Chapter 2: | Higashi e no Tabi
(Journey to the East)
"Fiction reveals the truth that reality obscures!"
The last of the stream's cold water dripped from Zhao Zheng's hair onto his neck, tracing a path under the rough fabric of his blindfold. He squeezed the excess from the black strands, his fingers trembling not from the chill but from the volatile energy seething in his broken meridians. He heard the stream, but he also heard the other sound beneath it.
Hooves.
Distant, rhythmic, and approaching fast. Not the wandering pace of a merchant cart, but the disciplined thunder of mounted soldiers. The Righteous Alliance had come to survey the massacre.
His body moved before his thoughts could fully form. Every stolen spark of Qi in his system flared in warning. The front gate was a funnel of advancing light and sound in his Qi perception, at least ten bright signatures. The back wall, however, was merely wood and stone, a dim barrier.
Home. The thought was a reflex, instantly rejected. This scorched courtyard with its silent buildings and fresh graves was not a home. It was a tomb he was still breathing in.
He gathered the chaotic energy within him, the stolen life-force of the fallen. It writhed, a storm of unresolved grief and fury. He forced it downward into his shattered legs.
Agony, white-hot and precise, exploded behind his blindfold. It was like threading his broken bones with lightning.
But his muscles corded. A violent, temporary strength flooded his limbs. He did not run. He pushed off with his good foot and launched himself upward in a desperate, graceless arc over the back gate. He cleared it, barely, and landed in a rolling heap on the other side, biting his tongue to silence a scream as his legs shrieked in protest.
He was in the Whispering Bamboo Forest. In his Qi perception, the world was a symphony of pressure and flow. The bamboo stood as pillars of gentle, green life energy, swaying in an unfelt wind. The earth pulsed a deep, slow rhythm. Small, quick sparks of animals hid in the underbrush.
Behind him, the ten blazing suns of Qi had dismounted at the front gate.
He pushed himself up. Running on the ground was impossible; his legs would betray him. He looked at the bamboo. An old lesson from Elder Fen surfaced. "The bamboo bends but does not break. It is rigid yet yielding."
Zhao was not contemplating philosophy. He was looking for a tool.
Focusing on a thick shoot ten feet away, he willed the storm in his legs again and jumped. It was less a jump and more a pained, falling lunge. His hands caught the bamboo. He swung, pushed off against the resilient trunk, and propelled himself toward the next cluster.
It was not the elegant "Bamboo Treading" art of the Wudang scouts. It was a brutal, wasteful, and desperate mimicry. He crashed from stalk to stalk like a wounded animal, using the bamboo's flexibility to absorb impacts his body could not. But it worked. He moved east, away from the sect, deeper into the green shadows.
From a high perch where three stalks crossed, he paused. He turned his blindfolded face backward. He could not see the buildings, but he felt their silent, dead energy, now punctuated by the bright, probing lights of the investigators. He wondered if they paused at Gwan's body, at that final, enigmatic smile.
A hollow tremor passed through his chest. An absence. The concept of "home" dissolved, leaving only a cold, empty wound. He turned east and pushed off again.
The theft demanded payment halfway through the forest.
The Qi inside him was not a single energy, but a chorus of dissonant voices. The sharp, metallic echoes of sword cultivators. The fading, warm embers of the healers. The stubborn, earthy tones of those who fortified. And underpinning it all, the cold, sour note of death itself, the energy that had lingered in their stilling blood.
It was corrupted. Unpurified. A cacophony, not a harmony.
His Qi perception, once sharp, flickered and blurred. The clear energy lines of the forest melted into a muddy, swirling static. Dizziness washed over him, followed by a deep, internal cold that began to freeze his meridians from the inside out.
No. Not yet.
He reached for the next bamboo, but his coordination shattered. His hand closed on empty air. The world tilted. He fell through a crackling canopy of leaves and branches, landing with a heavy, wet crash beside a fast moving stream.
The impact stole his breath and lit new fire in his legs. For a moment, there was only the roar of water and the silent scream of his own body.
Then, new sounds. Boots on gravel. Voices.
"Did you hear that?"
"Over by the water. Check it."
Two soldiers. Their Qi signatures were small, disciplined sparks of fire and metal, approaching rapidly from downstream. Patrol.
His mind, fogged with pain and inner chaos, sharpened to a cold point. He could not fight. He could barely move.
Using only his arms, he dragged his unresponsive body behind the massive, gnarled roots of a fallen tree at the water's edge, sliding into the icy shallows. The cold was a brutal shock, but it acted as a dampener, smothering his chaotic energy signature and blending it with the stream's natural, flowing Qi.
The soldiers arrived, their armored forms clear in his dimmed perception. They stood mere meters away, scanning the bank.
"Nothing."
"Probably an animal. A deer."
They began to turn. A louder, commanding voice cut through the trees from a distance. "You two! Beyond your patrol line! Report back immediately!"
The soldiers straightened, called out a reply, and crunched away through the forest, their signatures fading.
The immediate danger passed, leaving the greater one to consume him. The corrupted Qi was a frost spreading from his lower dantian, seizing his channels. His fingers grew numb. His breath came in shallow, foggy gasps. Memory surfaced, clear and desperate.
Elder Fen's dry, precise voice in the lecture hall. "Qi is the breath of the world. But Qi drawn from sites of death, from battle, from deep sorrow, carries imprint. It is corrupted. To use it is to invite poison into your soul. It will freeze your heart, shatter your mind, and leave you a beast driven by the residual wills of the dead."
Zhao had not just drawn from such a place. He had gorged on it. He had consumed the final, fading breaths of his entire sect, their unfulfilled desires and sudden terror now swirling in his core, fighting to drown his own consciousness.
This was the cost. Not just physical brokenness, but spiritual annihilation. To die here, mindless and frozen, or to be killed by the next patrol that found his inert body.
Weak.
The word echoed. What did it take to be called weak? Was it broken legs? A shattered dantian? No. Weakness was surrender. Weakness was letting the world's rejection be the final verdict. Weakness was allowing this stolen, poisonous energy to erase him without a fight.
A spark of defiance, hotter than the inner frost, flared. It was his own. It was the same spark that had made him drag himself from the battlefield, that had made him bury the dead, that had made him tie the blindfold.
He would not surrender. If he was to mend himself, he would start now. He would mend this chaos.
With immense effort, he hauled himself fully out of the stream, his waterlogged robes heavy as stone. He propped his back against the fallen tree, facing the flowing water. He arranged his broken legs as best he could, ignoring the screaming protests from his nerves.
Purification. The basic, first-year lesson every disciple learned. To cycle one's Qi through the core meridians, to burn away impurities with one's own spiritual warmth. But he had no core. His dantian was shattered. He could not cycle Qi. He could only hold it, a storm in a broken vessel.
But Gwan had not taught him traditional kintsugi. Gwan had shown him the principle: repair with what you have, and make the repair part of the beauty.
Zhao did not have a functioning dantian to act as a furnace. He had his will. He had his desperation. And he had the map of his own broken meridians, visible in stark, painful detail through his Qi perception.
He would not cycle the Qi. He would filter it.
He focused inward, on the storm. Instead of trying to control its chaos, he accepted its presence. He then imagined his meridians not as channels for flow, but as a lattice, a sieve. He focused on the single, purest spark within him, the defiant ember of his own consciousness. He fed that ember not with energy, but with focus, with memory.
The smell of ink and old paper in Gwan's study. The feel of the repaired pot, its golden seams rough under his thumb. The sound of the old man's voice telling stories of an eastern sea that knew no masters.
He used that memory, that singular point of self, as a filter. He willed the chaotic energy to pass through it.
It was agony of a different kind. The cold, deathly Qi resisted. The angry, metallic energies slashed at his focus. The sorrowful echoes threatened to drown him in their grief. It was like trying to strain a hurricane through a sheet of silk.
He persisted. Breath by ragged breath. He was not a cultivator purifying his Qi. He was a survivor mending his soul with stolen fragments. He was practicing kintsugi on his own spirit, and the gold was his stubborn refusal to cease existing.
Slowly, infinitesimally, something changed. A thread of the storm, the barest wisp, lost its biting cold. It did not become warm, but it became neutral. It shed the echoing imprint of its former owner and simply became energy. It was a drop of clean water in an ocean of poison.
It was enough.
He guided that single, neutralized wisp of Qi to his legs, not to strengthen them, but to fuse the fractures just enough to bear weight. He guided another to his core, to stabilize the howling void where his dantian had been.
The process was unimaginably slow. The sun climbed overhead. Insects buzzed. The stream rushed on.
By the time the light began to soften toward afternoon, he had purified enough Qi to move. Not to fight. Not to run. But to stand. To walk with a heavy, shuffling limp. To continue his journey.
He opened his senses. The forest was still there. The world had not waited for him. He was still broken. He was still hunted. He still carried a sea of corrupted energy within him, a burden and a time bomb.
But he had mended one piece. He had taken the first, brutal step in creating his own path. He had answered the question: weakness was a choice he had refused.
Zhao Zheng used the tree to pull himself upright. Every joint ached. The blindfold was damp with stream water and sweat. He consulted the map in his mind, the one Gwan had drawn with stories.
East.
He took a step. Then another. The journey had truly begun.