Chương 156: Chapter 153

I listen to Lianhua without interrupting her a single time, which is already a considerable merit on my part, while she recounts to me with that flat and orderly voice she uses to report everything that has happened this morning from the moment she set foot outside the house to the moment she climbed back up the path.

And as the account advances, as the pieces gradually fit together and I finally understand how an errand as simple as going down for food has transformed into a duel, I notice how a stab begins to install itself between my eyebrows. By the time she finishes, I have already pinched the bridge of my nose with two fingers and let out a long sigh of resignation.

I stay a moment like that, with my eyes closed and my fingers on the space between my brows, ordering the words before saying them, because one thing I am clear about, and it is that I don't want them to sound like a reproach, even if deep down they are a bit.

"Lianhua", I say at last, lowering my hand.

"If it was not necessary to fight that duel, you shouldn't have done it." She looks at me without changing her expression, which is what she always does when she knows I have not yet finished, so I continue.

"And when I say you shouldn't have done it, I mean exactly that", I add.

"Regardless of what any random Disciple said. It doesn't matter what he let loose, it doesn't matter how rude he was, and it doesn't matter how much he deserved it. If the duel wasn't needed, then it wasn't needed, and that's that." Lianhua lets an instant pass before answering, measuring, as she always measures everything.

"I could not let the insults pass, Zhāohuán Wen", she tells me after a while, with that exasperating serenity she employs when she is sure she is right.

"We are in a place like the Sect, a site where everyone who is inside believes themselves entitled to look down on everyone who is from outside. In an environment like that, giving an appearance of weakness is not a good idea. If I let them insult us today without consequences, tomorrow they will insult us with more relish, and the day after they will do something worse than insult." I listen to her, nod slowly as if she convinced me, and don't say what I am truly thinking.

Because what I am truly thinking is that that is not the reason. Or it is not the whole reason, at least. I know Lianhua, I know her better than I know myself in some respects, and I know perfectly how to read what lies beneath that reasoning so neat and tactical that she has just laid out for me with the most neutral face in the world.

I know that the insults were not directed at her, but at me, and I know that what has driven her to raise her hand has not been a cold calculation about the convenience of projecting strength, but rather something much simpler and much less confessable, which is that someone has spat on my name in front of her and she has not been willing to swallow it. But I also know that arguing that with her is to get myself into a dead-end alley.

That if I tell her openly what I suspect, she will deny it with the same flat voice with which she would deny the cold in winter and we will spend half an hour going around the same stone without moving a single step, so I don't do it and I let it pass. But there is another thing I have no intention of letting pass in any way.

"Look, Lianhua", I tell her, and now my voice comes out different, lower and firmer.

"What some people I hope, with all my soul, never to see again in what remains of my life think of me matters to me considerably less than you believe. That they consider me weak, that they consider me useless, that they laugh behind my back when I turn around, all of that matters to me exactly nothing, because the day I leave here I will not cross paths with any of them ever again.

But what does matter to me, what matters to me a great deal, is that in one of those duels you end up wounded for defending a pride that does not matter to me." I see that she opens her mouth, that she takes a breath, and I know perfectly what is coming, because I have seen it coming so many times that I could recite it word for word, so I cut her off before she begins.

"I already know what you are going to say", I tell her raising a hand.

"But that is not going to make me change my mind, so save it." I breathe deeply, and transform what was going to be a plea into the only thing I know she will obey without protest.

"And since you are not going to listen to me if I ask you nicely, I am going to put it to you as an order", I continue.

"While we are in this Sect, if someone asks you for a duel again, whoever it is and whatever they tell you, you answer that you are forbidden to fight, that your lady has expressly forbidden you. And if the fellow in question insists, if he really wants that duel, then you tell him to come up here and to come ask me for permission in person."

Lianhua does not respond right away to my orders, but rather stays looking at me fixedly, with that absolute stillness she adopts when something displeases her but she doesn't find the way to refute it, and I see how she weighs the order, how she turns it over in her head searching for its seams, and how, in the end, she doesn't find a single one to slip through.

"As you order, Zhāohuán Wen", she says after a while, with a reluctance she doesn't even try to disguise entirely.

"I will follow your orders." And with that I have enough, because I know that, however much it may weigh on her, she is going to fulfill them to the letter. I let the air out, calmer now, and decide that the moment has arrived to change the subject before it occurs to either of the two of us to reopen it.

"Good", I say, and I soften the tone deliberately.

"Well, setting aside the whole blessed matter of duels, which I truly hope never to have to mention again in my life, tell me the important thing. How did the business with the provisions go?" And there, at last, Lianhua relaxes a bit, because this is comfortable ground for her.

"It went well", she tells me.

"Better than I expected, actually. It turns out that at the Supply Pavilion they don't only sell food, but all kinds of things. Furniture, utensils, cloths, tools. Almost anything one might need to live up here."

"Furniture?" I repeat, and I already begin to intuit where she is going.

"Furniture", she confirms.

"So I took advantage to buy a couple of extra beds, a couple of low chairs, one for the dining room and another for the cultivation cave and, just in case, several supplies that we will need if the stay drags on. I prefer to have too much and for it not to be needed than for us to lack something and not be able to go out for it when we need it." I nod, because it is exactly the kind of foresight I would ask of her, and I am glad not to have to ask it. But then Lianhua makes a pause.

A brief pause, barely anything, but I have spent enough years at her side to recognize that specific kind of silence, the one she makes just before telling me something she has decided on her own and about which she is not one hundred percent sure I am going to approve.

"There is another thing", she says at last.

"When I asked about the food, they explained to me that the normal food is handed over free of charge, without any cost. But they also told me that, in exchange for Merits, or for spirit stones in our case, since we don't have Merits, we could buy spirit food, so I took the initiative and bought a bit, both for you and for me. Taking into account the order you gave me to condense my Earth Core as fast as possible, it seemed the most sensible thing to me."

And there, the moment I hear the words spirit food come out of her mouth, there is a thought that gets ahead of all the others and rises up my throat before I can prevent it.

"Lianhua", I say all of a sudden, sitting up a bit.

"And Xia? If Xia eats that food without realizing, even a single bite, she could put herself in danger. It could kill her." But she is already shaking her head before I finish the sentence, with that reassuring speed she reserves precisely for the moments in which I alarm myself over something she had already foreseen.

"Nothing of that is going to happen", she tells me firmly.

"I have also brought plenty of normal food, enough for you and her, and I have it perfectly separated from the spirit food. It is clearly differentiated and I have pointed it out to Xia with all clarity, so that there is no room for any confusion. She knows which is hers and which she must not touch under any concept." Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more. She makes a minimal pause before continuing.

"And you, on the other hand, also cannot eat too much of it, since you still do not have the Earth Gate open", she tells me finally. I lean back a bit, somewhat calmer, though not entirely, because when it comes to Xia it is hard for me to fully let go of the worry.

"And are you sure?" I insist.

"Not the certainty that probably nothing will happen, but totally sure." Lianhua holds my gaze without blinking.

"If Xia does not make any mistake, there is no problem", she replies.

"With the head that girl has she will not make one, since she is careful and takes seriously what she is told. I have explained to her why it is important and she has understood perfectly that it is not a whim of mine." I look at her a moment longer, and in the end I let the air out through my nose and give up, because if there is anyone in this world whose judgment in these things is above mine, it is precisely her.

"All right", I say.

"If you are sure that there is not going to be any problem, then fine. I trust you." Lianhua nods, agreeable, and then, with that custom of hers of never giving me good news without accompanying it with the corresponding counterpart, she adds what was missing.

"Although there is a small drawback", she says.

"With this, the expenditure in spirit stones is going to increase. Until now we only had to worry about keeping the cave's Qi-gathering formation lit, but from now on, if we want to keep advancing at the rate you want, we will have to buy spirit food regularly. And that is stones that go every few days." I furrow my brow, because the matter of the funds is one of those it is not advisable to look away from.

"And will we have enough?" I ask without roundabouts.

"With what we have left, I mean."

"That is going to depend entirely on one thing, and it is on how much the techniques cost, in the event that what Song Yan has proposed goes ahead", she answers me.

"If the ones at the Chamber of the Scriptures agree to sell us any, and if the price is reasonable, we will be able to maintain the rest of the expenses without difficulty for quite a long time. But if those techniques turn out to be expensive, or if they ask us for much more than they are worth taking advantage of who you are, then the matter changes completely and we will have to start crunching numbers."

I turn it over an instant, and in the end I shrug my shoulders, because it is the only honest answer that occurs to me.

"Well then, we have no choice but to keep checking how things turn out as we go and to keep improvising as they come", I say.

"Which is, more or less, what we've been doing since we left the Palace, so it isn't any novelty either." Lianhua accepts that with a small gesture of the head, and a practical doubt comes to my mind.

"By the way, if you have bought beds and chairs, where are they?" I add.

"Because you haven't brought them."

"They are supposed to bring them before the day ends", she replies.

"They told me that a couple of members of the Pavilion would take charge of bringing them up themselves."

"Ah", I say.

"Well, all right then." And with that, the conversation dies down into one of those comfortable silences that no longer ask to be filled with anything. I stay still, enjoying the unthinkable coolness of this mountain, with my gaze lost on the path down which Song Yan went a while ago, and I am just beginning to let my mind wander off on its tangents when the door of the house slides open and Xia appears.

She carries a bucket in her hands and crosses the small courtyard with a determined step toward the well that is to one side of the house. I watch her leave the bucket, throw the rope, draw water and then head back inside carrying it held against her hip without asking anyone for help. And that image tells me everything I need to know.

"It seems Xia is going to begin preparing lunch", I tell Lianhua.

"And now that I realize it, I still haven't used my midday turn in the cave." I look a moment toward the door through which Xia has disappeared and make the calculation.

"So let's make good use of the time", I continue.

"Take me to the cave, and then, while I cultivate, lend Xia a hand with the preparations. Between the two of you, you'll finish sooner, and that way when I come out everything will be ready." Lianhua nods without a word, simply pushes the chair toward the house, we get around its single step without too much effort, she leaves the chair in the entrance hall and takes me princess style to enter the cave. She lays me face up in the exact center of the formation, on the folded blanket that serves as a bed.

Afterward she straightens up, checks at a glance that I am well and leaves, sliding the door behind her with that grave and sandy rumble that already turns out almost familiar to me. And I am left alone with the Qi.

I activate the Yin Gate and the Resonance to attract the dense Qi of the cave next, and little by little I go emptying the room the same way a pond is emptied with a water pump, until around me there remains nothing more than the omnipresent fire Qi and the few particles the formation begins to attract again, too slow for it to be worth waiting for them.

When I reach that point, when there is nothing more to squeeze, I stop concentrating and stay looking at the stone vault I have above me, waiting patiently, which is the only thing I can do, until I hear the door open again and Lianhua's footsteps entering to fetch me. She lifts me out in her arms, and when we return to the entrance hall, the scene has changed.

Xia has prepared a simple lunch, nothing complicated but clearly abundant, and Lianhua has brought the low table back from the courtyard and drawn it up to its spot against the wall again, with the cushion in the gap so that I can sit with my back resting. She leaves me there, settles me, and the three of us arrange ourselves around the table. Xia begins to place the dishes, and as she puts them out she separates them into two groups, one clearly on Lianhua's side and the rest closer to me and to her.

"These are the normal ones", she says indicating our side, and then points at Lianhua's side.

"And these are the spirit ones." The spirit ones end up to my left, and among them there is one that catches my attention immediately, a bowl of rice that is not white as it should be, but of a strange golden color. I look at the dishes, calculate, and realize right away that I have not the remotest idea of how much of all that I can allow myself to eat without getting into trouble.

I have not opened the Earth Gate, I don't know exactly where my limit is, and this is precisely the kind of experiment one should not do by eye. So I decide to leave it to someone who does know.

"Lianhua", I say, turning toward her.

"I have no way of calculating this by myself, so you do it. Separate for me the maximum quantity of spirit food I can eat without having the Earth Gate open without it bringing me problems. And I prefer to fall short than to overdo it." Lianhua nods, leans over the dishes and takes a bit of that golden rice, a quantity that strikes me as almost ridiculous, barely enough to fill the bottom of a bowl. She adds on top of it a few pieces of meat, measures the whole with one last critical look, and holds it out to me.

"With this, for one meal, it is enough", she tells me.

"It is better not to concentrate it all at once and to spread it out over the three meals of the day, since that makes the Qi absorb much better and punishes the body less. A bit at each meal yields more than a binge all at once." I take the bowl with both hands, and we begin to eat. Xia only touches the normal food, and she does it with the tranquility of one who has the matter perfectly clear and has no intention of approaching the other side of the table even out of curiosity.

I accompany my small ration of golden rice with normal food to have something more with which to fill my stomach, while Lianhua, on the other hand, eats only spirit food. And then, when I have already finished eating the spirit food, which tastes frankly good, and I am on the normal food, something happens that I did not expect and that no one had told me about. I notice, with all clarity, how a small thread of Qi begins to arise from my stomach.

It is a warm, faint sensation, like a tiny spring that gushes out of nowhere, and I, almost by reflex, prepare myself to direct that Qi toward the Yin Gate. But I don't do it, since to my surprise the thread divides without my doing absolutely anything and distributes itself into several branches, which disperse through my interior and seek out one by one the seven Gates.

And in each of them, without my having to guide anything, without my having to move a single finger, that Qi is absorbed automatically, as if each Gate drank on its own the part that corresponds to it. I am left so fascinated with the sensation that I almost forget to chew.

"Lianhua", I say, without taking my attention off what is happening inside me.

"This is strange. The Qi of the food has distributed itself on its own among all the Gates, and the Gates are absorbing it without my doing anything." Lianhua doesn't even lift her gaze from her bowl.

"It's normal", she tells me, with the naturalness of one who confirms that water is wet.

"There is nothing strange about it." And since she must see that the answer has not quite been enough for me, she deigns to expand it.

"I have known some people who, since they had access to great quantities of spirit food or Qi Pills, decided to give priority to opening the Earth Gate above the others", she continues.

"And it has its logic, so whoever can afford those things takes advantage of them from the beginning and gets the most out of them." She takes another small bite before going on.

"But that was not my case", she says.

"I never had that kind of abundance. Neither spirit food nor pills to spare. So for me that Gate was not particularly useful and that is why I left it for last. It would only have come in handy, perhaps, during my stay in the Celestial Fragment of the Sands, where I did come to have access to more resources than usual." She makes a very brief pause, and then continues.

"But by then it was already too late to change anything", she adds at the end. I keep silent, in part because I am turning over what she has just said, and in part because I am still too distracted with what I feel inside me to articulate a response worthy of it. We finish eating little by little, without haste. Xia scrapes up the last of her plate, Lianhua polishes off her ration with the same economy of movements with which she does absolutely everything, and I finish off the rest of my food.

When we finish, Xia and Lianhua set about gathering up the dishes and separating what is left over taking care not to mix the two groups, and I stay seated in my corner against the wall, without moving a muscle, because I have all my attention set on the silent prodigy that keeps occurring beneath my skin. Because the Qi has not stopped moving.

I keep noticing, fascinated, how it distributes itself through my body, how each Gate keeps accepting it at its own rate and how it distributes itself without my having to do absolutely anything. And I am so absorbed in the sensation that I almost don't hear the voice that arrives from outside, but the tone of voice is high enough for me to pay attention to it.

"We are from the Supply Pavilion!" says the voice.

"We bring the furniture that was acquired this morning." Lianhua leaves what she has in hand, wipes herself with a quick gesture to go out to receive them, and I, still seated in my corner, let out a sigh of pure and sincere relief. Because, with those beds that have just arrived, I will not have to share mine with Xia again, since a single night with her kicking me while she slept has been more than enough for the rest of my life.