The Way of Restraint

Chapter 208: A Walk, a Conversation

“Having the right resources to train with — there’s nothing like it.”

Half a month had passed. Su Jie’s development during that period had been substantial.

Today’s session was urban close-quarters combat. A team of bodyguards with live-loaded weapons was hunting him through a stretch of streets and alleyways — shooting, pursuing, trying to corner him — while he moved continuously, reading angles, calculating trajectories, taking each one down with thrown weapons as he went.

Real rounds. Not rubber. If he was hit, he would die.

But he moved as though he had an internal warning system — each time, at the last possible instant, he was already clear of the bullet’s path. He could feel the trajectory forming before the trigger was pulled, and he moved in a way that gave the shooter no stable lock.

He had noticed something over the sessions: when the rounds were rubber and carried no genuine lethal threat, his concentration ran at a somewhat lower pitch. When the rounds were live and his life was actually on the line, his mind pressed to the absolute limit. Every faculty sharpened to an edge it couldn’t reach otherwise.

This was pressure — the same principle as weighted training.

In combat preparation, overload is what forces growth. Apply sufficient pressure, and the body strengthens rapidly. Su Jie was now applying that principle to the psychological dimension — using live fire to generate real mental stress, the kind that couldn’t be simulated. Day after day, this was the equivalent of sustained exposure in an active combat zone: the constant, immediate possibility of death.

This was extreme cultivation.

And it wasn’t available to him back in China.

Bang.

The last bodyguard’s round left the barrel and punched a hole in the wall. The steel-jacketed bullet ricocheted back and grazed the air beside Su Jie’s body. Su Jie’s pellet left his hand at the same instant, striking the gun from the man’s grip. A second pellet followed, hitting the bodyguard in the torso. The man convulsed and went down twitching.

It took a while for him to recover. When he looked up at Su Jie, what was on his face was not frustration. It was fear.

Over the past two weeks, Su Jie had used these men as his training implements — running them through drills so punishing they bordered on what elite intelligence training looked like at its most demanding. Every one of them had been worked past comfortable limits repeatedly.

“Fall in,” Su Jie said.

“After this, we go for electrical stimulation — recovery and muscle reinforcement.”

The color drained from several faces simultaneously.

Larry’s facility did have electrical stimulation equipment, and it was substantially more advanced than what Uncle Mang operated — the product of extensive iterative research. Su Jie had requested access early, and Larry had arranged for the highest-tier apparatus available, as the request aligned perfectly with his own interests.

Electrical stimulation itself was not unusual in medicine — used to treat muscular atrophy, joint conditions, various neurological disorders, and reportedly even internet addiction. Its applications were broad.

Looking at the bodyguards’ expressions, Su Jie felt quiet satisfaction. Two weeks, and they had completely submitted. They looked at him the way small birds look at a hawk — no question of defiance even entering their minds.

This was what fear of genuine strength produced.

He suspected his word now carried more weight with them than Larry’s. They followed Larry for money. They followed Su Jie because they couldn’t afford not to. They could choose to forgo payment. They couldn’t choose to forgo their lives.

He didn’t order them into the stimulation session by force — that would have served no purpose. Without the will to endure it, the experience produced nothing useful. The equipment demanded a mind made of something close to iron.

*****

Su Jie entered the stimulation room alone.

The machine inside bore little resemblance to what Uncle Mang used. Mechanical arms, each tipped with needles like acupuncture filaments, arranged around a platform. The device was purpose-built medical equipment at a cost that made Uncle Mang’s setup look like a hobbyist’s project.

He removed his shirt, positioned himself, and let the mechanical arms insert their needles into joints, muscle groups, and nerve junctions across his body.

The current began.

Pulse after pulse through dozens of points simultaneously. Something like being charged — if the charging process involved sustained, significant pain.

He didn’t change expression. He didn’t make a sound.

Modern medicine’s understanding of the nervous system had reached the microscopic level. Su Jie’s background in the life sciences, combined with what he had been absorbing from Larry’s laboratory over the past weeks, had given him a precise picture of how to target stimulation for maximum gains in joint integrity, muscular strength, and cardiopulmonary function.

At the monitoring station, the observers watched their readouts.

“That current intensity would render a top-tier operative unconscious — or produce loss of physical control. He’s sitting through it.”

“His cellular and muscular activation levels are extraordinary.”

“His nervous system is firing across the board, and his musculature is responding — but his brainwave patterns show something almost like relaxation. As though the pain signals aren’t registering at the same level.”

“Remarkable. This warrants its own study.”

The data streamed from the stimulation session — muscle response, cardiac and pulmonary function, brainwave patterns — all flowing to the life sciences laboratory.

In a certain sense, Su Jie was now a research subject. He had read stories of people who developed unusual capabilities and went to extreme lengths to conceal them, terrified of being taken and turned into exactly this. He had no such instinct. Being studied by serious scientists with serious resources was, in his view, a good thing — a more efficient path to understanding. He was someone who pursued scientific truth as a genuine goal, willing to use himself as the experimental subject. Throughout history, the great scientists had done exactly that.

That, he thought, was what actual fearlessness looked like — not the absence of danger, but a willingness to offer yourself in the service of knowing.

*****

After the session: shower, the full application of Natural Essence Ointment, absorption time, nutrition, rest, study. The routine never varied.

Cass came to find him while he was reading.

“Su Jie — Mr. Larry wants to go out today. He doesn’t want a large retinue. He wants something closer to an ordinary person’s experience. You’ll be with him. No incidents — understood? And tomorrow is the Zhang family annual assembly. Mr. Larry will be attending that as well, and you’ll stay close.”

“Understood.” Su Jie read through Larry’s itinerary on his device, then pulled up the satellite street-view for each location. He walked through the route in his mind — mapping the positions that offered the best cover for a potential attacker, the angles that needed watching, the points of vulnerability. He ran the scenarios.

Providing security was its own craft.

The satellite mapping was Larry’s company’s core technology. This organization had its own satellites — no Chinese domestic company came close in this respect. The street imagery Su Jie was looking at updated in real time, showing foot traffic, vehicle density, and time-of-day data for each location. With this kind of intelligence support, his security work became considerably more manageable.

Once he had mentally rehearsed the possible scenarios, he put the device down, stood, and went with Cass to Larry’s office.

“Ready?” Larry asked, looking at them both.

“OK,” Cass confirmed.

“Just you for security today,” Larry said to Su Jie. “Let’s go.”

Su Jie said nothing. He fell in behind Larry at a measured distance.

This was his role: a shadow. He moved as Larry moved, went where Larry went, and remained responsible for stopping — or ending — anyone who tried to reach his employer.

Larry got into the driver’s seat himself. An ordinary-looking commercial vehicle.

He seemed to relax visibly the moment the doors closed — perhaps for the first time in some while. He hummed something to himself as he drove, something almost musical, with an ease that suggested real enjoyment. His speed was high, as though he were releasing pressure through the act of driving.

Su Jie had been reading this man since the first meeting: Larry was not happy. Possibly depressed. Despite being one of the wealthiest men in the world, his daily existence was crowded with concerns that left him less ease than an ordinary person might find. He carried the constant weight of everything that had to be thought about, planned for, and guarded against — including the real possibility of kidnapping or assassination. What was left after the anxiety and the forward projection was not much space for simply being.

A mind like that, even with the best nutrition and the best medical team maintaining the body, would not last as long as it might.

The car reached the outskirts and stopped beside a river. Larry got out and began to walk.

Su Jie followed at ten paces — close enough to respond, far enough to leave Larry his solitude.

“I like this place,” Larry said after a while. “When I was starting out — running into one problem after another — I used to come here and think. Answers came to me here. One obstacle after another, dissolved.”

“Mr. Larry,” Su Jie said, “you’re troubled right now. What is it, exactly? Is it the feeling that life is passing — second by second, day by day — and there’s nothing that can stop it? Or is it that you’re afraid of death? Because when it comes, everything you’ve ever built, everything you’ve ever accumulated, returns to nothing.”

“Yes.” Larry seemed to find it natural to speak to Su Jie about this. With an ordinary bodyguard, the conversation wouldn’t have happened. But after weeks of data and observation, Larry had come to think of Su Jie as something outside the usual categories.

He continued. “Aren’t you afraid? What you’ve achieved is harder than what I have, in its own way. I’ll give you a choice right now. If we could trade — I give you my wealth, my position, everything I have, and you give me what you’ve achieved — would you do it?”

“No,” Su Jie said, without a moment’s pause.

The Realm of the Living Dead was worth more than any amount of money. Not tens of billions. Not hundreds of billions. A figure with twelve zeroes placed in front of him would not have moved him.

“I envy you.” Larry studied him. “I would like to experience that state of mind. Even briefly. But it’s the one thing that can’t be bought.”

Su Jie found himself smiling. Money shaped so much of the world. But not everything.

“The methods you use to cultivate this psychological state — this inner work — would you be willing to share them with me? Would you consider being my mental conditioning instructor?”

“Of course,” Su Jie said. “No difficulty there.”

And then something shifted.

A sudden surge of danger rose from somewhere deep in his body. His gaze moved quickly across several points in the surrounding landscape — the positions that offered the cleanest angles for an attack on Larry.

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