The tongue was covered with spines, all pointing down towards the throat. The centipedes writhed and twisted, thrashing and biting each other as they fell. Tian had a good look at them passing. The bird was so huge, he was thirty feet above them. Only a desperate stretch of his arms, a violent gust of inhaled wind, and the full extension of his rope dart let him barely hang from the back of the bird’s mouth. And he was running Light Body Heavy Hands as hard as he could. Trying to think light thoughts, even.

  It was a Heavenly Person Realm bird. The dart hadn’t pierced that deep.

  Mmm. Tricky.

  “Grandpa?” The throat lining rippled. Tian clung to the rope with a seizure tight grip as the whole thing jerked. The bird swerved to the side, banking in a long curve. Tian slammed into the wall of the throat. He desperately scrambled for a grip on the mucus covered lining, with absolutely no luck. The bird flapped hard, and he nearly lost his grip on the rope again. He willed Snake Head Vine Body to twist the rope around his arm, giving him a better sense of security.

  Which was useful when the bird swung in the opposite direction and this time he was simply suspended over the void of the bird’s throat. A void becoming more perfectly dark as what light there was from the open mouth vanished.

  This is why I wanted you to go to that sect. Free stuff and, sure, it’s nothing amazing, but it’s good starter gear and introduces you to the key concepts. Well, that and your emotional, physical and social development, education, trauma management, and trying to get you some friends and mentors. You had some really good luck there.

  “I love the Temple too, Grandpa, but is now really the time?!”

  Sure, because this is the other part of why I wanted you to go. This kind of thing happens to cultivators a lot. It’s how they make their biggest breakthroughs, or die. And like your brother Su said, they mostly die. You are on the literal brink of death, Tian. But there is a piece of immense good fortune for you here. If you can figure out what it is and how to get it.

  “Oh good. So about the whole not dying thing-

  You will figure something out. I truly do believe in you. But anyway, onto the important stuff- your homework. According to On the Origin of Supreme Forces, there is a guiding principle that governs yin-yang interactions. What was it?

  The bird banked again, more gently this time. Tian was swinging back and forth like a pendulum, sickly certain that the dart was working loose.

  Incidentally, and no pressure, but I am pretty sure this bird is headed for the Depot. I’ve been keeping track of the turns and, yeah. Bad things are about to happen for everyone, yourself included. So, you know. Before the bird gets there. Tick tock.

  Tick tock? The hell does that mean? Tian thought wildly. “Uhh… there is no such thing as pure yin or pure yang. One always has at least some trace of the other.”

  Good. Correct. And what happens when the concentration of one intensifies?

  “Imbalance. Disease, or other bad things. Um. Um.” The bird glided down a bit which left Tian briefly blank with terror.

  Think! You are almost there.

  “Generation! Like with the elements! Extreme yin gives birth to yang, and extreme yang gives birth to yin!”

  Correct! And what is a demon?

  “I don’t know!”

  Yin or Yang.

  “Yin!”

  Correct.

  The demonized bird clearly was sick of whatever it was dangling in its throat. It shook its head from side to side and the spine covered tongue thrashed around. Tian felt the dart slip out of the fleshy wall.

  Don’t try to stay in here, that’s hopeless. Your opportunity will come. Just remember the games we used to play. And… don’t panic. I’m with you, always.

  Tian fell down, into the darkness, and was swallowed. The crushing muscles of the throat were simultaneously soft and inescapable, squeezing him downward into the bird’s stomach. Tian couldn’t move, pressed on every side, unable to breathe. Everything was cold, and wet, and faintly burned his skin. And the stink! The burning stink!

  He started hearing screaming. Screaming of a kind he had never heard before, high pitched, furious, terrified, suffering. That unmistakable fishy stench of centipede venom. His feet were no longer being pressed by the throat muscles. Tian knew he would have a fraction of a second. Every nerve tensed. The constant pressure on him opened up and he lashed out with his rope dart, throwing it up and pinning it to the roof of the stomach!

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  Which was a vision of Hell.

  The centipedes, more than a hundred massive centipedes thirty, forty, fifty feet long, thrashed in a lake of acid and blue-green flames. It was bitterly cold. “Yin flames.” Tian stared in blank horror. Yin flames were only seen in areas of profound corruption and evil. Yang fire burned. Yin fire froze. Yang fire brought light and comfort. Yin fire only showed you what would lead you to death.

  The centipedes were a good example. So huge, armored with thick chitin shells. But in the belly of the bird, they could only freeze and rot from the acid. Desperately climbing on top of each other, trying to stay ‘clean’ for as long as they could. But the bird wasn’t still, and the lake wasn’t calm.

  Every move the bird made, every shift in the air, saw the acid lake shifting and sliding around the stomach. The centipedes had no choice but to tumble with it. Every one of them caught Hell. Every one of them was suffering. Every one of them was dying an ugly death.

  Tian was hanging from the top of the stomach. So long as the bird didn’t do a loop in the air, he should be safe. Except his qi wouldn’t last forever. Neither would his grip on the rope, even with it looped around his arm. Most worrying of all, if the acid would dissolve centipedes longer than the main Temple Hall was tall, was he willing to bet that it couldn’t dissolve his little rope dart?

  No chance. Absolutely no chance. He had bought some time, but not a lot of it.

  “The five elements generate and suppress each other. And a lot of other things, but I was promised that it would only become relevant once I reached the Heavenly Person Realm.” Tian felt the urge to either sob or laugh, but the cold was already biting through his desert-weight uniform.

  “The five elements don’t directly translate into yin and yang, though some elements are more yin and others more yang. Grandpa specifically reminded me about yin and yang generating each other in places of extremes, but…”

  Tian looked down at the acid lake and yin flames. It was certainly a place of extreme yin. But so what if it gave rise to yang? How did that help him? Grandpa wouldn’t have mentioned it for no reason, though. There must be something. Some path to survival.

  His mind flashed, thinking quickly. It felt oddly familiar. Hanging by a thread with his weak fingers, his memory and problem solving ability being tested by Grandpa. Ever since that first jumping game they practiced, in fact. He had been in pain, starving, ignorant about everything, and Grandpa taught him to move and focus through it all. The memorization methods, the big investigation missions tracking animals and solving the mysteries of the dump… They were all Grandpa’s very favorite things to do.

  Well that and make Tian healthier and stronger.

  “Now that I’m really thinking about it, Grandpa always got very quiet when I was in a serious fight. Or sparring with Hong Liren. Or when I was making Tian Soup. It was like he helped me prepare, but the actual problem solving had to be done by me.” A wild thought intruded.

  “Could this be the secret to his ‘energy?’ If he guides me and prepares me, it costs less energy. Giving me techniques costs far, far more energy. And the more I already know, the less energy he has to spend teaching. But I have to solve the problems myself so… is that how he gets new energy? The more and bigger problems I solve, the more energy he collects?”

  He felt giggles batterting at the gates of his teeth. Suspended over giant centipedes being tortured to death, one slipped piton from joining them, Tian had an almost irrepressible urge to laugh. He was definitely missing some details, but he was sure he was right. It was that simple. Grandpa Jun really was a cunning old ghost.

  The other thing Grandpa Jun kept nattering on about was building his foundation. Which was apparently another way of saying making his body and meridians better and better. When they went to make Tian Soup, Grandpa didn’t have a specific destination in mind. He just said they would find something.

  “This is why I wanted you to go to the Sect… this kind of thing happens to cultivators all the time…” The thoughts were flying through Tian’s head now, whole nets forming from the threads tying together.

  The Centipedes had stopped screaming. The last of them had stopped its struggle, slipping off the rotting bodies of its cousins and sliding into the frozen, annihilating lake.

  “Stomach acid is a yang water, but this stomach acid is yin, and in clearly excessive quantity. The stomach is a part of the Spleen, the yang to the Spleen’s yin. Yin is dominant, with yang as the support. Earth element. Responsible for transportation and transformation. Converts food into qi, which is then transported to the Heart and Kidneys. All of which, according to Brother Wong, should be understood as systems and not the specific organs that they are named after. For some reason nobody has explained yet.”

  Was the dart slipping? Probably. Or rotting. He had a spare, but what good was that? Once he fell in the lake, assuming he survived the first impact, he was going to be dead regardless. There was no way a fifteen foot rope was going to reach a hundred feet straight up.

  “In the beginning was the primordial chaos, which gave birth to yin and yang, which gave birth to the five elements. And from the five elements came everything. From the most mundane to the order of the stars, it’s all built on the same things.”

  The dart jerked a bit. It would be any second now.

  “Earth organ, water, fire, even metal from all the iron in the blood of those centipedes. The only thing it’s missing is wood. Wood being a Yang element. Yin and yang out of balance, demonic influence has become rampant, ah, ‘order is overturned and the heavens are in disarray.’” Tian smiled. There was terror there, and madness. But most of all, in his wide, wild eyes, was the determination of someone who had always bet on themselves

  “That’s what Senior Brother Fu said, and he’s smart. And Grandpa is smart too. And they both say I’m smart. So let's do something really smart.”

  He looked down at the lake of acid, and the blue-green flames licking the air from the surface of the water. The cold was already seeping into his bones. How much colder would it be once he was in it? Would he die at once? Or would he suffer and thrash like the centipedes? But there weren’t any centipedes visible in the water any more. Their carcasses had broken down and sunk below the surfaces.

  “‘Lotuses are snobs. They don’t share their ponds with other flowers.’ I have no idea if that’s true or not. I’ve only ever seen them in the wild that one time.” Tian let go of the rope.