The next morning, the Alliance Leader put us through an infodump about the levels of martial arts: Third, Second and First-rate warriors were the grades that most common soldiers fell in, with Peak Master being a particularly lauded distinction, and one that most people referred to as ‘heroes’ among the chaff fell into. This was effectively the end for most martial artists, with Supreme Peak Mastery being counted as heroes among heroes, legends whose actions would endure the test of time.
Lastly were the Transcendents, the true gods of the world of Martial Arts: the Three Demons, Seven Saints and the Five Evil Kings made up the fifteen Transcendents currently alive, living legends one and all. They were spread among the orthodox, unorthodox and the Demonic cult, with the demons having three entire Transcendents all to themselves. This was particularly impressive considering the orthodoxy and the unorthodoxy were comprised of many different factions while the Demonic cult was one single unified faction with a clear hierarchy, the Heavenly Demon standing above them all.
Transcendent was where the Alliance wanted us, and before making us fight on their behalf, they would have us swear an oath of cooperation and friendship, giving us the incentive to fight on their side in return for acclaim, power and monetary reward.
Basic business at that point.
“This will be it for my direct intervention,” the Alliance Leader said as he gestured for a Peak Master to step forward. “For the time being, you will be learning your martial arts from Peak Master Shen. He will introduce you to the Basic Forms, a set of martial arts stances that stimulate your acupoints and promote the movement of energy throughout your body. Consider it a tutorial for real martial arts. Once you have mastered these movements, there will be a Great Selection, where all the martial arts sects of the Alliance will have their pick of you. There, you will learn specialized martial arts that will give you the potential to reach amazing new heights. Before the Great Selection, you will be given the terms of our cooperation in the form of a heavenly oath. This is a two-sided promise that ensures cooperation on both sides, and is a prerequisite for learning true martial arts. The selection will occur in six months. If you have any other questions, feel free to direct them at Peak Master Shen. I wish you the best of luck, children. May the spirit of enlightenment be with you.” And like that, he scattered into fragments that disappeared with the wind.
Pretty hilarious, actually, for anyone that knew how martial arts worked. The man had spent a pretty costly sum of qi on a movement technique and a stealth technique to make himself look like he was being blown away by the wind. For a Wudang master, he certainly didn’t spare any effort or exertion to maintain his mystique in front of all of us.
“Good morning,” Shen said with a wide smile. He had a long pony-tail that reached his waist, and swished around as he turned. “I am Peak Master Shen, and I will be instructing you in the basics of martial arts, henceforth, starting with the Basic Forms. We’ve had enough talk to last us a while now, so I suppose there’s no other thing to do now than get started!”
He began on the movements, breaking them down into bite-size pieces that we could absorb. If you judged purely based on how the movements looked, they weren’t optimized towards fighting, and looked more like old world martial arts that you’d see in recitals on TV. Long, sweeping strikes that didn’t really carry the full weight of the body, but did demand a lot of balance and finesse, as well as ornate and rotational hand movements that outwardly did nothing, but inwardly collected your qi and poised it for attack.
It had taken my body a while to adapt to these movements in my past life, mostly because I didn’t see the sense in them, and thus refused to give it an honest effort. Once I did, I ended up finding it fun and interesting, mastering it quite quickly compared to my classmates, not that it mattered too much. I had given them a substantial headstart after all, only really applying myself weeks into training, and by then, they were already moving on to advanced applications of internal energy like energy strikes, a move that could defy Newton’s third law of motion by applying more force on a target object than your body received from applying that force.
In theory, it worked like an energy beam that only worked on contact, and the energy was purely kinetic, though there were martial arts that could apply some other quality onto that energy, as well as ‘evil’ or unorthodox techniques that could set fire to that energy.
The Infinite Enlightenment Fist was a martial art that stuck to kinetic energy all throughout its path, but that was more than enough. Anything else, really, was a distraction. Sure, narrow the kinetic energy and you’d have sword energy or spear energy or what have you, but that too was just kinetic energy with almost exclusively lethal applications. It didn’t quite fit the shaolin ideal, and that was fair enough.
“You’re doing remarkably well, Tianming!” Shen looked at me and beamed his signature smile. “If I didn’t know any better, it’d seem like you’ve trained this before. Do you have movements of this kind in your world?”
“Something like that,” I replied, kicking myself for losing focus and accidentally performing the movements perfectly.
“Keep working hard! Your technique is good, but your foundation is lacking! I will be making sure that you focus on strength training for now.”
He turned to someone else. “Ah, yes, Wenhao. On the flipside, your physique is perfect enough to perform these movements without a hitch, and yet your finesse is lacking, which is no surprise. You should focus on capturing the essence of these movements better, not just rely on how the energies of the world guide your movements. That goes for all of you!”
True to his words, my classmates weren’t capturing the movements of the forms perfectly, but they came close enough to general proficiency that it was indeed surprising, at least to those who didn’t know how the energies of the world, as well as your own internal energy, could work in tandem to move your body along something known as the ‘Heavenly Funnel’.
Simply put, it was perfection in movement. The stronger one’s internal energy and one’s resonance with the energies of the world got, the better one was able to move their body.
By the end of our lesson on basic forms, my training clothes were drenched in sweat, and I was utterly exhausted. I didn’t even have the energy to go to the dining hall, so a servant just brought the food to me, as well as a healing elixir to get my body back into shape.
My baseline strength had increased by a decent amount due to my usage of innate qi, but that hadn’t been enough to bridge the gap between myself and Wenhao. What came closer to that was my accumulation of vital energy in my body.
The energies of the world, also known as external energy, could become internal energy once processed by a martial artist’s gathering technique. That energy was known as qi or internal energy.
The energy that found itself inside the physical body, not the energy body, of the martial artist was known as vital energy. It was what enabled external martial arts, which was Newtonian martial arts and was far more physical in nature. It was also what enabled body tempering.
Vital energy accumulation requires that the body exhaust itself, only for newly gathered energy to seep into the body and bolster its cells. This, thankfully, also depended on my gathering speed, which was twenty-four times the average. For every hour of body tempering, I reaped the same rewards as someone doing it for twenty four hours straight, or a day.
I had worked for five hours now, which meant I had made five entire days of progress, which was equivalent to twenty days of actual training since a day of training was typically only six hours.
After I regained my strength, I followed a servant into a building, to a classroom where another Peak Master would teach us all about the Martial Arts Alliance’s greatest personages: the Seven Saints. Well, they used to be ten Saints, with the three Demons being a part of the martial alliance’s sainthood, but they had recently been excluded from the count due to them falling to a… less wholesome driving ideal. The truth was that they were once aligned with the orthodoxy, the Demonic cult having been considered a righteous sect once upon a time.
Incredibly boring stuff, though. All the history we learned was clearly just sanitized in order to maintain the face of the people we learned off. Nothing really true or relevant to us. Just a silent request to have us worship these people the way the instructing Peak Master did.
Boring.
Next came etiquette class, because we direly needed it. Then a session of meditation, seeking insight into the martial arts we had practiced, as well as gathering and refining our qi.
And that was our first day.
The following days went largely the same. Training, studying, a little bit of socializing in our courtyard at the end of the day, at least for the others. I spent all of my freetime meditating and pressing out every ounce of benefit from the Soaring Dragon Elixir. As the days passed by, the make-up styles of the girls shifted drastically, from the more subtle Earth style to a far more ornate and purposeful Central Plains style, ostensibly because they had no other option, and the servants assigned to them were also trained in such tasks as applying cosmetics on their charges. Mei Ying’s style seemed to have not changed at all, hers looking just the way she preferred it to look back on Earth, only showing that unlike the other girls, she went out of her way to project a very specific image of herself, learning the new styles of makeup just to make it her way.
Weird, but ultimately very crafty.
My appetite grew increasingly as the days passed by. One breakfast, lunch and dinner turned to one breakfast, one lunch and two dinners, then two lunches, and before I knew it, I doubled up on every meal. Then tripled up.
Body tempering became a fixation of mine like it never had before. Something had changed this time around. After all, I could see the results rush in much quicker, and coupling that with my endless supply of healing elixirs to keep the recovery times in-between training as low as possible, and I was starting to become what Earthlings termed as a meathead.
Eventually I’d hit a wall called my body’s physical potential, a predestined barrier that would take something truly extraordinary to get past. Something that only a person blessed by the very heavens themselves would come upon. One had to be extremely lucky and blah-blah-blah—
I had something very specific in mind, so I didn’t quite lament the arrival of this wall. I just enjoyed the process of training until I received diminishing returns, after which I wouldn’t waste too much time. After all, external arts were a fringe martial art that was either practiced by the talentless, unaffiliated warriors who didn’t have access to good internal arts, or absolute freaks of nature who could be on par with any master just by the strength of their body and vital energy.
Still, it paid to have a solid foundation of body tempering no matter one’s future speciality. The benefits of a tempered body went beyond just physical hardness: increased regeneration, resistance towards disease as well as the elements were just a few of the many benefits that a person with an uplifted physique could have.
After three weeks, the extra boost on my gathering speed finally abated, and although the amount of qi I had actually gathered was negligible compared to what a thirty-year qi pill or even a fifteen-year qi pill could do for me, my vital energy accumulation was what truly mattered, since that couldn’t just be ingested in a pill. Traditionally, the shortcut for body tempering was being submerged in an elixir bath that would… hurt you. A lot.
The method I was actually using, simply training until the point of exhaustion, was made far more effective for two reasons: I had twenty-four times the gathering speed, and vital energy accumulation worked differently from internal energy accumulation in that it took a lot less to gain decent results. Even a year’s worth of vital energy in your body was an insane boon to have, and at this point, I had gathered a hundred and twenty six days worth of vital energy, roughly corresponding to a little over four months. Add the multiplier from the Jade Canal Elixir and I was sitting at six months of accumulated vital energy.
That increase in vital energy would only magnify in effect once I put on more weight, and I predicted that I would soon be going through another growth spurt to accommodate this sudden increase in vital energy.
I held a horse stance with thirty kilograms of weight on my hands, and an additional fifty on my back, trying to push for thirty minutes. At this point, my muscles had become defined, but in terms of mass, I was maybe four or five kilograms heavier. Most of my strength came from the supernatural, which didn’t have a mass to it.
As I was training, Jingshu approached me. “Hello,” I said.
“For someone who was talking big about teaming up, you certainly aren’t making a case for why yours is a winning faction,” he said.
The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
“I told you,” I said. “I’m no good at talking.”
“That’s why you haven’t said anything of note in all this time?” he asked, arms folded.
“Precisely,” I said. “Also because I didn’t feel like there was anything to say. We’re just training.”
“Today is the sponsorship day,” Jingshu said, and I nodded. That had totally slipped my mind. Some days ago, the masters had announced that soon, the greatest masters of the Alliance would come to grant boons and treasures to whoever they were the most impressed by.
“Right,” I said. It had slipped my mind, but that didn’t mean I was at a disadvantage. I had prepared enough for it anyway.
Jingshu tilted his head at me, as if prompting me to say anything.
“I’m going to be honest with you,” I said. “You and I are operating on entirely different planes of communication right now. Just… speak your words out loud. I’m not a telepath.”
“What do I get from teaming up with you?” he asked. “And what does teaming up mean?”
“It’s not really a formal arrangement,” I said. “There isn’t much give and take. What I had in mind was more like a partnership. One of mutual benefits. As for material benefits, we kick something good each other’s way every now and then, but the important thing is our agenda. The main agenda is making sure cooler heads prevail. Making sure Wenhao doesn’t get carried away, what with his newfound relevance in this world.”
“You don’t get along with Wenhao?” he asked. “Why?”
Ugh. Saying I didn’t get along with him made it sound like we were operating under the same terms of conflict. Wenhao just wanted a good fight, my quarrel with him was much deeper. “It’s more complicated than you think,” I said. “But put briefly, I don’t trust him. Moreover, I think there aren’t any lengths he wouldn’t cross to get what he wants.”
“And what’s that?” he asked. “What does he want?”
I looked at Jingshu with a raised eyebrow. “What do you think?”
He gritted his teeth, clearly reluctant to answer. Finally, he did. “Xinyi… right?”
“No,” I said. But that answer was… problematic to say the least. This kid was in love with Xinyi? “God, I thought you were better than this,” I said. Jingshu frowned, and I explained. “You always struck me as someone with a more analytical mind, but this love thing you’ve got going has slightly lowered my esteem in you.”
“Shut up,” he said. “It was a shot in the dark, but I know what you mean now. Wenhao wants to be the strongest, right?”
“Wrong again,” I said. “He wants a challenge. He has fun when he fights, and I have a feeling that will get fairly terrible once he gets up there in power. Anyway, I’ve got some disconcerting news for you,” I said. “Given that we partner up, I see no reason to hold this information back from you, since you’ll only benefit from learning about it.”
“What is it?” he asked. “And must I make a decision before you tell me?”
I wavered a little under the weights I was carrying, but decided to go ahead and say it anyway. “If my source is correct, then Xinyi is already in love with Wenhao.”
“I already know that.”
Oh.
“My esteem of you has gone up,” I said. “To put yourself through such heartache over what will undoubtedly be an unrequited love… that’s impressive.”
“I don’t need you talking down on me.”
“Apologies, I was just teasing,” I said. Perhaps if he’d have been older, he’d know to take my words in stride. But young men’s hearts were fragile things. Best be more careful in the future. “In any case, I figure I’ll be receiving my unfair share of boons from my sponsors. I’ll give you anything I don’t strictly need. Well, you and Mei Ying, who I’ve gone through the trouble of befriending.”
“I don’t need that,” Jingshu snapped. “How is a partnership supposed to be founded on one person carrying the other?”
“Your irritability is misplaced,” I said. “I just want us to work together.”
“For what?” he asked. “You say this as if there is some great danger lurking in the horizon that none of us know!”
I dropped the weights, not because I got tired, but because I couldn’t believe the words he was telling me. “War,” I said the word with such an emphasis that I almost shouted it. “You don’t know what that is! None of you do!” Jingshu backed away a step, and I stepped forward. “You think I’m just trying to make moves in order to build up a power base or something? I couldn’t care less about power! All I want is for people to have some common sense, that’s why I’m working hard. I don’t have an agenda beyond that.”
“And why are you so sure that things will fall apart without your efforts?” he asked. “You said it yourself: you fail at talking. You aren’t the best at discerning people either. So what gives you that unshakeable faith in this terrible future?”
“History,” I said honestly.
My history, and history in general. War was hell. And it didn’t bring out the best in people. It wouldn’t bring out the best in my classmates either.
Jingshu growled. “What do you know about war?”
“This isn’t a competition,” I said. “Grow up, Jingshu. I’m not trying to lord knowledge over your head. You know as much as I do: war is hell. It’s not pretty. People die. Those who don’t change. Some hurt forever, physically or mentally. Some live for it. And it’s never good.”
“And what do you intend to do about it?” he asked.
“I intend to stop it,” I said. “And those who may benefit from it.” I sighed. “Listen; they won’t involve us in the minutiae of warfare now because we still have a lot of indoctrination ahead of us, but eventually there’ll come a time when people like you will be given a front-row ticket to power. In a limited capacity, of course, since no matter what you do, you’ll never really be in the room where it happens. Not unless those oldies kick it first, along with every named heir of theirs, and the heirs of those heirs, until they finally get the idea to let some foreign otherworlder call the shots. Get it? We’re weapons. That’s all they want us to be. My goal is to make sure we remain as unused as possible. Thus, the name of the game is limiting the trigger-happy elders from blooding us too often and raising tensions. Diplomacy, too. It’s not in our job description or training, but that’s due to an agenda that isn’t ours. And if that promise they’re making us swear is really what they say it is, then that gives us an opportunity to seize actual power: by leveraging ourselves.”
Jingshu’s eyes widened. “The Promise of Cooperation states that we serve the interests of the Martial Arts alliance in exchange for the esteem and ear of the elders. That still doesn’t guarantee that we have leverage. The onus is still on us to serve their interest in exchange for that esteem.”
“It’s a circle,” I said off-handedly. “Their esteem and ear will allow us to influence their interests, which will give us the ability to steer ourselves. Besides, interest is casting a wide net. For example, it would be in their best interest for us to not resent them. Our will is still a factor. It’s just buried under the obligation that we have towards them.”
“Then we must find a way to raise the importance of our will,” Jingshu said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Uh, you go and do that, and then let me know the plan, Kongming.”
Jingshu gaped. “W-what? That’s on me, now?”
“Like I said, you’ve got a head for this sort of stuff. Probably. That’s why I wanted us to team up in the first place.”
“I’m doing a lot of the work here!”
“Hold on a minute here,” I said. “I had the impression that you didn’t want to fall in line. This is exactly the opposite of that.”
“It doesn’t feel like it,” he groused.
I shrugged. “You untangle that mess on your own. I’ve still got some training to do before I lose interest and—” I sighed. “Nevermind,” I said. I looked down at the weights and decided that I wouldn’t continue training. My progress would be at half rate from here on out, and I didn’t feel like grinding. I looked up at Jingshu consideringly. Maybe there was still a way to engage my mind? “How are your Basic Forms?”
“I’ve… made good progress,” he said. “Performing the Forms becomes easier every day. It feels almost uncanny.”
“Yes, that’s the Heavenly Funnel,” I said.
“I have studied this phenomenon extensively,” Jingshu said.
“Then you should know how one might be able to increase their resonance with the Heavenly Funnel,” I said.
“Through enlightenment,” Jingshu said. “And, uh, insight.” He looked down at the ground. “It doesn’t seem very scientific or controllable.”
“It’s psychology,” I said, waving his concerns off. “Plenty scientific, if you insist on using that framework. I read somewhere that one of the most common triggers of enlightenment is overcoming mental hangups,” I said. “To be confronted with a structural flaw in your mentality and finding a way to resolve it.”
“You’ll excuse me if I find such an effort difficult,” Jingshu said dryly. “The only thing I can consider a weakness is… my attraction to a certain someone. I’m powerless to do anything about that, though.”
I smiled a little at that. He was so very cute.
“You know what your problem is?” I asked him.
“I do not,” Jingshu said. “Though I guess you’ll tell me what.”
“Once upon a time, somebody lied to you and told you that you could become a genius and know everything. You never stopped chasing that fantasy,” I said. “That’s why you will never reach enlightenment.” Jingshu scowled at me. “That is, unless, you can bear the burden of this question: what is the sound of one clapping hand?”
Jingshu blinked. “What? That’s nonsense!”
“So you considered the question, decided it didn’t fit within that narrow framework of reality which you labor under, and threw it away without a second thought. You couldn’t bear the burden,” I said. “Just like I said.”
He frowned sharply at me, but I only smiled. I remembered once upon a time, the abbot tried to trap me with that koan. Well, not trap per se, but he did expect me to agonize over the futility of what I initially deemed was a nonsensical question, before eventually coming to an enlightened position.
What he hadn’t expected me to do was immediately make the jump from First-Rate to Peak Master by finding truth outside our ordinary notion of reality, widening my perspective beyond my former ken.
“Whatever,” Jingshu said. “I won’t waste my time on your pointless games. I have Forms to practice.”
“Good luck with that,” I said as I turned around to leave.
“Where are you going?” Jingshu called after me.
“Away to do something worthwhile,” I said. This was a long time coming.
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]
After speaking to a servant, I received the item that I requested, wrapped in cloth. With that in hand, I made my way out of the courtyard complex, along a path up the mountain that split off into several different paths. I took the one that led to the mountain lake. After a fifteen minute trek, I arrived there to see an abandoned shack on the grass at the bank of the untouched lake, beyond it a drop that revealed an infinite vista of clouds. This was barely a fraction of the true beauty that the Wudang mountain had to offer.
There was no beauty like what nature had to offer. Made one wonder why we even tried.
I unwrapped my item, revealing a pipa in immaculate condition, no doubt a gift given to the sect which was then promptly discarded into a pile of similar gifts—tributes from non-martial artists who wished to show their gratitude but failed to realize that martial artists were not actually artists.
Most of them at least.
I did a few experimental strums. I could control my body better now that I’d gotten some minor attainments in martial arts: a bit of vital energy, and a respectable store of internal energy.
That allowed me to just barely bridge the gap between my body’s physical inexperience and my memories.
Warming up, I played scales, each string resonating in the room. The wooden surface felt smooth against my fingers. As I continued, my fingers moved faster, testing my limits. I experimented with different patterns and chords, challenging myself. The pipa responded, the sounds filling the space. The warm-up turned into a fast-paced rhythm. My fingers danced over the strings, embracing the challenge. The pipa's resonance echoed discipline and grace, breaking free from the rigid martial arts world, returning finally to where I belonged.
I started playing ‘White Snow in Spring’, feeling that I’d attuned myself enough to the instrument that I could give it an honest attempt. While the pipa wasn’t my ballpark, the instruments that I did know—mastered back on Earth—were enough that at the very least, my fingers obeyed me.
My right hand’s fingers strummed rapidly while my left hand’s fingers stopped the strings in various positions.
Barely halfway through the song, I got bored, and decided to change things up.
And what better change than something wildly different in style? I started strumming an old gypsy guitar song about a girl named Georgia, adapting it to the pipa with reckless abandon. It was a slow start with numerous false steps before I finally managed to get through the entire song without stuttering.
Then another, named after the artist’s tiger. This one was way faster, and almost felt like trying to ride a tiger.
If there were any hiding masters listening to me, then I probably wasn’t earning any favors playing this sort of music. From my experience, jazz had always been one of those… extremely divisive forms of art. This effect was was even even more pronounced in this world whenever I’d tried to play for an audience. At least back on Earth, there was some chance that a listener could have been influenced by jazz. Here, that genre just did not exist.
I heard clapping behind me and stopped playing to turn around and get a sight of the newcomer. He looked like shit: torn and tattered rags making up his clothing, a tangled white beard and a bald head, he looked every bit a beggar. Except for the parts that mattered. He didn’t stink for one. Judging from his posture, he didn’t have any aches or pains that came as a general consequence of being a beggar.
Who was he?