Picking Up Attributes In Martial World

Chapter 173: Ye Jun

The world dissolved around Ye Jun the moment Weaver finished dying, and the next one took him without giving him a breath of break.

He felt the shift go deeper this time. The first trial had let him watch Weaver from behind, with the distance an audience kept from a stage. This one pulled him into the body...into those memories.

He would feel everything as the boy had felt it.

"I’ll be damned!"

The world finished forming.

He was small and warm and not afraid. He was sitting on the wooden floor of a low-ceilinged room in the Ye Clan’s outer compound, where the lesser bloodline families lived.

The afternoon light came through a single paper window and laid itself in soft yellow stripes across the floorboards. The room smelled of rice steam and the dried herbs his mother kept in a clay jar by the stove.

Ye Lan sat on a low stool in front of him, mending one of his shirts. Her hands moved the needle quickly. She was thinner than a woman her age should have been, and her cheekbones cut sharper than they should have, but Ye Jun at five was too small to know that. To him she was the warmest thing in the world.

She was singing. The song was an old folk tune, but she had been swapping in his name for the hero’s name for as long as he could remember. He thought every song in the world had his name in it.

He had brought her a small yellow flower from the courtyard outside. She set down the needle, took the flower with both hands as if it were a precious artifact, and tucked it into her hair above her ear. Then she leaned forward and pressed a kiss to his forehead.

"You’re going to grow up strong," she said.

She said it just like any other woman might have said it as encouragement, but underneath her voice there was something that was not encouragement. There was a quiet, fierce, almost cornered insistence on it, as if she were arguing with something Ye Jun couldn’t see.

He laughed and crawled into her lap.

The light through the window shifted. The trial moved on.

He was nine.

He stood in front of a long table in one of the assessment halls. A clan elder sat behind it with his fingertips pressed to Ye Jun’s wrist, his eyes closed in concentration. Ye Jun’s mother stood at the back of the hall. His father, Ye Zhong, stood by the window with his arms folded.

The elder’s expression changed slightly. He withdrew his hand, frowned, and pressed his fingertips back to Ye Jun’s wrist. He tried the assessment a second time, then a third. His mouth set into a thin line.

"Broken meridians," the elder announced.

The room went still. Ye Jun, who was nine, didn’t yet understand what those words meant. He understood the silence around them, though, the way the air had changed.

His mother’s hand was on his shoulder. He hadn’t felt her come up behind him. Her fingers tightened until her grip was painful, but she didn’t make a sound.

Ye Zhong’s face had gone blank, something Ye Jun would come to know well. He looked at Ye Jun for a long moment, then at Ye Jun’s mother, and then back at Ye Jun.

His eyes lingered too long on the shape of the boy’s face, the slope of his nose, the line of his jaw, as if he were searching for something there and not finding it.

"A waste of a bloodline slot," Ye Zhong said, like Ye Jun wasn’t standing three paces away.

That night his mother held him longer than usual at bedtime. She told him the things she always told him, that he was loved, that he was hers, that he was going to be strong. But the song was shorter, and her voice underneath the words sounded like a woman who had just realized the time she had been counting on was much shorter than she had thought.

Ye Jun, nine years old, did not understand. He pressed his face into her shoulder and felt her breathe and trusted that whatever was wrong, she would handle it.

The trial gave him no more breath than that.

He was ten, and the rations were cut.

He was ten and a half, and they were moved to a smaller house at the far edge of the outer compound, where the well water tasted of iron.

He was eleven, and his mother was coughing in the mornings.

The trial moved through these years in short, cruel pieces. The other children of the outer compound stopped being allowed to play with him. Then they started being encouraged to hit him. He came home with bruises and his mother cleaned them with a wet cloth and told him stories from her own childhood that she had never told him before, stories that made no geographic sense and that she was careful to give no specific names.

She was getting thinner. Her hands shook when she sewed. She refused to see a clan healer because clan healers cost favors and the favors had run out. She tried to teach him what she could, basic conditioning, reading, the names of medicinal herbs. He stole herbs for her from the outer gardens but was caught twice and beaten both times.

He kept stealing.

She died in the eleventh winter.

He did not see her die. He came home from being beaten by a group of older children and found her on the floor by the wooden stool. The shirt she had been mending had fallen into her lap, the needle was still in her hand.

He sat with her body for a long time before anyone came, too numb with the loss of the only warmth in this world.

A clan servant arrived eventually and told him in a flat, tired voice that the body would be taken away. Standard clan procedure. Ye Jun, eleven and stunned, followed the servants who carried her wrapped in cheap white cloth, because there was nothing else in the world for him to do.

They went past the regular funeral grounds without stopping.

He didn’t notice at first, as he was a child following because following was all he had left. He walked behind the servants through the outer compound and past the courtyard with the dry fountain and down the path that led toward the back of the clan’s territory, and only when he heard the hounds did something in him understand that this was wrong.

The clan’s kennels were behind a high stone wall.

The hounds were big animals with scarred hides, used for hunting Spiritual Beasts in the Black Wind Wildlands. They ate raw meat. The kennel master was waiting by the feeding pen with his arms crossed, and he had not fed them today.

Ye Jun stopped at the edge of the courtyard. The servants kept walking, perhaps forgetting that he was following them. They carried his mother’s body into the open feeding pen and set her down on the dirt.

The kennel master cut the cloth away.

Ye Jun, eleven years old, hid behind a stack of grain barrels at the edge of the courtyard because something in him understood without understanding.

His body moved without his permission. He could not have left if he had wanted to. Something locked his eyes open as if his survival depended on witnessing every part of this.

The hounds were released.

He watched.

He watched the body that had held him, that had sung to him, that had pressed its lips to his forehead in soft afternoon light, become food. The sound was the worst of it. The smell came later. The visual went into a part of him that he did not yet know existed and did not come back out.

Across the pen, on the balcony above the kennels, Ye Zhong stood with two other clan elders. They were talking about something else entirely and weren’t particularly interested.

Ye Zhong glanced once toward the stack of grain barrels where Ye Jun had hidden, glanced directly at it, because of course he had arranged for the boy to be brought along, and his expression did not change.

The lesson was delivered without a word being said.

Weakness made you food. Weakness stripped you of dignity. The world respected only strength, and Ye Jun did not have it.

Ye Jun did not cry. There was nothing left in him to cry with. He stood behind the grain barrels until the sounds were over, and then for a long time after that, and finally he walked back through the compound to the small house at the far edge and lay down on the wooden floor where his mother had died.

The boy who got up the next morning was not the same boy.

He stopped talking, stopped reacting to beatings, moved through the compound like something already dead, and the other children stopped enjoying hitting him because he gave them nothing back, and gradually they stopped bothering.

At night, he trained.

He had broken meridians. Every cultivation manual he could steal from the outer library told him cultivation was impossible for someone like him. He trained anyway.

He ran the length of the outer compound in the dark until his lungs burned and his legs gave out. He did breathing exercises that were never going to work for him. He hit a wooden post in the courtyard with his bare fists until his knuckles split, and then he kept hitting it.

He was not training to succeed, he was training because the only other option was dying quietly in this compound the way his mother had died, and he refused.

He would rather die screaming. He would rather die having spent every breath he had on the world that had taken her.

The hatred crystallized during these years into something cold and clean, something patient, total, unchanging enmity directed at his father, at the clan, at the heavens that had given him broken meridians, at every part of the world that had allowed any of it.

He was thirteen, and then fourteen, and then fifteen, and the hatred had become the load-bearing wall of who he was.

That was when Xiaoyu came.

She was a new servant girl in the outer compound. Her family had been bought into clan service after losing their farm in a drought somewhere south.

She was a year younger than him and she did not know to be afraid of him. Nobody had told her his story yet, or if someone had, she had decided not to believe it.

She brought him water one afternoon. He was sitting under the dead plum tree at the edge of the courtyard after training, his hands wrapped in bloody cloth, and she came up to him with a wooden cup and held it out.

He didn’t even look at her.

She sat down next to him with the water and waited.

The next day she brought him a steamed bun.

The day after that she asked him what he was reading. He did not answer her then either. She told him about her grandmother’s farm instead, in case he wanted to hear it.

She wore him down by being kind. She was not trying to fix him. She did not seem to know that he needed fixing. She just kept showing up.

After a few weeks he answered her in short sentences. After a few months he was talking to her in real ones. She made him laugh once, briefly, on a summer afternoon by the water troughs, and the sound was so unfamiliar in his own throat that he almost got angry.

She was the first person since his mother who treated him like a person rather than a stain on the clan’s bloodline.

Some small, cautious, terrible thing in him began to thaw. He started thinking, very carefully, that maybe his life could become something other than what it had been. That maybe the hatred and the warmth could exist in the same person. That maybe...

The clan noticed. The clan always noticed.

Ye Zhong noticed first. He let it grow for a long time, waited until Ye Jun had admitted to himself that he cared about Xiaoyu, and then he waited a little longer, until the boy had begun to imagine a future small enough to hold her in.

Then he made his move.

Xiaoyu was dragged into the central courtyard one morning on a charge of theft. Stolen jade, planted in her sleeping pallet by someone the clan paid to plant it there. Ye Jun was made to come and watch. He stood at the edge of the courtyard between two clan disciples who had been told to hold his arms if he tried to move.

She looked at him across the courtyard and was already crying. The girl didn’t understand yet what was happening. She just knew that something was very wrong and that Ye Jun was the only person there who might know what.

He looked at her, and the look on his face must have told her everything, because she stopped struggling.

The beating took a long time. The killing came afterward, in front of him, performed by a clan disciple as a training demonstration. Her body was left in the courtyard for an hour before anyone moved it.

Ye Jun couldn’t scream or cry. The disciples holding his arms eventually let him go because there was no need to hold him. He had gone very quiet, and the quiet was the kind that did not break.

The thing inside him that had thawed locked itself away again. It did not even have a door this time. There was just a wall, a giant wall.

The lesson his mother’s death had taught him was confirmed. The lesson the hound scene had taught him was confirmed. Anyone close to him would be destroyed in order to hurt him. The only path that was safe was the path of solitary strength.

He trained harder after that.

And the trial began to press on him.

It started slowly. The hatred that had crystallized in him during the cold years rose up like cold water filling a room. The trial was simply refusing to let him put any of it down. It made him sit in it without relief.

Then the visions came.

He saw Ye Zhong on his knees in front of him, blood at the corners of his mouth, begging. He saw the Ye Clan compound burning, every member of it screaming in the courtyards, the hounds in their kennels turning on their masters for once.

He saw the elders who had stood on the balcony hung from the beams of their own halls. He saw the clan disciple who had killed Xiaoyu lying in the same courtyard, broken in the same ways she had been broken.

The visions felt right and they felt earned. Every part of him that had lived through the trial agreed that this was what was owed.

The trial whispered nothing. It didn’t have to. The hatred was speaking for itself.

He felt his Soul, deep in the Spiritual Realm, beginning to take on the shape of pure revenge. His Dao Heart trembled, something inside him recognized that if he let this Dao take him, it would feel righteous, after all he was bringing justice.

He held very still.

The hatred was real, and it was also justified, and he didn’t deny it. The boy who had watched his mother eaten was right to hate. The boy who had watched Xiaoyu killed in the courtyard was right to hate. There was no false answer here.

But he could see, with the clarity that came from being inside the original Ye Jun’s experience while not being only that, what would have happened if the boy had lived to act on it.

The original Ye Jun would have spent his entire life serving this hatred. He would have torn the Ye Clan apart, and then he would have found the next target, and then the next. The hatred would have been a fuel that burned through everything else he was, until the only thing left was revenge achieved and a man who had nothing else.

The original Ye Jun had survived through hatred. He would have died through it too, not in body but in person.

Hate and Spite defined him.