Chapter 84: The New Master
Hundreds of heads turned at the sound of his boots on the stone.
He walked the length of the yard to the central platform. The cluster of new applicants — the ones who had arrived in the past week post-Yuncheng — held a position off to the right side of the formation, robes a shade newer than the rest. The veterans filled the remaining ranks. Master Jin was not present. He had been informed and was already at the inner court.
Lin Xuan reached the platform. He folded his hands behind his back, the way his father held his hands when an entire courtyard had been waiting on him to speak. He let the yard hold its silence a beat longer than the yard expected.
"Well." His voice carried without lifting. "You all know who I am by now. Lin Xuan. From this morning onward, your master."
A small wave of murmurs ran the formation. Some of them had been told. Most had not. One of the veterans in the third rank let half a word escape before his mouth could close around it.
"...master?"
Lin Xuan located the voice without turning his head.
"Yes. I will be training you starting today. Is there something strange about that?"
The veteran’s face slackened into the open expression of a man who had not been ready to be asked a direct question by the Crown of Yuncheng. He did not say anything more. Nobody else did either.
"Think so," Lin Xuan went on. "Today, you are going to show me what you have been doing with Master Jin. So go ahead. Show me what you do."
He took three steps off the platform and folded his arms beside the rail. The senior disciples in the front exchanged half-glances and began the morning formation. The breathing drill came first — the one every outer disciple in the empire ran before sword forms. Inhale, hold, exhale, rest.
Mira opened the inner channel at his shoulder.
[ Xuan. I am going to analyse each one of the hundreds in front of you. Are you ready? ]
’Go ahead. Let us straighten them out.’
She came back in layers. He took each one the moment she sent it.
[ First layer. Breathing is wrong in eighty-three percent of them. They are inhaling at the chest, not the dantian. Average depth is forty percent of what the Nine Dragons catechism specifies. ]
Lin Xuan walked back onto the platform. He raised one hand. The formation paused mid-cycle.
"Stop. All of you. Your breathing is wrong. Almost every one of you is inhaling at the chest. The Nine Dragons Breathing Art has a four-count catechism. Four counts in. Four hold. Four out. Four rest. The inhale starts at the dantian, not at the lungs. Watch."
He demonstrated. The diaphragm dropped first. The abdomen expanded a beat before the ribs. The four counts arrived with the patience of a metronome and departed the same way.
"Try it. The next ten cycles. If your shoulders move, you are doing it wrong."
The formation began to breathe under his watch. The younger ones caught the rhythm by the third cycle. The veterans took longer. They had been breathing wrong for years, and their bodies needed to be convinced that the old way had been the wrong one.
[ Second layer. Half of them are placing the lead foot too far inside the centre line. They are losing rotational power on every cut. ]
Lin Xuan walked into the formation. He touched the inside of one disciple’s ankle with the back of his own foot. The boy adjusted without being told. He touched the next. That one adjusted faster. By the third correction, the rest of the rank had stopped waiting to be touched — they were watching the ankle in front of them and matching it. A wave of corrections moved through the formation without him needing to raise his voice.
[ Third layer. Three of the back-row veterans have not adjusted their stance once in the past six minutes. Two of them are yawning between forms. ]
Lin Xuan walked the length of the yard. The first master to walk the back of this yard in years.
He stopped behind the three veterans. He did not name any of them.
"You three. Your form has been bad for three years because nobody has corrected it. That is not your fault. But it is going to be your fault if it continues from this morning forward. Catch up to the line. Begin again."
There was no anger in the line. The three of them swallowed once, reorganised their stances, and went back into the rotation.
As Lin Xuan walked back toward the platform, a disciple from the middle of the yard turned his head a fraction to track what had happened at the back.
Lin Xuan did not turn his head. He kept walking. He spoke at the floor in front of him.
"Do not get distracted if you do not want to be corrected in another way."
The disciple’s head went back to centre before half a heartbeat had passed.
When Lin Xuan reached the edge of the yard, he kept walking past the practice posts and out toward the stone field along the back wall.
The training stones lay along the perimeter in a rough hierarchy of weight. Fist-sized. Head-sized. Chest-sized. Boar-sized. And at the very back, half-buried into the dirt of the wall — the ones nobody used. The ones some forgotten outer disciple from another generation had hauled down from the upper quarries and abandoned because nobody after him could move them.
Lin Xuan walked past every weight he had been expected to choose from.
He stopped at the back wall. He bent his knees. He placed both hands under the lowest curve of a stone the size of a small chest — a stone whose grey surface had been carved by two centuries of mountain wind, whose weight Master Jin almost certainly could not have lifted unassisted.
He picked it up.
The yard heard the lift before it saw it. Boots shifted on dirt. Forms slowed. The breathing drill broke pattern in three different ranks at once.
Lin Xuan carried the stone back to the platform. His forearms held the strain. His face did not. He set the stone down with a thud that travelled into the compacted dirt and was felt by every disciple standing on it.
"Push-ups," he said. "One hundred. If you break form, restart at zero."
He lowered himself into a plank. With one motion of the right shoulder, he lifted the chest-sized stone from the dirt and seated it across his upper back, balanced between the shoulder blades.
"Count with me. One."
The yard froze for three heartbeats.
Mouths opened. Eyes widened. Two of the new applicants exchanged half a glance that did not need words. The veterans in the back row, the same ones who had been corrected an hour earlier, stared.
Nobody spoke.
The formation dropped into push-up position and began.
[ Beautifully done. Now keep them on rhythm. They will not complain when their master is moving more weight than they could collectively lift. ]
After the push-ups came squats.
Lin Xuan rolled the chest stone off his back. He stood, walked back to the rear wall, and bent his knees at the next stone — one shaped like the body of a year-old boar, irregular and pitted, the surface carrying the scars of where some long-dead disciple had tried and failed to break it with a chisel.
He lifted it.
He carried it to the centre.
"Three hundred squats. Same rule."
