Chương 137: Chapter 136: Wide Resonance Trial

"This Wide Resonance Trial is for last-stage Golden Core cultivators. For those who have not attended this event in other divisions, the rules are as follows. Only music techniques are permitted. Instruments are allowed, provided they are purely musical with no additional capabilities added. Participants will be judged solely on their music cultivation. Anyone found using any additional aid will be disqualified and face further penalties from Yunhe Peak." The elder called the first contestant to the stage.

The first participant was a woman. She carried a long zither in her arms as she walked to the centre of the stage and set it on the stone table that rose from the ground to meet her. She settled her hands above the strings and did not pluck them yet. She sat with her palms hovering, her eyes closed, just breathing. When she began, the first note was so quiet Yang almost missed it. A low, drawn-out tone. Yang had no particular knowledge of or background in music.

His familiarity with it mostly came from whatever was playing on the television, internet, and the occasional song played on someone else's device. He had no framework for describing what he was hearing in any technical sense. But he felt it within his core, something that seemed to give his whole body a life it had not quite had a moment before. He noticed the people around him reacting to it too. And then he noticed something else. The stage was changing.

Hairline cracks spread outward from the performer in all directions, thin as threads, radiating slowly across the stage in every direction. They reached the edges and continued outward into the seating area of the arena. From each crack, small dark points appeared in the stone. Green shoots. They rose from the stone, swaying without wind, climbing in soft spirals, unfurling leaves as they grew. The bright green of new spring growth.

Yang watched, fascinated, as one vine wrapped itself around the armrest of his seat. Others wound their way around the seats of nearby disciples, curling into the hair of some, forming rings of leaves around arms and necks. Yang unwound the vine whenever it approached him until it gave up and contented itself with just the seat instead. The stage was now full of vines. But the performance was not over. Buds appeared on the vines, swelling and then opening into large cream-coloured flowers.

The blooms spread from the stage outward until they reached the audience. Yang could not help but take a few sniffs as the flowers bloomed nearest him. They smelled pleasantly. Then the music deepened, and he could feel the music coming from multiple directions now, the flowers themselves were acting as speakers. His eyes widened as he understood. It was not only a visual change.

The disciple had extended herself into the flowers, making them tiny instruments of her own technique, reaching her music further than her instrument alone could carry. That was why the effect had become more intense. She was playing from every flower in the arena at once. If this had been anything other than a competition, if she had chosen to harm rather than to entertain, Yang thought it would have been catastrophic.

He looked around and saw disciples practically surrounded by the flowering vine, most of them looking entirely at peace with this, but the elder section was free of any vines. Yang didn't think it was the performing disciple that left them out. He could see that the cracks in the stone were simply unable to extend to the elder's seating area. By the time her piece ended, the entire platform was a garden. The disciple lowered her hands and bowed once to the judges. Once to the audience.

Then she took her zither and walked off the stage, leaving the garden behind her. The elder returned to the stage.

"A wonderful demonstration of bringing the mountain to life through music. It does look considerably better than before." He continued.

"However, we cannot leave it as it is. We have more participants ahead of us." He waved a hand and the plants receded back into the stone, the cracks closing, until there was no visible trace of what had been there a moment before. He called the next participant. The second performer was a young man carrying a flute of pale jade. He walked to the centre of the platform, raised the flute to his lips, and began. The first note was high and clear. White light appeared above him.

It simply formed in the air, motes of it drifting slowly toward each other, gathering shape. Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon. The first form Yang made out was a deer. It was made entirely of light, pale with soft edges, and it moved. It lifted its head, took a step, and paused, as it looked out at the audience with eyes that were two small bright points within the larger glow. The flute climbed higher. Another shape gathered beside the first.

A second deer, smaller, pressing itself against the first one's flank. Birds emerged next, a flock of small, quick ones that swirled around the deer in a spiral, before climbing higher and higher until they reached the level of the sky and burst outward in a circle, scattering across the entire venue. One passed close enough to Yang that he could see individual wing-feathers, each made of fine threads of light. A fox followed. Then a hare.

Then a great bird with a long sweeping tail that almost grazed the stage's edge before lifting into the air. A large school of fish appeared next and swam through the audience. More and more animals of light came into being and made the whole arena their playground. The piece shifted. The notes became playful. The animals responded to it. The deer bounded in long, graceful leaps. The fox chased the hare in circles.

The birds dove toward the audience, swooping close, interacting with the seated disciples with what could only be described as enjoyment. One dove directly at Yang, and he raised his hand on instinct. It landed on his finger. There was no weight to it, but he could feel the light pressure of its feet holding on. The bird shone with a faint rainbow sheen as the light shifted with its movement. He looked around and saw everyone smiling. The flute climbed to its highest note, held it, and then released.

All the light-animals burst apart at once. The space above the platform filled instantly with drifting motes, like the seeds of a dandelion blown apart in a single breath, spiralling outward, fading as they spread until the last of them dissolved into the air and was gone. The performer lowered his flute and grinned at the audience. Yang found he was smiling too. He could see now why the elder had spoken of this path with such pride.

The elder returned briefly, and since there was nothing to clean from the stage, called the next participant without delay. The third performer carried a long pipe-flute. It looked entirely out of place beside the refined instruments of the previous performers, worn and plain where theirs had been beautiful. The disciple raised it to his lips without ceremony and began. The melody was simple. So ordinary that Yang almost dismissed it.

A few notes, repeating and gentle, the kind of tune someone might hum absently while working. Nothing special. Then Yang saw him. Grandpa Chen was sitting beside him. Yang's breath stopped. The old man was not a figure of light. He was not a shape in the mist. He was there, present beside Yang, his thin shoulders, his weathered hands, the small smile he wore when he was about to tell a story.

He was looking ahead at the platform, not at Yang, and Yang understood within some part of himself that this was not real, that Grandpa was not actually there, that the music was reaching into him and finding what was already present and giving it back to him. But understanding that did not make any difference. He wanted the music to go on forever so he could keep sitting beside him. He could happily spend the rest of his life sitting here next to Grandpa. He wanted to reach over and take his hands.

Press them against his own face. Feel that weight of those hands on his head the way it had felt when he was small. He wants to be held. He wants Grandpa to take him in his arms so he can tell him all his grievances, all his pain. Grandpa. I have been trying to be brave. Grandpa was there. And Yang could not move. The scene shifted. He was in the little mud hut. The fire was burning. Grandpa was sitting by it, squinting over a torn basket he was mending, the needle small between his fingers.

Yang, very small, was arranging stones on the threadbare blanket. The hut smelled of smoke and the herbs Grandpa kept in a small bundle by the door. Yang could feel the texture of the blanket beneath him. The warmth of the fire on his face. He wanted to feel Grandpa's heartbeat against his ear. The vision shifted again. Yunxi Village. The afternoon sun slanting through the trees.

Uncle Li was on the porch, carving something, his hands steady and slow, and he looked up as Yang approached and his face broke into the grin Yang had seen a hundred times and had not seen in eighteen years. Eldest Brother was somewhere behind him, half-visible, laughing at something Second Brother had said. Second Brother was protesting good-naturedly, his hands raised in mock surrender. Li San was running toward Yang across the village square. Small, the way he had been when they first met.

He grabbed Yang's hand and pulled him toward something Yang could not see, and Yang found himself laughing in the way he had not laughed in a long time. The visions came faster. Eating breakfast with Grandpa in the early morning. Li San holding up a fish he had caught, beaming. Uncle Li placing a hand on Yang's shoulder after allowing Li San to leave with him. Eldest Brother teaching him how to hold a knife properly, voice patient. Second Brother sneaking him candy when no one was looking. Small moments.

Not the ones that had changed his life or ended things. The ordinary ones. The ones that had built him into what he was today. The music drifted toward its end. The last vision Yang saw was Grandpa Chen, very old, very thin, sitting by a dying fire. The old man looked up toward where Yang sat watching, and for a single impossible moment his eyes seemed to meet Yang's directly. He smiled. Don't leave me again. Then he was gone. The mist was ordinary mist.

The platform was empty except for the performer, who lowered his flute and bowed without looking at anyone. Yang sat very still. Around him the audience was silent. They were people who had each seen something different and had each been undone by it. A woman two rows ahead was crying into her sleeve. A disciple across the aisle was staring at his own hands, his face open and soft, his mouth slightly parted as though he had been about to say something and the words had not come. Yang did not wipe his face.

He did not think to. He sat with the unexpected gift he had been given and tried to hold every detail of it in his mind, afraid that if he breathed too hard it would dissolve before he had committed it to his memory. Grandpa, I love you. I miss you. I am alone.