I will unpack - I know where everything goes. When you get inside, go down the hallway until you reach an intersection, then go left. The first door on your right will be where you want to be. I'll see you soon."
No answer was given, nor was one expected - Zhichao Tingfen immediately began to trudge to the back of the cart, taking great sacks of rice and bundles of clothing in his arms, heading into the deserted ruins of the sect. Xiao Fan was left alone after only a few moments, and those moments were ill-spent, her eyes still glued to the hall before her. After her mentor's second return-trip, she forced herself into motion.
Her legs were more usable now than only a day ago - she could feel every movement she was making, every motion she impelled, and yet it still came effortlessly. One foot in front of the other; that was the way walking worked, right? It certainly seemed so, because she blinked, and when her eyes opened again the door to the hall was inches from her face. The smell of agarwood drifted softly through the air, undernotes of old incense along with, and a more acrid scent: ash and smoke.
Her hand would have trembled as she reached to push the door open, if such trembling was something her body allowed itself. Instead, only her soul quivered in anticipation and a latent sense of dread. With a creak that felt deafening to the dead woman's mind, the door allowed itself to be opened. A rush of dust hit her face and eyes, though she only blinked out of courtesy, and even then, no one was around to see it.
The hall opened into a long corridor, flanked by rooms on either side. The intersection that Zhichao Tingfeng had mentioned was visible, but larger than Xiao Fan had expected. It was more of a gathering place than a mere intersection: pillows for kneeling were strewn about, most of them in relative order, but a good portion in disarray. In the center of the room, a pillar of wood that could have been an entire tree in its youth dominated the space. The same sort of engravings were found herein as they were outside, though with more detail, and more care in their production. Every animal, it seemed, had a place to hold an incense stick - hollow pupils, open beaks or mouth, coiled tails, grasping talons.
Many of them still held incense sticks, half-burnt or unburnt, though most of them had been burnt down to the stem. Xiao Fan swallowed hard, looking around for the hallway Zhichao Tingfeng had described. Her eyes passed over censers in the darkness, hanging paper lanterns, and - to her dismay - a variety of darkened areas where it was obvious a fire had once raged.
The leftmost hallway. There it was. She blamed this place's presence for her disorientation. The living corpse set herself to move quickly, wanting to be out of this place as soon as she could; wanting to escape the incense tree. For an unknown reason, it made her feel like an animal being petted backwards, raising all the hair on her body. The hallway she was directed down was thankfully free of any ominous features save for further charring, and she was able to push those from her mind's eye as she proceeded to the right door.
As soon as she walked through, she let out another sigh - this one of relief, rather than acceptance. It felt good to be out of that place, whatever it had been... Out of the reach of any lingering ill-will, she figured. She hoped that was all that it was. This new room, instead was welcoming - the paper panes of the walls faced the setting sun, keeping everything well-lit even as the sun began to hide beneath the treeline. Training dummies of wood were positioned in orderly fashion throughout the entirety of it, each one well-worn, but now hardened with age. Even those that were splintered and lacked padding looked hard as rock.
She didn't need Zhichao Tingfeng there to tell her what to do. He wanted her to practice, right? Practice her motions... Throwing a punch or kick, maybe. And so, she did. Heading to the nearest dummy, she wound back and threw a blow - that went embarrassingly wide, failing to connect with anything but open air. Xiao Fan exclaimed aloud, cursing her own body's inability to perform what she had always known herself to be capable of. This was going to be more than a minor issue.
Again, and again, she tried. She nicked the body of the dummy with her fist once or twice, but not nearly as often as the force of her attack sent her tumbling towards it, tackling the wooden effigy to the ground. Frustration began to mount with every attempt. Maybe she would try a kick - that would definitely connect, right? She could just swing her left, couldn't she?
The first kick she made didn't come close - it barely happened at all. Balancing on one leg was still something to be re-learned, it seemed, and as she perched on her left and kicked with her right, the world spun around her. When her back kissed the ground, she realized it actually had been spinning - and her along with it. "Gods damn it! Why...? Why can't I even kick correctly?!" Her exclamation into the empty room was ricocheted off of the dated walls, sent back at her with just as much force as she had given. Behind her, someone chuckled.
Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.
Xiao Fan rushed to push herself to a stand, though this was just as uncertain and awkward as every other motion she had recently made. Her head whipped around as soon as it could, readying herself for a fight, or a hungry ghost, or some sort of danger... Only to find Zhichao Tingfeng standing there, leaned against the doorframe. He applauded her in a slow way which dripped sarcasm.
"Good, good, meimei... You're learning. You can't do what you used to - that much was obvious when we first met. Your soul is trapped in your body, but the two are cleft, not united. Soul cleaving... Isn't something you see every day, so I can't reverse it, but... I think, with training, you can surpass it. But first? We learn the basics." His smile did little to placate the burning shame that filled her spirit, and if her blood still moved in her veins, she knew her face would've been a bright scarlet. Thankfully, she remained as pale as the ghost she was.
Zhichao Tingfeng came forth to stand beside her, slowly making the motions she had been rushing into: throwing a punch, making a horizontal kick, ending with a palm strike to the dummy's head. He did it again, this time ensuring Xiao Fan was watching, making certain that they were both on the same page. She aped him wordlessly, mimicking his motions, focusing as much of her concentration as she could on the feeling of her muscles. It was like feeling sand through paper, or a sword through cloth: what lay beneath was able to be made out, but muffled in a way. Like her emotions. Like all of her that had been her, before she had died.
Eventually, Zhichao Tingfeng stepped away, allowing Xiao Fan to try her attacks unguided. She was still wobbly, without a doubt, but focusing on the motions... remembering the sensation of striking out accurately, in a straight line, and not swinging wildly... She was able to land a punch on the dummy's torso, near the theoretical sternum. The kick, too, hit strongly - right where a man's liver would have been, if dummies had livers. And then, the palm strike.
She wondered about that for a moment. He had seen her throwing punches and kicks - why a palm strike? What was so good about those? In every fight between drunks in the tavern she had bore witness to, punches and kicks were the preferable weapon. They were the ideal vehicle to transport one's wrath upon another. So why, then, would he mix in palm strikes?
She was probably overthinking it, she thought. And so, with as much force as she could muster, she struck out with her right palm - and was greeted with a distant sense of distress, though not quite pain. The heel of her palm crashed into the dummy's face, and she nearly cried out in shock as the wood beneath splintered and gave. It was only a little... Only enough that it would be comparable to swinging a cudgel at its face, and swinging it without the force a soldier could muster. Yet, still, there lay a notable breakage in the chunk of wood that composed the dummy's head.
Emboldened, Xiao Fan went to strike again - but this time it came off awkwardly, just as it had before. She glanced her thumb off of its face and cursed, spitting at the dummy, stomping her feet, howling with sudden, powerful frustration... Behind her, Zhichao Tingfeng, once again, laughed. "Meimei, calm down! Do you know what happened? Stop and think. What are you feeling?"
Her tantrum lasted a bit longer, long enough that Zhichao Tingfeng could clap her on the shoulder and take her right arm by the wrist, but as he did, she calmed. His words began to sink in: there was a reason she had missed, a new reason. She had struck far more powerfully than she would have ever suspected herself of being able to do, and with great accuracy... And then missed her follow-up strike. After landing the first so perfectly, she had failed entirely on the second. Why?
She toyed with the question like a child toys with food, pushing it back and forth across her brain, stabbing at it with the fork of conjecture. The first explanation she arrived at was lack of practice - but that couldn't be right, could it? She had landed the first one, and done the exact same motions for the second. Focused on the same muscles, made the same motions, held the same stance...
That sense of distress rang its clarion call in her head again, and she looked to her right arm - to where her mentor held it. The more she actively thought of her arm, sending those tendrils of inquiry down from her spiritual mind into her physical body, the greater the distress grew. She became aware of a new sensation within the musculature of her bicep and shoulder, one that brought a graven chill much like death had. There was a tear. She had torn a muscle. It didn't hurt, per se, but the feeling of it told her it should hurt.
If she was alive, she would be in agony right now. She would be rolling on the ground in pain, screaming for a doctor, crying her eyes out. The further she explored, the more she found she could discover - new parts of her body that, in life, she had never been able to actively consider. She could feel the muscles individually, at least in the same way a map would show individual provinces. She had yet to familiarize herself with the provinces of her body; she had never known them to exist, when she was alive.
That tear screamed at her, pain still muted, but the distress of it crying loud. By damaging her arm, she had built enough power to push the dummy's imagined nose into its imagined brain. She had sacrificed the integrity of her own physique to surpass limits she never knew were in place - limits of the brain, not the body. Limits held within a part of her that was unattended - left offline, asleep, never to awaken again.
A conflicted smile came to her then, more akin to a baring of teeth than a display of mirth. She looked to Zhichao Tingfeng with those glassy, dead eyes, and nodded at him with as much vigor as she dared muster. Learning she could damage her body by over-applying herself had her cautious to act more emphatically. "I get it! I... Hurt myself on my first attack, right? And I'm not used to attacking while I'm injured in this way. So, now that I am... I need to learn it again, shushu. I need to learn to attack while injured, because putting all of myself into an attack will injure me. Right?"
Zhichao Tingfeng's smile then was absent of any mockery or derision. His expression softened, his eyelids drooping to cast a warm, sympathetic gaze at his disciple. He nodded, slowly, but with pride. "Yes, meimei. I've heard of schools... Different sects, where warriors train, only using their body as a weapon. They believe that our dantian are muscles to be trained, just like the rest of our body. Unrefined dantian can only produce so much force, and through qigong, we can refine them, allowing our bodies to be more than they are otherwise."
He let her arm drop, then, and continued. Xiao fan listened like an eager student sitting at her teacher's feet, brain awhirl with all the implications of what she was being told. "So, dantian hold us back, so we don't injure ourselves like you did. But, being dead, your dantian are dead, too. They can't limit you. You can exert as much force as your body allows. See, I was thinking a lot about your potential as we were travelling, and..." The rest of Zhichao Tingfeng's words may as well have not existed. Xiao Fan was no longer listening - hearing that she had this power, this potential, was enough to send her back to her own brain.
If she was capable of producing more force than a living person, now, what was stopping her from just killing those bastards that had attacked Er Xin? What was stopping her from razing their camp to the ground and slaughtering them where they stood? What the hell was stopping her from just finding them and taking Zhang Daiyu back from them?
The distress in her arm brought her back down to earth. It was warm, in a way, which was in and of itself strange - she hadn't felt particularly warm or cold since coming back to life. She hadn't even spared a thought to the temperature. So the breakage in her form feeling warm, of all things, sat ill with her. She remembered that Zhichao Tingfeng was speaking, and snapped herself back to reality; the clearing of her throat told him that she was paying attention once again. He laughed, shaking his head in resignation.
"Alright, Xiao Fan, I get it. I was like you, once - not in the same way, but filled with that same fire I'm sure you're feeling. Knowing that we have access to these things? Martial techniques that most would consider divine? It's thrilling, initially. But remember what I said: the ability to kill with one's hands is a burden. You will never be the woman you once were. Always, always remember that." It was his turn to draw in a great breath and release a greater sigh. He turned to the door, taking a few steps before beginning once more.
"Keep training. If your arm doesn't fix itself, you'll be better off for the knowledge you gain from this practice. If it does? Both will be useful to you. Now, I'm going to dust some things off, try and remember where some old manuals are. See you later tonight, meimei. Don't give up just because you miss - take it as an opportunity to strike again."
And with that, he drifted out of the room. Xiao Fan didn't even notice that his footsteps were completely silent, nor did she notice that the sun had fallen below the horizon finally, and the room was dark. Not too dark to see, surely... But quite dark. She steeled herself to begin again, now with a new injury, but a new sense of direction. Earlier in the day, she hadn't even known how she was going to save her beloved; she hadn't known where to start. Now?
It was like finding a map in a labyrinth. All she had to do was follow directions.