Chapter 10 — Buddha and Dao
The Sword Questions the Heavens · Page 6 of 6
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.