Growth, Part One (Revised)

New Year's Day is over, guys. Happy New Year! How did you all spend it? Today was kind of shitty-I scraped the car on the very first day of the year. Going out for fun really turned into a pain. Maybe there really is something to all that talk about bad luck in your zodiac year. Unbelievable!

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Loa woke before dawn had fully broken.

No noise had woken him; he had woken on his own. He lay on the plank bed, staring at the old rain stains on the roof beams. The room was dark, with only a little gray light seeping through the cracks around the window. From next door came Old Jack's coughs, sometimes soft, sometimes loud. After a while, he heard the rustle of clothes being put on.

Loa sat up too and pulled on his clothes in the dark. His trousers had grown too short, leaving his ankles exposed to the chill. He tugged at the hems, but it was no use. What was exposed stayed exposed. He would have to find time to ask Grandpa Jack to add another length of cloth.

He pushed open his door. Outside, everything was still steeped in a heavy blue-gray. Not even the first pale light had appeared on the eastern horizon. Only a few stars hung coldly overhead, looking chilly in themselves. The air he drew into his lungs carried the distinct crispness of early morning, like a mouthful of ice water.

He walked to the middle of the courtyard, but instead of immediately starting his usual sword practice with its huffs and shouts, he closed his eyes and simply stood there.

The breeze was so light he could barely feel it. But listening carefully, he could hear it brushing the leaves of the old locust tree outside the courtyard wall, making a very faint rustling, like silkworms nibbling mulberry leaves in spring. Somewhere far away, someone's rooster crowed once, then twice, its calls sounding muffled at that distance. The whole town was still asleep. It was quiet enough to hear his own heartbeat.

He recalled the feeling he had experienced in the mountains a few days earlier.

It had been no incredible revelation. His mind had simply felt especially clear, his hearing especially keen. When it came down to it, wasn't that just calming his mind and concentrating? Wasn't that exactly what sword practice needed?

Loa opened his eyes and drew the sword he had forged himself. Its blade gleamed a cold, hard blue in the dim light.

Rather than rushing to practice Gale Thrust, he began with the most basic opening stance. Feet shoulder-width apart, knees slightly bent, he planted himself firmly like an old tree with spreading roots. He held the sword in his right hand, its tip drooping slightly toward the ground ahead and to his left. He relaxed his whole body without letting it go completely slack-he imagined himself as a drawn bow, its string not yet released but already brimming with tension.

He had practiced this stance countless times. He could take it with his eyes closed without being the slightest bit off.

But today, it felt a little different.

In the past, his thoughts always raced when he took his opening stance: Was the angle of this thrust right? Was his footing steady? Was there enough strength behind it? Today, he thought of nothing. He simply stood there, focusing on the solid weight of the sword in his hand, the firmness of the hard ground beneath his soles, and the faint sensation of cool air brushing the fine hairs on his face.

He stood like that, as though another wooden post had appeared in the courtyard. About seven or eight minutes passed. His body grew slightly warm, but his mind seemed to have settled below his navel, utterly steady.

Only then did he move.

The first form was the simplest straight thrust. He extended the sword level, directly ahead. Loa moved slowly, as slowly as a bewildered child just beginning to learn swordsmanship. The tip advanced little by little until his arm was fully extended, his shoulder unmoving and his waist steady. At full extension, he stopped, silently counted one breath, then slowly drew the sword back at an even pace.

He withdrew the sword even more slowly than he had thrust it.

For the first time, he felt so clearly the faint resistance as the blade cut through the air, the aching stretch of sinew and bone as his wrist turned, and even the pounding rhythm of his heart. Strangely, every heartbeat seemed to fall precisely at a turning point in the sword's movement.

He practiced that single straight thrust ten times, over and over. Each repetition was slower and steadier than the last.

As he withdrew his sword for the tenth time, the horizon finally began to pale, a faint gold edging the gray clouds.

Loa let out a long breath, white mist dispersing into the crisp air. His sword hand was perfectly steady, his breathing even, and there was not a drop of sweat on his forehead. Yet he felt a peculiar weariness within-not physical fatigue, but an exhaustion that welled up from deep inside after total concentration. And within that weariness was a solid sense of fulfillment.

He rested for a while, leaning on his sword, then began practicing the main event-Gale Thrust.

It was currently his best technique, and the one he had worked hardest on. It called for twisting all the body's strength into a single force and releasing it in an instant, like a gale sweeping past. The sword struck like a venomous snake flicking its tongue: fast, accurate, and ruthless. After nearly half a year of hard practice, he could already pierce a hardwood board three inches thick with a single thrust.

But today, he changed his approach.

He sought neither speed nor ferocity. Just two things: slowness and steadiness.

He spread his feet, lowered his center of gravity, and raised his sword level in his right hand, his left hand resting lightly against the end of the hilt. He inhaled, imagining that breath sinking into the dantian in his lower abdomen. Old Jack had taught him this while forging, saying it made the application of force steady rather than ungrounded.

Then he slowly thrust forward.

Slow. Truly slow. Slow enough to make out the faint cloudlike patterns left on the blade by the hammer, slow enough to feel the disturbance as the tip pushed through every inch of air ahead. So slow that... it looked nothing like a "gale" at all. It was more like an old man leisurely extending his walking stick during a morning stroll.

Yet Loa stubbornly kept practicing that way.

He recalled a sentence marked in red in the almost worn-out Essentials of Basic Swordsmanship: "Seek speed through slowness; strength arises from stillness." Before, he had only half understood it. Practicing this way now, he felt as though he had begun to find the doorway.

On his fifth repetition, the courtyard gate creaked open.

Linley walked in.

He was about two and a half years younger than Loa and roughly half a head shorter, but he was not thin. Loa, by contrast, was thin enough that his cheekbones protruded a little and the outlines of the bones in his arms were clearly visible. Linley's face usually held little expression. His dark eyes showed little ripple when he looked at someone, like two deep wells. He wore relatively good clothes, while Loa wore old clothes washed pale and covered in several patches, their frayed cuffs sewn crookedly with coarse thread.

"You're here?" Loa withdrew his sword and raised a hand to wipe his forehead. There was no sweat, really. It was just a habit.

"Mm." Linley nodded, saying little. He walked to the other side of the courtyard. Instead of standing still first as Loa had, he dropped straight down and began doing push-ups.

His warm-up had always been distinctive. One, two, three... His form was so precise it might have been measured with a ruler, his body held straight and rigid as a plank. When he lowered himself, his chest almost touched the ground. When he rose, his arms straightened fully, veins bulging slightly.

Loa watched from beside him.

Linley completed fifty push-ups without stopping, neither red-faced nor breathless, with only fine beads of sweat at his temples. He stood, dusted off his hands, and immediately began doing squats. One hundred squats, followed by sit-ups-another hundred.

This was Linley's daily morning routine, without fail. Loa had long since grown used to it.

He remembered once, not long after they had met, being unable to resist asking, "Why do you train yourself so hard?"

Linley had been tying his hands to a rough wooden post with hemp rope to practice punching. At the question, he paused, turned his face slightly, and said only, "My body's all I have."

Later, Loa asked Linley why he had trained his body so desperately back then, and only then learned the reason-the Dragonblood Warrior Bloodline. Its concentration did not meet the requirement, so he could not practice the powerful ancestral Dragonblood Secret Manual. Yet the presence of that very bloodline made his body naturally reject other battle-qi manuals, leaving him unable to practice those either. He was awkwardly caught in the middle, with no way forward and no way out.

So Linley could only temper his body with everything he had, pushing every muscle, every bone, and every ounce of strength to the limit. Aside from the body he had been born with, he had nothing else to rely on.

Loa watched Linley finish two hundred sit-ups. Sweat had soaked the thin old shirt on his back, plastering it against his clearly outlined spine. But he did not stop. Drawing a deep breath, he began doing frog jumps around the small courtyard. One lap, two laps, three...

"What are you training today?" Loa asked as Linley reached his third lap and his breathing began to grow heavier.

"Weighted running." Linley kept moving, his voice coming through slightly hurried breaths but still steady. "The back mountain. Three trips."

A single run along that mountain trail with no load at all could leave a person's calves cramping. Three trips carrying weights?

Loa did not hesitate. "I'll come with you."

Linley turned to look at him. He said nothing, merely nodding once.

They prepared separately. Linley went to the corner, where he kept his crude homemade equipment. He picked up two heavy sandbags and deftly tied them to his lower legs. Each looked to weigh at least twenty jin. Then he shouldered a bulging coarse-cloth pack filled with pebbles carefully selected from the riverbank. That was no light load either.

Loa did not have so much equipment. He simply tied an iron ingot to each lower leg. They were irregular scraps left over from Old Jack's forging, each weighing about ten jin, and he had wrapped them in several layers of thick cloth.

Once everything was secured, they exchanged a glance and dashed out of the courtyard almost simultaneously, running toward the back mountain outside town.

The mountain trail was silent and deserted in the early morning. The only sounds were their somewhat heavy footfalls, their bellows-like breathing, and the rustling of leaves and grass as the wind swept through the mountain woods.

Linley ran ahead. His strides were long and rapid. The sandbags on his legs and the stones on his back seemed to have no effect on him at all. Loa followed, barely keeping up through gritted teeth, but his calves already felt swollen and his chest tight.

The first trip was a long uphill climb.

The mountain trail was steep and littered with loose stones. One misplaced step could send someone slipping. Yet Linley ran with exceptional steadiness, planting every step firmly with a dull thud, thud. His breathing followed a regular rhythm: two steps in, two steps out, steady and powerful as the old bellows in the smithy.

Loa tried hard to match that rhythm with his breathing. But the increasingly heavy iron on his legs and the increasingly hot air in his chest made him feel as though he were suffocating. Sweat blurred his eyes, salty and stinging.

"Adjust your center of gravity." Linley tossed the words back without turning his head. His voice was low but carried clearly through their panting. "Lean forward. Drive with your thighs, not just your calves."

Loa adjusted as instructed. It did feel a little easier, and the muscles at the fronts of his thighs began taking most of the strain.

At a slightly flatter bend halfway up the mountain, Loa could hold on no longer. He stopped, braced his hands on his knees, and opened his mouth wide, gasping desperately like a fish out of water. Linley stopped too, but unlike Loa, he did not bend over. He simply stood there, chest heaving, sweat dripping continuously down his firm jawline and striking the dusty trail in tiny dark circles.

"You... you train like this every day?" Loa asked between heavy breaths, the taste of blood in his throat.

"Mm," Linley answered simply, looking toward the woods farther up the mountain. The sky was growing brighter. Though the sun had not yet appeared, the horizon was already stained a brilliant red-gold, like molten gold splashed across it.

"Why..." Loa wiped the sweat from his face. "Why push yourself... so hard?"

Linley was silent for a moment. The mountain wind lifted the sweat-soaked hair on his forehead, revealing eyes that were calm yet burning.

"I don't want to spend my whole life in Wushan Town." His voice was quiet, yet it sounded especially clear in the open mountains. "I want to become strong enough. Strong enough to leave and see just how vast the outside world really is. Strong enough... to truly control my own fate one day, instead of being dragged along by it. And I have a mission I want to fulfill!"

With that, he lingered no longer. He turned and continued running uphill. This time, he seemed a little faster, carrying a determination that cut through the morning mist.

Loa stood there, stunned for two seconds. Linley's words were like a small stone dropped into the lake of his heart, sending ripples spreading outward. He forcefully exhaled a stale breath and set off after him.

"In that case, I'll risk my life to keep a gentleman company."

"What's a gentleman?"

"Oh, it's a word from deep in my memories. Just take it as something nice."

"Oh, okay."

Their voices faded into the distance as they ran.