Transmigration Blues
The chamber was small, but well appointed. The floor was tiled with a mosaic of pattern near the doors and under the windows. Heavy wool curtains were pulled shut, letting only the faintest glimmer of light pass through. The shaded sun revealed a fine wooden desk, a wash basin and a luxurious four poster bed. Upon this bed, tangled in light cotton sheets, lay a still form. A handsome youth: with pale skin, elegant eyebrows and a strong angular face. Even in rest though, his expression was drawn, his forehead lined with unwillingness. Tracks of a few spilled tears could be seen on his cheeks.
He did not move.
Next to the bed lay a folding table holding a partially eaten meal, long gone cold. A bowl of rich soup, fats gelling on the surface, a few buns and a bowl of rice. A bun and a few bites of rice, perhaps a spoonful of the soup— that was all that had been taken. The meal had lain so long now that insects had found their way to the plate, a few flies and a beetle. Like the figure on the bed they lay completely still,
for these insects had much in common with the handsome youth.
To give a simple example, like the youth the insects had eaten some of the meal on the tray, and then had proceeded to lie down, and die.
Had one of the servants of the house had been present, then, they would have been startled into a faint when suddenly color blossomed on the young man’s cheeks and he gave a hoarse gasp, fingers gripping the sheets like they were the only things keeping him from falling back into death. He moaned, clutching his stomach and then his ribs in pain, before coming fully aware, opening piercing black eyes to take in the chamber were he lay.
*******
“Ugghh…” ‘God damn, what happened to me? I feel worse than that time those punks broke into the restaurant and kicked the shit out of me and Little Bai. I think I cracked a few ribs, someone did a number on my whole torso, and I feel dehydrated and sick to my stomach.’
He opened his eyes, squinting in the gloom recognizing his room/not being able to place exactly where he was. The harsh dissonance of familiarity and strangeness played sourly in his aching mind. He was John Penn/Chu Feng, a cook and writer/the young master of the Chu family…
John/Chu clutched at his head and shuddered as the dual identities combatted for primacy. It was painful, disorienting and a bit macabre, but, eventually, John opened his eyes secure in his selfhood. He had the advantage over the vestiges of Chu Feng’s personality in several ways, the first, and perhaps most important being that he ‘wasn’t fucking dead,’ and secondly that he had a good twenty years of life experience over the child whose body he now apparently inhabited. ‘Note to self, never binge drink and read Wuxia again.’ John chuckled briefly to himself, before the pain in his… everywhere made him gasp.
Running his dry tongue over chapping lips, John turned his head to the ewer of water he ‘…Chu Feng not me, Chu Feng…’ had filled with fresh water every evening. Slow wincing steps brought John to the basin and water. Reaching over to heft the jug, John startled at the features reflected there-in. Again the juxtaposition of who he was and what he expected to look like sang in his mind, but he was able to push it aside over the practical desire to quench his thirst.
John slopped water over the floor and himself in his haste, but to be fair this wasn’t really designed for drinking out of. The water was just a bit cool, but fresh and earthy in a way John hadn’t tasted in a long time. ‘Well water,’ John thought to himself. There was no flash of double recognition here. To Chu Feng this was just how water was. The dryness and the sour feeling in his stomach both began to ease, and, leaving a little less than a third of the large, heavy jar full, John made his slow way back to his bed. The tray of food made his stomach clench and his mouth water despite it looking quite stale. The fact that ‘I/Ch/J/FUCK’ the-young-man-who-was-no-more had eaten some of this final meal before passing on, as well as the dead insects ringing the food, let John resist the hunger that was gnawing steadily in his gut.
John took a deep breath, winced, and then took a shallow breath instead. ‘Pain and weakness rule out anything but the strongest of hallucinations— the situation is real, embrace it, don’t retreat into fantasy or denial. I need food and more water. I need to access these memories without losing myself. I need… at least a week of healing, maybe a month for that floating rib on the left. I need to piss.’ A dark chuckle escaped his lips and he muttered to himself. “99 problems, but I can fix that one.”
After locating the appropriate pot and taking care of business, a glimmer of a plan was building in his mind. John wanted more strength and rest before attempting to wrestle with his identity, so a quick check for more food and drink was ideal. His glance into the courtyard had revealed a classical Chinese mansion, and the positioning of his room showed that the original occupant held quite a bit of status. There would usually be a small kitchen and a few other rooms in this wing if the layout held true to his previous experiences.
John eased the thin wooden door open, and listened. The hall was silent. He stepped carefully out of his room, silently making his way towards the back of the dwelling. He passed small sitting room and dining area, and saw a small doorway off to the side of that room. This led to a servant’s passage that at last ended in the small kitchen he’d sought. The stove was cold and when he checked the fire box, not even an ember was lit. Shrugging his shoulders, John took a quick inventory. A jar of rice, dried herbs bundled, vinegar, a small brick of sugar, flour… aha! A jar of brined eggs and another of sweet wine. A handful of walnuts rounded out the meal, but not before John found a whole smoked fish that was in the pantry. Carrying his bounty back to his room, John still encountered no one, which was starting to be just a tad bit fishy. He shook his head and focused on moving without aggravating his wounds. John tossed the (probably) poisoned leftovers into the chamber pot, then stacked his eclectic breakfast on the folding table.
Comfortably full and only the slightest bit tipsy, John refilled the ewer from the small well in his courtyard, drank, washed, and changed into simple pair of white silk pants and a black, comfortable, if somewhat tight, center fastened shirt. John did a few light stretches for his legs and arms, before retreating to bed and lying on top of the blankets. With the base needs satisfied to the best of his ability, John relented and let the piece of his mind that was panicking and spinning in circles get some attention.
‘The last thing I remember was going to sleep last night… then there was a noise, pressure, light, spinning, and suddenly I’m waking up as a body snatcher. In a very nice pre-industrial Chinese style house. Where I have significant injuries and someone succeeded in offing my predecessor with a touch of poison and his own weakness. As much as the process troubles me, if I don’t want to end up like this guy, I need to know what’s going on, and that means tapping these memories.’
John shifted around until he was as comfortable as he was going to get, then began to breathe in a slow, rhythmic pattern. He lay completely still, but his eyes could be seen moving under the eyelids, and his face showed micro-expressions, as if he was in the midst of an intense dream.
Hours passed, and still no one came to check on the young man. The sun set, the moon rose. Stars shone, then were obscured as a light rain fell. Soon a gentle mist filled the air, and the clouds passed overhead. The first glow of dawn was driving away the mist when John’s eyes darted open, taking in his surroundings.
He had been successful in searching Chu Feng’s memories. At first John had gotten only random scenes with no understanding; a beautiful woman held him and smiled joyfully, a stocky man with small white scars all over his body was correcting his posture during a punching routine, numerous children pointing at him and laughing as he lay in the dirt, sneers and catcalls of ‘trash.’ This last scene was connected to other encounters, and soon John had learned how to guide the memories. While outside his mind only a single night had passed, John had been able to skim through most of Chu Feng’s life, and drawing on his experiences, John was able to understand the way this society functioned, his place in it, and his future prospects.
John sighed, then cast his eyes in appeal to the heavens, “Not that I’m not grateful for surviving whatever happened to me with my consciousness intact, but couldn’t I have ended up in a less cliché setting?”
The heavens did not answer.
*****
“Status, inventory, help, menu, system activate…. I feel like such an asshole for even testing to see if that would do anything.” John was sitting on the edge of his bed, picking over some of the food he'd scavenged the previous day. “Still,” John continued to think out loud, “I thought transmigration was equally absurd two days ago so it was better to check. There are no treasures or strange stone medallions, so it looks like Chu Feng doesn’t have a ‘mysterious’ inheritance. He is the main branch heir, and his mother did disappear suddenly last year with no explanation from his father, so that trope means some uber clan will want me dead later. Daddy dearest got himself killed hunting demon beasts with Uncle Pang, and looking at my situation here that was clearly an assassination. I’m approaching my majority in a few years, I have 4 cousins with better martial skill than me, but… heh at least Chu Feng isn’t really trash, he was cultivating a high purity qi condensing art, and in a few months would have reached a tipping point where he’d start to show the dividends of his hard work… of course with his dantian cracked like a tea egg half of that cultivation was lost. Ugh…. Aren’t I supposed to have something as a transmigrator to make me peerless under the heavens? There are apparently medicines and Spirit arts that can heal my dantian, but Uncle won’t put out any money for me. I have 20 taels of silver, which means… fuckall, its basic pocket money, not enough to do anything with.” John paused in his rambling and re-examined that last statement, before ruefully shaking his head and continuing. “Heh, more than a peasant earns in months and I’m scoffing, I guess I’ve assumed my role as the ‘Young Master Chu’ pretty quickly. Come on, there has to be something left to me I can use…”
John screwed his face in concentration until…
It is late at night, and Father is showing me a spot on the corner of my new writing desk. He pushes hard and a piece of wood sinks in, pushing out a small drawer. Father’s smile is weird as he puts a pouch in the drawer. ‘Heh heh, son you are too studious and focused on cultivation. Without widespread experience you will find the Dao elusive, you need to have fun more. Still, Father is watching out for you. When you are a young man you will face many trials, and it may not be proper for me to step in. At that time, remember this drawer, I have set something aside to ensure you stay high spirited.”
A smile bloomed on John’s face as he quickly made his way to the writing desk in the corner, pressing on the spot he’d seen in his memory. With trembling fingers he opened the pouch and poured the contents onto the table: a medicinal pill, a goldnote worth ten taels, and low quality memory jade.
John quickly put the jade to his forehead, allowing the memory to play in his mind. He swayed and almost fell… Chu Feng’s father had been wasted when he made this. The unfocused consciousness almost made him throw up, but he pushed through it to the message.
“Ah, son… he he you are almost 11, soon you will become a man. With your aloof and studious nature, how will you attract any girls before you’re twenty? Go to the street of Night Blooming Jasmine and find a few girls, one won’t be enough for MY son, heh heh…”
John was at once disgusted, amused, and a little jealous. His own family had died when he was young, and his foster family had been supportive but emotionally distant. John wished he’d had such a silly, doting father, even if he was a gregarious fool who was too trusting in the end.
John moved to pull the jade from his forehead when it flickered back into activity. “Oh, and if you haven’t gotten that stick out of your butt yet, there is a cultivation method for this that will increase your aptitude and fortify your dan tian… just channel qi through the Chongmai, and both yin and yang Qiao Mai when you, heh heh, erupt. The girl must be a virgin, and its best if she has not cultivated. This can only be used for your first time, it has no effect once the vital yang is exhausted. Don’t feel like you are taking advantage, you will burn some of your lifespan to prolong her youth and the purity of her skin, while you fuse her vital yin into your soul and nurture your dantian. Heh heh… have fun son. Don’t worry, I’ll cover for you with your mother if you spend a night out suddenly. He he, its good to have a son…’
John’s face was half sneer and half fond laughter. No need to guess the nature of the pill then, it was certainly a mild aphrodisiac. John paused, and then shook his head with a snort. He’d consider the matter after he cleared house for a bit.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
His servants were compromised, so he couldn’t trust them to manage his courtyard. ‘I need to figure out if I can stay safely in the Chu compound, or if I should try to disappear. Uncle seems to want to rely on plausible deniability, he had stooges from the Li clan infuriate then ‘spar’ with me in an attempt to cripple my cultivation, mostly successfully. I imagine I was supposed to ‘lose the will to go on’ after that and succumb to ‘internal injuries’ helped along by the poisons in my dish. He had the wing emptied of people so I could waste away, he’ll likely kill the servants as scapegoats and then his sons will be the new main branch heirs. There is some supervising authority here that’s making him pay attention to the formalities in not directly killing me off… but who or what is it?’
After considering Chu Feng’s memories of the political situation in the clan and the city in general, John snapped his fingers and muttered, “Of course. The Prefectural Governor and the City Lord. Chu Feng’s horny old goat of a father was on decent terms with them through judicious use of bribes. Uncle… Chu Feng’s Uncle… would need to match or exceed those, not difficult with the small spirit vein the Chu family owns, but would go against the insular politics he’s advocating, which are really just an excuse to pour resources on himself and his children, as well as those of the elders supporting him.”
John began to pace slowly across the room. Before he’d made a full circuit, John felt his steps shorten then lengthen in a strange pattern, his steps falling naturally into a series of fluid, yet chaotic footwork.
A moment’s reflection revealed that this was the Breaking Waves movement technique that Chu Feng had practiced into his bones. John shook some of his apprehension over the lack of control he was experiencing, and let the movements of his body take over, a small smile erasing the brooding face that had rested there since his awakening. John felt the potential these steps had created, a coiled force that needed but the final motion of his qi to unleash.
As easily as acknowledging it a rope of Chu Feng’s pure qi surged through John as he sprang forward with the speed and force of the ocean, laughing in pure exhilaration as he found himself on top of his courtyard wall some hundred yards away, a sheen of sweat shining on his forehead.
“Holy fuck… that was incredible!” John had intellectually known that he was in a cultivator’s world, and while he had seen similar things in Chu Feng’s memories, he hadn’t really experienced them, only viewed them at a remove. The rush of his body moving in sequence with spirit and will, to achieve the very limits of nature… John was faint from the exertion and lost qi. After carefully maneuvering into his room, John once again lay on his bed, and this time, he tried to cultivate.
In the center of his being was cavernous well. Within, a blindingly pure white qi, thin as threads of silk, swirled together in the center. This was his dantian, and that was the source of his cultivation, the qi spiral. Using the cultivation art he…Chu Feng had chosen from his father’s secret library, the Thousand Petal techniques, John chanted the mnemonic while he shifted some… thing inside of himself that somehow encouraged the energy of the heavens and earth to start seeping into his dan tian.
A huge tide of cloudy smoke and fog rushed into Johns inner self, but at the last second he held it back from his qi spiral. He remembered from Chu Feng’s memories that if he wanted to be completely sure of reaching immortality, he couldn’t just absorb the raw energy, but instead work and process the energy into its purest form.
This refining was Chu Feng’s original idea after a sudden insight on the nature of qi. Most, if not all, cultivators initially focused on harvesting as much unrefined energy as possible, to drive their martial arts and condition their bodies. Instead of the luminous pure qi Chu Feng possessed, theirs would be a dull or milky rope of energy that could be used very quickly. Lacking a large volume of energy was why, though Chu Feng possessed good comprehension and a talent for martial arts, he was called ‘trash.’ His peers could lift 200 pound urns over their heads by the time they hit 11, so what if Chu Feng’s strikes were precise when he had only a natural boy’s strength? But Chu Feng persevered, because his goal was to be an ultimate cultivator, a true immortal, to surpass even the Xiantian realm, to develop a Nascent Soul, to reach what no one in this tiny kingdom had achieved before, and enter, or even surpass, the Dao Origin stage. And for that goal he would need incomparably pure qi. Oh one can refine the body and temper the meridians after the impurities of the world inhabit them, but you can’t remove them all without godly medicines or some fortunate encounter.
As the heir of a well-established clan, Chu Feng felt his foundation was sturdy enough to endure early weakness. He only discussed his plan with his father, Chu Chang, who had immediately told Chu Feng that he was the least fun child in the kingdom, if not the world, but as his father he would cherish and support him in all things. Since 8 years old cultivation had been his entire world, hours spent refining the thinnest and purest qi threads in his qi spiral, his speed increasing slowly but noticeably year by year, until now he was cultivating at a similar pace to his peers when they’d first started. By next year, he’d be only half as slow as his peers for qi hundreds of times more refined. In two years he would surpass them all.
Well, if he hadn’t died. With a shaky foundation and no proof of his prowess, Chu Feng was being maneuvered out of inheriting the clan, denied resources, and then provoked into an uneven fight with a vicious opponent.
With these reflections in mind, and not enough understanding of his situation to change cultivation menthods, John would need to tease out the nearly subatomic particles of unaspected qi and condense them into his qi spiral if he wanted to follow Chu Feng’s plan.
Johns first few attempts were like trying to grip smoke, but at last he was able to interpret his memories and properly flex the new spiritual muscles he possessed. The qi was obviously psychoreactive in some way, the stronger his visualization the better and quicker it responded. Here was where his experiences from Earth gave him a leg up over Chu Feng. John had seen time lapse videos of crystals forming, industrial polymer creation, winnowing machines; a hundred thousand examples to draw on. Chu Feng’s experiences were much more limited. Soon John’s mental constructs were scooping through the energy of heaven and earth like a whale sieving for krill.
Next he had to force these disparate particles into a unit that would rest in his dantian. The idea of the ‘qi spiral’ and ‘threads of qi’ were so fundamental to this mindscape that John would need to work with those metaphors if he didn’t want to scrap everything, and he saw no benefit to doing so yet. He chose instead to flex the idea a little and use the concept that the little pieces of qi he was holding in his mental hands were like flecks of metal, and with the pressure of his consciousness they became molten and self adhering. One last skim of the energies for any residual dross and the result was a portion of pure qi that he could just slip into his…
‘FUCK!’ John screamed inside his mind as the laboriously gathered qi failed to merge with his spiral and scattered back to the primordial mists. After glaring at his qi spiral in betrayal for a few moments John once again revisited Chu Feng’s memories of cultivation to see where he’d gone wrong. Another eternity later John was slowly impressing his sense of self on his refined qi and forcefully merging the newly gathered energy into the spiral, letting out a small sigh of relief as the process seemed somewhat self sustaining once started.
John was nearly spent, but felt that he could continue for a bit more. He now had a more or less complete understanding of the process, and from Chu Feng’s memories and his own experience he would be able to relax from his total mental focus and control to just go with the flow.
However John soon found that this was not the case. The second his iron focus slipped from any part of the action the qi would seep away, drawn by some invisible force to the edge of his dantian, where instead of resting against the surface it leaked out through the million fractures he now saw lining it.
With a trouble sigh John let go of his cultivation. He could still refine qi, but his dantian couldn’t hold the energy he was absorbing from the world. Any energy not immediately grasped by his spiritual consciousness would simply seep away, causing a lot of redundancy of effort as he gathered, refined a bit, gathered, then refined a bit more. His cultivation speed had been decimated, and it hadn’t been quick to begin with. Hours of painstaking effort and he’d regained half of what was lost to the movement technique he’d used.
John laughed at himself as he finished the last of the brined eggs he’d found the day before. Here he was, injured and with someone plotting to take his life, and he’d wasted most of the day on kungfu sorcery. Priorities, me! If I want to cultivate, do it while I’m safe. Hell I can always just open a restaurant again, there’s no need to be a cultivator!’
That last thought, unfortunately, caused a vehement wave of dissonant denial to rise up from within. Cultivation was the entirety of his host’s previous existence, and rejecting it would not be abided by his remnant. And, to be honest, the idea of living as a restaurateur in a world with super powers and might makes right philosophy didn’t exactly appeal to John either.
Fine! I’ll need medicines and safety and,(thinking of the technique Chu Feng’s father left) possibly a virgin sacrifice if I want to shore up my dantian and cultivate properly. I should either slip away from the compound for a while and try to drum up some support… wait? Why am I letting tropes control my behavior? I don’t give two shits about this clan! I should definitely just leave. Is there a way for ‘Uncle’ Pang to just let me off? Probably not, he did likely kill his half-brother. But if I leave a note abdicating my seat and run off they won’t spend much effort trying to track me down.
The young man sat on the bed in silence, contemplating his future, hazy afternoon slipping into twilight beyond his curtains. Slowly, a firm look of resolution came over his face, and he sprang from the bed, stopped, clutched his chest, cursed, and then walked carefully but firmly towards the writing desk. A few moments with brush and ink and a suitably maudlin letter was left for the next investigator.
“I have disgraced the clan… blah blah… not worthy of the name Chu… will take my spirit to the beast forest to join my ancestors… blah blah.. wash this disgrace with my own blood…. And done.”
Next he made his way to the wash basin. John had noted a painfully sharp jade handled razor by the basin earlier and with minimum fuss began to shave his head, blithely hacking the luxurious curtain of thick black hair to the floor. When he was finished he carefully collected the hair in an old towel and hid it in his closet. He folded his finest clothes on his bed, along with a thick blanket and a beast leather coat, and then wrapped the bundle tightly in a sheet. Into a backpack he stored a writing desk and decent supply of paper, a few rougher changes of clothes that Chu Feng would wear for messy excursions or practicing, a spare set of sandals, and all the few books, scrolls and Memory Jades in his possession.
Taking another look in the mirror, John decided against attempting to further disguise himself with his limited supplies. The haircut and adopting the hurried, bowed posture of a servant would suffice.
Now came the most difficult part of his plan. After resolving to leave the Chu estate Ch… John would need some resources to support himself in his journey. As luck would have it, Chu Feng’s father had taken his son into his private library in the main building before leaving on that ill-fated hunting trip six months ago. Perhaps he had a premonition, for Chu Change had shown the lad a secret panel behind a calligraphy scroll on the east wall. Chu Chang had not cataloged the contents, but simply said that in an emergency these were his personal resources, and that Chu Feng should feel free to help himself. Chu Chang had personally installed the safe, and was rather proud of all his little secret compartments. If John was ever to return to the compound, he would scour it with a fine tooth comb, as he was sure he would find little caches all over the place, but that safe was his goal tonight.
John initially considered approaching one of the clan elders that wasn’t visibly in Chu Pang’s pocket, but had rejected the idea as too risky. He would instead leave his letter, grab some funds and slip out the gate, and hopefully be well shod of the whole business and get on with his new life as a Super Saiyan... er… cultivator.
The gates would be sealed just after sunset, and no one would worry over a servant with a pack and a bundle to deliver on his head. John just needed to get to the safe, scoop everything into the pack, and then get gone. The family as a whole would be heading to dinner when the gong sounded… and as if on cue a resonant clash could be heard in the distance. John waited for 15 minutes before making his move.
There was a covered stone walk connecting the branch complexes to the main building, and John could hear his host’s relatives and servants converging ahead of him. When someone well-dressed was in the way he differentially stepped aside. As he had hoped, he became invisible when people saw a laborer, even one who could afford a better cut of material. John got one or two odd looks from the servants, and he thought a cousin frowned at him contemplatively, but John made it to the study without issue.
A quick check saw it empty and unlit. Faint red rays illuminated the scroll he remembered, giving him enough light to make his snatch and grab without sparking a… ‘Oh they used a glowing stone here for that. Neat.’
John eased the door closed then made his way to the painting, pocketing a glow stone from its paper lantern in the process. John snorted as he read the scroll, ‘this old man had been a character.’ It read- “The four treasures of the study: brush, ink, paper, inkstone.” This was a very common couplet both in this world and China. But putting your valuables behind a painting lauding simple scholarly tools and actually had the word ‘treasure’ in it was… cute.
John shrugged off his pack and hurriedly took the painting off the wall. His fingers danced along the pressure plates before he sent a quick surge of qi into the crystal behind the paneling. With a soft, almost unheard hum the formation concealing and protecting the nook turned off as the panel fell open on silent hinges. Not bothering to catalogue John just swept the contents into his bag, before freezing at the sight of a familiar knife wedged all the way in the back of the secret safe.
‘Fat… Chu Chang’s spirit weapon!’ A twinge of remorse ran through John’s heart as he realized that if his predecessor’s father had kept this weapon on him, he might not have died. It was a priceless artifact forged by a Xiantian level ancestor of the Chu Clan. It was peerlessly sharp and could channel qi and spiritual energies, and so could be used to carry out martial techniques. While John was unaware of the actual specifications of this dagger, most spirit weapons had at least an inscription of amplification added to them, magnifying the strength of their wielders to some degree.
John quickly tucked the weapon into his sash. He’d be able to wound even a peak Houtian expert with
it, and it would be a worthy trump card so long as it was hidden. If it was known that he had it however… carrying a treasure is a sin for the weak.
John would have to be very careful.
After closing the panel and rehanging the picture John turned to leave the study, when the paper door slid open suddenly with a crash, revealing… one of his cousins, Chu Long, and a visiting friend of his from the Du clan whose name John couldn’t dredge up at the moment. Chu Long sneered at him and was about to speak before he took a second look and recognition flashed across his face, followed by a dark chuckle and a look of distaste.
“Well Xiao Han, you were right. We definitely don’t have any servants as suspicious as this in the compound. I however think young master Chu’s attire is highly appropriate. What are you up to, trash? Practicing for your new role now that you’ve been crippled?”
‘So uncle has spread the word that I’m a cripple now? This meshes well with my plans to disappear.’
John put on an expression of exaggerated solemnity before saying, “Truly I have brought myself and the clan dishonor, and am taking my leave of the clan to fight the spirit beasts that took my father, until I too am no more. In this way my blood shall wash my shame. I will offer this last service to the clan though. Cousin, be less impulsive in the future. Instead of trying to make a name of yourself by attempting to find a spy or thief on the compound, bring suspicions to an elder. What would you have done if you’d found one here tonight anyway? They would have likely had cultivation equal to or stronger than yours, within an empty hall to dispose of you in.”
John enjoyed the small flash of chagrin as the boy realized that he should have told someone where he was going before chasing a hunch. While John thought most of these clan kids were thoughtless and annoying, he didn’t hold a grudge over it. Chu Long was just a child, cruel and uncivilized, aping the actions of his elders and peers to get along.
“I see you understand. I’m done here. I’ve another errand before I begin my pilgrimage, good night cousin Long, Du Han.”
Holding in a smirk at the respectful gaze of Du Han and Chu Longs conflicted expression, John walked straight backed without the demeanor of a servant as he passed towards the door, hoping he’d judged the situation right… then let out a soft sigh as a strangely heavy palm grasped his shoulder and spun him from the door.
“Did I say that you could leave? Hmph, wasting I, your father’s time with your false piety and waste of a self, still lecturing me while a cripple… I…I’ll let you off if you kowtow and admit your wrongs!”
Du Han looked uncomfortable and Chu Long was clearly having some small doubts about continuing to bully John. Chu Feng would have been furious, and been close to coughing up blood, but John just rolled his eyes and complied, wincing at how the movement’s pulled at his injuries, saying “I was wrong,” while letting his head smack audibly to the planking on the floor, before quickly rising striding purposefully to the exit.
‘Based on the dumbfounded looks I’ve got about a 10s before…’ the sound of hurried steps from the interior proved his guess correct. With a sigh for the waste, John chose a spot behind some bushes near the west gate, and cycled his qi into the Wave Breaking Steps. When the door opened onto where he’d last stood his cousin and hanger on could only blink in surprise at the empty courtyard, before hustling off to dinner and to share the new gossip about the suicidal and shameless Chu Feng.
A sweaty and pale faced servant soon hurried through the gates under the bored gaze of the guards, who quickly began to close the doors to the Chu estate and made their way, joking, to the small guard house for a drink and a game of dice.