Chương 20: Getting Mugged (off)

Unit 4 was as empty as ever, which Lin Che supposed was a given, given that it was a private gym and he had booked a solo booking on the way over. He'd come here directly from the office, changed, and spent the first half an hour on warm ups and fundamental movements, testing his strength compared with the first time he'd come to the gym and comparing the effects of both Liuhe Breathing and the Hollow Bell Technique.

He then moved onto the Swallow Returns pdf, which had described the early stages as a process of erosion — of wearing down the gap between perception and response the way water wears down stone. That is to say, a lot of flowery language which summed up to: repeat, repeat, repeat. Lin Che ran the Liuhe circulation and threw a medicine ball against the far wall, harder and harder until it bounced closer to where he was. He then turned his back to the wall and threw it over his shoulder.

His arm extended on its own and fingers closed around the ball at roughly chest height on the return. He spent the next hour with his eyes closed, catching the weighted ball at all sorts of strange angles, twisting and contorting his body via instinct whilst sensing its location from sound and air pressure alone. By the time he'd finished and packed up, the sky was a deep and featureless navy.

The artificial lighting in the city made it nearly impossible to see the stars, and, despite the supposed lighting, it was still rather dark near the warehouses. He was halfway down the side street that connected Unit 4 to the main road when he heard it. A girl's voice, sharp and frightened.

"—let go!" He stopped. At the end of the street, partially obscured by a parked van, a man had a teenage girl by the strap of her bag. She was pulling back, and he was not letting go. He said something to her in a low voice, which Lin Che normally would have been able to hear, but it was obscured by the surrounding city noises coming off the main road. She was in a school uniform, bag half off her shoulder, half in the man's grasp. Her phone was on the ground. Lin Che walked forwards. Very slowly.

He made sure not to announce himself, and the man didn't notice him until he was close enough to be a problem. By that point, the man had registered that the girl was looking at something behind him and turned around. He was in his thirties, built broadly, and had the stereotypical grin and scar down his face one would expect of a thug.

"Keep walking," he warned. Lin Che stopped about two metres away. The man reached into his jacket and a small folding blade found itself in his right hand. The left remained fixed on the schoolgirl's bag. He held the knife low, pointed towards Lin Che.

"I said keep walking." The girl made a small sound. Lin Che's eyes were on the knife hand.

"You can keep the phone," he said.

"Let her go and keep the phone." The man's expression didn't change. He took a step forwards. What happened next was difficult to reconstruct in the seconds immediately afterwards. The man's knife hand came up and across in a short arc. Lin Che's body moved — stepped left and inwards, arm coming up to redirect the blade's trajectory. His hand caught the man's wrist and turned it outwards and the knife fell to the ground. Lin Che only processed what happened after the matter.

The man looked at his own hand with an expression of slight confusion, as though he wasn't sure how the angle had gone wrong.

"She doesn't have anything worth this," said Lin Che. There was a pause before the man released the bag strap and gave Lin Che one more pass over with his eyes. He turned and grabbed his knife before walking away quickly in the direction of the main road. Lin Che watched him go until he turned the corner. The girl had not moved, instead staring at Lin Che.

"Are you hurt?" he asked.

"No," her voice was small. She bent down to retrieve her phone, checking the screen with automatic instinct.

"He— he grabbed me when I came out of the station. I don't — I didn't know what to—""It's okay." He held up a hand.

"You weren't going to get that out of him by pulling. You did the right thing by making noise." She was shaking slightly, the adrenaline working its way through her now that the immediate danger had passed.

"Do you want to call someone?" he asked. A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation. She looked at the phone in her hand and nodded, but didn't dial anything. He waited.

"We should file a report," he said.

"I can go with you if you want. The police station's not far from the train station." He paused.

"I'll stay at the counter with you if it would help." She looked at him for a moment and nodded again.

The report took far longer than Lin Che would have expected. The officer at the counter had been professionally unhurried about it, which had irritated Lin Che slightly as he had dinner waiting for him, but it seemed to help calm down the girl — Nie Yilin, sixteen, on her way home from tuition. Lin Che gave his account separately, describing the man's approximate age, build, and predominant facial feature of a scar, before describing the knife.

He did not mention the redirection, noting only that the man had left after he'd intervened verbally. Nie Yilin's parents arrived before the report was finished. Her mother was slightly out of breath, running one hand over her daughter's face and hair before composing herself once again. Her father immediately started asking the officer a series of questions about next steps and improved police presence on the roads at night.

When they were done, both parents turned to Lin Che and thanked him immensely saying how society needs more people like him. Lin Che was too awkward to take the compliments. He got home late.

Shen Yue was at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and a document she'd been annotating in the margins. She looked up when he came in, before not so subtly making a watch gesture.

"What time do you call this?"

"Sorry. I booked Unit 4 to see if my strength has improved since the break in and must have overran."

"You know I have your location." Lin Che paused.

"I was at the police station because a little girl was getting mugged and I helped her. I stayed to give a report and left once her parents got there."

"Are you trying to get into more fights?" She sighed.

"Sorry, you did a good thing and I should be congratulating you. I'm a bit on edge with the whole Elder Mao thing coming up."

"It was a normal person and I didn't fight back. Just intimidation, that's all."

"Good, good," she nodded, taking another sip from her cup. Lin Che entered the kitchen and pulled himself a chair opposite his wife.

"Elder Mao is going to be watching you very carefully when we visit," she said, eventually.

"I went home again today and he was looking at me with suspicion. I imagine he knows I've been feeding you techniques." Lin Che leaned forwards.

"Are you going to get in trouble for that?"

"I doubt it. Elder Mao's just curious and already thinks of you as a family member. It's just that Zichen is a top three beginner practitioner in his generation, and, even after accounting for surprise, the fact that you survived and Zichen ended up needing topical cream is not something someone can see as coincidence."

"And so the conclusion is that you've been giving me techniques against sect rules."

"Precisely. But he doesn't know what to think yet, which is why he wants to meet you." She set the cup down.

"He'll be looking for signs, and I suggest you don't try to appear like nothing. He'll see through it and will be distrustful of you."

"What do you suggest then?"

"Just be honest. Tell him I gave you some beginner techniques and you were just lucky in the fight."

"And if he tells your uncle?"

"He won't tell my uncle anything he doesn't want my uncle to know. He's been managing parts of the clan for a long time and has his own sense of how things should go." Shen Yue picked up her annotation pen and continued on with her work. Lin Che turned on the tap and drank a glass of water. He stared at the kitchen window for a while and looked at nothing before eventually going to bed.

The days leading up to the weekend ended up following the same old structure: up before seven, office by eight-thirty, and then training at Unit 4 until eight or nine. The Swallow Returns technique had moved past the coins and medicine ball stage, and he'd started working with the wooden dummy in the corner of the room. More specifically, Lin Che had been practising not directing the motion of his hits.

The hardest part of that had been not stopping himself when his arm moved in a direction his mind hadn't approved yet. Still, he was getting marginally better at ignoring it. On Thursday evening, Pang Wei had mentioned something about drinks on Friday, to which Lin Che had made the appropriate amount of noise about potentially coming whilst softlaunching his own cancellation.

On Friday, he sent a message saying something had come up, and Pang Wei replied with a thumbs up emoji and a photo from the bar three hours later, so evidently no lasting damage had been done. Saturday arrived.

The Shen Clan residence that morning seemed much less like a traditional gated community and more like what Lin Che had expected it to be. People moved through the outer paths and he caught a glimpse of people in training whites moving with wooden poles in a courtyard through a gate. A group of older members sat in the shade doing what appeared to be calligraphy. Shen Yue walked slightly ahead of him, leading Lin Che directly to their main goal.

They passed through the outer residence and an inner courtyard before stopping in front of a door. Shen Yue looked back at Lin Che and simply nodded. She knocked, and, after a moment, opened the door. The room beyond was modest, with bookshelves lining the walls to the left and to the right, filled with what seemed to be archived materials in protective sleeves. There was a low table with sofa chairs surrounding it, and three cups of tea already steaming, already prepared for their visit.

A girl made her way out of the room past them, head slightly bowed in respect, books tucked under one arm. Lin Che looked at her face. She looked at his. Nie Yilin's eyes went wide. He gave a very small shake of his head, and she looked away and walked out into the corridor, no longer maintaining the unhurried pace she'd been going for. Lin Che looked up.

Seated at the low table on the far side was an older man in his sixties, whose body had been maintained with care and eyes were analysing the two people at the doorway. His gaze pierced directly through Lin Che. Then, he looked at the corridor where the girl had gone, and looked back at Lin Che with an expression that contained — or at least Lin Che thought contained — something very close to amusement.

"Sit," said Elder Mao.