Chapter 4: Bridges and Walls
The silence in the training courtyard stretched, thick and heavy. Liang's question hung in the air, not as a welcome but as a challenge, a demand for an account. Jin had now fully regained his feet, brushing sand from his training clothes with sharp, irritated motions, his eyes also fixed on Damish with a less aggressive but no less intense curiosity.
Kai shifted nervously beside him. "Senior Liang, Senior Jin," he began, his voice respectful but tight. "This is Damish. He is… a guest of the Headmaster. He is recovering here."
"A guest?" Liang repeated, the word dripping with skepticism. He took another step closer, his eyes performing another slow, thorough inventory of Damish—his modern haircut, the way he held himself, the faint remnants of city-life softness that hadn't yet been erased by mountain air and anxiety. "We don't get guests. We get initiates. Or we get nothing. Which are you?"
Damish felt a familiar prickle of irritation, the same one he got when a condescending upperclassman at university would talk down to him. These guys might be able to swing a sword, but they were just bullies in a different setting. The awe he'd felt in the Headmaster's presence was gone, replaced by a defensive stubbornness. He met Liang's gaze without flinching.
"I'm neither," Damish said, his voice steadier than he felt. "I'm someone who had a bad accident. Your people found me and brought me here. According to Master Ren, I'll be staying until the winter snows melt. So, I guess that makes me a temporary resident." He kept his tone neutral, factual. He wouldn't be intimidated.
Jin, who had been quietly seething, spoke now, his voice cooler, more analytical than Liang's blunt force. "An accident? Where?"
"On a road. A car hit me." Damish saw the blankness in their expressions. "A… metal chariot. A vehicle."
Understanding dawned, mixed with a flicker of something else—not sympathy, but a spark of intense interest. Liang's arrogant smirk returned. "So, the outside world is as dangerous as they say. All those noisy machines and people rushing nowhere."
"It has its dangers," Damish conceded. "Just like apparently having a conversation here does." He gestured vaguely at the sand where Jin had just been lying.
A moment of stunned silence was broken by a sharp, surprised bark of laughter from Jin. He quickly suppressed it, but a trace of amusement remained in his eyes. Liang's face darkened slightly, not appreciating the jab.
"You've got a sharp tongue for someone who looks like a strong wind would knock him over," Liang said, his knuckles tightening on the grip of his practice sword.
"Liang, enough." The command came from Jin, surprisingly. He seemed to have decided Damish was a more interesting puzzle than a simple target. "The Headmaster has granted him sanctuary. That is the end of it." He turned his full attention to Damish. "I am Jin. This is Liang. We are senior disciples of the Cloud Peak Academy."
The introduction was stiff, formal, but it was an introduction nonetheless. It was a acknowledgment of his presence beyond being a curiosity.
"Damish," he replied with a slight nod, mirroring their formality. "As Kai said."
"Damish," Jin repeated, testing the unfamiliar name. "And what do you… do in the outside world?"
The question was asked with a genuine, almost anthropological curiosity. It was the same way Damish might ask someone what life was like on the International Space Station. The outside world wasn't just another place to them; it was a distant, almost mythical concept.
"I was a student," Damish explained. "At a university. I study… well, I was studying engineering. Learning about machines, materials, how to build things."
Liang snorted. "You build things with your hands?"
"Sometimes. Mostly with your mind. You learn the principles, the math. Then you design things. Buildings. Circuits. Engines."
The two senior disciples exchanged a glance. The concept was alien to them. Here, skill was earned through physical repetition, through cultivating the body's energy and mastering form. The idea of knowledge being primarily cerebral was strange.
"And you live in… giant stone forests? crammed together with thousands of others?" Jin asked, his nose wrinkling slightly as if he could smell the pollution from here.
"Cities, yes," Damish said. "But not everyone. My family lives in a house. With a garden."
This seemed to be a slightly more relatable concept. "And you travel everywhere in these… cars?" Liang asked, saying the foreign word clumsily.
"Many people do. Or on buses. Trains. Airplanes."
"Flying metal boxes," Liang said, shaking his head in a mixture of disdain and wonder. "It seems… unnatural. To be so disconnected from the earth you walk on."
It was Damish's turn to be curious. "How do you get anywhere? How did you find me?"
"We run," Jin said simply, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. "For long journeys, we may use horses or carts. But the body is the primary vessel. To make it strong, to make it endure, to make it move with efficiency—that is a fundamental art."
The conversation had shifted. The initial hostility had thawed into a tense but genuine exchange. They were fascinated by him, Damish realized. He was a living window into a world they only knew from whispered stories and the rare, sanctioned visitor.
"It is not often we see someone from outside," Jin confirmed his thoughts. "The Headmaster is very strict. The world must not know of this place. So, those who come are… special. Or they are not supposed to come at all."
"Special?" Damish asked.
Liang leaned on his practice sword. "There are a few. Disciples who have been granted permission to venture out to gain experience. To see the modern world without being corrupted by it." He said it like it was a great test of willpower.
"And sometimes," Jin added, his voice dropping slightly, "rarely, someone from the outside is granted permission to come in. If they possess a unique… potential."
A name seemed to hang in the air between them, spoken with a tone of reverence and slight bewilderment. It was Liang who said it first.
"Like Cynthia."
The name was utterly foreign amidst the Chinese names and the setting. It sounded like a melody from another land.
"Cynthia?" Damish repeated.
"A blonde girl from the West. From… Europe?" Jin said, trying to place the strange geography. "She came here two years ago. She was the first outsider many of us had ever seen. Her hair was like spun gold. Her eyes were the color of the sky."
"She didn't look like she could fight a rabbit," Liang interjected with a grunt, though there was no real malice in it. "But she was strong. Incredibly strong. And fast. She had a way of moving… it was different from our arts, but just as effective. The Headmaster himself welcomed her. Gave her full access to the library and the advanced training grounds. No one questions it. She keeps to herself mostly."
A European girl training here? The image was so incongruous it was almost laughable. Yet, the way they spoke of her, with a mix of awe and respect, confirmed it was true.
"And the other," Jin said, his expression becoming more complicated, a blend of pride and something almost like longing. "Is Ren Xiaoqian."
"The Headmaster's daughter," Liang clarified, seeing Damish's confusion.
"She left a year ago," Jin continued. "Master Ren granted her permission to go into the outside world. To test her skills and her spirit against its chaos. To 'temper her jade in a different fire,' he said. No one knows when she will return."
The idea of the serene, mountain-like Headmaster having a daughter who was out there in the world Damish came from was strangely comforting. It created a fragile, personal link between these two impossibly different realities.
"There are others," Kai piped up, finally feeling safe enough to contribute. "Senior Lin and Junior Wei went to the southern coastal cities six months ago. We haven't heard from them, but that's normal. They're on their journey."
Damish looked at the three of them: the brash Liang, the analytical Jin, and the earnest Kai. Their world, which had seemed so monolithic and sealed, now appeared to have tiny, carefully controlled capillaries connecting it to the outside. He wasn't the first anomaly. He was just the latest.
He was a temporary resident, an unexpected guest. But Cynthia was an honored one. Ren Xiaoqian was an emissary. Others were explorers. He fit into no category, which was why his presence was so unsettling to them. He was a question without an answer.
Liang seemed to remember this too. The brief window of curiosity was closing, replaced by his default competitive suspicion. "So, you will just… stay? For months? Eat our food, use our resources, and watch?"
"Those are the Headmaster's instructions," Damish said, keeping his voice even.
"And what will you do?" Liang pressed. "We do not idle here. Everyone contributes. Everyone trains. Even the cooks can break a man's arm in three moves. What is your skill? What do you have to offer besides stories of metal birds?"
The question was a direct challenge. It laid bare Damish's complete uselessness in their world. He couldn't fight. He didn't know their medicine. He couldn't farm their terraces or build their structures.
He had nothing to offer them. And in a place where every action had purpose, being purposeless was the greatest sin.
Before Damish could form a response, a clear, melodic chime echoed through the academy grounds, signaling the changing of periods.
Jin placed a hand on Liang's shoulder. "We are due for meditation. This discussion is over." He gave Damish a final, unreadable look. "The Headmaster has his reasons. We will watch, and we will see."
Liang shrugged off Jin's hand but didn't protest. He shot Damish a last, warning glance. "Don't get in the way," he said, before turning and striding off towards the main hall, his practice sword slung over his shoulder.
Jin followed without another word.
Kai let out a huge sigh of relief. "Whew. That was intense. Jin's okay, mostly. But Liang… he's the best fighter in our generation. He thinks that gives him the right to question everything."
Damish watched the two senior disciples disappear around a corner. The encounter had been jarring, but illuminating. He had learned more about the complex, hidden dynamics of the academy in those ten minutes than in all his time awake here.
He wasn't just in a remote martial arts school. He was in a living, breathing ecosystem with its own hierarchies, its own mysteries, and its own carefully managed relationship with the world he thought was the only one that existed.
He thought of the blonde girl, Cynthia, moving through these ancient halls with her sky-blue eyes. He thought of the Headmaster's daughter, Ren Xiaoqian, somewhere out there in the bustling, noisy world of cars and universities. Two bridges between two worlds.
And he thought of himself, stuck in between, a temporary resident with no skills and no purpose, a stone that had been tossed into the pond for reasons he couldn't comprehend.
Liang's final question echoed in his mind: What do you have to offer?
As he stood there, surrounded by the evidence of a thousand years of disciplined tradition, Damish had never felt more like an answerless question in his life.