“I’m actually an aristocrat,” Yu Jie said. We were still sitting next to each other, enjoying each other’s warmth while she gave me the time to puzzle out my newfound preferences.

I was attracted to women.

That… explained a lot, actually.

Of course, having already been overwhelmed by that revelation, I couldn’t help but take her confession completely blankly.

That’s when I realized the implications. “Isn’t that… prohibited?” I asked.

“Yes,” she responded. “My mentor took a great risk by teaching me. When I was ten, I was kidnapped by a group of bandits in the Gobi Desert. Jianghu bandits from the Wushu Woods,” She frowned. “They didn’t touch me because they knew what would happen if they did, but they demanded ransom money. I… was scared that my family wouldn’t buy me back, so I managed to sneak into the chief bandit’s room where he stored valuable scrolls. I tried finding a weapon, but the scrolls, they were so much more valuable. Chi techniques, the basics, but more than enough to ignite hope that I could break out on my own. For over a month, I read from the scroll and tried to replicate the feats written, but it was hard without a mentor, and the diction was too strange for me to parse correctly.” She sighed for a moment. “I had almost completely given up hope of ever leaving the bandit den, counting down each day before the bandit leader decided it would be easier to just throw me into the desert so I could starve to death.” I hugged her with one arm, offering what little emotional support I could. “One man came to rescue me,” she continued. “He… he was paid by my parents. He killed the bandits like cutting grass, seeming almost bored with the whole ordeal. When he came to me, I thought he was going to kill me, too, so I applied the little that I had learned to defend myself, knowing that I would die, but not without a fight.”

She broke into a wry smile. “He laughed. He said I had guts. He decided to try and teach me a thing or two, then gave me his jade slip, telling me not to show it to anyone. I didn’t. Whenever I had free time, I would leave the clan compound, and my Mentor would always be there to teach me.” Her smile gradually fell. “When I became sixteen, my clan wanted me to marry some asshole who didn’t care about me. I told them…” she took a deep breath and exhaled as I squeezed her a little tighter. “I told them of my preferences. They told me to ignore it, that marriage didn’t happen because of love, anyway. I would continue with the engagement regardless of my wishes, so… I ran away.” She smiled. “I came back, of course, only to see that nothing had changed. After that, I finally left for good, and I haven’t seen them since. I experienced a leap in my power when I finally did leave them. It just tells me that I did the right thing.”

“Hell yeah, you did,” I muttered. “If they can’t accept you for who you are, fuck ‘em.”

“Yeah,” she repeated. “Fuck ‘em.”

“Hey,” I said. “Do you think we should wake someone else up for a shift?”

She turned to me and leaned forward for a kiss which I reciprocated. “Does that answer your question?”

“On second thought,” I said, softly butting my head to hers. “They could use the rest.”

She laughed beautifully, a titter that warmed my heart. Once again, we kissed, and it was everything I could ask for.

000

Monkey had escaped by the skin of his teeth. With discipline and skill, he had reset his bones, and upon entering the state of Enlightenment, had sat down to heal himself for three days and three nights before he was barely capable of moving on his own.

The defeat was humiliating, utterly unexpected, even. How was he supposed to know that she could simply regenerate wounds from out of nothing?

Like all plans, man proposes and heaven disposes. With the Divine Fire, victory was imminent. All he had to do was train harder, become stronger.

After catching himself something to eat, he meditated on what had happened. What did he do wrong? He was overconfident, yes, but a lot of it wasn’t even that. All of Kang Yilan’s friends had kept him suitably busy before he could lay in the final licks to that hateful bitch, and when she had recovered, she had done so with a storm, sacrificing entire limbs just to break his, fighting with gruesome ferocity, not fearing for her own life for even a moment.

The image of seeing a face stripped down to a mere skull beating him down was an image that would stay with him.

There had to be another step to mastering the Divine Fire. His Chi stores were still too immature, so the few condensed blasts that he had thrown at Kang Yilan were gambles, one and all, that surprisingly did not pay off.

He couldn’t afford to gamble anymore. He needed skill and power, pure and simple.

After all, he didn’t want to return to Tian Mo empty-handed…

…He didn’t want to return to Tian Mo at all, come to think of it. The only thing keeping him there was his Mentor’s undying devotion to the monster of a man, but his mentor was dead. He had already mourned his mentor during his Blessing ritual, having burnt his emotions in the pyre of the Divine Fire, immortalizing his memory as the man that had raised him from a child to adulthood.

A son should not mourn their father incessantly, and the Dragon’s convictions were his and his alone, and Monkey had no obligation to share them.

After all…

…he really couldn’t give less of a shit about Tian Mo.

He owed the man nothing, yet he pranced about, behaving as if Monkey should worship the ground he walked on. He knew all about what Tian Mo wanted to achieve. “A world without violence and bloodshed, where the few hold power, so they can police the many.” Granted, the only reason to side with him was so that he wouldn’t lose his Martial Prowess, there was nothing that stated that he had to agree with him.

And maybe that was another place where he stalled in his Martial Path? Dragon always told him that a Martial Warrior should be true to themselves, that there was an unmistakable difference between a conqueror and the conquered, that a conquered could never truly become strong on their lonesome.

He felt as if he was getting closer to an answer, but the obvious ones were not satisfactory at all. He couldn’t cut ties with Tian Mo to strike out on his own. That would literally be suicide, especially after the man had said, with his mouth, that Monkey was now valuable.

He decided to not dwell on the unfairness too much. It was par for the course in the Martial Arts world to always be under someone’s thumb.

He would have to get stronger, strong enough to strike out against Tian Mo to reclaim his freedom, and after that, he would simply roam the lands, looking for challenges where he could find them. Freedom was a gift unto itself, so he didn’t dwell much about what he would do with it, at least not in the short-term. As for now, he had a goal.

All he needed was directions.

And direction came. The Dragon of the East had assumed his name in what was a legendary move that had been repeated ad nauseum all over China. A man had jumped into a live volcano in the east of China, where he swam like he was taking a dip in a lake, before finally leaping out, standing on a layer of slowly cooling lava.

It had been the ultimate sign of Fire mastery, bending the Flames of Destruction to his will in such a manner that it couldn’t even think of striking against him.

Still, like most things Monkey was now realizing, Dragon had missed something. In his bid to come off as powerful and overbearing, he had treated it like a test of endurance.

How long could he be inside the lava before he burnt to death?

The answer, for a true master, should have been ‘mu’.

The premise of the question was inherently fallacious. Why should it be that he had to endure the flames? That did nothing but confirm that you did not really have control of Fire, that you were simply borrowing a higher power.

Monkey could not do that to himself, pretend at being powerful when he was not. It would end in just another shameful defeat. This was where he was built differently from his mentor, a born conqueror where mentor had only played at having power, yet bowing his head to Tian Mo as if the idea of ever becoming as strong as him terrified him.

If Monkey had true mastery when he battled Kang Yilan, he would have struck her faster than she could dodge even a single inch, burning her heart into ashes in a fraction of a second before she could even think of mounting a counter-attack.

To do so, he needed to be one with the Divine Fire.

He stood up and looked eastwards, towards the merciless volcanoes that contained the apotheosis of fire on a single mission; to become one with them, to supersede his mentor and kill Tian Mo.

Nothing less would sate his appetite. Nothing less would sate the sacrificial pyre of Divine Fire that existed in his core.

000

Lin Leng ignored Kang Yilan and Han Yu Jie’s adorable display, chatting animatedly as they laughed together, seated so closely. By the looks of things, they had finally found each other.

About damn time; they had been staring at each other like love-birds for the last ten days, and it was getting grating seeing them so utterly lost in their feelings. The catharsis would definitely leave them less high-strung, and consequently more combat capable.

Speaking of combat capability, Lin Leng had been in meditation almost every waking hour of his day, contemplating his handy defeat. Monkey had almost burned him alive, having gone from a middling weapon-master to a force of nature in such a short amount of time. It didn’t take a genius to see that his mentor’s death had affected him in such an adverse way.

Meanwhile, Wei Chow had done his thing, not training yet somehow still managing to gain strength. He had been teaching Bai Guo how to sing, otherwise relaxing and catching animals on the side, filling his stomach with obscene cuts of meat.

Yet, he was an Earth Blessed titan in the battlefield, capable of matching and defeating Lin Leng five out of ten times. A slacker like him, beating a hard worker like Lin Leng. Absurd.

His mind worked quickly however, dismissing the idea that ‘hard work’ was the end-all-be-all to the Martial Path. After all, if that was really the case, then Lin Leng should be unrivalled in this party of warriors. The only one whose training approached his intensity was Bai Guo and Kang Yilan, with the others doing their own thing, somehow getting stronger for it.

On a good day, it felt like cutting flies with a heavy spear to eat, hard work for minimal gain. The energy gained from eating the flies would not even equal the exertion spent cutting them down.

…he always had a problem with that saying. For one, it was weird. Nobody in their right mind would eat insects unless they were actually crazy, and it wasn’t like there truly was nothing to be gained from such an exercise.

In his cross-legged position, a fly flew past. He unsheathed his dagger, and sliced its wings off, sheathing it in one smooth motion. The fly crash-landed and crawled on the grass, unable to fly. Minimizing the poor creature’s suffering, he crushed it with the tip of his finger.

If he couldn’t be the strongest or fastest, he had always fallen back on being the most skilful, but there was no amount of skill that could bridge the gap between a skilful dagger-master and one who could spew flames from their body, burning anyone who came close.

On that level of combat, there was no substitute for sheer power.

What irony. He had come out from the lake looking for challenge, thinking he would be winning by the barest of margins at best, only to be utterly outclassed by the wider world.

He knew that there was no fast way to expand one’s pool of Chi other than to meditate and introspect.

.

.

It didn’t help that he didn’t have much to introspect about. He wasn’t making the strides that he wanted to make, and he had no idea whose fault it was: his own, for not working hard enough, or his own for working too hard, or others for being more, ugh, talented than him?

Still, the truth was there, left only for him to grasp. There was something that impeded his progress, and he knew it stemmed from an inefficient mentality.

He just couldn’t really put his finger on it.

“Something the matter, bro?” Wei Chow rolled over next to him. “You seem vexed.”

“How are you so strong when you don’t even train?” Lin Leng asked him.

Chow knitted his eyebrows and puffed his cheeks. “Where is this coming from?”

“You’re blessed with an element, for heaven’s sake,” Lin Leng continued. “Why is it that you barely even train as much as I do, yet you get so much stronger, so much faster?”

Chow looked down on the grass and shrugged. “I guess it’s one of those things you figure out yourself,” he responded meekly. “It’s not like I don’t actually train. It’s more like… I let it all just come to me. I don’t… really mind if I’m not all-powerful, as long as I’m having fun. Here for a good time, not for a long time, and all that.”

“So you just don’t care,” Lin Leng said. Of course, that made sense. What made even more sense, a bitter pill to swallow, was that Lin Leng could probably never emulate that level of nonchalance. IT was a path forever closed to him.

Or… or maybe this was Wei Chow’s path. Every Martial Path was different, and asking for advice could send one to a dead end. Maybe Lin Leng’s stagnation wasn’t because he was taking the path so seriously, but another stupid roadblock which seemed tailor-made to him and him alone.

Then again… who in this clearing didn’t have a mentor but him and Wei Chow, and he was almost equally matched with the latter. If he had a mentor, perhaps they could have given him the right pointers to avoid this pitfall?

It didn’t do to dwell on what he could have, since the only way one could have anything in this world was to grab it for oneself. The Heavens were not fair to anyone, so expecting some reparation or other went directly against his beliefs.

“It’s not like I don’t care,” Wei Chow continued. “I just don’t… feel too hung up on the number-game,” he continued. “People think it’s all about who has the most Chi, the most techniques and the strongest weapons. Personally, I’m just… cool with fighting in general.”

It was disorganized and messy, what Chow was talking about. Lin Leng liked things orderly, numbered. He numbered his power-level approximately, his skill-level, and Chi-level. His training was just increasing those numbers as much as possible.

A small part of him doubted that he was supposed to do that, but it wouldn’t make sense for him otherwise. It didn’t just feel right as much as it was right, at least for him.

“Tell ya what,” Chow said. “You pull out that flute and play us a ditty. I’ve been eager to show y’all what our boy Bai Guo can do, now.”

Seeing no sense in trying to force improvement, he pulled out his flute from his sack and blew through a couple of notes before beginning in earnest.

The flute had been an idle fancy, learned through months of playing with it once he had found it, figuring out the different ways to produce music from it through experience.

He had come a long way from back then, showing as he played serenely, a warm melody juxtaposing the now-more noticeable chill of autumn.

Then, Bai Guo opened his mouth, and the impossible happened.

He sang… non-horribly.

It was nowhere near Wei Chow’s proficiency, but he was still above average, with potential to become even better.

For a moment, Lin Leng had wanted to stop playing altogether before sequestering himself in the woods to train, bitter that someone could be learning so fast where Lin Leng would take months.

Those thoughts only lasted moments, however, as he gradually fell into his melody, appreciating Bai Guo’s honest attempt at bettering himself in something he was initially horrible with.

Slowly, as he played, he wondered if there was something he could learn from this, something he could gleam from Bai Guo’s singing.

The thought pumped him with confidence and energy, both of which he inserted into his music, listening with satisfaction as Bai Guo became louder, less restrained, but still deep in his effort to carry a tune, a far-cry from Wei Chow’s effortless way.

Chow quickly joined as well, scrubbing over Bai Guo’s mistakes, leading him on and riffing off of him as if his true specialty was music and not battle. Soon enough, the Monk started humming. Yilan and Yu Jie stopped talking, entranced by his music, the music he was playing!

The slowly began to hum along to his tune, Deng Ming joining in as well. Upping the ante, he increased the rhythm, getting everyone to stand up and move about feverishly, trying their best to shake off the sheer energy undulating through them.

They began to dance.

And it was a beautiful dance, bodies undulating every which way in a vague pattern, nonetheless mesmerizing to the eye. The Monk kept enough self-restraint to just hum along but the rest moved like animals.

When he was finally done playing, the group fell on the ground of the clearing, exhausted.

“What…” Yilan panted. “Was… that?”

“Magic,” Wei Chow replied, also panting.

He looked at his flute, nonplussed.

In the depths of self-loathing, he had discovered a skill. He didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry, so he did neither.