Chương 38: Chapter 37 — Impromptu Road Trip (3)

In the twin room beside Lin Che, two occupants lay in their beds with a lamp on a night stand in between them. It was positioned such that its placement was equally inconvenient for both occupants, being just barely out of reach for either of them.

"So," said Mingzhe.

"Why are we here?"

"Road trip. Bouldering at the end, too, supposedly."

"Xu Fang." Xu Fang put his phone face-down by his pillow and exhaled deeply as he prepared himself for what he was about to say.

"Lin Che is going through something," he said, being careful with his words.

"His mother called me about a week ago. Apparently—" He paused again.

"He was supposed to get married today." Mingzhe rolled over to his side to make eye contact with Xu Fang. The lamp was in the way, so his eyes were instead assaulted by a warm, yellow light, but the thought was there.

"And then, clearly, none of that happened, because instead he showed up at my door this morning and asked if I wanted to go on a road trip." Xu Fang buried his head under his pillow, muffling his voice as he spoke a bit quieter.

"I'm not going to ask him about it," he continued.

"That's not — that's not how he works. He'll get to it when he gets to it, and pushing him before that point is just going to make him shut down entirely." Xu Fang pulled himself out of bed and tapped on the lamp a couple of times, causing it to brighten, get dimmer, and change to a harsh white, before finally turning off. He crawled back into bed in the darkness.

"So for now," he yawned.

"We drive and sing terrible songs and hope he opens up to us." Guo Mingzhe remained in silence for a while, before switching positions to lay on his back once again.

"That's fair enough," he said.

"Though I'll say, for whatever it's worth — I didn't exactly have much warning about any of this either."

"I know. I'm sorry about that."

"I met the man ten minutes before I was sitting in that van." Xu Fang raised an eyebrow.

"Ten minutes?"

"He knocked on my door, and I opened it to find a complete stranger standing there ready to throw hands."

"Lin Che throwing hands? That's got to be the most unbelievable lie ever," quipped Xu Fang.

"Well, I've been working on a new technique for months, as you know. It's all I ever talk about now," he sighed.

"And then this man knocks on my door, and I think — fine, let's just see. Let him try a move." Xu Fang remained in silence.

"He didn't need one," said Mingzhe.

"I didn't even last a single move. Couldn't even react."

"I didn't know," said Xu Fang, slowly, "that Lin Che was—" He frowned, mentally flicking through their old conversations.

"He's never mentioned anything like that."

"He told me he'd help me improve," said Mingzhe.

"Said this trip would do it. Something about getting stronger rapidly." He shook his head slightly.

"He didn't elaborate, so I have no idea what that means in practice, but I figured, given what I'd just seen — I believed him." Guo Mingzhe waited in silence for a while as Xu Fang was lost in his thoughts. Eventually, however, he could hear his friend snoring beside him and decided to capitulate to his fatigue too.

Next door, the snores were making themselves known through the wall. Lin Che stared at his phone screen and got to work. The shared folder containing the Shen Clan archives loaded slowly on his phone, which he expected was to do with the slow wifi provided by what had turned out to be the cheapest motel around. He scrolled through the archives methodically, despite having seen all the entries in his last life.

This time, however, he paid a bit more detail, now building a mental map of the terrain of all the Shen Clan beginner techniques. After about twenty minutes, he closed the browser and picked up his bag. From the front pocket, he pulled out a small notebook and a pen. In the centre, he wrote Liuhe Breathing Method and drew a circle around it. If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

From there, he began drawing branches outward — each one a technique that either derived from the Liuhe foundation or complemented it at a later stage. He labelled each branch in small characters and even smaller characters where the progressions forked. The page looked less like a diagram and more like a true mapping of cultivation progressions. He held it up to check the overall shape, and added the two lines he had previously missed. He set it down on the duvet and looked at it for a long time.

The question wasn't which techniques were the strongest — no, that was the wrong way to think about it. The question was always which techniques would suit the person learning them. After all, you could hand two people the same manual and get different, albeit similar, results depending on whether the method fit them. Most importantly for Lin Che, however, was the speed of progression.

There was no point in teaching these people how to cultivate if it would take them forever to catch up to his level given their lack of infinite lives. This was the foundation of a plan looking multiple lives ahead: figure out which techniques are best, and figure out how to learn them quickly. Then, figure out how to get them to progress even faster than he ever could, resulting in him having his own allies away from the Shen Clan.

He thought about Xu Fang first, and how there was a naturalness to how he occupied space in this world, as if his life had its own rhythm. He was always the spontaneous friend, but also the most thoughtful of the group, and could, with extreme ease, flip between spontaneity and mirroring — matching the emotions of a person if needed. Lin Che circled one of the branches on the diagram – Flowing River Stance.

It was a foundational movement method that rewarded people who already had an instinctive sense of rhythm and weight distribution. In the right hands, it would compound quickly. Next, he thought about Guo Mingzhe, and this one would require a bit more effort, as Lin Che had hardly met the guy for an afternoon in one life, and he spent most of the time asleep in this one. Moreover, Lin Che had noticed earlier this morning that Guo Mingzhe still had that sliver of Qi within him.

That meant his foundation was already established, or at least in the process of establishing itself. He was in the transition stage between martial arts and cultivation, if he were to oversimplify some of the differences, such as how cultivation is not a progression of martial arts, but that the two work together. Shen Yue had rambled on about the differences to him one night, but only the basics stuck to his brain. He circled a second branch — Iron Wood Form.

It was something that would force Mingzhe to slow down and think before committing, so would probably frustrate him at first, but it coupled well with his strong body and innate talent. He opened the archive again and navigated to both entries. Lin Che sighed in relief upon seeing that the techniques did not have video tutorials, and that both instead relied on PDFs filled with diagrams and verbose terminology that assumed prior knowledge.

Lin Che read through both documents and then spent a while with the notebook open beside him, translating the essential principles into plain language. He crossed things out and rewrote them, stripping away the fluff and keeping the mechanics. He even tried to replicate the diagrams by hand, and was very much pleased to find he could trace what he saw with ease thanks to Swallow Returns to the Nest. By the time he was satisfied, Lin Che's hands were smudged with ink.

He let out a big yawn and set the notebook on the night stand. With the steady rhythm of the snoring providing ample white noise, Lin Che fell asleep within minutes.

Shen Yue sat in the main living room with her hands folded in her lap and her expression giving very little away. Two cups of hot oolong tea were in front of her — one hers, and the other belonging to the man stood by the door.

"—should have anticipated this," said Shen Bowen, in a self-critical tone that still maintained a degree of dignity.

"The oversight is mine entirely. I should have arranged for a tracker to be placed on his person well in advance. It would have been trivial to do."

"And yet," said Shen Yue.

"And yet," Bowen adjusted his cuffs.

"We didn't foresee that he would actually—" He paused, apparently finding the word flake to be unsuitable for his vernacular.

"—absent himself, given the significance of the situation."

"And there was no indication of any of this from your brief exchanges with him online?"

"None whatsoever," he sighed. Shen Bowen walked over to the sofa and sat himself down before picking up his cup and putting it to his mouth.

"The clan is exploring alternatives in the meantime. There are other avenues being considered for opening the portal to the Holy Land. Whether any of them are viable—" He took another sip.

"In other words," said Shen Yue.

"Not viable." Shen Bowen said nothing, which was confirmation enough. She looked down at her hands and upped the heating level of the electric blanket she had wrapped around her. The situation was what it was: Lin Che had walked away from the wedding, and, more importantly, from everything the wedding was meant to facilitate. The clan's secondary options were apparently not options in any meaningful sense. Her phone buzzed. She glanced at it — a security notification from her email.

She almost let it pass, but, for some reason, looked at it a bit more carefully. New sign-in detected. Is this you? She clicked on the notification. Account: Shen Yue Location: Hebei Province Device: Lin Che Phone (1) She said nothing, as she was not sure what to make of the situation. Shen Yue handed her phone to her uncle.