It had been in the tiny movements in the corner of his eyes where Lin Leng had spotted some irregularities. Shadows that moved too fast. Eyes that felt like they were boring a hole on the back of his neck. Lin Leng had excused himself to investigate. It didn’t hurt to be vigilant, and his senses hadn’t failed him yet.

The more he explored the wider world, the more he was thankful that Chow had convinced him to leave the lake house. There was always a challenge in every corner, always a way for Lin Leng to prove to himself that his hard work had been for something.

“What did you see?” Asked Bai Guo.

“Not sure,” he responded laconically. It wouldn’t do to rile people up over a mere suspicion, anyway.

This village was one of the primary reasons why he didn’t want to leave the lake in the first place. It looked like complete shit, and it hit way too close to home. On some level, he still wanted to delude himself into thinking that he wasn’t the same as the hapless children running about, muddied and dirty because their parents hadn’t eaten enough to care about them, or at least once upon a time.

He had never been a village person, himself, but the city slums were arguably even worse. In the country side, there was no shortage of tranquillity what with the proximity it had to untouched nature.

Seriously, with all these natural resources, with people still starving, it was safe to say that they, on some level, deserved it.

Once more, his respect for the fighter Kang Yilan increased. It took a level of exceptional willpower to be able to leave this shithole, one not found in the average person. Their situations were so similar, yet he could only best her in a select few areas, none of which were immediately helpful in a no-holds-barred brawl between the two, on even terrain.

It was a feeling of passion which bloomed in his heart when he thought of her strength, wanting to outmatch and one day defeat her. He believed, now, that if Chow had not convinced him, he would continue to languish in mediocrity. The competition was healthy, and given enough time, he would come out on top.

“You know,” he heard the voice from atop a thatched rooftop, the same guy that had fought him in the invasion of Jixing. “I don’t really get what your deal is.”

Bai Guo levelled his Guan Dao at the guy, and Wei Chow rolled up his sleeves. Lin Leng just stood, reservedly. He hadn’t brought his quarter-staff, so he wouldn’t pull off his daggers for this fight. “What’s there to explain about me?” Lin Leng responded flatly. “I’m just a guy who wants to be the strongest.”

“You never caught my name, did you?” He asked. “I guess you wouldn’t really care about that, though. A lot of people would construe that as being rude.”

“Well, I felt you’ve earned the honour of memorizing your name,” Lin Leng responded, needling him intentionally. “So speak.”

“Monkey,” he responded simply. “I don’t appreciate what your friend did to my Mentor. Come to think of it, where is she?”

“Not here,” Lin Leng said. “You’re fighting me, now.”

Monkey just chuckled. “You don’t want that.” He looked around at Lin Leng’s companions. “In fact, none of you would want that. Even if you came at me all at the same time, you would still die.”

“It’s been seven days since we met,” Lin Leng observed. “Am I to assume that you spent a year of training in seven days?”

“Assume what you will, Lin Leng,” he replied. “You aided and abetted the murder of my Mentor. That automatically makes you an enemy which I will dispose of, no matter the difficulty.”

They lapsed into silence. Monkey’s proclamation left nothing to the imagination. They were going to fight. As such, Lin Leng leapt towards him first.

Monkey directed his palm towards Lin Leng’s flying form.

Then, he saw it. A spark, turning into a gout.

Lin Leng created a powerful Chi pad underneath his foot and shot away from the gout of flame, singed by the super-heated air, but still whole. He rolled at the thatched roof, Lightened, Stabilized and recovered himself.

That answered why he was unarmed. He didn’t need weapons. He was a weapon. Lin Leng pulled out both daggers from his back, taking a low stance, assuming the initial Crane Lunges form. This would be interesting.

“You know what?” Monkey asked. “Thank you for not dying so quickly. It fills me with so much joy that you’re willing to drag this on. I mean, I’m totally game for this.” He took a step forwards. “Keep trying not to die. It’ll be fun for us both.”

Monkey’s blasts of fire were fast, but Lin Leng was faster, bobbing and weaving out of the way, avoiding the super-heated air as he tried to close the distance. His power made pursuing an opening a chore, his heat a deterrent that gave no quarters.

Well, until Wei Chow and Bai Guo came in, fists and pole arm at the ready.

That’s when Monkey exploded.

Lin Leng tucked and rolled as he lightened, but he could not avoid damage completely, scraping his arm at the roll, getting up to wave the smoke from his face.

When the air cleared, the house they had stood on was naught but smithereens, the surrounding houses on fire as well.

Immediately, it had all just gone from interesting to troublesome.

000

He stood on the top of the roof, dressed in a rather form-fitting black tang-suit, his hair a wild, unkempt mane styled in long braids which swished around when he turned his head.

I didn’t know who the hell he was, but I had already decided that I was going to kill him. I moved in as fast as I could, far before he even noticed, and appeared before him, my ‘Unwholesome State’ unleashed.

To think that an outlet to my anger could be found so quickly. My, the heavens really were smiling on me. If I played my cards right, we could burn down the entire village, even.

He reacted all too slowly to my punch, hitting him right on his face. I prayed that he wouldn’t die as he hurtled away from the rooftop, flying above other houses before crashing into a rather frail house, destroying the wall in the process.

Feeling slightly irresponsible for the wanton destruction, I cleared my throat and raised my voice. “Leave this village, everyone! I cannot guarantee your safety otherwise!”

The village streets began to crowd slightly as people exited their homes and made for the nearby forest.

Good. Now all I had to worry ab-

It came faster than I could have reacted. One moment, nothing. The other, a beam of condensed fire shot towards me. I had only moved away slightly, turning the deadly shot into one which merely debilitated me.

My arm was gone. My shoulder and down, my arm had completely disappeared.

Before I could properly react to that, even, the asshole had struck me right in my stomach, sending me hurtling away. In the ensuing flight, I did what I could to Lighten and gather composure, but that was until another beam struck me. I bent away in the nick of time, and instead of my heart, it hit my leg, cleaving it right off from the middle of the thigh, cauterizing the stump far before I could begin to bleed.

Before I landed, I saw that the others had engaged him, keeping him too busy to lay in the final hit.

I fell on the ground flat on my back, digging a trench as my momentum was slowly arrested by the earth.

I closed my eyes to reach for Enlightenment, if only to assess my wounds.

Then I felt it. My garden of Divine Wood was growing, chomping at the bit to finally be of use for once.

But how? I couldn’t grow the damn trees externally, so what the hell was it planning on making me do, regrow trees from my stump?

No.

Oh, no. That was never the intention.

How could I have been so stupid?

This was Divine Wood, a Divine Blessing, and so far, I had treated it stupidly. I was always so focused on the utility of indestructible wood that I never really considered the things that went into it all.

Growth.

It was the first thing I had learned, even.

Growth. Regrowth.

I focused my Divine Wood Chi and sent it to my wounds. The change was nearly instantaneous, excess Chi bleeding into my wounds and regrowing my limbs, like a plant whose branches had been cut off. My Chi was limited, but it was more than enough to regrow what I had lost, more than enough to put me back into the battle.

When I opened my eyes, the village was up in flames, the belligerent asshole who had just wounded me so handily laughing atop the one house that hadn’t been burned.

I stood up to meet him head on. “Okay, asshole. You’ve had your fun.”

He turned to look down at me. “You don’t know who I am, do you?”

“You’re related to the Dragon guy,” I observed easily. “What with all the fire and shit. Would it be right to assume that you were his disciple?”

“My, you are a bright one,” he grinned toothily. “My name is Monkey.”

“I’m Kang Yilan,” I said. ”As much as I like what you’ve done with the place, I’m afraid I’m going to have to kill you, now.”

“Wouldn’t have it any other way,” he said.

We collided. My fist was incinerated, turned to ash, while his had broken. I pushed the burnt out stump towards him and regrew the hand, good as new, in seconds. “You bitch,” he muttered flatly.

The rest of my companions appeared around us, watching, except for the Monk, possibly taking care of the injured. “He’s mine,” I announced. “It seems that the Worm of the East still has allies.”

He chuckled darkly. “You really think that’s going to make me blow my top off? I can’t want to kill you any more than right now.”

I blocked a physical strike with my forearm and struck him back, only for him to dodge, using the momentum to spin tightly and send an elbow strike towards my head. I stabilized and leaned back, making the elbow strike go wide before stepping back to build momentum for a strike directed at his solar plexus.

It struck, though I could feel a force stopping my hit from having a desirable impact.

Still, he skidded backwards and coughed some blood. “What’s the matter, Monkey?” I cooed. “Why don’t you regenerate your wounds and fight on?”

I took the initiative before he did, sprinting towards him, dodging barely as a gout of flames, not nearly as condensed, shot at me. I sacrificed my left arm for a shot with my right hand, breaking the forearm of the hand I had previously broken. The compound fracture had shoved a piece of his bone right out through his forearm. He screamed in agony, exploding once more. I jumped back, well away from the area of effect.

“Really?” I asked. “Did you see what your bastard of a Mentor did to me, and you have the guts to scream just when one arm is broken?”

“Bitch!” He stepped back and seemed to pour every ounce of effort into a ball of fire which exploded into a serpentine dragon, headed straight for me.

I was a mite too slow, losing my right leg beneath my knee. With a grunt of exertion, I shoved wood Chi out the amputated leg, and restored function to my charred arm, pressing the advantage by returning to close-quarters-combat.

He would burn off an arm, and I would break an arm. He would burn off a leg, and I would break a leg. When all that remained was to attack me with his mouth, he blew a wave of Fire on my face, blinding and deafening me momentarily, but I pressed my advantage, holding him by his throat to punch him repeatedly, barely noticing the pain.

There was barely any pain to notice, pain having lost its meaning during my training.

I threw Monkey away and healed my face, regrowing lost hair at will. My Chi stores were getting dangerously low, now. Even a hand lost, and I would be completely defenceless.

The moment my eyesight returned to me, Monkey ripped out a necklace from his neck with his mouth and bit down on the jade pendant.

Space rippled about him before he suddenly disappeared. ‘Daoist magic’, maybe. He had escaped like a wretched cur, leaving nothing but destruction in his wake. What a motherfucker.

Suddenly, the world seemed to flip as the ground approached me quickly. Yu Jie held me on her arms, and I felt completely safe.

000

It took a while before I recovered enough Chi to function. When I did, I went to the place in the forest where the villagers had congregated. The chief had been carried, an obvious stain of red on the crotch of his pants, and sweat flowing down him in rivulets. I stuck my hand into my bag of holding and pulled out a sack of coins.

I dropped the sack of coins on his crotch. “This is for travel. Get the villagers to a city, and give them a life. If I hear that you’ve slacked, I will cut off your balls, too.”

He nodded frantically. I turned around to the rest of my travelling companions and left the village underneath Taishan once and for all.

We set up camp hours later, the mood in the air utterly dead.

“You did the right thing,” the Monk said. “By providing for the villagers.”

“Whatever,” I muttered. The Monk had soon gone back to meditating. I had gone to sleep early, having not eaten a single thing.

000

Yu Jie woke me up in the middle of the night, a concerned expression on her face. “Whu…?” I muttered, still bleary from rest.

“We need to talk.”

I sat a little more upright at that, wondering what she would want to talk about. “What is it?”

“You can’t keep doing this,” she cautioned. “Pretend like what you heard yesterday never disturbed you.”

I crawled out of my bedroll and hugged my knees, looking up at the stars. “What would you have me do? Cry?”

“Is that so bad?” She asked. She pressed up against my side, sharing her warmth with me. “I don’t… uh… uhm.”

I turned to her curiously. “There something you want to say?”

“Yes,” she said. “It’s just… I don’t feel so good that you have to keep pretending with me.”

I sighed. It was all just… kind of hard to open up. “I’ve spent a year in prison,” I said. She tensed a little. “I killed three men. It was… complicated. You know,” I said, turning to her. “Prison life doesn’t offer much opportunity for relaxation or sharing of feelings. You put on a mask that you don’t take off, and if someone slights you, you pay it back tenfold, because not doing so only invites more harassment.”

“O…okay,” she muttered.

“The Martial Arts world is the same, now that I think of it,” I said. “But in other ways, nothing like prison. Because… because of freedom.” I sighed. “I don’t think I’m entirely free. There’s a lot of things controlling me, things I can’t help but let control me, but,” I smiled at her. “When you hugged me in Huangshan, I… I think it was the first time I ever really felt free. Could you…?” I bit my lips, finding it almost impossible to voice my request. “Could you hug me again?”

She wasted no time throwing her arms around me. I hugged her back, wishing I could stretch this moment on forever.

She pulled back a little so she could face me. Then, she brought her face closer to mine. My heart beat a mile a minute as she came closer and closer, wondering if she would… she would do it, and whether I should feel disgusted or elated. I couldn’t maintain the former as it collapsed under the weight of the attraction I was feeling.

My body betrayed me as I leaned forward as well, giving her tacit approval to do what she was going to do, but not going the full way in case I had somehow completely read the situation wrongly. She came just a little closer, and I came closer, hoping beyond hope that she wouldn’t pull back.

She didn’t.

Our lips met.

I felt my entire body heating up at that very moment, Yu Jie becoming more aggressive, bringing our lips closer. I had no idea how to do this, so I let her lead, going along with it as she did crazy things to me.

I pulled back gently, panting, wonder what we were doing. “It isn’t wrong,” she whispered.

I believed her. I knew it, even, deep inside. If anyone had a problem with this, they were welcome to try and separate us, but they wouldn’t get far. “I know,” I whispered back.

I kissed her again, and I knew I had another place in the world, as the disciple to Shen Zhimei, and as the one who stood besides Han Yu Jie.

Or, you know, her… girlfriend.