Sorry, I set the bar a little high there. That’s on me.
As I looked at the smoking remains of my hand, it struck me, once again, that Merlin was quite the master of the understatement.
“First of all, ‘Ow!’ Secondly, let’s take a moment to remember this is a new body, and I would really rather not be blowing bits of it off straight away. I might need that hand for something. I’m having flashbacks to buying my first new car and driving it straight into a lamppost as I pulled away from the dealer. I mean, it’ll grow back, right?”
Sure. Let me just … there you go.
There’s a horrible little insect called the Jewel Wasp that preys on cockroaches. It paralyses its prey first and then injects in some mind-control venom which means the cockroach has to do everything the wasp wants. Then it buries itself into the body of its victim, takes control of it and marches it to its nest to lay lots of eggs inside it. The eggs then hatch and devour the body of the cockroach in, what I sense, might be a moment of blessed relief.
I take this diversion into natural history because that’s kind of how it feels every time Merlin makes use of my Qi.
He’d explained that he was able to do so, to a limited extent, because of having so little power of his own.
I can divert the flow because I know where it needs to go. But it’s you that is providing all the energy. You visualise cultivating as painting, right? Well, I am merely providing the paint-by-numbers template, but you’re the one who is holding the brush. If you did not want to do it, I could do nothing to make you use your Qi in this manner. However, you would not know what to do without me pointing the way.
I thought back to the previous night in the village. “Can other cultivators do that? Gather up my Qi and guide it in that way?”
No. You’d immediately reject anyone else seeking control like I’m doing it. Your sense of Qi is, and understand that I am dumbing this down considerably, it’s what you might think of as your soul. You’d absolutely know if someone was trying to make you do something with your soul in a way you rejected. It’s only because I have such little energy of my own that there’s no incompatibility. I can’t force you to do anything you don’t want to.
Under Merlin’s expert guidance, my Qi slowly rebuilt my hand. I felt his hand guide my brush, sketching the outline of my new hand. The purple paint coloured the torn tissue, repairing it at a pace that surpassed mortal comprehension.
The process was not without difficulty; the damage resisted removal, attempting to reject the restoration. But Merlin simply bullied his way through the obstacle forcing my Qi into resistant channels. Finally, the glow around the hand subsided; a mutilated mess had been fully restored.
As one of our first lessons, we’d been trying to see how much Qi my fists could hold. I’d been quite interested in learning how to throw energy bolts like Malehan, but apparently, that was a little further down the training montage road. So, we’d been playing around with stuffing energy into my fists to enhance my punching power. I’d thought I’d reached capacity, but Merlin had been sure I could squeeze in a bit more.
It turned out legendary wizards don’t always know best.
“Can I be honest? I’m not sure I’m a punch-first-ask-questions-later sort of person. Is throwing hands really my best option?”
There was a pause. I wondered how regularly Merlin’s apprentices questioned his training methods and how often that worked out for them. A vision of a mouse, a broom, and a flood came unbidden to my mind.
You are in somewhat of a unique position. Whilst you have absolutely no idea what you are doing, you are in the body of a boy whose whole culture was dedicated to body cultivation. Not that they would call it such, but that gives you distinct advantages. So, with his foundation and my knowledge, there is, in theory, the chance that …”
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Merlin’s voice faded away. “Big M, you okay?”
I’m sorry, my dear. I’m just a little overwhelmed by the scale of the challenge here. The approaching cataclysm would be difficult for me to overcome. Not impossible, but it would be something that would test my power and experience. And I don’t have that. All I have is you, and I worry that’s not going to be enough.
“Don’t do yourself down. If saving the world does not work out, you have a second career lined up in motivational speaking. I cannot tell you how inspired I am right now.”
There was no reply. If I did not know better, I’d imagine Merlin had gone outside for a cigarette and to give himself a talking-to.
Well, this sucks.
Don’t get me wrong; I’d disappointed plenty of people in my time. It was kind of my thing. In fact, my specialist subject on Mastermind would be ‘Failing to live up to Low Expectations’, at which I would, ironically, manage an underwhelming score.
But on this occasion, I did not really feel I was getting a fair shake of the stick. I’d taken dying, being reincarnated to the dark age, being a boy, dealing with wolves and witnessing a murder like a champ. It did not really feel that Merlin was entirely giving credit where credit was due. Sure, I was not immediately assimilating everything I was being told about an ancient form of spiritual existence quite removed from my Western Christian upbringing. But, to be fair, it took me several films to accept Daniel Craig as James Bond.
I’m a Roger Moore gal.
These things take time.
I could feel a darkness begin to settle on my mood, and that never led to anything good.
I stood up, dusting myself down - both physically and mentally - and looked for something to do to distract myself.
Trees. Rocks. And nothing else as far as my eyes could see. To be honest, it was taking me quite some time to come to terms with how desolate this part of the world seemed to be.
From my understanding of myth and legends, I should be somewhere down Cornwall way – or what would eventually become Cornwall. I had vague memories of family holidays to Bude when I was younger and thinking if there was a bright centre of the universe, we had chosen the chalet it was farthest from.
It would be fair to say, though, modern Cornwall was a veritable Las Vegas of colour and vibrancy compared to its 6th-century equivalent.
Finding nothing external to interest me, I turned inward and examined what I was choosing to describe as my artist’s studio. Merlin kept trying to get me to call it something else, but if he was going to get in a strop about my learning potential, I wasn’t going to pay him and his dantians and meridians much mind.
My blob of purple paint was still there, but since I completed my first cycle, I could see it was branching off to move steadily around my body in time with my heartbeat. Vitruvian me, with softly glowing veins highlighted against my skin, was looking darn pretty cool, I must say.
No matter how much Deputy Downer wanted to rain on my parade, I felt I had made decent progress considering the speed at which I had needed to come to terms with things. From memory, characters could spend tens of chapters trying to do what I’d mastered in a few hours, so I was feeling a touch unloved by my mentor.
I flexed the fingers of my new hand and considered where I had gone wrong. Merlin was sure I should have been able to pack more Qi there, but it didn’t make sense to me to think about things in that way.
I wondered if it was to do with how we both visualised the movement of our Qi around our bodies. For Merlin, it was all about water. Every time he spoke to me and the way to cultivate, it was about ‘flow’ and ‘waves’, but that metaphor didn’t work for me. When my hand exploded, I could see that there was no more capacity for more paint – in the same way that I’d know a brush couldn’t hold any more without dripping.
But, for Merlin, the ocean could always hold more water … Those were two fundamentally different ways of viewing the experience. Perhaps I needed to plough my own furrow here.
I started pushing more and more of my Qi towards my new hand. Once I felt it reach the ‘full’ stage again, I stopped and looked at it. Both inside and out, it was glowing a fantastic purple colour.
Like, a full-on Grimace version of Danny Rand but without the lame Netflix tie-in.
I opened my fist and moved it slowly in front of me, leaving purple light trails in the air. This was very cool. I sensed that the movement had dropped the levels of Qi slightly, so I pushed some more in.
I moved my hand faster, like I was cleaning a window and kept pushing more of my paint outwards. A cloud of purple light was taking shape in front of me, with each pass of my hand adding to its solidity. Rather than causing my hand to explode, I seemed to be able to have some control over its release.
Wax on, wax off, indeed.
An idea occurred to me, and a smirk appeared on my face. I closed my hand back into a fist and extended my index finger, crooking it at the end. Miming holding an aerosol can in my hand, I depressed my finger and watched a cloud of purple paint spray outwards.
If Merlin had felt a bit disappointed with me when he left, I thought it would be as to nothing to his reaction at seeing me having learned how to Qi-tag.
And if there was one thing I knew how to do, it was to lean into expectations of failure.
As I passed an enjoyable twenty minutes, I wondered if, in thousands of years, people would seek to ascertain the meaning of the giant purple cock and balls I drew in the middle of this field.