Nine Lives of the Sword Saint

Chapter 3: A Technique From a Body That Doesn't Exist Yet

The first time Xiao Chen tried to circulate qi, he nearly broke his own arm.

It shouldn't have been possible to fail so badly at something so basic. The technique — Nine Heavens Sect's foundational breathing method, the very first thing taught to every disciple who crossed the mountain gate — was carved into his memory with a precision sixty-one years of daily practice could not erase. He could recite it in his sleep. He had, once, recited it in his sleep, waking an entire dormitory of junior disciples who'd found it hilarious for approximately three decades afterward.

But the body currently attempting to execute it belonged to a seven-year-old orphan with no cultivation base whatsoever, and qi, it turned out, did not care how well you understood the theory if the vessel trying to hold it had never been conditioned to carry a single drop.

He sat cross-legged behind the orphanage's woodshed — the only privacy Stone Hollow offered — and drew breath the way the technique demanded: deep, structured, pulling at threads of spiritual energy that, in his old body, would have answered like an old friend. In this body, the qi came sluggish and wrong, and when he tried to force the circulation faster than his untrained meridians could bear, something in his forearm seized like a rope pulled too tight.

The pain was almost funny. He'd survived Heaven Tribulation lightning. He'd survived Zhaoxin's poison, technically, if you counted the dying as a kind of survival. And here he was, doubled over a woodpile, undone by a technique meant for eight-year-old novices.

Knowledge is not power, he thought, flexing his aching hand once the spasm passed. I forgot that. Sixty-one years and I forgot the first lesson I ever taught a junior disciple.

He tried again the next day, slower. And the day after that, slower still. It took him eleven days — eleven days of small, careful, humiliatingly gradual progress — to achieve what a genuinely talented eight-year-old novice might manage in a single afternoon under proper instruction. The irony was not lost on him. He was, technically, the most qualified cultivation teacher currently breathing on the entire continent, and he was also, currently, his own worst student.

But there was something the technique gave him that no ordinary novice would have had: certainty. He knew exactly what correct qi circulation was supposed to feel like, the exact rhythm, the exact resistance point where a student typically panicked and either forced it — tearing something, as he just had — or gave up too early and let the qi dissipate before it took root. He knew the failure states from the inside, because he had spent decades correcting other people's versions of them.

By the twelfth day, sitting behind the woodshed with the late afternoon light going amber through the trees, Li Wuchen — Xiao Chen, he reminded himself, he needed to start thinking of himself as Xiao Chen, at least in this body, at least for now — felt the first true thread of qi complete a full circuit through his dantian and settle there, small and warm, like a coal banked for the night.

It was nothing. Objectively, measured against what he'd once commanded, it was less than nothing.

He sat very still in the dying light and let himself feel, for just a moment, something dangerously close to hope.