Chapter 10 — Buddha and Dao

Then Tian Buhui flicked his sleeve and rose, shook his head, shifted his short, stout body, and without a word went off toward the rear hall. The disciples exchanged glances, not knowing what to make of it.

Song Dayi had followed Tian Buhui longest and had some inkling of what was in his master's mind; he guessed that the master had given up on this little junior brother. Over the past three months, apart from his cultivation duties, Zhang Qingyue had busied himself running errands in his spare time, glad to help others, and honest by nature; everyone liked him well enough. Life on the mountain was lonely, and even the spoiled Tian Lingsu, suddenly given a playmate close to her own age, for all her scolding to his face, was in her heart a little glad of him.

Song Dayi knit his brows and stepped forward to raise Zhang Qingyue up. "Little junior brother, Master is only angry for the moment; it is nothing serious. So long as you apply yourself diligently, sooner or later you will win the old man's approval."

Zhang Qingyue, ashamed at heart, nodded again and again, and from then on worked all the harder.

Each morning he went up the mountain with Tian Lingsu to cut bamboo. An ordinary disciple, after three months of practicing the Taiji Profound Purity Way, could already cut through black-joint bamboo; it took Zhang Qingyue fully half a year to cut through his first stalk. Yet rain or shine he never missed a day, and his body grew quite sturdy—at least he no longer gasped like an ox on the climb.

And from that time on Tian Buhui paid Zhang Qingyue no further heed. Song Dayi asked once or twice at first how his cultivation was coming along, but as the days lengthened and Zhang Qingyue's progress grew slow beyond all slowing, in the end even Song Dayi lost heart and stopped asking.

Zhang Qingyue himself did not much mind. He knew his aptitude was poor, and though he sometimes wondered whether cultivating the two methods together was the cause, whenever the thought came to him he would recall the monk Puzhao's face and voice, and his heart would warm, and he would persist. Hard beyond words as the road was, his stubborn, dogged nature carried him through.

His quarters were quiet and secluded; by day he cultivated the Taiji Profound Purity Way, and deep in the night he practiced the Great Brahma Prajna. So the time drifted idly by, and before he knew it three years had passed.

And in that time Zhang Qingyue set a record for the worst since the Canglan Sect's founding: he spent a full three years—three times what an ordinary person needed—before at last completing the first tier of the Jade Purity Realm of the Taiji Profound Purity Way, able to control every aperture of his whole body at will and draw the spiritual qi of heaven and earth into his body to run thirty-six circuits. But what none of them knew was that he had at the same time, through practicing the Great Brahma Prajna, gained a first glimpse of the way of inner-qi control and laid a solid foundation.

When Zhang Qingyue timidly announced this to the company one evening at supper, the disciples of the Dazhu Peak line of the Canglan Sect gaped like men seeing an iron tree bloom after a thousand years, and then burst into loud laughter. Song Dayi even caught up the much-grown Zhang Qingyue and tossed him into the air, again and again, overjoyed.

Tian Buhui, seated at the head, watched coldly, gave a sniff, and muttered, "What a prize idiot!"

Over these three years Zhang Qingyue had grown to fourteen, and because of the daily bamboo-cutting his frame had grown sturdy; though two years younger than his senior sister Tian Lingsu, he was already her equal in height. Tian Lingsu had grown from a girl of thirteen into a young woman of sixteen, her beauty ever more radiant, so that between her smiles and laughter she was lovely beyond all compare.

Tian Lingsu had always felt the other six senior brothers were too much her elders, grave and stiff, and so she had always liked keeping company with this muddle-headed junior brother; over three years they had grown close as could be. Yet it was always Tian Lingsu who had the upper hand. Zhang Qingyue himself felt his senior sister was indeed much his better, and though she ordered him about and shouted at him day in and day out, whenever he was occasionally teased by the senior brothers, she was always the first to step forward and champion him and have his back.

Life on the mountain was lonely, yet also quiet. Now and then Zhang Qingyue asked Tian Buhui and Song Dayi about the Willow Temple Village massacre, but the matter had to that day yielded no clue; as time went on, it too slowly faded in Zhang Qingyue's heart.

This morning, Zhang Qingyue took up his woodcutter's billhook as usual and went out of the house alone, heading for the back mountain. Tian Lingsu had finished her bamboo-cutting chores two years before and no longer went, so for the past two years Zhang Qingyue had mostly gone up the mountain alone—though sometimes, when she had nothing to do, Tian Lingsu would run up to play and sport with him.

Today Zhang Qingyue saw no sign of Tian Lingsu and thought nothing of it; he went up the mountain path alone. In a little over a month he too would be done with these bamboo-cutting chores. He could now cut two stalks of black-joint bamboo a day, but that was still far short of Tian Lingsu, who toward the end had been able to cut a dozen or more in a day.

A month before, he had at last mastered the first tier of the Jade Purity Realm of the Taiji Profound Purity Way, and Song Dayi had thereupon transmitted to him the knack of the second tier. He had practiced it for a month, and though it was far more profound than the first tier, somehow he had a vague sense that it was easier instead. The first tier, for instance, required control of every aperture of the body, and it had taken him a full three years to gain some small success; the second tier required "transmuting qi into essence," making the spiritual qi drawn into the body turn to essence-qi within the meridians. By his eldest senior brother's account, this was more than ten times harder than the first tier, yet Zhang Qingyue found it unexpectedly easy. Tracing it to its root, it seemed to have some connection with that set of "Great Brahma Prajna"; for three years he had practiced it daily without a single break, and his inner qi had already reached considerable mastery. And essence-qi is a kind of inner qi; with those three years of foundation, Zhang Qingyue's progress was astonishingly fast.

Only he did not believe in himself. Others had mastered in a year what had taken him three; this time, surely, it must be an illusion. So he paid it no mind, and simply practiced on schedule each day, and no one came to disturb him or ask after him.