Chapter 4: training day
The jeep smelled of diesel, sweat, and the sharp, clean scent of gun oil. Lu Yuan sat wedged between Zhang Wei and Zhou Feng in the back, the vehicle’s stiff suspension jolting his spine with every pothole on the road leading out of the city. He wore a borrowed set of fatigues, the fabric stiff and unfamiliar against his skin. The trousers pooled around his ankles, and the jacket’s shoulders sagged comically, making him look even younger, more fragile.
“You’re swimming in it,” Zhou Feng chuckled, reaching over to adjust the collar, his fingers brushing the nape of Lu Yuan’s neck.
“It was the smallest they had,” Zhang Wei said from his other side, his gaze fixed on the passing landscape. His tone was neutral, but his eyes, when they flicked to Feng’s hands, were not.
The base emerged from the morning mist like a clenched fist of gray concrete and steel. Barbed wire coiled atop high fences. The air itself changed, growing thinner, charged with a tense hum of generators and distant, synchronized shouts. It was a world of hard edges and brutal angles, a stark expulsion from the soft, green sanctuary of the garden.
They pulled up beside a vast, dusty parade ground. A unit of two dozen recruits, men and women in identical fatigues, stood at loose attention, their faces slick with sweat under the climbing sun. A sergeant with a voice like grinding gravel was barking at them.
“This is you,” Zhang Wei said, opening the jeep door. The roar of the base flooded in. “Stick with the recruits. Do what they do. Don’t think, just follow.”
Lu Yuan climbed out, his boots—also too big—scuffing the gravel. He blinked against the glare. The scale of the place, its purposeful grimness, was overwhelming. Zhou Feng clapped a heavy hand on his shoulder. “Eyes forward, kid. Just put one foot in front of the other. We’ll be watching.”
The sergeant’s eyes, like chips of flint, found him immediately. “You! The general’s pretty boy! Fall in!”
Lu Yuan scurried to the back of the formation. The recruits didn’t look at him; they were too busy holding themselves rigid, but he felt the weight of their silent judgment. The soft civilian. The weak link.
“Warm-up!” the sergeant bellowed. “Five klicks! Route Delta! Move!”
The unit lurched forward into a run. Lu Yuan followed.
The first kilometer was a revelation of pain. His body, this soft, underused vessel, screamed in protest. His lungs were two burning bags of glass shards. The too-big boots slapped the asphalt, threatening to trip him with every step. He fell to the back almost instantly, his breath coming in ragged, whistling gasps. The world narrowed to the pounding of blood in his ears and the receding backs of the others.
From a shaded observation awning, Zhang Wei and Zhou Feng watched.
“He’s not going to make it,” Feng muttered, lighting a cigarette. His jaw was tight.
“He doesn’t have to make a good time. He just has to finish,” Zhang Wei replied, his arms crossed. His eyes tracked the stumbling, distant figure. He remembered the original Lu Yuan—vain, lazy, prone to feigning weakness for attention. This was different. This was a genuine, brutal struggle. There was no audience here, no one to perform for except the unforgiving ground. And yet, the boy kept moving. One clumsy, agonizing footfall after another.
On the track, black spots danced at the edges of Lu Yuan’s vision. His calves were knots of fire. A part of his mind, the ancient scholar-cultivator part, observed the suffering with detached curiosity. So this is the limits of mortal flesh without qi infusion. How… inefficient. Another, more immediate part wanted to collapse. But a third, stubborn part, forged in a lifetime of meticulous spiritual discipline, whispered a simple truth: stopping was not an option. The body was merely a tool. The will commanded the tool.
He adjusted his breathing, falling into a ragged, stumbling rhythm that faintly echoed a meditation pattern. In through the nose, out through the mouth. His focus turned inward, away from the pain, to the simple mechanics of motion. The world faded.
When he finally staggered past the finishing marker, dead last, the rest of the recruits were already formed up again, breathing heavily but recovered. He bent double, hands on his knees, vomiting a thin stream of bile onto the dust.
The sergeant walked over, looked down at him. “Not dead. Good. Fall in.”
The next hour was basic drills. Stances. Punches. Blocks. Lu Yuan’s muscles trembled with fatigue, but his mind was now awake, clear. He watched the demonstrations with an intensity that was almost unnerving. The sergeant showed a simple forward stance, a straight punch.
“Your body is a spear! Drive from the heel!”
Lu Yuan mirrored the stance. It was all wrong. Crude. In his previous life, a stance was a conversation with the earth, a channel for energy. This was just… leverage. He shifted his weight minutely, tilting his pelvis, aligning his spine not just for power, but for a flow that wasn’t needed here. The adjustment was subtle, invisible to most.
The sergeant didn’t notice. But Zhang Wei, from the awning, did. His eyes narrowed.
“Pair up! Light sparring! Control your shots!”
Lu Yuan found himself facing a recruit, a burly young man with a thick neck and a dismissive smirk. “Try not to break, rich kid,” the recruit grunted.
The whistle blew.
The recruit came forward with a lumbering right haymaker. Slow. Telegraphed. To Lu Yuan’s perception, it moved through mud. His body, exhausted, responded not with the drilled block, but with an instinctive, minimal shift. He didn’t meet force with force. He let the fist graze past his shoulder, his own body flowing around the attack like water around a stone. As the recruit overbalanced, Lu Yuan’s foot, seemingly without thought, hooked behind the other man’s ankle. A gentle pull.
The recruit crashed to the dust, more surprised than hurt.
Silence fell across their corner of the yard. The recruit scrambled up, face red. “Lucky trip,” he spat.
“Again,” Lu Yuan said softly, his voice still breathless from the run. He settled back into his adjusted stance.
This time, the recruit came more carefully, a jab followed by a cross. Lu Yuan weaved. He wasn’t fighting, not really. He was redirecting. A palm deflected a wrist, a shoulder turned into a passing chest, upsetting balance. It was a dancer’s performance, utterly devoid of aggression. Within a minute, the recruit was on the ground again, frustrated and unhurt, baffled by how little it had taken.
The sergeant was watching now, his scowl deepening. He blew his whistle sharply. “You! What’s your name again?”
“Lu Yuan, sir.”
“You’ve trained before.”
“In a manner of speaking, sir.”
“Show me your form. Basic combination one.”
Lu Yuan performed the sequenced punches and blocks. Technically, they were perfect. But there was a fluidity between the movements, a grace that made the rigid, military-issue kata look like something entirely different, something ancient and personal.
Zhang Wei was suddenly there, having crossed the ground silently. He dismissed the sergeant with a nod. “I’ll take him.”
He stood before Lu Yuan, who was panting lightly, sweat plastering the too-big uniform to his slender frame. His face was flushed, his eyes brilliantly alive with focused light. “You’re not using the form they taught you,” Zhang Wei stated.
“It’s inefficient,” Lu Yuan replied, simply. “The transitions waste momentum. The stances are static. They root you to the spot when you should be a leaf on the wind.” He spoke not with arrogance, but with the plain curiosity of a scholar discussing a flawed theorem.
Zhang Wei felt a thrill, hot and sudden, pierce through him. Leaf on the wind. “Show me.”
He assumed a fighting posture. Zhou Feng, having strolled over, leaned against a equipment post, his cigarette forgotten.
Lu Yuan looked at Zhang Wei, at the powerful frame, the perfect balance, the contained violence ready to uncoil. This was different. This was a real threat. A smile touched his lips—a spark of pure, unchained delight. He settled into his own stance, a picture of deceptive ease.
Zhang Wei moved. A testing jab, faster than anything the recruit had thrown. Lu Yuan flowed away, but this time Zhang Wei was ready, his other hand snaking out to grab the fabric of Lu Yuan’s jacket. He used the grip to pull him off-balance, into a throw.
But Lu Yuan didn’t resist the pull. He went with it, adding his own momentum, twisting in the air like a cat. He landed unevenly, stumbling back two steps, but he was free, his eyes wide. “Oh,” he breathed. “That’s much better.”
They sparred for five minutes. It was not a contest of strength—Zhang Wei could have ended it instantly. It was a dialogue. Zhang Wei would press with controlled, military-efficient attacks. Lu Yuan would evade, adapt, his movements becoming less a separate martial art and more an instinctive integration of what he was seeing, what he remembered, what his body could barely manage. He was learning at a visible, dizzying rate.
He was also getting tired. His reactions began to slow. Zhang Wei saw an opening, a clean shot to Lu Yuan’s unprotected side. He pulled the punch at the last millisecond, his knuckles just brushing the damp fabric.
In that moment of arrested motion, Lu Yuan, operating on pure survival instinct, did something he didn’t understand. His hand came up, not to block, but his fingers brushed against the sweat-damp skin of Zhang Wei’s wrist where his sleeve had ridden up.
A jolt, tiny but unmistakable, passed between them.
For Lu Yuan, it was a faint, warm spark. A fleeting sense of potential, like the barest whisper of sunlight on a closed bud. It was energy, pure and vital. It felt strangely, distantly familiar, akin to but far more potent than the vague hum he felt from the earth. His brain, ever analytical, filed the sensation away: Physical contact with a powerful, energized human subject yields a minute transfer of bio-energetic potential.
For Zhang Wei, it was a shock of a different kind. A visceral, electric zap that traveled straight up his arm and coiled in his gut. It wasn't painful. It was… arousing. Deeply, fundamentally so. It felt like a key sliding into a lock he didn’t know existed. He jerked his hand back as if burned, his breath catching.
Lu Yuan, misinterpreting the reaction, immediately bowed his head. “My apologies! Was that incorrect?”
Zhou Feng pushed off the post, his easygoing demeanor vanished. “Alright, break it up. Kid’s about to fall over.” He stepped between them, putting a solid arm around Lu Yuan’s shoulders, pulling him away from Zhang Wei’s stunned, tangled gaze. “You did good. Scary good. Where the hell did you learn to move like that?”
“It just… makes sense,” Lu Yuan mumbled, leaning into Feng’s support, his energy spent. He was too exhausted to process the strange spark, or the hot, confused look in Zhang Wei’s eyes.
Zhang Wei stood rooted, staring at his own hand. The ghost of that tiny shock lingered on his skin. He looked from Lu Yuan, trusting and pliant against his best friend’s side, to Feng’s possessive hold. The attraction was one thing. This… this was something else entirely. A connection that felt physical, metabolic. It terrified him.
It terrified him.
Zhang Wei didn’t mention the jolt. He shoved the sensation deep down, locking it away behind a wall of crisp, professional instruction. The following days fell into a grueling rhythm. Lu Yuan returned each dawn, his slight form swallowed by the same ill-fitting fatigues. The five-kilometer run remained a special kind of hell, but he no longer finished last. His body, protesting violently, was slowly adapting.
He learned how to fall without breaking, how to use an opponent's momentum against them, how to turn a pen or a book into a blunt instrument. His style remained fluid, an echo of another world's grace superimposed on brutal efficiency. Zhang Wei corrected his form with hands that now deliberately avoided skin contact, his touch landing only on fabric. Zhou Feng shadowed them, a silent, brooding presence whose corrections were always physical, always grounding—a steadying hand on Lu Yuan's back, a grip adjusting his elbow.
“You’re thinking too much,” Feng grunted one afternoon, after Lu Yuan over-analyzed a disarm technique and got his wrist pinned. “Your body knows. Let it.”
Lu Yuan, panting in the dust, nodded. He was learning to listen to this new body’s whispers, its limits and latent strengths. The soreness was a constant, deep ache in his bones, a companion he carried home each evening.
General Lu watched his son limp through the mansion’s grand foyer, his uniform stained with sweat and dirt. The boy would offer a tired smile before retreating to soak in a hot bath. The general’s heart ached with a sharp, paternal pang. He wanted to order him to stop, to protect this softness he’d failed to nurture before.
But he thought of the secret reports on his desk, the maps with circled potential strongholds, the cold inventory of weapons and ammo already stockpiled in Bai Lian’s extradimensional space. Tons of rice, barrels of water, medical supplies—a fortress built on credit and fear. His son’s exhaustion was a price he had to silently accept. He was grateful to Zhang Wei and Zhou Feng, even if their attention made his old soldier’s intuition twitch.
The following week introduced firearms. The indoor range was a cacophony of deafening cracks and the acrid, metallic scent of spent cordite. Lu Yuan, wearing oversized protective earmuffs, looked absurdly small.
“This is a Type 92 sidearm,” Zhang Wei said, his voice flat and instructional as he demonstrated the safe handling. “Safety. Magazine. Slide.” His movements were economical, precise. He stood behind Lu Yuan, guiding his stance without touching him directly. “Plant your feet. Don’t fight the recoil, manage it.”
The first shot was terrifying, the kick jarring his slender frame. He missed the target entirely. Zhou Feng, leaning against the wall, chuckled. “You’re flinching. You gotta expect the bang.”
By the end of the first day, his hands trembled. By the third, he was grouping shots in the inner ring. His innate focus, the same that once parsed complex cultivation arrays, now deconstructed the mechanics of trigger pull and sight alignment. The noise and violence of it held no fear for him; it was just another system to master.
“You’re a natural,” Zhou Feng said, nudging him with an elbow as they walked out, the smell of gunpowder clinging to their clothes.
“It’s just physics and focus,” Lu Yuan replied, flexing his sore wrist. His shoulders were a constellation of bruises from the rifle’s stock.
The physical toll was cumulative. Each night he returned a little more hollow-eyed, moving with the careful stiffness of the deeply sore. Yet, a new quiet confidence had taken root in his gaze. He was no longer just the strange, beautiful boy in the garden. He was becoming something else, something forged in dust and adrenaline.
One evening, Zhang Wei drove him home alone, Feng having been called away. The jeep was quiet, the only sound the rumble of the engine. Lu Yuan stared out at the dying city lights, his head lolling against the seat.
“Why are you doing this?” Zhang Wei asked suddenly, the question sharp in the quiet cabin. “Pushing yourself this hard. You don’t have to.”
Lu Yuan was silent for a long moment. “Everything feels… fragile,” he said finally, his voice soft. “The air, the ground, the… peace. It’s thin. I don’t know how to explain it.” He turned his head, looking at Zhang Wei’s profile outlined by the dashboard lights. “When you showed me how to break a hold last week, it felt solid. Real. I want to learn real things.”
Zhang Wei’s hands tightened on the wheel. The kid was sensing the fraying edges of the world, the coming collapse, without even knowing its name. His guilt was a cold, hard stone in his throat. He thought of Bai Lian’s cold efficiency, her calculated omission. He thought of that electric jolt from his skin.
He pulled up to the Lu mansion. The lights were on, a golden beacon against the gathering dark. “Get some rest,” he said, his voice rougher than intended.
Lu Yuan nodded, stumbling out. He paused, leaning back into the open door. “Thank you, Zhang Wei. For the real things.” He offered a small, exhausted smile, then turned and walked stiffly towards the house.
Zhang Wei watched him go until the door closed. He sat there in the idling jeep, the memory of that spark playing over his nerves. He knew, with a dreadful certainty, that the real things were about to get a lot more real, and the tools they were giving Lu Yuan might not be enough. He put the jeep in gear, the tires crunching gravel as he drove away from the light, back toward the planning and the secrets.