Chapter 3: The Art of Being Average
Time in the Great Wei Dynasty did not march forward with the clarion call of progress; it ground away like a rusted millstone, crushing the weak and polishing the ruthless.
A decade slipped through the valleys of the Black Mountain Range.
Li Mo was now thirty-six years old. To the inhabitants of Clearwater Village, he was a fixture as unremarkable and permanent as the moss on the northern side of the ancient village well. He was Li Mo the farmer, Li Mo the adequate trapper, a man whose shoulders had taken on a permanent, weary stoop from years of fighting the rocky soil and carrying the heavy burdens of a growing family. His face was weathered, mapped with the deep lines of sun exposure and a diet heavy in coarse grains. He smiled easily, agreed quickly, and never, ever raised his voice in the village square.
In the brutal hierarchy of the rural peasantry, he was considered incredibly fortunate. He had not been conscripted into the provincial lord's border wars. He had not been crippled by a wild beast. And, most miraculously of all, his wife Wang Cui had borne him five healthy children who had all survived past their fifth winters—a statistical anomaly that the village chief attributed to the excellent Feng Shui of the Li family's ancestral graves.
There was Li Changshou, now sixteen and built like a young ox. There was Li Mei, fourteen, quiet and observant with a mind as sharp as a knapping stone. Following them were Li Changping at ten, Li Chang'an at seven, and the youngest, a toddling girl named Li Lan, who had just seen her second spring.
Five children. Five radiant, pulsing branches on the Golden Bloodline Tree that stood eternal within Li Mo's sea of consciousness.
But beneath the guise of the weary, fortunate farmer, a terrifying transformation had occurred.
It was midnight in the dead of winter. The wind howled outside the mud-brick hut, tearing at the thatched roof. Inside, the family slept soundly, huddled beneath thick layers of animal pelts and heavy, patched quilts.
Li Mo, however, was not asleep. He was in the hidden root cellar beneath the floorboards, a space he had painstakingly expanded over the last decade until it was a cavernous, reinforced chamber nearly the size of the hut above.
He sat cross-legged on the packed dirt floor, stripped to the waist despite the freezing temperature of the cellar. The air around him seemed to warp and shimmer slightly, carrying a faint, unnatural heat.
His eyes snapped open. They were not the dull, subservient eyes of a peasant, but the cold, piercing voids of an apex predator.
Crack.
The sound came from within his own body. It was the sound of a muscle fiber tearing and instantaneously reforming, denser and more resilient than before.
Li Mo gritted his teeth, his jaw muscles bulging. Sweat poured down his face, instantly steaming in the cold air. For ten years, he had ruthlessly abused his body with the Iron Wood Body Tempering Art. He had struck himself millions of times. He had consumed an unimaginable amount of hidden, nutrient-dense meat hunted deep in the forbidden zones of the mountains, far from the eyes of the village.
He had long surpassed the Skin Refining realm. His skin, though calloused and tanned, could now deflect a direct thrust from a standard iron spear without breaking. But the Iron Wood manual ended there. It was a crude, mortal dead-end.
To push further, Li Mo had been forced to rely on pure, brutal extrapolation. Using his actuary mind, he had analyzed the physiological principles of the manual and pushed them inward. If striking the skin toughened it, what would happen if he used the crude breathing techniques to violently force ambient Qi and blood pressure into his muscle tissue?
It was an agonizing, highly dangerous theory. He had nearly ruptured his own heart twice in the last three years. But his absolute paranoia and terrifying patience had guided him through the deadly bottleneck.
He let out a long, shuddering exhale, a breath that blew the dust from the floorboards three feet away.
He had done it. He had stepped firmly into the Flesh Tempering realm.
He looked down at his arms. They did not look like the arms of a bodybuilder; they were not swollen or grotesquely huge. Instead, the muscles were impossibly dense, packed tight against the bone like braided cables of steel wire. When he flexed his fist, the air gave a subtle, audible pop.
He estimated that his physical strength had crossed a terrifying threshold. He could likely crush a man's skull with a single, casual squeeze of his hand. He had the explosive speed to cross the cellar before a normal man could blink.
But it is a fragile strength, Li Mo thought, the brief flash of triumph fading into grim calculation. My foundation is ruined.
He could feel it. The crude, self-taught progression into Flesh Tempering had left him with massive internal scarring. His meridians—the mystical pathways of Qi he had read about in cultivation novels—were likely blocked, twisted, or entirely damaged by his brute-force methods. He was a powerhouse of pure, unrefined mortal strength, but his path to higher martial arts, let alone immortal cultivation, was permanently severed. He would never ride a flying sword. He would never command the elements.
He dressed slowly, pulling the coarse, rough-spun tunic over his dense frame, instantly transforming back into the unremarkable farmer.
It does not matter, he reminded himself, looking up at the wooden ceiling of the cellar. I am not the sword. I am the scabbard. I am the soil. My foundation is ruined, but my descendants' foundations are a blank slate.
He climbed the ladder, securing the trapdoor silently, and walked to the partitioned sleeping area where his eldest son, Changshou, lay snoring softly.
Li Mo stood over the boy, observing him in the dim light of the dying hearth.
Changshou at sixteen was a physical marvel. He possessed a natural vitality that made Li Mo's own meager talent look like a joke. Under Li Mo's strict, secret tutelage, Changshou had practiced the Iron Wood Body Tempering Art with terrifying efficiency. The boy had reached the peak of Skin Refining two years ago, at the age of fourteen, without the agonizing side effects Li Mo had endured.
But Li Mo had immediately halted his son's physical cultivation.
He refused to let Changshou ruin his foundation with a garbage-tier manual. The boy was a dormant volcano, possessing immense strength, but to the outside world, he was trained to be a bumbling, heavy-footed farm boy.
"Wake up, Changshou," Li Mo whispered, his voice barely a breath, but it carried a specific tonal frequency they used for secret communication.
The boy's eyes opened instantly. There was no grogginess, no confusion. He slipped out from under the quilt without making a single sound, moving with the terrifying stealth of a trained killer, entirely at odds with his large frame.
Father and son moved silently to the back of the hut, stepping out into the freezing night air, shielded by the dense, snow-covered bamboo thicket.
"Stance," Li Mo commanded quietly.
Changshou dropped into a horse stance. It was flawless. His breathing slowed to an almost imperceptible rhythm.
"Who are you?" Li Mo asked, pacing slowly around his son.
"I am Li Changshou, son of Li Mo," the boy answered, his voice steady. "I am a slow-witted, heavy-handed farmer. I am easily frightened by loud noises. I am greedy for small change but terrified of conflict. If the village bullies push me, I fall into the mud and apologize."
"Good," Li Mo said. "And if a martial artist from the city stops to ask you for directions?"
"I keep my eyes on the dirt. I stammer. I point a trembling finger. I do not look at his weapons, his clothes, or his face. I am a speck of dust beneath his boots."
"And if that martial artist decides to test his blade on your neck for his own amusement, and there is no one else around for ten miles?"
Changshou's eyes glinted in the dark. The farm-boy persona vanished, replaced by an aura of cold, focused lethality that mirrored his father's perfectly.
"I shatter his knees before he can draw. I crush his windpipe. I bury him deep. I scatter his belongings in the deep river. I burn my clothes. I am never seen."
Li Mo stopped pacing and nodded. A profound sense of pride swelled within him. Changshou was his masterpiece. The boy possessed the physical talent of a protagonist, but his mind had been molded by an actuary obsessed with risk aversion. He was the perfect, invisible weapon.
"The wind is shifting, Changshou," Li Mo said softly, looking toward the distant, dark peaks of the Black Mountain Range. "The village is no longer a safe harbor to hide your potential. We have lingered in the shallows for too long. To grow the tree, we need deeper water."
The catalyst for Li Mo's long-term plan arrived three months later, riding the bloody coattails of the spring thaw.
Clearwater Village was thrown into absolute panic. The Black Tiger Gang—the local tyrants who had terrorized the region for two decades, collecting taxes and breaking legs—had been annihilated.
It wasn't a righteous rebellion. It was a corporate takeover by a much more vicious entity.
The Iron Fist Brotherhood, a massive syndicate from the provincial capital, had expanded its territory. They swept through the rural towns like a plague of locusts. The gang leader, Black Tiger Wang—a man who was said to be invulnerable to blades—had his head severed and hung from the gates of Qinglin Town as a warning. The rumors said the Iron Fist enforcer who killed him was a master of the Bone Forging realm, a man who could shatter boulders with his bare hands.
When the new tax collectors arrived in Clearwater Village, they didn't ride ragged horses and wear cheap leather. They wore uniform black armor, rode armored warhorses, and carried themselves with the cold, disciplined brutality of a private army.
They tripled the tax.
But worse than the tax was the new edict.
"Every village under the Brotherhood's protection must provide a quota of able-bodied youths between the ages of fifteen and twenty!" the lead enforcer roared, his voice amplified by deep internal Qi, making the very air vibrate. "They will serve in the peripheral mining camps and logging operations. Serve well for five years, and your families will be exempt from the grain tax. Resist, and the village burns."
Old Man Wang, the village chief, collapsed in the mud, weeping. To send a son to a peripheral gang camp was a death sentence. They would be worked to the bone, used as cannon fodder in territorial skirmishes, and discarded like trash.
Li Mo stood in the crowd, his face an impeccable mask of terror, holding Wang Cui tightly as she trembled against him.
He analyzed the situation with a cold, calculating detachment. He had enough hidden silver in his cellar to easily bribe the enforcers and exempt his family for a decade. He had enough hidden strength to slaughter this entire patrol in under a minute without taking a scratch.
But neither option is viable, he thought, his eyes tracking the enforcers' movements, noting the quality of their steel and the density of their breathing.
If I pay the bribe, I reveal wealth. Wealth attracts wolves. They will come back next month for more, until we are bled dry. If I kill them, the Brotherhood will send a Bone Forging master, or a Blood Moving elder. The escalation will not stop until my family is exposed and annihilated.
He needed to remove Changshou from the board entirely, but he needed to do it on his own terms. Sending him to a gang's labor camp was unacceptable.
That evening, a solemn, terrifyingly quiet family meeting was held in the expanded root cellar. The heavy trapdoor was sealed. The air was thick with the scent of damp earth and dried herbs.
Li Mo sat at the head of a crude wooden table. Cui sat to his right, her face pale, holding young Chang'an. Mei, sharp-eyed and silent, sat next to her mother. Changshou sat opposite his father, his broad shoulders squared, his face betraying no emotion.
"The Brotherhood will return in ten days to collect the youths," Li Mo began, his voice devoid of the peasant accent he used above ground. It was crisp, authoritative, and utterly cold. "Changshou is of age. He fits their profile perfectly."
Cui let out a muffled sob, burying her face in Chang'an's hair. "Husband... we cannot. We have silver. We can pay. Please."
Li Mo looked at his wife. His heart ached for her, but his logic remained ironclad. He reached out and gently covered her rough hand with his own.
"If we pay, Cui, they will know we have means. They will extort us until we starve, and then they will take him anyway. A gang is not a government; they have no laws, only appetites."
He turned his gaze back to his eldest son. "Changshou, you will not be going to the mining camps."
Changshou nodded once, accepting the statement as absolute fact.
"Two towns over, near the base of the Azure Peak, the Azure Wood Sect is holding its decennial outer disciple recruitment in five days," Li Mo continued, pulling a crumpled, hand-drawn map from his tunic. "They are a legitimate, albeit declining, martial arts sect. They possess higher-tier cultivation manuals. They possess alchemical knowledge. Most importantly, the Iron Fist Brotherhood will not dare cross into their territory to snatch a registered disciple."
Li Mo tapped the map. "You will leave tonight. You will travel through the deep mountain trails—trails I have taught you, where no bandits or gang members dare tread. You will arrive at the recruitment grounds, and you will join the Azure Wood Sect."
Silence descended upon the cellar. Joining a sect was the dream of millions of youths in the Great Wei Dynasty. It was a path to power, prestige, and potentially, immortality.
But Changshou knew his father better than anyone. He knew this was not a quest for glory.
"What are my orders, Father?" Changshou asked, his voice low and serious.
Li Mo leaned forward, the dim lamplight casting deep, dramatic shadows across his face.
"The Azure Wood Sect will test your root bone, your meridians, and your physical strength," Li Mo explained. "Your physical foundation is terrifyingly strong. If you show them everything, they will hail you as a genius. They will make you a core disciple. They will give you the best resources."
Li Mo's eyes narrowed into dangerous slits. "And you will be a massive, glowing target. The jealous seniors will plot against you. The rival sects will assassinate you. The elders will use you as a pawn in their political games. Geniuses die young, Changshou. They are meteors—bright, fast, and ultimately, they crash and burn."
He pointed a finger at his son's chest.
"Your mission is to be the most remarkably average disciple in the history of the Azure Wood Sect."
Changshou's eyes widened slightly, absorbing the profound depths of the Gou philosophy his father was imparting.
"During the physical test, you will suppress your strength," Li Mo instructed rapidly, his actuary mind ticking through the variables. "You will lift exactly the amount of weight required to pass, and not an ounce more. You will sweat. You will pant. You will make it look like a monumental struggle. When they test your root bone, you will hide the density of your Qi. You want them to classify you as 'Grade Four'—acceptable, but completely unremarkable."
"You will be assigned to the Outer Sect. You will be given menial tasks—chopping wood, carrying water, tending the spirit fields. You will do these tasks diligently, without complaint. You will be polite to everyone, subservient to your seniors, and entirely invisible to the elders."
Li Mo paused, ensuring every word sank into his son's soul.
"Your true goal is the sect's Pavilion of Hidden Arts. You are to quietly, methodically copy their foundational martial arts manuals. Flesh Tempering, Bone Forging, Qi Gathering. You are to learn the names of their medicinal herbs, the formulas for their healing salves. You will accumulate this knowledge in secret. Once a year, during the winter solstice festival when the sect's security is lax, you will leave a cache in the hollowed-out ancient pine at the base of Azure Peak. I will retrieve it."
It was an espionage mission. He was sending his son not to conquer the sect, but to parasitize it. To act as a siphon, slowly drawing out the knowledge the Li family needed to elevate their bloodline, without ever drawing attention to himself.
"And if I am challenged, Father?" Changshou asked. "If an inner disciple demands my resources, or tries to humiliate me?"
"You give them the resources," Li Mo said instantly, without a shred of hesitation. "You bow. You apologize for offending them. You let them kick you into the dirt. You thank them for the lesson."
Changshou swallowed hard, his jaw tight. It went against every instinct of a powerful young man.
"Pride is the absolute enemy of longevity, Changshou," Li Mo whispered, his voice vibrating with intense conviction. "Let them have their arrogant laughter. Let them feel superior. Let them preen like peacocks. While they are busy showing off and making enemies, you will be in the shadows, quietly reinforcing your foundation, copying their secrets, and growing stronger."
Li Mo stood up, walking around the table to stand beside his son. He placed a heavy hand on Changshou's broad shoulder.
"They are playing a game of decades, fighting for temporary glory. We are playing a game of millennia, fighting for eternal survival. Do you understand your mission?"
Changshou looked up at his father, the fire of youth entirely extinguished, replaced by the cold, enduring glacier of the Immortal Ancestor's philosophy.
"I am the gray stone in the river, Father," Changshou recited the tenet he had been taught since childhood. "The water flows over me. The fish ignore me. The fishermen do not see me. But when the river dries up and the fish are dead, I remain."
Li Mo smiled, a genuine, rare expression of absolute approval. "Exactly."
The departure was orchestrated with the same meticulous paranoia that governed every aspect of Li Mo's life.
There were no tearful goodbyes at the village gate. At three in the morning, under the cover of a moonless, overcast sky, Changshou stood at the edge of the deep forest behind the family hut.
He wore a coarse, patched tunic that Li Mo had carefully rubbed with dirt and ash to make it look old and well-worn. Woven into the lining of his thick leather belt, completely undetectable to a casual search, were ten small, perfectly cut squares of solid silver—emergency funds, just enough to bribe a lower-level overseer, but not enough to tempt a murder.
Cui clung to him in the darkness, weeping silently, her tears soaking his chest. Mei stood beside her, her face solemn, pressing a small, tightly sealed leather pouch into her brother's hand.
"Dried blood-clotting moss and a powder made from the widow's-bite spider," Mei whispered, her voice barely audible. "If you are forced to fight and cannot run, coat your blade. It paralyzes the muscles in seconds. Leave no trace."
Changshou nodded, securing the pouch in a hidden pocket. He possessed his father's physical strength, but Mei had inherited Li Mo's calculating, ruthless intellect.
Li Mo stood a few paces away, his hands clasped behind his back. He did not hug his son. He did not offer emotional platitudes.
"Five days through the deep ridges. Avoid the merchant roads. Avoid the inns. Drink only from running water. When you reach the Azure Wood Sect, you are no longer a tiger. You are a mouse."
"I understand, Father," Changshou said, bowing deeply. "I will not fail the family."
"Survive," Li Mo commanded softly. "That is your only absolute order. If the sect falls, run. If the sect is attacked, hide. Your life, and the knowledge you bring back, is more valuable than any sect's honor."
Changshou turned and vanished into the treeline, his massive frame melting into the darkness without snapping a single twig or rustling a single leaf. He was a ghost, unleashed upon the martial world.
Li Mo stood in the freezing night long after his wife and daughter had returned to the hut. He stared into the darkness, the immense weight of his strategy pressing down on his shoulders.
He had cast his first die. He had sent a piece of himself into the chaotic, bloody meat grinder of the cultivation world.
He closed his eyes and sank into his sea of consciousness.
The Golden Bloodline Tree stood in the limitless void. It was growing taller, its trunk thickening with the passage of time. And there, on the right side, the thickest, brightest branch pulsed with a steady, rhythmic golden light.
Li Changshou.
As long as that branch glowed, the boy was alive.
I cannot protect him anymore, Li Mo realized, a profound sense of isolation washing over him. If he faces a true master, if his disguise fails, he will die. And his lifetime of cultivation will return to me.
It was the ultimate, horrific safety net of his transmigration gift. Even in absolute failure, even in the tragic death of his son, Li Mo would benefit. He would absorb the boy's strength, his experiences, his lifespan, and he would use it to protect the remaining branches.
"Do not die early, my son," Li Mo whispered to the empty forest, his voice carrying the heavy, melancholic burden of the First Ancestor. "Live a long, boring, invisible life. Let your father bear the weight of time."
Year Sixteen: The Hidden Harvest
Five years crawled by in the mortal realm.
The Iron Fist Brotherhood maintained their iron grip on the region, though their presence in Clearwater Village had settled into a predictable, brutal routine of high taxes and occasional beatings. Li Mo, playing the role of the aging, compliant farmer perfectly, paid his dues, kept his head bowed, and vanished into the background.
He was now forty-one. He had allowed his hair to gray prematurely, rubbing ash into his temples. He walked with a pronounced limp, mimicking his late father, claiming a bad fall on the mountain had ruined his knee. He was the epitome of a broken, defeated peasant.
But beneath the floorboards, the Li family was quietly, terrifyingly evolving.
It was the night of the winter solstice. A heavy snowstorm blanketed the Black Mountain Range, plunging the world into a deep, freezing silence.
Li Mo, wrapped in a white wolf pelt that perfectly camouflaged him against the snow, moved through the treacherous mountain passes with terrifying speed. His limp was gone. His Flesh Tempering strength allowed him to leap across ten-foot ravines and scale sheer cliffs of ice with the agility of a snow leopard.
He traveled thirty miles in three hours, arriving at the base of the towering Azure Peak.
He found the ancient pine tree, its massive roots gnarled and twisted into the rocky soil. With practiced precision, he cleared the snow from a specific root, pressed a hidden latch mechanism he had carved years ago, and pulled back a thick piece of bark.
Inside the hollowed cavity sat a tightly wrapped, oil-cloth bundle.
Li Mo's heart beat slightly faster. It was the fifth cache.
He swapped the bundle for a new one—containing refined silver, high-quality dried spirit-beast meat he had hunted in the deep forbidden zones, and a coded letter written by Mei—and sealed the cavity.
He did not linger. He did not look up toward the distant, shrouded peaks where the Azure Wood Sect resided. He vanished back into the storm, a white ghost in a white world.
Hours later, sealed securely within his subterranean root cellar, surrounded by his family, Li Mo unwrapped the bundle by the light of a single, shielded oil lamp.
Mei, now nineteen and possessing a cold, striking beauty she kept hidden beneath dirt and ragged clothes, leaned forward eagerly. Changping, a sturdy fourteen-year-old, and Chang'an, a quick-witted eleven-year-old, watched in silent reverence.
Li Mo pulled out three items.
The first was a thick stack of cheap parchment, covered in tiny, meticulously cramped handwriting.
The second was a small, jade bottle containing three murky green pills.
The third was a letter.
Li Mo unfolded the letter. It was written in the coded cipher he and Changshou had developed—a system that looked like a farmer's crop tally to anyone else.
Li Mo read the tally aloud, translating the cipher for his children.
"Father. I am safe. I am currently ranked 412th out of 500 Outer Disciples. I am considered dull, slow, and lack ambition. The overseers ignore me. The senior disciples use me to chop iron-wood because I am strong but compliant. I have 'failed' the Inner Sect promotion test three times by intentionally exhausting my Qi before the final round."
Li Mo smiled. It was a masterpiece of Gou behavior.
"The sect is growing unstable. The grand elder is nearing the end of his lifespan, and the factions are fighting over resources. Three inner disciples were found dead last month. I sleep in the outermost ring of the dormitories, nearest the escape tunnels I have secretly dug."
Li Mo's smile faded into a grim line of approval. The boy was prepared for the inevitable collapse.
"I have finally gained access to the secondary archives by bribing a drunken elder with the silver you sent. Enclosed is the complete, unredacted copy of the 'Azure Wood Qi Gathering Art', the foundational internal cultivation method of the sect. It is vastly superior to our mortal manual. It details the opening of the twelve primary meridians. Furthermore, I managed to steal three 'Minor Blood Refinement Pills' from the alchemy waste bin. They are defective and slightly toxic, which is why they were discarded, but Mei might be able to purify them."
Li Mo set the letter down. He picked up the stack of parchment containing the Azure Wood Qi Gathering Art.
His hands, which could crush solid rock, trembled slightly.
This was the bridge. This was the exact resource he needed to elevate his family from mortal martial artists to true cultivators. He, with his ruined foundation, could not use it. But his children... his descendants... this was their key to the heavens.
He looked at Mei. "Can you purify the pills?"
Mei took the jade bottle, uncorking it and sniffing the murky green pills. Her eyes, usually cold and calculating, flashed with dark excitement. Over the years, using stolen herbs and animal venoms, she had become a terrifyingly competent, self-taught poison master and rudimentary alchemist.
"The toxicity comes from unrefined fire-silk grass used as a binder," Mei diagnosed instantly. "It burns the meridians. But if I dissolve it in a solution of moon-flower extract and filter it through charcoal... yes. I can remove the toxins. It will take me a week, but I can make them safe."
Li Mo nodded, a profound sense of satisfaction settling over him.
The machine was working. The bloodline was elevating itself.
He turned to his younger sons, Changping and Chang'an.
"Tomorrow night, you will cease practicing the Iron Wood manual," Li Mo instructed, his voice ringing with absolute authority in the dim cellar. "You will begin studying this." He tapped the copied Qi Gathering parchment. "We are no longer just tempering our skin and flesh. We are going to open our meridians. We are going to gather Qi. We are going to step onto the path of true cultivation."
He looked around the table at his family. They were dressed in rags. They lived beneath the dirt. To the world above, they were nothing but destitute, ignorant peasants waiting to die in the next famine or gang war.
But down here, in the dark, the Immortal Clan was taking root.
"Study hard. Cultivate silently," Li Mo commanded, his eyes reflecting the flickering flame. "Let the sects fight. Let the geniuses die. The Li family will wait in the shadows until the world is ready to be ours."
In his sea of consciousness, the Golden Tree pulsed. Five branches, strong and bright, reaching into the void, drawing power, drawing knowledge, and patiently waiting for the millennia to unfold.