Chương 122: Chapter 120

I listen to how the murmurs grow and spread through the salon after my declaration, like the ripples when one drops a stone into a calm pond. It is a low sound, made of whispered comments and of glances that cross seeking confirmation in one's neighbor, but which, summed from a thousand mouths at once, fills the entire room like a background hum impossible to ignore. And, nevertheless, there it stays because, just as I already expected, none of those murmurs quite manages to coalesce into something more solid.

No one dares to raise their voice, no one takes a step forward, no one risks putting into clear words the objection that, I am certain, several of those present are dying to let out.

And the reason is as simple as it is brutal, because to complain now, out loud, would mean putting an objection to a gift offered to my father before the whole court on the day of his birthday, and that is a social suicide that none of these courtiers, however much my little speech about books and knowledge within reach of all may have stung them, is willing to commit for a crippled girl and a book with ugly covers.

I had calculated it thus, and seeing it confirmed produces in me a tranquil satisfaction, since in a court like this, silence does not mean approval, it means, simply, that no one has yet found a safe way to attack you and, for now, that is enough for me.

So, ignoring the whispers with the same deliberate indifference with which one decides not to scratch an insect bite, I put the book back in its box and close the lid with a soft click that, in my head, sounds like the period at the end of a sentence I have just pronounced perfectly. And then, for an instant, my gaze drifts toward the long row of brocade-covered tables that rises in front of the throne platform, the place where I am supposed to deposit my gift so that it remains displayed alongside the others.

There I remain for a few seconds while a little ironic voice inside my head asks me how the devil I am supposed to do that exactly, but it doesn't give me time for the worry to fully manifest because, before the problem materializes, the handmaiden who has pushed me here positions herself silently at my side once again. I guess her intentions almost instantly, so, without need of a single word passing between us, I hand her the box with the book.

The handmaiden takes it with a perfect reverence and holds it between both hands with solemnity, then advances to the table and deposits the box with care in the gap that, I suppose, some functionary will have decided weeks in advance is the one that corresponds to me. Once her task is fulfilled, she returns, positions herself again behind my chair and begins to move me back toward my spot, beside my mother.

And it is then that I notice the detail that, internally, draws a dry laugh from me, since she does it backward. Or rather, she retreats without at any moment turning her back on the Emperor, pulling my chair backward with a smoothness so absolutely clean of hesitations that it admits only one possible explanation, which is that the handmaiden has rehearsed this maneuver.

And not once nor twice, but enough times to execute it now without looking back, without stumbling and without deviating an inch from the trajectory, measuring each step with the blind confidence of someone who has repeated the same route until engraving it on her feet. I can almost imagine the previous scene, some functionary of the Lǐbù standing in an empty room, ruler in hand, correcting the angle of her heel and the rhythm of her breathing for hours, all for this moment.

And while I glide softly backward under the disguised gaze of half the court, I cannot help thinking, with all the irony I am capable of, that it would have been infinitely simpler to let Lianhua in so that she could push me. But no, instead of that, the imperial machinery has preferred to set aside the only person who truly knows how to move me and replace her with a handmaiden trained over who knows how many days, all for an act that only lasts five scarce minutes.

While the handmaiden executes her choreography, I cannot help thinking that imperial bureaucracy is not complicated, it is absurd. Of that kind of absurd that is only born in a culture that has refined its rituals over centuries until forgetting their initial purpose. Here, an action as simple as pushing a chair is transformed into a complete ceremony, with its own protocol, its rehearsals and, surely, even its own budget line.

The handmaiden finally leaves me beside my mother and disappears without pronouncing a single word, blending again with that invisible army of serviceable hands from which she seems to have come.

After my presentation, the ceremony continues its course, although there still remain, here and there, some loose murmurs that do not quite die down entirely, and which, by the way certain glances drift toward me when they think I don't notice, I suspect still have to do with my gift and with the little bomb I have just dropped in the middle of the salon.

The acts continue, one after another, with that solemn slowness that clothes this type of event until, at last, the Shangshu raises his voice and declares the main ceremony concluded and indicates that there will be a brief period of rest before the celebratory banquet. As soon as he pronounces those words, my father rises from his throne.

And upon doing so, the whole salon bows like a single creature, a thousand heads lowering in unison in a perfectly coordinated movement, and I do the only thing within my power, that is, to lean forward again in the chair as much as my body allows me until the figure of the Emperor disappears through the door situated at the rear of the platform. Only then, liberated from the imperial presence, the multitude begins to break into groups.

And I observe how it does so following lines of force so clear that I could almost draw them on a diagram, because the largest circles form, with not the least surprise, around the imperial princes and the consorts. Each of them becomes the center of a small star surrounded by their corresponding retinue of functionaries and nobles, who orbit around them with carefully measured smiles, seeking a word, a glance, a favor, or simply the opportunity to be seen near them later.

I contemplate the spectacle with a rather scarce interest, cataloging faces and positions out of pure habit, when I realize something curious, which is that, unlike all the others, no one approaches me or my mother. It is as if the two of us had been marked with an invisible sign that all those present know how to read perfectly except me, a sort of circle of exclusion that the rest of the court respects with a unanimity that, far from offending me, awakens my curiosity.

I lean a bit toward my mother and lower my voice until I turn it into a whisper.

"Mother", I tell her.

"Why does no one approach to greet us? I thought that at least some of your commercial associates would take advantage of the rest to come chat with you for a while." My mother replies without altering her expression, maintaining on her face that amiable and distant mask she has worn since we entered.

"The majority of them do not have a status high enough to have been invited to an event like this, Wen", she explains to me in a low voice, almost without moving her lips.

"A reception in the main salon of the Imperial Palace is not within reach of just any merchant, however much gold he may handle. And the few who do have rank enough to be here prefer, by far, that our alliance not come to light. To approach us before the whole court would be like shouting it to the four winds, and the last thing that suits them, and us, is to put the Fei Lan on alert." I nod slowly at her words.

After all, on a board like this, discretion is a form of armor, and exhibiting one's own cards ahead of time is the quickest way for someone with worse intentions to snatch them from your hands. My mother has been playing this game for some time, weaving a network of commercial alliances as silent as it is solid, and I suddenly understand that that void surrounding us is not a sign of weakness, but just the contrary, the proof that her network functions precisely because it cannot be seen.

After that, I make a small gesture to one of the handmaidens who circulate among the groups with trays of light drinks, and I ask her for something cool. The handmaiden serves me with a reverence and disappears, and it is just as I take the first sip, letting the cold liquid go down my throat, when I notice it. A man approaches us, and he does so in a way that obliges me to lower the cup very slowly. Because at his passing, the whole court steps aside.

Not with disguise, not with the calculated subtlety with which absolutely everything is done here, but in an open manner, almost reverential, as if his simple direction of advance were a silent order that no one considers disobeying.

The groups dissolve before him, the nobles retreat, the functionaries move to one side lowering their heads, and all together they open for him a clean, straight corridor that parts before him just like the waters of the Red Sea before Moses, a corridor that, I realize with a prick of unease, leads directly to where my mother and I are. Puzzled, I look first at the man and then turn my head toward my mother to seek some clue in her.

And what I see finishes putting me on guard, because my mother, who until barely an instant ago was relaxed, chatting with me in whispers, has changed completely, since she has become rigid, and I would swear that, for the first time since I have memory, she even seems a bit fearful. It is a subtle change, almost imperceptible, of those I only notice because I know my mother well, but precisely for that reason it alarms me so much. I look at the man again, and my conclusion is immediate and categorical.

Whoever he is, it is crystal clear that he is someone dangerous, since something or someone managing to frighten my mother is not a good sign at all. I observe him attentively as he approaches, engraving every detail on my memory, because if I am going to have to deal with someone who scares my mother, I prefer to know what I am facing. He is an elderly man who moves with a serene slowness, with his hands clasped tranquilly behind his back and without the slightest urgency.

He wears garments of silk of a deep blue, sober in their cut but of a finish so evidently extremely costly that the luxury shows in him precisely in the discretion, with the emblem of the Celestial Sun embroidered in gold thread on the chest and the sleeves, shining softly each time the light reaches it. His expression floats at some indefinite point between indifference and boredom, as if being here, among us, were for him a tedious formality he would have preferred to spare himself.

His eyes are small and dark, and when they finally settle on me, I have the uncomfortable sensation of being measured and cataloged, just as I was cataloging the rest of the room earlier. The man finishes arriving at where we are, and my mother inclines toward him in a deference I have not seen her dedicate to anyone except my father.

"Elder Feng", she greets him with a carefully neutral voice. This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience. After seeing her behavior, I decide that the most prudent thing, until I understand what is happening, is to imitate her to the letter, so I incline in my chair as much as my body allows me and repeat the name.

"Elder Feng", I say. The Elder Feng does not bother to return my mother's greeting, as if, simply, she did not exist for him. Instead of that, he raises a hand and makes a lazy gesture in the air, barely a movement of the fingers, and instantly the world around the three of us blurs, as if a fine curtain of air had suddenly interposed itself between our small circle and the rest of the room, blurring the sounds and the figures of the others.

I recognize the effect almost instantly, because the effect is nearly identical to that of a privacy talisman. And that, that careless and trivial gesture to achieve that effect, indicates to me quickly that what he is using is, probably, a technique that has an effect similar to talismans. And then he looks at me in silence and without saying absolutely anything. And he keeps looking at me, with those small and dark eyes fixed on me, for just long enough that everything begins to become frankly uncomfortable.

I hold his gaze as best I can, resisting the impulse to shift in the chair or to look away, because something tells me that to yield now would be a mistake, until, just when I begin to half-seriously wonder whether the old man has fallen asleep with his eyes open, he finally speaks.

"After your gift to Sun Hao I am beginning to understand what perhaps the envoy of the Tower of the Five Dragons saw in you", he tells me, and my heart gives a small lurch upon hearing him pronounce my father's given name with the same naturalness with which I would mention that of a classmate, without a hint of respect or of title.

"Despite your more than evident deficiencies." And upon arriving at that last word, deficiencies, his voice is tinged with a disdain so clear, so little disguised that it is evident he is saying it on purpose, and I have no doubt at all as to what he refers to when he sweeps his gaze over my useless legs and the chair that holds them.

I open my mouth disposed to protest, because it is one thing for them to ignore me and another for a complete stranger to throw my condition in my face right off the bat, but I stop dead before the first syllable escapes me, because someone who refers to my father, the Emperor of the Tianjing Empire, by his given name just like that, is not at all a normal person with whom I can permit myself the luxury of arguing lightly.

So I swallow the reply, join my hands over my lap with all the calm I am capable of feigning and decide, for lack of a better option, to contain myself and see how far this old man, who, it must be said, is already beginning to strike me as thoroughly unpleasant, wants to go.

"There are two things I have to communicate to you", he continues, dropping his words like someone placing stones in a wall.

"The first, go preparing the woman in your service who entered the Celestial Fragment of the Sands. When that realm opens again, it will be she who guides the members of the Sect to the room she found, so make sure that by then she is ready, since I do not want surprises."

His words about Lianhua first surprise me and then fill me with indignation, so I get ready to retort to this piece of shit old man when I feel how my mother presses my shoulder with her hand, with the evident intention of restraining me because she knows me too well, so I bite my tongue and let him continue.

Here the old man makes a barely perceptible pause, and when he resumes speaking, the disdain for my condition appears again, this time with a different nuance, almost of haggling, of someone evaluating a dubious merchandise.

"The second is that everything you have invented up to now are insignificant trifles, little toys that any artisan with sufficient patience would have ended up creating", he tells me.

"But, even so, the whole reveals that you possess a certain degree of capacity to develop new things, and that kind of mind does not abound as much as you think. For that reason, when the situation has stabilized and your cultivation has improved enough that you are not an absolute waste of resources, I will propose to the council of elders that you be transferred to the Sect, and there we will see if that capacity of yours can be applied to something of real benefit and not just to creating trinkets."

Here he makes another pause again, as if considering something, and then continues.

"And I will speak with your father so that he assigns you more resources, in such a way that your level of cultivation increases with the greatest possible rapidity", he finishes saying to me finally. And it is precisely that last part, the bit about increasing my cultivation with the greatest possible rapidity, that almost makes me let out a guffaw right in the elder's face.

Because I am astonished, simply astonished, at the manners of this old man who has planted himself in front of me to tell me, without my consent, all of my future and Lianhua's as if it were already engraved in stone.

And faced with such a display of arrogance, the only thing that occurs to me to think, with that black humor that is the only thing I have left to keep from exploding and saying some outrage I would later regret, is that if I accelerate my cultivation speed even more than I am already doing, it is quite possible that even Master Mu's earrings will end up exploding in my ears out of sheer incapacity to keep up with the pace, unable to keep camouflaging an advance that already in itself goes against all logic.

But I keep quiet, press my lips together and keep listening, because something tells me he has not finished yet. And, indeed, after telling me all that, the Elder Feng finally diverts his gaze toward my mother, and by the change in his tone I understand that for him this is a mere appendix, an instruction to the servants.

"As for you", he tells her.

"As her mother, your task is to guide her so that she increases her level of cultivation as fast as is possible so that the day the Sect calls her she is, at least, minimally capable and not the hindrance that her condition makes her now." My mother, after hearing him, inclines before him again, even more deeply than when she greeted him.

"I will fulfill your orders with everything that my capacities allow me, Elder Feng", she replies with a voice firm and submissive at the same time.

The Elder Feng directs at us one last look, one that encompasses the two of us with the same distracted attention with which one reviews a couple of lines in a list before passing to the next matter of the day, and then he raises his hand again, makes another lazy gesture in the air and the curtain of air that enveloped us vanishes all at once, returning us to the noise and the light of the salon revealing, in passing, that nearly half the room is spying on us over the rim of their cups and out of the corner of their eyes.

Without a word more, without a farewell or a nod, the old man turns about and leaves the way he came, with the same serene slowness with which he arrived, and at his passing the court steps aside before him again, opening for him once more the clean corridor, withdrawing as if the simple fact of remaining in his path were something best avoided.

I follow him with my gaze as he moves away, not missing a detail, and only when his figure disappears completely among the multitude, far enough that he can no longer hear me however fine his hearing may be, I lean toward my mother and lower my voice to the minimum.

"Mother", I whisper to her.

"Who is that old man who has just planted himself here to decide my future and Lianhua's with such arrogance, as if we were his property?" My mother lets out the air very slowly, as if she had been holding it in for a while, before replying to me also in a whisper barely audible.

"He is the Elder Feng, Wen", she tells me.

"The liaison between the Sect and the Empire and the one charged with transmitting the orders of the Sect directly to the Emperor, without intermediaries. When he speaks, he does not speak for himself, he speaks for the whole Sect."

"And he can do that just like that?" I insist, still not quite assimilating it entirely.

"Appear any given day and decide our lives as if everything were already done and written, without a single reply being possible, without anyone being able to say anything?" My mother takes a moment to reply, and when she does, she sighs first, a deep and tired sigh, and her voice is tinged with something I had not heard from her, something that resembles too much compassion.

"I very much fear that what he has said about Lianhua is more than probably already decided and that there is nothing either of the two of us can do to change it", she tells me softly.

"Those things, when they come from where they come from, are not discussed. As for your own future, that is something more variable. There there is still margin and perhaps the Emperor can influence how it develops. But it will be complicated, Wen, very complicated. I don't want to deceive you."

I furrow my brow at her words, and for the first time since I arrived in this world, since I awoke in the body of a girl, I begin to consider truly, seriously, without the ironic distance with which I usually wrap everything, what exactly I am going to do with my future. And, above all, what I am going to do with Lianhua's.

Because by the tone my mother's voice had when speaking of her, that contained and sad nuance that betrays much more than the words actually say, I fear that this business of Lianhua guiding the members of the Sect is not by a long shot something as simple, clean, and harmless as the old man has made it sound with his tone of mere formality.

There is something beneath all this that my mother has not told me, or that she does not dare to tell me, and the mere idea that Lianhua, who has become the closest thing to a true friend that I have in this world, is going to be dragged into something my mother speaks of in that tone, turns my stomach.

And if to that I add that the manners of that elder, his disdain, his way of dictating other people's lives like someone signing delivery notes, have done nothing but reinforce the opinion that had been going around my head for some time, the one that the behavior and functioning of the Sect resemble much more those of a mafia or a drug cartel than those of any respectable institution.

And with their untouchable hierarchies, their orders that are not questioned together with their custom, if my mother did not lie to me when she explained to me the functioning of the sect, of disposing of people as if they were disposable pieces, then the conclusion I arrive at I do not like at all. Because if our futures, Lianhua's and mine, end up truly falling into the hands of people like that, I very much fear that they are not going to be, not by a long shot, pleasant futures.

And for the first time in a long while, as the refreshment continues around me amid laughter and conversations of others, I feel that the clock has begun to run, and that I had better start thinking fast. But then a dull and deep crash, that of something enormous breaking somewhere far off in the palace, crosses the walls of the salon and makes the air tremble for an instant before dying in an echo that seems to travel through the entire building.

The effect upon the room is immediate and absolute, since the laughter cuts off short, the cups remain suspended halfway to the lips and that constant murmur of a thousand crossed conversations that filled the salon extinguishes all at once, as if an invisible hand had torn the sound of the world out by the roots.

The silence does not last, since from the doors and the sides of the salon the voices of the imperial guard rise almost in unison barking evacuation orders over the panic that begins to awaken among those present.

I see them deploy with a rapidity that betrays a protocol rehearsed a thousand times, distributing themselves among the different exits, raising their arms, channeling the multitude toward the doors in a flow that aims to be orderly, probably aware that the true danger of a room full of frightened people is not the distant explosions, but the evacuees themselves pressing against one another until leaving no space even for air.

But then comes the second explosion, and shortly after the third, and it is precisely at that moment when I see several Nei Wei, whom I recognize as those of our escort, burst into the salon shoving aside any noble who interposes himself in their path and forcing their way in a straight line toward where my mother and I are.

My mother reacts and I feel her hands close over the handles of my chair when, without saying anything, she begins to push me toward the mass of bodies that already crowds against the nearest exit.

"Mother, stop", I tell her. I do not raise my voice, but there is something in my tone that stops her dead.

"Wait, don't take us in there", I continue, pointing with my chin at the bottleneck that is forming at the door, that tide of backs and elbows struggling to pass all at once through a gap that does not allow for so much.

"To enter that multitude with me in the chair is much more dangerous than to stay still where we are. If people start to push for real, it only takes someone tripping on a wheel, a single time, for the chair to tip over. And if I fall to the floor there in the middle, with everyone pushing, it is clear what is going to happen to me. It is not the fire that kills in places like this, Mother, it is the panic."

My mother remains motionless for an instant with her gaze fixed on the multitude, waging in silence that battle between the instinct that screams at her to run and the reason I have given her not to do it. But finally her hands loosen over the handles and she simply lets out a sigh. And just when I think I have recovered something resembling control of the situation, that fragile illusion blows apart when one of the walls of the salon bursts inward.

A body crosses it in a rain of rubble and dust, flies describing an arc that no human being should describe and collapses upon the marble with a heavy and wet thud, rolling among the debris until it lies face down barely a few meters from the first row of courtiers. The entire salon turns its head toward the bundle like a single creature, and for a second absolutely nothing is heard save the noise of the rubble settling. And then, when the cloud begins to clear, I distinguish it.

Stained with blood, torn by the impact but entirely unmistakable, the silk of a deep blue and golden glimmers of the Elder Feng. The same man who just now planted himself before me to dictate my future and Lianhua's as if they were decrees now lies sprawled among the debris of the salon, and some dark and petty part of my head cannot help thinking that the universe, every now and then, can grant small joys to a girl.

But it barely gives me time to hold that thought because through that very hole, silhouetted against the dust and the light entering from the destroyed room on the other side, advancing with the paused serenity of someone who is strolling through his own garden and not crossing the burst wall of a room in ruins, appears my father, the Emperor.