My purported master, Wa Lei, helped me limp out to his rickshaw as he explained that I had a year to train to defeat the Champion of the White Crane Tong in a city-wide kumite. We rode out of Hong Kong, stopping to pick up his parrot which I had rescued from a thief earlier, and to Wa Lei country estate on the non-Communist(’What’s a Communist?’ He asked me when I ventured a worry.) mainland. I could abrogate the deal he had struck on my behalf as I paced in my berserker fury, and thus fatally injure his own status, and lose horribly to their Champion. Or I could accept him as my teacher.



He seemed offended when I wanted to know how good he was, but it seemed a fair question to me. So, the pony-drawn rickshaw was halted, and the seventy-year-old man got out, and punched an eight inch thick tree down with two blows of his knobby fists. That answered my question very thoroughly.



Once at the estate, I was purified by steam baths, and plain food. Luckily, he considered meat essential for keeping the strength of mind needed to resist suggestions and mind games. It was fortunate that purification was the first step, because the aftermath of a berserker rage leaves you as weak as a kitten for several days.



The fourth day began the training, and the verbal abuse. But in two weeks too his evident disapointment, I had worked off what little out of toneness existed. Being a verser is a very strenuous lifestyle. I rarely meet a too overweight or out-of-shape verser. Landing in a dessert without food or water, and walking out over the course of three days as one such verser did tends to be all too common an experience for us.



“Now my flabby little foreign devil, we get serious.” Considering, I was running twenty miles a day, and sparring for two hours at a stretch I thought we were already serious.



Add running up a mountain, at night, with a backpack full of jagged rocks, and a pschyotic guy waiting somewhere in the dark to spring out, and trip you so you can roll down the hill, and varying it for spice with beating one with a stick, and then you have serious.



“How do you like my mountain?” He asked me a week later as he did something that made my sprained ankle not sprained. I had yet to make it to the top.

“What mountain?”

“That one!” He pointed to my nemeses.

“That’s not a mountain, that’s only a hill, a little one at that.” It was about four thousand feet high, and I had planned this insult with care last night as I lay in a ravine with a snake crawling over my scraped body. Laughing Boy had dumped me here with a trip and a kick in my stomach.

He turned red, and then he started dancing about, screeching at me in some other of the several Chinese languages.

“Really, I have climbed ones that were seven times as tall.” He stomped off to sulk. But I was not sure that it was not all a game to him.



About this time, I became aware that my genteel host had other interests. Men came and gave him gifts. Other men came, and he directed them to suggest things to men who were not so forthcoming with giving gifts. Things were built, and laws were passed when he smiled on them. And the converse was true. My host was a gangster just like the White Crane Tong.



I packed, and confronted him with this on my way out the door. After chastising me for my simple, Western morality which did not move me much at all, other than to laughter, he admitted it. He told me, and showed me his operations. Yes, he was a criminal, but he was as much as possible, a positive influence. And he did his deeds with a gentle hand that was never arbitrary.



“If you leave, then I am without a champion. I have stalled the White Crane who longs for mastership of the city. I have bluffed him. But I lack the strength to defeat him. If you leave, the boy who is the future of the City as I am the past, and White Crane is the present, if you leave, the boy will be his, and his barbarous forces will rule the city with blood.” He pleaded with me.



It was a good point. Unfortunately, there were a lot of places on many worlds where a relatively benign capo di tutti capo would be an improvement on the local government, or lack thereof. Who do you want in charge, Michael Corleone, or Mao Se Tung?



I consented on one condition, the boy, would be allowed to grow up with his family, and not under my host’s tutelage. The old man nodded softly.

“Perhaps that is for the best. Quite subtle for a Westerner.”



We never talked of that again, and the next day I was back running up the hill. Soon, new obstacles appeared. Hurdles, traps, hired men to attack me en masse. The year passed slowly.



“You have done wonderously well.”

“But…”

“I fear it is not enough.” He said as he listlessly demonstrated a Dim Mak technique.

“What of other techniques? Flying, projecting chi in visible manifestations…” I ran through a list of wild kung-fu techniques I had heard of. At the end, he stared at me, and laughed.

“Those are the stuff of story. Not real, the best we can manage is a few varieties of a killing strike, and I would know if more were possible.”

“More is possible elsewhere.” I muttered to myself as I remembered the vast array of worlds where I had worked magic, and done other wonders. Never had I been to a world where you could fly through martial arts, but I expected that such was out there somewhere.

Too bad my plasma cannon did not work here, or I would just light up the White Crane and cook them for dinner. Mm,mm, good, crane soup.

“What about this Dim Mak then?” I asked.

“Ineffective against their champion. He had specially strengthened the muscles over his heart so that it will not work.”

“Show me how Dim Mak works.” I said as an idea bubbled up within me.



Later that night, I told him of the verse. The multitude of worlds I had visited and that stress to the point of death was the ticket to a new world. He is a fascinating conversationalist, and we talked the Sun down, and up again. He thought I was giving him a last gift before we died. Wa Lei let me take a few days off before the tournameant.



I did not relax, but I practised a new technique.



The week came, and we began to fight. I shall not go into great detail, but we triumphed in this double-elimination tournameant. I learned a lot of respect for my competitors, except for the Champion who had no competition. Fear of reprisals ruled his matches. Anyone who actually fought him risked their family being injured.



“You need to stop the intimidation.”

The Champion just stared down at me. I am not a small guy; in fact I dwarfed most of my competitors. This guy was a mountain. Actually, he was a Gifted One. In this world, the physical abilities of the human race exceeded ours by maybe twenty percent. In other words, most people were just like you and me. But a few were literally superhuman for someone from my native planet. Wa Lei, the Master of the White Crane, the boy Yaung Chang, and this mass of muscle known as the Champion who was actually only half-gifted compared to the other three. His gifts were strictly physical without wisdom, or charm, or mind that was any better than normal.

“No.”

“You make yourself look weak; like you need help.”

“Hah.”

“If you go into the last tournameant with me without a single flaw, since I already have a single elimination, the only way I can beat you is to kill you.”

Maybe one of my arguements sunk in. The intimidation stopped.



We entered the fight, and simply put, he was better than me. But he saved me from defeat. He kept me from rolling out of the ring, because he was wanting to slowly beat me to death. I would make an excellent example to the horrified crowd of thousands.



Using most of what I had, I escaped, and got to my wavering feet. I prepared for Dim Mak, Tiger-verser style. He came at my throat in a move that I had to block, for it would result in a broken neck otherwise.

I ignored the attack, and took the damage. A tournameant fighter trains for a clean defense, and a quick jab. A streetfighter accepts a punch in the gut, if it leaves his opponent on the ground with a dislocated knee. A determined verser lets his opponent break his neck if it means that he can get a full force, unobstructed Dim Mak strike in.



He fell back with his heart stopped, and I forced myself to stand there with my hands holding cradling my head. The referee grabbed my hand, and raised it in victory. My head moved a bit, and bye-bye spinal cord. I was out of that world.



I figured the boy would grow up honest and push for honest behavior, and would gently dismantle the corruption of Wau Lei, as the community leader he, Yaung Chang, almost inevitably would become. I hoped and prayed that my sacrifice wasn’t for nought as I fell through the scriff to another world.



Tadeusz