This time around, Mei Ying didn't faint when we got down from the mountains, and seemed able to continue walking unassisted. That was the difference that fifteen years of qi made in a martial artist.
For the vast majority of martial artists, fifteen years of qi was not even the average. It was much lower, in fact. The average was in a range of five to ten years, and none of that was bolstered by alchemical products, but sheer effort. Anyone that could boast fifteen years possessed a foundation for the martial arts that was truly impressive, and could easily become First-Rate in time.
As unfair as Mei Ying’s experiences were, in the grand scheme of things, she was enormously blessed and set up for a bright future. More so than any of my classmates, even. After all, she was my colleague, now.
On our way to our living quarters, Mei Ying spoke up.
“Don’t get any ideas,” she said.
I furrowed my eyebrows at that. “What do you mean by that?” I asked gravely. Was she really just going to cut and run now? If none of today had made us any better connected, built us no mutual trust, then I really had no idea what else to do.
Let it go, a calmer and wiser part of me soothed my irritation with its simple advice. Keep trying, but don’t lose hope. There was a way that I could change things around in this timeline, chase a better future where not as many people died.
Eventually, we would all work together. Maybe even with Wenhao, though I wouldn’t pin my hope on him.
“Just because we were out and alone doesn’t mean I like you or anything,” she said. “You might not be short, but you’re still too plain-faced.”
I stopped for a moment, my mind snapping uncomfortably at the whiplash. Here I was thinking she was going to prove an unreliable and ungrateful ally, but no: she was just being a teenager.
I blinked for a moment. “I’m beginning to think you haven’t spent any meaningful amount of time alone with a guy before,” I said.
“What?!” she scoffed.
“We’re quite blunt and obvious as you know, and picking up signals really isn’t that hard if you pay attention. Just… pay a little better attention next time, and you won’t… conjure such information out of thin air.” I would like it if she was a little more discerning.
“You,” she breathed through her nose. “What the hell is this? Why are you talking to me like I’m a little kid? That’s seriously disrespectful.”
I couldn’t help but choke back a laugh at that. I gathered myself quickly. “I… took the Heavenly Lotus Bloom,” I said. “And now I’m finding myself more inclined towards compassionate responses, rather than defensiveness or aggression.” I tilted my head. “I mean, I was not being facetious. Figuring out social cues is an important step before joining society. Otherwise, you will only invite miscommunication.”
She raised an eyebrow at me. “You really think you’re clever, huh?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I have spent time alone with boys before,” she said. “And they all throw themselves at my feet, okay?”
“Okay, hime-sama,” I said.
She snarled. “You don’t believe me?”
“I do,” I lied. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter,” I said. “Mei Ying, I’ll always consider you a younger sister at best,” I said. “That won’t change.”
Her eyes widened at that. A moment later, she just rolled them and walked away. “Whatever. Quit acting all cool when you’re a nerd.”
I followed after a few steps behind. I hope I hadn’t annoyed her too much with the ‘younger’ part, though in my defense I couldn’t stop myself in time. We were meant to be close enough in age that such a distinction would only seem like I was trying to put on airs.
I didn’t care about age-based hierarchy, but she might. Or she might not, and then feel stifled. Hmm, figuring out a way to ease her misgivings was going to be a challenge on its own. Whatever, I’d just call her ‘sister’ from now on, no ‘younger’ tacked on. Hopefully she’d forget this ever happened.
After I got back to my room, I decided to stow away my pouch and get going to the bathhouse with only my towel.
Inside and nearest to me, I saw Jingshu mechanically scrubbing away the grime from his body. His swellings had gone down, and combining that with how his posture looked, it told me that he was pretty much healed. He and I made brief eye contact, but then he looked away with a frown.
Quest! Win back Jingshu’s goodwill after having beaten up his crush.
Whatever. Not now.
Deeper inside, I saw Wenhao glaring at me without cutting off eye contact. Leifeng and Qiang were around him, too, but neither of them were looking at me. Both looked suitably cowed however.
I stripped naked and walked into the bath, trying to put them out of my mind. Then I saw Wenhao from the corner of my vision, still glaring at me.
Uncanny. It felt genuinely uncomfortable having his eyes on me like that. Whatever. Couldn’t fault a man for his thoughts, even when they were being very loud!
“You got bigger,” Jingshu said to me. “How?”
“Same way you did, I reckon,” I said. His Dragon pearl sure worked wonders.
I looked him up and down and saw bulging muscles, and he had grown by at least two inches. He was still taller than me, but our difference in height had reduced by some amount. Hopefully, things would just end here for me, but my newfound path seems insistent on trying to insist me into the world like these bamboo stalks always did.
There, I said it. I’m a tallphobe. I hate tall people. They are too full of themselves and take up too much space!
How could you be tall and have any sort of humility? Your very existence is meant to lord over others and I want no part in that perverse act.
“Congratulations,” I added. “At this rate, you’re slated to become the number two in this class.”
Oh no, that was mean. I let my distaste show. No, this wouldn’t do. Mine was an irrational distaste and I couldn’t let that color my interactions with people. People couldn’t help their bodies after all.
“Behind you,” he completed, like that wasn’t a given. “You know what? You don’t get to make any moves or assert any sort of authority. You came from nowhere a no one. You don’t get to just flip the whole board, that’s not how the world works. So tell me, what are you? Because you’re not just some kid from our class, are you? Not just some average student with no friends. It’s a little suspicious, don’t you think? How little anyone knows about you?”
I waved my hand in front of my face. “That… that’s ridiculous, just stop it,” I said. He wasn’t moved by that. I looked at him with wide eyes. “This is nonsense!” I smiled with incredulity. “You think I’m some sort of CIA spy or something? Or a serial killer in my downtime? What are you getting at?”
“That this doesn’t make sense!”
“Fine, I,” blew air through my lips. “I traveled in time, fifteen years. I’m actually my thirty-three year old self. I’m way older, so I’m stronger. That’s me. You never stood any chance.”
He snarled at me. “That’s not funny.”
Yeah, no shit, it wasn’t a joke. But explaining that would be a waste of time. “You can’t fault me for fighting my hardest. I had a lot to lose too.”
“Yeah? People are saying you made her challenge you,” he said.
I shrugged. “What are you talking about? I told her to challenge me since she couldn’t beat Wenhao, and she fucking did. Does that make me a master manipulator or something? I didn’t make that girl do anything she didn’t want to do. And guess what, city-wide genius, she’s not just some girl you get to fawn over. She’s a sister-in-arms. We are being made to fight! Get these ridiculous thoughts out of your head and start focusing on not getting cooked by some fire-using martial artist.”
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Jingshu had progressively stepped back from me as I ranted to him. A couple more boys had arrived around us while I was delivering my speech. We were ten now, missing two boys.
“This goes for all of you!” I shouted. “We’re going to fight in a war! What more do you need to hear before you put aside these ridiculous thoughts of fighting each other for the best thing. We came from the same place. We’re supposed to have each other’s backs. Be each others’ comforts. Who else will? The Martial Arts Alliance? They’re here to train you. Everything else, we take care of it on our own. And that includes being there for each other.”
“You play favorites!” one guy, Li Ren said. His eyes were wild and he was hunched over, glaring at the crowd. “He beats on Xinyi, and then tells us that we can’t hurt girls now!”
I stomped my foot in the ground. “Shut up!” Li Ren almost jumped out of his skin. “First off, I never fucking said that, so don’t put words into my mouth. I said it earlier, and I’ll say it again. Every girl in our class is a sister-in-arms. They’re soldiers meant to have your sorry ass’s back when war breaks out. Secondly, I wasn’t defending Mei Ying because she was a girl. I did it because she is a friend, and I won’t let my fucking friends get hurt.”
“But that was the sponsorship event!” Li Ren said. “We were supposed to fight!”
“No,” I said. “We had the choice to fight. Every one of the people that fought me had the choice to. I didn’t make them do anything. Not even Wenhao, who would have been obligated to fight me. And tell me, how did fighting work out for us anyway? Which one among you can boast of a treasure not taken from your fellow classmates? Which one among you would maintain that no cruelty has been undertaken today? Needless cruelty that sacrificed the good of the many for the good of the few? We were turned into thieves and bandits today, and we’re supposed to just take this disgusting stain on our esteem? Branded thieves by our conscience? Seriously, whoever feels proud of what they did today, speak up. I want to hear it.”
“I do!” Jingshu said, raising his arm. He stepped up to the ledge of the communal bath pool, standing above us all. “Three times, I was challenged against my will. Three times I accepted, for I had no choice to. And three times I won!”
“But you yourself can recognize that this shouldn’t have happened to you,” I said. “You were pushed to the brink today. That wasn’t pleasant, was it?”
“Pleasant?” he sneered. “What part of this has been pleasant for anyone? Whatever cooperation you are proposing, Tianming, you’re deluding yourself and others, putting them all in danger in the meanwhile. If war is really coming, then we must become cruel ourselves in order to survive.”
I clicked my tongue, and with a flex of my foot, I jumped on top of the ledge next to Jingshu. “While this guy is telling you to throw away all hope of life and become mindless drones capable of killing anyone on command,” I looked at the crowd. “I’m telling you that the key to victory is to have each other’s backs. And here’s a bonus point,” I looked at Jingshu. “That’s how real wars were won. Not from training commandos willing to stab their teammates in the backs to be considered the strongest, but by cohesive units of comrades who think as one.”
“Okay?” one of the boys said. It was Du Lin. “Then what are you suggesting, anyway? Rebel against the alliance? We aren’t being given a choice here, are we?”
“This time it was a choice,” I said, shaking my head. “And you all fell for the bait. But yes, we do have a choice. They’ve given us a fortune, haven’t they? Everything I’ve gathered tells me that what they have given to us today, the stuff that cannot be recovered from our corpses at least, was far too costly to give to just a bunch of expendables. We are important to them, so let’s learn to leverage that.”
“Okay, but,” Du Lin shrugged. “That still doesn’t erase the fact that a hierarchy needs to exist for the right person to get their reward. And we can only be in a hierarchy if we fight each other.”
“Then let’s not be in a fucking hierarchy,” I said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “Let’s decide who gets what based on need and aptitude. Internally. Why do we get to let people we’ve never met measure our worth anyway? I have a runic breastplate that doesn’t fit me, and I wasn’t intending on just throwing that away. And because the limit of internal energy in a single person is a hundred and twenty years, I gave away my surplus to all those who gambled their fortune away. Twelve of you, by the way. I haven’t worked out the math of that yet, but that’s bonkers. You recreated capitalism from scratch in roughly thirty minutes.”
Some of them chuckled.
“Also, I’m giving away more qi pills as well,” I said. “I already hit my spiritual level cap anyway, so I’ve got a surplus. If any of the two that didn’t get any are in here, I’d like to share.”
One arm raised their hand. “Come to me after dinner,” I said. “See? That wasn’t hard. Anyway, all this competition is stupid. It’s better to learn from others than just trying your best by yourself. If the normal method worked on Earth, why should it be any different here?”
I heard footsteps from behind the crowd. Wenhao and his friends were walking past us to leave the bathroom, and Wenhao’s eyes never left me until we cut line of sight.
I definitely needed to think about barricading my door. Or sleeping with one eye open, because holy shit.
Anyway.
“So how about it, boys?” I asked. “Any of you guys willing to acknowledge our brotherhood and bury the hatchet so that we can work together?” I stretched my arm to the crowd.
“Ugh,” Zhou Hao grunted. “I won’t lie that I’m grateful for your generosity. If it wasn’t for you, I would have walked away with nothing.” he walked up to me and took my hand. “And you’re right. If those people told us the truth, then this is a war and we need to band together for our own good.”
I heard stomping on the ground. Rhythmic stomping. “Go! Go! For victory!” one boy chanted our school’s chant while stomping his foot. “Our team, our tigers, on the prowl!” More people joined in for that line. “United we stand!” most of us were in now. “Forward we go!” I joined in then and raised my hand to forestall the last line. I didn’t quite like the last line: The glory of our brotherhood, we will protect!
Brotherhood was an exclusive faction, and wasn’t good for promoting unity with the rest of the class. Glory was a fabrication of the strong leading poor men to die in wars. We couldn’t depend on glory to save our lives as soldiers being trained for war, could we? This fight was imposed on us.
But that wasn’t our style. We were Generation Z. We didn’t love the idea of fighting for our betters. Ours was a selfish generation, and the only motivation that could move us was self-interest.
Like the tigers our athletic team was named after:
“We will have our fill! Eat!”
I raised my fist in the air. “Eat!” Someone else echoed. “Eat!” Again. “Eat! Eat! Eat!”
It's In The Details: Interior Art for Kindar [https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wEna6T86--o/UT-buNLIw9I/AAAAAAAAAz8/aZy5fbTUYUo/s1600/Interior+Art+Sword.png]
Alliance Leader POV
The smoke of the scrying incense dispersed as Li Hong, the Alliance Leader, waved his hand through it, disintegrating the visions of the boys’ bathhouse, having formed in the middle of a round table where his council of Peak Masters and representatives of the great Orthodox sects sat.
“I should have gotten rid of that boy after the stunt he pulled,” Li Hong muttered. “When he foolishly gave away the Crown of Unity. Now he’s planted seeds of rebellion in the rest of our crop. The bad apple has spoiled the bunch.” He shook his head in annoyance.
“Obviously,” someone from the Kunlun sect, dressed in peasant’s attire said. “We must tighten discipline. We have given these children far too much freedom. Their food is too good, and it blinds them with desire for the material world. The women avail themselves of cosmetics. The boys drink themselves into a stupor. How were we supposed to inoculate them to our ways when we took such an easy hand with them?”
“Hear, hear!”
The rest of the table seemed to assent, all except for one person, the genius and rising star of the Wudang sect, Daoist Meng.
He just raised his hand for everyone’s attention before speaking. “Inoculating them fully into our ways would never have worked from the get-go. They are military assets that require special treatment, and from what I’ve seen, none of them need go against our goals when all they’ve decided to do was bind together more tightly.”
Li Hong grunted. “His rhetoric will sow resentment that will only compound over time.”
“I’m afraid that ship sailed when we stole them from their lives and gave them new ones without ever consulting them beforehand. What we need to do now is damage control.”
“What are you suggesting?”
“Dismiss the other instructors,” he said. “I am enough for all of them.”
The council table was quiet. Dismissing all the instructors was a grave suggestion, and could offend every sect but the Wudang because they were given an unprecedented influence on these budding military assets.
“I am prepared to swear an oath that my instruction will be impartial, and I will be sticking only to teaching martial arts, not pushing an agenda on behalf of my sect.”
The Kunlun councilmember coughed lightly. “We would never accuse the illustrious Wudang of not playing fair, but you must forgive us for assuming such a thing based on your audacious proposal, young Daoist Meng.”
Li Hong raised his hand. “Why should I allow this?”
“Because,” Daoist Meng said. “They have been overwhelmed by faces, and they need one face to associate mercy with. I will be that face. Earn their trust by playing to their feelings. At this juncture, force would only do the opposite of earning their loyalty. We must be soft.”
Li Hong himself was a Wudang martial artist, so he could see the sense that a soft approach made. The only problem was smoothing things over with the other sects.
“I agree with your claim that a soft approach is necessary,” Li Hong said. “But I will allow the others to let their thoughts be known regarding entrusting you with their education.”
The Shaolin representative spoke first. “You invented the basic forms, Daoist Meng, bridging all our disparate styles into a cohesive system of movements that eventually would tell us what student is best suited for what school. Your genius cannot be understated, and therefore I trust that you will know how to teach these students best. Not to mention, mercy is the right path for those we have wronged.”
“Shoulder the burden of responsibility well,” the Kunlun sect representative all but threatened. “Our futures depend on it.”
More and more assented, until Li Hong had finally heard enough. “Very well. Sole responsibility of their education goes to you, Daoist Meng. Do. Not. Disappoint.”
“Thank you, Alliance Leader Daoist Li Hong,” Meng gave him a martial salute.