Use your needle! Forget the light body technique, use Heavenly Swallows and jab at the cuts.
Grandpa Jun sounded urgent. Tian didn’t question it. The needle dropped into his hand and the art circulated. The needle collided with the tearing tal qi with a sharp chi. The qi broke. The tiger made a chuffing noise and sent three more. Tian blocked another, but the two coming high and low forced him to step off his spear-nest and onto a glave rising from a nest of halberds tucked into a tall grass of pin-sharp spikes.
Tian wanted to make a snarky comnt about the idiocy of practicing a throwing dart art with stabbing. It’s just that he couldn’t seem to catch a mont to get the words out. Besides, it was actually working. The tiger’s qi was unholy-sharp and the only way his dart was going to survive was if Tian poured tal vital energy into it. And not just pouring it in, he had to pour it in just the right way. It had to circulate. Rigid, sharp, and filled with a circulating energy. The shock of the impact transmitted through the tal and into his body. Absorbed and dispersed by his flesh.
It didn’t take long for Tian to reach the ragged edge of his focus and endurance. Every move had to be perfect. A lack of perfection was no different than death. His focus had to be total, yet divided between movent and defense. The synchronization of breath, intent, motion, the circulation of energy, all had to be flawless.
The damned tiger was laughing. It would make little chuffing noises and send extra claws whenever he made a mistake. Tian couldn’t decide who he hated more- the tiger for punishing him, or himself for making the mistakes.
Sweat dripped into his eyes. How long had it been since he really sweated? Even the runs through the desert hadn’t tested him like this. tal generating water. Hah.
He blinked hard, trying to keep his vision sharp. Sothing clicked. Sothing in that mont, that gesture, clicked.
tal overcos wood, but it also reinforces it. Wood gives flexibility and resilience. Water is flow, the birth of energy. His feet danced across daggers and axes as an elental diagram ford in his mind.
It begins in spring. Wood rises from the cold earth, drawing on the stored water and nutrition, rested. Reaching for the fire of the sumr extre yang. Flexibility, resilience, growth, reaching for inspiration, for joy and spontaneity.
His needle shifted its movents slightly. His hand absorbed the impact more gently, and returned to place more sharply. His steps were vigorous. Precise but daring.
Yang reaches its peak in late sumr, the ti of earth and the beginning of the yin phase. Growth changes over to reproduction, the yielding of fruit and the harvesting of grain. Earth was still missing from his arts. He would soon have it.
Then cos autumn, the last of the harvests as the energy slowly condenses and returns to the ground. tal chilling in the nights. The sharp air piercing through the sumr heat, cutting down the plants who have given everything they had to the next generation. Not destroying them, returning them to the earth to nurture what cos next. No room for error now. The starving ti would be on you soon.
Tian’s motions were sharp. There was a hidden richness and warmth to them. It was a precision born of soone who cared about what ca next, not from a need to destroy what was already there.
Then winter, the cold water seeping into the ground. The necessary death and stillness allowing energy to gather before the birth of spring. The condensation of autumn’s efforts. Whether it was a slow death or a ti of healing was down to that preparation. Because either way, winter would absorb everything it was given. Water accepted it all. Water flowed.
Tian flowed too. His coordination reached a new height. There was no distinction between attack and defense, between advance and retreat. He was the center of the wheel, the pivot on the balance arm. Ragged breaths slowed and ca under control. His steps slowed. Still precise, but unhurried. He moved where he had to, and only if he had to. There was a restrained power to his movents now.
Soon he could stand still under the bombardnt of qi cuts. His dart traveled high and low, but it didn’t miss. Tian stood stably on the razor’s edge. There was a pause in the storm of cuts. His hand shot forward, the dart flying like a diving swallow towards the tiger. The tiger chuffed and caught the dart between two long claws.
The White Tiger flicked the dart back at Tian so fast, it vanished from sight. No matter. Tian snagged it from the air with a casual grab as the tal qi in the room dissolved. The guardian was defeated. Tian paid it no mind. He was already dropping into lotus, determined to preserve what he was feeling in his mind.
How long had people been telling him everything was connected? That nothing was all one thing, that it was about a balance of all the elents? Yin and Yang gave birth to the elents, yes, but the elents were an endless mystery in their own right. The interactions contained literally infinite subtleties. How could they not? They made up the whole damn universe! And they made up him.
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Things moved inside of him. Iron flowing through the water of his blood, the stone and tal of his bones, the wood flexing and contracting in muscles and tendons. The fire burning in his heart, making him move. The qi of the world pulled into the golden furnace and transford into vital energy, nourishing his flesh and rising to the crimson palace. It all worked, and it all worked together. He flung his dart out once more. It pierced through the tip of a stalagmite. He tried to recall it to his hand.
It fluttered a mont, but lay where it fell. He smiled anyway. It was a lack of cultivation, not a lack of technique. Soon enough, it would move in ti with his thoughts. Not long now. After he left the caverns, it would be ti to start cultivating a second dart.
Perhaps he was displaying his ignorance, but to Tian, the characters for the elents all seed to contain elents of each other. Even more than that, he thought he could see the shadow for the character for a person hidden in them too. Was it a coincidence that wood looked like the intersection of earth and human? Or that fire seed to be the middle point of human and mountain? tal certainly had the shadow of a mountain in it, and perhaps a bit of wood too.
It was probably his imagination. But the ancestors weren’t stupid. It wasn’t smart to bet on coincidence over capability.
The elents twisted around and through him. Tian felt like an unbalanced ring. The elent of earth was missing and badly missed. It was the pivot on the swing arm, the point of balance between yin and yang. For all that, he could still feel his body changing. It wasn’t a bodily rebirth. It was a rebirth of understanding. He was a nexus of elental energy. His arts, his cultivation, his understanding of the world should reflect that. Was it too big for him to understand? Of course it was.
Things being too big or too complicated were only a problem if you had limited ti. Tian walked the path of the immortal. Sooner or later he would either understand it or fall from the path and die. Either way, no problem.
Tian felt the ocean of water roaring in him. The dissolved tal churned and swayed, washing into the mangrove swamps of his flesh and bones. He only had a faint understanding of the sea from books, but he could imagine a river easily enough, and trees growing in that water. He could imagine himself as an entire ecosystem.
He didn’t bother to sleep or rest. The second he had the image fixed in his mind, he raced to find the Void Chamber. He didn’t get to experience the tal dao charm long. He had to capture what he could as fast as he could.
Six days passed in a furious rush. He was desperately trying to dig out everything he could with every second available to him. Every art he knew was pushed to the limit. Even the Demon Pulling Art was studied relentlessly, particularly in the Null Chamber. Seeing the interaction of vital energy with the elental forces of the body in such startling clarity was saving him months, perhaps years, of study ti.
The Earth Chamber was a grave, and one that was crushing in on him. He had a brief mont of utter terror, but was able to sooth himself with two things- his little light, and the fact that he was a wood cultivator.
Wood overcos earth. He had the room cracked in minutes. He didn’t try to squabble with the enormous earthworm qi spirit. It seed rather friendly, if anything. He just ripped apart the earth qi and fed it into his dantian for processing. As he did, he studied the Dao Charm of the place.
You could throw around terms like “solid” or “Nurturing,” but it really wasn’t the sa as seeing it in person. As feeling it in person. “Earth” wasn’t just dirt or soil. It was everything that made up dirt and soil. All the rotted down organic material, all the minerals, all the underlying stone. It was the mountains and a single grain of sand all the sa. It had a rich feeling of sincerity. You might misunderstand it, but it would never lie to you.
Like water, you could put whatever you liked on it. But where water would part around and obstacle and envelope it, earth would bear up under it. Earth would endure. It would take the weight. Tian had once said that he could endure for his patients, for the wounded and the dying. “Good,” the earth seed to say. “Take as your asure. Understand that ti is asured in the distance between a mountaintop and a flat plain. This is what it ans to truly endure. And if you can, I welco you.”
The understanding of the earth slid in with the rest of what he had learned in the caverns seamlessly. There was a terror and a majesty to earth. There was a distinctly inhuman sense of ti to it, to say nothing of mass. But that wasn’t earth to him.
For Tian, the earth was what he dug into to find dicine. All the way back in the junkyard, so earth tasted good, and could heal him. Earth was where water and plants t to grow rice and fruits. It was the solid footing for the temple, and the mountain his ambition wanted to surpass. The earth… Tian smiled, down in the caves. The earth was necessary, for without it, how could there be a sky?
The five colored wheel spun in him and to his mild surprise, the way to the Null chamber was open. The Earth Chamber burst into pure qi as he stepped through. How long had he ditated, buried under the earth? His sense of ti was slipping. His legs felt stiff. He had sat for longer than he realized.
The Null chamber was no longer empty. Still devoid of qi, still inky dark, it was now inhabited. A fiery bird, a bamboo shoot that had grown into a dragon, a white tiger, an earthworm that sprouted horns and claws, and a profoundly ugly looking snake-turtle thing. They ford an honor guard surrounding a skeleton with mostly blackened bones. A few polished up to a lovely iridescence. On the Skeleton’s hand was a very familiar ring.
Elder Rui had said that if he completed all the chambers, his future path would be smooth. But if he found the true center of the Six Turn Caverns, he would be destined for the Monastery and supremacy. Tian clenched his fists in his sleeves. It seed that finding the center would be more easily said than done.
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