Contrary to my expectations, our travel companion did not falter for even a single moment in our morning trek over the mountain, crossing past the range. While some fatigue was slowly setting in on our slightly ludicrous speed.

Finally, when we reached the peak, we took a training break.

“We spar,” Mentor announced excitedly.

“Ah, come on,” I muttered as I divested myself of my backpack and assumed a rather open-ended stance.

Mentor remained still, smiling at me knowingly. “What?” I asked.

“I will not be your opponent today.”

I looked to the Monk, who sat down in meditation. “Him?”

“Monk,” Mentor roused him. He opened both eyes and smiled jovially at her. “Would you mind sparring with my disciple?”

“Not at all!” He smiled, getting up to face me, leaving his monk’s spade behind as he took a low, and wide stance. “Ready when you are, opponent!”

I rolled my eyes. I leaned forwards before shooting off towards him with a simple jab meant to probe his full capabilities.

He was fast, managing to side-step me by a large margin before directing a palm-strike to my face.

Before it could connect, he froze, retracted his hand and bowed. “Good spar?”

It took a moment to process what had just happened, but when I did, my respect for the young Monk had grown. “You’re fast,” I said.

He nodded with a smile. “I was trained by my Mentor since the age of six for this mission. How long have you trained?”

“…Two months,” I admitted, rather shamefully.

“Two months?!” He yelled with a start. He looked away, then eased his expression before accepting my response. “Very well, then.”

“What?” I asked. “I know I’m new at this, so you don’t have to rub it in or anything.”

“Oh, no, no!” He said with a frown. “I meant no such thing! I was merely… surprised, but… let’s move on.”

“Okay,” I said, a little suspiciously. “Another spar?”

He agreed.

We tried again. I inched closer to him before getting him in my range. I was just a little taller than him, and my arms were noticeably longer. I probed a little. He wasn’t as fast in this short range, but he still maintained a wide margin between my strikes and him.

I moved in for a kick. He dodged, and took advantage of my openness, grabbing a hold of my leg before delivering a punch towards my face. It stopped a scant few millimetres before my skin.

Right. He followed the Right Action, and would not harm me unless absolutely necessary. After all, he was taught Martial Arts and was given a weapon. If he was never to hurt someone, then they would both be completely redundant.

He was graceful with each victory, and I was already used to getting my ass handed to me by my Mentor, so it was only some skin off my back.

But I did adapt to his tactics. He was gentle, fast and punishing. He would pussyfoot around, and when the time came to strike, he struck. To fight him was to leave no openings, to emulate a turtle and shell up whenever a threat approached. It made for a more intellectual brawl, and the lack of a painful ‘motivator’ was a welcome change, but I did not falter in treating this spar with utmost importance.

This was the first person I had ever met from the Wulin aside from Mentor, and at the same time, he was an expert in his craft. Refusing to learn from him was a kind of pride that Mentor had long-since beaten out of me.

Finally, when I managed to corner him behind a cliff, I meant to pull him into a grapple, only for him to jump over me, into my blindspot, directing a straight punch to my face. Long since used to them, I didn’t move, just waiting for the draft of wind to billow my hair.

A rather strange part of me wondered how much it would hurt to have him not hold back, but from his personality, there was less than a zero-percent chance to have him harm me just because I asked him nicely.

Still, the way he just jumped over me, it was like he was weightless or something. It was reminiscent of Mentor’s cloud-stepping. I had to learn it, but with Mentor’s reluctance to advance me from the basics, I had no choice but to learn what she was teaching me.

Once the training break was over, we continued the trek in silence.

No. It wasn’t as if Mentor didn’t want to teach me. She just said that I wasn’t ready, because… because of my anger, because of my ‘unwholesome state’. They didn’t understand. None of them did. My anger was what made me such a good fighter. Anger was what I needed to put my enemies in the ground, and if that somehow offended my Mentor’s prissy sensibilities, then so be it.

And the Monk… the less said about him, the better. Cloistered away all of his life, he knew nothing of suffering, yet he thought to come down to try and tell people, real people, how to live their lives. It was naïve, and downright offensive of him to be so presumptuous. How dare he?

I pushed down my anger at them both. It wouldn’t do to blow my top, now. It would only prove them right. I could control my anger, harness it into something useful. I wasn’t just some maniac.

A demon?

…No. I wasn’t a demon. It was the simple truth. There were demons out there, people who were abjectly evil, but I wasn’t a demon. I was wronged. Still, the experience had not left me unscathed. I was not a demon, but I had been touched by them, plagued by them, until what remained was almost indistinguishable from a demon.

Mentor helped me see it her way, that I was wronged, and yet, did that really matter when I harboured all this darkness like a blanket, afraid to let go?

I couldn’t even think about going without it. Having held onto it from my childhood, it felt like it was fused into my bones, that without it, I would fall apart, collapsing under my own weight. Was it an illusion, or truth?

And what about my fear? Fear helped me survive, but would that impede me, too? I would ask my Mentor, but I still didn’t trust her to know what was completely good for me. Only I knew the most about that, and even now, I was still iffy about some things.

For now, I would have to decide on a single course of action; tame my anger. I could not let go of it, but I had to construct a vessel for it, to tap into it whenever necessary, to never let it control me.

That would be my long-term goal for now.

000

Finally, we had completely crossed the mountain chain, taking us back to the forest where we stopped for the night. After a quick and gentle spar with the Monk, and a not-so-quick and utterly-non-gentle spar with my Mentor, we ate and retired to our beds.

I was on my bed, but I remained completely awake, sorting through my anger. I shut my eyes to think.

I asked myself one question: why was I angry?

The myriad memories popped up one after another, all evidence for why my anger got the hold of me. Instead of letting it all pop up at once, I decided to picture it all inscribed in a scroll, each event written in one, and then deposited in square bookshelves.

It took a while, and much concentration, and I felt grateful for Mentor’s lessons in reading, but when I was finally done transcribing the last of my memories, I placed them in a shelf, and locked the door to my little ‘library of anger’.

Then, I felt it.

Peace.

The anger still existed, but no longer was it a constant pressure, a constant buzzing in my ears which forced me to always be mindful of it, like a pack of mosquitoes that would never stop flying around my head, constantly forcing me to swat them away.

My anger was easily accessed, of course, in times of need, but now, it wasn’t always there. This was the perfect solution!

But that was not just it. When I expanded my mindfulness away from the library of anger, I felt myriad motes of energies crash into me, circulating ineffectually before disappearing.

On a fit of pique, I tried to hold onto them, to examine them and to see what they were.

When held onto, they circulated fully around my body, allowing me a limited view into my body, before settling into the center of my gravity, where it tried and failed to pierce a wall.

Annoyed, I sent a host of different motes all the way to the obstruction, circulating them, rejuvenating myself and sending them crashing again and again and again.

Not a single mark had been made on the shell.

Letting out some of my anger, I controlled the energy and balled it tightly before sending it careening towards my core.

A spider-web crack formed on it, and immediately, a lurch of pain radiated across my stomach, but I held on. I was getting there. I wasn’t the least bit bothered by the pain. Instead of banging repeatedly on it, I decided to wait for a long time, gathering more and more energy, taxing my concentration more and more as I worked my very best to hold onto it all.

Once I had reached the maximum capacity of energy which I could hold, I sent it all to the same exact point, having condensed it into a single beam. The shell had broken, and the energy entered inside my core. The pain lasted much longer this time, but slowly, the shell evaporated completely, leaving a bright core of energy in my mid-center.

I opened my eyes and coughed out blood. Mentor and the Monk looked at me, both with varying degrees of apprehension. “Disciple,” Mentor said rather gently. “How do you feel?”

“…At peace,” I responded. The ‘Library of Anger’ had been locked for now. Both Mentor and Monk deflated with relief, as if they had expected something disastrous to happen.

Huh… I really should have consulted Mentor before trying anything. Well, I’ll make a mental note of doing so.

Mentor gave me a proud smile. “Go to bed, now. You have a long day tomorrow.” I nodded. “Also,” she said, now looking completely neutral. “If you’re trying to reach a milestone, do be sure to have your Mentor present in case things go awry. This is your future you’re gambling. Do not be so headstrong ever again.”

I nodded, gulping. If sleep came easily after every training session, right now, all I had to do was close my eyes, and I was asleep.

000

If I honestly thought that we would be moving past basics any time soon, call me a fool, because even thought I awakened my ‘core’ and achieved ‘Enlightenment’, that still didn’t qualify me for learning kickass magic like cloud-stepping or that super-jump thing that the Monk likes to do.

Instead, I just became stronger, and I could recover faster.

Was I ungrateful, though?

Hell. No.

Whatever tricks Mentor pulled with me now, poking me sharply in specific areas, by circulating what she said was my ‘Chi’, I could remove the intruding needles of energy with some difficulty, though she wouldn’t be able to reliably train me with pain unless I submitted myself to her completely.

Maybe this was why she didn’t want me to take the next step! She didn’t want me to be able to render her training methods obsolete! Wow, she was conniving.

Still, I moved faster, could take more hits, and I was much stronger than before. It cut the distance between the Monk and I, but he was still capable of that sorcery which let him completely ignore natural laws and jump wherever he pleased.

I didn’t begrudge him his fleet-footedness, because I was twenty percent sure that I was actually more physically capable than him. Of course, he had a weapon, which would render an actual battle between him and me unfair, unless I received a weapon of my own. A pole arm would be the wiser choice, but really…

…there were few things more satisfying than feeling the crunch of cartilage beneath your knuckles. Even gloves would diminish the experience a little. I would just have to be fast and strong enough to defeat armed opponents.

The Monk continued to chant his sutras along the way, extolling the virtues of the Noble Eightfold Path whenever I asked him to explain certain points. The Monks living in the Monastery could actually not follow the right livelihood effectively because of the work they put in to acquire their food, but they managed to find a roundabout way to combat this, by essentially training animals to forage for them. The training would naturally interfere with the animal’s dharma, which was frowned upon, so only a few monks would take the fall for such an ‘egregious sin’.

I found that to be noble. The monks that sacrificed Nirvana for the sake of easing the path for their brothers and sisters, that was true selflessness, and that was more valuable than any monk who followed all the eight tenets with complete faithfulness.

Finally, he had explained to me what Samadhi meant. It was their form of meditation which brought them to the State of Enlightenment, which all Martial Warriors had to enter if they were to expand their cores and their Martial Prowess. It was an amalgam of the Four Noble Truths, as well as the seven preceding Paths, a heightened form of meditative consciousness that would bring them to their ultimate goal, which was true transcendence from the trap that was life.

Functionally, it differed from normal Enlightenment because of the mental component. Most Martial Warriors only cared to meditate so they could absorb heavenly energy and convert it into Chi, but few people know that the physical aspect is only the tip of the iceberg, drastically affected by one’s mentality and state of mind.

At the same time, Martial Warriors that relied on hatred or anger would always have unstable, fluctuating prowess that was unreliable. Not me. My anger would never fade. The Monk’s advantage is that he would never have good or bad days, his strength a constant which was not affected by random variables that he could not account for.

I still didn’t know whether I should just respect the Monk or disdain him. Without the constant anger telling me how much of a presumptuous asshat he was, I could see what he was doing and take it at face value. He was just trying to help people. Despite myself, I never actually shied away from discussing with him on the finer points of his faith.

He and I were just fundamentally differing beings, but it helped to learn how we differed, and how I could adapt his practices into my own Martial Path.

As he nattered on about the finer aspects of mindfulness, I caught Mentor’s sly smile looking at me from the front of our group. It had been her idea to set him upon me, from the very beginning, in fact. It had allowed me to formulate the solution with my anger, and it had granted me practice in patience, as well.

It seemed that I always felt grateful for my Mentor’s actions after I reaped its rewards. I would honestly be more on-board with her schemes, but would it kill her to be more transparent?!

Or… could she just not trust me with this information, risking a backfire if she told me what she was intending? After all, you probably wouldn’t be trying to explain the process of milking a cow to the animal itself in hopes that it would go along with the farmer’s plan.

Ugh, that fucking Monk’s weird way of talking had infiltrated my mind, now.

I saw the Monk as a rival of sorts. He still dominated nine out of ten battles every day, but I was getting closer and closer to making that eight out of ten battles instead. His failures could be attributed to bad luck and a surprise manoeuvre from myself, but it would do wonders for my bruised ego if I could just outmatch him deliberately just once.

Unfortunately, all good things came to an end. We had arrived at the main road, and made our way towards Jixing City at a sedate pace, arriving in front of the large gates within four hours.

The guards had checked our freight, and after paying the toll fee (Mentor paid for the freeloading Monk), they let us in.

It was there that I bid farewell to our temporary travel companion, hoping that our paths may yet cross once more.