Oh, how cruel the world was!

I looked out at the courtyard floor covered in bamboo leaves. With the rough broom handle stuck in my hands, I felt like a pitiable little servant from a palace intrigue story.

If I had known shizun would punish me, I would have indulged a little more today.

The day had even started off so well. I had brewed tea especially delicious and crisp in flavor, and in my morning meditation I had felt an unusual peace and calm.

When I went to report to my shizun, he performed his daily check-up on my health and inner balance and reached a pleasing result: despite the formation, I had succeeded in reaching the right state for meditation. Although I still couldn’t transform my internal energies to cultivate, it boded well for my future—or so shizun said.

And then he dropped the bad news.

He wanted to step up my training.

Apparently, meditation, reading, and writing weren’t enough; he also wanted me to learn swordplay. Shizun pulled me to the training grounds, put a wooden sword in my hands, and said, “Let us begin training your body’s essence. A mastery of the basics will allow you to cultivate sword techniques when the time is right.”

To which I wanted to say, shizun! Look at me! Does it seem like a fragile garden flower such as myself could possible go swish-swish with a sword and chop off people’s heads? Clearly he didn’t realize just who he had taken for a disciple. I could learn anything for him, except for wielding such a rough-on-the-skin weapon. So I told him, “Shizun, this can’t be done.”

Rarely did I contradict my shizun this way. He seemed surprised with a furrow in his brow, and in this pause I took the opportunity to explain.

I put the sword in the crook of my elbow and showed shizun my hands—delicate, soft, and clean. “Shizun, don’t you see? It’s unthinkable for me to wield a sword. Every part of me is as soft as a kitten’s paw pads. I’m a pearl to be cherished in the palm of one’s hand—how could anyone bear seeing rough calluses mar my skin?”

Cold and to the point, shizun said, “I can bear it.”

“…But I can’t!” Full of hesitation—oh, I couldn’t tell him the real reason why I had to refuse so harshly, could I?—I stumbled with a few meandering words. “Shizun, I can do anything else, but this…”

His patience ran thin, then disappeared when I didn’t provide any good excuse. He frowned. “Very well. If you will not wield a sword, then wield a broom. Go sweep the courtyard clean.”

With that, shizun reached into his sleeve and threw a broom at me. I was baffled at this new wooden stick in my hands, but when shizun said that failure to sweep the yard meant I would need to sweep the whole mountain clean tomorrow, I gulped and held it fast.

Oh, how things went wrong. Although I knew from shizun prided himself on his swordsmanship, surely that didn’t mean I, too, had to wield a sword? In the demon sect, some of the cultivators utilized gu bugs; some of them used whips; some of them even danced with ribbons as their chosen weapons.

It wasn’t that I wanted to disobey shizun, but my body really wasn’t meant for sword practice. And now I had to sweep the yard… which wasn’t any better at all.

In the end, I had no choice but to do it. Shizun left the mountain for the day, leaving me to muddle my own way through this task.

The handle of the broom was even rougher than the sword; it wasn’t lacquered at all. The untreated wood carved into a pole shape felt rough and abrasive in my hands. I wrapped a strip of cloth around the handle to give it some cushioning and set about trying to sweep away the bamboo leaves.

The courtyard wasn’t particularly large, and now, I was grateful that shizun’s house was so humble.

After only a few minutes of sweeping, the skin on my hands eroded. It broke into open sores and wounds from the tight grip I had on the broom, and the repetitive motions which led to my skin chafing against the handle. Blood soaked into the cloth, which sagged and grew slippery with liquid.

I was used to certain levels of pain, so this didn’t make me flinch. It was just inconvenient. It was unsightly. I was glad that shizun had left the mountain before I started—I didn’t want him to see me struggling this way.

‘How dare this furnace ruin the master’s goods?’ The voice of the steward rose in my mind. ‘Selfish, ungrateful cauldron. The master will not want it. Shall we throw it to the guards?’

I stomped on a pile off leaves. Shut up. He’s dead. They’re all dead.

I was no longer a furnace. I was a disciple. The maintenance of a furnace was different from the maintenance of a disciple. Disciples were meant to become injured through training and battle. Things weren’t like back then, where I would be punished for any accidental wounds, where I had to be carefully inspected for flaws. Shizun didn’t care about such things. He didn’t care.

But seeing the state of the injuries on my hands, a deep guilt suffocated my chest. It was so ugly. Shizun wouldn’t want me when he found out my body was so unfit for his needs that I couldn’t even—I stifled the thought. He wouldn’t find out.

Once I was done sweeping, I looked out at the freshly-cleaned yard. It was proper and tended, and shizun would be satisfied with my performance. But I had to clean up my body before shizun returned to the mountain.

I hurried to the river. There, I rolled up the bloody rag and hid it by the tree root, and made sure to wash the broom and my hands. The smell of blood, the evidence of my body’s inability, washed away downstream. The mangled flesh wouldn’t heal for another two hours—I had to take care not to drip blood.

After an hour, the blood stopped trickling down. I returned home and fled to my room, where I set the broom aside.

Then I sat, waiting.