Birth of the Tiger

The storm was still raging near Central Passageway in Zhengzhou. It had been pouring down for hours and every now and then lightning cracked open the sky. The surrounding heights cast thunders back ninefold and it was as if the Thunder Emperor himself had come to the Land once again, raging in wrath.

The wounded man was lying in a state of semi-consciousness between several giant boulders. It was all that he could do to hide, before passing out the first time. That and hoping for the rain to erase the traces and drive the savage beast known as Blood Wolf King back to his lair, as well as keep the Heavenly Demon disciples at bay.

His jacket was smeared with his own blood, but even so it was plain that it displayed the insignia of none of the clans wrought in struggle for control of the land. He bore the simple and worn down garments of vagabond travelers, the kind of which thousands roam the Land every day in an attempt to forge their fortune. His brief, but near deadly encounter with the Blood Wolf King had left barely more than rags of them - as well as his face. A blood smeared slash on his right cheek had cost him an eye and nearly his life. In the dreams of his fever ridden unconsciousness, the bared teeth and piercing eye of the red furred beast turned into gleams of flaming sabers. For some brief moments, he fancied catching glimpse of a huge, black, single-eyed leopard but later he would not be able to tell if he had heard the black feline's purr, or if it was the roar of the beast in his nightmare.

It was in this sorry state that a couple of disciples of the Wu Tang Clan found him a couple of hours later. They had traced the single-eyed leopard to that place at the behest of their master only to see the agile cat run away and finding the wounded man instead. By now, fever and blood loss had overcome him completely and the disciples had to carry him the nearby village of Lushan. The old doctor at the clinic shook his head in dismay. Lushan was a quiet little village and though it was through here that disciples of all the White Clans in the land passed when setting foot on their Road to Dragon, it was ill prepared to tend to such serious wounds. His scarce moments of awareness had disappeared completely. All he kept muttering in an almost obsessive way in his feverish sleep was the word 'Tora', which means tiger. The Divine Turtle, the doctor at the clinic could do little more for the wounded man than supply some calendulas for his wounds and an improvised stretcher for the disciples to carry him to Baiyun village in Wu Tang Shan. For what the man needed, was a skilled disciple, trained in the higher arts of healing.

It was thus that he came to Wu Tang Shan and in the care of Leandine, a Red Phoenix and healer of Wu Tang. And it was in the long time of his recovery that the clan disciples had come to call him Arashi Tora, the Tiger of the Storm, given the circumstances of his coming to Wu Tang Shan.