image [https://i.imgur.com/yIXZRaX.jpeg]
Dorja understood hard work. She did. She also understood that in order to master anything, be it cooking or dancing or combat, it would take a person a lifetime of study. She had heard the numbers: Ten thousand hours of practice makes one a master. That was the theory. She’d even read the science on it, the mind-body connection that was made through frequent building of neural pathways, stemming from repeated motion. That meant if she trained two hours a day, six days in a Standard week, throughout the four hundred days in a Standard year, it could take up to fifteen years to attain mastery with the Ten Exalted Fists.
The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, she thought. Master Jerrod had said that, she was sure of it, but he was quoting somebody else.
So, after she had put Turtle through her own training that day, and had ensured the girl was attending his math studies with Kirek, Dorja sequestered herself in the cargo hold. She locked the door, telling Veringulf to give no one else access. She didn’t trust the AI that called itself Master Korvix, not yet, probably not ever. She didn’t want its words offending Turtle. Or worse, poisoning her mind.
“This is J’ing,” said Korvix, demonstrating it one more time. “The power to strike not with muscle, but with energy as channeled through tendon strength. But first you must strengthen the tendon.” He demonstrated again, and Dorja watched the hologram closely. Korvix stood in the center of the hold and jumped lightly up and down on his tiptoes, arms limp at his side. Then, all at once, he would shoot both his hands down, straightening his arms, and exhale in a sharp his as both his hands bounced back up at him. “This is called tendon-locking, and it will push your Golgi tendon to its limits. Assuming you have one, which all humanoids I’ve ever seen has it, or something like it.”
“Golgi…tendon?” Dorja said.
“Think of it as a breaker switch for the body. It holds you back, for your body’s sake, keeps you from stretching muscles and tendons to their maximum potential. Because if the body isn’t ready, tendon-locking will cause severe injury.”
“This is J’ing?”
“This is the first step to J’ing,” the holographic figure clarified, and briefly froze, then winked out of existence before rematerializing behind her. “J’ing is a reciprocating power, drawing as much power from the retraction of the hand strike as it does from the actual attack.” He suddenly punched through her face, his holographic hand snapping towards and then returning to a guard position before Dorja could even flinch. “J’ing,” he said.
“What good is this for a bladesman?” she said. “Dorja needs help with her bladework, not—”
“If you tried to use that heavy glaive of yours to learn tendon-locking, your shoulders would be suffering terribly inside of a month. A year of this, and you may not be able to raise them ever again. This hurts, my pupil. Tendon-locking is offensive to the body, it isn’t natural. You have to teach it what you want to do. And,” he added, smiling down at her weeping-hands, “you have two sets of arms that could become greatly injured. That’s a bad thing, since whenever you experience an injury from tendon-locking, it usually comes around the rotator cuff inside the shoulder, and if that happens, then any kind of jostling only exacerbates it, which means you cannot train anything until it is healed.”
Dorja paced around the long-dead Master, her robes hissing as they lightly touched the floor. “Show Dorja again.”
Master Jerrod performed the tendon-lock exercise again. “Now you try.”
Dorja stood in a loose stance, hopping up and down, then hissed violently and shot her hands towards the ground, almost hyperextending them. The movement did hurt a little.
“Again,” said Master Korvix, walking around her. “And when we’re finished with several sets, we’ll working on increasing your range in the joint. Joint expansion will be key for ameliorating the body, and giving yourself greater range.”
Dorja performed another tendon-lock.
“Again! Harder!”
She did it again, gritting her teeth against the pain.
“Harder!”
She did it again.
“Harder!”
* * *
One day at a time. That’s how training works.
Dorja knew this. Master Jerrod called it the Routine of Improvement. Nothing could be done about it, you just had to wake up and commit yourself to the work. “Turtle,” she said each morning to the young girl. “It’s time to wake up, little one.” As Turtle was still beholden to the structure, she moved to obey. They would eat a meal, then go through morning stretches and small orbit breathing exercises, feeling the chi moving within them, between them. Well, actually, at present, Turtle confessed she could only feel some strange semblance of movement within.
“That is okay,” Dorja would tell her. “It comes with time. You must learn to feel it. Open your heart and mind to it, and feel the chi flowing through your dantian.”
Next, Turtle with through the stances of Form One, and then the transitional steps of Form Two, all while keeping her bokken rigidly to her side. Dorja noticed she struggled a little less with this each day. That is good. Form Three will test her, though. But not yet. We will save that lesson which she has mastered these movements.
And then, as always, Turtle would go off to be with Kirek and go through her histories and maths, then have some play time with Joshua and Newpik.
The structure was still holding, which left Dorja to her own training with Master Korvix. She jogged lightly around the cargo hold, all four arms limply at her sides, randomly jolting them straight and hissing intensely. “It will cause you to have terrible headaches,” Korvix was saying, pacing at the center of the room while she jogged around him in circles. “But you must learn to retract harshly at the end of the hit, pulling the strike back faster than you sent it.”
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
For days on end, this was how it was. Awake, feed Turtle, put her through her training, send her off to Kirek, and then spend hours training with Korvix. Secretly, without telling Korvix she was doing it, she began sending chi through her weeping-hands, into the fingertips, right at the moment of the J’ing movement.
“Now, do the J’ing movement out in front of you. Good! Now send your arms straight over your head when you do it! Good! Harder now! Faster! Good!”
Awake, feed Turtle, put her through her training, send her off to Kirek, then back to the cargo hold to seal herself in with Korvix. Days on end. Mindless training. As long as the structure held, she could organize her time like this. Dorja came to realize that this was exactly what time management was, and had heard Master Jerrod talking about it. It was one of the chief reasons for structure, because it allowed you to more responsibly schedule the time for training, for cooking, for cleaning.
Awake, feed Turtle, put her through her training, send her off to Kirek, then back to the cargo hold to seal herself in with Korvix. Again and again, until she heard Master Korvix in her sleep, the long-dead blademaster shouting at her, “Faster! Harder now!” Sometimes she awoke in the middle of the night to see her four arms mimicking the movements of J’ing.
She entered into a gray blur, one day bleeding seamlessly into the next. Dorja felt herself become more focused, and with someone guiding her through the more refined movements of her technique, she began to feel something she had not felt in ages. Growth, she thought, sweating bullets when she was finally allowed to hold her glaive while going through the J’ing exercise. This is growth. I’ve gone so long without a master, I’d forgotten what true progression feels like.
Awake (this time with a headache), feed Turtle, put her through her training, send her off to Kirek, then back to the cargo hold to seal herself in with Korvix. The blademaster shouted at her at times, and spoke quietly from just beside her ear at others. “Careful now,” he said. “Careful. J’ing is going to stretch you beyond your limits. It is important to do this sort of work. As I told you before, this work is changing your body, like straightening out an antenna to make it more receptive to the energy signal you are looking for.”
“Zero-point energy,” she said, moving into a low squat and performing the J’ing from there. “Chi.”
“Call it what you wish. The people of Udr’oon-XIII called it essence. I knew a few blademasters who simply called the Source. Whatever you want to call it, it’s the same everywhere, and the methods you must use to attain it are the same.”
“Which are?”
“Discipline,” Master Korvix said, shrugging. “And pain.”
Awake, feed Turtle, put her through her training, send her off to Kirek, then back to the cargo hold to seal herself in with Korvix. Dorja awoke now with a headache every day, and all four shoulders were killing her. But it was worth. Unbeknownst to Korvix, she could feel chi moving into her weeping-arms with a rapidity and flow she’d never felt before, and, some nights, when she trained alone in parts of the ship that were far away from the essence box, Dorja tested her faery lights, and discovered that they were brighter than they’d ever been! Almost enough to blind her!
Awake, feed Turtle, put her through her training, send her off to Kirek, then back to the cargo hold to seal herself in with—
“Dorja?” a voice said on one of these occasions, jarring her flow and pulling her out of her training reverie.
She swung around, panting. “What?”
Kirek stood in the doorway. He glanced over at Master Korvix, then back at her. “Can we have a minute?”
“Yes,” she said, wiping her brow. “What is it?”
With a glance back to the blademaster, Kirek said, “Alone?”
Dorja noticed Master Korvix’s wry smile before he said, “It’s all right, Dorja. We were almost done for the day, anyway. You are dismissed. Meet back here tomorrow?”
Dorja nodded, and the blademaster winked out of existence. When she stepped out into the corridor and had sealed the door behind, Kirek gave a look in the direction of the cargo hold. It was subtle, but Dorja caught it. It was a look of mistrust, a man who thought they might just have a K’talian snatch-viper running loose in the cargo hold and yet nobody but him seemed to notice it. “Don’t worry,” she said. “Dorja has him under control.”
“I’m sure you do,” Kirek said, hiking up his pants, which a looked a little on him. He’d definitely lost a little weight. They all had. Veringulf was low on rations and they were having to ration even more now. Dorja’s people handled calorie deficits better than humans did, so she’d been giving a lot of her rations to Turtle to keep her healthy. “Listen,” Kirek said, “there’s a couple things I need to say. First thing is, how are you holding up?”
Dorja stopped in the corridor, and Kirek walked a couple steps beyond her, then turned to face her. “What do you mean?” she said.
“This whole trip…it’s got me second guessing a lot. We’ve had some moments of cohesion and you really helped bring us together in many ways, but let’s be honest, this hasn’t exactly been the most auspicious of beginnings. I believed in your Candle when I first heard you speak of it. Dorja, you are a most remarkable woman and I commend you for your tenacity in training Turtle—”
“Just say it,” she said.
“But now you’re in league with an AI? And a highly functional one at that. You’re in there every daycycle, focusing on all your energy on him—it—when you’ve got a crew out here, such as we are. And as if the Kennisons didn’t have enough reason not to trust you, you’ve now made it clear you’re more comfortable training with an AI than speaking with them.”
“They don’t want to speak with Dorja,” she shrugged. “So she doesn’t speak with them. Dorja gives them their privacy. And Dorja seals herself in the cargo hold with the AI box.”
“That’s not the point,” Kirek sighed, and leaned against a bulkhead.
“Then come to the point, Kirek.” Dorja felt worried about what he was going to say next. She had come to trust this man, even like him in a companionable sort of way, the kind of person one might enjoy having in close proximity to let you know someone had your back. And he had come to her aid when she fought the intruder, hadn’t he? What would happen if their bond broke now? Dorja was afraid to admit it to herself, but she really didn’t think she could take it.
Luckily, Kirek only said, “I just think you should lay off the training. For now. At least until we’ve found a safe place for Luke and his family.”
Dorja could that as a decent compromise. She nodded, “Dorja will consider it. Right now, Dorja’s training is very important, she is on the verge of a breakthrough, she’s sure of it.”
“Then will you at least consider cutting back on the training? Just until we’ve left Wyrmdov?”
“Once we reach Wyrmdov, the Kennisons may leave if they wish. That is,” she added, “if Dorja deems it safe enough for them.”
Kirek hove another sigh and shrugged. “All right. I suppose that is as much as I can ask. Thanks for listening.”
“What was the other thing?”
“Sorry?”
“You said there were a couple of things you wanted to talk about.”
“Oh, yeah, right. Saito Sector.”
“What about it?”
“We’re here. I just got a ping from a subspace buoy, pinging off of an old Free Ranger frequency. It’s a hailing frequency. Veringulf seems confident it’s not a fake ping, not a pirate trying to lure us in.”
Dorja brightened, smiling. “We made it?”
“We made it. We're just outside of the Vastekk system. Porhl is the fourth planet out form the star, and Wyrmdov orbits its moon. It should be at our next jump.” He grinned, flexing waistline of his pants. "We made it, and barely a calorie or a pycno pellet to spare."
image [https://i.imgur.com/f6fHUfp.jpg]