Tian fell towards the burning lake of acid, doing his best to go slow. His best wasn’t very good. He made his body as light as he could manage, but it was a long way from being as light as a feather. He fell belly first, stretching out his arms and legs like a bat, hoping his robes might catch a little of the air and slow his fall. It didn’t really work.

  His mind raced as he thought through his plan. “Plan.” Maybe more like a “pln.” It was all based on his bare understandings of utterly, impossibly profound cosmological and medical concepts. It was like trying to perform surgery after reading the Table of Contents of an introduction to anatomy. On the other hand, it was better than giving up entirely, so he’d go with it.

  Tian felt the air getting colder and denser as he fell. He knew it was only a couple of seconds, but it felt longer. Like the air was shifting from gas to liquid despite the blue-green flames dancing over the waters below. At the last moment he twisted to hit the water feet first. His seniors had been very clear on this- if you do fall in the water, make sure you land feet first. You could survive two broken legs, but you couldn’t survive a crushed skull, and you never know what’s under the surface.

  He just wished he had learned how to swim. Not that it was going to make a difference.

  Tian crashed into a lake of freezing acid. The tiny bones in his feet shattered, his ankles broke, his fibula, tibia, patella, femur, all shattered. The joints with his pelvis ripped apart, stabbing up into his guts, ruining the flesh and damaging the dantian. The force sheared away the organs inside his body, making them pulp against each other, against his shattering ribs, and his broken spine. His brain took a violent blow. Somehow he retained his wits.

  He was in the belly of a demon. A sadistic and cruel death would be entirely fitting. Infernal interference was the only reasonable explanation for Tian becoming fully paralyzed yet experiencing each and every sensation of pain his ruined body experienced.

  And then the acid set in, and with it, the ruinous yin qi.

  What was yin? Half the universe. But in the belly of a demonic bird it was despair. It was depression and regret so total, it didn’t even permit suicide. There could be no escape from this pain besides death, and your death was beyond your control. There was only stillness. Only dissolution.

  This is why the centipedes fought so viciously when they fell, Tian realized. They had to drive themselves, stir up all their fury to combat that endless apathy. But the end is always the trasheap, the midden. The place where all the waste goes to rot.

  The effect was a sort of sublimation of pain. Tian knew that every bit of him, inside and out, was in agony. He knew that this would kill him in moments. He knew that he was submerged in acid, being dissolved with terrible quickness. The cold froze flesh so totally, it forcibly rotted away his muscle and tissue. Tian didn’t know the word ‘sublimation’ or that water could be made to evaporate by extreme cold. He was falling apart. He was dying. He was helpless. He couldn’t stir even a finger, and the cold was invading his body. It was even freezing his meridians.

  “There is no growth without yin, no birth without yang. Pregnancy is yin- the fetus accepts the blessings of the mother’s body and accumulates all it needs to be born. It also accumulates luck and fate.” Brother Wong’s words drifted through his mind.

  “Birth is yang. You need both in balance. The five elements, yin and yang. Enormous concepts. Enormous. But you have been immersed in them since before you were born. Since the moment of your conception, yin and yang combined. Immense grandeur, the secrets of heaven and earth, Sun and Moon mere embodiments of these supreme principals- all found in your parent’s bed. All found in you, and me, and every blade of grass, every rock, every breath of air.” Brother Wong smiled one of his sharp, pointy smiles.

  “Now, can you turn that theory into something practical?”

  “My parents tossed me into a garbage heap, Brother Wong.” Tian didn’t answer the old man. He had just nodded, and got back to tying purple thyme on the long strings in the workshop to dry.

  “They saw my face and hated me. They threw me in the trash, and never once came looking for me. Or worse, maybe they were the rock throwers. Am I supposed to be touched by all this? Because I can’t really thank my mother for all her ‘gifts,’ can I? The only thing I can thank my parents for is giving birth to me. But after they threw me in the trash, I can’t say they gave me life. Life is something I fought for. Even after Grandpa Jun found me, life is something I took for myself.”

  There wasn’t much of Tian left. His body was almost more of an outline around his nerves and brain now. Even his dantians and meridians were corroding. They might be pressed by the acid, but the three elixir fields endured. In the lowest dantian, a few fingers below Tian’s navel, a fierce light still flickered. Mysteriously, the storage rings didn’t shift from where his fingers should have been. Neither did Grandpa Jun.

  “I took life for myself, Brother Wang. I don’t know why I live, but I still want to soar. Brother Fu. Grandpa. Watch me fly.” Tian’s mind was fraying, lost in pain and despair, but not gone. He still had a spark of will left in him. That little irreducible fraction of fight that pain or and sickness and loneliness and fear never managed to eradicate. And it was enough to begin his counterattack.

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  “After winter comes spring.”

  The Advent of Spring was one of the supreme arts of Ancient Crane Mountain, created by the first disciple of the Ancient Crane herself. How could it be something simple? The art revolved through the ruined meridians and stimulated the breath of prenatal qi that burned brightly in the lower dantian. It drew in the yin qi, cold and ruthless, and warmed it.

  The dissolution of Tian’s body stopped. There was a moment of fragile balance.

  Yin qi could be demonic. Despairing. The embodiment of death. But it was also relaxation, acceptance, and accumulation. How could half the universe be just one or two things? Yin qi was neither good nor bad, it was only what was made of it. The demon used it to break down its food to become a force of cruel murder. Tian used it to break down himself- and rebuild.

  Yin and yang reversed, the five elements were born.

  The damage to his meridians began to slowly repair. The lower dantian is known as the Golden Stove for good reason. The qi of the outside world was drawn in, and refined in that mystic alchemy furnace into Tian’s own vital energy. That power that gave life and strength to a body. The flame in that furnace was none other than the breath of prenatal qi. That minuscule wisp of energy that embodied a supreme yang principle- growth!

  The refined energy stretched along lotus root meridians, expanding them, making them more resilient and flexible. It did the same for the middle and upper dantians. The books Tian had studied said that it was essentially impossible to change the dantians. Their qualities were fixed practically as soon as you were born. But Tian was in no ordinary condition, and this was no ordinary yin qi.

  It was the qi refined by the stomach of a Heavenly Person realm demonized hawk. The qi carried a wisp of immortality with it. The bodily reconstruction accepted that accumulated energy and nurtured flesh. Shattered bones were healed or replaced entirely. Missing bones were rebuilt.

  Tian could look down on all ten toes, now. His organs were rebuilt once more, drawing in the five elemental qi to rebuild the systems of his body. His muscles grew back sleek and strong. His spine was reforged, no longer between tiger and dragon, but a true rain dragon in flight!

  Cold flames danced over his body, constantly trying to burn him away. They were doomed to lose. The flesh that they destroyed was rebuilt and repaired using the qi of the demonized bird itself.

  Yin had reached the extreme. Tian became the spark of pure yang that triggered the transformation. The tree reached down its roots and suppressed the dark waters. Corruption was transformed into purification. Demonic energy became immortal energy. The rebuilt body now carried a faint hint of that heavenly breath.

  The one place the reconstruction seemed to falter was Tian’s hands. Wave after wave of immortal energy crashed against them, and was driven back. It was as though there was a wall there, or a barrier. Invisible, untouchable, and not even the corrosive yin power could break it down. But there was an awful lot of that yin qi. And Tian was persistent.

  He hammered away at them, and when that didn’t work, he narrowed his focus. His middle fingers! They had been destroyed down to between the first and second knuckles on the left hand, and to the first knuckle on the right. He poured all his efforts into healing just those two fingers. The energy built and built, pressing and boiling against the invisible barrier. Relentlessly building. He felt the barrier weakening. Tian reached through the pain and pressed even harder with his qi!

  There was no crack or shattering noise when he broke through. But if one had the right ears, one might faintly hear the triumphant peals of an ancient temple bell. Qi cycled through Tian, flowing more smoothly than it had before. Something had changed in him. What, he didn’t know. But something had definitely changed, and for the better. He tried to press on with the other fingers, but it was like striking a mountain with an egg. There would have to be another period of accumulation.

  The acid had stopped gnawing at his skin. Tian blinked his eyes. They didn’t even sting. It was just dark and eerily lit with flickers of blue-green flames. They drifted in the dark water too. Tian was sinking. He didn’t know how long it had been since he breathed. It felt like hours, but then, he hadn’t had intact lungs for that long. Eventually, his feet landed on the rubbery, slippery wall of the stomach.

  He could hear awful booming noises. The bird shifted suddenly, and he was sent sliding. Ripples of force shook him, tossed him until he could no longer keep up and down straight. There was an enormous crash and the bird vibrated with a scream of rage. Tian heard splashes coming from up above. The bird was fighting. His brothers and sisters were dying.

  Can’t have that. Tian felt the storage rings on his fingers. Even with the insanity, that had him boggling for a second. How? Just what were these rings? He shook it off. Not the time, not the place. He pinched up a bit of the stomach, trying to grip a bit through the slimy mucus covering it. No luck.

  He pulled a camp knife out of his ring and stabbed it in. Success, sort of. He had gotten through the mucus, but barely touched the lining. By the time he lifted the blade to check the damage, the wooden handle had corroded to nothing. The blade was already pitted and etched as well. He didn’t try to stab again. He used the blade to scrape away as much mucus as he could.

  “Do you know what an ulcer is, bird bastard?” Tian thought. “Well, this is going to be a bit more than that.” He pulled out his backup knife and hacked into the lining. He worked quickly, trying to get as deep as he could and leverage the blade around to open a hole.

  By the time the second blade dissolved, the acid had invaded the wound and was ripping the flesh apart. Soon, Tian could stick his hands into the gap. Then his hands and feet. Then something broke through because there was a sudden suction from the tear and the screams of the bird nearly shattered his eardrums.

  Tian grinned, his once missing and broken teeth now shining white in the dark. The acid was widening the rip. Soon, the pressure would pull him through, and dump him into the body of the beast. He would have to swim through blood and hack through muscle to escape. And that was just fine by him.