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 metal qi with a sharp chime. 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 comment about the idiocy of practicing a throwing dart art with stabbing. It’s just that he couldn’t seem to catch a moment 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 metal 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 metal 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 movement 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. Metal generating water. Hah.

He blinked hard, trying to keep his vision sharp. Something clicked. Something in that moment, that gesture, clicked.

Metal overcomes 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 elemental diagram formed 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 summer extreme yang. Flexibility, resilience, growth, reaching for inspiration, for joy and spontaneity.

His needle shifted its movements 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 summer, the time 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 comes autumn, the last of the harvests as the energy slowly condenses and returns to the ground. Metal chilling in the nights. The sharp air piercing through the summer 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 comes next. No room for error now. The starving time 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 someone who cared about what came 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 time 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 came 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 movements now.

Soon he could stand still under the bombardment 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 metal 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 elements? Yin and Yang gave birth to the elements, yes, but the elements 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 metal 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 transformed 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 moment, 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 time with his thoughts. Not long now. After he left the caverns, it would be time to start cultivating a second dart.

Perhaps he was displaying his ignorance, but to Tian, the characters for the elements all seemed to contain elements 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 seemed to be the middle point of human and mountain? Metal 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 elements twisted around and through him. Tian felt like an unbalanced ring. The element 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 elemental 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 time. 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 metal 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 metal 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 elemental forces of the body in such startling clarity was saving him months, perhaps years, of study time.

The Earth Chamber was a grave, and one that was crushing in on him. He had a brief moment 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 overcomes earth. He had the room cracked in minutes. He didn’t try to squabble with the enormous earthworm qi spirit. It seemed 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 same 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 same. 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 seemed to say. “Take me as your measure. Understand that time is measured in the distance between a mountaintop and a flat plain. This is what it means to truly endure. And if you can, I welcome 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 time 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 medicine. All the way back in the junkyard, some earth tasted good, and could heal him. Earth was where water and plants met 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 meditated, buried under the earth? His sense of time 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 formed 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 seemed that finding the center would be more easily said than done.