Qi Deviation

The two words cultivators fear most. The qi runs to the gap in the art and strikes it, surges back and scatters; at the light end a dull pain and sinking qi, at the heavy end meridians choked dead and the mind warped. Every few days somebody goes down at a street corner in the market town, chest rising and falling, a ring of people standing round to watch and few of them willing to step in.

The heavy kind has a look a man remembers. First the face flushes and sweat beads at the temple, and the onlookers take it for a hard push at a barrier; one or two of them even cheer under their breath. Then a mouthful of blood comes out, threads of blood seep from the seven orifices, the meridians stand up all over the body as though something were running loose under the skin. At the end the man goes limp, and the colour turns from red to purple. Past that point, if he is not brought back within the burning of a stick of incense, the meridians tear.

There are two ways of saving him. The ordinary one is pressing the points to channel qi, a palm laid flat between the shoulder blades, pushing the reversed qi back the way it came; the scattering qi can be pushed back, but the place that is choked shut will not open. The other is needles, opening a thread of a gap at the tightest of the qi-knots so that the backflowing qi has a road to retreat down. The needle has to land on the aperture, and a fraction of depth either way wastes it. Whether it lands, the market town says, is half a practised hand and half luck.

The light kind never reaches a street corner; it passes in a man’s own room. The qi packs tight in the chest, he squats with his teeth set and gets through the night, and goes to work the next day the same as ever, only with his qi sunk a stretch lower and ten days or half a month before it comes back. Nobody keeps accounts of this kind, and nobody knows. What actually drags a man down is often this kind, borne in silence and borne again and again.

The most troublesome thing after a qi deviation is the reckoning that follows. The poorest meridian-mending medicine runs 10 spirit stones a dose, and the care debt on one qi deviation is 174 copper coins. A man who cannot pay gets taken over: signed to a cultivation indenture, or carried into the kind of place nobody comes out of. What the ring of people at the corner is mostly there for is this stretch, waiting to see whether anybody comes to redeem the man on the ground. Those who go out through the gate with their cultivation ruined do not get their qi-sense back in 3 years, and can only keep a gate, split firewood, beat the night watch, the callus on the hand moved from where a sword is gripped to where a hatchet is.

The market town calls a qi deviation your aptitude reaching its limit. But what if every man who deviates is striking the same flaw?