Separated by a Wall

Su Xinpei thought he would feel relieved. After the sorcerer surnamed Kuang was taken away by the Special Affairs Bureau, he imagined he should at least feel a little at ease—the bad guys had been dealt with accordingly, the repairman couple could get a full night's sleep, and the child would no longer wake up startled in his mother's arms. These were all his expectations when he submitted that anonymous letter, and each one was logically consistent. But in reality, he sat at his workstation for two mornings, and nothing came of it; he just felt even more tired.

He didn't regret it. He saw the wall.

The Special Bureau's silver seal was affixed to the iron gate in the bungalow area, but on the night the sorcerer was taken away, the repairman's wife came to the neighborhood office again. She didn't cry, nor did she say much; she just stood in front of Aunt He's window for a while and asked, "Will that person be released?" Aunt He told her that the case belonged to the Special Bureau, and the neighborhood office had no authority to inquire about the follow-up procedures, but as far as she knew, he wouldn't appear in Beihe District again in the short term. The repairman's wife thanked her and placed the enamel mug she was carrying on the windowsill before leaving, saying that she had brought a cup of her own brewed herbal tea for Aunt He. Su Xinpei looked over from next to the printer; the enamel mug was wrapped in an old woolen sleeve, the same gray-blue as the scarf Aunt He had given him last winter.

He knew the herbal tea wasn't for him. But his gaze lingered on the enamel mug for a moment.

Then he returned to his workstation and continued entering data for the renewal of his social security benefits. The printer jammed, so he crouched down, opened the paper tray, pulled out the jammed paper, and reinstalled it. Amidst the hum of the printer restarting, he pondered a question: With Kuang being taken away, was a complete chain of profit being dismantled? There were two similar complaints at the end of last year; because the complainants didn't follow up, they were expelled from the system. If there were other schemers behind Kuang taking orders, the only ones who would suffer would be the next person unaware of the consequences.

He tried setting up a cross-year tracking system for reported incidents in the resident system—he created a document visible only to himself, summarizing all vague complaints from the past two years involving "talismanic water," "divination," and "luck-changing," attaching the time, address, and processing result to each one. He didn't have the authority to conduct formal internal investigations, but creating a searchable index of leads was a task any junior clerk could accomplish independently. He named the document "Annual Summary of Folk Customs Complaints in Beihe District," adding three words to the remarks column: "For Reference."

This process took him two lunch breaks and an evening. While doing these things, he remembered something Aunt He had said when she was organizing files: "Files are not for arresting people, but for making it impossible for people to have an excuse to say they don't know."

On the evening of the fourth day, Su Xinpei arrived at Tiegutang about twenty minutes later than usual. The old man selling roasted sweet potatoes at the alley entrance was packing up his stall; the fire in the stove hadn't completely died down yet, and the charred sweet potato skins on the iron stove walls emitted a sweet, burnt aroma. He turned into North First Alley. The gate to Tiegutang's courtyard was ajar. Pushing it open, he saw Wu Xiong squatting in the corner mending another old sandbag, a nylon thread dangling from his mouth, his speech muffled. Old Tie Tou sat in a rattan chair, the radio playing the weather forecast. The announcer said that cold air would arrive over the weekend, and the lowest temperature in the lower city area might drop to five degrees Celsius.

Su Xinpei changed his shoes and prepared to practice standing meditation as usual. He placed his water cup on the bench and bent down to unbutton his coat. He stopped just as he was unbuttoning the second button.

He stood there, his coat open, one hand hovering beside the button, motionless.

Then he buttoned his coat back up and said, "Master, I'm not doing standing meditation today."

Old Tie Tou looked up at him.

"I want to box," Su Xinpei said.

Old Tietou placed the enamel mug on his lap, glanced at him, and didn't ask why. He stood up, walked to the tap, washed his hands, then opened the storage room door, pulled out a worn-out sandbag—it was Wu Xiong's unopened heavy canvas bag, already covered in a thin layer of dust from being stuffed in the corner. He dragged the sandbag to the center of the open space and hung it on the horizontal bar hook with a rope.

"Give me three hundred punches," he said.

Su Xinpei stepped forward and assumed the opening stance. The first punch landed, the canvas making a dull thud, and the sandbag swayed twice. The second, the third—for the first ten punches, he still followed the secret hand's standard, twisting his muscles with each strike: pushing off the ground, twisting his waist, relaxing his shoulders, and twisting his arms. By the fifteenth punch, his movements began to distort. It wasn't that he lacked stamina; it was that he no longer wanted to hold back.

When he threw his thirtieth punch, Wu Xiong put down the needle he was using to mend the sandbag and turned to look at him. Every punch Su Xinpei landed squarely on the sandbag, the force so great that the canvas bounced repeatedly, the chain of the sandbag straightening and bending repeatedly, emitting a sharp metallic screech. By the fiftieth punch, his knuckles still ached through the hand wrappings, and the golden veins on his forearms gleamed faintly through his sweaty skin as his muscles tightened. He didn't stop. By the eightieth punch, he pushed his entire palm out, abandoning the closing stance and the twisting power of his secret hand; to what extent—he was simply swinging.

He was still in control of the first and second punches, but after a dozen or so, that control was stripped away, leaving only pure coercion—coercing the sandbag to retreat, forcing the chill left behind by the sorcerer in the bungalow to be shattered from his own memory, and forcing those next door who had heard the footsteps of the soldiers to stop waking up in the middle of the night. Wu Xiong stood by the wall and said, "What's wrong with him?" Old Tie Tou ignored him.

By the time Su Xinpei landed his ninetieth punch, his breathing had shifted from a controlled, stationary stance to a violent, rapid inhalation. Between each strike, he inhaled deeply through his throat, like a marathon runner desperately scrambling for his last breath before the finish line. Sweat poured from his forehead, splattering onto the canvas of the punching bag, each punch leaving a damp mark. By the time he landed his one hundred and twentieth punch, he suddenly realized—he didn't feel any numbness in his hands or feet. Normally, during high-intensity training, his hands would occasionally go numb due to poor blood circulation, but today the transmission through his joints was unusually smooth. His "Golden Muscles and Jade Collaterals" technique, in his extreme anger, hadn't increased his explosive power, but rather held him back from the brink of losing control, maintaining an extra layer of stability before his force collapsed.

He stopped after throwing his 150th punch. Not because he was tired, but because his forearm started to swell. It wasn't a soreness, but a tight, constricting swelling, as if something was tightly holding the fascia under his skin.

"See that?" Old Ironhead suddenly said.

Wu Xiong turned to look at him. Old Tie Tou was still leaning back in his rattan chair, an enamel mug resting on his knees, his eyes fixed on Su Xinpei's arms hanging down at his sides.

"He threw nearly two hundred punches, his speed didn't drop, and his power didn't diminish." Old Tie Tou spoke slowly, each word as if it had been scooped from a pot of broth and drained before being spoken. "If you were to throw the punches, you'd be more ruthless in the first thirty, but by fifty you'd start compensating with your shoulder, and by eighty your forearms would be trembling. He didn't tremble. He came here to vent his anger, but his golden muscles and jade-like tendons held it in. He wanted to smash things, but his tendons didn't break."

Wu Xiong opened his mouth, but couldn't say anything.

Su Xinpei lowered his head, panting as he looked at his hands. His knuckles trembled slightly when he clenched his fist, but the force line in his wrist and forearm remained strangely stable. The golden lines on his skin retreated quietly after he released his fist. The panel displayed his Tendon Refining experience points; he glanced at it, and the progress bar moved forward slightly. This progress wasn't worth noting in his eyes—he hadn't come today for the sake of progress.

"I don't blame you for not practicing your stance today." Old Ironhead stood up, pushed the rattan chair aside, walked to the sandbag, and placed his hand on the canvas. The sandbag was still swaying, and he pressed it down with his palm, the swaying gradually absorbed by his rough hand. "But after you finish these three hundred punches, you need to mentally dismantle today's stance—why are you practicing your stance? It's not because you're afraid those mirror images will come looking for trouble again. You're practicing your stance because that day in the apartment building, when you saw me break it, a voice in your head told you, 'If one day it's not you standing in front of that thing, it must be me.' You're practicing your stance for all the people you've seen. Aunt He, the blue box on the bottom shelf of the third row in the archives is full of 'unresolved' cases. You're not practicing for yourself anymore."

Su Xinpei caught his breath, stood up, readjusted his opening stance, and finished the remaining dozens of punches. This time, he didn't abandon the routine—he controlled the final force of each punch, twisting it until the very last moment.

After finishing his practice, he untied the hand wrappings and splashed his face with cold water from the tap. The cold water trickled down his temples and into his collar. He turned on the tap and looked up at the old newspaper pasted on the wall. The edges of the newspaper were swollen from the steam, making the words seem submerged in water. Wu Xiong hung the mended sandbags back on the hook, patted the canvas, and muttered, "Today's sandbags are sturdier than yesterday's." Old Tie Tou turned the radio volume back up; the weather forecast had finished, and it was a late-night news program reporting that the Northern Fleet across the strait had added several more patrol boats.

Su Xinpei wrung out the hand wrap, hung it on the back of the bench, walked to the corner, picked up his enamel mug, and took a sip of water. The water was just the right temperature to drink in large gulps. After finishing the water, he placed the enamel mug back on the windowsill, the bottom of the mug making a soft sound next to the old newspaper, like closing a door that only he could hear.

He didn't want to watch those things devour anyone anymore, even if that wall was still in front of him, even if he was just a contract worker at the neighborhood office who had just entered the Golden Skin Jade Network and hadn't even begun tempering his Water and Fire Immortal Robes. He was going to stand here and push the cement in the wall, piece by piece, until it collapsed.