Chương 51: Lìchūn: Ascend 3

That evening, Liu Yinhua sits in her room with the window open and the last of the day cooling across the sill. The room is small enough that she knows every sound of it now. The faint click in the wall when the beams settle after sunset, the scrape of the window frame.

Her comb lies beside the little jar of hair oil, the sewing packet tucked neatly behind it, and the bronze mirror sits on its old silk with the First Ember Method beside it, the scroll corners beginning to soften from how often she has opened and closed it. The house beyond her door is quieter than it had been an hour ago. Wu Cailan has gone out somewhere, probably to do something practical, and Tang Mingxia is in the front room with a book, turning pages at the same careful pace she uses for cutting vegetables.

The hearth has gone low. Somewhere in the rafters, a night insect clicks and stops, clicks and stops, like it too is learning discipline from Elder Yun just by osmosis. A month ago, Liu Yinhua would have thought this room plain. Poor, maybe, if she were being honest in the privacy of her own head. The bed is narrow, and the mat is thin. The wall has a water stain near the lower beam, pale-edged and old. One floorboard catches the cloth when she wipes it, no matter how carefully she folds the rag around her fingers.

The lamp is useful rather than beautiful, and the window looks out over a little courtyard strip where someone before them planted herbs and then abandoned it the growth of weeds. In the Moon-Viewing Tower, there had been lacquer and silk and carved screens, bronze lamps polished bright enough to catch her face in distorted pieces. There had been painted birds, painted moons, painted flowers, and girls painted just as carefully, arranged so that everything seemed rich.

She breathes in and lets the thought pass down, past throat, past breastbone, past the place where old anger lies. Her dantian beneath her navel answers before she reaches for it properly, a small warmth, rounded and held, much fuller than it had been when she first sat in this room and tried to find anything at all inside herself except fright and exhaustion. It is still not much, and she knows that. Elder Yun's hall teaches humility with every breath, even if Elder Yun herself never lowers herself to saying so.

There are disciples who draw qi with the ease of drinking water, disciples who cycle without their shoulders tightening, who sink into meditation like they were born with a cushion under them and a family elder correcting their posture before they could speak. She settles her hands on her knees, palms upward, and turns her attention past the room, not outward exactly. Qi is not sound. It is not warmth either, though warmth is the easiest lie her mind uses to hold it.

It is not breath, not blood, not desire, not any of the things novices apparently mistake it for. The room has qi. Everything does, according to the scroll. The timber, the paper, the cooling hearth, the herb pot outside the window.

Her own body, which had apparently been carrying the possibility of all this through every year of dancing until her feet ached, smiling until her face went numb, eating too little and sleeping too lightly and thinking that endurance was only a thing mortal girls did because there was no other choice. A month ago, she had been mortal. The thought comes in, large and foolish, and she almost loses the thread of her breath. Mortal.

Not nothing, she corrects herself, because the word rises too easily and she dislikes how comfortably it fits. She had not been nothing. She had hands, and a mind, and a body that had survived everything asked of it. She had music beaten into her fingers, poetry in her memory, the exact tilt of a tea cup, the exact weight of a man's gaze before he decided what he wanted from her. Mortal did not mean nothing. Her dantian stirs, heat answering the thought, and Liu Yinhua exhales through her nose until it settles.

The first rotation she draws is ugly. Too much of everything comes with it, damp from the courtyard soil, old cooking heat from the hearth, a faint woody taste of the floor and beams that is not taste at all except her mind has no better place to put it. She lets it go before it reaches her centre, not sharply enough to scatter, only opening her attention until the mixed little strand thins and fades back into the room.

This time she reaches more carefully, past the cool air and the smell of cloth, past the stubborn green life in the herb pot, past the low grey warmth left by the hearth. Sun, bright and hot and beautiful, only a little. The day is gone, and what remains of it is held in stone and wood and the outside edge of the sill, a pale gold remnant tucked under the evening. Liu Yinhua touches it with her attention and draws. Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators!

It comes slowly, thinner than a hair, almost nothing. There is no sudden flare through fingers and wrist, no hard heat needing to be guided before it grows impatient- this warmth is softer and stranger, less like fire than the feeling of standing in a courtyard after winter rain when the clouds open and sun finds the back of the neck. It settles into her dantian with a small, low pulse.

It is not the fire from Suzhou, not silk catching, not screens curling black, not Madame Xue's voice breaking into something high and furious behind smoke. This warmth does not want to eat the room, or everything around her. It sits with the little flame already there and colours it gold at the edges, only for a breath, then another. Her body accepts it.

Her dantian tightens and she knows it is a warning only, a pressure low beneath her palm when she rests her hand there, as if the vessel inside her has grown full enough to push back against the shape it was given. She had first thought of it as a spark. Then as a little lamp. Then, privately and with some embarrassment, as a small teapot over coals, heavy with heat and waiting to rattle if mishandled. Now even that feels too small. It wants more room.

Soon, she thinks, and the word moves through her with the same small fright it always does now. She will have to break through again soon. Soon because the qi has begun to press against the edges of what she can hold. The last stage of the first realm. By the end of the year, she must have the title that proves she belongs here as more than a rescued girl with a violent awakening and a conveniently pretty face.

She must be able to stand in a hall and have the sect name what she is in a way nobody cannot cross out, cannot add interest to, cannot sell onward with a smile. Her breath catches, and the sun warmth trembles. Liu Yinhua stops drawing at once, pressing her attention down until her dantian steadies. The scroll was clear enough even for her pride to understand. Anger, fright, hunger, grief, pain. Fuel, yes, but fuel without shape only destroys. She knows all about things being destroyed.

She has no desire to become another room full of smoke because she could not sit still with her own thoughts. For several breaths, she listens to the house, and she can hear as Tang Mingxia turns a page. Water shifts in the jar near the front room, perhaps from the cooling wood under it. Outside, somewhere beyond the courtyard wall, two disciples pass in low conversation, their words too muffled to catch and their laughter kept polite for the residential paths.

Liu Yinhua sits behind her door with sun in her dantian and a healing scratch on her hand from a venomous lizard and the strange, uncomfortable knowledge that if she called out, someone in this house would answer. Not everyone, not always, but still, someone. The girls have become difficult in that way. Wu Cailan, with her crooked shoes and knife under the pillow, who gives advice like she is throwing a stone at a stray cat.

Tang Mingxia, who arranges bowls, corrects errors, leaves tea where Liu Yinhua can reach it, and somehow makes concern sound like an accusation. Xie Lianqiu, not in the house but present all the same, severe about arrows and food and Liu Yinhua's ongoing failure to regard her own safety with suitable seriousness. Xu Qinghe, pale but steady, tying a bandage around her hand. Trust is too large a word for most of it, but some small part of her has begun to expect them.

Their habits, their voices carrying through the day, and returning at night. The boys are harder. She does not think Chi Yanluo will hurt her. That is the strangest part, perhaps. He is careful in ways men rarely bothered to be unless someone important was watching. He keeps lessons public. He does not let his gaze behave stupidly, even when Shen Yuanzhao's whole face goes red enough to heat tea. He listens when people set terms, and worse, remembers them later. Shen Yuanzhao is ridiculous, but not cruel.

Loud, careless around the edges, loyal in ways that show most clearly when he forgets to make them charming. Duan Xueheng is quieter, more difficult to read, and perhaps that should worry her more than it does, but his corrections land where needed and do not linger where they are not wanted. She does not think they will hurt anyone. She has said that before. The thought slips in with no drama at all, which is how the worst thoughts often arrive. Men in the Tower had worn finery and silk.

They had smelled of sandalwood, wine, ink, rain on expensive cloaks. Some had spoken gently. Some had looked embarrassed by their own wanting, as if shame made them safer. Some had asked whether she was cold, whether the tea was too bitter, whether Madame Xue treated the girls well, and then had gone on asking softer questions until the answers no longer mattered, and their true faces leered out like a wolf through the brush. Some had meant no harm.

Liu Yinhua has learned, with some bitterness, that harm does not always require meaning. So no, she does not think Chi Yanluo or Shen Yuanzhao or Duan Xueheng will hurt her. Between that and trust lies something wide and dark enough that she does not yet know how to cross it without looking down, and she finds herself entirely unwilling to cross the distance. Her dantian pulses again, strained and warm. Enough.

She lets the remaining qi settle, not drawing more though the last scraps of warmth still tempt at the edge of her awareness. It would be easy to take another thread, so easy to tell herself one more would help. That sort of thinking sounds very much like Liu Yinhua and has led her into trouble before. She folds her hands in her lap instead and breathes until the pressure eases from sharp to full.

By the time she opens her eyes, the room has gone blue with evening, and the bronze mirror reflects only a dark shape of her sitting, face pale in the dimness. She looks like herself, which is still a thing she sometimes finds surprising. From the front room, Tang Mingxia says, without raising her voice, "If you are finished meditating, there is tea." Liu Yinhua looks toward the door, already gathering herself.

"I did not make it just for you," Tang Mingxia adds, warningly. Liu Yinhua can tell she's had a good day today.

"So hurry up." Of course. Liu Yinhua presses one hand briefly over the warmth beneath her navel, then rises to take tea with her friends. They are truly ridiculous.