The weeks following the purchase of the new clothes were the most peaceful Zhì Yuǎn had ever experienced.
The tribute was paid. The war in the north continued, but distant, a rumor that reached the village only through the lips of peddlers traveling between the capitals. The mine, under his guidance, produced enough coal to keep the stores full and the elders satisfied. Yù Chéng, now confident in his son-in-law's ability, had delegated to him the responsibility of checking the records once a week—which left the other six days entirely free for cultivation.
And they used every one of those days.
The routine had become a perfect cycle. In the mornings, after tea, they sat facing each other on the veranda and circulated Qi for two hours, the dual rhythm pulsing between them like a heart that never tired. His Yang and her Yin intertwined, transformed, completed each other, and with each cycle the Qi within their bodies grew denser, purer. Zhì Yuǎn's dantian—that compact sphere in the center of his chest—pulsed with silent satisfaction, storing the Qi it received and compressing it into something denser, more potent.
In the afternoons, they trained.
Yù Qíng still could not extend Qi outside her body with the same ease as he could, but her precision was remarkable. After many days of trying, she had managed to move a single flower petal through the air without disturbing it, keeping it suspended for nearly a minute before the thread of Qi broke. Zhì Yuǎn, by now, could move entire branches—and had begun using Qi to propel his own body.
This was what he focused on now.
The bamboo grove stretched before him like a sea of green and golden stalks, the afternoon light filtering through the stems in thin golden lances. Zhì Yuǎn stood in the center of a clearing he and Yù Qíng had discovered weeks ago, deeper into the grove than either of them had ever been. The stalks there were taller, darker, and the ground was covered by a thick layer of dry leaves that muffled his steps.
He closed his eyes.
The inner vision kindled, but now it was different from what it had been in the early days. He no longer needed to concentrate to see it; it was like opening a second pair of eyes, as natural as breathing. His meridians gleamed like silver rivers, his tendons like cords of light, his bones like jade pillars. The organs, all tempered, pulsed in a constant rhythm, and the dantian in the center of his chest…
The dantian was a sphere of dense light, compact, so full of compressed Qi that it seemed like a star about to break through the night sky. But it did not overflow yet. Compression was the key, he understood: the more compressed the Qi, the higher its quality. More potent. Purer.
What happens when it can no longer compress? he asked himself. What comes next?
The Wisdom did not answer. But he knew the answer would come when he was ready.
Pushing the thought aside, he turned his attention to the surface of his skin. Not to the meridians, not to the dantian. To the pores.
Millions of them. The inner vision, guided by the Wisdom, showed him each one—tiny openings in the flesh, so small that ordinary eyes could never see them. Most were inactive, like doors locked for so long that no one remembered they existed.
What if I open them? he thought. What happens?
He did not know. But the Wisdom in his mind whispered that the path lay there, before him.
He began with a single pore on the back of his hand. He focused on it, feeling its structure, its inertia. First, he needed to bring Qi there. The main meridians did not reach the skin's surface in that way; he had to guide the flow through paths he had never traveled, secondary channels so fine he could barely distinguish them from the surrounding flesh.
He found one. With the patience of someone untangling threads, he guided a strand of Qi through that tiny channel, feeling it advance centimeter by centimeter, navigating invisible obstacles, finding passages where before there was only darkness. When the Qi finally reached the base of the pore, a small spark ran through his hand.
Open, he commanded, not with words, but with the pressure of the Qi itself against that point.
The pore trembled. Hesitated. And then, slowly, began to open.
The sensation was strange. It was not pain, nor pleasure. It was as if a part of his body he had never known existed had finally awakened. The air touched the exposed surface of the pore, and with that touch came something more.
Qi entered.
It was not the vigorous flow of the rising sun, nor the deep flow of the full moon. It was a thread, so tenuous it could barely be perceived. But it was constant.
He repeated the process on the adjacent pore. This time, he found the path faster. The secondary channels, once unknown, now revealed themselves like streams he could traverse with his eyes closed. Qi flowed, the pore opened, the world entered.
In one hour, he had opened hundreds.
In two, thousands.
The pace accelerated with each success. The pores, once opened, remained open, and the paths he had forged to reach them grew wider, easier. What had at first required minutes of concentration now happened in the blink of an eye.
Qi now flowed through his pores like a stream that never dried, feeding his meridians, nourishing his organs, replenishing his dantian. What he spent during training was replenished almost as quickly as it was consumed.
He opened his eyes, amazed.
This is how the world breathes, he understood. Qi is everywhere. It always has been. It only needed someone who knew how to open the doors.
He stood, and his senses were sharper than ever. He could feel the moisture in the air, the scent of earth beneath the dry leaves, the vibration of each bamboo stalk in the wind. His body was lighter, his movements more fluid. When he began to run among the bamboos, Qi responded effortlessly, propelling him forward with a precision he had not possessed before.
The open pores absorbed Qi continuously, replenishing what he spent. He ran, leaped, dodged, and the Qi never diminished. It was as if the world itself were breathing energy into his lungs with every breath.
When he finally stopped, sweat covered his body and the sun was beginning to tilt toward the west. But there was no fatigue. Only a sense of fullness, of connection, as if he had finally learned to be part of the world's flow instead of merely observing it.
Yù Qíng will want to learn this, he thought, smiling. And I will teach her.
He did not yet know how. Opening the pores required such minute awareness of one's own body that he doubted any ordinary mortal could achieve it without the Wisdom that guided him. But he could see every one of her pores with his inner vision. If he could guide her manually, pore by pore, perhaps…
Later, he decided. First, I need to fully understand what I have discovered.
He turned and began walking back home.
---
The path through the bamboo grove was familiar, every curve, every clearing. His thoughts were on Yù Qíng—she would be on the veranda, waiting, or perhaps she had gone to her parents' house to fetch something. Perhaps she was preparing tea, as she did every afternoon.
He thought about how he would teach her absorption through the pores. How his hands would trace her back, his fingers finding each point, each closed door. How he would use his vision to guide her Qi, to show her where to open, where to let it flow. It would be intimate, deep, like everything they did together.
She will love it, he thought. It will be another way of belonging to each other.
He smiled, pushing aside a bamboo stalk.
And then he saw.
Two men were on the veranda of his house.
They were not from the village. Zhì Yuǎn knew every face in Qīngshān, and those faces did not belong there. Their clothes, though dusty from the road, were made of better fabrics than those worn by the peasants of the region—faded silk, worn embroidery, leather boots that had once been fine. Refugees, probably, but from a higher station than simple soldiers or peasants. Perhaps mercenaries, perhaps something more.
The taller one, broad-shouldered with weathered features, had his face red with fury. His hand gripped Yù Qíng's wrist tightly, fingers digging into her skin, and his jaw hung at a wrong angle, as if something had dislocated it. Blood dripped from his lip. The other, shorter, thin, had stepped back, his arms slightly raised, his face pale, his eyes fixed on the scene with an expression that mixed horror and disbelief.
"Let go of my wrist," Yù Qíng said. Her voice was calm, but every syllable was a blade.
The man holding her tightened his grip, and Zhì Yuǎn saw the fingers dig into her skin.
"Let go?" Each word came out slurred, thick. "Where is your husband? I will teach him how to treat a disobedient wife."
Zhì Yuǎn stopped.
The world around him fell silent. Not the silence of absence of sound, but the silence that precedes a storm. The pores in his skin—those he had spent the entire afternoon opening—seemed to dilate even further, as if his body itself were preparing for something.
The Qi within him began to move. Not in the calm flow of cultivation, not in the controlled surge of training. It was a vortex, a torrent, a river breaking through a dam. His meridians filled, his muscles tensed, his dantian pulsed like an enraged heart.
He saw the man's fingers digging into Yù Qíng's wrist. Saw the red marks on her skin. Saw the wide, satisfied smile of the other man who was laughing.
And he felt something he had never felt before.
It was not anger. Not hatred. It was something simpler, more primal. An absolute truth that imposed itself over everything else, silencing any thought that was not its servant.
Mine.
The thought was cold. Precise. There was no poetry in it, no metaphor. Only a fact, a law written not on paper, but in the very substance of his being. She was his. And what was his was not to be touched.
The Qi in his pores began to escape, not as the controlled thread he used to move branches, but as pressure, an aura. The air around him thickened. The dry leaves on the ground began to scatter, pushed by something invisible.
He took a step forward.
The pores opened wider. Qi flowed as never before, not to nourish, not to replenish. To annihilate.
The Wisdom in his mind did not try to stop him. It did not whisper of prudence, of consequences, of the price of killing. The Wisdom, at that moment, was not coldness. It was the extension of his will. And his will was singular.
He took another step. And another. The bamboo grove began to sway around him, not with the wind, but with the pressure of the Qi emanating from his body.
Yù Qíng had not yet seen him. Her face was a mask of ice, her eyes fixed on the man holding her. But something in her changed. Her shoulders relaxed slightly, as if she had felt something in the air.
The laughing man stopped laughing. He turned his head, his eyes scanning the bamboo grove, searching for what his instincts had already perceived.
"Brother," he said, his voice suddenly less confident, "there is someone there."
The man holding Yù Qíng's wrist—his jaw still hanging at the wrong angle, his face red with fury, blood dripping from his split lip—lifted his eyes. His eyes met Zhì Yuǎn's.
And for a moment, the whole world narrowed to that gaze.
The man saw a face that was not human. He saw eyes black as night, deep as an abyss, fixed on him with an intensity that did not belong to this world. He saw the air around that figure distorting, the dry leaves scattering, the bamboos bending as if fleeing from something.
And he saw something more. Something his brain could not process, but his body, on some primal level, already understood.
The man's hand, which seconds before had gripped Yù Qíng's wrist tightly, began to tremble.
Zhì Yuǎn took another step. And the whole world seemed to hold its breath.
---
End of Chapter 13