Chapter 116 - 115: The Magistrate’s Son
Standing in the center of the yard were Lin Yuan’s three newly acquired disciples. Two of them, Li and Chen, were the sons of local merchants—boys dressed in simple tunics, their faces etched with the earnest desire to learn how to defend themselves in a harsh world.
The third was young master Zhao Ming.
Zhao was thirteen years old, draped in a flawlessly tailored silk tunic that probably cost more than the entire Azure Swallow School combined. He was the only son of the town’s magistrate, a boy who had been fed with a silver spoon and raised on a diet of flattery. He had joined the school not out of a desire to learn, but because his father wanted him disciplined, and the local rumors of Lin Yuan’s bloody stand against the Black Tiger Gang had piqued the magistrate’s interest.
"Keep your back straight, Li. Lower your center of gravity, Chen," Lin Yuan instructed, pacing slowly in front of the boys. His own fractured ribs were tightly bound beneath his robes, shooting dull spikes of agony into his chest with every step he took. "The horse stance is the foundation of all martial arts. If you cannot root yourself to the earth, the earth will eventually rise to meet your face."
Li and Chen gritted their teeth, their thighs trembling under the strain, sweat beading on their foreheads as they held the grueling posture.
Zhao Ming, however, was not in a horse stance. He was standing casually with his arms crossed, a look of boredom painted across his plump face.
"Master Lin," Zhao drawled, kicking a loose pebble at Li’s trembling leg. "How long must we endure this peasant posturing? My father paid you an exorbitant sum of silver to teach me the lethal techniques of the this school. I did not come here to squat in the dirt like a field hand taking a rest. Teach me how to break a man’s jaw."
Li lost his balance from the kicked pebble and tumbled into the dust. Zhao burst into a cruel, mocking laugh. "Look at him! How pathetic. Is this the caliber of peers I am forced to associate with? He belongs behind a plow, not a sword."
Lin Yuan stopped pacing. The courtyard fell dead silent.
Deep within his mind, Lin Yuan could not help but think about how poorly this boy would survive in the cultivation world. Back when Lin Yuan had been an outer-city cultivator with his meager Qi Condensation cultivation, if he had dared to speak to someone even a few levels above him in such a disrespectful and insolent manner, he would have been severely punished, if not killed outright.
The sheer audacity of this brat!
For a brief moment, Lin Yuan felt the urge to grab Zhao by the collar and throw him out into the muddy street. But he quickly suppressed the thought.
This was the mortal world, not the world of cultivators. Different rules governed this place, and different hearts were needed to live within it.
He then remembered the empty cupboards. If he kicked Zhao out, the magistrate would undoubtedly demand the tuition back. The school would default on the Black Tiger Gang’s debt, and Lin Fan would starve in the winter cold.
Pride did not feed children. Lin Yuan already understood that much.
He swallowed the bitter pill of humiliation, forcing himself to accept the reality before him.
In this life, pride is a luxury I simply cannot afford.
I must compromise.
Lin Yuan slowly walked over to Zhao Ming. He did not yell, nor did he raise his hand. Instead, he forced his expression into a mask of solemn, assessing contemplation.
"You are absolutely correct, Young Master Zhao," Lin Yuan said smoothly, his voice devoid of anger.
Zhao puffed out his chest, a smug grin spreading across his face as he looked down at the panting Li and Chen. "I knew it. Now, show me the lethal strikes."
"Your physical foundation is clearly too... refined for the basic horse stance," Lin Yuan continued, weaving a masterful lie of martial philosophy. "To teach you the lethal techniques now would tear your muscles. You require a specialized, elite conditioning method. A method reserved only for those with the potential to truly master the Azure Swallow’s highest arts."
Zhao’s eyes lit up with arrogant greed. "Specialized conditioning? I am ready."
Lin Yuan walked over to the corner of the courtyard and retrieved two massive, iron-banded wooden buckets. He filled them to the absolute brim from the stone well, water sloshing over the sides. He carried them back and dropped them heavily at Zhao’s feet.
"Pick these up. Keep your arms completely straight, extended horizontally from your shoulders," Lin Yuan instructed. "You will walk the entire perimeter of this courtyard. When you finish a hundred laps, you will take the woodcutting axe and split fifty logs behind the kitchen. This will forge your shoulders into iron and your grip into a vice. Only then can you learn to break a jaw."
Zhao Ming hesitated, looking at the heavy buckets. But his ego had been perfectly stroked. Believing he had bypassed the "peasant" training for a secret, elite method, the boy grunted, grabbed the buckets, and strained to lift his arms horizontally. His face instantly turned beet red under the crushing weight.
"Begin," Lin Yuan commanded.
As Zhao began his agonizing, stumbling march around the courtyard, too exhausted to breathe let alone insult the other boys, Lin Yuan turned back to Li and Chen. He had successfully managed a toxic student without angering the town’s most powerful political figure, exchanging immortal wrath for mortal cunning.
While correcting Li’s posture, Lin Yuan’s gaze drifted toward the edge of the courtyard.
Standing near the wooden veranda was his seven-year-old son, Lin Fan. The boy had been watching the training session intently. Seeing his father look away, Fan quietly stepped out into the dirt and attempted to mimic the horse stance.
Lin Yuan watched silently. It was painful to witness.
Lin Fan’s legs were spindly and undernourished. As he tried to lower his center of gravity, his knees knocked together. His balance was entirely off, his core completely lacking stability. After just a few seconds, the boy’s legs gave out, and he tumbled ungracefully backward into the dirt, scraping his elbows.
Fan scrambled to his feet, his face burning with intense shame as he realized his father had seen him fall. The boy’s eyes welled with tears of inadequacy. Without looking back, Fan turned and ran away, disappearing behind the main hall.
Lin Yuan felt a heavy, sinking weight in his chest. In the world of cultivators, root bones and martial talent dictated a person’s entire worth. Watching his son fail so fundamentally at the most basic stance confirmed a harsh truth: Lin Fan lacked martial talent entirely. He was physically weak and hopelessly clumsy.
After dismissing the students for the day—leaving Zhao Ming collapsed in a groaning, exhausted heap of sweat and blistered hands—Lin Yuan walked to the back courtyard.
He found Lin Fan sitting beneath the sprawling branches of the old plum tree, his knees pulled up to his chest, quietly sobbing into his frayed sleeves.
Lin Yuan walked over and sat down in the dirt beside his son. He didn’t speak immediately. He just sat there, offering his quiet, steady presence.
"I’m sorry, Father," Fan sniffled, rubbing his red, puffy eyes. "I tried to do it. I wanted to be strong like you. I wanted to learn how to fight so the bad men wouldn’t hurt you anymore. But I’m too weak. I can’t even stand right. I’m useless."
Lin Yuan’s mortal heart violently contracted.
Typically, a father would have scolded the child, forcing him to consume bone-forging pills or beating the weakness out of him. The core philosophy of the cultivation world was absolute: Might makes right. A man’s worth is measured by the blood on his fists and the height of his realm.
But Lin Yuan reached out, wrapping his arm around his trembling son, pulling the boy into his side.
"Fan’er, look at me," Lin Yuan said softly.
The boy sniffled, looking up at his father’s bruised and battered face.
"A man’s worth is not measured by his fists," Lin Yuan stated, his voice carrying a profound conviction that entirely contradicted his own beliefs as a cultivator. "Fighting is a brutal, ugly trade. I do it because I have to, not because it makes me a better man. The strongest men are not the ones who can break stones. The strongest men are the ones who can carry the weight of their family, who treat others with kindness, and who face their fears even when they know they might lose."
Lin Yuan gently wiped the tears from Fan’s cheeks with his thumb. "You have your mother’s gentle heart, Fan’er. That is a strength far greater than any martial stance. You are my son, and you are perfect exactly as you are. You never have to swing a sword to make me proud."
Lin Fan stared at his father, the crushing weight of inadequacy slowly melting away under the absolute, and unconditional warmth of paternal love. The boy buried his face in Lin Yuan’s robes, crying not out of shame, but out of sheer relief.
As Lin Yuan held his son beneath the plum tree, he felt a profound shift within his spiritual sea. He was beginning to value a child’s emotional well-being over the strict and ruthless hierarchy that governed the cultivation world.
The tempering of his Mortal Heart was advancing, forged in the quiet fires of patience, compromise, and affection.
To sever a Mortal Heart, one first needs to possess a Mortal Heart worth severing. For cultivators like myself, might determines one’s worth. To deny that would simply be lying to myself.
Even in the face of danger, one’s strength determined how they could respond.
There’s a saying, ’The fear of a deer came from knowing the lion’s might. An ant, knowing nothing of such power, felt no fear at all. The higher one’s realm, the greater the world one could perceive.’
Lin Yuan had never opposed the concept of might. His Dao Heart had only rejected the idea that the path of cultivation had to be walked alone.
But now, as a mortal trying to temper his heart, he was beginning to understand something else, something he had partly understood even before transmigrating into the ruthless world of cultivation.
For mortals, might was not everything.
A mortal could not rely on overwhelming strength to solve every problem. They could not erase hunger with a wave of their hand, cure an illness with a strand of Qi, or silence an enemy with a single thought.
They had to depend on one another.
A farmer needed his family to survive the harvest. A merchant needed the trust of his customers. A child needed his parents. An old man needed someone to help him when his legs could no longer carry him.
Their lives were built upon connections rather than overwhelming strength.
A mortal might possess no great power, yet they could still protect someone through sacrifice. They could have nothing but a few copper coins, yet willingly give half of them to someone they loved. They could be weak enough to be crushed by a cultivator with a single finger, yet still find the courage to stand between danger and their family.
That was something might alone could never explain.
In the cultivation world, strength allowed one to protect what they cherished.
In the mortal world, sometimes the desire to protect someone was what gave a person the strength to endure.
Lin Yuan lowered his gaze toward Lin Fan, who was peacefully resting against his chest.
Might could determine how far a cultivator could walk, but it did not determine why they walked. And perhaps that was the very thing most cultivators had been missing. A Mortal Heart was not teaching one to abandon their strength. It was teaching them that, for some, strength was never supposed to be the only thing that gave life meaning.
To enter the spirit severing realm, one should sever all unnecessary obsessions!
Then,
Over the next few weeks, a strange, beautiful rhythm settled over the Azure Swallow School.
Zhao Ming, subjected daily to the grueling physical labor disguised as "elite conditioning," had actually begun to develop real muscle. More importantly, the exhausting work had completely drained him of the energy required to be a bully. He began to look at Lin Yuan not with disdain, but with the genuine respect of a student for his master. Li and Chen progressed steadily, and Lin Fan found his place by helping his father manage the school’s meager ledgers, showcasing a bright, sharp mind for numbers.
For a brief, fleeting moment, it felt as though they had finally stabilized.
But the Heavens in this mortal realm were notoriously cruel.
One evening, as Lin Yuan was securing the wooden shutters of the main hall, the temperature in the air abruptly plummeted. A harsh, howling wind swept down from the northern mountains, carrying with it the bitter scent of frost.
Lin Yuan looked up at the sky. The gray clouds broke open, and the first, freezing flakes of an early winter snow began to fall.
He turned and looked back into the dilapidated dojo. The roof was riddled with cracks, the walls were thin, and there was hardly any firewood left in the shed. A severe, freezing draft immediately swept through the school, instantly dropping the indoor temperature to a deadly chill. The brutal, unforgiving winter had arrived, and with it, a completely new, terrifying battle for survival.