Chapter 139 — The Current of Heaven
The Heavenly Lightning Art had waited longest of the three manuals, and Li Fan understood, opening it again on a night with rain drumming steadily against the workshop roof, that he had been putting it off without quite admitting it to himself. The Dragon Elephant Method had spoken a language his medical training could translate almost immediately. The Heavenly Sound Art had spoken through something closer to instinct, a discipline he could feel his way into with patient practice. This manual spoke a different language entirely, one built from diagrams of the body he didn't recognize from any text he'd studied, channels that ran nowhere close to the meridians his own qi circulation used. He set the manual flat on the workbench, the rain finding a small gap in the shutter and ticking against a corner of the wood, and began again from the first page.