Chapter 104: The Rock in the Stream
My first instinct was to dismiss Corvus's "assignment" as the ramblings of a brilliant pervert. Stand in a crowd? Feel like a rock? It sounded like useless, airy-fairy nonsense compared to the brutal, sweat-and-blood training I'd imagined, hitting posts, running drills, learning to throw a proper punch.
But the 24.5% glowed. And the memory of Silas's impossible, flowing speed was a ghost in my muscles. So, swallowing my pride and my deep-seated desire to do something that felt more productive, I went to the market.
Torak's main market was less a place of commerce and more a living, breathing organism. It was chaos given sound and smell. The air was a thick soup of roasting meats, exotic spices, overripe fruit, animal dung, and the sharp, clean scent of ozone from a nearby mage's stall selling minor weather charms. The sound was a physical force a wall of shouted prices, haggling arguments, children's shrieks, the braying of pack animals, and the constant, low roar of a thousand simultaneous lives colliding.
I stood at the edge of it, feeling profoundly stupid. Just be the rock in the stream.
I picked a spot near a stall selling bolts of brightly colored cloth, a place where the human current was strong but not crushing. I planted my feet, shoulder-width apart, and tried to relax. Immediately, everything went wrong.
My body, trained by weeks of constant threat, defaulted to a combat stance. My knees bent slightly. My shoulders tensed. My eyes darted, tracking potential threats in the crowd, the large man with the heavy-looking tool bag, the swift, pickpocket-looking kid weaving through the stalls. I was braced. I was the opposite of a rock. I was a suspicious, twitchy fence post.
A woman carrying a basket of live, clucking chickens bumped into my shoulder. "Watch it!" she snapped, not breaking stride.
My Ki flared instinctively in response to the contact, a defensive pulse that made my skin tingle. I forced it down, my breath catching. This was impossible.
I closed my eyes for a second, trying to block out the visual chaos. Big mistake. Without sight, the auditory assault was overwhelming, and the smells became nauseatingly potent. I opened them quickly, feeling dizzy.
For ten minutes, I was a failure. A tense, awkward statue that people grumbled at as they veered around. I was resisting the stream, creating my own little eddy of annoyance.
Then, something shifted. A memory surfaced. Not of this world, but of my old one. Stuck in a crammed subway car during rush hour. The only way to survive wasn't to fight for space; it was to relax, to become a soft object, to let the press of bodies dictate your balance. You didn't stand; you floated.
Don't resist. Don't assist.
I took a deep, slow breath, trying to exhale the tension from my shoulders, my neck, my jaw. I stopped trying to stand. I stopped trying to do anything. I just… existed in the space.
A man with a handcart loaded with pottery rumbled past. The crowd instinctively surged back to avoid him. The wave of bodies pushed against my left side. Instead of bracing, I let it happen. My left foot shifted back an inch, my weight transferring smoothly. The push passed through me, around me. I hadn't moved; I'd been moved.
A small revelation.
A group of laughing children chased a runaway dog between legs. The chaotic, darting energy rippled through the crowd. I felt the subtle shifts in pressure around me, a jerk here, a sidestep there. My own body made micro-adjustments, not from conscious thought, but from a deeper, almost spinal awareness. My knees softened further. My center of gravity, which usually felt like a clenched fist in my gut, seemed to drop, becoming a still, heavy point.
I wasn't relaxing into weakness. I was finding a different kind of strength. The strength of the wall that doesn't fight the flood, but simply decides where it will and won't be eroded.
A vendor arguing loudly with a customer caused a knot of people to stop and gawk, creating a sudden dam in the flow. The current diverted, pressing more strongly against my right side. This time, my right foot slid out, my hips turning slightly, channeling the force past me. It felt less like being pushed and more like guiding a river around a stone.
For a moment, just a sliver of time, I was the rock. The chaos didn't disappear. It became data. The shoves weren't attacks; they were vectors of force. The noise wasn't a distraction; it was the stream's song. I wasn't apart from the crowd; I was a feature within it, and the crowd adapted to my presence as I adapted to its motion.
Then a cart wheel rolled over my foot.
"Oy! Idiot! Move yer lumber!" the carter bellowed.
The spell shattered. Pain flared in my toes. I was back to being Kaizen, a guy standing in a market getting yelled at. I hopped back with a curse, the smooth, fluid feeling evaporating like mist.
But it had been there. I had felt it.
I limped out of the market, the carter's insults fading behind me. My foot throbbed, but my mind was buzzing. Corvus's assignment hadn't been about fighting. It had been about listening. About understanding force not as something to be met head-on, but as a thing with direction, weight, and rhythm. Jax's charge was a tsunami. Silas's strike was a needle of focused current. My Ki blasts were… geysers, erupting with raw power but no direction.
I wasn't a hammer. I was a mess. But maybe, just maybe, I could learn to be a watershed.
The next morning, I arrived at the Shattered Ladle armed with a small bag. Inside were two bottles of 15-year Silvershade (which had cost a small fortune), a paper cone of Marla's honey-glazed almonds (no red spice), and a fine, silk polishing cloth I'd bargained for in the textile district. The Torak Tattler subscription was pending, and the bathhouse surveillance would have to wait. In all it cost me 1350 Pele.
Corvus was in his usual corner. Today, his perverted research involved a small, self-inking quill and a sheet of parchment. He was sketching with swift, sure strokes, his eyes flicking between his paper and a pair of middle-aged women at a table near the window who were engaged in an animated, gossipy conversation. He wasn't drawing their faces. He was drawing the lines of their bodies, the lean of a torso to emphasize a point, the sharp gesture of a hand, the aggressive forward tilt of the head during a juicy revelation.
"You're late," he said without looking up. "The light on Mrs. Gable's indignant posture was perfect two minutes ago. You've missed the peak dramatic tension."
"I brought the goods," I said, sliding the bag onto the table.
He finished a line, set the quill down, and peeked into the bag. He sniffed the almonds, nodded in approval, and tucked the whiskey bottles away in the folds of his robe with the deftness of a stage magician. He held the silk cloth up to the light, examining the weave. "Adequate."
Then he looked at me. His sharp eyes did their quick scan. "You stood in the market."
"How did you know?"
"You're not standing like a squeaky gate about to fall off its hinges. You're standing like a slightly damp, confused fence post. It's an improvement. What did the rock feel?"
I struggled to put it into words. "It felt… heavy. But in a good way. Like my weight was an anchor. And the crowd… it was like water. I could feel the push and pull. When I stopped fighting it, I stopped feeling like I was about to fall over."
A flicker of something that might have been approval passed behind his eyes. "Good. You have described the sensation of not being a complete waste of space. This is the foundation. All force is movement. All movement is flow. To redirect a punch, you must first understand the river of its intention. To avoid a blade, you must hear the whisper of its path through the air."
He stood up. "Come. The back room is available for another hour. We will begin with the first principle: Yielding is not surrendering. It is choosing the ground upon which you will not be moved."
He led me through the curtain into a small, bare room. It was clean, with a matted floor and a single high window. It smelled of tea and old wood.
"First," he said, turning to face me. "Show me how you stand when you expect to be hit."
I fell into my instinctive brawler's stance: feet planted, knees bent, shoulders hunched, fists up near my face. I felt strong. Solid. Ready.
Corvus sighed, a long-suffering sound. "You look like a constipated badger defending its den. You are a fortress with no gate, inviting a siege. All your energy is locked in place, waiting. It is stagnant." He gestured impatiently. "Now, stand like you did in the market when you weren't being an idiot."
I tried to recall the feeling. I let my feet find the floor. I dropped the exaggerated bend in my knees. I let my arms hang loosely, my shoulders sinking. I focused on that low, heavy point in my gut.
"Better," he conceded. "Now. I am going to push you."
Before I could ask how, he stepped forward. His movement was unhurried. He didn't wind up or put his shoulder into it. He simply placed his open palm against my chest and pushed.
Instinct screamed. Brace! Resist! My old muscles tensed to fight the force.
"No!" Corvus snapped, his voice like a whip. "You are a rock in the stream! The water pushes. Does the rock push back?"
I forced myself to exhale, to let the tension go. As his push continued, I let my back foot slide, my torso turning slightly, his pushing hand sliding off-center across my chest until his force was spent and he was leaning awkwardly past me, off-balance.
He recovered with that same fluid motion and stepped back. "What did you do?"
"I… moved out of the way?"
"Wrong. You invited me in, and then you showed me the door. You used my own force to create my imbalance. You did not meet me. You greeted me and guided me past. Again."
We spent the next hour on this single, simple concept. He pushed. Sometimes slow, sometimes with a surprising, sharp shove. My job was not to stop him, not to match his strength, but to receive his force and redirect it so that he, not I, was the one made unstable. It was infuriatingly difficult. My body's default was opposition. Time and again, I'd stiffen, and he'd send me stumbling back with what felt like minimal effort.
But occasionally, I'd get it right. I'd feel his push as a vector, and my body would make the subtle, yielding adjustment, a pivot of the hip, a roll of the shoulder, a slide of the foot and he would grunt, his own momentum betrayed. Each small success felt more profound than landing a clean punch. It was a victory of intelligence over inertia.
By the end of the hour, I was drenched in a sweat that came not from exertion, but from intense, focused mental effort. My muscles ached from unlearning.
As we finished, Corvus tossed me the silk cloth. "Polish my observation disc. It's dusty from this morning's research on kinetic tension in the female form during mid-morning social rituals."
As I took the disc, bewildered, he fixed me with a stern look. "Your homework. Find a wall. Not to hit. To listen to. Place your hands on it and push. Feel where the force goes. Then, go back to the market. This time, be the rock, but also watch the other rocks. See how they handle the stream. Report back. And don't forget the Tattler."
I walked out of the Shattered Ladle, my mind humming. My body felt strange, looser, but more aware. The 24.5% hadn't changed. But for the first time, I felt like I was holding a tool that might, one day, let me change it myself.
I had a teacher. A perverted, tea-drinking, infuriatingly cryptic teacher who talked about force like it was poetry and used a mirror to study legs. But he was a teacher. And I had ten days to learn how to flow before I had to go hunting for a philosopher's stone. The race was on.