Kenja avoided the rock coming at his face before glancing at the man who yelled his name.

He met the glare of a stern man with dark eyes and an equally dark, short beard. Although the top of his head was jet-black, his sideburns had already begun greying.

It was Vice Elder Shirou…again.

Kenja frowned at the man for arriving earlier than usual. In his opinion, Vice Elder Shirou had too much time on his hands to shoo away a nosy nobody like him every morning.

The middle-aged man motioned for something to fly out of his brown bag, and another rock cloaked in a blue aura floated up into the air.

Without breaking eye contact with Kenja, the stone began spinning in place. It accelerated to a very high speed before suddenly breaking apart into dozens of small fragments. The appearance of Vice Elder Shirou standing deathly still below his army of soldiers told Kenja one thing.

Lesson time was over.

Before Vice Elder Shirou could pelt him with another rock, Kenja free-fell from the branch he was standing on. Rushing toward the ground as quickly as he could without injury, he periodically latched onto a branch and used the tree’s leaves to slow his descent. He took his shoes out of their hiding place and dashed away, putting his shoes on while hopping on alternate feet.

As he sprinted, he looked back at the sky above the sect half-expectantly. He saw several dozens of specks being launched into the sky. Kenja rolled his eyes at the sight of at least twice the usual number of projectiles. The vice elder was being especially wasteful today.

This event had long become part of his daily routine.

Once discovered peeking at the lectures, the vice elder would toss a significant number of rocks into the sky, hoping to teach Kenja a painful lesson for intruding on the sect’s private teachings. Initially, he had used the normal stones littered around the sect’s grounds, but eventually he had switched to tossing broken fragments of his spirit stones at Kenja.

Spirit stones were smooth, oval-shaped rocks that contained the universe’s Yin and Yang. Their stored energy was a valuable resource for cultivating, which caused the stones to become a type of currency amongst cultivators.

Kenja did not know precisely why Vice Elder had made the switch, but he could think of three possibilities.

The first possibility was that Kenja's daily climb up the tree and struggle against the vice elder had tempered Kenja's body enough to outrun a regular stone’s top speed, so the old man had to rely on a faster alternative. Since the spirit stones contained a quantity of Qi, a person of his capabilities could easily manipulate the energy to increase their speed.

The second possibility was that the vice elder wished to take advantage of his ability to manipulate the stone’s stored Qi which allowed him to accurately home-in on Kenja, raising the likelihood of landing his attack. Ever since he had made the switch, zigzagging and making sharp turns was not enough to evade being hit.

The third and most likely reason Kenja could postulate was the simplest. The vice elder had used most of the stones lying around the sect. How could he make rocks rain down onto Kenja if he could only find one or two at a time now? Was he supposed to go somewhere else and farm rocks just to throw at Kenja?

Whatever reason it could be, the vice elder’s determination was transparent; he willingly paid out of his own pocket to inflict pain onto Kenja.

Kenja used to worry about the day the vice elder would tire of chasing him out in this fashion and personally pursue him, but that day never came. What started off as an indifferent ‘shoo away the fly’ with a single rock-toss three years ago eventually became a fierce game of ‘drown the chicken with rain’, with the figurative raindrops steadily increasing in volume, speed and accuracy.

Kenja smiled at the spirit stone fragments barreling toward him, his eyes glinting greedily at the incoming good fortune. Without pausing his sprint, he turned to face forward once more. As the fragments closed in, he caught sight of a big, empty basket straight ahead of him. He increased his speed and picked up the basket without stopping as if he had done this a thousand times before.

In the basket, a fluffy pillow lined the bottom like it was routinely used to carry expensive china, fragile artifacts…or cushion the blow of a falling object.

Kenja turned around and angled the basket toward the impending onslaught. Even though he stopped sprinting, he continued to jog backward, allowing the distance between him and the rocky barrage to shrink.

TUK.

TUK.

TUK.

TUK-TUK.

TUK-TUK.

TUK-TUK-TUK.

The rhythm of the fragments hitting the bottom of the basket was music to Kenja’s ears.

'One, two, three, four...'

Kenja counted his steps as he skipped backward catching the fragments. The basket became heavier, but Kenja raised his speed to match the pace of the projectiles. His legs felt the scratching of various shrubbery and bushes.

The basket was half-full when he noticed that the remainder of the rocks would hit him all at once.

'Seven, eight, nine...and ten!' Kenja counted his steps.

Placing his palms on the basket’s underside and moving it above his head, Kenja suddenly jumped backward and fell into a narrow hole. The basket left his hands and covered the entrance of the tunnel as Kenja dropped two meters, falling onto a pile of dusty pillows.

Kenja coughed several times from the puffs of dust that came from the pillows. While he fell onto them regularly causing the dust to be dispersed on a daily basis, the pillows never left the deep hole, so they would be just as dusty the next day.

TUK-TUK-TUK-TUK-TUK-TUK-TUK-TUK.

With the furious bombardment of fragments finally finished, all Kenja could hear was his heavy breathing.

Kenja looked up at the basket covering the hole which let a small amount of sunlight peer inside. He smiled and relaxed knowing that he accomplished his goal.

After a moment's rest, he got up and climbed toward the basket, pushed it aside, exited the artificial hole and looked back at the sect. It stood alone at the top of a large, grassy hill with four walls guarding it and a single fruit tree towering over it next to the entrance. Simply walking up the hill would be quite a hassle for an average person. But that was okay for Kenja since he wanted to break free of ‘average’.

Kenja turned around and forced the basket onto his head, aligning its center of gravity with his own.

This, too, was part of his daily routine. While this made it easier to carry the basket, it also improved his balance and posture. He climbed that tree every day, and a single careless fall could severely injure, or even kill him. He wanted to minimize the odds of that happening as much as possible.

Plus, a major part of Kenja’s personal creed was to constantly seek self-improvement. He would take any opportunity to improve himself, including those with small yields! After all, a marathon was completed one small step at a time, and Kenja understood this logic better than most.

TUK!

A final rock hit the inner-front side of the basket causing Kenja to lose balance and fall over, spilling the basket. Kenja sat up and checked the sky to make sure there were no more stragglers before letting out a merry laugh.

He was not laughing at the well-timed irony of deciding to work on his balance or at the vice elder’s increasingly-persistent attempts to outsmart him. He was laughing because he had planned to work on his arm strength today, but he switched to balance because he remembered that his other pair of daoist robes was still unwashed. Since he wanted to look good at the examination, he couldn’t afford to get his only available outfit too wrinkled from carrying the basket.

If he hadn’t put-off doing his laundry yesterday, Vice Elder Shirou would have had the last laugh.

Kenja stood up and patted the dust off his robes. He gathered the rocks back into the basket and resumed walking toward the buildings in the distance. He went over his mental checklist of things to-do for the day:

1. Store half of these stones.

2. Sell the rest to Satoshi-san.

3. Prepare the twins.

4. Pass the examination.

5. Become a cultivator!