Chapter 24

The children didn’t see the preparations that were going on for the summer solstice. They weren’t meant to see them. They wouldn’t have understood them anyway. That was fine, they would benefit from them all the same.

One day, Tren marched ten miles to the north and scratched a formation into the ground with his hoe. The next day, he marched ten miles to the south and did the same thing. He went east, then west, then once he had the cardinal directions covered he traveled to clockwise to the northeast, the southeast, the southwest and the northwest in turn.

Finally, in the basement of the manor that his wife had made him build, he scratched nine tenths of the final part of the formation. He waited, sensing the power as it built up.

The children began to sense something was going on, but they couldn’t quite put a finger on what it was. There was some sort of excitement in the air that they couldn’t understand or qualify. They dealt with it as children do, working off their nervous excitement with play. They cultivated daily, they sparred occasionally.

Pao lost his place as the strongest disciple of the Shen household when Tan began kicking the snot out of him once more. It wasn’t just that he had increased from the seventh stage to the eighth. There was something qualitatively different about is blows. He wasn’t just punching with his muscles, but backing his strikes up with Qi in a way that Pao couldn’t duplicate.

Pao continued to get in one devastating blow now and then, but Tan either endured or avoided the worst part of Pao’s superior strength. Even when Pao thought that a blow landed cleanly, it somehow did less damage than he thought it should.

Meanwhile, Pao felt Tan’s blows resonate inside of his body, hurting him in a way that was more than physical. He recovered each day swiftly after the fight. When he asked Master Shen what was going on, and whether it was dangerous, the man had laughed.

“Fighting is always dangerous, even when it’s a friendly spar. As for what Tan is doing to you, he has discovered the power of erosion. He is wearing you down with his Qi and that is how he’s winning once more. There are two ways you can counter it. Either learn to withstand it, or learn to avoid it,” Tren had said.

“But I do not think that at the current level it’s bad for you,” the man continued. “Rather, I think that it’s a bit of polish to the gem that’s hiding beneath your exterior. Keep fighting him until you understand what it is that he’s doing to you, and once you understand, you’ll be able to take that power for yourself. Not in the way that Tan is using it against you, but in the way that the earth benefits from erosion.”

As always, Pao took the man’s words and meditated on them carefully. He meditated until he thought that he understood them, then he challenged Tan to another bout.

And got the snot kicked out of him once more by the younger boy.

The twins, meanwhile, were their own perfect training partners. Boy and girl, water and fire, yin and yang, they matched each other perfectly. Including the fact that they were at the same stage of cultivation and proceeding to progress at an even pace.

Oh, occasionally one would pull in front of the other. Won passed into the fourth stage of the initiate’s realm before his sister, for example. But she promptly caught up to him, and redoubled her efforts to keep pace.

They continued to spar every day, fighting both physically and with their elements. Unlike Tan and Pao, they had direct control over their magic, with Won having been able to manifest small flames almost since he’d absorbed his spirit and Ko able to manipulate water and turn it to ice.

The matches where they fought with fists were usually won by Ko, as she remained able to enhance her body, while Won could not. Neither of the adult Shens thought that he was ready for one of the body enhancement techniques that his element would eventually allow him to access. They said that he would literally burn himself out from the inside if he tried the way he was now.

Ko had no such trouble. The body enhancement techniques of the water element were easy to master, focused as they were in the blood and muscle of the body.

In the duels where they limited themselves to magic, however, Won beat his sister handidly time after time. His fire wasn’t hot enough to really hurt any of the cultivators on the farm, but it was enough to defeat her own water constructs and claim victory.

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Occasionally the twins fought against Pao, or against Tan. Sometimes it was a fight of one on one, and the more advanced cultivators would hold back to make the battle more fair. Othertimes the twins fought in unison in an effort to overcome either the steadfast Pao or the overbearing Tan as a team. They lost more often than they won, but, especially working together, they did win occasionally.

On the day of the solstice, which was typically celebrated as a day of rest and hiding from the heat either by resting in the shade or swimming in the nearby pond, the adults announced that it was time for the children to try working together as a team, battling together to overcome someone far stronger than any of them were individually.

The children had exchanged looks and Tan had asked “Who are we to fight, then?” and Wensho had grinned.

“Me, of course,” she had said.

They had gone out to the fallow field were most of the sparring battles took place, and the beautiful woman had faced off against the four precocious cultivators she was helping to raise.

The children, used to fighting each other but never along side each other, were easily outmatched by the fluid grace of the water cultivator. Won and Ko were used to operating as a team, but they constantly found that either Tan or Pao were getting in their way and causing their coordinated attacks to fail.

Both Tan and Pao fought as hard as they could, but found that they continued to stumble into each other, foiling the others attacks and, in more than one occasion, literally running into each other.

Wensho just smiled the entire time, easily avoiding or diverting the attacks which came close to her without even getting any dust on her dress. She continued to fight for an entire hour while the children slowly improved their teamwork. Finally, seeing that they had exhausted themselves physically and spiritually, she called an end to the match.

“What did you learn?” she asked them.

“That Tan’s mom is ridiculously strong,” Won answered cheekily.

She grinned. “What else did you learn?”

“That we need to practice fighting together so that we don’t get in each other’s way,” Pao answered for the group. He put his fists together and bowed to his mistress humbly. “Your student thanks you for furthering his path.”

Each of the children bowed in turn, even Tan, who felt a little silly bowing to his mother like she was a grandmaster. Even though, technically, she was. But she was also his mom, which made it awkward.

“Right. Now, my husband has prepared a little surprise for you. Go to the top of your hill and spend the rest of the day cultivating. It should be most productive,” she announced, sending them off.

They followed her advice, and Tren took the opportunity to complete the formation circle in the basement which had been slowly gathering power over the last several days. As soon as it clicked into place, the power of the natural world took over.

The sky darkened, and a wind began swirling around the farm. Tan watched as the Qi of the wind turned far more violent than he’d ever seen it before. He impressed that violence into his memory, studying it, memorizing it, saving it for later.

Yet at the same time, the crops were not flattened, the buildings were not torn down, and not even the shingles on the roof were blown away. The wind was violent, but it spared the farm in its wrath. He wondered if he too could be so selective in his targets as this storm.

Pao watched as the storm interacted with the earth. The wind blew the dirt and the leaves and the grass. The water nourished the crops and the plants and formed the dirt into mud. He felt the pull of the earth Qi reacting to the storm, coming to life as the plants took their nourishment from the heavens.

Ko watched as the water began pelting them, driven hard by the rain. It crashed into the earth with all the fury of a typhoon. Could she, too, bring such power to bear? She watched as the clouds gathered in the heaven and circled above the farm. She watched as the hail began to fall. She sought meaning in the cycle that she was witnessing.

Water rises, and water falls. Water freezes, and it thaws. Water dries, and it condences.

Everything was a cycle, she realized. Even life and death.

As for Won, he too watched the skies as the lightning danced among the clouds. The thunder was deafening, and the heavenly lights were flashing so brightly that they left afterimages in his eyes.

What was lightning, he wondered. Was it fire? Was it something that he could control? No sooner had he had that thought than he looked at the brazier, which was burning even now, and he noticed sparks leaping from it as the flames turned from normal fire into St. Elmo’s flames.

He gasped in shock. Nervously, he pressed his hand into the brazier, snatching it back a second later in pain as the electricity burned him and coarsed through the muscles.

He remembered the feeling, despite the pain. It resonated with something inside him, inside his core.

Inside his dantian.

The storm lasted two hours then abruptly dissipated when Tren destroyed the formation’s circle in the basement. The rest of the formation, without the focal point, abruptly burnt themselves out. The power that remained was released back into nature, and the storm died within moments.

The children remained on the top of the hill for the rest of the day and into the night, until the adults called them to go to bed.