Year 658 of the Stable Era,

Fourteenth day of the tenth month

7th Outer Hour:

Yeung Lin leapt from his flying sword 300 feet above Clear Jade Mountain, the third peak to have been integrated into the Teal Mountain Sect. He twisted in the air as he fell, burning off his momentum as he lightened his body with a subtle application of his Striding Gale Step movement technique.

His fall slowed from a meteoric descent to a fierce tumble, and as he straightened out in anticipation of making contact with the ground, he clicked his heels together to activate the charm etched into the inner band of his anklet. The carved characters activated without a hint of a glow, and as the tip of his toes touched the ground, the smooth stone slabs of the training field bowed beneath him. It compressed under the force of his weight and velocity, sinking an inch or three before slowly rising back to its original shape as he took three steps forwards.

The crowded disciples gasped at his entrance, having spotted him on his approach, a full stick later than the posted starting time. He had learnt that arriving a bit late helped ensure that the disciples would catch sight of him as he fell. If he was on time, they tended not to notice him until he had landed. It was, however, odd for an instructor to be to be late to the first session of their own class, so they would always be on the lookout for a tardy teacher.

As ever, his Stone to Pillow technique was flawless in its activation. He had originally developed it to make long expeditions more bearable, but it had such lovely practical applications in other areas. Sadly, few shared his vision, and technique had ended up languishing in one of the sects many libraries. Its obscurity did make it easier to impress his students with it, however.

They tended to associate the ease of his landing with a higher level of cultivation rather than a skilled application of technique, which would make it much easier to gain their respect. In his early days as an instructor, this had been quite a challenge for him, as younger cultivators tended to assume that they knew better than him. Ego and pride were the twin enemies of education, and he had found that a good show of prowess tamed them more readily than any declaration of his own accolades.

He could, of course, have simply made the landing with force, but then repairing the field would have been a chore he’d rather not task himself with.

He raised his hand to halt the clapping of the one disciple that had decided to applaud, and began his prepared introduction as his flying sword sheathed itself on his back. Clasping his hands, he gave a slight bow as he introduced himself.

“Greetings disciples. I am Instructor Yeung Lin.”

The disciples hastily reciprocated his gesture, left hand clasped over right, though with the appropriately deeper bows. “These disciples greet the Instructor.”

“I am happy to see that all eighteen of you are here on time. That is good. As with life, opportunities are what you make of them, and your lack of attendance at any of our sessions will be its own punishment.”

“The purpose of our next six months together is to improve your body cultivation. Should you desire to neglect it, I will not stop you. You will only be harming yourselves. But if you wish to learn, and follow my instructions, I can guarantee that you will improve. Now, are there any questions?”

The disciples remained silent, although one or two of them still had their mouths slightly open. After giving them another moment to respond, he resumed. “Very well. Now, your first exercise will be to select a practice dummy and bring it to the center of the field for our next drill.” He pointed to the corner of the arena, where a collection of dull blue-green stone pillars stood. They were roughly the size of a very large man, so small to be pillars but quite large compared to some of the disciples. They were roughly cylindrical, with a series of protruding bars at various angles and lengths. They had many uses for sparring, and as the disciples were about to learn, handling.

Several of the disciples groaned at the task, grumbling complaints under their breath.

“He can’t be serious.”

“We have to move them ourselves?”

“Why aren’t they set up to begin with?”

“Is he really making us do his job for him?”

Yeung Lin clapped his hands, silencing them once again. “As I said, the purpose of our training is to cultivte your bodies. If you cannot handle your own tools, how can you hope to master them?”

To prove his point, he walked across the field and stopped next to the largest practice dummies. Leaning back, he loudly cracked his spine for dramatic effect (a trick he had learnt from one of his own mentors), stretched his arms, and without any further delays, deftly slung the pillar over his back.

As the disciples watched, he walked back to the center of the training field, up the five short stairs surrounding it, gripping the dummy by a pair of protuberances. Leaning to the side, he slowly slid it down, letting an edge come to rest against the ground before rocking it slowly into place.

“There,” Yeung Lin said, leaning his hand against the side of the dummy. “Now, we only have two hours together today, so get to it.” The disciples quickly moved into action, jogging across the field to claim their own dummies. He carefully watched as they each chose a dummy to use, making sure to be at the ready in case a fight broke out over a particular dummy.

He had made sure that all save one were as close to the same size as possible, but you never knew with youngsters these days. So many of them had so much to prove, and it often manifested in them squabbling over the smallest things. Fortunately, the selection process was quite uneventful. The moving process, however, was quite the opposite.

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“Why…are…they…so…heavy,” one of the more muscled disciples grunted, biceps bulging as he struggled to part the dummy from the earth. Min Gang, Lin noted, recalling the name from his register. He had a younger relative taking the entrance exam. Perhaps he would see him later today.

“Perhaps they’re fixed to the ground,” a freckled female disciple with straw colored hair grunted as she tried to push her pillar to little effect. “And this is all… a test… of our persistence. Instructor Chun… did made us do the same with those…stupid bottomless buckets.”

“No, Disciple Gao Oma, I can assure you that that is not the purpose of this lesson,” Yeung Lin said, stepping up to her pillar. With a minor effort he pushed the pillar a foot to the side with a pat of his palm, before sliding it back to its original position. “The goal of this exercise is for you to move the dummy. If it was impossible to do so, it would defeat the purpose.”

The disciples looked a bit stunned by this, as none of them had detected a hint of qi when he moved the stone. When he had been on the other side of the field it had been harder to tell if he had used any, but up close there was no doubt. Their instructor was indeed moving the heavy stones with nothing but his body!

“Is there some secret to this?” Disciple Li Fen muttered, hair buns bobbing as she strained to gain leverage against her dummy’s bars. A good idea, if one poorly supported by her form.

“Of course,” Yeung Lin replied.

“Will you tell us?” Min Gang asked, still straining to lift his rock.

“Of course,” Yeung Lin replied.

“Wait, for real?” Another disciple, Hao Kuo, asked incredulously. Upon hearing this, the rest of the disciples immediately stopped what they were doing to listen in, which made sense to Yeung Lin. Many of his fellow instructors were not quite so forthcoming with their answers, which had always frustrated him as a student.

Said frustration had shaped his own teaching style, which was why he kept his object lessons short and to the point.

“Of course,” Yeung Lin replied. “It is never the wrong choice to seek enlightenment. If you neglect to think your approach through when solving a task, you can very easily put in twice the effort for half the results.”

“Instructor Chun says that only a fool seeks answers to questions rather than solve them themselves,” Gao Oma said, resting against her pillar.

“Instructor Chun is…” Yeung Lin caught himself before he said ‘a crusty fossil with beliefs that should have gone extinct in the Age of Drought’. It wouldn’t do to start another feud with a fellow teacher, especially one with a slight degree of seniority. “…a follower of a different philosophy than I. He prefers to teach with harsh lessons, while I fail to see how such a circuitous path is the best way forwards.” There, that should be a diplomatic enough.

“I would also like to note that Instructor Chun has somewhat muddled the original meaning of that proverb in his telling. It is not ‘fool seeks answers to questions rather than solving them themselves’, but rather ‘a scholar seeks answers, while a fool expects to be handed them’. My purpose is to teach. If I were to simply respond ‘figure it out on your own’ to every question I was asked, I could be replaced by a wooden sign and a pile of scrolls.”

There was a silence as the class let his words sink in, surprised at how nakedly backhanded they were. Eventually, one raised her hand.

“Yes, Disciple Gao Oma?”

“So, what is the secret Instructor?” Oma asked, clearly curious to hear what it was.

“Oh, it’s quite simple,” Yeung Lin said, standing next to another dummy. “How much do you think these dummies weight?”

There was a pause as the disciples waited to see if the question was rhetorical. When their instructor exasperatedly waved his hands in response, they quickly began to call out numbers.

“500 pounds.”

“800 pounds.”

“Half an elephant.”

“A ton.”

“700 pounds.”

“That’s actually correct, Disciple Li Fen,” Yeung Lin said with an approving nod. “These dummies do, in fact, weigh a full ton. So quite a bit away from half of an elephant, unless it’s a very small one. No, Teal Nephrite is quite heavy for its size, and many disciples don’t realize quite how much more until they try and lift a block of it themselves.”

“So is the lesson that we should know how much stone weights?” Min Gang asked, before hastily adding, “Instructor Yeung?”

“In a way,” Yeung Lin replied. “The lesson here is twofold. The first is that you should have taken a moment to analyze your task before you attempted it. You assumed that because I was able to easily lift the stone, that you could lift it as well. And in doing so, you underestimated them because of their appearance. That can be quite dangerous a dangerous assumption to make when you are out in the world. Many cultivators hide their fangs, and what appears trivial to some can very easily be a tribulation for you should you carelessly attempt to imitate them.”

“The other lesson is for you to understand your weakness, and through it, your goal. By the end of our time together, you will be able to move these dummies. Perhaps not as easily as I can, but you will be able to move them. It will take a lot of hard work, but if you follow my lessons diligently, you will be able to move them. Now, on to our real first exercise.”

Yeung Lin stepped over to the tarp that had been set up over the equipment adjacent to the dummies. Such cloths were commonplace around the training field, so it had gone unquestioned by the disciples. With a flourish, he tossed it into the air, where it slowly fell before eventually landing atop the dummy in the center of the field. Underneath were a series of stone bracers and weights, all of the same dull blue-green stone as the training dummies.

“Now, there should be enough for each of you. The large bands go on your legs, while the slender ones go on your wrists. We’ll be starting off with a lap around the training buildings, and if we have time, I will take you through a series of exercises to do on your own.”

He produced his own set of weights from his storage ring, smiling to himself as his disciples gasped at how much larger they were. He could have chosen to bring out his set made from Black Mountain Sand, which weighed twice as much at a tenth the size, but they never got quite the same reaction.

9th Outer Hour:

As Yeung Lin’s class collapsed to the ground, glad to finally be free from their torment, Lin walked around the field, passing each of them a gourd of water and a Body Recovery pill. They were relatively mild, made from some herbs that he’d been cultivating in his personal garden for the last decade or so, but they were potent enough to reduce the disciples’ exhaustion level from limply panting on the ground to being severely winded.

Typically, such medicine would cost a few sect merit points, but he found that providing minor support to his students helped endear him to them. Especially after such rigorous exercise.

“You all did a good job,” he said, treating them to a brief round of applause. “I believe I have a good grasp of your individual levels, so next class I can start to give you more personalized instruction. Be sure to eat a good meal to help your body recover. Nutrition is important for your growth.”

After reminding his disciples to store their equipment back where they’d gotten it, he returned his sparring dummy to its place before jumping on his flying sword to set off towards Cracked Peak Mountain. He was genuinely running late for his next class, and while he had accounted for his Body Tempering Guidance class to run a bit late, he didn’t want to push his margins too much.

Unlike his physical cultivation class, his Practical Application of Defensive Formation class was halfway through their curriculum, so he had established slightly higher expectations for him in them.