Chương 36: Lìchūn: Connection 2

Liu Yinhua waits four days before returning to the gate. It is not only caution. Caution is part of it, certainly, but caution by itself would have kept her away longer. She spends two afternoons in the outer archive with her notes tucked close beneath her sleeve, copying what little she can find on sun-aspected spirits from the shelves open to first-year disciples. Most of it is broad enough to be nearly useless, written for novices who might one day need to identify how to placate a spirit in their way.

Still, broad knowledge is better than none. First Light is the earliest edge of the sun, thin and uncertain, tied to beginnings, first insight, opened eyes, and the first breath of a path not yet walked. Dawn is gentler, more golden, a light that washes and renews. Rising is hunger and motion, the sun climbing with all the impatience of young strength. Ascendant is discipline, assertion, banners raised, bright enough to command but not yet unbearable.

Zenith is perfection and judgement, the sun above all things, permitting no shadow large enough to hide in. Blazing Noon is harsher. Drought, exposure, endurance, heat that does not comfort. Falling is ripening and harvest, red-gold strength paid for over time. Dusk is memory, grief, oaths, endings, and the last light over a road already walked. The archive says little else plainly, but the warning is in the strokes beneath the words.

Sun spirits do not favour what is concealed, for all they do not all hate lies in the manner of moral officials or legal clerks, because spirits are not officials and rarely care for human law. It is worse than that. Falsehood is dampness under their light, rot under clean cloth, a shadow where there should be none. A clever phrasing may pass before a river spirit. A flower spirit might enjoy the shape of a pretty evasion. A dusk spirit might keep a secret until it is time for grief to open it.

A sun spirit will only be discontent. Liu Yinhua thinks of the spirit near the vent, his bright hair and bare feet, the dry old pressure of his attention settling over her until summer filled the room and every soft thing in the world learned how easily it could fail and wither. She takes the spring water anyway. The jar is heavier than it was when empty, wrapped in cloth and tied inside her sleeve so it does not knock against her wrist as she walks.

She has filled it from the clean upper channel near the springs, where the water runs warm and clear before the bathing pools take it. She had considered bringing more, but the spirit had said less than a pond, and she has no desire to discover how much humour he finds in a girl dragging half a barrel through the forest. The path above the novice grounds is quieter in the late afternoon.

Most disciples are in lessons, at tasks, or too wary of being seen wandering alone after the faction announcement to take upper trails without reason. Liu Yinhua has reason. Whether it is good reason remains unclear. The token sits in her other sleeve, wrapped separately from the water. The small sun burned into the back has not faded. It warms when she turns toward the western ridge, not enough to hurt, only enough to guide.

The first time, she had followed that warmth with Xie Lianqiu beside her and ignorance ahead. This time, she has a little more knowledge and no Xie Lianqiu. There are already too many eyes on who walks beside whom. A second trip to the same hidden gate with Xie Lianqiu would be another line written in other people's minds. Liu Yinhua has no wish to provide Guo Meilin's circle or Jiang Wenhao's smiling friends with more ink than they already have.

And she has not wish to be followed or stalked here, and lose this boon. The forest thickens around the ridge, giving way to pale trunks, dark moss, roots across the path. The warning markers stand where they did before, half hidden by fern and stone, and the narrow path between them remains permitted in the unhelpful way of many sect things. Liu Yinhua pauses before the gate when she reaches it.

The arch sits beneath its moss and trailing vine, grey surface sealed behind stone, looking no more alive than any old shrine wall left out in weather. The carved hollow waits beneath the character, and Liu Yinhua takes out the token and sets it into place. For a moment, nothing happens. Then the small sun on the back of the wood warms through her fingers. The grey surface does not fold open as it had before. It thins, pale and dry, light passing across it like heat over summer stone.

The path beyond is not the first dark passage. It leads at once into warmth. Liu Yinhua does not step through quickly. She is not stupid, and spirits are not friends because they have thrown stones at her and insulted her clothes. She tests the threshold with one hand first. The light presses back, recognising the token, and the jar in her sleeve grows warm against her arm. She steps through, and t he forest falls away behind her. The chamber is the same, or close enough. Pale stone curves overhead.

The vents split the far wall, breathing dry heat in slow waves. Old water marks crust the basins and channels, white rings around emptiness. The air catches at her throat at once, familiar now and still unpleasant. Light sits everywhere without seeming to come from anywhere. The spirit is lying on his back across the flat stone by the largest vent, one arm over his eyes and one bare foot hanging off the edge.

His hair spills over the rock in white-gold strands, bright enough that Liu Yinhua has to look down before her eyes water. He does not move when she enters. She draws the jar from her sleeve with care and steps closer. The heat in the room presses around her, dry and searching, and she feels the familiar urge to dress the offering in better words. This junior humbly offers what the honoured spirit requested. This junior hopes the honoured spirit will accept this small sign of reverence.

This junior seeks only to repay a kindness. None of them are quite lies, but she stops before any of them reaches her mouth.

"I brought the water you asked for," Liu Yinhua says, holding the jar out in both hands, fighting back the honoured spirit epithet.

"I want to return here, and I thought you would send me away if I came back without it." The spirit sits up properly on the flat stone. His bare foot swings once, heel knocking softly against the rock, and the light around him shifts until the edges of his body blur with heat. This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it. He slides off the stone and comes to her with both hands loose at his sides.

Up close, he looks almost younger than before and also older in a way that makes her eyes sting if she tries to hold him all at once. White-gold hair, bare feet, pale loose sleeves that may not be sleeves, blurring like dappled light through foliage. A young, male-shaped thing full of dry old summer. He takes the jar from her, and the water steams before he opens it.

"Clean," he says, peering inside.

"I took it from the upper spring channel, before it reached the pools," she says, fighting the urge to bow.

"Better than bath water."

"I thought so," she agrees. He snorts, then carries the jar to the shallow basin beside the vent. The basin is as dry as it had been before, pale mineral crust lining its hollow. When he pours, the water hits stone with a soft hiss and vanishes so quickly at first that Liu Yinhua thinks the chamber has swallowed it whole. Steam curls up around his wrists. He keeps pouring. After several breaths, a thin pool gathers at the bottom, trembling with heat, slowly shrinking in size under his gaze.

The spirit crouches over it and watches the water settle.

"My name is Lièjìng," he says, not looking up at her. Liu Yinhua stills, but he continues on regardless, gaze fixed on the slowly winding curls of steam.

"You keep coming into my room, so you should know what to call me," he says. She had expected to ask. She had expected refusal, or mockery, or some strange little bargain made of heat and insult. The simplicity of it catches her more sharply than any of those would have.

"Lièjìng," she says, carefully.

"I am Liu Yinhua." The name sits in her mouth with more weight than sound, and the characters are not certain in her mind, but the meaning feels close enough to make her chest tight. It suits him, suits the heat, the white stone, the old water marks, the visions of riverbeds stripped clean and rot drying before it can spread. Fierce Purification. Lièjìng dips his fingers into the shallow pool again, then flicks water at the nearest vent. It becomes steam before it reaches the crack.

He makes a small pleased sound, almost childish, and Liu Yinhua understands very suddenly that he had wanted the water. He looks back at her.

"What do you want?" Liu Yinhua had thought of this on the forest path. She had turned it over in her head between the trees, each version neater than the last.

She wants guidance in cultivation, and permission to use the outer chamber, and clarification of the bronze slip and a chance to learn and a chance to repay and a respectful exchange between a junior disciple and an honoured spirit of the mountain, and— Lièjìng watches her, chin resting on one now dry hand, and she thinks of the archive line about Zenith, judgement and exposure. She thinks of Blazing Noon, drought and endurance and heat that strips away weakness.

She thinks of the Tower, of words like silk screens, of smiling while meaning nothing anyone could hold against her. The sun does not want silk screens.

"I want to understand my own power before someone else explains it to me in a way that leaves a leash attached," she says, and once she starts, stopping seems impossible, drawn out of her.

"I want to learn. I want resources. I want to return here because the qi is good and because you know things I do not. I want to be strong enough that help does not become ownership, but I do not know how to reach that point without accepting help from someone." Lièjìng stares at her, and the water steams between them, clouding his vision and behind the water, his form blurs into sunspots and harsh glare. Then he says, "Greedy," all dry and amused. Liu Yinhua lowers her eyes.

"Yes."

"Good." It is closer to approval of a thing being set in the proper place, a cracked cup turned so the break can be seen, than it is an approval of her. Lièjìng stands and comes toward her, and the heat comes with him. Liu Yinhua holds still when he reaches out, though every part of her remembers the first time he touched her wrist and the way her meridian route had flared under his fingers. This time, he does not touch her hand, but instead the wooden token through the cloth of her sleeve.

The sun mark burns warm, almost so hot and she struggles to not jerk away, tongue between her teeth like she had so many times, Mama Xue's whip-thin cane at the back of her legs.

"I will no give lessons," he says, and she looks up before she can stop herself.

"Not yet," Lièjìng amends, making a face as if her disappointment is annoying to him personally.

"You are not yet of the sun, for all you aim your gaze to it."

"What may I do, then?" He points past her, toward the entrance she came through.

"The outside room, you may sit there."

"The gate will allow it?" she asks, and she fights to not sink polite words into it.

"It will now." Lièjìng taps the token again, and the warmth runs through the wood and into her sleeve, then deeper, not into her skin but into something around her, a thread tying token to gate to stone. Far behind her, beyond the bright chamber and the folded path of the trial, something answers with a low shift of qi that she feels more than she sees. He steps back toward the basin and crouches again. The water has already lowered, steam thinning in pale ribbons around him.

He drags one finger through it, leaving a brief line in the pool that bubbles and roils violently.

"You bring water, you use the outer chamber. You leave my room alone unless I call or you are less boring."

"Less boring?"

"Brighter," he says, and his smile is a viscous, lopsided thing that reminds her of the cut of summer noon-heat, that unbearable dry shaking world where all perished. Liu Yinhua breathes out once, slowly. It is not what she had hoped for, but—a place to cultivate where qi gathers thick and warm under the mountain, and a route past the most dangerous sections of the trial.

She bows, not deeply enough to hide behind it, but hopefully enough to hide that little greedy urge in the sunlight, that she had expected more, against all of her training, her greedy nature.

"Thank you, Lièjìng," she says, softly. He squints at her.

"Still too much politeness," he says. She straightens.

"I will try better."

"That is worse," he says and this time, she does smile. He looks pleased by that too, which makes no sense at all. Then the brightness around him shifts, and the chamber feels wider for a moment, dry heat opening behind her ribs. Summer holds the world still and waits for false things to sweat themselves empty, waits for paint to run and damp cloth to sour and soft clay to slump unless it has been shaped well enough to keep its walls beneath the sun. Heat does not ask what a thing wishes to be called.

It dries the surface, enters the crack, finds the soft place and the hidden rot and the untempered seam, and what remains after is smaller, harder, truer, if it remains at all, if it will— The pressure passes, and Lièjìng is crouched by the basin again, chin on his knees, looking into the last of the water.

"Go use the outside room," he says.

"You are making the air wet." Liu Yinhua looks at the nearly dry basin, then at the vents, then at him, at the pool of water he has poured out. She is making this place wet? He seems to notice her internal struggle over the hypocrisy, and his grin spreads far over his mouth, too far and Liu Yinhua perhaps had already made the mistake of forgetting this was a spirit clothed in human artifice, not a human.

He flicks a hand to her again, and the light near the entrance folds softly, not around her this time, but away from her. Beyond it, the path back to the qi-rich cavern opens in a warm line of stone and dull gold. Liu Yinhua takes one step toward it, then another, feeling the token against her wrist and the faint pull of the room beyond.