CHAPTER 5: MEDITATE IN HEAT

"I don’t understand." Meixing complained as she walked around the outskirts of town. She had a bag of ingredients that she had collected. "What are we looking for?"

"A few ingredients." the voice said. "We're going to make a potion that will help clear out your acupoints and make it easier to open them."

"You keep talking about acupoints." Meixing said. "When are you going to teach me to fight and do magic stuff."

"Magic stuff? Try not to speak too much girl; you'll come out looking a lot less foolish."

She opened her mouth to rebut but the sword continued to talk.

"We have a year. We will need to use 6 months to condition your body to perform stances. Then whatever time we have left we'll have to use to teach you a stance."

"A stance?"

"That is the... magic stuff you were talking about earlier." The sword said. "Stances are Spiritual Techniques that use spiritual energy as fuel and are released at the acupoints. Speaking of which, there seems to be no root here. We'll have to go to the woods for the ingredient."

"No ways." she said. "There are wild dogs in there!"

"Your point being? If you see one, you will run."

"And if I can't outrun it?"

"Then I have a strong suspicion that you will die."

"No ways, I'm not going in there."

"Then you willl die when those demons come. Your grandmother and your town."

She sighed.

"I will look out for you You should be safe."

"I hate this." Meixing said as she entered.

A few hours later, she was kneeling on the ground, digging with her bare hands. Her fingertips dug into a root. She curled her fingers around the root and pulled it out, the skin on her fingers chaffing off. She pulled the root clear.

She looked at the root. "Man, this thing is ugly."

"This should be good enough for 4 sessions."

"Cool!"

"Watch out."

"What?" she looked to the side. She saw a goat with ragged fur. "What is that?" she got up and backed away.

"Are you not a village girl?" the voice in the sword said. "That's obviously a goat."

"I know it’s obviously a goat!" she said as it backed up, swinging its head side to side. "Wait... is it..."

"Yes. You better run."

Moments later, Meixing was running out of the woods with the goat behind her. The voice of the sword was laughing while she screamed and cried. Once she had cleared the woods, the returned to the woods.

"Stupid goat!" she said in between gulps of air.

"I haven't been this entertained in 80 years!"

"I'm starting to think your evil, Sword."

"Sword? Sword is the vessel I am trapped in, I am not a sword. I have a name!"

"What's your name?"

"To know my name, you would have to know who I am."

"Okay, so who are you?"

"I am a Librarian of the Great Library! I am the Prodigy of the East Islands. The heat in the cold. The Red Boil and the genius of my home. I am Song Wu Dzu Dong!"

"Song what Dong?" she said. "I'll just call you Dong."

"Do not call me Dong! Each of my names were earned and..."

"Whatever, Dong." she said. “Now, what do I do with these ingredients?”

Dong helped Meixing prepare a potion with a portion of the ingredients she had collected during that day. She looked at the green liquid prepared in a tiny pot.

"What do I do now?" Meixing said, looking at the potion's swirling green surface. "Do I drink it?"

"No, you use it to steam yourself."

"Oh? I've never done that before."

"I'll walk you through it."

Meixing collected pieces of wood and rocks. She lit the wooden logs, heating the rocks up. Once they turned red, he placed the pot on the red rocks.

She built a small tent around the fireplace and stripped until she was nude before entering. The potion in the pot boiled and the green steam rose from the pot when she opened the lid.

"It’s... It's hot!" she clenching her teeth against the hit steam.

"Good, it should be as hot as possible."

"But... my skin will melt off!" she cried, "It’s... It's too much!" she made to leave.

"You leave and you may as well throw yourself down that old well with that dead demon. Because when those demons come back, you're as good as dead."

"But..."

"But nothing! If you want to get stronger then you'll sit here."

"But how? How am I to stand this pain?"

"You think of why you want to be stronger."

She closed her eyes, the nails of her fingers digging hard into her knees, drawing blood.

"There's something wrong!" she said. "…something else... my eyes are burning, like chillies has been rubbed into them and I feel like my skin is getting pricked by a thousand needles on top of the burning heat!"

"That must be the poison."

"P-Poison?"

"The root you collected is poisonous," the voice of the sword said. "The poison shocks the body enough to open acupoints."

"This... This is crazy!" she said. She curled on the ground in a foetal position as the pain became worse. After some time, she began crying but she stayed in the small tent.

She did not know how long it took but the pain began to fade. She got back to a sitting position. The air around her was cold. She touched the sword with her fingers.

"It’s over."

"You mean the steam? It ended 40 minutes ago. A pathetic showing, really."

"What? I was there for a long time!"

"My last student was a brick like you... in fact even more so. But he worked hard; he could stand the heat for 5 hours."

"You're lying!" she said. "The rocks would not hold enough heat for more than an hour."

"He would tend the fire during the process."

This shocked Meixing to silence.

"He had the drive to do it; the question is... do you?"

Meixing gulped. She opened her mouth to answer when her grandmother opened the tiny tent.

"Hon Hon, what's the matter?" her grandmother said, kneeling down to hug her.

Meixing put her head against Ling's chest, taking comfort after the ordeal she had been through. The old woman surveyed the scene, the pot with a green crust, the dead pieces of wood and the rusted sword that Meixing was sitting on top.

"Nothing's wrong, Gran Mama?"

The old woman sighed and continued to hold her in her arms. She felt how hot her granddaughter’s skin was to the touch and saw the dried streaks on her face, resulting from crying for a long time.