Chương 19: Swallow Returns to Nest

The television was on but neither were watching it. This had become a routine between Lin Che and Shen Yue over their evenings together, with something running in the background to fill in the gaps of silence. It was a way of letting the day wind down following all of the action the past few weeks had brought them. Shen Yue had her legs tucked up on the sofa and an empty mug on the coffee table in front of her. She was wrapped in her electric blanket.

"I bumped into Yang Zichen at the pharmacy today," said Lin Che. Shen Yue's ears perked up at the mention of his name.

"Hu Baolin had a prescription waiting for him — a topical cream for bruising and soft tissue damage. Same one he gave me!" Shen Yue looked back at the television, mustering a monotone "Good."

"Did you know he'd be there?"

"No. I was back home today." Lin Che waited.

"I went to see my uncle," she said.

"About Zichen, funnily enough." She was quiet for a moment, as though calculating exactly what she could reveal.

"And about what was in your air conditioning unit."

"What did he say?"

"That it was a safety measure in case you turned out to be a problem." She looked at him with a warmer face than before.

"Relax — he'd ordered it removed. He said Zichen was there to do exactly that." She turned back to the television.

"He was apologetic about it, too. Probably because I brought it up in front of Elder Mao."

"Elder Mao?"

"He oversees the clan's external affairs and most of the cultivation guidance for younger members. He's — he's kinder than the other elders, and I suppose my uncle didn't want him to feel disappointed in him. Hence the apology."

"I hope he doesn't retaliate in private."

"He won't. Elder Mao wants to meet with you — a kind of informal introduction completely separate to the one you're being blocked from. It'll be like having dinner with my uncle, except back at the clan."

"And you're sure it'll be safe?"

"Of course. We'll visit on the weekend." The conversation ended there, the two half-listening to whatever programme was on the television and half in thought. After a while, Lin Che reached forwards and changed the channel to a game show. Twenty minutes later, when he glanced sideways, she was asleep. The electric blanket was still on, but he'd come to understand, after a couple of nights of seeing this same view, that she preferred to keep it on. Somehow she never woke up like a dried prune.

Her phone was on the cushion beside her. Lin Che looked at the phone. He'd had the PIN for a couple of weeks now. He'd clocked it one evening when she'd unlocked it at the kitchen table without thinking about the angle, and he'd looked away immediately afterwards. He'd not used it — he told himself that this was because he respected her privacy, which was true to an extent. He'd not told himself the other part, which was that using it felt like a line he was waiting for a reason to cross.

He looked at the phone for a moment longer. He thought about Zichen in the dark room and the gap between sensing something coming and being able to do anything about it. He thought about the version of events where SHen Yue didn't walk in. He reached for the phone. He considered, briefly, using her fingerprint whilst she was asleep, but he dismissed the thought as quickly as it arrived.

Her senses were better than his, and the risk of waking her was not a risk he was willing to run for the sake of avoiding putting in the PIN. He unlocked the phone, navigated to the shared drive, and found the folder. It was larger than he'd expected — it contained much more than just the techniques she'd shared with him. The contents were clearly the clan's entire beginner-to-intermediate archive: dozens of folders organised by category. He didn't browse, afraid she'd wake up any minute now.

Instead, he found the share option, selected the root folder, and generated a link. He sent it to himself and exited. Start to finish, it took less than a minute. He set the phone back on the cushion in the same position it had been in, face down and slightly askew. This was the necessary decision, he justified to himself. The difference between necessary and right was something he'd think about more when he had the luxury of thinking about things that weren't immediately relevant to his continued survival.

He turned off the television and went to bed.

Tuesday at work was slow. The morning's task was a carrier rate comparison across some half a dozen freight providers for the upcoming tender, which required him to just fill in numbers into a template spreadsheet. Lin Che circulated the Hollow Bell technique passively and worked through the documents, eventually finishing his work for the day quite early.

Despite being complete well in advance, he felt no particular sense of achievement about it, but rather dread, as he'd have to busy himself with all sorts of nothings until he could eventually clock off work. He took out his phone. He clicked on the folder link he'd sent himself last night and navigated to the external arts section, filtered by beginner and started reading the titles. He was three entries in when Pang Wei's head appeared over the partition.

"What are you watching?" he asked. Lin Che tilted the screen slightly away before returning to his original position. He'd realised it was much more suspicious to hide things than to just say the truth.

"Training videos," he replied. Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

"Like fitness?"

"Something like that."

"My wife got me into those." Pang Wei leaned slightly further over the partition, practically invading Lin Che's designated office residence.

"Have you tried the ones with resistance bands? There's a channe—""I'll look into it," said Lin Che. Pang Wei nodded and smiled to himself about making a useful contribution in the conversation before retreating behind the partition. Lin Che waited until the two-finger typing resumed and went back to the folder. The entry that stopped him was near the bottom of the external arts section and contained both the tags #martial and #external, which was a combination that contained precisely just this one technique.

Swallow Returns to the Nest A method for the acceleration of the body's natural response threshold. Where standard external arts increase the force of physical action, this technique increases the speed of physical reaction — the interval between stimulus and response. Between perception and movement. The body already knows what to do in most situations it encounters. This technique shortens the distance between knowing and doing.

Primary effect: significant reduction in reaction time under both active and passive Qi circulation. At intermediate stages, the practitioner responds to physical stimuli before the conscious mind has finished processing them. Secondary effect: fine motor precision increases proportionally with practice. Practitioners of this technique at advanced stages are described as being difficult to observe accurately in motion because the body's micro-adjustments become too small and frequent for the eye to track cleanly.

Training note: early stage practice can be done with simple reflex exercises. A common method is attempting to catch small fast-moving objects. Lin Che clicked onto the linked video, but it had been removed for violating copyright due to containing scenes from a film company. Instead, he had to default to the pdf file with written instructions for the entire technique.

After giving it a scan through and envisaging roughly what the technique was about, Lin Che decided to start his training immediately. Since the early stages required him to hone his reflexes, he first started with throwing a coin in the air and catching it. It fell to the floor. He flipped it again and tried to be ready rather than fast. It hit the floor again. Readiness, the entry had said. The body knows what to do.

He flipped the coin and looked beyond it, focusing his eyes on the wall instead and the coin's shadow thereupon. His hand moved and he looked down. The coin was in his hand. He flipped it again. Caught it. Again. He ran the Liuhe circulation up to the third harmony and flipped the coin in arcs whilst swivelling on his office chair, and his attempts got cleaner and cleaner. He'd tried it with his non-dominant hand, and it felt about the same.

He eventually added more coins, and, upon running out of coins, added the loose scatter of pens he found in his drawers. Essentially, Lin Che had become a rotating juggler with lots of small objects, now able to do so with his eyes closed.

"Lin Che!" came the voice next door. The coins and pens dropped to the floor.

"I don't care if you're not working, but seeing pens fly up and down above the barrier is really distracting," whispered Pang Wei. Lin Che felt his face getting hotter.

A couple of minutes of brainstorming later, Lin Che figured out another way of training his reaction time. He recalled those videos of people measuring their own reaction speeds and remembered a website where one simply had to click the instant their screen changed colours from red to green. Click. 98ms Click. 93ms … Click. 26ms On the train, in the window across from him, a fly landed on the glass. He looked at it for a moment, but didn't try anything. At the next stop, his hand moved. He opened his fingers.

The fly was grasped in that fleshy gap between his middle and ring fingers before he released it once more. Lin Che got off the train and headed in the direction of Unit 4.

The holy land was a short-distance flight away from the Shen Clan residence, situated in an old farmer's wheat field in the middle of the countryside. An old field, which, upon receiving word that the holy land was located at the site, was swiftly purchased by the Shen Clan for a price which could not be rejected. Elder Mao stood by the entrance, which had been marked out by an assembly of tractors.

The holy land itself was not a physical place in this world, but rather a portal to another much smaller world roughly the size of the field it was in. Some argued that these portals were alternate realities or historical versions of their locations, whilst others knew that they were constructs made by high stage cultivators to store their wealth amongst other things.

"Ah! Elder Mao! Lovely to see you here," came a voice belonging to a man in his late thirties disembarking a tractor. He was one of the surveyors — a former construction worker that was injured during renovation to the Shen Clan residence some years ago who was accidentally sent over to the healing unit rather than the hospital. Once stumbling into the world of cultivation, he never really left, and was promptly hired by the Shen Clan.

"Jianfeng, I am here for a progress update," said Elder Mao.

"We've got a couple of new photos of some sigils and runes found inside and have sent them over to the decoding department, but progress is really slow," he admitted.

"Show me the photos." Jianfeng appreciated the straightforward no-nonsense speech of Elder Mao, as it reminded him of his former days in construction. The pleasantries and dressing up of his speech when talking to his seniors was something he was still not used to. He fished out his phone from his pocket and wiped off the dust and mud on his trousers before handing it over to Elder Mao. Elder Mao simply looked at the phone, then back up at Jianfeng.

"Ah! I apologise, Elder Mao. I didn't realise my phone was so dirty! Can you put your phone up against mine and the images should send through." Elder Mao stared blankly.

"No, no. Not like this. Here, give me your phone and you put the two together like so, and. Oh, I think your phone is too outdated for this. Do you know your email address?"

"Email address? Yes, I have something like that somewhere."

"Thank you for the images, and I do apologise for all the tech support I put you through."

"Anytime, Elder Mao. Anytime."

"Still, why is it that the progress is so slow?"

"Well, as you know, only practitioners at or below the realm of Qi condensation like myself can enter the site, and, quite frankly, we're all a bit too scared. Most of the team are currently in high school so we can only work at night, but then, once we're inside, we keep on hearing noises from the central chamber."

"Noises? What sort of noises?"

"It's like a wolf is howling inside. Rumour has it this used to be some sort of zoo or containment facility, with how it's all structured and whatnot. And if something has this level of protection, it's something we won't be able to fight off. We barely even know any techniques!"

"I understand," said Elder Mao.

"I will provide some teaching resources for your team in case they require self defence." Elder Mao opened his phone and navigated towards the shared drive. There was one update. 1d. Shen Yue generated sharing link @ 11: 32pm Elder Mao raised an eyebrow. Then, after tapping the screen a couple more times, deleted the file history.