Senior Redmane was a thoughtful old bird. He waited until Tian left that special state, then returned silently to the depot. He arranged for some of his brothers to sit with him on the back patio of the hospital until he entirely returned to himself. He was more or less functional by dinner time, but silence was coming easy today.

It was a floaty sort of feeling. Like he was utterly connected to everything around him, but was having trouble thinking anything about it. Chopsticks seemed impossibly complicated, but he managed his spoon after carefully watching the people around him.

Everything tasted so much. It wasn’t broken down into boiled chicken and coriander and gently warming vegetables. It was The Soup. Soup was enough of an idea all on its own. The endless ocean of Soup, overwhelming his ability to abstract or deconstruct. The notion that there might be other, different Soup, or that he had enjoyed Soup before and might again in the future, simply did not occur. There was no space for those thoughts to occur.

The feeling finally completely faded away when he returned to the barracks and saw Brother Fu’s empty bed. “I wish I could share this with him. I bet he’s experienced it at least once. All those words, all that fighting with ideas, the books, trying to wrap complication around an idea so big, so simple, humans can’t manage it.”

“Mortals can’t. But we are cultivating immortality, little brother. Now you know why the words “enlightened,” and “enlightenment” get thrown around so much. Why our most ancient and sacred texts say that the dao which can be spoken is not the true dao.” Brother Su rested his hands on Tian’s shoulders. His smile seemed very kind tonight. Tian hadn’t realized he was speaking out loud.

“That's why I’m here. Moments like this.”

“No. It’s all the other stuff. Really, it is. I know you wrestle with yin and yang a lot. All this, everything you have seen and done and been through, every choice you made, everything you studied, every thought you had about everything you saw, it all builds up. You are so young. Everything is so shocking, so new. It’s all accumulation. It all builds up, settles, gets broken down and compacted and from that accumulation comes a sudden burst of life. A new thought. Immortal and free.”

“Yang growth from yin accumulation. A single explosive moment, brilliant, but fragile. It can’t last forever.” He looked around the barracks and saw the smiling faces of his brothers from the West Town Temple. Fewer now, but still there. Hearts unbroken. Their care for him so plain.

Tian bowed to his brothers. He didn’t have the words to wrap the emotion in. His heart felt too big for his chest. He could only offer them what he knew. He bowed, and they laughed, straightened him up, and embraced him. He didn’t cry. He was fourteen now. Much too old to cry. Even if he really wanted to.

The feeling had faded by the time he woke, but he could feel that he wasn’t quite the same person as he was this time yesterday. He dropped into the lotus position on the back patio of the hospital and watched the dawn rise. Cultivating with the sun, and trying to place his emotions on his body. The tarry ball of hate was still there, but much smaller, much more… fragile, perhaps. Though he sensed something dreadfully hard within it.

“Grandpa?”

Your hatred of the heretics originally was an emotional response to pain. They hurt you by hurting the people you love the most. So you hate them. Then you started hating the sect, or aspects of it anyway, as you learned more and more about it. It all seems so phoney, right? So much lies, so much stupid cruelty. Then you learned more, and things got more and more complicated, and people were still kind to you in the middle of all that cruelty and, in the end…

“I couldn’t hold it all. But instead of breaking or going crazy, I poured it into the sky. And the sky poured itself into me.”

Basically. You didn’t stop hating the heretics. But now, buried under that instinctive emotion is something tested. You have verified to your satisfaction the things you truly despise about them. Same with the things you don’t like about the sect, and the things you do like. You have heard the phrase Dao Heart? You are forging yours.

It wasn’t quite the way they expected, but the Discipline Squad still gave you the best possible answer for your humiliation. Transcendence. You will still be just beginning your immortal journey when even the dust of that Li animal has broken down into nothing.

Tian snorted at that. “Grandpa, just why the hell is the sect such a mess? None of this should be run this way. I don’t know what the right way is, but this has to be the wrong way.”

Operational confusion due to a lack of leadership focus.

“I understood all the individual words, but not what they mean in that order.”

It’s an entirely sincere religious organization that runs a protection racket while also maintaining a vast network of other businesses and administrative functions to pay for their religious and military instruction. The people at the very top have no urgency to do anything since they are going to live for centuries and millennia, the people in the middle know they aren’t valued much, and the people at the bottom are doing their best to live good lives. Everyone has a lot of things to do, and they contradict each other all the time. Welcome to Immortal Sects. It’s a damn mess. Fun fact, Ancient Crane Monastery is considerably better run than many I’ve seen.

“That feels impossible.”

Not at all. Nobody’s offered you a job as an experimental medical subject in exchange for a trivial number of contribution points, and you have even been given free arts. That’s huge. That’s amazing. On that point, you really should read what Doctor Pei gave you. It’s spicy.

“Spicy?” Tian was absolutely sure books didn’t taste spicy. He gave it a sniff. It smelled like paper and medicinal herbs. He considered licking it, and concluded that someone, somewhere, was definitely watching and he would never live it down.

“Demon Pulling Art? Didn’t Doctor Pei say this was a medical art?” Tian muttered and opened the old volume. He couldn’t help smiling a little. The herb smell was pretty nice.

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In the days of old, before the Book of Golden Prescriptions was published or the Treatise On The Nine Phases was compiled and even the Essential Manual of Human Physiognomy was unknown, the ancients believed as their ancestors did- that sickness was caused by demons. Relying on the shamanic teachings, they found ways to heal the sick. Lacking a true understanding of medicine, their methods were unreliable. However, I, Kong Long Tian have managed to transform poison into medicine and have transformed ancient error into modern wisdom. Treat poison and sickness as a demon. Drive it from where it hides in the body, pull it through the veins, and force it from the patient.

“This… honorable ancient… didn’t read the instructions on how to write introductions, did he?”

Clearly felt that modesty best suited people of modest intellect and modest achievements, yes. Keep reading.

Tian did. The diagrams were instructive, even if the text was cryptic.

“I can’t be reading this right, can I? Can you even do that with Vital Energy?”

Doctor Pei sure seems to think so. But you can also see why he would be worried about someone crippling themselves in the process.

“Yeah, but training it, my knowledge of how to manipulate the five elements and yin and yang will be huge.” Tian’s eyes were so wide, it would take half a minute to blink.

Demon Pulling Art. Just have to set the right bridle on them, and find the right whips to drive them. And the right bait to lead them on. You know you aren’t going to practice this for real for ages, right?

“Right. But until then…”

The week before he left for the Six Turns Caverns were slammed. He did his best to stock up on everything he could think of, chatted with everyone, studied everything he could. The night before he left, Brother Fu returned. They had a happy dinner together, then once again walked out into the wasteland.

“Master Rui arranged for me to be here before you set out for the Caverns. I’ve never been, but I’ve heard things. Don’t overthink it.” The old man smiled. “Though I hear you have had a breakthrough in that regard. I am incredibly proud of you, Tian.”

Everything was suddenly worth it. Everything that he had endured, all the pain, all worth it. His dad was proud of him. He had done well.

“Thank you. Father.”

“Come, Tian. Let’s see if you haven’t learned a bit more about effortless action. If what I heard is true, it will be of great help to you in the caverns.” Brother Fu looked awkward, turning away and rubbing his nose before facing Tian with a smile.

Tian jumped forward, trying to move with the wind. And failing. He swung his palms out, trying to catch that feeling of weightlessness, of being part of something so vast, it could hold the world. And failed again. He frowned, reaching for the feeling but only feeling it slip further and further away.

“Tsk. You can’t reach effortless action by forcing it, Tian. The hint is in the name. Effortless. The same with what you felt on the back of Senior Redmane. You didn’t force it. You were ready for it. You welcomed whatever ‘it’ was.”

“But it’s so passive! I saw you- you attacked!”

“Did I? I wonder. But yes, it is often passive. You are letting the world push you around, to a certain degree. Start with just being aware of the world around you” Brother Fu smiled. “Use your perception art, and just feel. When something presses on you, let it move you. If it wants to harm you, let it move you out of the way, and counterattack. Like the scale in Brother Wong’s medicine hut. When one arm goes down, the other comes up. But the pivot, the center? Eternally steady.”

They played back and forth across the desert until the moon set. In the morning, Tian greeted the dawn cultivating alongside Brother Fu. Elder Rui met Tian and Hong at the gate, along with Senior Redmane. Brother Fu bowed to his master, and watched his son leap into the sky.

Elder Rui was in no hurry to talk, which left the two juniors waiting at attention. Eventually he glanced over to them. “You realize that this reward is disproportionate to your services to the sect? Yes, I see you do.”

The elder smiled. There was an edge to it. “You are the beneficiaries of positional politics. The short version is that I was owed a debt sizable enough that it was a problem if I didn’t cash it in immediately. That won’t make sense to you right now, but believe me, sometimes being owed a favor is more dangerous than owing one.”

Tian believed him. He also had no idea where this was going.

“Your reward is entirely based on you two being ‘my’ people, as my naked favoritism for the West Town Outer Court is well known. As is my severe dislike of Elder Yi and Elder Sun, who now find themselves in the unfortunate position of scrambling to find alternative opportunities for their grandchildren. Brats who make that Li boy look brilliant and well behaved. And, not unrelated, one of the Li Clan’s quilin sons will be at the cavern today, though not the one who hit you.”

Elder Rui smiled and breathed a happy little exhale.

“Are those meadowlarks I hear? I swear I have been hearing them wherever I go for weeks now. The Six Turns Caverns are a trial ground. The caverns are extremely qi dense. Five of them are elementally aligned, while the centermost cave, the Null Cavern, allows you to experience a qi void. Qi voids are very useful, in small doses, for developing minute control over your internal circulation, diagnosing any problems you may have with your arts, that sort of thing. Too long in there and you would die, of course. So use it in extreme moderation. But none of that is really what makes the place a once in fifty years treasure.”

The smile evolved from edged to wretched.

“Each of the caverns is ruled by a particular element, and possesses a… sort of guardian. Sometimes a spirit, more often an environmental condition, sometimes both. To defeat it, you must understand it. Violence alone, at least in the Earthly Realm, won’t do it. The conditions in those rooms do not easily allow for rest. You must defeat a chamber before you will be able to rest, heal and access the Null Cavern.” The elder chuckled grimly.

“There will be three more disciples in the same batch as you. Each of you will be placed in your own chamber. Each chamber has a time limit, and the overall time you can spend in the Six Turns Caverns is one month. Defeat the guardian, and you can cultivate in that chamber until you are shifted to the next open one. Fail to defeat a guardian, and you are eliminated from the Six Turns Caverns entirely. You might well die. You could live. But if you do, you will live knowing you are inferior.”

Tian felt Hong swear internally that she would not be eliminated. Tian quite agreed. The elder looked away, across the sky. Admiring a cloud, Tian supposed. Eventually, he continued.

“The Six Turns Cavern is a place within the Monastery’s control, but it has a master who does not belong to the sect. That master is not your friend. They won’t sabotage you, but they benefit from your failure and your death. If a danger looks fatal, it is. I can’t tell you anything more useful than that. Just be aware that the supervising elders will try to protect you, but try is all we can promise.” Elder Rui looked uncomfortable, bordering on nauseous. Then he waved the moment away.

“I cannot easily put into words just what you will earn from this experience, as everyone gets something different out of it. Everyone who cleared the whole cycle became a powerhouse, essentially unrivaled within their level within the monastery and the sects we are closest to. Those who managed to find the true center of the wheel and survived had few rivals within their realm. While I can’t say it was causally linked, I can tell you that each person who cleared the whole trial ground broke through to the Heavenly Realm, and several were taken as Direct Disciples when they did. Core Discipleship is all but guaranteed. So… succeed. Your whole future counts on it.”