Teaching the Tao

Night. Lu Zhao went looking for Zhang Like, and the two of them drank at a late-night food stall outside the border defense station, intelligence-gathering on the side. As Border Defense Duty Battalion Commander, the direct superior of every grassroots border soldier, Zhang Like had many things pass through his hands whether he liked it or not. Lü Jinshan had barely finished being chewed out before Zhang Like knew all about it. Lu Zhao didn't even have to ask. Zhang Like was already gloating: "Old Lu, let me tell you some good news. Lü Jinshan's in for a rough time." Lu Zhao raised his cup, touched it to the other man's, and asked, betraying nothing: "How so?" "That business a few days ago, with the Greenwood bandit." Zhang Like stirred his chopsticks through the pot and fished out a big piece of tripe. "It happened suddenly, and he was already close to the border—we were afraid he'd get clean away, so they had you shoot him yourself." Lu Zhao sipped his drink and said nothing, signaling him to go on. "Your report said he might have hidden something, but Lü Jinshan just never ordered the mountain searched." The smile wouldn't stay off Zhang Like's face, and he told it with relish: "The special investigation team came down, took one look at the report, and hauled our grand station chief straight over for a proper dressing-down! Word is Team Leader Lin pointed at his nose and cursed him out, and our Station Chief Lü could only keep his head down, not daring to breathe." That last part surprised Lu Zhao a little, and he asked: "They're not in the same system. In theory, Lü Jinshan doesn't answer to her." "In theory the man who runs the mess hall is my equal too—isn't he still a head shorter than me when he sees me? But that Team Leader Lin must come from no small background. She's got an air of nobility she was born with. Who knows whose family's precious young lady she is." Zhang Like was genuinely curious; a few brief encounters had already told him this woman was not ordinary. Lin Zhiyan acted with lightning decisiveness, and at the same time had little use for rules and standard procedure. People like that were either hotheads, or born to wealth and power—they were the rules themselves. Someone appointed team leader of the special investigation team by the prefecture was most unlikely to be the former. Lu Zhao wasn't much bothered: "Noble or not, none of it lands on my head." "Now you're just taking your grudge out on her." Zhang Like teased: "If I were you, I'd hurry off to a beautician and get myself prettied up. Who knows—you might learn their arts and turn them right back on her." "If I were you, I'd find a tailor and have your mouth sewn shut." "Tsk. Not one speck of opportunism in you." After the two had traded a few more jabs, Zhang Like sobered his face and pulled the topic back around: "The large-scale mountain search should start tomorrow. You know Ant Ridge, and you're a psychic superhuman. If you find it first, best to keep it quiet." Lu Zhao said nothing, a probing look in his eyes. "Hand it in now, and the credit is still yours—Lü Jinshan gets to count it as redeeming a fault with merit. But stall a while, and at the very least he'll be tagged with a lapse of oversight. Maybe even formal discipline." Without Lu Zhao steering him at all, Zhang Like had landed on exactly the same thought. The border defense station was organized as a full battalion, its power resting on three staffs: command, duty, and oversight. In the structure of power, the station chief, the political instructor, and the duty deputy station chief formed the core leadership. Station Chief Lü Jinshan, as the highest military commanding officer, had overall charge of everything. The oversight branch handled discipline and ideological development and held major supervisory power over the station chief, but in ordinary times it stayed all but invisible. Zhang Like, commander of the duty battalion, was responsible for duty deployments, cases, and other operational affairs—and especially at the level of concrete cases and operations, he held considerable discretionary authority and control of information. Lü Jinshan, as station chief, held the greatest power, but his subordinates still checked him. Otherwise a border defense station could all too easily become a petty emperor of the border, even fostering and guiding smuggling. It had all but become an unwritten rule: whenever a border defense station went wrong, smuggling was sure to be involved. So long as the man showed no opening, Zhang Like would never be stupid enough to cross his direct superior. But if the man showed an opening, don't blame him for handing over the knife. After all, over the Lu Zhao affair, the man had spent the past year needling him at every turn. ----- Back in his room, Lu Zhao sank his consciousness into his mental world. He pushed through the layered psychic tsunamis and came once more to the Primordial realm. The old Taoist sat cross-legged within, his gaze turning toward him warm and mild: "Layman, today there was a faint strangeness stirring in your spirit aperture. Has something from outside touched it?" Something from outside? Lu Zhao was taken aback for a moment, then at once thought of the Fate Bone. But how had the old Taoist known? Could he observe the real world? The spirit aperture was the psychic body, yet Lu Zhao himself had sensed nothing unusual. A thread of wariness rose in him on instinct, and he answered truthfully: "I found a Fate Bone in the mountains. I seized it from a bandit." The old Taoist stroked his beard: "This thing benefits the soul. Make good use of it, layman." "This junior's life-force development is only thirty-five points. With my body as it is now, it's not yet fit to absorb and devour other Fate Bones... er, Taoist master, would you even understand 'life-force development'?" Lu Zhao wrung his brains dry and, for the moment, couldn't think how to explain. In ancient times, the classification of divine-power Fate Bones was not the simple five-category scheme used today. The ancients distinguished them by fate pattern and Fate, coining anywhere from dozens to a hundred-odd terms. Life-force development could roughly be divided into six stages, each with its own traits, and the common thread was combining like with like. That is, with every promotion in rank, one could devour Fate Bones of the same type to strengthen one's divine power. For Lu Zhao to raise his own divine power, he would have to wait until he was promoted to second rank. Stacked up that way, every divine power had a road leading to a great divine power, whose final form was one of the Tiangang and Disha divine powers. "The names differ, but the sense is one." The old Taoist nodded and lifted a hand for him to sit. Lu Zhao sat cross-legged on the rush cushion, back straight as a rifle, the bearing of a soldier showing through unbidden. Toss a Taoist robe over him, and no one would likely take him for a Taoist anyway. Even now, he wasn't quite used to sitting cross-legged. "Layman, here you may do as you please." Lu Zhao stopped holding his back rigid, let it bend, and relaxed his posture. The two sat facing one another, and the teaching began again. Their time together was like that of teacher and student at a school: the old Taoist taught without explaining his reasons, and Lu Zhao attended without paying tuition. It was as if their presence in this space alone had fixed the identities of teacher and student. "Today we speak of nature and life. What is called nature is spirit, intent, and awareness." "Zhuangzi said: form safeguards the spirit, and each has its own measures and norms—this is called nature." "Nature is the Tao that Heaven and Earth endow to man; it carries inborn constraints." "The original intent of cultivating nature is to break free of the constraints built into human nature and transcend the cage of troubles woven from the seven emotions and six desires. Do not drift with the current outside; do not distort your true self within. Follow the natural way, and only then will you attain great ease." Several thousand characters of abstruse scripture flowed from the old Taoist like drifting clouds and running water, without the slightest stumble. When he finished, he left Lu Zhao the space of one stick of incense to think. The lecture's difficulty had climbed steeply today. Lu Zhao's head swam as he listened; every word had to be chewed and ground to pieces. Education at Dijing University prized the all-rounder, letters and arms alike. Lu Zhao had dabbled in ancient divine-power Fate theory, and the psychic discipline he majored in connected with the human nature the old Taoist spoke of. He could catch the thread running through it, grasp the literal meaning, and link it to the theories of modern psychic-superhuman mind science. But those theories weren't enough to carry him to understanding. What the old Taoist expounded was like a skyscraper, and Lu Zhao could only stand at its foot and touch the corner of the building. He could only commit the content to memory and raise his questions later. When time was up, the old Taoist asked: "Layman, have you understood?" Lu Zhao shook his head honestly: "Half-understood at best. I can just barely grasp the literal meaning and some of the connections between the concepts, but as for 'insight'—I'm afraid I've only brushed the surface." He was used to the modern education system's clear definitions, logical derivation, and experimental verification, and with this mystical style of teaching that demanded "enlightenment," he always felt a little out of his element. But Lu Zhao's talent was excellent, and he could sense that the old Taoist's material ran deeper still. He could not use his existing knowledge to understand the scripture, yet through a single corner of it he could work out once-obscure points of knowledge, answering questions his former self had left open. The cultivation of the spirit lies in understanding: the more of the world you understand, the more resilient you become. The old Taoist smiled instead of answering: "No matter. The time has not yet come. As your practice deepens in the days ahead, the channel will form of itself, as water carves its course." "..."