You Tanzhi practices the Yijin Jing

You Tanzhi practices the Yijin Jing through an accidental route to martial power: fearing that the Frost Silkworm’s poison will leave his body, he imitates the postures in a soaked manual to summon and observe it. Because he has no ambition to master martial arts, he approaches the exercises without the desire that has frustrated more accomplished practitioners. The practice gradually improves his agility and awakens a potent Yin-strength in his palm, though he misunderstands the cause of his growing ability.

Circumstances and Purpose

After deciding he cannot return to A'Zi, You Tanzhi wanders through the wilderness, living on wild berries, birds, and small animals. On the second night, bored and uncertain where to go, he takes out the Sanskrit Yijin Jing and decides to follow the postures shown in its illustrations. His immediate concern is not the manual’s martial teaching: he has just absorbed the Frost Silkworm’s poison, and fears that the creature, or what he imagines as its lingering spirit, might leave him.

The book has been completely soaked. As he turns its pages carefully, afraid of damaging them, he discovers that each page bears a different drawing of a monk, visible only when wet. The diagrams’ appearance seems at first to invite a supernatural explanation, but You Tanzhi works out that moisture has revealed them. He begins with the first posture and attends to the small red arrowhead printed beside the strange writing, seeking to bring the Frost Silkworm’s presence into motion.

The Manual and the Silkworm

The practice develops through a repeated pattern of sensation and interruption. When You Tanzhi adopts a posture and concentrates on the arrowhead, he feels what seems like a cold thread moving through his limbs and bones. Alarmed, he stands up, and the sensation vanishes. He spends four hours wondering whether the Frost Silkworm has left him; unable to bear the uncertainty, he tries the posture and concentration again. The sensation returns, and stops when he breaks off his contemplation.

Rather than avoid the experience, he begins to test it. He follows the manual’s different postures and the complicated turns of the arrowhead, repeatedly calling up the feeling and then interrupting it. Each time the sensation moves through him, he feels comfortable and unrestricted. The practice therefore serves two purposes for him: he is experimenting with the strange presence inside his body, while unknowingly rehearsing the sutra’s method.

Conditions for Mastery

The account explains why You Tanzhi’s seemingly casual imitation succeeds where disciplined effort has failed. The Yijin Jing is described as a supreme martial manual, but its method is exceptionally difficult: practice requires the dissolution of the distinction between self and others, and the practitioner must have not the slightest desire to learn martial arts. Shaolin monks of the highest standing are the ones permitted to study it, yet their eagerness to master its techniques and gain its benefits works against that condition. Centuries of diligent practice produce little, leading monks to regard the sutra as ineffective.

The manual’s history includes an earlier accidental success. A hundred years before, a monk who had been ordained as a child was dull-witted and considered mad. His teacher, unable to master the sutra, threw it aside in frustration. The monk picked it up and practiced its contents playfully, eventually becoming a leading martial artist of his generation without understanding that the manual was responsible. You Tanzhi follows a comparable path: he does not practice to become skilled, but because he finds the unusual effect on the Frost Silkworm interesting. His lack of martial ambition, normally a disadvantage in the martial world, becomes the condition that allows the training to take hold.

Growth and Misunderstanding

After several months, You Tanzhi notices that his hands and feet have become lighter and more nimble. He can jump farther, and his running speed has greatly increased. The improvement is evident in his movement before he understands its source. When a hungry wolf attacks, he flees, but, with the animal close behind him, throws out a palm without thinking. The wolf falls and dies. He retreats several paces, then tests whether it is still alive by throwing a stone at it. Only after confirming that the animal is dead does he inspect his own palm in surprise.

You Tanzhi attributes this force to the Frost Silkworm’s spirit, which he believes remained in his body after the creature died. The narration identifies a different explanation: the Yijin Jing has developed his internal energy, while the silkworm’s deadly poison has been absorbed into him. Together they produce an exceptionally fierce Yin-strength. His mistaken explanation matters because it shapes what he does next. Believing the silkworm spirit must be summoned daily or depart, he keeps using his palm and does not dare stop, even as the real source of his growing martial power is his practice of the manual.

Significance and Aftermath

The episode turns an accidental survival strategy into a martial transformation. You Tanzhi’s attention is fixed on the Frost Silkworm, not on conventional achievement; the manual’s method works precisely because he does not approach it as a prize to be conquered. The contrast with the ambitious Shaolin practitioners, and with his own false belief in a silkworm spirit, separates the actual process of cultivation from the explanation he gives himself.

The new abilities do not resolve his difficulties or return him to a secure life. He is still afraid of returning to A'Zi, and still wary of Qiao Feng; instead, he continues travelling south, living in the margins of settled society. Knowing that his iron head will frighten people, he sleeps by day in caves in the wild and steals food from homes after nightfall. The Yijin Jing has made him faster and more dangerous, but his practice begins in isolation and misunderstanding, not in recognition or mastery.