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I dodged the first punch, but misplaced my feet on the backstep, and the followup kick to my collarbone hit me square on. I flared my fighting spirit just a little and rolled with it, spreading out the momentum and turning a killing blow into a massive blast that pushed me out the dojo door. I started to turn it into a controlled roll, purely by reflex, but I smashed into something hard -- oh right, there was a boulder in the front yard, wasn't there -- and suddenly I was flying up, spinning at an oblique angle through the scrubby trees outside the dojo.
I reached for a branch, to try and control my momentum a little, but it snapped in my hand, and my opponent met me at the top of the arc. I caught a brief glimpse of him, coming in laterally with his fist cocked, but I couldn't get my spin under control and he landed a nice clean hit, right behind my left ear.
It was fine. Everything was going according to plan.
We hit the ground together, me skull-first and him on top of me. The next few seconds aren't real clear in my memory, but when I pulled myself together, he was talking:
"...understand now? Your corruption smolders at the root of your great work like a fire in the basement of a grand mansion, and like that fire it will bring all your glory to ruin. Extinguish it! Throw it aside and grind it out! Embrace the virtues of a true martial artist, and join me in purity."
He stared down at me, his stern, hawk-like features not quite hiding a trace of hope. I took a breath, and tried to match the dignity of his impromptu speech.
"You're a fine fighter, Ming Wu Shi. Your self-created technique, the Fist that Transforms the Heart, is a marvelous thing, and your speech just now was superlative. Even so, today it was all for nothing. Despite your best efforts and mine...
...I still want to smoke."
*****
On the off chance that you've never been to the Grand Confluence of Rivers, and never met anyone who has, I should explain.
My name is Kwan To-Chul, martial artist and wandering demon slayer. I have killed a thousand demons (give or take, it's not like I keep a census), and vanquished evils in seven realms. I have torn apart wind devils in Marsai and trapped the shapeshifter Orag in his own golden urn. I've cracked open the stone eggs of the Rukh birds and drunk their yolk (disgusting, but fortifying). The Third Tellurial Judge once called my straight left "adequate", which is the warmest compliment he's uttered in three hundred years. I am, at this point in my career, a genuinely big deal.
And...I smoke tobacco. Every day, without exception. I can go five days without water and fifty days without food -- I actually did that once, the time I snuck into Hell -- but if I go five hours without a cigarette I start to get cranky.
I've overcome nine hundred obstacles, but every day I lose to a leaf. It's embarassing.
From time to time I'd try to quit, but it never worked, and by the time I was forty I'd pretty much given up. And then, on my yearly hunting trip through the Basin, I started hearing stories. A young martial artist fought an Eastern sorcerer, but somehow neither of them died: instead, the sorcerer renounced all wicked practices and started living by the Nine Precepts. A bandit king became an upright magistrate, respected by the people he'd once oppressed. An ascended parrot, of all things, had given up tricking travelers to their deaths and was guiding them through deadly jungle passes instead.
One by one I tracked these reformed evildoers down and talked to them. They all said the same thing: they were doing all kinds of really terrible stuff, and then they met a wandering fighter who convinced them to change their whole lives with just one battle. This was a guy who could, somehow, punch the evil right out of you. You can see why I'd take an interest.
*****
After the fight, Ming led me to a nice quiet storeroom off the side of his dojo, where I could sit quietly and fight off the oncoming concussion. Once I thought I could walk around without embarrassing myself, and my tongue felt like it was back to more or less normal size, I got up and followed my nose to a long building off the main hall, where Ming and the other disciples were having dinner. The table went dead silent as I entered -- they all knew who I was -- but I gave them a vague wave, and cautious conversations sprouted behind me as I passed. Ming had saved me a place, and a bowl, fine young man that he was. I started in on my rice and vegetables without a word.
We didn't really start talking until after dinner, sitting by the remains of the cooking fire and drinking that fine fruit tea they have in the Basin. I was impressed with how much Ming had done at such a young age, but he was feeling morose. He hadn't wanted to impress me, you see; he'd wanted to succeed.
"That speech at the end, with all the fire metaphors, I thought it might be too on the nose." He was staring into the embers as he said it, maybe glaring at the fire for daring to inspire him.
"No, I thought that part was great. It showed the dignity of a warrior," I let my voice fall into the traditional cadences, smiling at him, "but at the same it felt fresh and closely connected to my circumstances. You really made that up on the spot?"
He smiled shyly, the same way he did everything when he wasn't fighting. "I did. I looked into my heart, and that was what was there. But still, it didn't feel right. There wasn't any..." He trailed off, and made a wavery gesture at the empty air between us.
"Any resonance between your fighting spirit and mine?" I suggested. "It's a pure spirit technique, isn't it? I guess it must be."
He nodded. "As near as we can figure. That's why I named it the way I did, the Fist that Transforms the Heart. But it's still pretty new, I've only used it for real six times, and I can't really practice it in a dojo. I've tried, but somehow the mood just isn't right."
I nodded. A lot of high-level techniques are like that: you need that fine edge to your fighting spirit that only comes from real conflict with real stakes. "Can you at least train the intent formation?"
"Oh, that part's easy: it's the same intent as when you educate your juniors. So if --"
That was too much. "-- you brought a 'spirit of educating your juniors' into a fight with an Eastern sorcerer?"
He snorted. "Kinda, yeah? I was just so mad at him. All that learning, all that power, and what was he doing with it? He could've built a school, or fought demons like you do, or just traveled the world and seen great sights. He could've made it his life's goal to drink a cup of wine from every tavern in the West, and that would still have been better! Instead he was poisoning apple trees and stealing peoples' bones. Not even dead people! When I got there, half the farmers were flopping around like worms! For no reason!
So I went and talked to him some, and then I yelled at him, and we fought, and he had me trapped in a bone cage for a while so I yelled at him some more while he told me about his life. And I could see how angry he was, how he wanted to feel powerful and how he'd picked this village because he knew they wouldn't be able to fight back, and that made me even madder so I broke through the floor and fought him again and this time it was working, when I talked to him it broke his focus, and his constructs couldn't catch me and I dodged all the poisons and when I finally put a hand on him he just...folded. He said - " Ming swallowed, and cut himself off.
"And then he went down to Seventh Bend and put everyone's bones back, and told the villager headman that they could kill him if they wanted but if they didn't he was going to go north a little ways and reform himself, and I could see that he meant it, my Fist worked, and it was going to go on working."
He ran down, panting a little. "Does that make sense at all?"
Honestly it didn't, but I didn't really expect it to; it wasn't my technique, after all. "He actually does have a school now," I mused. "That's where I found him. He brought me to his house and offered me a vegetarian meal. Follows the Nine Precepts as strictly as a monk."
That touched Ming's pride, and he smiled. "It's a strong technique, we just need to find a way to make it work for you."
*****
Our best guess, formed after a long night of talking and drinking, was that I was too powerful.
I'd been holding back in our fight, a lot, so while Ming's fighting spirit was roaring and raging and ready to go, mine was all limp and relaxed. Our spirits weren't well-matched, so they couldn't resonate, and without that there was no way for the technique to start. That would also, Ming said, explain why his test fights with the junior disciples never accomplished anything: either he'd hold back enough to stop the technique from working, or he'd use his full power and flatten them. His six real opponents followed the same pattern: they'd been pretty tough customers, especially for a guy his age, but they weren't hopelessly out of his league. Whereas I, not to brag, was to Ming like an eagle is to a sparrow. There just wasn't any place for us to meet.
So, overall a disappointing outcome, but not a surprising one. You have to understand, I'd tried a lot of ways to quit. Tapering down never worked; I always found myself tapering back up again. Quitting cold turkey was a total disaster. I got a blessing of healing from a lake spirit once, but it just made my lungs immune to smoke damage, it didn't solve the real problem. The Stone Mask prophesied I'd never quit even after I died, which was pretty disheartening, but at my level you're expected to defy prophecy from time to time so whatever. Moxibustion, pressure points, dream voyages, baptisms: I've tried them all and got nothing.
(I even passed through the Waterfall Curtain to petition the Sage of Many Reeds. He'll give a boon to anyone who can defeat his nine challenges, so I got him to use his Mirror to divide my good impulses and evil impulses into two separate people. I felt really good about that plan going in, but it was useless: we both wanted to smoke! And then I had to fight the clone and re-absorb my evil impulses, which is apparently how that always goes. Don't use the Mirror of Many Reeds to make an evil clone of yourself, is the moral there: it never helps.)
But you can't become a martial artist if you give up easily, so without saying anything I moved into their dojo and started hanging around. During the day I offered training advice and meditated, and at night Ming and I would go off and talk about his Heart-Transforming Fist (I liked that name better, just because it was snappier, but Ming wouldn't budge). From the outside it probably just looked like we were drinking and swapping war stories, but I was still looking for an angle, and on the fourth night, almost by accident, we found it.
"You know," I said, "that your fine technique is going to die with you? One day you'll find a fight that's a little too big for you, and..." there was a pause while I tried to snap my fingers, but it didn't quite work; it turned out I was still holding the wine jug. "...and BAM!" I said instead. "You'll be dead, and your technique will be dead, and that will be that."
Ming nodded amiably. "Well, I can't argue with that. Still, what can I do? It's a technique that only works in desperate battles. If I never get into any desperate battles, then there's no point to my having invented it in the first place."
"That's right," I said, nodding seriously. "The point isn't to keep you alive, it's to make sure the technique survives your inevitable death." We both snickered at that, and then I took a breath. "But seriously, why haven't you taught it to anybody? Having something this valuable trapped in just one head is making me nervous." I passed him the jug, as an apology for the heavy turn of the conversation.
He shrugged, drank, passed the jug back. "I'd like to teach it, but I barely understand it myself, I've only used it six times and I don't know that much spirit manipulation yet. The first few times I didn't even know it was a technique, it just felt like getting mad. And anyway, who could I teach it to? The disciples aren't ready, and the real master of this dojo is still off in a cave somewhere. I tried to teach it to you, look how that went."
I waved that away. "That was really my fault. That technique's a bad match for my background, I can't cultivate the right intent, I never had any juniors to educate." I was trained by a deer god who didn't have any other pupils, long story. "But, look, there are lots of martial artists who could learn it, they just aren't here. In fact..." I trailed off as my brain finally started to put the pieces together.
"In fact?" He prompted, when I didn't go on. I sprang up, so that I could pace around him energetically.
"Consider! We have three problems. In the first place I - ahem! - need help from someone who knows how to wield the Heart-Transforming Fist." He scowled at that abbreviation, but let it pass. "In the second place, you need to find someone with the right background, someone who can learn the Fist, and wants to. Third and last, you need more training, both to teach the Fist and to use it effectively, it'll probably get a lot stronger once you have a better foundation. All fair?" He nodded curiously.
"We'll solve all three problems at once, in the most traditional way for martial artists." I leaned in close to him. "We're going on a training trip!"
He just sat there, studying me. "I'll train you -- carefully, since I've never done it before -- and I'll let you do most of the demon fighting unless we trip over something really nasty. In between times we'll listen for rumors, and try to find a fighter who's on my level and can learn what you have to teach. When we find them, you teach them, they beat me, everyone's problems are solved. What do you say?"
Ming was eyeing me seriously. He wasn't grinning like I'd expected, but after a bit he said, "You know, I'd like that."
*****
Even though it was my idea, I was a little nervous when we set out. I'd been traveling on my own for more than 20 years, so it was already weird seeing the same face every morning, and on top of that I had to figure out a way to train him somehow. Of course I'd face any hardship if there was a chance it would solve my problem, but here I had no idea what to expect.
Two weeks in, I felt like I'd learned enough to render a verdict: having a pupil is great!
Our focus was on his spiritual development, and at his level that's mostly about training concentration. A well-honed fighting spirit is necessary for a high-level fighter, but if it falls apart the first time you get hit then a winnable fight can snowball into a disaster. And if you don't have your spirit about you in the first place because you're distracted by your surroundings, then you're just a guy with muscles and delusions of grandeur, easy prey for anything that's better controlled. This is why it's said, "all fighters are equal when they're asleep".
Which is why, as his sifu, I had to make him hop on one hand up a hillside while dodging thrown rocks. And wrestle river sharks underwater without hurting them, while I tried to jab him with a spear. And jump back and forth between barge poles while I moved them around underneath him. And spar with me with one hand while eating with the other.
And the best part was, all those weird-sounding training methods somehow got results. After we'd been traveling for just one year, his martial arts were so much cleaner he was hard to even recognize. He was still nowhere close to me when we sparred, but I had to open my eyes to keep up with him, and in another year I figured I'd have to stand up.
(And if I could keep this going for five years, or maybe ten, he might be close enough to me to solve my problem all by himself. I didn't mention that to Ming; ten years seems like a long time when you're young.)
On top of all that, I made him do most of the demon slaying. We never found anything that strong, just lower-level fiends and some tainted insects, but it was all new to him and he went to work with gusto. The farmers we met were all thrilled with his work, and that turned up yet another benefit to our arrangement: Ming could go to the victory feasts for me.
This has always been my problem with demon slaying. I like the fights, especially if they're tricky and dangerous, but I never know what to say to people I've rescued. At first I'd at least try to talk to them, or go to parties held in my honor, but I always wound up sneaking off to smoke. After a while, I started sneaking off right away, as soon as the last demon was dead; it was just simpler for everybody. But now I could use Ming as a sacrifice, and smoke in private with a clear conscience.
So to summarize: Ming did most of the work, and most of talking, while I spent my time in meditation, refining my fighting spirit. We never found anyone to train, but somehow I didn't mind it. That said, there was a kind of saminess to it too. We'd stroll through the land, and then something would try to kill us and Ming would kill it, or I'd notice something out of place and point it out to Ming and he'd go kill it, or (more rarely, but not never) Ming would notice something and point it out to me, and we'd go kill it together, just in case.
In that way, a year passed. Then, when it was autumn again and the leaves were just starting to turn, we came to Giant's Hands.
*****
Even from a distance, you could see why they called their village that: it had these two big asymmetric hills, gently sloped on one side with a sharp cutoff on the other, like two huge palms reaching up out of the earth. I forget what we found there; that might have been the demon-parasite cow zombies, or the torturer who'd run away from Hell. I remember I was worried that the hills would turn out to be some kind of sealed monster, but it didn't happen; that kind of thing rarely does, I'm sorry to say. Whatever the problem was, I kept an eye on things until I was sure Ming could handle it, then climbed up one of the cliff-palms to have a cigarette and think up new tortu -- training methods for the next week.
Ming had been in a snappy, distant mood for the last few weeks, so maybe now it would be better to ease up a little, let him recover a little. Then again, maybe some tougher exercises would be what he needed, to get him out of his own head? I still wasn't a great teacher, but I fancied I was getting better, and as I sat there thinking on top of the hill, with my back to a tree, watching the sun set, I thought, "I could spend another twenty years doing this, and never get bored."
A little later, I heard Ming climbing the hill behind me. I rose to meet him, but something in the atmosphere was strange: he stared at me, with an expression I couldn't quite place. "You've been here the whole time, I guess. Did you even see the village?"
I just shrugged. "You had the fight under control. Anyway, it's nice up here.
He looked down, then visibly forced himself to look back up at me. "I'm quitting the training trip."
"What?"
"I said I'm quitting! The whole idea was dumb in the first place! Instead of roaming around looking for demons, I'm going to the capitol. There'll be spiritual experts there, I can refine my technique and open a school for it. I shouldn't have been fighting anything anyway, it's too risky."
Ah, that made more sense. "Your foundation still might not be firm enough, but it's worth a shot. We can leave in the morning."
But that just made him madder. "You don't get it. I'm quitting...this. Us. The whole thing where I use the Fist that Transforms the Heart to solve your stupid made-up problem. You've taught me a lot and I'm grateful, but you're so self-centered I can't stand it. Oh no, sometimes you burn some leaves, obviously this is a crisis on the same scale as Parnassus the Bone Thief!"
"Of course it's important!" I was almost shouting, my nose inches from his. "It's so important that I've spent the last year of my life turning you into a proper fighter! That's what this whole thing is about, remember? I have a flaw in my discipline, and I've tried to cut it out and I've failed. You're the best hope I've had in ten years! Without you, I'll just go on smoking!"
"The only one who cares about that is you," he said, and while I was trying to process that, he punched me in the face.
*****
It was a clean hit, with a year of intense training behind it, and my next memory is of skidding down the shallow side of one of the Hands, rolling left and right so I wouldn't get hung up on any trees. Ming was following on foot, but I had a big advantage in starting momentum so he wasn't all that close. Yay, me.
He couldn't catch up to me, so he expressed his feelings in words. "I am SO SICK of your crap!" he bellowed, dodging around a sapling. "When you told me all those stories back home, you told me all about the demons and enemy fighters and never one word about the stakes! Never anything about the people you'd helped!" He jumped over a rock, then twisted his body in midair so he could push off a tree, straight me. I really needed to stand up soon, and figure out a plan, but he was still talking and it was hard to think. "I thought you were being modest! I thought you didn't want to brag! But I'm an idiot! The REAL reason you never mentioned those people is that you don't give a shit!" And then he was on me.
I deflected his first two attacks on sheer instinct, and my head was still ringing too much for even a halfhearted counterattack. I gave more ground, trying to think of a way to reverse course, but he kept talking. "You think a weaver's apprentice cares that she was rescued by a man who smokes? You think a farmer values his cows less, because a smoker saved them instead of a 'real' martial artist? People don't care who rescued them, they just don't want to get eaten!" He punctuated that with a string of punches that led into a flipping kick. It clipped my chin and I reeled backward. "Being a farmer is hard! You plant your crops and you water them, and pray that the rain will come and the locusts will stay away, and that nothing will climb up from the underworld to ruin everything you've built. Anything unexpected can be a disaster, and anyone who wipes away one of those disasters is called a miracle." He'd hit me a few more times; I hardly felt it. _Miracle...?_
"You can't see that, because you're trapped by your own ideals! Your vision of a 'real fighter' doesn't have any flaws, so you figure the farmers must be judging you the same way. It's not like that; everyone has their own ideal. But you can't see that, because you don't see them."
His expression was hardening, and I finally recognized his expression: contempt. "I thought you'd take joy in saving people. I thought everyone did! But to you, their gratitude is just an awkward burden! Everything that happens after the fight is meaningless!"
And he started to press again, but I smiled, because he'd finally said something I didn't have to think around. It felt like a cold pure lake, like redemption.
"You're wrong," I replied, and for the first time since we'd met I went after him for real.
*****
I wasn't close to full power, he'd hit me too many times, but I had momentum now, I could move into his space and force him to retreat. He moved back and sideways, into the denser forest to limit my superior speed, but my blood was roaring and I knew it wouldn't be enough.
"If I didn't care about the world," I called, as I chased him through the brush. "I could pass through the Waterfall Veil and spend centuries cultivating my conduct, as the old kings were said to do." I cut down a bush with a spinning kick, and only a spectacular leap kept him out of my way. "Or I could just fight all the time; I love fighting! Being a martial artist is awesome! You go places and see things that no one else can imagine, and when you have a problem, you stay focused and train until you've solved it!". I'd closed the gap again, and forced a palm strike through his guard to knock him into a tree. "And you get to save people, too! So I don't know how to talk to them afterward; so what? You said it yourself: it doesn't matter who does the rescuing, so long as it gets done!"
Ming tried to dodge behind his tree; I smashed it down with one hand, then hid the second punch behind the falling trunk. He still almost dodged, but I caught his shoulder and spun him all the way around, to land kneeling five paces away.
"And don't misunderstand: smoking really is a filthy habit. Everyone says so, even the northerners who grow tobacco. If you haven't felt their judgement that's great for you, but I assuredly have."
I stood over him, watching him breathe in the long shadows. I'd broken his shoulder for sure, and probably a rib or two, but his heart was still ready to fight. He came up on one knee, shifting a little to hold the bad shoulder away from me, while I planned out how to finish the finish the fight without hurting him much more. Which was a mistake; it gave him time to think, and to talk.
"Just answer me one thing. How many people complained about you smoking? How many people said it undermined your dignity as a martial artist? You said it was real, so you must be able to at least guess a number, right?"
The right answer to that question, in that situation, is "I'll tell you as soon as I'm done beating your ass", but somehow the words wouldn't come. "Maybe it's a hundred?" he asked, "or maybe more like ten? You don't have to be precise." I tried to glare at him, but I couldn't stop myself from trying to figure it out. I can't think of an example right now, but overall ten is probably right. It's not like that many people even know that I --
My distraction only lasted a moment, but by the time I remembered where I was, Ming was already moving.
His uppercut landed perfectly on my solar plexus, so hard I couldn't even gag. I didn't roll with it so much as fold up around it, spitting blood. I managed one wild punch as I went down, and then I was on the ground, trying not to vomit. A few feet away I heard a footstep, a hiss of pain, and then another body falling; Ming wasn't in great shape either. If there'd been any leftover demons they could have had us for free, but Ming had been thorough, probably. Trusting that, I passed out.
That was how the farmgirl found us, the following morning.
*****
Neither of us was really in shape to travel, so the farmers put us up in a spare barn, lying down, splinted and bandaged, with strict instructions not to move and nothing to do but talk to each other.
Awkward.
We toughed it out for almost a whole day without saying anything -- like I said before, you don't become a martial artist if you give up easily. But finally Ming cracked: "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said you didn't care. I know you do."
"Thank you," I sighed, trying to talk without moving my diaphragm or lungs. "But you were right, too. That number you asked about...it's zero. I was projecting my fears onto everyone around me, because I was too scared to think." It was interesting, how easily that slipped out. In fact...
I closed my eyes, lost in thought. Ming didn't say anything else; I guess he was tired too. But when the farmer's little daughter showed up at sunset with our dinners (roast pork for him, clear soup for me), I said, "Miss, would you pass me one of those little white sticks from my pack, please? And light one end?" She grinned at me, for some reason, and did as I asked.
Still lying down, I took the lit cigarette from the little girl. And then, right in front of her, I smoked it, taking tiny little puffs.
And didn't feel even a tiny hint of shame.
Ming had watched the whole byplay; he could see that something important was happening, but not what. I took the cigarette and snuffed it in my fingers, put carefully down on the barn the floor. "Congratulations, Ming-sifu," I said. "You've cured my fear of being seen smoking."
He laughed, once, and then hissed; I really had broken a few ribs, I guess. "It was my toughest fight so far," he said. "If that's the outcome, I'd better take pride in it."
"Damn right you should," I said. "When you found that school, name it after me." We both did the laugh-and-wince routine, but then I sobered.
"One other thing," I said, watching the moon through the barn window so I wouldn't have to see Ming's face. "The name you picked is a little off. It should be, 'the Fist that Opens the Heart'. You didn't transform me, not really. You just showed me something I was hiding from myself. Someday you may meet an opponent who does evil, and knows that it's evil, and loves that evil the way I love fighting. When that happens, no amount of insight will save you. Make sure your disciples know that."
"When that happens," he replied, "I'll just tell them to find you. I know you'll figure out a way to save them."
And we lay there in the darkening barn, watching the moon rise together.