As soon as Supreme Sensei Master Jio is finished saying “Ahihahaha!” I already know that his next words will contain my doom.
“Sweet, little embryos, the first-year girls’ third Motivation will be … Vertical Battlefield!”
The same as the boys’ second Motivation. The Motivation that is composed almost entirely of jumping. Conducted on the roofs of the Pagoda of Filial Sacrifice. An eight-story structure.
* * *
The next morning when we begin training for Vertical Battlefield, I notice all the other girls have switched to skate boots with reinforced impact absorbers. The other students have so many different combinations of blades and boots, for jumping, for precision, for performances, for formal ceremonies, for dancing, and even for drinking tea anemones.
I have only these two boots and these one and a half blades.
Some part of me wants to just forfeit this Motivation. Save my knee for the other Motivations that hopefully won’t be as hard on it. It would also make me feel less guilty for making Doi get disqualified.
What am I saying? My top two rivals are eliminated from this Motivation and I want to throw away my only chance to pull ahead of them? Nobody said that becoming a legend of wu liu was going to be easy. If I wanted easy, I could have stayed in Serenity Cliff.
I’m just going to have to find some way to strengthen my knee.
Sensei Madame Liao has begun to lead us in brief Chi practices before and after every wu liu class to warm up and cool down. After the warm-up Chi practice, I raise my hand.
“Venerable and mighty Sensei,” I ask, “are there techniques of Chi practice that strengthen joints?”
“All Chi practice can be focused to bring healing energy to a particular point on the body. But it requires a great amount of Chi.”
I raise my hand again. “How much would it require?”
“A lot,” Sensei Madame Liao says slowly. “It takes years of meditation practice to summon that magnitude of Chi energy. But it is possible to receive Chi energy sent from another person.”
I’d heard about this back in Shin, but since it never worked for me, I figured it must be just superstition. I sneak a look to see if anyone is laughing at my questions.
Sensei Madame Liao continues, “It doesn’t work for those with only weak relationships, though.”
Why is she looking at me?
“The closer the relationship between the sender and the receiver,” she says, “the stronger and faster the transfer of energy and the farther it can travel. It is called Chi entanglement.”
Why would I want to have my Chi entangled with somebody else’s? I don’t want to rely on anybody that much.
“If the relationship is close enough, two people who are Chi entangled can send Chi instantaneously, regardless of distance, and can understand when the sending is interrupted.”
I shoot my hand up a third time. “And if you don’t have such relationships?”
“It’s especially powerful between siblings. Especially twins.”
Nonsense; I tried it once with Cricket. He tried to send Chi energy to me and I felt nothing. I tried to send it to him and he said it gave him a sinus headache.
“Although,” she finishes, “the relationship might not help if either the sender or the receiver is somehow … blocked.”
That wasn’t much help. I guess I’ll just have to work on building muscle strength so my right knee can take the impact of the jumps.
Sensei Madame Liao teaches us moves that will help us leap most efficiently between the tiers of the Pagoda of Filial Sacrifice, meaning that they give us a lot of vertical lift but with little wasted horizontal displacement. Everybody gasps when she demonstrates a riven crane split jump, but then we realize that it wasn’t done with a one-legged backward flip. It is a mock riven crane split jump and it is done with a backward flip and a half twist, which makes you land facing the opposite direction of how you started and therefore cancels out the jolt of the landing impact on the knee. Although it is far less beautiful than the authentic riven crane split jump.
I’m glad that there are moves that can spare my knee, but I still avoid doing the jump since it uses the placement of the liver for its center of gravity and thus can only be done on the right leg. I skate to a corner and pretend to be getting ready to do jumps instead of actually doing them like everyone else.
Chiriko and Etsuko are watching me. They and the other House of Flowering Blossoms girls have been doing their best to make up for Suki’s absence by taunting me whenever Sensei Madame Liao can’t see or hear. Chiriko and Etsuko look at each other, do a mock riven crane split jump in unison, and look at me. I can’t show any weakness. I look back at them and do a mock riven crane split jump in return. I land hard on my damaged right blade.
They unscrew and snap off their skate blades, which are perfectly undamaged, and toss them in the trash bin. They smirk at me, their eyes spiteful under their bangs. They screw on new blades and do two mock riven crane split jumps in rapid succession, the coils of the blades under their heels absorbing the impact. I do two of the jumps in rapid succession and land on my right skate with a double punch of force into my knee.
The girls again snap off their perfectly good blades, throw them in the trash, and put on new ones. They do three of the jumps in rapid succession and land balanced on their right skates, their left skates lifted high.
I swing my knee into the air and fling myself into three of the jumps in rapid succession, one, two, snap! My broken blade lands wrong on the third jump and a pain shoots through my knee like a shaft of steel.
Everyone turns to look at me as Chiriko and Etsuko skate away,
