Li Jun waited patiently as his mother finally entered the room. She carried a wooden box in her hands and set it down on the table beside the chair he had chosen to sit on.
Silently, she opened the box, revealing nine silver needles that seemed to be surrounded by a light blue glow. It wasn't intense, but Li Jun could feel a small amount of heat coming from them.
"Take off your shirt and sit with your legs crossed and your back towards me." She handed him a note, and Li Jun followed her instructions without asking anything. He knew she would never do anything to hurt him.
"I will tap your shoulder when it's time for you to swallow the pill." She wrote quickly and then sat behind him.
His mother placed the needles in a neat line across her left palm and ran the index finger of her right hand in a strange pattern along his back. She then tapped his shoulder three times, and Li Jun opened the jade bottle.
The sweet medicinal scent filled the air once more as he poured the pill out into his hand and placed it into his mouth. A foul taste filled his mouth. It tasted like spoiled milk, but he forced himself to swallow it for the sake of his crippled arm.
As the pill went down his throat, a fire burned within his stomach. It wasn't even comparable to the pain he felt the night before when he had touched the golden scroll, but it still felt uncomfortable.
Suddenly, he felt a small prick in his lower back as his mother stabbed him with one of the needles. Surprisingly, it didn't hurt, but the burning sensation changed slightly. It felt as though it was hovering just above his navel.
Suddenly, four more pricks stabbed him on each of his shoulders and in between his fifth ribs.
Li Jun felt something moving within him as his mother jabbed the remainder of the needles into him, but he couldn't tell exactly where they had been stabbed since the movement within his body felt too strange for him to think about anything else.
It felt like the needles were weaving something together within his body. He couldn't tell what it was exactly, but the rest of his body suddenly felt cold.
His mother's eyes flashed with concern as she felt his skin turn cold. She thought she had made a mistake, but as she placed her palms against his back, she made a shocked expression and then nodded her head slightly.
She pulled out the needles all at once and then stuck them into the area around his shoulder that had been sliced.
The heat from his body quickly shot around his body as it followed the location of the needles, and the strange feeling arrived once more as it felt as though the needles were weaving threads within his shoulder.
'This must be the tendon repairing itself.' He thought as his arm suddenly felt light, and the feeling returned to his shoulder. The weaving sensation continued, getting quicker with each passing second.
'But what was that feeling in my stomach? Did I have another broken tendon or something?' He thought to himself.
His mother drifted into thought as her hands continued to work tirelessly to give him a better chance of recovery.
***
It was a dark, rainy night. The sky wept at the loss of a loved one, and so did a mother and child. Li Jun was barely seven years old when he heard the news. He fell asleep in her arms after sobbing for hours, and his mother was on the verge of doing the same.
A loud crash outside startled her, and she quickly got out of bed to investigate. One of the servants must have dropped something. She made her way to the door when a dark aura filled the entire Li Family mansion. Her blood ran cold.
She panicked, quickly pushing furniture in front of the bedroom door. There were intruders. Someone was here to harm them.
The rain continued to pour, and Li Jun remained asleep. A dark green mist began to fill the room. She looked down in horror as the mist drifted in from beneath the door she had barricaded.
She tried to run, but her legs felt weak. She remembered something her husband had told her the night before he died, and with all her strength, she crawled her way to Li Jun's bed.
The door flew open as the furniture crashed throughout the room. A man stood in the doorway, his face covered with a strange-looking mask, his eyes spiraled in circles, and his mouth stretched up to his ears. He looked at Li Jun's mother as a dark glow flashed in his eyes.
He shot forward faster than she had expected. Her hand reached out, forming an incantation with her fingers. A ball of fire formed in the palm of her hand and flew towards the man. It struck him in the chest and burned through his clothes.
The man jumped back and let out a slight groan. He patted his burnt clothes to put out the fire as another flame struck him in the neck. It burned through part of his mask and scorched the skin directly beneath his chin.
The scent of burning flesh permeated the room as Li Jun's mother tried her hardest to remain conscious. Whatever the mist that filled the room was, it was trying its best to put her to sleep.
"You bitch. If they had warned me that you would put up this much of a fight, I would have charged extra." The man said in a deep voice, muffled by his mask.
He shot forward once more. Li Jun's mother tried to raise her hand, but she had inhaled too much of the green mist. Her body felt weak. Suddenly, a cold sensation slid across her neck as the man appeared behind her.
"Die!" He demanded as he slit open her throat with a sharp dagger.
Li Jun's mother watched on as the air escaped her lungs through a laceration in her throat. Blood poured down her neck, drenching her clothes. As she tried to stop the bleeding, she fell to her knees and watched as the man approached the sleeping Li Jun and raised a strange-looking knife above his body.
She couldn't fight it any longer and fell to the floor; the world around her vanished as she failed to protect her son.
***
"My arm!" Li Jun shouted. "I can move my arm!" He shot to his feet immediately after his mother withdrew the needles from his body.
"Mom, look!" He smiled as he turned to see she was smiling. But her eyes weren't on his arm, but on the spot just above his navel where she had directed the needles first.
"Mom?" He asked hesitantly. Suddenly, her eyes snapped up, and she looked at his moving arm.
"I'm glad it worked." She wrote before putting away the needles and quickly leaving the room before he could ask any questions. She walked to her bedroom and hid away the wooden box, then sat at the edge of the bed.
'I wanted to try to repair his spiritual root, but I didn't expect it to work so well. That strange energy in his body seemed to speed up the process and helped heal him quicker than I could have managed on my own. It seemed almost like a—'