The fresh air of the outside was a welcome change after staying holed up in that uninspired library for so long. Lao Chen felt that he had squandered his time in all actuality. While there was a whole tournament going on where his idiotic son competed, all he did was sit on his ass and meditate on the Dao while entertaining the whims of some child asking him questions.

After helping Wu Shan through a tough point in his journey, he decided to eat.

The only problem now was to find a place where he would eat. The Inner District had no shortage of places to eat, but Lao Chen wasn’t sure on which one to pick. Throwing caution to the wind, he simply entered the first place that caught his eye, a grand establishment with a rustic feel to it.

Of course, the moment he stepped foot into the threshold of the restaurant, conversations began to cease and everyone, even the proprietor, gave him a semi-disgusted look.

Lao Chen blinked, but walked to an empty table, nonetheless. The customers began their chatter once more.

After waiting for a short while, the owner, an immaculately-dressed merchant type approaches him.

“Ehm, I’d like a menu, if that isn’t too much trouble,” Lao Chen began before the proprietor could speak. He gave Lao Chen the thin booklet that he had on his hand.

“I… trust you’re capable of paying, yes?” The owner asked. Lao Chen looked at him strangely, but then it dawned on him.

“Oh. Ohhh, that’s why everyone was staring at me! You thought I was poor!” Lao Chen cackled, much to the owner’s embarrassment. “Well, I’ve got money, if that’s what you fear.” Lao Chen pulled a gold-coin from the bag of holding at his side, easing the owner’s expression.

After perusing the menu, and deciding that he wanted everything on it, Lao Chen began his eating spree.

After about an hour of filling his stomach with food that weighed half as much as he did, ordering more and more of his favourite meals, Lao Chen realized one thing.

He couldn’t partake in the sweet suffering that was a food coma.

On the bright side, he would be able to taste food without growing too bloated. After the eighth round, Lao Chen paid his bills in full, after which, he decided to buy some clothing. The rags he wore were starting to smell, after a month of use.

Luckily, the city was also lousy with tailors, but it didn’t take too long to get referred to ‘the best in the city’.

After buying a fairly comfortable set of clothing, he also bought two strange wooden shoes designed after shoes from a far-off island to the east known as the Yamato Islands. They were basically wooden slippers with two teeth-like extensions keeping them elevated from the floor.

It didn’t take long for him to love them. Thus, after he bought them, he laid eyes on the tall spires deeper into the Inner District. Spying the tallest tower, Lao Chen decided something.

“I wonder how the view’s from up there!”

Running with his shoes or ‘geta’ as they were referred to in Yamato was an easy learning curve. Once he learned where to distribute his weight, walking came naturally, and it had the added bonus of keeping his back straight, giving him a regal aura.

“Heheheh, I’m a regal master, aren’t I?” He muttered under his breath as he approached the base of the tower at break-neck speeds, dodging and weaving past obstructions with grace. Instead of entering the building and taking the stairs, Lao Chen hopped from where he stood and used flight to reach the wall of the tower.

With true flight, he ran up the tower vertically, taking great care not to damage it as he hopped over the ridges and windows.

It didn’t take long before he was at the top, and my, the view was magnificent.

At the very top of the sharp spire, Lao Chen stood. The sun was halfway down from its zenith, and this was the first time Lao Chen saw the entirety of of the city at once.

Lao Chen pulled out a wooden block from his bag of holding, an ink well and a paint brush. Letting the wooden block and the ink well float in the air in front of him, Lao Chen set to writing a short poem.

Halfway into the poem, the weather began to darken drastically, and suddenly, the clouds began to turn… red.

Then, Lao Chen felt it. The presence of a blood-red dragon coiling its way to the top of the towering pagoda he stood on. He could feel that it was significantly weaker than him, but that still did nothing to quench the awe in his mind.

The dragon surged upwards, into the red clouds, frolicking as the clouds began to thunder with red lightning as it roared its dominion over the skies.

Lao Chen almost shed a tear.

The Dragon dipped down again, appearing in front of him as it floated mid-air.

On the dragon’s head stood a man. A youth would be a better word to use. He seemed almost Wu Shan’s age, only he was strikingly handsome without a blemish to be seen and deep red hair running to his shoulders.

On his chest was a leather breastplate with the insignia 衁 and 龍.

Blood Dragon.

“Welcome, Dao Seeker. Would you like to have some tea with me?” He asked. Lao Chen’s eyes were transfixed on the dragon, but he still caught the other man’s words.

“Is that a real… dragon?” Lao Chen asked. The Blood Dragon Patriarch nodded.

“It is mine,” he confirmed.

“May… may I touch it?” asked Lao Chen. The Blood Dragon Patriarch whistled a short tune, causing the dragon to fly much closer to Lao Chen.

Waving his paraphernalia to the side, Lao Chen touched the snout of the docile dragon, feeling the heat on his hand, the raging hurricane of fury, blood and violence. “What a magnificent beast. I am grateful to have crossed paths with this creature. Perhaps I shall find one of my own in my travels!” Lao Chen exclaimed eagerly. The Patriarch smiled kindly from atop the dragon’s head.

“It is a real beauty, my Fu.”

Lao Chen looked up to face the Patriarch. “I’d like some tea, yes.”

With a wave of his hand, the Patriarch produced a whole tea-set, though there was no bag of holding at his side. Lao Chen raised an eyebrow as a floating cup and teapot floated his way gently.

Filling his teacup, Lao Chen ventured to ask. “Pardon my ignorance, but where is your bag of holding?”

“There’s nothing to be pardoned for, senior. I don’t use a bag of holding. I use a mystic ring known as a spatial ring. It can store objects within. You could say that summoning an object from it is as simple as…” he flicked his hand, allowing a fan to appear, then he flicked it again causing it to disappear. “turning one’s hand.”

Lao Chen took a sip of the tea, his eyes almost bulging.

“Do you like it? It’s known as Rainbow Tea, because with every sip, you taste seven different flavours at once.”

“W-well, uh, it’s certainly, uh, interesting…” Lao Chen took another sip, savouring the taste this time, finding it to be much better than the first time when he simply took a mindless sip.

“When I felt the natural laws of the Dao descend last night, I felt no small amount of bitterness over my own failings,” the Patriarch began. “But then, as a law-abiding veteran of the Jade Empire, I felt overjoyed. One more Dao Seeker exists within our folds. This will tip the scales! Our victory is assured.”

Lao Chen nodded slowly.

“Well, as you probably must know, senior, I have attempted to grasp at the Dao for over two centuries with no luck at all. Someone like you must possess boundless wisdom to have become a Dao Seeker. Is there any chance that you could grant a junior brother some pointers?”

Lao Chen took another sip before sighing. With grave eyes and a shake of his head causing the Patriarch’s heart to clench, Lao Chen spoke. “Please don’t call me senior.”

“What?”

“Please don’t call me a senior. How many years have you been alive? Let alone even that, how many years have you trained?”

“This… this is my 659th year of living,” the Patriarch frowned. “Though I could be off by a few years.”

“I’ve lived slightly above a tenth of that. I should be calling you my senior,” Lao Chen admitted, much to the Patriarch’s astonishment.

“You’re barely a century old?” asked the Patriarch. “How?”

“You wanted help on your Dao?” asked Lao Chen. “What is your Dao?”

The Patriarch puffed his chest. “I seek insight into the Dao of blood, the mighty liquid that animates us, and without it, we die.”

Lao Chen nodded. “The Dao of blood… hmm, and why haven’t you attained any insight?” He asked.

“For years, I have pondered, meditated and ruminated on the mysteries of blood. On the battle field, I have spent years at a time experimenting on it, the pathways through the body, what happens if there’s too much, what happens if you transfuse it, I should know everything there is to know about blood, and yet I do not achieve enlightenment.”

Lao Chen hummed. “Have you tried taking a step back to see where you might be doing wrong?”

The Patriarch frowned slightly. “Well, of course! I’ve tried all sorts of things, switched to all sorts of methods, but it’s always the same. The truth is there. It’s millimetres from my fingertips!”

“Ah, so you know everything about it, huh? Everything there is to know?”

“Please. If I wrote a book about everything I know about blood, I would jumpstart medicine several millennia forward!” The Patriarch bristled. “Nobody knows about it more than I do.”

“Well… I’ve got one piece of advice for you,” Lao Chen admitted. “You know that thing when you take a really far step back, farther than should be practical. Then, you go even farther behind and realize that all you’ve done until now is wrong? Have you done that yet? Own that you’re wrong?”

The Patriarch’s expression shifted from incredulity to annoyance to sheer rage to wide-eyed enlightenment at once.

“I’m wrong.”

“Yes,” Lao Chen confirmed. The Patriarch began to pace around on his dragon, eyes darting from one place to another.

“Even after I gave up on researching blood as a means for fighting, as a means for violence, I still couldn’t reach the Dao. I was laughed at. ‘Blood is too mystical to gain enlightenment towards’, but no. There is something more than just blood. Something that separates us, but connects us. We pass it to our children, and although it is found in blood, it is so much greater than that. The red cells that transfer air into the muscles that move us, the white cells that destroy diseases that threaten our body, the blood plasma that transfers nutrients around our body… inside some of them, there it is.”

“Let it all out, senior,” Lao Chen nodded.

“Never once did I think that I was wrong, that this path led to an empty Dao! Never once did I consider that there was a wider truth behind it, but that the path I took did not lead to it!”

“It’s getting closer, senior, I can feel it,” Lao Chen encouraged.

“It isn’t the Dao of Blood or the Dao of Death. It’s…”

“Go on!”

“Heredity! It’s the Dao of Life!”

The thundering clouds overhead began to disperse as from the heavens, a pillar of light descended, striking the Patriarch on his forehead as the natural Dao descended.

Lao Chen marvelled. “Did that really happen to me? How come none of my reader buddies in the library noticed?” He murmured.

Once the light abated, the Blood Dragon Patriarch was born anew.

Lao Chen gave a small clap. “Congratulations, you did it. You’re now a Dao Seeker.”

The nascent Dao Seeker shook his head. “You may call me Yi Ming, my friend.”

“Thank you, Yi Ming. My name is Lao Chen.”

Yi Ming nodded. “A fine name for a fine friend, Junior Brother Lao Chen.”

--

The Council of Elders. Reeked of corruption and old men. Yi Ming wasn’t one for hatred, but few people earned his ire as much as his short-sighted junior brothers in the Council who had no respect for him, the Patriarch.

The Elders discussed loudly, and sometimes over each other. It was a divisive machine, in dire need of lubrication. In the best of days, there would be a 30-70 agreement on certain laws, which mattered little as sect laws were passed unanimously, through history has that been true.

As such, the Blood Dragon Sect has been stagnant like bad water for the better part of two decades, when it became abundantly clear that the Patriarch was going to remain a ‘half-step’ into Dao Seeking until his longevity ran dry.

They even prepared for him a replacement. Gu Ren, the boot-licking toady that the council saw fit to put as their figure head. The Sect truly stopped being a sect decades ago. Now, it was just a small-time political party that solely had stakes on Gold Stone City, a pitiful existence in the eyes of the larger sects out there.

And to think, five hundred years ago, Yi Ming captured Fu and created this sect for the sake of rising to the top only to be halted by a few dozen elders with ties to noble families that directly fund the sect.

If he attempted to flush the elders out and pay for the sect’s maintenance out of pocket, he would lose so much face, the Blood Dragon Sect would truly just be a laughing stock until the end of time.

It’s a good thing that being a Dao Seeker made that whole part irrelevant.

“Council!” Yi Ming called out, without even putting a dent to the loud hubbub in the room. Yi Ming’s blood began to pump with rage.

“Silence, children.”

All the elders stopped talking simultaneously, some nearly fainting from the aura of a true Dao Seeker.

With the silence, Yi Ming began to saunter around the room. “I hope I’ve made it abundantly clear that I’m here to stay.”

Silence.

“I also hope I’ve made it clear that you are all dispensable.”

More silence.

“But what I truly hope I’ve made clear is this.”

The Elders craned their necks.

“I’m calling the shots. Now, and until I die.”