Chapter 38 : Running On Empty

Jack had hit his limit.

He couldn't go on. His body was rebelling and a lonesome desperation

descended upon him as he listened to the sound of his straw sandals

squelching in the mud.

The rain, which had slackened at the start of the challenge, was now

cascading in a torrential downpour and Jack was soaked to the skin. His feet

were aching blocks of ice, his second pair of straw sandals were already

disintegrating, and his muscles burned with a sickening pain.

But he couldn't stop.

He wasn't allowed to.

'To reach the top, you have to climb a mountain step by step,' the High

Priest had told the six Circle entrants prior to commencing the Body

challenge. 'You will experience pain on this journey, but remember the pain

is only a symptom of the effort you're putting into the task. You must break

through this barrier.'

But Jack was finding the pain too great to overcome. He'd been

running for over half the night. He was hungry and weak from exhaustion;

the energy from the pitiful last meal was already burnt up and he had visited

only fourteen of the twenty shrines he had to reach before dawn.

Jack stumbled on.

But the fifteenth shrine was still nowhere in sight. Surely he must have

passed it by now. He began to question whether the Two Heavens could be

worth such physical punishment and all the momentum from his body

ebbed away as his mind took hold, coaxing him to stop.

'Climb the mountain and satori is yours,' the priest had told them.

Jack no longer cared for enlightenment. All he wanted was a bed and

to be warm and dry. He felt his pace almost grinding to a halt.

This challenge was impossible. How was he supposed to find his way

along mountain trails, made treacherous by the rain, in complete darkness?

Somehow he was meant to cover a distance equivalent to crossing the

Channel from England to France, with only a paper lantern to light the way

and a tiny book of directions to guide him to each of the twenty shrines.

There was no chance of taking a short cut, since the shrines had to be

visited in a set order and his book stamped with an ink woodblock to prove

he'd been there. Jack wished he had someone else to follow and encourage

him on, but each entrant had been separated by a short period of time

measured by the burning of a stick of incense. He was alone in his

suffering.

Without food or sleep, he wondered whether anyone would get to the

temple's main shrine before the first light of dawn struck the eyes of the

wooden Buddha.

Despair had Jack in its grip and it weakened the last threads of his

determination. His foot struck something solid and he went tumbling

forward.

Jack fell to his knees, defeated.

His lantern, miraculously still burning in the downpour, illuminated an

old moss-covered gravestone. The whole trail, Jack had discovered, was

littered with such burial sites, each one marking the mortal fate of a monk

who had failed in his pilgrimage.

He looked down at the rope round his waist and the knife in his belt.

That would not be his fate, however desperate things became.

Jack attempted to stand, but the effort was too great and he slumped to

his hands and knees in the mud. His body had given up.

The Circle of Three had broken him at the first hurdle.

Jack had no idea how long he stayed there on all fours in the pouring rain,

but deep in the recesses of his mind he heard Sensei Yamada's voice,

'Anyone can give up, it's the easiest thing in the world to do. But to hold it

together when everyone else would expect you to fall apart, now that's true

strength.'

Jack hung on to these words like a lifeline. His sensei was right. He

must continue. This was his path to becoming a true samurai warrior. His

fast track to learning the unbeatable Two Heavens technique.

Jack crawled through the mud.

He willed himself to rise above the pain in his legs and knees.

He had to complete the Body challenge.

He reminded himself that this single night's task represented only one

day of the Thousand Day Pilgrimage the Tendai monks had to complete as

part of their spiritual training. The High Priest had told them that over a

period of seven years, his disciples would run the equivalent of the

circumference of the world. Only forty-six monks had ever completed this

extraordinary ritual in the past four centuries, but the old priest was living

proof that it could be done. He was the forty-sixth. If that old man could

complete one thousand days, then surely Jack could manage one.

He lifted his head, letting the cool rain wash the grime from his face.

In the darkness, a glint of light from his lantern reflected off the fifteenth

shrine only a little farther up the path.

Don't try to eat an elephant for lunch.

The phrase popped out of nowhere and Jack laughed at the absurd

saying Sensei Yamada had given Yori. But now he understood.

By breaking down the course into smaller sections and tackling it piece

by piece, perhaps he could finish the challenge. Jack focused on the

fifteenth shrine as his first achievable goal. A trickle of energy seeped into

his body and he got back to his feet. He took one unsteady step forward,

then another, each step bringing him closer to his goal of the fifteenth

shrine.

Reaching the shrine, Jack rejoiced and said a little prayer. The words

filled him with optimism. With a renewed determination that masked his

aches and pains, he stamped his book and set off down the path to his next

goal, the sixteenth shrine.

He was running. He had broken through the pain barrier the High

Priest had spoken of. But Jack hadn't gone twenty paces when he spotted

two red eyes glaring at him out of the darkness.

A strangled scream erupted from this devilish apparition and it charged

straight at him.