Forty five….forty six….
I pulled my body up on the tree branch, held it for five breaths, and then lowered myself. The cold air burned in my chest on the descent. My shoulders were telling me things I was choosing not to prioritize.
I had been watching Hao exercise in this manner for awhile now and I studied the way he walked across a room, the way he carried timber or turned a tool. He made it look easy because it was, for him, easy due to the fact that he had honed his body through rigorous training.
I pulled my body up, held it for six breaths, and then lowered myself back down.
I need to do this every morning.
I finished the set and dropped from the branch, landing lightly onto my feet and shaking out my arms.
The dagger work came after.
I had settled into a sequence over the past week: conditioning first to warm the body, then field work to open the channels, then drills to close the gap between the two. The sequence mattered because the body could not do precise qi work while the muscles were cold any more than a forge could produce fine metalwork before it reached temperature.
Left to right. The horizontal cuts, elbow and shoulder. The qi moving through the arm channels as the blade moved. That was the critical correction from the week before.
I pushed qi through the stomach pathway on the right side, concentrated it through the hip and down the leg, let it drive the step that drove the diagonal movements that exponentially increased my speed.
I ran it again. And again. The pathway work was starting to integrate with the physical movement, and it was as if I had entered a kind of flow state.
Push qi through the bladder pathway on descent. Test the footwork.
I ran a set of footwork patterns, pushing qi through the back channels, feeling the spine straighten and the weight distribution shift. The qi was buying speed by reducing the body's load, which meant less muscular compensation required when the energy was already moving through the structure.
I sheathed the dagger, cleaned my hands in the river, and turned to find Hao sitting on the bank.
He had his arms resting on his knees and a cup of something warm between his hands and he looked like he had been watching me for quite some time.
"How long have you sitting there?" I asked him.
"Long enough." He nodded at the tree branch. "That’s some nice dagger work."
“I’m still a novice,” I said flatly. It was the truth, but I took solace in the fact that I was steadily improving.
He was thoughtful for a moment, his gaze lingered off into the distance, then he suddenly said: "Come spar with me."
We used the flat ground at the bank, the same stretch where I did the field work every morning. Hao set his cup down and rolled his shoulders and I drew the practice dagger and we squared off.
The first exchange was quick.
He read my weight shift before my foot moved, stepped around the dagger's line of attack, and he had his hand at my collarbone before I could redirect. He applied enough pressure to make me win, and in a real exchange I felt that he could have snapped my bone in half if he wanted to.
"Again," he said.
I reset.
Used the qi in the leg channels the way I had been drilling. The speed improvement was tangible and I was inside his range a half-step sooner than he would have expected, but he adjusted quickly and on the fly and he grabbed my wrist before I could tag him with my dagger, then he let go and I reset once more.
We ran ten exchanges.
I landed clean touches on the second and seventh.
Hao landed eight.
Through all of it, the visualization showed me what I had been seeing for days. Hao’s channels were running at a density I hadn't seen in anyone else I'd assessed, every pathway was fully open, and the structure below the sternum was sitting untouched. This was Hao at base capacity. He hadn’t even need to press his hands together to channel his Qi to keep up with me.
I called it after the tenth exchange when he grabbed me by my wrist hard enough to make me drop my dagger.
"You're the strongest cultivator in Hekou," I said. I was getting my breath back, meanwhile he looked like he had barely broken a sweat.
"Probably," he said modestly.
"There’s no probably about it, Hao. You’re definitely the strongest."
He considered my words and then said, “My goal is to train someone even stronger than myself.”
I couldn’t help but agree with him. It would be an honor and a privledge to train someone that could carry our legacy forward with integrity. I’ll let Hao worry about the strength, but for me, a true heir would always put their people first.
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After we took a second to wash our faces in the river, I told Hao about the attempts at ambient pooling that I had made.
"You're drawing before the vessel is open," he said when I finished.
I perked a brow at his words. "Show me what that means."
He moved closer and placed his hand flat against my abdomen, just below the sternum, pressing with moderate firmness. "There's a space here. You know it's there, because you can see it when you look at mine, right? The question is whether you can feel it from the inside."
"I've been trying to draw the ambient Qi to it by pulling it into my core," I said.
"That's wrong." He kept his hand where it was. "You don't draw it towards you, you open yourself up to it and wait for the Qi to come to you. This is the safest way to do it, otherwise, you risk flooding yourself." He paused. "Find the space and then open yourself up to the world around you.”
I found it.
A region that felt slightly different from the surrounding tissue, and less defined than the channel pathways. I had been running qi past it for months in my circulations without stopping to notice it.
"Found it," I said.
"Now breath out.”
I breathed out.
It was subtle and unmistakable: ambient qi from the river environment shifting toward the space I'd opened, the way air moved through an open doorway. I didn’t feel the uncomfortable pressure build up like I had before.
I held the energy there for six counts before it dissipated safely through my limbs. It was as if I was a vessel was merely used to provide the ambient Qi safe passage.
Hao kept his hand where it was while I ran the attempt. When I finished he pressed once, firmly, and moved his hand away. "See? You got it down already."
I was kind of surprised at that fact because it seemed almost effortless. "It's almost nothing."
"Everything is almost nothing at the beginning. I used to hold it for three counts before it drained away. Now I can hold it through a full form.”
I sat with that thought for awhile and felt myself feel stupid for not thinking of it first.
Because I didn't know it existed.
"The five principles don't cover this," I said.
"I know." He looked at his own hand, the one that had been on my abdomen. "I wasn't sure what I was doing with it. I still don't have a name for it. I just knew it helped and I kept doing it." He looked at me. "But you can feel it now, so maybe it’s a principle that we can build together."
My mind thought of not only the principles, but of what the Cultivation realms could mean, and what they could lead to. Should I define what me, Hao, Suyin, and Bolin had worked on as Qi Refinement?
"I need to ask you something," I said.
He waited.
"I've been building a way of describing cultivation competency in stages. If he used Gao Ren’s smith work as an analogy, then the same way a smith refines steel through progressive stages, that’s how we could define cultivation. The first stage would be Qi Refining." I looked out at the river. "For example, me and you would be considered at the Qi Refining stage, but you would be at the pinnacle, and I would probably be Stage Two.."
He turned the thought over in his mind, and I could feel him giving it the same consideration that I had. "So what would the stages tell someone?"
"It would tell them where they stood and what they need to improve on," I explained.
"You sound like you’ve been thinking about this for a while," Hao said.
"I have."
He leaned his head against his fist. "Did you ask me because you weren't sure?"
The directness of it landed squarely.
"Yes," I admitted.
He waited for me to continue.
"What worries me is what people do with it. A student who knows there's a Stage Three will want to reach it before they've finished Stage One. They'll be tempted to skip the foundation work, and if they push past what their body can hold in order to get there faster —" I thought about Dian Lu's shoulder and even the backlash from my own pooling attempts… "The stakes here are larger than one person’s injury. And even more, what if we train someone who uses the knowledge we gave them to harm innocent people?"
Hao’s gaze remained fixed on the river as I talked, and after a moment of silence, he finally said: "A smith forges a sword, and someone uses that sword to protect a child from a tiger. That very same sword is then used to cut down a family," He looked at me. "The smith isn't responsible for the hand that wields the sword."
"That's just one sword," I pointed out. "What we have is the knowledge to train someone to cut down more than just a family, but even an entire village."
He sat with my words with a frown on his face, then he sighed and shrugged his shoulders.
"I don't know what the right answer is," he said. "But I know that you asking this question means that your heart is in the right place."
Somehow, what he said made me feel better about it. I had a tendency to spiral in my own mind and make things more complicated than it needed to be. "Thank you," I said.
He squeezed my shoulder once and stood. "Come watch Bolin work. I want to see how the cohort handles the fence post drill."
The zone three class was already running when we reached the training ground.
Bolin had set up the striking posts along the hillside, eight of them, rough timber at chest height, spaced to give each practitioner room to work without seeing their neighbor's results. The technique required the practitioner to draw qi through the arm channels at the moment of impact, concentrating it at the fist. It was zone three's first real test of what zone one and zone two had built: did the foundation hold under the demand of a high-output release?
Chen Wei was methodical. His strikes landed clean, the post taking steady damage across the surface. He would never punch through a post on instinct but he would never damage himself trying, either.
Lu Ling was working from the legs up. His power output had jumped in the past week and he was learning to direct it. The post in front of her was showing real damage.
Shu Lian's posture was excellent. Her power output was catching up to her foundation. She was at the stage of the work where everything felt slower than it was because the body was learning at a high pace.
At the end of the row, Dian Lu.
I could see his channels from where Hao and I stood at the observation platform. The large intestine restriction was gone, the pathway was fully clear, the qi moving through the right side of his body the way it was supposed to move. Three weeks of daily focused work on a problem he had been building around for years, and he had done it without complaint.
He set his feet.
He drove the strike.
The post exploded.
The upper section spun off to the left, the impact wave running down through the timber and splitting it below the strike height. The sound reached the training ground before the pieces had finished falling.
Dian Lu stood with his fist extended and stared at what was in front of him.
Then he looked at his own hand.
I watched his face change from shock as he then turned to the nearest person, grabbed them by both shoulders, and they both started laughing.
Everyone was laughing.
Dian Lu was jumping and spinning, Shu Lian was shaking her head with a grin she wasn't trying to hide, Lu Ling was clapping in excitement, and Chen Wei was producing a warm smile.
Bolin stood at the edge of the drill line and watched his cohort celebrate and he gave a nod of approval.
I was already smiling before I noticed I was doing it.
This is why.
The stages could wait.
The framework could wait.
The conversation with Hao and whatever I decided about it and whatever it cost could all wait.
For this moment the River Fork Academy had a student who had cleared a two-year restriction in three weeks through daily deliberate work and he was happily celebrating punching his fist through a fence post, just like he wanted to do.