The tenth day of the fifth month, Guangzhou.
"He's changed. He's different now."
Wu Jiu could not help widening his eyes as he looked at the returning Lian Youming.
Previously, although the lad possessed an astonishing physique and the bearing of a wild beast, he was hardly a rarity in the vast martial world. Yet in just two or three months, not even half a year, how had he come to seem so utterly transformed?
It was not his appearance that had changed.
Lian Youming stood there quietly, his looks and build unchanged, yet he possessed an indescribable beauty. This beauty did not refer merely to his features, but to a kind of completeness, of perfection.
From birth through their subsequent growth, people's minds and bodies were tossed about in the mundane world, weathered and tempered by experience. They appeared to be growing constantly, but that growth itself already meant becoming incomplete.
In other words, everyone was flawed.
These flaws were not necessarily in their limbs, appearance, or some internal ailment, but in the obsessive entanglements caused by regrets, remorse, hatred, or attachments; or in illness brought on by accumulated toil, and the body's daily aging, which made perfection difficult to attain.
A person came closest to perfection in the innocent ignorance of birth, and in the instant of release before death.
In Water Margin, the tattooed monk Lu Zhishen composed a verse before his death: "As the tidal bore arrives upon the Qiantang River, only today do I know that I am me." This, too, was a kind of perfection. But both these forms of perfection were perfection of the spirit.
The perfection Lian Youming displayed was physical. Perhaps it was not yet true perfection, but in a certain sense, he had already transcended the ordinary. His limbs and