The relentless cold of the mountain winter finally began to yield. The frosty mornings gave way to a gentle, crisp air that carried the scent of pine and wet earth. For Haruki, the changing seasons were a physical calendar marking his slow, grueling progress. His fifth birthday was fast approaching, and while he still looked like a small, unremarkable boy, his body had become a testament to his unbreakable will. He could now perform a clean twenty-five push-ups before collapsing, and his mountain run time had improved by a full ten minutes. The calluses on his hands were thick, a map of his endless, solitary struggle.
He had learned to use his whole body to lift the water buckets, but the true lesson was not in the physical act. It was in the unyielding frustration of failure, and the quiet, bone-deep satisfaction of a small, hard-won victory. That triumph had been a turning point. It had shown him that his progress, no matter how tiny, was real and cumulative. He was not a weakling pretending to be a warrior; he was a future warrior building himself from the ground up, one molecule of muscle, one drop of sweat at a time.
The temple's training evolved with the seasons. As the streams swelled with melting snow, the Abbot announced a new form of training: the Meditation of the Still Mind.
"The body is a vessel, but the mind is the engine," the old monk explained, his voice a low, gravelly rumble that seemed to come from the very mountain itself. "Without control of the mind, your strength is nothing but a wild animal. You must learn to silence the chaos within and find your core of peace."
The task was simple in its description, maddening in its execution. Each student was to sit for an hour under a small, constant waterfall that cascaded from a rocky ledge. The water was frigid, the roar a deafening, unending assault on the senses. The purpose was to train the mind to ignore all external stimuli—the freezing cold, the deafening noise, the stinging water—and to find a state of absolute focus.
For the other children, it was an exercise in endurance. They would shiver uncontrollably, their teeth chattering as they fought to stay still. Their young minds, filled with thoughts of games and food and a thousand fleeting fancies, were simply not equipped to handle such a singular focus. They squirmed, they cried out, and they eventually gave in to the physical discomfort, their hour under the falls a testament to their physical resilience rather than their mental fortitude.
But for Haruki, the challenge was different. The cold was a physical pain he had become accustomed to, another weight to be borne. The roar of the waterfall was a constant torrent of white noise that, to his mind, was a welcome distraction. His true battle was with the ghosts of his past life.
When he sat beneath the falls, his eyes closed, his mind didn't just have to fight the rushing water. It had to fight a million other thoughts and memories. He saw the flash of the truck's headlights. He heard the muffled laughter of his friends from his old life. He felt the phantom weight of a smartphone in his hand. He would try to silence the roar of the waterfall, only to have it replaced by the roar of traffic, the constant digital hum of his old world. The irony was a bitter pill to swallow. He had escaped a world of constant noise and distraction, only to find that the noise lived inside him. He was a small, meditating boy in a silent world, but his mind was still a battlefield.
He tried a new approach. Instead of fighting the thoughts, he let them come. He allowed the memories to surface, the fear to rise, the anxiety to swell. But he didn't hold onto them. He treated each thought like a leaf floating on a river, watching it drift by until it disappeared. He let the mental chaos rage, but he remained still at its center. He was not trying to empty his mind, but to find the calm in the eye of his own mental storm.
After his first session, shivering and soaked to the bone, he met Krillin on the path back to the dojo. Krillin's gi was also dripping wet, but his face was flushed with a mixture of cold and frustration.
"That's the worst training ever!" Krillin complained, stomping his feet to warm them up. "I can't stop thinking about Master Roshi. I keep picturing what it would be like to ride the flying cloud, and then I get all excited, and the monk tells me to start over!"
Haruki nodded, a small, wry smile on his lips. "It's hard."
"Hard? It's impossible!" Krillin exclaimed. "My mind just won't be quiet! It's like a bunch of monkeys jumping around." Krillin paused, looking at Haruki with a curious tilt of his head. "You seemed... different. What were you thinking about?"
Haruki paused. How could he explain? How could he tell Krillin that his mental battlefield was not filled with dreams of flying clouds and fighting turtles, but with memories of a world that didn't exist here? A world of technology, of history books that detailed events that would never happen in this timeline, of a past life that was both a phantom limb and a terrifying advantage.
"I was thinking about... nothing," Haruki said, the closest truth he could manage. "I just tried to listen to the water."
Krillin's face scrunched up in confusion. "But it's so loud! How can you listen to it? It's just noise."
"You don't listen with your ears," Haruki explained, the words feeling strange coming from a four-year-old's mouth. "You listen with your whole body. You let it wash over you. You stop fighting it."
Krillin stared at him for a long moment, a flicker of genuine respect and confusion in his eyes. He didn't understand, but he didn't dismiss it either. He simply accepted Haruki's strange wisdom. "That's a weird way to think," Krillin said finally, but he said it with admiration. "But I'll try it."
Haruki knew that Krillin would try it, and that eventually, with his open and pure heart, he would succeed. He would find his peace, and he would be able to listen to the water with his whole body. But Haruki's journey was different. His mental discipline came from a place of deep, existential dread, not from a simple desire for inner peace. His past life had given him a profound understanding of what it meant to be powerless, to be a small, insignificant thing in a vast, uncaring universe. And that fear, that quiet dread, was the foundation of his mental strength.
The next day, as he sat under the falls, he did as he had practiced. He let the roar wash over him, letting the memories of his past life flood his consciousness. He saw himself, a young man, filled with a passive sense of apathy, drifting through a comfortable, but ultimately unfulfilling existence. He saw the mundane and the ordinary. And he saw the final, terrifying moment of impact. He felt the terror and the helplessness.
But this time, he didn't let the feelings consume him. He held them, acknowledged them, and then, slowly, he released them. He focused on the present moment. The cold bite of the water on his skin. The vibration of the roar in his bones. The distant chirping of a bird.
And then, for a single, fleeting second, something happened. The roar of the water didn't stop, but it faded. The cold didn't disappear, but it no longer felt like a threat. And in his gut, a place he had never paid attention to before, he felt a faint, unfamiliar warmth. A spark of energy. It was a feeling of profound quiet and a hint of a power he had only ever seen in a cartoon.
It was gone as quickly as it came, and the roar of the water crashed back into his ears, but the feeling lingered. A single, tiny, infinitesimal spark. He didn't know what it was, but in his past life, he had read enough forums and watched enough videos to have a name for it. Ki. It was the inner energy of a warrior.
He sat there for the remainder of the session, no longer fighting, but reaching. Reaching for that feeling, that spark. He didn't find it again, not that day. But for the first time, he felt a surge of hope that was not based on his past knowledge, but on his own potential. He wasn't just training to not die; he was training to become something more. He was training to control a power that lived inside him, a power that was his and his alone. The body was the vessel, but the mind was the engine, and he had just felt the very first, very faint rumble of his own.