Chapter 19: Training Montage (That Goes Wrong)
Yun Shu gave me forty days Training to stop being a fraud.
It did not go well.
The first morning, she set up in the little dirt yard behind the laundry, rolled up her sleeves, opened a fresh page in her black ledger, and said, with the calm of a woman who solves problems for a living: "We’ll start with the basics. Show me a punch."
I showed her a punch.
There was a long silence. A bird, somewhere, stopped singing, as if out of respect.
"...That was a punch?" Yun Shu said.
"That was my best punch."
She wrote something in the ledger. I didn’t ask what. I have, since, imagined it said subject cannot punch — with the word cannot underlined twice.
We tried everything. She tried to teach me a stance, and I fell over. She tried to teach me to dodge, and I dodged directly into a water barrel. She had me hold a wooden practice sword, and after watching me hold it for a while she quietly took it back, the way you’d take a sharp thing from a baby. By midday she had filled three pages and arrived at a conclusion that she delivered flatly, sitting on an overturned bucket, pinching the bridge of her nose.
"You have," she said, "no skill. None. Not a little. Not some. You are, physically, exactly what you appear to be — a clerk who sits down for a living. I have trained soldiers, Lin Bo. I have trained bad soldiers. You are not a bad soldier. A bad soldier is on the chart. You are not on the chart."
"I told everyone this," I said. "I keep telling everyone this."
"Then how," said Yun Shu — and here she leaned forward, and the scientist in her woke up, the part that had spent eleven years figuring out how impossible things were really done — "did you fold a demon of the Ninth Pit through a wall?"
So we tested that.
And this is the part that taught me the most terrifying thing about myself.
She had me do the Breath — my one and only "power," the gust that came after a sneeze. In the empty yard, with no one watching but Yun Shu, I breathed out as hard as I could at a stack of clay pots.
It ruffled them. One wobbled. It was, frankly, pathetic — about as much wind as you’d make blowing out a lot of candles at once.
Yun Shu frowned and wrote that down. Then she did something clever. She went and got Tao Tao.
Tao Tao had been hovering at the edge of the yard all morning, of course, watching her Master train with the shining eyes of a girl witnessing history. She had written down my failed punch as "Master Lin Bo demonstrated the Formless Fist, a technique so advanced it appears to do nothing." I’d given up correcting her. Yun Shu positioned her right in front of me, about ten feet back, and said: "Tao Tao. I want you to watch Lin Bo do the Breath again. And I want you to believe, with everything you have, that it’s going to be incredible."
"I always do," said Tao Tao, completely serious.
"I know," said Yun Shu. "That’s why I picked you."
I breathed out again. Same breath. Same effort.
It hit Tao Tao like a gale off the sea, knocked her clean off her feet, sent her tumbling head over heels across the yard into a hedge, and blew the entire stack of clay pots into powder against the back wall.
Tao Tao sat up in the hedge, hair full of leaves, beaming with absolute joy. "Incredible," she breathed.
Yun Shu lowered her ledger very slowly.
"It’s not you," she said quietly. "The power. It was never you. The same breath does nothing in an empty yard and levels a wall in front of a believer." She looked at me, and I watched her understand it the way I was, in that exact moment, beginning to understand it. "Your strength isn’t in you, Lin Bo. It’s in them. In what people believe. You’re not a cultivator who got strong. You’re a—" she searched for the word, and the one she found was gentle, and it landed like a stone anyway "—a vessel. You hold whatever the world pours into you. And when no one’s looking, when no believer is near you—" she didn’t finish.
She didn’t have to.
When no one’s looking, I’m just a clerk who can’t punch.
I sat down in the dirt next to the powdered pots. I want to tell you I took it well. I didn’t, not really, not inside. Because here is the thing nobody warns you about being made of other people’s belief: it means that the famous, mighty, world-shaking Lin Bo — the demon-slayer, the man with the glowing noodles, the comet climbing the sky — isn’t actually me. It’s a costume the whole world is holding up, and I’m just the small tired nothing standing inside it. Strip the belief away and there’s no hero under there. There’s no one under there at all. Just a man who wanted six tables and never even got those.
"Hey," said Yun Shu. She’d come to sit beside me on the dirt, which she never does, ledger set aside, which she never does either. "For what it’s worth." She was quiet a moment, looking at the powdered pots. "I’ve read the legends of every great name on the continent. Spent my whole life pulling them apart, finding the fake under the famous. And here’s a thing I’ve never told anyone." She glanced at me. "Under almost every legend, when you pull it apart, there’s a frightened, ordinary person who got carried somewhere they never meant to go. Everyone’s a vessel, Lin Bo. You’re just the only one honest enough to know it." She nudged my shoulder with hers, awkwardly, like she wasn’t sure how. "The clerk who can’t punch is still in there. I’ve met him. I like him better than the demon-slayer, frankly. He makes decent noodles."
It didn’t fix it. But it helped. More than she knew.
"So what do we do," I said. "I can’t train. I can’t get better. I walk into that arena in front of ten million people and I have nothing — no skill, no technique, nothing but whatever they decide to believe about me in the moment."
"Yes," said Yun Shu grimly.
And from my shoulder, Scroll — quiet all morning, watching — spoke up, and for once its smugness had an edge of something fierce under it.
"Then it’s a good thing," it said, "that making ten million people believe something is the one thing in this entire world that I am better at than anyone who has ever lived." The gold of its eyes burned steady. "You don’t need skill, talent. You’ve got me. Walk into that arena and don’t fight. Never fight. Just let them believe. I’ll handle the rest." A pause, and then, lower, that buried fierce thing again: "I’ve done this before. I know exactly how to make a legend big enough to be safe. Trust me. Not again."
There it was once more. Not again. The two words it didn’t mean to keep saying.
I let it go. For now.
But I lay awake that night thinking about vessels, and costumes, and the small nothing inside the hero — and about whoever the Scroll had poured all of this into before me, and what had happened to them, and whether they’d lain awake too, in some other room, a long time ago, feeling exactly this hollow.
