Chapter 10
*The Jade Palace training ground — Po's perspective.*
Standing off to the side with the others, I listened to very bad news delivered by the same servant I recognized from that morning, who had clearly run the whole way here.
It turned out that the three thugs walking into my father's restaurant had only been the beginning. The bandits had grown bold enough to launch genuine raids on the village, seize children, and demand ransom for them.
While I was processing this, Shifu asked the servant the exact question that had been forming in my own mind:
"Where were the guards when this happened? Have their numbers dropped so low they can't even drive off ordinary thieves?" he said sharply, fixing the servant with a hard stare.
The servant bowed quickly and began speaking in the tone of someone defending himself:
"Respected Master Shifu—"
"No need for pleasantries. Speak plainly," Shifu cut in, frowning.
"The village has almost no guards left," the servant continued in a trembling voice. "What remained of the garrison departed yesterday, shortly after the news spread about the Dragon Warrior's selection. The soldiers apparently left to escort trading caravans. Only one warrior remained, and he proved completely ineffective against a crowd of bandits."
He finished on a somber note and lowered his head.
"Is he alive?" Shifu asked directly.
"Yes, but severely beaten," the servant answered.
Shifu absorbed this, his expression becoming focused. Then in a firm voice that left no room for argument, he announced:
"Furious Five — listen carefully. Your assignment: rescue the children. Try to avoid killing the criminals, but beat them soundly and tie them up, to be handed over to the guards. Or at minimum placed under the watch of local residents until they can be transported to prison."
He paused and swept his gaze across his students, then looked at me and added:
"One more thing. Take the panda. Let him see the purpose for which masters study kung fu."
*Of course. Couldn't do it without me.* The moment Shifu finished speaking, a very clear mental image presented itself: me slowing the group down at every stage of the journey ahead, steadily increasing everyone's irritation.
"Is that understood?" Shifu said — more statement than question.
"Yes, Master. We are ready to carry out your instructions," Tigress answered with a deep bow.
I made no attempt to refuse. This was not a request but a directive, and less than a minute ago I had formally pledged to follow my new teacher's instructions. Rescuing children was a worthy and good thing to do. And it would be genuinely interesting to see how the Five operated in real conditions.
Besides — maybe it would do something for my self-esteem, which had taken a considerable beating after being driven into the ground on the training field.
*Please let there be no kung fu masters among the bandits. There aren't, right?*
And on the way back, perhaps I could stop by to see my father.
The whole situation produced a strange feeling I couldn't quite name — a sense that something was off. Just a few days ago life had been orderly and calm, and now I was being thrown across training grounds and helping rescue the innocent.
"What are you standing there for?!" Shifu barked, snapping me back to the present. The Five moved immediately, sprinting toward the descent — and instead of taking the stairs, they simply jumped into the gorge, with one voice calling back from the very edge:
"Panda, we'll wait for you at the bottom!"
*How exactly am I supposed to catch up with this insane group?* I thought angrily, running for the staircase. Following the Five's example was absolutely not happening — jumping into a gorge hidden in fog was pure suicide.
Running down the stairs was tempting, but slow — and I'd almost certainly slip and go rolling.
*Wait. Rolling?* The image surfaced from somewhere: a panda curling into a ball and rolling down a mountain.
Apparently I was becoming a genuine student of the Jade Palace, because nothing this deranged would have occurred to me before.
"Well. Here goes nothing," I muttered to myself.
By some miracle I managed to tuck into a compact ball and roll down the staircase, picking up speed as I went. I won't describe in detail what that experience felt like. I'll say only this: it was terrible.
All I could do was hope I didn't fly off the edge of the steps into the drop below. Then a sensible thought arrived — how exactly was I planning to stop?
I couldn't tell you how long I rolled, but it didn't feel like very long. The end of my journey was marked by a series of collisions with something hard and a loud splintering of wood. The accumulated momentum vanished, and I came to a stop on my stomach.
I spent some time trying to get to my feet while feeling for all the world like someone who had drunk themselves into severe vertigo. When my inner ear had more or less righted itself, I surveyed the damage.
I was immediately very relieved that this was the back staircase rather than the front entrance, and that it came out slightly to the right of the village onto an empty lot. My armored body had demolished several decorative columns on the way, and those columns could just as easily have been local residents or their homes.
*What is wrong with me?* The thought came with genuine discomfort, because I hadn't felt even a hint of pain from any of the collisions — just a faint tingling across my body.
"Perhaps you could stop destroying Jade Palace property?" Tigress said with irritation, walking up to me. She and the others had been standing nearby watching the damage I'd caused.
Her words landed with an uncomfortable sting. I could already picture Shifu finding out about my latest exploit and deciding how to punish me for it.
"It's not my fault. It's the builders who should have accounted for the fact that—" I started to offer a weak excuse, fully aware the blame was entirely mine.
"That a giant panda might come barreling through them many years after they were built?" Crane finished my sentence with noticeable skepticism.
I arranged my face into a neutral expression and said plainly: "Yes."
"Right, this isn't the time for this. Let's go to the village and talk to the residents and the guard if we can find him," Tigress said with irritation, clearly having decided that expecting accountability from me was futile.
We headed into the village, where the atmosphere was heavy with gloom and unease. The residents moved slowly, as though carrying a weight no one could see.
I understood them completely. Years of calm and peace, and then suddenly creatures like these burst in, commit their crimes, and walk away unpunished with children in tow.
I learned in the course of conversation that the Furious Five had made many trips down from the Jade Palace over the past while to deal with bandits, though most of those assignments had taken them to smaller neighboring villages that had no guards at all.
Our path took us to the local garrison building. It was an old two-story structure with upturned roof corners covered in gray tile, and it looked empty and abandoned. At the entrance, sitting dejectedly on the steps, was a large buffalo guard. His arms and legs were wrapped in bandages, deep bruises showing through the dense fur on his face, and his expression combined genuine sadness with profound disappointment.
Seeing our group, he brightened and tried to stand — then groaned and sat back down.
I waved for him to stay put, and we began asking him about what had happened.
From his account we learned that all the attackers were crocodile bandits, numbering around ten. They had appeared three hours ago, first hitting the market and attempting to rob the traders — who had barely opened for the day and had almost no money on them. The bandits had then seized seven children and demanded ransom: five hundred gold coins per child.
When I heard the figure I let out an involuntary low whistle. For a typical village family that sum was virtually unthinkable. A normal household could live comfortably for an entire year on that money.
The location chosen for the ransom handoff was the entrance to the Western Forest. The time was the following evening. They wanted the money first — then they would release the hostages.
The guard had had no way to stop them. He was the only one left in the village: everyone else had been recalled the previous day, and he had been kept behind purely because someone needed to watch the local archive and armory and handle petty criminals. On his own, that was the most he could realistically do.
I actually respected the man. Despite being completely alone, he had gone up against a crowd with a numerical advantage and hadn't stood down.
He either didn't know where all the other guards had been sent, or was doing a convincing impression of someone who didn't know — because the question made him visibly agitated and furious, his fists clenching.
Having learned everything we could from the guard, our group set off toward the Western Forest, hoping to catch the bandits or at least pick up their trail. I was able to run at a reasonable pace without falling too far behind the others.
While I ran, my mind kept returning to what had happened earlier. The demonstration and Shifu's account had made a powerful impression on me, whether I wanted to admit it or not.
If I were a typical transmigrator, I'd already be actively searching for qi and trying to manipulate it. Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, I was not. And Shifu's warnings about the consequences of errors with that power were deeply unsettling. Being torn apart or losing my mind had no place in my plans.
What bothered me more than anything, though, was how thoroughly I'd been driven into the dirt on the training ground. Yes, I had proven abnormally durable and walked away without real injuries — a few light bruises at most — but that was cold comfort.
Because in return, I had done nothing. I couldn't block their attacks, couldn't land a counter. I hadn't fought at full strength, but I suspected they hadn't either.
The worst part was that they had brought back that sticky feeling of weakness and helplessness that had followed me everywhere in my previous life.
And after eating all that dust on the training ground, something had started whispering at the back of my mind — persistent, annoying thoughts along the lines of: *surpass them. Become stronger than all of them.*
Those thoughts unsettled me. They didn't feel like mine.
*Apparently the dark side is trying to seduce me,* I thought wryly.
***
After roughly twenty minutes of running and internal monologue, we reached the edge of the forest. And that was where the problems began.
The forest stretched out as an enormous mass — hundreds of hectares of dense green, threaded through with a maze of paths and roads. Finding the bandits in there seemed essentially impossible. It was looking for a needle in a haystack.
The bandits appeared to have deliberately covered their tracks, leaving us with no indication of the direction they had gone.
While Crane made his aerial survey and we waited, I decided to start a conversation and gather some information at the same time.
"How capable are these opponents of ours?" I asked.
Monkey, who had been bored, visibly brightened at having something to do and launched in willingly:
"Croc bandits aren't particularly talented in the martial arts. Their strength lies mostly in numbers and aggression." He illustrated this with his hands, shaping them like a snapping jaw.
"Then why don't people deal with them decisively if they're not that dangerous?" I asked with genuine curiosity.
I had heard about someone getting robbed by crocodiles on some road or another for as long as I could remember living here.
Monkey answered in a tone that carried a note of resignation:
"There are many crocodile bandit clans, living deep in the wilderness. You deal with one gang and two more appear in its place. The traders and guards consider them a permanent headache. They're also somewhat distinctive in that they rarely actually kill anyone — which is a large part of why they're still around in such numbers." He finished with a slight shrug.
I was about to ask a follow-up question when the sound of wingbeats announced Crane's return.
"The forest is too dense. Nothing is visible from above. The canopy masks any trace of the bandits completely," he reported, landing with evident disappointment.
"What do we do now?" Viper asked, clearly anxious about the children.
Mantis was first with a proposal, thinking it through as he spoke:
"I think the sensible approach is to wait until tomorrow evening, catch the criminals when they come to collect the ransom, and extract the location of their camp from them."
Monkey went next, his broad grin already in place:
"What about bait? We play the role of lone travelers and lure them into a trap." He made an illustrative gesture.
Then Tigress straightened up, clearly deciding this was a moment to demonstrate leadership:
"In my view, we should split up immediately and begin searching the forest's perimeter. I doubt the bandits have gone far inside." She swept a decisive look over all of us.
"Or we wait until evening so Crane can spot campfire light through the branches," I offered, not feeling particularly inspired by the prospect of searching blindly.
I received a deeply irritated look from Tigress in response.
***
Which option did the Furious Five choose? Tigress's, naturally.
I pushed for my approach and Mantis's, since both seemed genuinely viable. The group's leader informed me that waiting was too slow, and we needed to act immediately.
Right. Who were we to question the kung fu masters.
The division ended up as follows: Tigress took the northern forest boundary, with Crane. Viper took the south, with Monkey as her partner. Mantis and I were assigned the central zone.
We agreed to regroup in two hours at the start of the main forest road, hoping someone would have found a trail by then.
What none of us thought to ask was this: what do we do if someone gets lost?
Because within ten minutes of entering the forest it became clear that Mantis and I shared one very specific quality — a complete inability to navigate woodland. As soon as we went any meaningful depth into the trees, our sense of direction evaporated entirely, and we kept losing the path.
The situation had a certain comic dimension: two individuals with no natural sense of direction, wandering fruitlessly through the forest while the others searched for criminals.
There was some beauty in it, at least. The way sunlight filtered through the dense canopy of ancient trees, throwing strange shadows on the ground. The quiet rustle of leaves. The fresh, damp forest air filling the lungs.
That was the first hour. Now we had been wandering for an indeterminate amount of time, it was getting dark, and we had found nothing whatsoever — which was becoming genuinely irritating.
"Tell me, Mantis — how did you get into kung fu? If it's not a secret." I tried to lighten the atmosphere and start a conversation.
Mantis, hopping lightly from stone to stone, caught my interest and decided to go with it:
"It started when I was young. It sounds funny looking back, but as a child I was terribly impulsive and couldn't sit still for anything. A childhood friend of mine turned down my marriage proposal, and I became consumed with the idea of proving my worth to her by becoming an outstanding kung fu master." He began the story with amusement in his voice.
"The problem I ran into immediately was that my size put teachers off. Nobody wanted to take my physical training seriously, despite my agility and reaction speed." A touch of old sadness came through.
"They refused to teach you? That's hard to imagine," I said with genuine surprise, thinking of what I'd seen him do.
"You know how it is — people judge the book by its cover," Mantis replied, with a slightly guilty note.
I didn't dwell on it and kept going:
"And how did you end up at the Jade Palace? Did Shifu really just accept you outright?"
Mantis glanced around as though checking for unwanted ears, then leaned in with a conspiratorial smile:
"I had to resort to a little trickery. I posed as a physician and got myself into the Jade Palace, hoping to cure Master Shifu and earn his trust that way. With the plan that he'd then accept me as a student."
"And did you cure him?" I asked.
"On the contrary — I made his condition considerably worse through incompetent acupuncture." He laughed.
"And after that he agreed to take you on?" I raised an eyebrow, genuinely impressed by the turn of events.
Mantis stopped and turned to face me, getting into it:
"A whole chain of unusual coincidences followed. Seven years ago, the valley was terrorized by a villain called Boar. He wasn't particularly skilled in the martial arts, but his physical strength and aggression made him dangerous. Master Shifu took it upon himself to deal with him personally."
"Then unexpectedly, Shifu fell seriously ill that day — symptoms resembling severe poisoning, later found to be complicated by additional signs of illness. To handle the crisis, Tigress was sent to gather the finest martial arts masters from across the valley and surrounding area, to defeat Boar through combined effort."
"Due to some mix-up involving a scroll, she brought back Crane, Viper, and Monkey — none of whom were actually masters."
I shuddered internally at the thought of Shifu's reaction to that particular development, but didn't take my attention off the story.
"Master Shifu expressed his extreme displeasure at the situation, but we came together and proved we could learn kung fu by defeating Boar in battle. Impressed by our courage and ability, Shifu officially enrolled us as his students." He finished with the satisfied air of someone who had come a long way from where he started.
*So that's who Boar was,* I thought, the memory surfacing. There had been a lot of celebration around those events at the time. The village had treated the new Jade Palace students as heroes.
As it happened, I had also been sick with something unpleasant around that same period — a severe head cold, persistent cough, and sharp stomach pain. My father had insisted the illness was specific to pandas and infectious only among them, though for some reason he kept trying to keep me away from the kitchen.
Then one day my father had gone out to buy supplies and left me home alone. An urgent order arrived from the Jade Palace — the messenger announced it was for Master Oogway and Shifu personally. I pushed through and prepared the meal, because turning down a request from people of that standing simply wasn't possible.
*Wait. An illness that only pandas get?* The thought arrived with a sudden sharpness.
"By the way — what were Shifu's symptoms exactly?" I asked, trying to sound casual.
"Oh, severe exhaustion, constant runny nose, relentless coughing, and sharp abdominal pain," Mantis answered.
Every symptom matched. It was entirely possible that I had infected Shifu through the food.
Whatever showed on my face, Mantis noticed it immediately and asked with interest:
"Do you know something about the master's old illness?"
"Well, here's how it happened," I said, and decided to share the discovery. Mantis listened carefully.
When I finished the account, an awkward silence settled for a moment — then Mantis burst into clear, ringing laughter. The absurdity of it got to me too, and I joined him, laughing freely.
"So it was you who played one of the leading roles in creating the Furious Five!" he exclaimed, wiping a tear of laughter from the corner of his eye.
"Apparently so," I said with a grin.
Talking further, we found ourselves reflecting on how extraordinarily consequential coincidences could sometimes be.
While we talked, the sun had slipped completely below the horizon, plunging the already dim forest into total darkness.
Then something caught our attention — a faint strip of light pushing through the tree trunks and thick undergrowth somewhere ahead.
We had apparently stumbled onto either the bandits' camp or a small village.
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