CHAPTER 72: BLIND SPOT AND THE RHYTHM OF THE WILD

Another dawn in the hidden basalt valley arrived in the company of thick, blue-gray fog that settled as fine dew on the walls of the shelter and beast hides. I opened my sapphire eye and immediately winced slightly, feeling my body send a powerful, unambiguous feedback signal. Every single welt on my back, every bruised shoulder from yesterday, and every battered rib throbbed with a dull, burning pain at any sudden movement. The conduits in my chest were silent, blocked by the old man's hard barrier, and the powerful engine of my soul ran at idle speed, disconnected from the motor pathways.

I threw off the heavy trapper cloak, remaining in my underwear. On pure logic, I had no intention of giving my body any leeway. The raw cold, the direct friction of wind against bare skin, and spartan rigor suited this training perfectly.

I cut through the chilly fog toward the riverbank, where Sensei was already waiting. The old man, unmoved and bone-dry as usual, slowly puffed on his old wooden pipe, holding a flexible bamboo staff in his wrinkled hand. His golden-brown Tiger-Eye eyes measured my figure standing barefoot on the damp earth. A shadow of amusement flickered at the corner of his lips, though he didn't utter a word of comment.

"Get in," he instructed briefly, gesturing with the bamboo toward the same slippery, rounded basalt stone right in the middle of the foaming, roaring current.

Without wasting time on talk, I stepped barefoot into the ice-cold water. The rushing current immediately slammed against my bare calves and thighs, stinging my exposed skin like thousands of invisible needles. The cold was so intense that my breath hitched for a moment, and my abdominal muscles instinctively contracted. I ignored the signal, forcing my lungs into a steady, calm rhythm. I waded to the center of the river, bent my knees slightly, lowered my center of gravity in my hips, and placed my bare left foot on the rounded boulder.

My left foot immediately conformed to the shape of the basalt, executing minimal, well-practiced micro-rotations in the ankle to smoothly let the river's rush pass. I stood stable, with my arms hanging completely loose along my torso, letting the freezing water flow freely around my leg without generating unnecessary drag.

"Good," the old man nodded. "Now close your eyes."

I lowered my eyelid over my sapphire eye. And in that exact fraction of a second, the world around me exploded.

The moment I cut off visual perception, my mind—ever active, running at top speed due to my innate ADHD—reacted with violent sensory overload. Without a visual reference point, my other senses went wild, trying to compensate for the sudden darkness. The roar of the stream, which had previously been background noise, suddenly swelled to the proportions of a freight train rushing right beside me, filling my skull and drowning out my own thoughts. Every gust of wind against my bare back felt like an icy blade, and the river slamming against my thighs burned like boiling water. The scent of moisture, rotting leaves, and wet stone became so intense I could almost taste it on my tongue.

That sensory short-circuit instantly shattered my balance.

My left ankle locked in an instinctive attempt to correct my position, friction with the river was broken, and with a deafening splash I fell backward straight into the freezing depths of the stream.

I surfaced violently after a few seconds, coughing loudly, choking on cold water, and wiping my face with my hand. The icy chill of the mountain stream struck my bare, warm skin with paralyzing force.

"You're trying to control the darkness with your thoughts, boy," Sensei's voice came from the bank, his calm tone effortlessly cutting through the roar of the water. "You want to organize every sound and touch into a separate drawer in your head, measure it, and analyze it. That's impossible. Your mind must become as empty as a shelter after a trapper departs. Don't analyze the river. Let it flow through you, and then it will tell you where to stand."

I didn't answer. I spat out the remaining water, bit my lip, and scrambled back onto the stone. Once more I closed my eyes, breathing deeply through my nose and trying to calm my racing thoughts. I tried to listen to my surroundings, but the roar of the torrent was so massive it masked any other sound. I tried to sense which direction the attack would come from.

Suddenly, without a single warning, the pain of a tearing strike exploded across my left ribs.

I didn't see the swing, didn't hear a whistle—I only felt the hard, ruthless thud of the bamboo that knocked me off the boulder straight into the water. The force of the blow robbed the air from my lungs, and the icy depth of the stream received me with a loud splash.

When I surfaced, my chest burned like living fire.

"You're locking your hip when you try to dodge," the old man called out as I gathered myself from the riverbed, slipping barefoot on the river gravel. "And you're tensing your neck. You think if you close your eyes, the staff doesn't exist until it hits you. You're trying to guess where I'll strike instead of listening to the space around you."

I walked onto the shallows, shivering from the cold. Yet onto my face, inch by inch, that predatory, brazen grin slowly began to creep, and a wild, immensely satisfied fire flared in my sapphire eye. These icy falls and stinging strikes from the bamboo staff were neither misery nor torture to me. For my analytical mind, every hit from the old man was direct, tangible verification of my biomechanics.

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Pain didn't lie. There was no room in it for interpretation, doubts, or guesswork. If the bamboo hit my shoulder, it meant I had tensed my trapezius muscle a fraction of a second too early. If the staff caught my thighs, it meant I had locked my ankle and prevented shock absorption. Pain pointed out my movement errors with ruthless, millimeter accuracy, and I felt a pure, almost narcotic satisfaction because of it. It was a brutal, physical calibration of my own nervous and motor system.

"Got it," I muttered, returning to the river with a predatory gleam in my eye.

I scrambled onto the boulder, closed my eyes, and completely relaxed my shoulders. I decided to stop fighting my own mind. Instead of forcing a racing brain to focus on a single point—which was impossible in this sensory darkness and river chaos—I let my attention flood the entire surroundings at once. I stopped looking for the bamboo staff itself. I stopped treating it as a separate object about to attack me.

The staff wasn't separate. It was merely a disturbance in the rhythm of the stream and the wind.

I began learning the rhythm of the valley. The roar of the stream ceased to be chaotic, irritating noise; it became a constant, rhythmic vibration that permeated through my bare foot, calf, and hips. The wind brushing my bare, bruised back had its own predictable cycle. I simply stood on the stone, allowing the river and air to flow around me without the slightest resistance from my muscles. I stopped thinking about what the old man would do. I became part of the basalt and the water.

And then I felt it.

It wasn't a sound. The roar of the torrent still dominated everything, but right at my left temple, there was a sudden, minimal shift in air pressure. A microscopic disturbance in the uniform flow of wind, as if an invisible obstacle had sliced through the fog for a fraction of a second and pushed a wave of warmth toward my ear.

I didn't hesitate for a millisecond. I didn't analyze what I felt. I simply surrendered to that physical impulse. My neck and hip executed a minimalist, fluid movement, tilting my head a mere two centimeters to the right.

Whoosh!

The old man's thin bamboo staff sliced through the fog right where my left ear had been a moment ago, brushing single strands of my dark hair. The rush of air from the swing slapped against my cheek.

I didn't open my eyes. I stood motionless, barefoot on the slippery basalt, a brazen, predatory smirk playing on my lips. I understood the principle. I had caught the rhythm of emptiness.

"Again," Sensei's cold voice came.

The strikes kept coming, but now the slaughter transformed into an incredible, raw dance. I still took hits—and often. Every mistake cost me a painful thud and an immediate plunge into freezing water. Bloodied welts and purple bruises multiplied on my bare skin, stinging under the icy current. Yet with every passing hour, fewer hits landed, and my dodges grew increasingly precise. My analytical brain eliminated unnecessary tension at incredible speed, tuning my nervous system to the surrounding physics.

I learned to evade strikes by millimeters, executing minimalist, effortless micro-movements of my hips, knees, and neck. My bare body, whipped by freezing wind and water, moved with unnatural, fluid lightness. I began to understand what a massive waste of energy my previous, hard blocking of blows had been.

As the sun began to slowly sink behind the high basalt walls of the valley, casting long, dark shadows across the clearing, I was still standing on the stone, breathing heavily. My skin was red from the biting cold and covered in a dense network of bamboo marks, but my body was completely relaxed. My ankle and knee silently absorbed every strike of the river, and I remained in a perfect, natural balance.

From the bank, a powerful, lightning-fast bamboo blow suddenly sped straight toward my forehead. This strike carried inhuman speed, far greater than all the previous ones.

I didn't open my eyes. I felt a minimal thickening of the air in front of my face, a sudden pressure spike signaling the strike. With a minimal, fluid movement, I pulled my chin back one centimeter while gently lowering my hips.

The old man's flexible bamboo stopped exactly one millimeter from my skin, slicing the fog hanging over the stream with a sharp whistle.

Silence. Only the monotonous, mighty roar of water filled the basalt valley.

I slowly raised my eyelid, my sapphire eye meeting the attentive, deep gaze of the old man's Tiger-Eye. The Master held the staff motionless, looking at me with stern, unchanging calm. After a moment, he slowly lowered the bamboo and tucked it behind his worn leather belt.

"That's enough for today. Get out, kid," the old man said gruffly, turning toward the campfire. "Your body is starting to understand what emptiness is."

I slowly stepped off the stone, feeling my heavily strained muscles tremble from exhaustion. When I reached the bank, I was shivering from the cold, and my bare skin throbbed with dull pain from dozens of hits, but my mind was filled with that same predatory satisfaction. Every bruise was proof that my body was tuning itself to a new, resistance-free mode of movement.

In the evening, we both sat by the crackling fire. Red flames licked the basalt stones, warming my chilled body once I finally put on my dry clothes and warm coat. The smell of burning wood mingled with the aromatic smoke from the old man's pipe. I slowly drank clean, boiled water from a simple clay cup, listening to the loud roar of the stream that had so ruthlessly battered me just hours before.

"What you felt today is the foundation of the Sapphire Flow Style," Sensei spoke, staring into the fire illuminating his scarred face. "Most fools believe combat is a matter of who hits harder and who has tougher skin. True craft lies in eliminating friction. Your body must become like this stone and this water at the same time. You must absorb the enemy's force, let it flow through your structure without offering resistance, and then redirect it and give it back with doubled power. If you are rigid, you will be broken. If you are fluid, nothing can touch you."

I smiled quietly, and in my sapphire eye reflecting the red flames of the campfire, that same predatory, destructive fire ignited—the fire that a year from now would shake all of Crossgard.

"Tomorrow," Sensei muttered, closing his eyes and leaning his head against the shelter wall. "We walk out of the stream onto solid ground. And we'll see how this fluidity works under the pressure of my fists. Go to sleep, kid. Tomorrow your list of mistakes will be much longer."

I lay down on the hard ground, tucking my dry coat under my head. My entire body throbbed with sharp, clean pain, and I fell asleep with a deep, predatory sense of satisfaction. The katorga continued, and with every passing day, I calibrated myself into a relentless monster.