Chương 163: Chapter 160

The doors of the Main Hall close at my back with the same dry and clean thud with which they opened, and there, three paces beyond the last step of the terrace, are Lianhua and Xia. Lianhua waits standing, with her hands crossed in front and her back straight, so still that if it weren't because she is carrying a backpack and the breeze moves a corner of her clothing she would seem another of the varnished columns of the facade.

At her side, Xia carries another backpack, and the moment she sees me appear her face lights up with a smile that goes out halfway upon remembering where she is and who is watching us. So it was true. While I was in there answering questions with the best face of an overwhelmed girl in my repertoire, someone has gone to our house, ordered them to gather everything and brought them here so that we wouldn't lose a single minute. These people have many defects, but they certainly cannot be accused of wasting time.

The Inner Disciple takes me out to the center of the landing, and then, without prior warning and without saying a single word, he lets go of the handles of my chair, but Lianhua is already in motion and three quick paces later my chair once again has behind it someone who knows what they are doing.

She says nothing, doesn't even look at him, and nevertheless, when her hands close over the handles, I notice how the weight of the chair corrects itself and the general sensation of being about to tip over that I have had for a while now disappears.

"Follow me", says the Inner Disciple without turning around. And we begin to descend the mountain by the same road as on the way up, only that now I travel it without noticing any of that, because my head is full of the Elder's last statement that something has happened at the Imperial Palace and I must return immediately. That is all they have told me, not one word more, and with that I have to make the journey back to the capital.

So the only thing I want at this moment, the only thing, is to reach the entrance of the Sect as soon as possible, climb into the carriage and never see this mountain again for what remains of my life. And that is why, when we have barely lost sight of the Main Hall behind a bend of the path and I see another person appear coming toward us, the first thing I feel is not curiosity, it is a profound and sincere annoyance.

It is a young woman, with the same tunic of sober cut that our guide wears and the same embroidery on the chest, which, if I have understood correctly how the hierarchy of this place works, means that she is also an Inner Disciple. She walks quickly, with her chin high, and does not slow down until she plants herself right in front of us.

"Lin Xun", she says as she looks at our guide. And just like that, suddenly, without ceremony and less than an hour before leaving forever, I finally find out what that man is called.

"I come to substitute for you", she continues without further preamble.

"Tianyu Feng wishes to see them before they leave." And the effect of that sentence on Lin Xun is immediate and considerably more interesting than anything I have seen on his face since I met him, because that whole facade of superior boredom he wears as if it were part of the uniform crumbles.

"That cannot be, Wang Jing", he answers her, and even his voice has changed.

"They don't belong to the Sect. Seeing Tianyu Feng is an honor very few can come to have and it is not something that can be granted to some strangers." Wang Jing looks at him, and her reply arrives without her being altered in the least.

"Tianyu Feng has specifically asked that I take them to visit him", she tells him.

"If you have any complaint, go express it directly to him before we arrive, because I am going to do what I have been ordered." And there escapes me, without it showing on my face, a little noise of sincere admiration, because she has just dispatched the objection without discussing it, offering a path the other is not going to take and making clear that she has already decided.

Lin Xun clenches his jaw and stays a moment in silence, and in that silence I can see how he makes the calculation anyone would make, which is to weigh how much it matters to him to be right against how much he feels like going to argue with whoever gives that kind of order.

"Very well", he yields at last, and he does it with the worst grace in the world.

"But if the Elders complain about this visit, I want nothing to do with the matter."

"That is something the Elders and Tianyu Feng would have to resolve", replies Wang Jing with perfect serenity. And I, meanwhile, witness the exchange from my chair with my hands still in my lap and a single question spinning around inside me with growing insistence. What the devil is going on here?

Because they have just thrown me off this mountain with a haste unbecoming of a place where everything is done by clear rules, they have prepared my luggage without consulting me and they have told me that my father has sent an urgent notification. And now, when I am already descending, someone appears halfway to take me to a visit that an Inner Disciple considers an almost inconceivable honor. And with whatever it is I have waiting for me at the end of this journey, the last thing I need is a detour.

But at the same time, and although I have spent a while trying to ignore it, there is something that doesn't leave me at ease and it is that that name sounds familiar to me. I don't know from where, I don't know from when, but Tianyu Feng is a name I have heard or read before.

Lin Xun adds nothing more, he simply dedicates to us one last look, not to me in particular but to the three of us at once, with the expression of one who washes their hands of something that smells bad to them, then he turns around and begins to climb back the way we have come with his back very straight. And then Wang Jing turns toward us.

"If you would be so kind as to accompany me", she tells us. And those words throw me off more than everything previous put together, because in three weeks, on this mountain no one, absolutely no one, has addressed me with that formula. Here things are ordered, indicated or communicated, but they are not requested with courtesy. But I notice that Lianhua does not move.

She says nothing, she doesn't protest, she makes no gesture that any ordinary observer could interpret, but I have spent twelve years with her and I know perfectly what it means that her hands remain still on the handles.

"Follow her, Lianhua", I tell her. And she obeys instantly, without a single question, because that is what Lianhua is. What I don't tell her, because there is no need to say it aloud and because on this mountain the walls probably have more ears than bricks, is the reasoning behind it. And it is that, if someone from this place wanted to do something to me they would not need to mount such theater, and even less a disciple who comes to relieve another disciple in front of witnesses.

If someone wanted to be rid of me they would only have to wait for the carriage to pass along the bad stretch of some road to do it with much more discretion. So whatever this is, it is not a trap, it is something else. And with that idea reasonably settled, we begin to walk. If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

Wang Jing does not take us back to the main path, but rather a few paces on she turns off down a side branch I had not even seen, and from there the landscape changes. It is a road that goes around the mountain instead of climbing or descending it, wide, of packed earth and with stone fitted only in the stretches where the terrain calls for it. It winds among the pines, looks out from time to time on a view of the valley below, climbs and descends constantly along long and gentle slopes.

And it has no staircases, not one. It takes me a good while to realize, and when I do I cannot help staying looking at the road with a very strange mixture of relief and suspicion, because I have spent three weeks cursing this mountain precisely for the opposite. Up here there are staircases even to go from one door to the one next to it, staircases no one needs and that are there because they are more elegant than a slope.

And suddenly there appears a long, tended and perfectly maintained road that goes all the way around the mountain without a single step. Someone has built it that way on purpose. And the reasons that occur to me for building a road without steps are basically two, either it is conceived for carts, or it is conceived for something that cannot climb steps.

But I keep the observation to myself and, while Lianhua pushes and Xia walks at our side puffing from the effort, I devote myself to the only useful thing I can do right now, which is to search for that cursed name. And here, once again, I curse the fact that my Blessing does not come with a search bar. Because I can remember every word I have read and every word I have heard since the day I opened my eyes in this world, yes, but that does not mean I can jump directly to where I want.

There are no shortcuts, there is no index and there is nothing resembling one, the only thing I can do is what I always do, begin to pull on the thread and mentally read my own life until finding the other end. It takes me a good while but I find it, and I find it so early in my life that a guffaw almost escapes me. Because it was at my Man Yue.

The Throne Hall, my mother kneeling, the Jiangjun Han Xin beside my father, the decorations of phoenixes and lotuses everywhere and me, turned into a bundle of silk incapable of focusing my sight beyond two hand-spans, lying on a cushion on top of an altar. To one side of the cushion, the Imperial Seal. And to the other, a feather.

And the voice of the Taijian Li Ming, since at that time he was still the Taijian, reciting the ritual blessings with that bored tone of a functionary who knows the script by heart, and one of them clearly asking that the feather of Tianyu Feng protect me from all evils. And once the first thread is found, the rest come on their own. Because after that I have read the name quite a few more times, always in passing, always in the same type of solemn paragraph without details, always accompanied by the same formula.

Tianyu Feng, the Guardian Beast of the Empire. And I, at the time, did with that expression exactly what anyone does with an expression that appears in a history book among fifty other equally grandiloquent expressions, which is to file it away as an honorific title or part of the ritual mythology of the Empire. Guardian Beast, of course.

But it occurs to me, not for the first time, that perhaps I should have paid a bit more attention to the words the people of this world use when they speak of the kind of things I used to consider part of a mythology. I am turning that over when Wang Jing stops, so I lift my gaze and discover that the road has ended. Before us, the mountain opens in a cleft.

It is the entrance of a narrow canyon, wedged between two walls of rock that rise almost vertically, with a floor of gravel and without a single tree, without a single shrub, without a single blade of grass in the stretch I am capable of seeing.

"From here on you have to go alone", Wang Jing tells us, and for the first time since she appeared I notice something in her voice that is not professional courtesy.

"I will wait for you here and, when you come out, I will guide you to the exit of the Sect." I look at her, I look at the canyon and finally I look at her again. And as I have been doing all morning, I can only continue whether I want to or not.

"Lianhua", I tell her.

"Forward." The canyon is not long. I calculate that on a normal walk one would cover it in a few minutes, and from the entrance one can almost make out the light of the other end, but we have not gone fifty paces when I begin to notice the heat. At first I attribute it to the obvious, that we are in the middle of summer, that we have spent a long time enduring a fire Qi surge that has turned the entire Empire into an oven and that getting in between two walls of rock at midday is not precisely refreshing.

But at a hundred paces I already know that is not what is happening, because the heat does not come from above, it comes from the end of the canyon. I notice it in the air that rises from the gravel and strikes me in the face, I notice it in the way the atmosphere trembles at the height of my knees.

It is not the sun beating on the stone and giving it back, it is something that comes out of the air itself and that increases with each step we take toward the other end in a constant and perfectly regular manner, as if we were approaching a lit forge at the end of a hallway. And at that moment, with the air burning my throat and the sweat running down my back, I put the three pieces together. A name that ends in Feng. A sacred relic that is a feather.

A heat that comes out of a canyon where absolutely nothing grows. And inside me there forms a suspicion so enormous, so absurd and impossible, that I don't even dare finish thinking it and that, nevertheless, fills me with two things at the same time, with an anticipation that makes my hair stand on end and with a perfectly reasonable fear. The heat keeps rising as we advance.

And it keeps rising to a point at which it is no longer discomfort, but something the body understands as a warning, with my throat dry in two breaths and the skin of my face taut as if I had stayed too close to a brazier. Lianhua slows down, and she says nothing, because Lianhua never says anything, but she slows down.

And I make the only appraisal I can make, which is that we have been brought here by a disciple of the Sect who came expressly to fetch us, who argued with another disciple in front of us and who has guided us to the entrance of this place, all of it by order of someone whose name is pronounced with reverence. And however absurd things may be in this world, and they are fairly absurd, it would be an absurdly convoluted way of incinerating a girl.

"Lianhua", I tell her, and I have to swallow saliva before finishing the sentence.

"Ignore the heat and keep advancing."

"Yes, Zhāohuán Wen", she answers me. And we advance toward the heat. The last meters are bad, since the loose gravel makes the wheels skid, the air burns going into my lungs and burns coming out of them while each breath costs. But out of the corner of my eye I see Xia and the poor thing is in a lamentable state.

She is bent over under the backpack, with her face a color I have never seen on her, her mouth open searching for an air that in here is of no use and that expression of a stubborn mule she puts on whenever she has decided that she does not intend to complain even if they split her in two. And I don't intend to arrive at wherever we are going with a fainted girl at my feet, so I gather the Qi around me and use the Dragon's Grip on her.

Xia detaches from the ground and lets out a fairly muffled little noise of surprise that, in any other circumstance, would have amused me, but right now the only thing that interests me is that she has stopped dragging her own weight and that of her luggage through an oven. Upon noticing that I am holding her, I see how she relaxes a bit, and thus, hanging in the air like a little lantern, she keeps advancing with us.

And in case someone sees us I already know what I am going to say, which is the same thing we say at the Imperial Palace and that the one who has the Dragon's Grip is my Fei Yi and not me. And so, with Xia floating, Lianhua pushing and me clenching my teeth to maintain concentration in this heat, we cross the last meters and come out of the canyon. And the first thing I notice, the moment we cross the line of shadow that marks the end of the rock walls, is that the heat disappears.

It does not drop, it does not attenuate, it simply disappears all at once and what occupies its place is a fine and cool mist that touches my face with the softness of a spring morning. The change is so abrupt that Lianhua stops suddenly, so the second thing I notice is where we are.

It is an enormous valley, closed on all sides by mountain walls, carpeted with a grass of a green I have not seen since the surge began and full of a mist that softens everything and that makes the walls at the far end seem much farther away than they are. And in the center of the valley, alone, there rises a tree. And I say it rises because no other way of saying it occurs to me, since it is colossal.

It is a tree so absurdly large that the brain takes a few seconds to accept the scale, with a trunk that would need at least thirty people holding hands to surround it, a bark of a pale grayish green and a crown of broad leaves that extends over the valley as if it were a ceiling. And crowning it, wedged into the crown, there is a nest.

An immense nest, the size of a courtyard, and that besides does not seem made of loose branches piled up, but rather has the appearance of a perfectly constructed platform, of a golden color that the light filtering through the mist makes shine in slow waves. The three of us stay looking at it in silence, and Xia keeps floating because I have completely forgotten to lower her. A Chinese parasol tree or, if I am correct, a cursed Wutong tree.

And here is where I have to acknowledge to myself, with all the honesty I am capable of gathering, that I have known it perfectly since the canyon and have been denying it out of pure intellectual cowardice, because in the land I come from it is only a myth, and that myth only consents to alight on one type of tree. And then, from the nest, there comes a cry.

It is a sound that resembles nothing I have heard in my life, long, clean and crystal clear, and that resounds from wall to wall throughout the whole valley until the mist itself seems to vibrate with it. After that cry, from the nest there emerges a figure. That figure rises above the crown of the Wutong, opens its wings making the entire valley fill with color, and with a couple of wingbeats that raise a gust of warm wind that throws my hair backward, descends and alights before us.

I contemplate in disbelief the figure alighted before us, because despite the fact that I already suspected it, nothing could prepare me for seeing the eastern equivalent of the Phoenix, considered besides in its mythology the supreme ancestor of all birds. So, swallowing saliva, I contemplate the impossible figure that is in front of us, because there, less than ten meters away, there rises a Feng.