That morning, Li Yuan awoke with a strange sensation.
Not pain, not fatigue—rather… awareness.
Awareness of his body in a way he had never experienced before.
Every muscle, every bone, every current of blood felt as though… they were speaking to him.
He sat on the floor of the emergency care center, listening to the morning sounds of Yangzhou beginning to stir. But his attention was drawn to something deeper.
This body has carried me this far, he reflected. From Ziran Village, over mountains, across rivers, through thousands of steps. Every step, every breath, every heartbeat… all recorded here.
The understanding did not come like lightning, but like dawn—gradual, yet impossible to ignore.
The body is a temporary home. But while it is home, it holds every story.
Li Yuan rose and walked to the quietest corner of the room.
Doctor Huang and Nurse Jin were still asleep.
The patients lay in the gentle rest of early morning.
Li Yuan had time to enter his Zhenjing undisturbed.
He sat cross-legged, closed his eyes, and let his awareness sink into his inner world.
This time, the transition into Zhenjing felt different.
Usually, entering his inner world was like stepping from one room into another.
Now, he felt his body… entering with him.
Not the physical form—it still sat on the floor—but the awareness of it, the memory of all the body had lived.
Inside Zhenjing, he was not in the familiar landscape.
He stood inside… a mirror.
Or rather, inside the reflection of himself, vast in scale.
Water still flowed in the distance.
The Sky still stretched above.
The other understandings still resonated each in their own way.
But now, all was seen through the body—through memories stored in bone, muscle, and breath.
Ten years, Li Yuan decided. I will need ten years to truly understand this.
Time began to flow at the familiar ratio: ten years within, one day without.
The first year, Li Yuan explored the body's memories.
Every small scar told a story—
The finger cut while learning to write with the Old Teacher in the village.
The knee scraped from falling out of a tree with Mu Yi and Fan Tu.
The shoulder sore from helping his father carry timber.
Every wound is a story, he realized. Every healing, a lesson.
The second and third years, he studied how his body had changed through years of Daojing practice.
His muscles were not large like a warrior's, but carried a different kind of strength—born of efficiency, of moving without resisting nature.
His bones were not as hard as stone, but flexible like bamboo that does not break even in strong winds.
A body that understands Dao moves differently, he thought.
The fourth to sixth years, Li Yuan began to sense other people's bodies.
Not in a supernatural way, but in the deep recognition of how a body expresses the inner state.
The way Doctor Huang walked with slightly rounded shoulders—not from age, but from the weight he bore.
The way Nurse Jin's hands trembled faintly—not from illness, but from the anxiety she hid.
The body never lies, Li Yuan understood. It always reveals the truth, even when the mouth speaks otherwise.
The seventh and eighth years, he learned of healing—
Not through medicine or technique, but through resonance.
When his body moved with the right rhythm, others nearby would unconsciously adjust.
When his breath was steady, theirs became steadier.
When his posture was balanced, others felt more at ease.
Healing is not about fixing what is broken, he realized. It is about reminding the body how to be whole.
The ninth year, something surprising occurred.
He began to feel… other people's pain.
Not as his own, but in understanding its root—and how to ease it.
An old man's cough was not only illness, but loneliness settled deep in the chest.
A child's feverish crying was not only from sickness, but from longing for home.
Every illness has a story, he thought. Sometimes, healing the story matters more than healing the symptom.
The tenth year, he reached an insight that shook all of Zhenjing.
The body is a temporary home for what does not perish.
Not as philosophy or metaphor, but as something felt.
The body is the vessel, but what resides within—awareness, spirit, essence—is what is true, what is eternal.
And once one understands this, the relationship with the body changes—no longer clinging, yet not neglecting.
Like a guest who respects the house they stay in, but remembers it is not theirs forever.
At the end of the tenth year, Li Yuan felt a great shift within his Zhenjing.
The Understanding of the Body—until now just a concept—now vibrated with new intensity.
Like a struck gong, its tone spread through the whole inner world, altering every other understanding.
Water flowed with more… awareness, as if knowing it coursed through a living body.
Silence stretched with more… warmth, as if aware it dwelt in a breathing vessel.
The Sky arched with more… closeness, as if knowing it was seen by mortal eyes yet eternal spirit.
Then, with the gentleness of morning air touching skin, the Understanding of the Body crossed the unseen threshold—
and entered Ganjing.
Li Yuan opened his eyes on the floor of the emergency center.
One day had passed in the outer world.
Doctor Huang was examining a patient.
Nurse Jin was preparing medicine.
The city's morning bustle stirred beyond the windows.
But Li Yuan felt something fundamental had changed.
Every movement of his body now felt… intentional. Not awkward, not excessive, but precisely what was needed—like water flowing through a perfect channel, never too fast, never too slow.
When he stood, the motion felt like a dance—
Not a learned routine, but the natural dance of a body in harmony with the world.
"Li Yuan?" Doctor Huang called. "Are you well?"
Li Yuan turned, and the doctor paused. There was something in the way Li Yuan moved—
More fluid, more aligned, as though each motion had purpose, yet was utterly natural.
"Well," Li Yuan replied, walking over. "Is there anything I can help with?"
As he approached, Doctor Huang noticed something odd—
The usual ache in his back eased.
His anxious breath deepened.
"You're… different today," he murmured, unable to explain.
Li Yuan smiled faintly. "Perhaps I slept well."
The whole day, Li Yuan worked as before—helping patients, bringing water, sitting with the lonely.
But the effects were far more tangible.
The man who had complained of headaches in the morning was sitting upright, smiling by noon.
A feverish child's temperature fell without additional medicine.
An old man's breathing eased after Li Yuan simply sat beside him for half an hour.
Doctor Huang watched in growing astonishment.
"Li Yuan," he asked during their midday rest, "what are you doing to these patients?"
"Nothing special."
"But they're recovering faster than usual."
Li Yuan looked at his hands—not just tools, but extensions of something greater.
"Perhaps the body already knows how to heal itself. Sometimes it only needs to be reminded."
That evening, Li Yuan helped an old woman who could not stand from back pain.
He did not massage or apply any special technique.
He simply placed his hand gently on her back and… waited. No forcing, no pressing—just presence.
After a few minutes, she said, "Warm."
"What?"
"Your hand is warm. And my back… it doesn't hurt as much."
Li Yuan felt the subtle flow—not mystical energy, but the resonance of the Body understanding in Ganjing.
It was as if his body reminded hers how to relax, how not to cling to pain.
Ten minutes later, she sat upright without assistance.
That night, Doctor Huang approached Li Yuan with an unreadable expression.
"Li Yuan, may I ask something?"
"Go ahead."
"Who are you, really? You're not a doctor, yet patients recover faster when you're near. You're not a trained nurse, yet you know exactly what each person needs. You say you're from the north, yet you tend the people of Lu as if they were your own family."
Li Yuan was silent for a moment.
"I'm just… someone who understands this body is borrowed. And while it's borrowed, it's best used to help other borrowed bodies."
"Borrowed from who?"
"From something greater than us all."
That night, Li Yuan did not sleep immediately.
He sat on the back veranda of the care center, feeling the effects of the Body understanding newly entered into Ganjing.
Eleven understandings now resonated together—more complex, more subtle, more… whole.
He felt his body no longer as the limit of himself, but as an extension of his Zhenjing.
Every movement was an expression of understanding.
Every touch, a bridge between one soul and another.
This is the path, he realized with new clarity. Not the path to power, but the path to understanding what it means to truly live in a mortal body with an eternal soul.
Inside, the patients slept more soundly than usual.
Doctor Huang, who often stayed awake in worry, slept peacefully.
Nurse Jin, who often dreamt of the war to come, dreamt instead of a quiet garden.
And Li Yuan, with eleven understandings resonating in Ganjing, sat in a fullness of stillness—
The stillness of a body that knows it is a temporary home,
and the stillness of a soul that knows its own eternity.
Tomorrow would bring new challenges.
But tonight, in the small care center on Bamboo Street, healing happened not only in the flesh—
but in the deeper place where the body remembers it is the vessel for something far more beautiful than pain.
Something that has never been wounded because it has never been separate from its source.
Something that is always whole, always healed, always… here.
And in the distance, though Yangzhou still breathed with anxious anticipation of war,
there was one small place where the breath flowed in the rhythm of remembered peace—
where weary bodies found rest in a truth larger than their fear.
Water had found a new way to flow.
Through hands that healed.
Through presence that reminded.
Through a body that knew it was a temporary home for an eternal love.