The Tattered Breathing Scroll

A 12-page hand-copied fragment of a breathing art, bound through with coarse cord, no name on the cover. It has passed through at least 3 hands in the copying; the writing runs light and dark by turns, the ink on the first few pages already gone brown while the back half is still black.

On the third page there is a title, the Breathing Scroll, Part One, and beneath it a verse of 16 characters:

In two, hold one, out two, hold one. Draw the qi down and sinking, past the dantian, around the Governing Vessel.

Against the Lesser Heavenly Cycle Breathing Art in common use in the market town, it runs one more minor meridian below the left rib — and it is on that minor meridian that a break half an inch long has been left.

Trained as it is written, the qi runs to the break and strikes it: at the light end a dull ache, at the heavy end a qi deviation and torn meridians. Strike it often enough and the injury grinds deeper into the minor meridian layer by layer, until in the end a man is stuck at the top of the third layer, up against a wall with no door in it, push as he will. Running one more minor meridian looks at first glance like a gain, and the men who copied it mostly thought so too.

There are some 70 rogue cultivators in the market town training tattered scrolls of no known origin. Not all of them train this one, but what they run into is the same thing.

The 3 hands each have a temper of their own. The first writes upright, not a stroke slurred. The second was working against time — the characters lean to the right, and where he did not recognize something he traced it as it stood. The third spared himself the most: any stroke he was unsure of, he covered over with a blot of ink. Between the three of them, errors and omissions were added down the copies. Only the run of that one stretch of minor meridian is copied in all three without a hair’s difference.

Scrolls like this are not sold on the stalls in the market town, and could not be. A man who buys one wraps it in oilcloth and pushes it into a hidden slot under the floorboards, takes it out at night to train, and puts it straight back afterward. Asked what he trains, he says the Lesser Heavenly Cycle Breathing Art.

There is only one line about where this scroll came from: 6 months ago, a drunk old rogue cultivator traded it for 3 spirit stones. Handing it over, the old man left one sentence behind. “Young man. Don’t train this.” Nobody took the words to heart at the time. It was after striking the flaw once and being bent double with the dull pain of it that someone went back over them a word at a time.

Where the fragment is broken, and why none of the 3 men who copied it mended the flaw, the scroll does not say. The edge of that break is not worm-eaten and not water-stained. It is clean, the way a thing is clean when a knife has been taken to it afterward.