Maksym Pachesiuk
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Moon Cultivation [Book 2] - Chapter 108: Concrete Jungle Mad Monkey
🕑 Added 2025-07-16 23:36:01 +0000 UTCRene held individual training sessions late in the evening, after the general practice in the hall. Like I said — my evenings were busy. Though to be fair, the rest of the day wasn’t exactly free either: morning session with Adam, morning session with Rene, lunch, block duty, Adam again, and only then the one-on-one with Rene. I usually had time to recover before my second training with Adam, but by the time I got to Rene, I was already tired all over again.
The spot he’d chosen looked like an abandoned construction site under a dome, now turned into a material dump: a skeletal frame of an unfinished tower block, broken concrete beams piled together, columns, and blocks of varying height and shape.
It was all old, battered, and chipped, like it had been used for target practice by a heavy machine gun.
“Ready to give it your all?” Rene asked.
I pulled myself together and nodded.
“Brimming with enthusiasm,” he commented sarcastically.
“I had a one-on-one with Adam just before this. He’s… a bit demanding. Plus, he doesn’t know how to hold back. Frankly, I’m amazed I made it here in one piece,” I deflected.
Adam really didn’t know how to hold back, but what he’d been teaching me was Iron Head, not dodging. Rene didn’t need to know that, so this answer would do.
“That’s bad, Jake. I need you fresh, otherwise this is just wasted money.”
“Then let’s not waste any time,” I waved him off.
“Fine,” Rene grunted, glancing at the training ground. He took a step, then another, and began jumping with diagonal leaps left and right, which was how the technique handled most of its forward motion. But the real spectacle began once Rene reached the concrete obstacles.
He vaulted a concrete beam with his legs, pushed off it with his hands, and launched onward like a ball ricocheting off every surface in his path without losing momentum. There were standard flips in his run, and some rotations that were hard to even imagine, let alone repeat.
Basically, it was parkour — cultivator style.
Rene only stopped once he’d reached the second floor of the skeletal building, having jumped up from a nearby concrete pillar.
“Get up here,” he waved at me.
“I can’t repeat that!”
“I’m not asking you to,” Rene said. “You can get up here without using your hands, just your legs. Look,” he pointed to the first beam he’d pushed off with his hands. “There’s a route — a spiral that coils around the centre. The obstacles rise higher and higher until they bring you here.” He gestured at the column next to him, close to a slab propped on its edge and another concrete block.
There really was a route, and plenty of support points for jumping. So I didn’t need to worry about detonation from continuous movement in a single direction.
Still, something about it bothered me.
“I specifically built channels through my arms,” I reminded him.
Rene leapt again, but this time he didn’t look for footholds. Mid-air, he brought his hands together as if tearing a hole in space, then flung them apart, and the air burst hurled him further. He took another step, kicked off the air with his left foot, and when he was nearly above me, he slashed his arms again and dove downwards with the acceleration of a falcon diving on prey.
I wisely Monkey-stepped to the side, but Rene landed just in front of where I’d been standing.
This was Mad Monkey of the East in all its glory.
“As experience shows,” Rene said, “the biggest obstacle to mastering truly difficult techniques is fear. Or rather — fear doesn’t stop you from learning the moves; it stops you from unlocking their full beauty. Prove to me you’re not afraid, and we’ll start working on the hand phase straight away. Or admit that you are, and we’ll begin with the safe version.”
I looked at the maze of broken concrete structures.
I wasn’t afraid of the run itself. Sure, I didn’t want to trip four or five metres up and slam face-first into a random beam, but I wasn’t afraid. Hell, I stood my ground in the arena against Dubois, and they stitched me up in a couple of days!
Didn’t exactly want to regrow teeth… or break my neck. I was still First Stage, my spine couldn’t exactly compete with concrete. And I hadn’t seen tournament arenas with obstacles this complex.
“I’m… cautious about injury,” I said. “Not afraid. But what do you mean by safe version? Is this another of your jokes, like with the projections, when you let me get hurt on purpose?”
“No, I don’t want you injured,” Rene assured me. “The question is which version of Monkey I’m teaching you. The technique is the same, but the application is different. A few refined, polished steps will help you in the arena. A chaotic gallop will save your life in the Ontel caves.”
Ontel was one of Earth’s other moons. If I remembered right, the obsidian Novak gave to Doc Robinson came from there.
“I’m all for staying alive — hands, feet, and all. But right now, it’s the arena I’m training for.”
“Retraining will be difficult,” Rene warned. “Once you’ve mastered Mad Monkey of the East, you’ll start creating footholds in the air automatically.”
“So what’s the problem?” I asked. “That’s exactly why I’m learning Monkey.”
“The problem is that Ontel has no atmosphere,” he explained. “Refine the technique while you still can. Later, it’ll be much harder.”
I turned back toward the obstacle field, took a step, then another — and jumped: slightly left, slightly right, onto the concrete.
My jumps didn’t look anything like Rene’s. I wasn’t ricocheting off vertical surfaces, wasn’t tracing intricate arcs. I was still like a bouncing ball, just a lazier, slower one. I simply jumped forward, more or less, veering right in a spiral. Fortunately, the layout made moving in a straight line impossible, so there was no danger of building up unstable qi in my legs.
What I did have to worry about was the fact that I didn’t know the route and I had no idea what was coming next. Sometimes the concrete structures were clustered close together, a chaotic pile. Other times, a single vertical beam stood alone with nothing within two metres.
That wasn’t so bad at first, but with each new platform, I gained height, soaring over the concrete at increasingly reckless speeds, and the gaps between blocks widened. Somewhere around the three-metre mark, I had to admit: fear jabbed me in the gut. The risk of snapping my spine had become very real.
And who better than me to know that, miraculous as the medical tech here was, it still couldn’t pull someone back from the other side of death.
Still, along with the fear came a rush. A surge of the same thrill I’d felt on the tournament floor. I just did everything I could and focused on not slipping up. It was a different kind of control, a different rhythm, or maybe the absence of rhythm altogether. A chaos of movement. Rough, graceless, but real. The jumps started to bring a strange kind of joy.
Is this what parkour runners feel?
I made it halfway through the route. Then two-thirds. I’d nearly circled the central building. I could already see the column Rene had used to leap to the concrete platform of the second floor. A few more jumps and I’d be there.
I was just preparing to push off from the edge of the final block, to clear the last big gap, when the qi detonated under my foot, and the block shattered.
Instead of launching me upward, the explosion sent a chunk of concrete plummeting down. It dropped like a cannonball, ricocheting and splintering off every surface it touched. Near the bottom, it slammed into a concrete slab and burst into a spray of rocky shrapnel.
And I followed after it.
My takeoff had lost almost all momentum. I was suspended over open space with nothing to grab hold of.
“Fuck!” I yelled.
A kaleidoscope of images flashed through my mind: Tariq’s teeth exploding in slow motion, Harn’s bloodied eye socket, a shattered watermelon — and my own head split like that melon, bright red pulp with little seeds instead of brains.
Legs!
I had to fall feet first!
They could fix legs down here, but heads, not so much.
I tried to correct my posture. I had only seconds, but the flailing at the start of the fall had already tilted me headfirst.
I extended my arms instead of my legs. The concrete slab rushed decisively towards my face…
“Got you!”
Something yanked me by the legs, hard enough to make my spine crack as it stretched. The slab froze just centimetres from my face for a heartbeat, and then the world flipped, and I landed flat on my back.
Still unpleasant, but a lot less fatal.
“Fuck!” I shouted again, wiping sweat from my forehead with a trembling hand.
“No fear, huh?” Rene teased.
“Fuck!” I snapped back. “You!”
Rene burst out laughing.
“You lied!” I said. “This was just like with the projections — you set me up!”
“Yes,” he replied, still grinning. “But I was right there to catch you.”
“Well, congratulations!” I said, getting up and brushing the dust off my backside. “Now how about telling me what that was for?”
“I already told you. Fear keeps a cultivator from unlocking the full beauty of a technique. You got scared, and from now on, you'll be more cautious. You’ll unconsciously limit yourself to guaranteed success, and you’ll never be able to replicate what I showed you.”
“Even if I reach the Third Stage?” I jabbed.
“Jake, what I showed you, that was First Stage potential.”
I raised an eyebrow.
That made it even more impressive than I’d thought.
“So now what? You wouldn’t have given me that whole heartfelt speech unless you had some insane plan in mind.”
“No madness. No genius. Just something as old as the world itself. We’ve triggered your fear — now you have to beat it before it sets in.”
“You want me to do it again?”
“You will do it again,” Rene promised. “If we have to stay here until morning, then so be it, but you will do it.”
“I’m only paying you for two hours!”
“Don’t worry, I won’t charge you for the rest… unless you ask for another private session.”
“Hey! That’s a bit unfair!”
“It’s excellent motivation to stay within the time limit. Besides, one run takes what — three, four minutes? You almost made it to the end. Nearly ruined my whole plan!” he laughed.
But this time I didn’t rise to the bait. It was just his way of pushing me to climb back up on those cursed blocks.
I looked more closely at the concrete. I hadn’t noticed it before, but the slabs weren’t just chipped, there were suspicious dark stains on them too.
Still, Rene was right. If I didn’t break through the fear now, I’d never run like that again. And I liked how that run had lit up my nerves. I just didn’t like how it had ended.
“Stay close,” I told him. “Or you’re not getting paid.”
The image of the melon smashing against concrete still wouldn’t leave my mind.
Trying the run a second time turned out to be harder and scarier. My movements were stiff. I slipped and sprawled on the very first few blocks, barely a metre high.
That pissed me off.
The anger gave me energy, but not grace. I forced my way back onto the route, only to fall again, scraping my cheek. And again. And again. And again.
I wasn’t even scared anymore, I was just furious. At myself. At the concrete. At Rene. The anger had replaced the fear, but it was keeping me from focusing.
I couldn’t just shut off the emotional flood, but maybe I could swap one feeling for another.
“Rene,” I asked. “What’s your favourite food?”
“What? Why?”
“Trying to replace anger with hunger. I like metallic rice.”
“Metallic rice?” Rene blinked.
“They serve it in the cafeteria. Tastes like stew.” It was working, I was starting to salivate. I wanted to finish this and get to dinner. “Little elongated grains, silver coloured.”
“They don’t serve anything like th— Wait. Oh! You mean the termite eggs?”
“…What?!”
“Yeah, they look like metallic rice. Taste like braised meat.”
The saliva dried up instantly. Appetite gone.
I’d been eating termite eggs this whole time?
I felt nausea creeping up from the pit of my stomach.
“Better stop talking,” I said. “I’ll manage on my own somehow.”
Comments
Jonathan Griffith
Tyftc!
