The statue crashed into my chest, knocking me backward. Its claws were sharp and dug into my skin, tearing the robe I wore, and its fangs snapped soundlessly at my face. My surprise was almost complete, and the thing was doing its damnedest to tear my throat out.

Fortunately, I’d run afoul of guard dogs before, and my body reacted almost before I’d thought about it. My left forearm slammed up, catching the dog beneath the muzzle and holding its fangs at bay, while my right knee smashed into its stomach, holding its rear claws away from my skin. I cracked my right fist into the side of its head and cursed, shaking my hand. The damn thing was made of stone, after all, and I’d just punched it. That didn’t feel good at all.

“Use your qi, John,” Sara reminded me, and if I’d had a hand free, I would have face-palmed with it. I’d reacted without thought, and my reflexes still didn’t include qi channeling.

My next punch made the stone of the monster’s head ring as my celestial-enhanced blow cracked into it. The dog’s muzzle jerked to the side, but it quickly reoriented on me, snapping its fangs at my flesh. I punched it again, but this time, when its head jerked to the side, I got my left foot up under it and kicked. The heavy, stone monster had to have weighed a few hundred pounds, at least, but my qi-boosted kick launched it into the air and slammed it into the ceiling overhead. I rolled to the side as the thing came right back down and crashed into the floor with a snap of breaking stone.

I scrambled to my feet and dodged as a second statue launched itself at me. As I ducked beneath it, I slipped my brass knuckles onto my right fist. At least I was armed, in a way; the stone creatures were tough, and the spiked knuckles promised to do more damage than my bare fists did. A moment later, I remembered that I didn’t need the knuckles. I had my own spikes.

The statue I dodged spun around, making no sound except the clicking of stone claws on the floor, and rushed at me again. It leaped at me, its jaws gaping, and I jammed my left forearm into its open mouth. The creature made to bite down, but before it could, six-inch wooden thorns erupted from my flesh. I’d expected the thorns to hold the monster’s jaw open, maybe lock it in place so I could punch it to death. I hadn’t expected the thorns to pierce through its jaws – wood couldn’t do that to stone, after all – but I wasn’t complaining, either. I slammed my brass knuckles into the creature’s head, cracking its skull and feeling the stone crumble beneath my blow. I punched it again, and the thing’s lower jaw cracked and fell off, dangling from my thorns.

I hissed in pain as jaws clamped onto my left calf and glanced down. The statue that had first attacked me was missing a leg, but it managed to limp up to me and seize my ankle in its jaws. Unlike a real dog, the statue wasn’t shaking or worrying my leg, it was simply biting and pressing down. I felt stinging pain as the teeth pierced my skin, but it didn’t really feel like they’d gone all that deep. I kicked out at the monster, and my heel cracked into its chest, knocking it backwards.

I flung the second statue off my arm, tearing it free from the thorns there, and spun to face the first one. It was less mobile, but it still had teeth, which made it a greater danger. It hobbled toward me, its jaws snapping, but I didn’t give it the chance to strike. Instead, I retracted the thorns from my forearm and extended them from my shin, snapping a low kick at the beast’s head. The thorns sank into its stony hide, and when I jerked my leg free, a huge chunk of obsidian stone came with it. I kicked again, and this time the blow pulverized its skull. Apparently, even stone beasts couldn’t handle losing their heads because the thing collapsed into an inert chunk at my feet.

I turned back as I felt the second statue pushing up against me, trying to bite me with jaws that would no longer close. Another pair of kicks crushed its skull, and it fell into a headless, unmoving lab of obsidian at me feet. I quickly withdrew the thorns and turned to check on Jing. As it turned out, she’d had even less trouble than I had; a pair of headless statues lay at her feet, their skulls nothing but shards of pulverized rock.

As I examined the hunks of stone, cracks started to run through them, spiraling out through the stone. The statues shifted and cracked into chunks of rock. Those crumbled into gravel, and the gravel shivered into dust. A moment later, the dust itself seemed to blow away on an unseen breeze as the statues gave up whatever energy held them together.

“That…felt too easy,” I thought warily. I didn’t trust defenses that were that easy to beat; they usually meant they were just distractions from the real security.

“Well, those things were barely wood-ranked, John,” Sara explained. “I’ll bet they were more ceremonial than anything else.”

Apparently, Jing agreed. “Those were no true challenge,” she said contemptuously, brushing the stone dust from her robe. “I do not believe they could have held out a child, much less either of us.”

“Which means that they probably weren’t meant as an actual defense,” I replied slowly. “That can’t be a good thing.”

“Why not? If they were but here for show, is that not beneficial?”

“I can’t imagine someone made those for show, Jing,” I shook my head. “This is a school of cultivation, after all; if those were just there to look nice, I’ll bet someone would have pulverized them a long time ago, just because they could.” My eyes widened as a suspicion dawned in my mind, and I turned to the woman. “We need to get moving!”

“What? Why, Xu Xing?”

“Because if those things weren’t defenders, Jing, they had to have been…” My heart sank as I heard more clawed, stone feet clattering in the distance. “An alarm.”

“A what?”

“Come on!” I said urgently, setting off down a corridor that didn’t echo with clawed feet. Jing followed behind me.

“Where are we going?”

“Away from the reception committee coming to look for us,” I said grimly. The hall we ran down had numerous doors branching off it, but I didn’t bother with any of them. The feeling in my stomach was fading swiftly; somehow, we needed to either get back to the main room or find a passage that connected this hallway to the one I wanted. None of these doors were it; my stomach didn’t complain about a one of them.

My ribs did, though, as something large and heavy tore through one of the paper screens and smashed into me, slamming me into the opposite wall. I rolled with the impact and felt my skin sting and burn as stone claws dug into my side and upper thigh. Still, I got away from the somewhat larger statue that had just tackled me before it could sink its jaws into anything. It bounced off the wall and rushed for me, but this time, I was ready for it. I was not, however, ready for its brother, who crashed through another paper door and struck me from behind.

I staggered forward, and the first statue decided I was just asking it to bite my extended arm, so it did. Its teeth pierced my skin and sank in, just deep enough to hurt. I hissed in pain but had enough presence of mind to call up Thorn’s Embrace on that arm. Glossy wooden spikes shot out of my arm and tore through the monster’s muzzle, pinning it in place. I spun, hauling the thing along with me, and slammed the stuck statue into the body of the second, catching it in mid-leap as it lunged for my back again. The first statue’s muzzle broke completely off as it impacted, and both of the creatures tumbled to the floor, tangled in one another.

I took the brief moment to summon Skin of the Great Oak, and instantly, my flesh hardened, turning a deep, burnished brown. I shifted the thorns from my forearm to my left fist, giving me a second set of spiked knuckles, then moved forward to engage the statues. With my defense in place, the stone creatures couldn’t get their fangs into me, and my thorns and brass knuckles quickly turned them into twin piles of crumbled stone. As I retracted my techniques, I looked down at my arm, where a set of small holes oozed droplets of blood.

“Those were stronger, weren’t they?” I asked Sara grimly.

“Yes. Mid-wood ranked, I would guess.”

I glanced over to see that Jing had again handled her pair of creatures just fine without my help. Her kicking style would be a disadvantage against a human opponent, who might use the predictability against her. Against creatures like this, though – ones that seemed to have no intelligence or idea of strategy – it was very powerful. My style let the monsters get close to me; hers killed them before they even had a chance to attack her.

I kept going, deeper into the building, and the statues kept ambushing us. Somehow, it seemed that they could sense us through the paper doors and walls of this place, and they were fond of tearing through the thin material just as we passed by. I smashed them with spiked and thorn-covered punches, crushed their skulls with hammer blows of hardened wooden fists, and dismembered them with potent kicks. And I paid for it, with a growing accumulation of scrapes, gouges, and puncture wounds as the creatures caught me by surprise again and again.

Jing, on the other hand, looked practically untouched by the monsters. One the one hand, I was pretty happy about that. I was struggling plenty, here, without needing to look out for her, too. On the other hand…why was I struggling so much, when she wasn’t? It couldn’t be just about kicking versus punching styles. Why was she tearing through the creatures easily, while I was struggling with them?

“It’s the types of qi she’s using, John,” Sara explained. “These things are creatures of metal and fire. She uses sky and water, the opposites of those types. Her qi is perfectly suited for killing them.”

That made sense, but – it was more than that. I was under a time constraint, here, and I knew it. That made me rush, and in my haste, I was trying to evade or escape the monsters, rather than taking the time to hunt them down. This was supposed to be a scouting mission, but tripping their alarms changed that. Now, I was trying to avoid capture and death, and that meant I wasn’t doing a good job of scouting. The logical thing would be to retreat, come back another day…but I doubted that I’d get another chance like this. After this, they’d up their security; their guards would be suspicious; they’d probably move whatever I was sensing, if they could. At least, that’s what I would have done.

So, I plowed on. As we moved into the building, the guardians became faster and stronger. We moved from the mid-wood ranks to the high end of wood-ranked monsters. A statue with a head more like a wolf than a Doberman and skin that had a silver sheen to it crashed into me at one point, and Sara assured me that it was a low metal-ranked beast. Its claws were sharper; its skin was tougher; it was faster and deadlier than its lesser kin. I managed to cave in its skull with a combination of wood and celestial qi, but it left long scratches on my body and a new set of holes in my right calf. Even Jing suffered a bit from that fight; the statue tore her robe and scratched her porcelain cheek when one of its attacks got too close.

As I passed a door, my stomach lurched, and I stopped, staring at it. Queasiness filled me, and I slid open the paper panel to reveal a long hallway. My stomach churned again, and I couldn’t help but grin. I’d found a way to where we needed to go, at last.

“This way, Jing,” I told her confidently.

“Why?” she asked curiously, staring down the nondescript hall. “Why do you wish to go this way?”

“I just – I have a feeling it’s the right way, is all. A hunch.”

She frowned. “While it is said that a cultivator must trust their instincts, Xu Xing, I do not believe that this was the intention.”

I looked at the woman in surprise; had she just made a joke? I hadn’t heard her make a joke since I’d stepped into this world. Looking at her face I could see that no, she hadn’t intended that to be funny. She was legitimately trying to instruct me. Jing one, humor zero.

I frowned as a thought occurred to me. As far as I could recall, I hadn’t heard anyone make a joke in this world, period. That suddenly struck me as weird; was this an entire world without a sense of humor? No, I’d heard people laughing plenty. I simply never heard anyone trying to deliberately make another person giggle. How did that even happen? Perhaps I’d have to introduce the knock-knock joke before I left here. That wasn’t really my kind of humor, but if these people really never told jokes, I would have to start with something small and easy to understand.

I led Jing down the corridor, and the unease in my stomach grew with every step. The hallway ended at a simple, sliding door. I pushed it open, and as I did, I saw a flash of motion. I ducked and rolled out of the way reflexively just as a large shape smashed through the door, shredding the wood and paper with ease before spinning to face me. It was a statue, like the others, but this one seemed carved out of blue-green jade, with a pulsing core of light deep inside it. Its head was more feline than lupine, and its paws were wider, with long, hooked claws. The monster opened its mouth wide in a soundless roar, and I felt a sudden buildup of heat roll out of its throat. I jumped backwards, through the shattered door, and rolled sideways.

I’d moved just in time. A gout of yellow flame shot through the tattered remains of the wall, scorching the paper and causing it to curl and blacken. The heat from the blast washed over me, tightening the skin on my face as it seared the stone wall opposite the door. I rolled quickly to my feet as the monster rushed through and refocused on me, its leonine head lowered menacingly. The statue stood a solid five feet tall at the shoulder, and its body was long, supple, and powerful. Its claws grated on the stone floor as it moved rather than clicking, and I noticed that each slow step left a line of thin gashes in the rock below. I crouched slightly, setting my feet, and grew a set of thorns from my right shin. If I could take out the statue’s leg, it should be easy to bring down…

The statue lunged, and any thoughts I had of a quick victory were dashed. It was fast, faster than I was, faster even than Jing. If I hadn’t been prepared for its pounce, that probably would have been the end of the fight; as it was, I was barely able to leap to the side and roll out of the way. The lion rushed past me and sprang up against the stone wall, rebounding off it and angling itself back at me. I jumped to the side and smashed my brass knuckles into the side of its feline head. The knuckles rang loudly, and the statue’s skull shifted slightly to the side, but the only damage I could see was four long, thin scratches in its jade hide.

“Oh shit,” I muttered as the lion’s head snapped back to face me. I couldn’t even seem to hurt this thing! I backed up, ready to dive out of the way, but before I could take a step, the creature lunged forward. Its weight slammed into me; a paw slapped my side, knocking me off my feet; its jaws opened wide, reaching for my face. Panicked, I slammed my fist into it again, then once more, but the twin impacts merely distracted it for a moment.

Something smashed into the creature’s side, and it staggered, taking a step off me and freeing me from beneath its paw. I rolled backward and regained my feet as I saw Jing standing before the creature, her foot outstretched. The lion turned to face her swiftly, batting at her with a paw, but she seemed to almost float out of its way. It leaped and pounced, but she stayed just in front of it, a leaf blown by the potent wind of its attacks.

I readied my fists, but before I could charge in to attack, Sara’s voice stopped me cold.

“John, this creature…it’s water-ranked!” she told me urgently.

“Water-ranked?” I repeated. “Sara…can we even hurt it?”

“I think so,” she told me. “I’ve been watching this creature move, and…”

“Sara, we don’t have time for explanations. What do I do?”

She hesitated for a brief moment. “Try this,” she instructed. An image of me flashed in my vision, my meridians lit up and glowing. What drew my attention, though, was my dantian; it looked smaller, as if it had been…compacted?

“What is this?” I asked, my attention split between what Sara was showing me and Jing dancing around, avoiding the big cat with only partial success. If I didn’t do something, quickly, that thing would catch her, and I was pretty sure it wasn’t just intending to bat her around a bit.

“You need to try to push with your dantian, John. If it works, I think you can kill this thing.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“Then you’ll need to use Lightness of Being and hope Jing can keep up, because otherwise that golem will kill you.”

I stared at the image of me for a moment, trying to memorize what I was seeing. It wasn’t complex, but it didn’t look very…comfortable. Of course, most necessary things weren’t, so I guessed that didn’t matter. I turned my focus inward, picturing my dantian in the center of my being. Sara’s voice guided me as I reached mental hands down into my celestial cultivation spiral and squeezed, forcing all the qi in it to press tightly together. The whole spiral spun faster, and the qi rushing through it looked less misty and more…fluid.

I continued to squeeze, forcing the spiral down toward my dantian. Pain flared in my stomach, and I almost let go, but Sara stopped me.

“It’s okay, John. It’s not real pain. Your dantian is just fighting you, is all.”

Well, it certainly felt like real pain. Still, I squeezed harder, ignoring the spike of agony in my middle. My dantian shuddered as pressurized qi flowed into it, squeezing down on the energy I’d so carefully laid in the pattern Sara had shown me. The patterns shifted inside me, twisting painfully. Suddenly, the entire structure just…collapsed, like a house of cards falling into itself. My dantian shrunk drastically as the qi in my core compressed, feeling fluid and sluggish. I felt a surge of panic; what had I done? Had I broken my cultivation?

“No, John. You made it better. Try to hit that thing, now.”

I hesitantly gathered by qi, summoning a bit of it from my dantian and circling it into my body. I’d expected the thick, heavy sludge of power to flow like syrup or molasses, but instead, the strand I touched flooded my body with power. I blinked as everything seemed to decelerate ever so slightly around me. The effect wasn’t huge, but the lion’s paw moved just a fraction of a second slower than it had, and Jing’s graceful dance at the edge of the lion’s attack felt just a bit more sluggish.

I ignored the odd time shift and rushed forward. Although it felt like the world slowed down slightly, it seemed like I’d sped up by that same amount. I raced toward the lion, lifting my brass knuckles, then jabbed at it. My arm darted forward, fluidly and smoothly, and my fist cracked into the side of the lion. It stumbled as the blow knocked it sideways, and I couldn’t help but grin. My blow had dug four deep, conical holes into the side of the monster, and the jade around it was crazed with fine cracks.

The lion whirled to face me, and I barely managed to dodge the slap from its huge paw. It lunged forward, snapping its teeth at me, and I slid to the side, allowing the attack to snap on empty air. I didn’t dodge the follow-up paw swat, though, and I cried out as the lion’s claws raked across my chest, cutting into my skin and knocking me backwards. That thing was fast!

The creature staggered again as Jing’s foot crashed into its side. It whirled to face her, but as it did, I sprang to my feet and crashed my fist into it again, and the blow tore free a sizeable chunk of jade from its side. It lurched as it spun back to face me, but this time, I was moving. As fast as I was, the lion was quicker, and I couldn’t do whatever Jing did to stay ahead of its attacks. Fortunately, I wouldn’t need to; I’d figured out exactly how to beat it.

I dodged the paw slap, then cracked my knee into the lion’s chest as it lunged forward, snapping with its jaws. As the blow hit, though, I ducked, allowing the next paw swipe to pass over me. The lion was fast, powerful, and deadly, but what it wasn’t was smart. The statue wasn’t alive; it was really nothing more than a machine. At least, that was my guess, and like any machine, it could only do what someone had designed it to do. Its attacks came in a pattern, every time. Jaws snapped shut after every paw slap. Paws alternated swipes, trying to keep defenders off-balance. It was a pattern, and so long as I could stay ahead of that pattern, I would win.

Of course, it wasn’t that easy. The thing was still faster than me, and if I hesitated in the slightest or moved the wrong way, it punished me with its claws. Each time, though, Jing moved in, her kicks not doing any damage but staggering the monster and keeping it from mauling me. That gave me time to get back to my feet and crash into it once more.

The lion slowed as a low kick cracked into its leg. A hairline fracture shivered through the limb, not enough to cripple it, but enough to keep it from attacking at full speed. An elbow smash to its muzzle shattered a handful of teeth, and a blow from the brass knuckles cracked its eye. The lion was moving less steadily as Jing and I took it slowly apart. Finally, the creature spun to face me, its jaws opening wide and heat welling out from them. The attack was unexpected, not part of the pattern, and I ducked without realizing that things had shifted. The movement place me directly into the line of the fire breath, and in desperation, I rose swiftly and slammed my fist into the bottom of its jaw in an uppercut.

The lion’s remaining teeth cracked or shattered as its jaws were forced shut and its head jerked upward just as its breath weapon activated. The flames poured forth, but instead of bathing me in searing heat, they wrapped around the statue’s shattered muzzle. The lion’s skull glowed, shifting from blue-green to bright white in an instant. I slammed my fist into the side of its fiery skull; at the same time, Jing’s foot cracked into the other side of its head. The superheated jade shivered beneath the force of the twin blows, held for a second…and shattered, exploding into shards of glowing stone. The lion dropped to the ground, its headless body still at last, and I stopped and looked over at Jing, who smiled at me triumphantly.

“Now that, Xu Xing, was a proper challenge!”