Jingyi Bo once again found herself alone with a strange man.

Is this just how cultivation is? Spending time with odd men? Tatsumaki might be pleasing to the eye if your interests revolve around lifting rocks and shouting loudly. Why couldn’t I have studied with Amai instead?

Sitting on a low stone, Bo was watching Tatsumaki do exactly that: lift rocks and shout. When she had asked him to help her study Heat, the man had said some absolute nonsense about the ‘burning heat of passion’ and insisted they meet at a nearby field replete with rocky outcroppings and lacking in spectators. The very morning after her fateful encounter with Youni De, that was where she found herself.

“Heat is about passion! The burning heart, the drive to succeed and be the best at what you do!” Tatsumaki’s incomprehensible ranting was punctuated with punches and kicks that sent great cracks through boulders. “Heat is a man’s spirit! A man’s spirit burns with Heat! The manly spirit of Heat is burning within me now!”

All Bo could do was sit there and watch, and hope there was some point to all this. She couldn’t get close enough to observe with her aura - occasionally he would punch a rock hard enough for it to burst into splinters, sharp enough to hurt. With her elbows on her knees, and her head in her hands, she watched with her totally ordinary eyes and tried to observe at least the nearby flow of the elements.

Tatsumaki’s unstoppable rock-breaking rampage was causing a local effect. Heat was close to Air, which meant it was quite easy for it to influence it into becoming more Heat. Whatever ‘manly spirit’ or ‘warrior’s heart’ or ‘burning passion’ meant, it was slowly filling the area around Tatsumaki with a rippling aura of Heat. Despite the early hour, it was starting to get quite warm in the area. An impressively useless side-effect of an honestly pointless expression of elementally charged ki.

In fact, it seemed like Tatsumaki couldn’t just have elementally generic ki. Most people were able to have a kind of ‘unaspected’ ki or qi appear as part of an ability - it wasn’t pure enough to be identifiable as a particular element, generally through lack of trying. It was just redirecting local or internalised mana in the air. Tatsumaki however seemed to have a limitless wellspring of this Heat, and all of his Ki expressions were thus coloured.

Heat didn’t do anything to break stone. Stone (the element) was nearly the opposite of Heat, and making the rock warm didn’t make it any easier to punch. It was a testament to Tatsumaki’s raw physical strength that he was able to damage the stone despite the fact that his ki was largely useless for the task. If anything, the difficulty seemed to spur him on. No sooner had he finished pummeling one stone into dust did he move onto another. Even without her mana sense, Bo could see that Tatsumaki Ryu was literally glowing with Heat. Steam rose from his skin and the air rippled and distorted around him. It made for quite the visual spectacle.

“Tatsumaki, um, can I stop you for a moment?” Bo took her chance when Ryu stopped shouting and punching to wipe some sweat off his forehead. “It would really, um, help me if you could show me this Heat up close.”

“Up close? Aha! Your passion burns brightly, Jingyi! We shall spar then!”

“Wait, spar--” Tatsumaki Ryu was already removing his robe. Why?!

“Come on, then! Just two men, engaged in a burning, passionate contest of strength!”

“Y-You know I’m not a man, right?!” Thankfully for Bo’s delicate eyes, Ryu was wearing some kind of bound loincloth under his robes. The man’s body was exceedingly muscular, far exceeding Bo’s tastes. He was built like a tree had been exercising, glistening with sweat like some kind of horrible beast. Tatsumaki took up a stance that Bo recognised as one he usually reserved to wrestle with the other boys - he was squaring up to fight!

Suddenly afraid of a man twice her size in every direction, Bo instinctively got into a fighting stance of her own … before realising how stupid an idea it would be to face Ryu on an even playing field. Considering the amount of Heat that he had built up, the state of the crumbled rocks around them, and the eagerness to demonstrate the ‘manly spirit’, Bo was never going to survive a direct, martial-arts-only confrontation. Instead, she turned and bravely ran away.

“I see, Jingyi! Such burning passion - don’t think I’ll let you escape so easily!”

A dark shadow passed over Bo’s head as she fled, the figure resolving as Tatsumaki landed atop a rock in front of her. Cracks rippled through the stone he landed on - was he getting more powerful the more fired up he was? Bo froze like a startled deer. He’s gonna kick my ass!

It was at this point that Bo realised why she had struggled with Heat up until this point - it was conceptually quite simple, but it was also her polar opposite. Tatsumaki was physically powerful, headstrong and straightforward. Heat was burning passion and manly spirit and all those other ridiculous terms. Bo was small, weak and dedicated to doing things weirdly. Bo’s elemental alignment was Mud - the exact opposite of Heat. This has to be the singular dumbest set of opposites! Why am I here!?

As Bo contemplated, Tatsumaki leapt forward.

“Tatsumaki gekimetsu!” A Heat-sheathed foot span towards Bo, and she leapt to dodge it. The impact burned away a patch of grass and left a sizable dent in the ground, but the man wasn’t done yet. Bo could feel her heart pounding in her chest as he leapt at her again. For all his strength, he was quite slow and painfully predictable. It didn’t help that he shouted before every strike, or made one big, flashy strike where any other martial artist might have made several more practical ones. However, Bo knew that if even one of those connected with her, it would be lights out.

As she ducked and weaved, she noticed that her mana sense was slowly becoming more and more useless. Whenever Ryu attacked, he generated Heat. That Heat lingered in the air, poured into the earth, filtered into the stone. It wasn’t harming anything, but her world of new colours was slowly being painted over with a single tone. Once again she was back to using her eyes and ears - the old ‘look behind you with your mana awareness’ trick was losing its effectiveness.

Bo concentrated and swept her aura around her as far as she could, converting the ground and stones to Mud. It worked to slow Tatsumaki down, but it was also slowing Bo down. If only I could leave the ground I’m stepping on intact … wait, of course!

Flinging a spray of mud up at Ryu to force him to stop a moment, she reached down and plucked off her boots with some effort.

“That’s it, Jingyi! Let your body free to feel the Heat! Let that manly spirit flow through you!”

“I’m not taking my robes off, creep!” Bo pegged her boots directly at Tatsumaki’s head - he laughed, at least until Bo turned and began to run away again. With her bare feet exposed to the mud, she could do something with her Endless Steps she had considered but not quite tried. With her aura, she turned everything on the ground to Mud. With her physical contact through her feet, she then turned that mud back into solid Earth. These solid places to stand let her move far more freely than Tatsumaki, improving her speed advantage.

“Very good! Tenacious! A real man fights with everything he’s got! Netsu bakuhatsu!”

“I’m not a man-- guh!”

Bo was cut off as she was forced to duck a wave of propelled Heat ki - there was so much of the element floating around now that he was able to fling waves of the stuff straight at her. It dissipated harmlessly on the stones, but left behind a fierce scorch mark - it would most certainly not be ideal to have that contact skin. To make matters worse, Tatsumaki had figured out that jumping between the stones would let him avoid the swamped ground. At the very least, the stones themselves were also slowly melting into mud.

If it were that simple, all the matter in the area turning into Bo’s element of choice, this would be a simple battle of attrition. Jingyi Bo would continue to dodge until all was mud, and then mire Tatsumaki and force him to give in. Unfortunately, it seemd that Heat had a similar property to Mud - while the ground was Bo’s domain, the air was Tatsumaki’s. Heat spread like a virus through the air, converting it into yet more Heat. At the rate this encounter would end up with a cold, sodden earth and a burning, unbearable sky - the main issue being that Bo (like most other people) needed to breathe air to live. It wouldn’t do to breathe air that was so hot as to burn the lungs. Jingyi Bo needed to end this fight sooner rather than later.

“Tatsumaki ketobasu! Tatsumaki utsu! Tatsumaki goyaku!”

The sweltering heat and relentless attacks made it hard for Bo to think straight - instead, she decided to just throw out half-baked ideas and see what stuck. She recalled the trick she had done to make clay ‘vines’ - they were animated with simple instructions to grasp and coil repeatedly, a task that had taken rather more effort than expected. Focusing, she had some sprout from the melting stones, only to watch the clay immediately bake in the heat as they touched Tatsumaki, fragile earthenware shattering without incident.

Using her manipulation power to fling globs of mud at Tatsumaki seemed to have the effect of slightly diminishing the Heat, but it was too slow. The rate of generation for Tatsumaki’s Heat meant that the lumps would dry instantly to clumps of earth and fall away without effect. Splashing him with transmuted Water only caused clouds of steam that were more dangerous to Bo than to Tatsumaki, and it was far too hot to make any appreciable amount of Mist. Bo found a moment in the battle to stop and catch her breath, wiping away sweat from her forehead. Her robes were starting to stick to her body and her lungs burned with exertion.

“Looks like you’re starting to understand the manly passion of Heat! Feel your muscles burn with effort! Let the Heat flow through your veins, Jingyi!”

“Would you … stop … yelling at me?!” Bo whipped out a hand, and a lash of mud burst from the ground alongside her, smacking into Tatsumaki. The aura of heat billowing around him dried up the mud long before it made contact - it was like she had flung a handful of dirt at him, for all the good that did. Gritting her teeth in frustration, Bo had one last idea to try out.

Both Heat and Mud were what Bo called secondary elements. The fusion between two of the cardinal points of the elemental octahedron - air and fire, and water and earth respectively. The influence of Yin or Yang could turn them into tertiary elements, which was exactly what Bo wanted to do. Adding Yin would be a terrible idea, which was a general maxim for any elemental transformations - the mud would turn into a sea of acid, and the heat into pure destruction. Putting aside the fact that Bo wasn’t even sure if she could make Destruction, doing so would be suicidal. Adding Yang, however, made some far more interesting changes.

Yang wasn’t an element that Bo understood, so she couldn’t produce it. However, it was something that was all around her, something that could be redirected to be useful. Her aura changed its role - instead of liquefying everything into mud, the ground began to turn to sprouting, life-filled Wood. Blossoms, branches, creepers and flowers burst into life all around her, giving Tatsumaki a moment’s pause. There was nothing inherently dangerous about the plants, except for the fact that the constant changing growth made for difficult terrain to move about in. The true danger was in the transformation of Heat into Lightning.

Eager to avoid electrocuting herself, Bo channeled the flow of Yin into the plants themselves. The air around them sparked dangerously, and a charge seemed to fill the air. Within a few moments, thin bursts of lightning were crackling between petals, arcing off vines and grounding themselves on Tatsumaki’s bare skin. He flinched in pain as the first jolt struck him, only to suddenly seize up - the bolt had caused a chain-reaction, and the Heat filling the air was becoming electrified!

Bo’s eyes widened with terror as the man was shocked with an unbelievable amount of lightning. All of it was generated from his own Heat, and it burned through him like nothing else. He began to shout, a horrifying and primal yell that caused Bo to quiver in fear. Even crackling in electricity, he began to step forward. Where his body became scorched and blackened from bolts of electricity, the Heat ki was flowing over him and closing his wounds, healing his scars. Bo could feel Tatsumaki’s drive to succeed, to be the best, to never give up. The Heat was an expression of that force, growing to an overwhelming crescendo until it dominates all. That spirit of endurance was overcoming even the paralysing arcs of electricity!

Tatsumaki looked like some horrifying beast, his flesh burning and growing back, flames and lightning bursting out of him as he slowly put one foot in front of the other to approach Jingyi. He didn’t need to leap from rock to rock - the heat was so intense that it solidified the muddy floor and burnt away the entangling plants. There was only one thing Bo could do to escape!

“I concede! I give up!” Bo curled into a ball, covered her head and signalled her surrender. She understood Heat now - it was an overwhelming force she couldn’t compete with! She looked up as Tatsumaki bellowed out a great laugh, and then nearly shrieked as he collapsed face-first into the mud.

--

It had taken a little while, but Bo was able to flip him over onto his back and clear up most of the damage. The residual Lightning was reduced back into Heat, which in turn fuelled Tatsumaki’s ability to heal himself. The speed of his ability to heal from surely-fatal wounds was extremely impressive, even for an early second-stage martial artist. The indomitable force of Heat refused to die - that was just part of what Heat was. Tatsumaki’s nonsense about ‘burning passion’ and ‘manly spirit’ was still nonsense, but the sentiment was true enough. As loath as she was to engrave Tatsumaki’s image onto her soul, he did make a fitting representation of her understanding of Heat.

All in all, it took about ten minutes for Tatsumaki to recover after Bo started her medical attention. As soon as he was conscious, the man sprung to his feet.

“You fight with honour and passion, Jingyi! You may make a great man one day!”

“For the last time, I’m not-- Ugh. Let me get this out of the way - thank you for your help.” Bo couldn’t help but sigh, even as Tatsumaki bellowed another great laugh.

“When it comes to demonstrating the power of the Tatsumaki Spirit, I’m always ready to help! Keep the heat of passion burning within your heart, Jingyi! Be the manliest of men!”

“... Just put your robe back on.”