Martial King's Retired Life

On account of the gravity of a mistake, and to justify all the meridian damage, blood I coughed, and times I suffered qi deviation as part of my daily childhood, I decided to seek opinions of reliable individuals. Thus, I interviewed Boss, Tang Ye, General Manager Bai, and Su Xiao, whom I didn’t want to admit knew more Chinese characters than I did. Unexpectedly, the four of them reacted similarly – frowning, labelling it complicated, folding their arms to think, walking off with the manuals, then coming back a few days later with a new copy of their interpretation.

Boss opined that, although there were a number of profound views and innovative methods, there were too many horsefeathers. There were virtually three sentences of nonsense for every half a sentence of genuine knowledge; the more she read, the more riled up she was. By the time she got to the latter half, it was basically nonsense and actual knowledge all mixed together. To quell her rage, she took it out on innocent me with her inkstone. She decisively deleted over half of a manual, removing the parts she believed were designed to mess with the reader. As such, there was only the first to third chapters of the mental cultivation left, so it was impossible to practice even half of the discipline.

Tang Ye came back with notes five times thicker than the two manuals combined after referencing all of his knowledge base. Had he not told me that wrapping yourself up in blankets to train in summer was to ward off bad spirits and mastery would ward off flies as one of Kongdong Sect’s mental cultivations claimed, I’d have believed him. After giving me the stack, he told me to wait for his sixth notebook, so he had been locked up in his room since.

I thought General Manager Bai would have had something valuable to offer since she learnt from my uncle, but she just complained that Zizi would just go wrong learning it. Instead of pointing out what to learn, she pointed out an endless list of things he couldn’t learn.

Su Xiao told me the yang qi gathering method wasn’t correct based on his experience, and then he gave me a bunch of weird descriptions that I never encountered when learning Yijin Jing.

That was how I ended up with four more copies.

All I could do was reflect on Shifu’s personality and experiences, combine them with my own experience and analyse it. It was a more painful process than taking Shifu’s tests back home – if they weren’t questions on chess or medicine.

The person who found a solution to the problem was the last person I expected – Zizi. He really was talented. As I was lamenting when I was in yet another rush, Zizi had already started on the first chapter. After the first day he had access to the manual, he read through it himself, asked me questions when he needed clarification and then secretly refined his qi. In less than a month, he had completed the opening chapter and started on the first chapter. Not only was he able to spot the common denominators between the two manuals, but he was also able to explain the principles to me and even explain why the principles were what they were, and it actually all made sense.

“Shifu, we are not meant to actually wrap ourselves in a blanket in summer. It is a method for implementing the movement manoeuvres. Otherwise, it would not match up with the movement manoeuvres in the successive chapters. Burying ourselves in ice in winter does not mean that literally; it actually refers to a defensive mode. Although there are no defensive techniques in the manual, fundamental defensive basics are covered. I believe this is an altered rewriting to make it easier to understand.”

This is easier to understand? You people consider this easy?!

Tang Ye, come here for a beating! What the hell was that nonsense about warding off mosquitoes and evil?!

Zizi didn’t have any basic training in an internal discipline, yet he was able to comprehend all of that purely from reading the text. If he was able to glean so much from a fragmented version, I couldn’t imagine how far he’d go with the original version from Shifu.

But, you know who was the smartest? Me. Yeah, me. I told Zizi to practice on his own!

On this sunny noon, save for some supposed riot in a barrack that forced Boss to rush out the door, no trouble came knocking. I was going to drink with Ol’ Cai from the kitchen before I headed out for work, you know, chatting with Ol’ Xu from across the road. Of course, it was a necessary chat to follow up on a case. The last time we went to a chicken fight together, he lost, but he suspected foul play, so we were supposed to look into it today. That was when Zizi came up to me and told me, “Shifu, I do not understand this part.”

Zizi had no idea I didn’t even understand the preliminary chapter! However, he looked at me with puppy eyes.

“Shifu, this part says, ‘Without the six extremities variations…’”

Blah, blah, blah.

“Mm.” I ran my eyes over the text, nodded and asked, “What do you think it means?”

“I think it means…”

Blah, blah, blah.

“Exactly, especially this part. You must control it well.”

“But how do I collect so much pure yang qi?”

That section was all about pure yang qi? All the qi, supplement, loss and red in there made me think it was a recipe for congee with dried red dates.

Thankfully, there was a standard answer for such questions.

“That’s why you need to train.”

“I will… but I need to constantly accumulate yang qi for a year, and each successive time, it must be more potent yang qi than the last. How do I do that…?”

Hmm… I think I know the answer to that!