Chen Xiuyuan pulled the short saber from the wooden block and checked its edge first.
Fortunately, there were no new chips. But the white mark on the shell was pitifully shallow. He rubbed away the loose scrapings with his thumb; the actual wound left behind was only a very short line.
For the second strike, he adjusted to a straighter angle, trying to concentrate the force along the cutting edge. The blade no longer slid wildly aside, but the hard shell still stood intact against it, jarring his wrist until it ached.
Elder Shi stopped him.
"Tell me what you want to test first."
"Is my strength lacking, or is the blade taking the wrong path?"
"Either is possible. This saber might simply be unsuited to splitting this piece of shell, too. Striking harder each time will only tell you when its edge starts to roll."
Chen Xiuyuan stopped, unfastened the shell plate, and turned it over to inspect it. Its edges were somewhat thin, its middle thick, and a little tough hide that had not been fully cleaned away still covered the back. His two strikes had landed in different places. Even if one had cut deeper, that did not necessarily mean he had improved the move.
He asked Elder Shi to help select comparable sections and trim the tough hide on the back until they could see clearly. Processing these things relied on blade and eye. The panel still showed only the Bloodstone Saber Technique, already at great perfection; stripping away a layer of hide had not added a new entry.
The old man left him with one remark: "If you only want to split it, you can do that once your Qi and blood are fuller and you have a better saber. If you want to find where this saber technique can save you effort, keep those two things separate."
Chen Xiuyuan put away the short saber and went to finish the day's chores first.
Shi Yuan was moving a wooden frame needed by the herb shed past the meat shed; one person at each end was enough to carry it. As Chen Xiuyuan helped, he thought about the blade mark that had slid across the hard shell. Without noticing, he lowered the front end, and the other end nearly jabbed Shi Yuan in the ribs.
"If you're going to think about saber work, put it down. Don't practice on me."
"Sorry."
Chen Xiuyuan steadied the frame again and finished carrying this load first. On his way back to fetch water, he walked beside the stone channel and saw the thin stream strike a projecting ridge of rock and split in two. One current curved around along a sloping surface, while the other gathered into a small eddy in a hollow.
He stopped and watched for a while.
The water had flowed around the stone without cutting it open. Of course, positioning a saber to follow the water's course would not conjure strength from nothing either. But when the cutting edge struck hard shell, if it could first slip close along a surface it could follow, then deliver force where it met resistance, would that waste a little less than crashing straight into it?
Chen Xiuyuan crouched and traced along the stone surface with a twig, then stood and picked up the water.
I need to go back and try it.
That afternoon, he secured the shell plate to the same wooden block and first marked two spots of similar thickness. He used the same short saber and kept his footing unchanged. At one spot, he followed the original straight blade path; at the other, he tried tilting the edge slightly, sliding it over the shell before cutting in.
The first strike left a shallow cut. The second slid straight off the shell's edge.
Shi Lei happened to pass by. Seeing the blade sweep past the wooden block, he halted.
"Where are you trying to send that saber?"
Chen Xiuyuan brought it safely under control and pointed out his intended landing point. After hearing him out, Shi Lei moved the wooden block a little farther into the training ground, told the people nearby not to pass through this spot, and stood behind him to one side to watch.
Tilted too far, the edge could not even catch the shell's surface. Reducing the angle made it little different from before. Chen Xiuyuan tried several times, adding a jumble of scratches to the shell plate, but none was enough to convince him the new method worked.
Shi Lei asked whether he wanted to try a heavy saber instead.
Chen Xiuyuan shook his head. "If I switch to a heavier one, even if it cuts deeper, I won't know where the improvement came from."
He wiped the borrowed, blunt-edged heavy saber clean and wrapped it up, asking Shi Lei to return it when he went back to the hunting shed on patrol. For now, he kept only the old short saber to make the same comparisons.
That night, he sketched the landing points he had tested on a fresh page of his notebook, marking which attempts had sliced in and which had caught. Seeing "wrist pulled" written beside several cuts, he remembered trimming sinew in the meat shed: once the edge pressed crosswise against a tough spot, pulling with the wrist alone took effort and easily tore the meat.
But thin sinew like that was a far cry from hard shell.
Chen Xiuyuan wrote the thought down beside his notes without adding "success" after it. As the lamp was about to go out, Elder Shi came inside, saw the messy diagrams of blade marks in the notebook, and asked whether he would keep testing tomorrow.
"Yes. I'll start with an undamaged spot."
The old man glanced at the short saber he had set down.
"Don't wait until you've ruined it with your tests to remember it's borrowed."
Chen Xiuyuan smiled and agreed, returning the saber to its original place by the wall.
When he tried again, Chen Xiuyuan did not start by increasing the slant. Instead, he shortened the brief motion between feeding the blade forward and drawing back his wrist.
The edge first rested lightly against the shell, traveled a very short distance along the slope, and only after he felt resistance did he bring his elbow into the motion. On the first attempt, the tip still veered aside. On the second, however, it bit in a little, leaving a fine groove clearer than those beside it.
He was just about to try again when Shi Lei blocked his hand with a wooden saber.
"This edge is thin."
Chen Xiuyuan turned the shell over. Sure enough, the back was slightly concave-exactly the sort of spot most easily mistaken. He crossed out the mark for that attempt, moved to a spot of similar thickness on another face, and tried again.
This time, it failed.
The saber caught against the shell's surface. It would not go farther in, and to pull it back, he first had to relax his arm. Chen Xiuyuan slowly withdrew it, then switched back to the original method to test a similar depth. At least he could recover the blade smoothly that way.
The line showing the Bloodstone Saber Technique at great perfection remained there throughout. The failures he had tested so far had not erased what he had mastered, either. After resting, he ran through the original method. His returning hooks and turns were as steady as ever, and only then did he resume breaking down that still-immature slanting, close-following blade path.
On the third day, Chen Xiuyuan shortened the distance over which his wrist exerted force alone as he advanced the saber, using his forearm and waist together to carry the edge over the shell. The blade no longer relied solely on his fingers and wrist to barely hold its course, and it was easier to recover when it veered aside.
A fine groove finally appeared on another similar piece of shell.
He did not immediately add force and strike again. He placed the two old pieces together and asked Shi Lei to swap their positions. Without looking at their backs first, he tested each once from the same stance. With the original method, the jolt was more direct. The slanting, close-following strike required extremely fine adjustments to the angle, but once aligned, it spared him that abrupt collision.
"It's only a little deeper," Shi Lei said.
"It doesn't jar my wrist as much."
"You've rested. Of course it doesn't ache as much. Reverse the order and try again."
Chen Xiuyuan agreed. Once both arms had recovered somewhat, he tried the slanting approach first and the original method afterward. The difference was still there this time, but whenever the shell's surface bulged even slightly, the slanting blade tended to slide away.
He kept the successful spots in his notebook, along with the failures, and no longer circled a chance deeper cut as the answer. Elder Shi came over to look and pointed to one diagram, telling him to mark separately where the edge first made contact and where it truly bit into the shell.
The two points were very close together. Chen Xiuyuan had previously drawn through them in one stroke. Only after separating them did he realize that the timing of his wrist turn changed every time, sometimes early, sometimes late. What he called the same strike was not actually the same.
So his subsequent practice slowed down again.
He first used softer scraps of hide to check whether the blade path was stable, then switched back to hard shell, never treating a cut through soft hide as proof he could cut through hard shell too. Whenever Shi Lei had time, he watched the landing points for him. When he did not, Chen Xiuyuan tested only within the limits of his own judgment, never relying on repeated blows to crack the shell with the impacts and counting that as success for the new method.
By the seventy-fourth day since his return, several small pieces of cut shell lay in a row beside the wooden block.
Elder Shi handed him one and asked what he had gained this time.
Chen Xiuyuan pointed to a fine groove, shallow but continuous. "On this face, chopping with the old method pushes my hand outward. If I follow the surface first and feed the blade in here, there's a little less recoil. I've tested several pieces of similar thickness, and I can do it on all of them."
"What else?"
"It might not work if the curvature changes. I still can't cut into thicker shell. And linking it into the returning stroke isn't steady enough yet."
Elder Shi nodded and told him to keep those pieces and find others of varying thickness to test gradually.
As Chen Xiuyuan put away the saber, the panel finally showed accumulation beyond the original method.
[Bloodstone Saber Technique: great perfection.] [Original version limit breaking accumulation: 12%.]
Twelve.
He looked again at the diagrams still marked with crosses and reached out to turn back to the very first page. Back then, the saber had slid straight off the shell's edge, its landing point running all the way outside. Now, at least on similar material, he could decide for himself where the saber entered and where it withdrew.
How much remained lacking was also laid out clearly before him.
Chen Xiuyuan closed the sketchbook, put away the old saber, and headed toward the herb shed. His accumulation for the second meridian had reached ninety-eight that morning; next, he would continue his usual practice. Testing the shell today had consumed a good deal of his strength. Tonight he needed to eat and rest first, not make up for it by forcibly rousing his Qi and blood.
A narrow cart stood outside the herb shed, its bed covered with a dark tarpaulin. Two herb transporters had come to deliver an ordered batch of ordinary medicinal ingredients. Auntie Sang and Shi Yuan were checking the bundles one by one, while a patrol guard sent by Shi Qiren stood nearby, letting them pass only after checking the goods and their destination.
Chen Xiuyuan helped move the checked herbs into the shed and heard the driver say they were heading toward the South Entrance tonight, crossing the shallows before dark rather than staying nearby. The cart's left sideboard was cracked and held tight with a dark leather strap; it kept making faint noises as they unloaded.
"Hold it down. Don't knock it again," the driver said.
Chen Xiuyuan steadied the cracked board, noted where it wobbled, and went to eat dinner after the cart left. He did not confuse the ordinary herb cart with the detained cart with the repaired shaft; the latter was still inside the gate, and the pale wood on its shaft remained visible through the wooden railing.
After dark, Chen Xiuyuan went to the meat shed to return the old cloth he had used to pad the shell. Shi Yuan was closing the rear passage. Someone raised a lantern on the distant gate wall, and the sound of a cart axle came intermittently from outside.
Chen Xiuyuan walked up the low slope and looked out through a gap beside the wall.
A cart stood beyond the lantern's reach, its tarpaulin hanging low. The person carrying the lantern took a few steps forward, illuminating the cracked board on the left and the dark leather strap cinched around it.
The daytime driver was not in his former seat. Someone with a hat brim pulled very low stood beside the cart.
Shi Yuan recognized the cart too and asked quietly, "Weren't they going to cross the shallows?"
Chen Xiuyuan had already turned and started toward the patrol post.
"Don't open the back gate yet."