I am a Furnace

Chapter 8: A learning furnace

For the next few days, shizun established a steady rhythm of lessons.

In the mornings, after I bathed and brewed tea, I meditated in the training ground. Although the days were warm, frost laced my breath. I sat cross-legged on the dirt, breathing in and out to cycle the qi through my body. Shizun said the cold air I released was because of the 'instructions' left in my mind: instead of a proper refinement of energy, I churned it in a strange pattern to bolster my yin constitution.

Through the method taught to me, although my energy grew, my soul didn't. This imbalance was dangerous for cultivators and could lead to heart demons—a weakness of the soul that lead one astray and caused psychosis or mental breakdowns.

Although shizun showed me the proper way to meditate, I couldn't get the hang of it that easily. If I did it right, my mind would clear and the qi I cycled would transform into shen, enriching my spiritual awareness. But the more I tried not to think about anything, the more I ended up thinking about all sorts of things. Enlightenment was a long ways away.

After the meditation came the reading and writing lessons. On some days, I sat next to shizun as he read books aloud to me. On other days, shizun made me practice calligraphy.

Our first writing session came the day after shizun learned I couldn't read. He brought me to his study and had me stand next to him by the desk.

On that day, I got to watch his process. Shizun treated calligraphy like a sacred rite. He carefully set up his tools to their proper places before he began. His elegant hands partially unfurled an empty scroll at the center of the desk, then pressed the paper down with two blocks of wood.

To the right of the scroll sat the inkstone, a heavy rounded block with a flat surface that formed a well. On the left side, a stand held shizun's brushes similar to a proud warrior's display of swords.

Shizun had surprised me by handing me a thin, rectangular box, which was heavier than I thought it would be. "Open this." I pried open the lid of the box to see the inkstick nestled inside. This was a dried and compressed block of ink, and when ground against the wet inkstone, would turn into liquid ink. It was beautiful, a solid rectangle of black, with a sheen that reflected dimly in the light. Even though it was destined to be ground up, it was beautifully-decorated: words had been pressed into its surface with indents framed by raised clouds.

I brushed my thumb over the words. "What does it say?"

Shizun lowered his gaze. In his eyes, a hint of emotion flickered, and he held a finger to each word and recited, "You've longed to travel like roaming clouds."

"Oh."

"A line from a poem."

He seemed to be looking far away, even with his gaze on the inkstick. It made me wonder what or who shizun saw, with his mind drifting so far away from this mountain peak. "Does this poem have a special meaning to you, shizun?"

The question roused him from his thoughts. That momentary listlessness disappeared, and he withdrew behind the calm and cold. "This is a well-known poem. In the mortal realm, scholars are often the purchasers of inksticks. All literati in the mortal realm have heard these lines, making it a fair choice for ink craftsmen to mould and better sell their wares."

The implication was that this was just a common poem, only unknown to illiterate furnaces like me. Shizun spoke no longer on this topic. At the tap of his finger, water pooled on the surface of the inkstone.

He directed me to grind the stick onto the wet inkstone to dissolve the compressed block of ink, turning it into a liquid ink usable for writing. If I ground too little, the ink would be gray and faint; too much, and the ink would be dark and murky.

Though I did my best to push the block back and forth, before long, my arms started to tire. By this time, I had only dissolved a small edge of the inkstick.

Shizun stopped me at the point I started to struggle. The small pool of ink gathered at the sloped well of the inkstone, the black liquid mysterious and reflective. He picked up one of his brushes, a slender body of bamboo wood with long soft hairs forming a point at the head, and dipped the brown-haired brush into the ink. When he lifted it, the strands had plumped and turned black at the tip.

At the right-side of the scroll, shizun swept his brush in large, sweeping strokes. He wrote a word, bold and clear, then painted an image in accompaniment. From his brush, currents of ink flowed; images bloomed across the white paper, layers of ink cascading into depths.

Around the symbol written as 山, tall mountain peaks soared over hazy clouds.

Round, fluffy swallows hopped on tree branches over the 鸟 written near a playfully extended wing.

A simple farmhouse on a mountain peak overlooked the character 家. I recognized this as shizun's own home, and saw a face peeking from the window. "Is this me?" I eagerly asked.

Shizun smiled in response. The young boy he'd painted gazed out the window with bright and curious eyes, his chin resting on his hands.

While I was enamored with this miniature painting of myself, shizun set to work on a new one.

Thirty painted scrolls came to be, with shizun spending not more than a few moments on each one. Their inks dried in an instant, and when he was done, he rolled all of the scrolls up.

He then plunked the whole lot of them into my arms and said, "These are your assignments. Write the words until the scrolls are full. You must complete three per day, and when all are complete, you will receive your next set."

I nearly dropped the scrolls.

"That is for after our lesson." Without giving me a chance to breathe, shizun said, "Put the scrolls away. Come learn to hold a brush. For this exercise, we can begin with copying the words of a poem two thousand times."

Thus, shizun stuck a brush in my hand, and the muscles in my arm and fingers were made to undergo hell.

I followed this simple routine of maintenance and learning for almost a week. I bathed, brewed tea, meditated, read with shizun, and practiced writing until my hands were sore. But my lack of control over my cultivation wouldn't improve with the formation in my head.

So one day, I woke up, ready to do my normal daily routine—only for shizun to tell me, "Go get dressed. We're to see the Sect Leader today."