Chương 67: Chapter 65 Interlude 12

In the residence assigned to Zhāohuán Wen and her mother within the Imperial Palace, night settled with calm. In the center of a room normally used as a reception hall, where the ornaments were arranged to impress visitors and the low tables were always immaculate, there was now something else. A Qi gathering formation. It was not ostentatious, but neither was it discreet.

Its lines traced across the floor forming runes and channels that offered a promise of power to anyone who could comprehend them, and in the middle of that circle, continuously filling with Qi, sat Lianhua. Her posture was straight and rigid, not from tension, but from habit after countless hours devoted to cultivation.

Her back aligned, her hands resting on her knees, and her chin barely tilted, while her breathing was slow and measured, adjusted to the rhythm at which she absorbed the Qi from the formation as she cultivated. She had been at it for hours, because the last gate she had yet to open, the Earth Gate located in her stomach, she felt as a closed presence, a point that stubbornly refused to yield but that she could feel giving way more and more.

She pushed herself because Zhāohuán Wen had allowed her to use this formation to accelerate her cultivation, and that concession, along with the resources needed to use it, was a privilege bordering on indecent. Within the Imperial Palace, resources were political even when they appeared personal. Every spirit stone, every concession, and every favor was measured in terms of personal and familial advantage, in how reputations rose or fell. Lianhua knew this, and she also knew there was an anomaly, Zhāohuán Wen.

And that only drove her to deserve even more the favor she had received from her. Moreover, as she absorbed the Qi and guided it toward the Earth Gate, she maintained, as she had been ordered, five specks of Qi held motionless within her sphere of influence. They shouldn't matter to her.

In her original education and formal training, that practice belonged to an earlier stage, a method that became irrelevant once the gates began to open and cultivation stopped depending on grabbing and dragging Qi as if the specks were stones suspended in the air. She herself had said as much aloud, with her usual patience, when the Zhāohuán insisted on doing it or on convincing her or little Xia that the practice was beneficial.

But Zhāohuán Wen called them mental hands, and when Zhāohuán Wen decided something was useful, even if the rest of the world didn't understand it yet, she might be right, especially when, in her own cultivation, the Zhāohuán had achieved something Lianhua had never heard of anyone else accomplishing.

It still struck her as strange, but she obeyed all the same, since it cost her very little and because there was always a logic behind the Zhāohuán's orders, even if that logic existed only in a mind that combined the brazenness of a child with the coolness of a scholar who refuses to accept incomplete answers.

Lianhua kept the five specks motionless while her final gate absorbed Qi as it had done so many times before in an already familiar routine, and it was precisely that routine that caused her mind, inevitably, to wander. Not because Lianhua was easily distracted, because she wasn't. But even a disciplined mind, when not permitted to rest, seeks cracks through which to escape, and so she couldn't help thinking about recent events, above all the Zhāohuán's encounter with Master Mu.

Lianhua remembered, with uncomfortable clarity, how the expressions and gestures of those present in the hall had changed when she appeared. How even someone of Qi Sheng's standing, the manager of the capital branch of the Talisman Crafters' Guild, tensed, corrected himself, and seemed to shrink, not daring to contradict her. Because Master Mu's presence was overwhelming when she didn't rein it in, a type of power that needed no announcement and that clearly demonstrated how high her cultivation level was.

Lianhua had felt that level of cultivation before, but in people like the generals and even the Emperor himself. That was what made it more unsettling, because she was on the same level as the people Lianhua had always considered the strongest in the Empire outside the Sect of the Celestial Sun. And she also remembered how Zhāohuán Wen, as always, ignored everything happening around her that should have put her on guard and treated the woman's appearance solely as an opportunity.

Lianhua recalled the exact moment when her mistress, with that calm of hers that she sometimes couldn't tell was bravery or pure recklessness, not only asked the woman to be her master but later even haggled over the price as though she were shopping at a market stall and not speaking with someone who could probably kill everyone in the room without breaking much of a sweat.

But she also recognized that the figure she'd asked was very steep, yet in a practical, measured sense, it defined the distance between the Zhāohuán's world and that woman's world. Because someone who could name that sum with a smile and treat it as natural lived in a reality different even by the standards of the Imperial Palace. And then came the moment that still made Lianhua's shoulders tense when she recalled it.

"If you lower your fee, I can do you the honor of allowing you to reside as a guest in the Imperial Palace for those six months," she remembered the Zhāohuán saying to Master Mu in that voice of hers that tried to sound adult when it suited her.

Because in that instant, Lianhua felt something akin to a hollow in her stomach upon hearing those words, fearing that Master Mu would accept and that she would have to point out that Zhāohuán Wen was offering something she could not offer, since no one would allow a foreigner with an unknown cultivation level to reside within the heart of the Empire for months. Not without conditions, not without surveillance, and certainly not without turning it into a matter of imperial security.

And if that happened, Zhāohuán Wen would become the center of a problem she had created, one that would cling to her like mud. At court there would be talk of spies, alliances, and factions. The court would fill with rumors, the glances would linger longer, and what until now had been a peculiar, disabled princess with a wheelchair and odd hobbies would become an even more inconvenient variable.

Lianhua remembered that, in that second, she had almost opened her mouth and broken the silence, but then the unexpected happened. Master Mu began to laugh, an open, amused laugh that underneath made it clear the Palace and the court didn't impress her in the slightest.

"But no matter how high your parents' status may be, you're not going to be able to convince the court to let a foreigner like me take up residence in the Imperial Palace for six consecutive months. Especially not with my cultivation level," she finally told the Zhāohuán, calling her child with a lightness indicating that the revelation she lived at the imperial court hadn't impressed her one bit. Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

Lianhua recalled, with some embarrassment, that she had nearly sighed with audible relief, but that inside, the tension had passed as though a gust of wind had swept away a storm cloud. But the Zhāohuán kept insisting and even brought out her name and rank with a certain tone of self-importance, as though she had been waiting for a propitious moment to say it and show it off.

And even so, Master Mu refused to accept, though the revelation that the student before her turned out to be a princess seemed to coax a smile from her, insisting she preferred not to cause a conflict with the country's authorities, however much the offer came from an imperial princess. And then came the other moment, the one that provoked in Lianhua a small, guilty amusement at its oddity when she recalled it, because Zhāohuán Wen, upon seeing that her tactic hadn't worked and her offer hadn't impressed, sulked.

She didn't do it dramatically, but Lianhua knew her far too well. The slight hardening of the jaw, the way her chin lifted a fraction more than necessary, and the whisper she let slip as sometimes happened when she talked to herself.

"What good is my position if the one time I use it to show off, it turns out it doesn't work?" she muttered, and Lianhua remembered having to bite the inside corner of her mouth to keep from smiling too widely, because for a second the Zhāohuán sounded exactly like what she sometimes seemed to be, a brilliant child trapped in responsibilities far too large.

But in the end, the negotiation concluded with Master Mu holding firm on her price, though the Zhāohuán managed to secure that the lessons would not be daily but once every seven days, on the rest day from her other classes, and that each session would extend for three periods. But Lianhua was not naive, and she knew the problem was that now Master Mu would enter their lives on a regular basis.

A foreigner, a cultivator whose power she could not gauge, and above all, a woman who smiled as though everything were a form of entertainment. And Lianhua, as she held the five specks motionless and fed the Earth Gate with every speck of Qi the formation drew toward her, returned to the same thought that had driven her to increase her cultivation frequency in recent days. Master Mu was strong. Very strong.

And that would be merely an interesting fact if her mistress kept her distance, if she were protected by space, by protocols, by the structure of the Palace. But the Zhāohuán was going to spend a great deal of time in that woman's company, and although Lianhua had seen no evidence that Master Mu wished to harm her, neither did she believe in peace built on the absence of evidence. Lianhua had seen too many smiles concealing knives, too many accidents occurring at just the right moment.

And if, for some reason she didn't yet understand, that woman decided that Zhāohuán Wen was a boring toy, an obstacle, a threat, or simply a whim that could be broken, then she had to be ready. Not to defeat her. That would be absurd, and Lianhua did not fantasize about impossibilities. It was about slowing her down, about holding on, about buying seconds, minutes, enough time for the Nei Wei to react, for reinforcements to arrive, for someone with sufficient power to stop her to come to the Zhāohuán's rescue.

And to slow down someone like that, Lianhua needed the only thing she could increase without asking anyone's permission, her cultivation. That idea was so clear, so sharp that for a moment it eclipsed every other thought she might have. And it was almost ironic that, precisely when that thought filled her mind, the Earth Gate responded and began to tremble. It was not a physical tremor.

It was an internal shudder, a localized vibration coursing through her stomach as though a stone had struck a bell, and Lianhua felt it as a signal that her last gate was about to give way. Her concentration became absolute and she focused on the gate, releasing the specks of Qi she'd been holding so that maintaining them wouldn't interfere with this crucial moment, even though she had already been through the same thing six times before.

And as with every gate she had opened, time turned strange as the gate shook again and again under the influx of Qi until, at last, it yielded. The Earth Gate opened, and Lianhua felt the immediate benefit of it, the sensation that her body now assimilated and digested more quickly, and even that she would now be capable of consuming substances that would previously have killed her. Then the next thing happened, and Lianhua felt three of her gates slam shut.

It was a brutal sensation in its suddenness, leaving a void where she had previously felt their presence, and Lianhua understood what it meant even before thinking it through. She did not have the roots in those elements. For a second, Lianhua sat motionless, processing the information with that calm of hers that was not the absence of emotion but control over it, and then she exhaled. It was not a loud sigh. It was a contained release and, perhaps, the barest gesture of disappointment. Four elemental roots.

It was not the worst outcome. She had heard rumors and stories of cultivators with six, or even all seven, who were practically condemned to abandon the path of cultivation simply because of the time and resources needed to complete the Condensation of the Elemental Cores stage with that many elemental roots. But it was not optimal either. The more roots one had, the more time was needed to condense all the cores and the more effort required to reach the next stage.

Lianhua let the pang of dissatisfaction exist for an instant, just long enough to acknowledge it, and then set it aside. There was nothing to be done. There was no ritual that could change one's fate and no trick to cheat the outcome. The Heavens gave and took without asking for opinions.

Next, Lianhua did the only thing she could and began executing the method the Zhāohuán had shown her, that method drawn from the papers she had brought back from the Celestial Fragment and which, somehow, she had translated and organized until they became usable. Lianhua directed her perception inward, not as one looks with the eyes, but as one places attention on a point, and she was surprised by what happened.

Her dantian, which was what she was supposed to be able to see with this method, appeared before her as a white space. It had no visible walls, no ceiling, and no floor. It was an expanse without clear boundaries, an empty hall that could be infinite or simply too vast for her current perception. And in what she imagined was its center, where she instinctively knew the core of her potential lay, four manifestations floated. They were not solid objects, but neither were they entirely abstract.

They were presences that, when touched with her new sense, each embodied a concept she understood instinctively. A stable density for Earth, a cutting lightness for Air, a humid vitality for Nature, and a cold, silent shadow for Yin. For a moment, almost without meaning to, Lianhua's mind searched for Fire, but did not find it. The pang of dissatisfaction returned, more concrete this time, and not out of pride but out of pragmatism.

Fire was, according to everything she had heard and seen, the element that tended toward combat, toward direct destruction and swift response. Not having it meant that if she needed to fight, her path would be different, more indirect and more complicated. But that complaint, once again, served no purpose, and Lianhua set it aside to focus on what she could control.

Finding real information on how to make the most of those roots, which techniques were compatible, which combat styles suited a body that might not be able to compete in explosiveness but perhaps could in endurance. When she made that decision, the tension in Lianhua's chest eased and at last, with greater calm, she noticed something, now that she was looking at her dantian, her awareness of what was happening around her body had diminished.

That realization suddenly made her understand the reasons why all the great figures of the Empire were so secretive about how they cultivated and, above all, where they cultivated. Cultivating at this stage, according to the Zhāohuán's notes, required keeping watch over the dantian and the spiritual roots, and in this state it was almost too easy to catch someone off guard and spring an ambush. With that thought in mind, Lianhua stopped looking at her dantian.

Her inner perception dissolved and her senses returned to the outside world as she opened her eyes. For a moment she sat without moving. Not from exhaustion, but because she recognized the symbolic weight of the moment, for she had not only managed to enter the realm of elemental cultivators, but had also achieved her goal of doing so before Master Mu's first formal visit.

Though that guaranteed nothing, and Lianhua knew it did not make her someone capable of facing that woman, only someone better suited to delay her long enough for the Zhāohuán to survive. She rose with a controlled movement and deactivated the formation, since her next step was to inform Zhāohuán Wen. Not because her mistress needed it to sleep better, but because Zhāohuán Wen had invested resources in her and deserved to know as soon as possible.

She took one step, slightly unsteady after her breakthrough, then another more firmly, and walked out of the formation. And as she headed toward the door, a small smile, barely a minimal and almost imperceptible curve, appeared on her lips. Not because Lianhua found her own progress amusing. But because she was imagining little Wen's reaction upon hearing the news.