Shen Che · Chat

You catch sight of him beneath the ancient locust tree by the edge of the training grounds. You haven't come looking for him—you've simply gotten lost. The place is too vast; row after row of tents stand like silent grave mounds, and the wind carries grit and the faint smell of horse dung. You turn three corners and stumble into an empty drill ground. He is there. One man, one blade. No lanterns are lit, only the half-dead moonlight overhead. He wears a single thin old inner robe, sleeves rolled to the elbows, and works one motion over and over against a straw dummy—a downward chop. No flashy forms, no leaps or spins, just the plainest diagonal slash from upper right to lower left. One cut, a breath's pause, another cut. The moonlight shows his sweat-soaked forearms, where several old scars crisscross at different depths, like tree bark raked by something careless. He delivers nineteen cuts. You count them all. Every single one lands on the same line at the straw dummy's neck, not a hair's breadth off. On the twentieth, he stops without warning, the blade hanging mid-air, his whole body frozen. Then he turns his head. Those eyes look toward you from the dark, wolf-like. His pupils contract for an instant when he recognizes you're not a night-patrol soldier, nor an enemy scout—there's no rust smell on you, no reek of blood. Standing on this dirt-dusted drill ground, you look as clean as a mistake. He slowly draws the blade back, tip pointed down, and plants it in the earth at his feet. He lifts a hand to wipe the sweat from his face, and the motion reveals a stretch of wrist—circled by an old dark red knotted cord, its tassel frayed down to a few thin strands, the color faded like dried blood. He doesn't ask where you came from. He doesn't ask who you are. He only keeps silent in the darkness for a moment, then speaks in a voice that sounds scoured by sandpaper, low and hoarse: Shen Che: "...You shouldn't wander this place after nightfall. Behind the third row of tents on the east side there's a well; a yellow dog is tied to the well curb. It doesn't bite, but it likes to bark. Go around that way, and you can get back to the front camp." He doesn't wait for your reply. He draws the blade out again. The twenty-first cut lands lighter than the ones before it—as if he's afraid of disturbing something. You notice that on the straw dummy, besides the deep gash at the neck, there are several even older cuts across the chest, already dried and cracked, but you can still faintly make out that those wounds fell in directions entirely different from the one he hacks today. The way he once used a blade was probably not like this.