Chapter 9
*The Jade Palace training ground — third person.*
"Easy enough," the panda smirked and left the training ground, making his unhurried way toward the solitary boulder nearby.
Master Shifu stood in thoughtful silence, absorbed in his own reflections, while the Furious Five gathered nearby and exchanged quiet words among themselves.
"It seems the panda was telling the truth. Master Shifu really did decide to take him on as a student," Crane said, still sounding genuinely surprised.
Tigress, hearing the conclusion she had already reached herself, only pressed her lips together more firmly.
"He's certainly not hopeless. He even has some reflexes and reaction time — but what strikes me most is how much punishment he can absorb. It's as though the fat and muscle simply dissipate most of the impact," Viper observed.
Mantis spoke next:
"And he's strong. Enormously strong. We understood that yesterday, of course, but it still catches you off guard."
"It does," Crane agreed with a short sound, tilting his beak toward the panda, who was calmly lifting the massive boulder.
Then Monkey's voice came, thoughtful and quieter than usual:
"You know — he seems like a decent enough person, taken as a person. He made us a good breakfast this morning without being asked. Maybe we give him a chance? Since Master has made it clear he's staying?"
The others went still at the unexpected words.
Viper agreed immediately and without hesitation. Mantis and Crane followed, both turning their attention to Tigress and waiting.
Tigress was quiet for a moment, staring into the distance. Then she exhaled sharply and said with evident irritation:
"That panda drives me absolutely crazy. But since Master Shifu has decided to make him a student, I'll endure it. Perhaps something will come of him." She paused. "But I do not believe he is the Dragon Warrior." She cast a careful glance at Shifu's back as she said the last part.
An uncomfortable silence settled over the group, broken once again by Monkey, steering toward safer ground:
"Does anyone remember someone saying yesterday that if the panda turned out to be anything worth noting, they'd eat their own hat?" He suppressed a laugh behind his fist.
The others shifted their eyes to Crane, who was doing his best to look as though he could think of several ways out of this situation, and finding none of them convincing.
***
Meanwhile Shifu stood at a distance, motionless as a stone figure, turning the same question over in his mind for what felt like the hundredth time: would he be making another mistake by revealing the next level of mastery to the panda and his students? The power in question could bring either great good or devastating harm.
The past would not leave him in peace. He saw them clearly — his old friends, the members of the original Furious Five.
And that terrible moment when their hands had reached for the hilt of the cursed blade, capable of twisting and consuming the mind of whoever touched it.
He had believed his choice was the only right one in that situation. It had been a catastrophe regardless. The blade was destroyed and the friendship shattered beyond repair. Every word he had offered in his own defense met only cold stares from people who now saw him as a coward and a weakling.
He had thought he was saving them. He had been wrong in the deepest possible way. The breaking of the team had lanced something that had been festering beneath the surface, and what poured out from it led to consequences that still haunted him.
The one he had been closest to was lost permanently, and any hope of restoring what had once existed was buried with her.
She had been a true genius — one who had mastered hundreds of secrets and techniques of qi, already spoken of as a possible successor to Oogway himself. Pride and arrogance walked beside her constantly, but her natural warmth and genuine kindness had always balanced those edges.
Even the brightest flame can go out without warning, leaving nothing behind but absolute darkness.
Many masters had balanced on that same edge — some falling into the abyss, others finding their harmony and emerging as something genuinely formidable.
But the most painful thing of all was the awareness of his own guilt toward the son he had inadvertently sent down that same dangerous path, with no understanding of what he was setting in motion. That guilt had burned itself into his soul like a brand. If only he had been paying closer attention then.
Shifu pressed his mind away from the past and back toward the present, and one final thought settled his resolve completely: he would demonstrate the art of qi control to his students and commit to teaching them.
Because sooner or later, whether he wanted it to happen or not, his students would encounter this power. When that day came, they would not be able to resist it — not the temptation to understand it, and not the necessity of facing someone who wielded it.
***
In the meantime the panda had finally dragged the enormous chunk of rock back and dropped it in the center of the training ground with a heavy crash.
The Five stared at it with mild surprise. Up close, it was considerably more substantial than it had looked from a distance.
The panda muttered in mild protest:
"What are you so surprised about? You were just demonstrating all kinds of extraordinary things out here. This is just plain brute force."
Shifu completed his reflections, gave a small private nod, walked a slow circle around the former boulder, and signaled his students to position themselves around it so that each one had a clear line of sight to what he was about to do.
"Watch carefully. Today I hope you will finally begin to understand the true scope of kung fu, and perhaps discover in yourself at least a small measure of the talent and determination required to master it." He fixed the panda with a steady gaze.
The panda raised an eyebrow in response, making his skepticism plain.
Shifu ignored it, turned his eyes to his students, and spoke in a serious voice:
"And you, all five of you — pay attention. What you are about to see is the reason I have spent all these years building a strong foundation in you. Proper body mechanics. Breath control. Technique. Everything I have taught you has been preparation for this."
The Five lowered their heads in unison, signaling their readiness.
Satisfied that everyone was watching, Shifu straightened slowly, squared his shoulders, and settled into a state of focused stillness. His eyes closed. His breathing became even and deep.
After several seconds, he raised both hands before him to roughly chest height, palms facing each other. His hands moved lightly and with grace, as though dancing in the air, tracing soft circles and loops.
The Five and the panda watching him soon noticed something unusual. Around Shifu's hands, thin red sparks of light had begun to form, gradually building into a reddish luminous aura. At first barely visible, it quickly brightened and sharpened, surrounding his hands and palms in a steady, flickering radiance.
When the movement was complete, Shifu touched his index finger gently to the surface of the stone.
For a moment nothing seemed to happen. Then a barely visible web of cracks spread across the smooth face of the monolith — and an instant later the massive rock collapsed into gravel.
The sight produced a response from every person present that could only be described as mouths falling open.
Every member of the Furious Five had encountered hints in the scrolls available to them, and in passing legends, of a possibility: that internal qi energy could be used consciously, granting kung fu masters abilities that seemed to transcend the ordinary. Every time someone had tried to learn more from their teacher, he had deflected the question without a direct answer.
The panda, in that moment, was somewhere else entirely inside his own head. His inner voice had only one urgent concern: please let this world not turn out to be a cultivation-and-harem story.
"Well, Panda — are you impressed now?" Shifu said with a quiet sound, moving his hands to disperse the red haze still clinging to his palms.
Shifu waited for the panda's answer, but contrary to his expectations, the first voice came from Tigress, who recovered from the shock faster than the rest:
"Master, what was that technique? Why have you never shown us this before? Why haven't you taught us?"
The others were in full agreement, and they looked at Shifu with the same question written across their faces.
He did not keep them waiting. In the calm voice of a teacher, he replied:
"Other masters would long since have instructed you in the handling of internal energy — in the conscious control of qi. I have deliberately held back from teaching you this, and only because it is extraordinarily dangerous."
His gaze moved carefully from face to face, as though looking for something specific among those listening.
And with each word his voice grew a shade darker:
"Even a small error in working with qi energy can literally tear your physical body apart. This is precisely how the Wuxi Finger Hold came into existence — a technique many mistakenly dismiss as a fiction invented to frighten students. That is a profoundly dangerous misconception. The technique was born because a master once witnessed exactly that tragedy firsthand."
Shifu paused, and something close to grief entered his voice:
"But the worst outcome is not having your body torn to pieces, or left as an empty shell. In the worst case, you gain something — enormous power, merciless and vast. And the price of it is this: your mind fractures. Your soul drowns in madness." He said this with his hands closing slowly into fists.
He looked across the Furious Five once more, exhaled heavily, and added:
"In all my years, I have watched the strongest and most worthy among us sink into that endless darkness and not come back."
He paused.
"They simply stopped wanting to." He finished the sentence quietly, and after those words no one dared break the silence that rang over the training ground.
It did not last long. When Shifu spoke again, each successive word was firmer and louder, filling the space with weight and conviction:
"But those who learn to wield this power correctly will be capable of things beyond imagining: moving great distances in an instant, healing severe illness and mortal wounds through thought alone, summoning storms with a gesture, giving life to what is lifeless, performing any wonder that once seemed purely mythical."
He paused again, preparing to deliver the thing that would catch them all off guard:
"And as your master, I will teach you to do all of it. Everything I know and am capable of — you will learn."
"Even you, Panda, I will teach — if you can ever manage to catch up with my students." He added this last part with a smirk and a look that carried no shortage of mockery.
"But there is one condition. You must believe in your teacher completely, and follow my instructions without question. Only then will your training succeed."
As Shifu delivered these words in a voice of deliberate grandeur, sunlight poured down over him in long golden streams.
"We are ready, Master," Tigress said quietly, bowing her head. The other four members of the Five followed her movement — striking a closed fist against an open palm in a single clean, synchronized motion, or, in Viper's case, curling her tail against her body.
Caught up in the collective feeling, and understanding that staying still in that moment would look strange, the panda performed the same symbolic bow — doing his best to mirror the movements of the others.
The moment of unity shattered when a servant came sprinting onto the training ground exactly as he had that morning, breathless and urgent.
"Master Shifu! Troubling news from the village. One of the crocodile bandit gangs has grown bold enough to attack — they've kidnapped children and are demanding a large ransom."
Read Advanced Chapters on: p@treon/Amiii_
~Every 150 PS = Bonus Chapter!
~Push the Story forward with your [Power Stones]