56. Ten Become More Than One.

Arjun gasped as the vines crawled up his leg and yanked him into the air. The avatar that he was fighting had taken on the shape of a Gao Giant, but it continued to utilize the complex magic that all of the avatars utilized, especially when the disciples were working together.

Which they were more and more frequently, as the opening days where Little Bug was content to simply show them a mirror were long gone. Little Bug had stopped pulling his punches long ago, as he demonstrated by slamming Arjun into a rock and then launching him high into the air.

Polkluk was there to catch him and redirect him to the ground. While he was up there, the young man launched a lightning bolt at the Gao Giant avatar, who roared in anger when the attack connected.

Yara was being protected by Hien Ro, who burned the encroaching foliage back with his own power while Yara focused her abilities into a complex pattern of a technique. Abruptly she opened her eyes, which glowed blue from the concentrated Qi, and spread her hands.

Hoarfrost spread throughout the jungle, killing the vines that the Gao Giant had been using against them. It roared in defiance, then broke apart into a hundred bats.

The bats began flying at the disciples, and Thaseus stepped up. Conjuring up a wind, he set it aflame in an area denial attack to take out as many of the miniature avatars as he could. He caught perhaps nine in ten, but the ones that got threw changed into Boar Hounds and snapped their tusks into the thighs of Lahri and Lukal Lukal.

Lukal Lukal roared in pain and thrust an earthen dagger through the skull of the Boar Hound attacking him, causing it to burst into mist. He threw his trident at the one attacking Lahri, but Farn had already set it aflame and Arjun had impaled it with earthen spikes.

The trio of Dao Companions gathered back to back while Lahri staunched the bleeding.

A new Dao Avatar appeared, this one in the shape of a Yamatuma, a yeti-like monster said to inhabit the jungle. It roared and threw rocks, which turned into spears in the air.

The battle roared. Each time the disciples defeated a Dao Avatar, a new one would appear in an unpredictable shape and with unpredictable power. They had to identify its weaknesses and counter it swiftly, a task that was growing more complex every day.

But they worked together, and they were slowly overcoming the challenges that Little Bug presented them.

The battle raged through the day, and in the evening finally the attacks stopped. An avatar appeared in the form of Little Bug.

“That is it for today,” he said. “I’ll meet you back at the compound. Tomorrow, we begin the next stage of your training.”

The disciples, sweaty, bloody, beaten and weary, made their way back to the mountain. It was only one of three remaining mountains in the small range that Little Bug had claimed, the rest having vanished into spatial artifacts sometime over the last few weeks.

Little Bug was waiting for them, having already drawn up water for them to wash and cooked a stew for them to share. They rinsed off the worst of their sweat and grime and sat at the table, too exhausted to talk. This training session had been the most exhausting one in a line of exhausting training sessions.

But tired as they were, they were also hungry, and somewhere along the middle of the meal, someone cracked a joke, and someone laughed, and soon they were acting like teenagers again.

Little Bug watched them with a small smile on his face. They had done well, overcoming everything he had thrown at them today.

That night, after everyone had gone to bed, Little Bug climbed the mountain one more time. He sat in the freezing cold, and he cultivated.

Hien Ro woke up in the middle of the night as he felt a sudden change in the Qi of the mountain. He went outside and stared up at the summit. An hour later, he saw Little Bug descending.

The boy had broken through onto the silver path.

~~~~~~

The disciples stood outside in the gathering spot, nervously waiting for me to talk. I nodded at them. Aside from flaring my cultivation in the morning to make certain they knew what had happened, I hadn’t said a word all morning.

They hadn’t pressed me.

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Their reactions ranged from surprised to worried at my breakthrough. They ought to be worried; I had been as strong as a silver path cultivator, perhaps stronger, when I had faced them before. Now that I was on the silver path, I was fairly certain that I could take on Tornolai and win.

They were still powerful cultivators of the bronze path, but that’s all they were. Powerful cultivators on the bronze path. They couldn’t summon Dao Avatars, and they couldn’t utilize every element.

Yet.

I grinned.

“Today, we begin work on something which will give you an advantage. Something which will allow you to stand toe to toe with someone a hundred times stronger than you individually. I shall teach you the North Star Guiding Formation.”

They glanced at each other, confused. They’d never heard of such a technique. That wasn’t surprising, it wasn’t famous in this dimension.

“The secret to the formation is to become a part of a whole. I do not mean simply that you must cooperate with each other. I mean that you must become unified in a way that is presently difficult for you to understand. You have learned teamwork, and that is good. You have learned to rely on each other. You know each other’s strengths, and your weaknesses, your hopes and your dreams and your fears. That is good.”

I paused, allowing them to soak in the praise.

“But you are still nine teenagers and a jaguar working together as a team rather than Ten being One . When you learn the North Star Guiding Formation, you will become a gestalt, ten pieces that are stronger together than they are apart. Not one plus one, or two times two. You will be exponentially stronger for each part of the gestalt. You will be able to take on anyone in this world. Even Ko Ren. Perhaps even me.”

I smiled. “Let us begin. To start with, stand in a circle, hold hands, and send your Qi into the body to your left. Keep in mind that you are not sending it into a partner. You are sending it into a different limb of your body, for the ten of you are one and the one of you are ten. You must not reject the Qi that enters you from other parts of your body, just as you must not hold back when you send your Qi elsewhere.”

The ten of them followed the instructions I gave. Even Xol, who’s status as a quadruped made the formation somewhat uncomfortable for him and the others.

Immediately they experienced Qi rejection. They began vomiting and convulsing, and it took ten minutes for them to recover.

“Again,” I said twenty minutes later, after discussing where they had gone wrong. Where I knew that they would go wrong.

And where they would go wrong on the next attempt, and the one after that.

It would take weeks for them to master this technique and overcome the Qi rejection sickness that prevented most cultivators from utilizing this technique.

But they would be far, far stronger for it.

~~~~~~

Belqee stretched, the vertebrae in her ancient back popping as she forced them back into place. The other villagers were gathering around to bury the young man who had fallen victim to a snakebite the other day, and she needed to pay her respects.

There had been more traffic on the nearby highway than normal lately. She’d been called to translate a few times, and had learned that northerners were building a city nearby. She was too old to care about the comings and goings of the young overly much, but still she sensed the winds of change coming in, stirring up the dust of the old ways and shaping them into something new.

She wobbled through the village to the graveyard where the hole was already dug. The others waited patiently for her, and once the whole village was there, the village head, Coatl, stepped forward.

Ever since the wandering cultivators had put him in his place, he had been a much better leader. That they had left him in his hole for three weeks while he screamed and pleaded for release had something to do with it, of course, but she liked to think that it was thanks to her pleading for his life after his defeat that he had treated her with the respect that she deserved.

“Markee was a friend of mine,” Coatl said. “I will miss him.”

That was it? She scoffed. Some eulogy. But he took a shovel and began throwing dirt on the body.

When the second shovelful of dirt landed, however, the body abruptly sat up. The crowd gasped in shock as Markee climbed out of his grave.

“Get back! Get back!” Coatl shouted, but before anyone realized what had happened the corpse attacked one of the women in the front row.

The villagers ran screaming.

Only the swift and violent actions of their village head prevented a massacre as the bronze-ranked undead tried to massacre the friends and family of its body’s previous owner. Even so, the next funeral disposed of three bodies instead of only one, and they were burned instead of buried.

The next day, they dispatched runners to the south, to Mer’cah, and to the new city that was being built in the north. If the dead were rising, then the cultivators in the city must be made aware.

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