Unintended Cultivator

Chapter 21: Practice (4)

While that question plagued Sen, his life took on a new routine. In the morning, he would get up, practice what he already knew, and go for a run. From time to time, he and Uncle Kho would discuss the new scroll that Sen was reading. The new scroll was a lot less interesting than the first scroll. The first one told a story. While its implications still bothered Sen, it was the story that had kept his attention. The new scroll was about how the government worked. It most certainly did not tell a story. Reading it was a chore, but one that Sen diligently performed every evening. As boring as he found it, he considered the reading a huge step up from haunting alleys to look for food. Then, it was usually time for lunch. Sometimes Sen ate alone, but Uncle Kho or Master Feng would usually join him.

The biggest change in his life was the afternoon training. Up until that point, Master Feng had focused on teaching Sen fighting techniques, drilling those techniques, and correcting the errors he found. Now, Sen found himself having to apply those techniques in sparring sessions with Master Feng. Fortunately for Sen, Master Feng didn’t use his enormous strength and speed in those sparring sessions. Unfortunately for Sen, Master Feng didn’t need to use them. That point was driven home, yet again, as Sen found himself hauled back onto his feet. He took a moment to brush some of the slush off his clothes.

“You’re thinking too much,” said Master Feng.

It wasn’t the first time or the twentieth time that Sen had heard his master repeat those words. He’d heard them every day for a week now.

“It’s not like I can stop thinking,” said Sen.

“Well, that’s patently untrue. You’re young. Young people spend a lot of their time not thinking.”

Sen could see the laughter in the old man’s eyes. “That may be true, but I’m pretty sure it’s not the same thing.”

“You’ve got me there. Let me put it another way. You stop thinking all the time when you run.”

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“What?”

Master Feng snorted. “Are you really telling me that by the time you get to, oh say, lap fifty, you’re still thinking non-stop?”

Sen thought about it. “No.”

“Of course, you’re not. Do you know why?”

Sen shook his head.

Feng continued. “It’s because you’ve done it so much that you don’t need to think about it. You’ve burned those motions into your muscles. You only think until you find your rhythm with the action. Then, you trust your body to do what it needs to do without a lot of input.”

Sen squatted down and considered those words. He remembered many occasions when he almost came out of a daze at the end of his runs. In fact, he often couldn’t remember much of anything that happened during them, assuming nothing unusual happened. Still, that was running, not fighting.

“Fighting is different,” said Sen.

“It’s not. You think it is, but it isn’t. Right now, you’re trying to analyze every move I make. Then, you’re trying to decide what you should do about it,” said Feng, holding up a hand when he saw Sen open his mouth. “There is a place for thinking, for strategy, in a fight. But it’s not something you do for every move. If you have to think about how you’ll react to every single thing that happens, you’ll exhaust your mind long before the fight is over. You’ll defeat yourself.”

“What should I do instead?”

“Trust your body. Do you think I had you do all that practice because it’s fun? I had you do it so that you wouldn’t have to think about everything when a fight comes. Every fight has a rhythm, just like running does. Instead of thinking about how you’ll react, just let your body react. Let it find the rhythm of the fight.”

Sen nodded and rose. He took a stance and tried to clear his mind. Without a word or a warning, Master Feng launched a punch at Sen’s face. Without time to think, his body did just react. His arm swept up and out, brushing the blow to one side. Sen was so stunned that he almost missed the second punch. For maybe five or ten seconds, it was just a mad scramble of hastily deflected punches and kicks. Once the initial shock of it all wore off, though, Sen realized that there was a kind of rhythm to the fight. An observant part of his mind knew that Master Feng could move much faster than Sen, but the old man was consciously keeping his blows at a speed that Sen could realistically deflect. At least, he could deflect them if he didn’t waste all of his time thinking.

More importantly, with the blows moving at those speeds, there was a pace to it. It was almost all he could do to keep up, but Sen’s body could keep up because it did know what to do. Once he fell into the rhythm, the momentum of the sparring changed. Instead of all defense, Sen could go on the offense every once in a while. Block, block, notice an opening, and kick. Block, dodge, punch. For perhaps a minute, Sen found that empty mental space that let him hold his own. Then, thinking intruded on him. With a bit of breathing room, he tried to revert to analyzing every move. Within two heartbeats, he was staring up at his master from the ground.

“Not bad,” said Master Feng. “Now, do it again.”

Sen spent the rest of the afternoon chasing that mental stillness. That early achievement had given him a false idea that it would be easy. It wasn’t. Over the course of three hours, he found that zone of mental quiet exactly two more times. After he found that mental space and subsequently lost hold of it the third time, Master Feng declared that they had done enough for the day. Sen wasn’t really ready to stop for the day. He thought that he might have gotten a little insight into getting back into that state. Feng saw the reluctance on Sen’s face and just shook his head.

“You’re tired,” said Feng. “You probably don’t realize it, but you’re moving a lot slower than you were earlier. Don’t worry, you’ll get to try again tomorrow.”

Sen wanted to protest but discovered that, as the excitement of the spar wore off, he was tired down to his bones. He offered Master Feng a bow and wandered off to prepare himself a bath. Master Feng hadn’t lied, either. They did the same thing the next day, and the day after that, and the week after that. A week bled into a month and that, in turn, bled into several more. Yet, as the time passed, Sen found it easier and easier to fall into that state of mental silence. It was only when Sen could drop into it at will and hold off his master’s attacks at length that Feng cut back on the sparring and began teaching Sen new things.

All the while, Sen looked for ways to train that energy inside of him. He tried spinning the ball faster, but that just burned through the energy faster. He thought that using it every day might encourage the ball to grow, but it didn’t. He even tried to compress the energy in the ball. That did something, briefly, but it reverted so fast that Sen couldn’t make sense of it. He couldn’t maintain the mental effort of keeping it compressed. So, all he could sense was that there was a change, but absolutely nothing about that change. At the end of the day, all that worked was waiting. Most of the time, a good night’s sleep would restore the energy inside that little ball. Unfortunately, it remained a complete mystery as to why that happened. Most frustrating of all, it never grew.

After a time, he grew weary of his relentless efforts to affect the ball and turned his attention to those odd channels that connected the ball with the rest of his body. He did manage to learn some things about those channels. The first thing he learned was that he could send the energy down just one of those channels at a time. That, he discovered, was a very odd experience. It generally left just one piece of his body with a lot of energy. It was useful for giving his brain a jolt when he needed to focus. It was a lot less useful when it left an arm or a leg filled with power. Sen also learned that there were ways that those channels liked getting energy, ways they didn’t like getting energy, and ways that felt odd to Sen, but that the channels tolerated.

He found that cycling that energy through the channels at random fell into the category of things the channels didn’t like. His body didn’t seem to like it, either, and punished him by making him feel sick to his stomach every time he tried that. The channels reacted much better when he pushed energy into them in an order. The specific order didn’t seem to matter so much as the fact of doing it in order. He could start with any channel. If he moved over to the next channel that connected to the ball, everything was fine. His body and the energy reacted better to doing it in some orders than others. He made a mental note of those orders. Other orders left him feeling strange. It wasn’t sick precisely, but they might leave him feeling jittery or overly warm.

The longer this testing went on, though, the more certain he became that he would eventually have to talk to Master Feng about all of it. Even if Master Feng didn’t know about it personally, Sen was confident that his master would find the information or someone who could explain it.