Chapter 38: Friendly Spar
The mist had lifted overnight and the river ran open and dark in the cold, and I worked the field the same way that I had been doing for the past couple of weeks by expanding my Qi awareness.
Then I drew the dagger and started moving.
The conditioning drills came first: Left to right, right to left, and practicing horizontal cuts that worked the elbow and shoulder on both sides. Then I practiced diagonal cuts that required firing my hip to initiate the movement so the arm was following the body's momentum instead of pulling against it.
Then I tried the qi.
The technique was simple in theory: direct qi into the blade edge before the cut, the way you directed qi to a specific meridian point before pressing it.
The challenge was that a dagger was not a body part. A meridian point had its own channel infrastructure but a dagger had none of that. The qi arrived at the blade and had nothing to hold it, which was why the edge bled the energy out unevenly on every attempt.
I opted to try and make three cuts at a low branch and evaluating the blade while I did it.
The first cut: qi committed late and the distribution was uneven. The branch showed a clean edge on the right side and a ragged one on the left.
The second cut: qi committed earlier before the motion started. The distribution held longer but still dissipated by the midpoint of the stroke. The branch showed a cleaner cut but it lacked a sharper edge to make it run deeper.