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Just checking to see which one of us was denser.
15
“You need to control your temper,” Quentin said. He winced as he rubbed the spot where I’d clocked him.
We’d hit a roadblock in my training earlier than expected. Meditating wasn’t optional for this project, it was required. And I absolutely sucked at it.
The two of us had spent the entire morning in the park trying to get me to relax and focus. I had no idea why I wasn’t catching on. Discipline, self-governance—those were supposed to be my strong points. Failure got me more and more annoyed until finally Quentin insisted we take a break at a nearby bubble tea shop.
I hate bubble tea. So now I was cranky about two things.
I kicked a rhythm into the steel wire table we were sitting at. The feet of my chair scraped the sidewalk concrete inch by inch. It sounded as if I was abusing a metal songbird that chirped in pain with each impact.
“Get in line,” I muttered. “People have been calling me a hothead my whole life.”
Quentin slurped his pearls. “I didn’t mean it like there’s something wrong with you, I mean you only need to reach the point of tranquility where you can absorb my teachings. After that I don’t care what you do with your emotions.”
“That doesn’t make sense. I thought achieving gongfu requires maintaining a calm, virtuous character?”
“It does, but only while you’re still learning. Think of it this way. At one point you had no volleyball skills at all, right? So you were probably open-minded and humble toward your coaches and seniors. Otherwise it would have been impossible for them to teach you. But now that you have a certain amount of gongfu, there’s nothing preventing you from getting pissed off at an inferior opponent and running up the score in a display of poor sportsmanship. You’re not going to suddenly lose the ability to play volleyball just from that.”
“But I’m not actually that good yet. Jenny and Coach Daniels keep telling me that I’m relying too much on my height and not enough on technique.”
“And yet you don’t seem to be upset about that,” Quentin said. “You have room to develop. Just like you have room to develop as the Ruyi Jingu Bang.”
He swirled the ice around his cup. “If you want another example, most of the enemies I fought on my journeys were animals or demons who trained their bodies and minds in the exact same way that holy men did. They cultivated their conduct and performed austerities. If they can do it, you can do it.”
“Evil beings can also become stronger by being disciplined and working out? They’re not barred from the wizard club? Chinese magic is jacked up.”
“The Way is there for anyone to grasp,” Quentin clarified. “If an evil person trains harder than you, they will be stronger than you, and that’s that. Spiritual power isn’t just or merciful. It’s fair. That’s what makes it so dangerous.”
Hearing him say that actually cheered me up a bit. If learning special abilities required a kind heart or a pure soul, I’d be screwed. This system was like climbing the corporate ladder. Or getting tenure.
“I mean, look at me,” Quentin said. “I achieved spiritual mastery and immortality. And then I made war on Heaven.”
“Which basically makes you Chinese Satan.”
He drained the last of his drink. “Two sides to every story.”
I watched him for a bit. There was nothing about Quentin that betrayed any sort of legendary origin. In the short time I’d known him, his behavior had smoothed out into that of a regular teenager. Albeit the cockiest one I’d ever seen.
“If you’re not from these parts, how did you acclimate so fast? Clothes aside, you picked up modern culture pretty fast. You even ordered the small boba without anyone telling you.”
“I only need to pick up the tiniest part of something in order to understand the whole,” he said. “I simply watched your classmates until I absorbed how to act. Same thing with our schoolwork. It’s all pretty easy stuff; I don’t know why you spend so much time on academics.”
Overpowered bastard. “Is that how you got into my school? You dazzled them with your standardized test scores?”
“No, I just used a harmless spell. All the adults think I go there, but there’s no Quentin Sun Wukong in the records.”
“So then where do you go after school? When you’re not with me?”
He grinned. “I interact with other people. I explore the area. Not everything is about you, you know.”
“Oh, bite me. You were the one who was all, ‘waaah you were my dearest companion, waaah.’ If the Ruyi Jingu Bang was so important to you, how did you lose it in the first place?”
He pretended not to hear me. I never let anyone pull that move on me if I could help it.
“It would have had to die in order to reincarnate,” I said. “So what gives? Did a demon break it? Did you try to crack a magic Walnut of Invincibility?”
