"So, Maya — if you want to learn kung fu, the first thing is to accept it in your heart. Throw out the notions you've carried until now, make yourself an infant again, follow its line of thought, feel its ideas. Only that way will your study come to anything," Stick concluded.
Understanding dawned on Maya. "No wonder you're supposed to start kung fu young. It's not only that the body hasn't fully set — more importantly, the mind's still a blank page, so it's far easier to take in this mystical way of thinking!"
Stick nodded. "In truth I never wanted to take you two on. You're not just old for it — you're Westerners who don't understand Chinese culture. Only, Maya, you ought to be the exception. You already had chakra of your own, so accepting martial theory should come easier to you."
Uh — can I mention that my mind set a long time ago, too? Years of materialist schooling, "kung fu forms are all made up" — it's carved into my brain. Not something I can unlearn overnight.
By the time ten o'clock rolled around, Matt had climbed the wall into Central Park and made his way to the lakeside grove where Stick had told him to meet.
"Starting today, I'll begin explaining some of the philosophy behind cultivating Chi. The K'un-Lun Chi Cultivation Art is the fruit of the ancient Chinese tradition of dialectical thought, married to martial arts, traditional medicine, the Ancient Daoyin Arts, and culture and the arts. You may think of it as a higher order of body culture. The process of cultivating Chi is nothing less than coming to know the mutual relationship between your own self and the universe."
"To help you grasp it, Maya, Matt — don't think of me as a martial arts instructor. Think of me straight up as Newton, as Einstein. Hey — don't laugh, I mean it. When I studied the art in my day, my own master demanded I revere him as a god — that is, treat him as I would the Lord Above. This isn't some outrageous demand, and the point isn't to prop up a master's authority. The point is to make you respect the art you're learning. Regard it as a god, and your mind and spirit sink naturally into it — and it goes down that much easier. To study martial arts is, in itself, to accept an entirely new way of thinking."
"The K'un-Lun Chi Cultivation Art views a human being as a small universe. Cultivating Chi is the process by which the small universe and the great universe touch and connect with one another. All things bear the yin upon their backs and hold the yang in their arms—"
As Master Stick's teaching moved from the shallow to the deep, Maya couldn't say how much Matt was taking in — but she herself had genuinely taken the core idea of K'un-Lun's Chi to heart. Because she was an egg of a person — white on the outside, Chinese on the inside — and one who already carried chakra at that. Years back, in the course of studying the Hunyuan Art she'd pulled from a gacha draw, she'd already worked through no small stack of Daoist canon. The K'un-Lun Chi Cultivation Art Stick taught was a wholly different beast from the immortal-cultivation she'd once imagined — but that guiding theme, the unity of heaven and man, was one and the same.
On the third night of Stick's teaching of the K'un-Lun Chi Cultivation Art, the skills in Maya's System changed.
The gains to chakra, ninjutsu, and taijutsu were plain to see. Four skills — the Rasengan, Chakra-Enhanced Strength, the K'un-Lun Chi Cultivation Art, and her Fist-and-Sword kung fu — were now under active development.
The key thing was that her Chakra Sea shot up dramatically — straight from Silver rank to Gold rank, a genuinely enormous jump. Which was to say, the golden chakra stored in the sea of her dantian was now more abundant and more potent. Even her perception climbed a full level: in the span of a few days, Maya's sensing range grew from 200 meters (about 660 feet) to 300 meters (about 980 feet) — half again as far.
The other improvements came easily enough, but the Chakra Sea and Super Perception — these were the first major leaps in months. And this was only the beginning. As Stick's teaching went on, Maya's abilities were bound to hit a period of explosive growth. With such clear, obvious numbers to prove it, Maya threw herself into the study with even more heart.
It wasn't only her Shadow Clone that trained under Stick — her real body was home poring over the books Stick had provided. Working both ends like that, Maya's progress got to the point where even the old blind man himself was a little spooked.
Which was why Maya had been granted a single day off. In Master Stick's words, she was advancing so fast she made Matt look duller and clumsier by the hour, and Stick needed to give the boy some dedicated remedial coaching.
That afternoon, Maya's Shadow Clone was tucked away in her room studying as usual, while her real body sat in the living room watching TV, with little James on a floor cushion playing with his blocks.
"Jack, have you noticed the New York stations have been hyping Jordan lately?" Maya said to Jack, who sat off to one side yanking at his own hair.
Thanks to Jennifer's blowup a few days earlier, Jack had stopped going to the Black Widow's café to write, to avoid any appearance of impropriety. But the living room was too noisy with the kid fussing beside him, and he couldn't settle his mind at all.
So the moment he heard Maya's remark, he set his pen straight down and hustled over to the couch to watch TV too.
"Maya, you have no idea how insane Jordan's been these past few days. The Chicago Bulls swept the Cleveland Cavaliers 4–0 — the Cavs didn't win a single game. And the Eastern Conference Finals bracket is out: Bulls versus the New York Knicks. Us New Yorkers are terrified of Jordan. Lately every paper's been savaging him — trying to get in his head and rattle his game, probably."
Jack was an old-school fan. He was a Jordan man, sure, but the New York Knicks, right down the road from home, were Jack's true team. And in the nineties, this was the Knicks fan's golden hour — not the sorry dumpster fire of a team they'd become down the line.
"Something's off. Way off. Even if you want to rattle an opponent, you don't come right out and call Jordan a mutant," Maya muttered, eyes fixed on the screen.
At that moment a commentator on the TV was holding forth. "Is Jordan a mutant? I'd say there's a real chance of it. What normal human being breaks his leg and comes back playing harder? This is unfair competition. Mutants don't just wreck the stability of our society and threaten our very lives — they cheat us ordinary people right there on the court. Mutants are a different people from us, a separate race. They are the great enemy of ordinary humanity, and it's true from every angle you look. Jordan is the plainest example there is. I move that David Stern strip Michael Jordan of his eligibility to play."
With that, the white commentator — a man named Kelly — rose to his feet, hoisted up an anti-mutant placard, and shouted at the top of his lungs, "Mutants out! Lock up the mutants!"
"This — this really does seem a bit much. After the broken leg, Jordan changed his game a lot; it's gotten more efficient, more sensible. Anyone can see that, can't they?" Even Jack was shaken.
"Jack — has there been a lot of negative news about mutants lately?" Maya asked suddenly.
Jack scratched the back of his head and thought for a moment. "I don't think anyone's specifically writing hit pieces. It's mostly news about mutants wrecking public facilities, causing all kinds of casualties. But that's just fact, isn't it? You can't really call it slander."
To a political naïf like Jack, Maya didn't bother replying. The people steering the narrative worked exactly like this — never publish an editorial attack, just seed the negative news and let the public's hostility toward mutants grow all on its own.
Now, to hammer the mutants and drag their reputation through the mud, they'd even roped in a sports icon like Jordan. Clearly the hands behind the curtain were playing for keeps this time. The one thing Maya couldn't work out was why — why go after mutants this hard?
To use them for research? You could do that on the quiet.
Because mutants threatened the survival of the human race? Even more absurd — from the looks of it, it was the mutants being hunted toward extinction.
And another thing — where had Magneto and the Professor gone? That was the point that baffled Maya most of all. Last time, in her Spider-Man guise, she'd spoken with John, with Lorna and their group, and had all but confirmed they were core recruits of the X-Men. She'd heard them mention the Professor, the X-Men.
Yet the situation now was this bizarre. Had Magneto and the others done something truly enormous to the U.S. government? Cut them so deep, made them hate mutants so bitterly, that they'd secretly gone and killed Magneto and the rest?