Chapter 10 — Buddha and Dao
劍問蒼天 · Page 5 of 6
Zhang Qingyue, covered in shame, knelt before Tian Buhui, wishing he could sink through the floor, thinking that whatever scolding the master gave was only his due. Yet he waited half a day and heard not a word from the senior brothers around him, nor even from Tian Buhui. Puzzled, he stole a glance upward and saw that Tian Buhui's face, so full of wrath, had at some point turned to disappointment—truly as the saying goes: no grief is greater than a heart that has died.
Then Tian Buhui flicked his sleeve and rose, shook his head, shifted his short, stout body, and without a word went off toward the rear hall. The disciples exchanged glances, not knowing what to make of it.
Song Dayi had followed Tian Buhui longest and had some inkling of what was in his master's mind; he guessed that the master had given up on this little junior brother. Over the past three months, apart from his cultivation duties, Zhang Qingyue had busied himself running errands in his spare time, glad to help others, and honest by nature; everyone liked him well enough. Life on the mountain was lonely, and even the spoiled Tian Lingsu, suddenly given a playmate close to her own age, for all her scolding to his face, was in her heart a little glad of him.
Song Dayi knit his brows and stepped forward to raise Zhang Qingyue up. "Little junior brother, Master is only angry for the moment; it is nothing serious. So long as you apply yourself diligently, sooner or later you will win the old man's approval."
Zhang Qingyue, ashamed at heart, nodded again and again, and from then on worked all the harder.
Each morning he went up the mountain with Tian Lingsu to cut bamboo. An ordinary disciple, after three months of practicing the Taiji Profound Purity Way, could already cut through black-joint bamboo; it took Zhang Qingyue fully half a year to cut through his first stalk. Yet rain or shine he never missed a day, and his body grew quite sturdy—at least he no longer gasped like an ox on the climb.
And from that time on Tian Buhui paid Zhang Qingyue no further heed. Song Dayi asked once or twice at first how his cultivation was coming along, but as the days lengthened and Zhang Qingyue's progress grew slow beyond all slowing, in the end even Song Dayi lost heart and stopped asking.
Zhang Qingyue himself did not much mind. He knew his aptitude was poor, and though he sometimes wondered whether cultivating the two methods together was the cause, whenever the thought came to him he would recall the monk Puzhao's face and voice, and his heart would warm, and he would persist. Hard beyond words as the road was, his stubborn, dogged nature carried him through.
His quarters were quiet and secluded; by day he cultivated the Taiji Profound Purity Way, and deep in the night he practiced the Great Brahma Prajna. So the time drifted idly by, and before he knew it three years had passed.
And in that time Zhang Qingyue set a record for the worst since the Canglan Sect's founding: he spent a full three years—three times what an ordinary person needed—before at last completing the first tier of the Jade Purity Realm of the Taiji Profound Purity Way, able to control every aperture of his whole body at will and draw the spiritual qi of heaven and earth into his body to run thirty-six circuits. But what none of them knew was that he had at the same time, through practicing the Great Brahma Prajna, gained a first glimpse of the way of inner-qi control and laid a solid foundation.
When Zhang Qingyue timidly announced this to the company one evening at supper, the disciples of the Dazhu Peak line of the Canglan Sect gaped like men seeing an iron tree bloom after a thousand years, and then burst into loud laughter. Song Dayi even caught up the much-grown Zhang Qingyue and tossed him into the air, again and again, overjoyed.
Tian Buhui, seated at the head, watched coldly, gave a sniff, and muttered, "What a prize idiot!"