The Flawed Ten Thousand Methods

Rogue cultivators believe one saying: “Methods are simply like this. What it comes down to is talent and luck.” Failing to advance, a pill that ruins your meridians, a qi deviation at the moment of breakthrough — all of it your own poor root-bone, your own bad fortune.

Move to another street and the explanation changes with it. The pill-shop keeper calls it the firing, says nobody watched the charcoal that night. The old hands at the talisman stalls call it craft, say the last stroke was not closed steadily enough. The sect stewards have the most respectable version, four characters long: uneven root-bone. The explanations differ; where they land is the same. The one to blame is the man.

Every trade has its own name for this flaw. The pill shops call it backlash, the talisman stalls call it a broken stroke, the people who train call it a hurdle. All of them mean the same thing — you get that far, and the thing stops on its own.

But lay a dozen-odd copies of the same breathing art side by side and the place they lack turns out to be the same place. Turn the pill that sells hardest in the market town over and over in your hand and the ingredient gone bad turns out to be always the same one. Of the Qi Condensation Powder one middling pill shop in Qingqi Market sells in 3 months, at least one in ten comes back. In the waste-pill vat in the back yard, the death-black pills that ruin your meridians the moment you swallow them come out at a steady 2 to 3 a month, year after year, neither more nor fewer. The outer gate of the Xuanzhao Sect lost 3 disciples this year, different depths of root-bone, different speeds at the fire, and every one of them went down on the same layer, at the same aperture.

The look of the break is harder still to lay at heaven’s door. A flaw worn open by the years has a rotten, scattered edge; it feels furred under the finger. The breaks in these flaws are clean. The angle where the cut starts, the direction the stroke resumes, they match one to the next, as though someone had taken the same knife to the same spot and cut down through them one copy at a time.

“All ten thousand methods are flawed.” The market town uses the line to talk people down: a shopkeeper uses it on a customer who has lost his money, an old rogue cultivator uses it on a newcomer. But the line may not have been meant for resignation at all. To say a thing has a flaw is to say it was once whole, and that a piece went missing afterward.

All ten thousand methods are flawed. Nobody in the market town chases the line back to where it came from, and nobody could answer if they did. If it were to be chased, there are only two things worth chasing: who left these flaws, and who they were left for.