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The snake and the tortoise are twisted together
Then life will bear golden lotuses
Turn the Five Elements upside down
And you may become a Buddha or an Immortal.”
Quentin opened his eyes and smiled serenely at me.
“What the hell was that?” I asked.
“Huh?”
“That made no sense. You just zoned out and spouted a bunch of gibberish. What do snakes and turtles have to do with anything?”
He made an expression like I’d hocked a loogie on the Mona Lisa. “Did you not experience the Way of Heaven and Earth ensorcelling you just now?”
I scratched my head. “ . . . Sort of? I think I felt something. The air around us got a little warm and fuzzy.”
Quentin buried his face in his palms. “Those were the first words of true wisdom Master Subodai ever expounded to me, and all you have to say is that they make you warm and fuzzy, sort of?”
“Look,” I said. “I don’t learn well with vague instructions. Can’t you lay out all the steps from start to finish, so I can see what I’m supposed to be working toward?”
“Lay out!? These aren’t differential equations we’re talking about!”
“Well if they were, I’d pick them up faster! That’s how I do things! I arrange my curriculum into manageable chunks and then I destroy them piece by piece. You told me I had abilities far beyond those of mortal men. Now, what are they?”
Quentin jumped to his feet and paced around, swearing up and down. I sat there unyielding as he glanced at me, which set him off into a fresh round of expletives each time. He couldn’t believe me right now.
Finally he threw in the towel and plopped back down, abandoning a proper cross-legged position for a don’t-give-a-crap-anymore slouch. The guru image had popped like a soap bubble.
“You have the ability to keep up with me as I perform my Seventy-Two Earthly Transformations,” he said, staring up at the sky.
“That sounds lame.”
“Says the girl who doesn’t want superpowers. Don’t you realize what that implies? You can split into as many copies as I can. Each one as strong as the original, and capable of acting independently.”
I thought about that for a bit. Having extra mes to go around would be useful in the extreme. One copy for school, one doing extra plyos in the gym, one racking up more volunteer work in the city. Assuming that recombining let you keep all of the good you did.
“Okay, okay.” I was starting to get vaguely excited. “What else?”
“You can grow as tall as a mountain. You can be like a Pillar of Heaven. As I change, you change.”
Yeah, less interested in that one. The view from my current altitude already wasn’t kind. Stomping around downtown like a ’50s sci-fi monster was far from an appealing prospect.
“What else?” I asked. “Something good.”
“You weigh a whole lot,” Quentin said.
“Excuse me?”
“You’re supernaturally heavy,” he explained. “It’s what makes you such a fearsome weapon.”
In his defense, he wasn’t trying to needle me. In his mind he was rattling off a fact. Obliviously.
“Your true weight is seventeen thousand five hundred American pounds,” he said, not noticing that my cheeks were turning red hot. “You can hit like a ten-ton truck because you weigh nearly ten tons. It’s demonic, how much you weigh—OOF!”
I tested out the truth of his claims. On his chest. With my fist.
