Chương 3: Lìchūn: Novice 3

Dinner is a quiet, quick affair; everyone seemingly worn from the day and eager to turn in, though Liu Yinhua wonders if, for Tang Mingxia and Wu Cailan, some of that eagerness is only the desire to finally have silence. The rice porridge is plain but hot, and the greens are wilted through by the time Liu Yinhua takes the pot from the hearth. The house settles around them as they eat, and outside, the sect grows quieter.

When the bowls are empty, they find where to wash them, where the damp cloth has been folded beside the water jar, and decide where to stack everything once dry. Tang Mingxia rinses her bowl twice and sets it neatly at the edge of the counter. Wu Cailan puts hers down beside it, then, after a moment, turns it to match the angle of the first. By the time the hearth has been banked and the remaining rice tied away, the house has gone quieter than it had been when Liu Yinhua first entered it.

Tang Mingxia excuses herself with a polite goodnight. Wu Cailan only mutters something that may be the same and vanishes into her room with the soft scrape of her door in its track. Liu Yinhua takes the lamp and retreats to her own room. The door closes thinly behind her. The sound is not much of a barrier, but it is a barrier all the same, and for a moment she stands with her fingers still resting against the frame, listening to the muted shift of the other girls settling beyond the walls.

Tang Mingxia moves lightly across the hall. Wu Cailan's room echoes with the heavier sound of something being pushed against the wall. Her bag sits beside the raised sleeping platform where she left it. She has already set out the few things she owns on the low shelf. The bronze mirror rests on its square of old silk, the metal dark with age and the rim worn smooth where her fingers have touched it too often. Beside it lies the scroll.

The cultivator who brought her from Suzhou had given it to her before leaving her at the lower road, pressed into her hands along with the wooden disciple token and a folded set of robes still creased from storage. He had said little on the journey and little more at its end, only that she was late, that formal intake would be handled in the morning, and that she should not lose what she had been given.

His face had remained as cold and unreadable then as it had been in the holding cell, when he looked through the barred door and called her name as if he had found a marked parcel rather than a girl. Liu Yinhua sits on the mat and draws the scroll into her lap. The cord is simple, but the paper beneath her hand is smooth and heavy. A strip of red seal paper holds the outer fold closed, stamped with the sect's vermilion glass mark. She breaks it carefully and unrolls the first length.

The writing within is neat and formal, each character placed with the same measured restraint as the tiled paths outside. The First Ember Method A foundational breathing and dantian-sensing art for new disciples of the Vermilion Glass Sect, and the formative text of the Thousand-Facet Art of this sect. Those who have not yet awakened should begin at the first instruction. Those whose dantian has stirred without guidance should begin at the first instruction regardless.

The lamp beside her bends in a faint draft, its flame drawing long and then settling again. Her mirror catches the movement in dull bronze, making a second, warped light at the edge of her sight before she returns her focus to the scroll. Sit with the spine upright and the body unforced. Let the knees rest as they may. Let the shoulders fall. Let the jaw soften, and place the tongue lightly behind the teeth. The lower dantian rests three finger-widths below the navel and inward from the flesh.

Do not claw for it with the mind. Breath is the road by which the novice first approaches the gate. Liu Yinhua adjusts herself on the mat, drawing her legs beneath her as the small diagram instructs. Her knees ache from the day's walking. Her back knows how to remain straight, though this straightness is different from the one Madame Xue had required. There is no one here to correct the line of her shoulder or the angle of her chin. She rests her hands on her lower abdomen and keeps reading.

Breathe in through the nose. Let the breath descend. The chest is not a locked room. If warmth comes, observe it. If cold comes, observe it. If nothing comes, observe that also. A novice who invents sensation will build a false road and wonder later why it leads nowhere.

The last time warmth had come, there had been no observing it. There had been heat beneath her skin, terror in her throat, pain and shame, and the room narrowing around her until the painted screens seemed too close and the lamps too bright. Then the flame had risen. Or she had. Even now, she cannot separate the two with any certainty. Memory does not return whole. It comes in pieces and smoke. Silk is dragging against the floor, and the silks of the bed catch alight so quickly.

Madame Xue's mouth red from shouting, a screen catching at the corner, the painted cranes curling black as the fire took them. Liu Yinhua breathes in slowly. The scroll lies open across her knees when she refocuses on it. When the breath has settled, guide attention downward. Do not force qi. Do not pull from the air. Do not draw upon anger, fright, hunger, lust, grief, or pain. Such things are fuel, but the novice who burns fuel before shaping the coals will mistake destruction for progress.

It seems a rather unreasonable demand. Liu Yinhua shuts her eyes, not because the scroll tells her to, but because she does not want to look at the flame. The room darkens behind her lids. At first, there is only the house and all its small, unfamiliar sounds: wood cooling in the wall, Tang Mingxia shifting somewhere across the hall, Wu Cailan coughing once and then going quiet, the faintest whisper of wind along the outer paper screen.

Her own breath comes too shallowly, caught high beneath the ribs, so she waits until it lowers. The air enters cold through her nose and warms in her throat. She lets it grow, following it down past her breastbone and the hollow beneath it. Her hands rest over her belly. Beneath them, there is cloth, skin, muscle, the ordinary workings of a body that has carried her through the end of one life and into the first night of another. For a while, nothing happens. That should be disappointing.

Instead, Liu Yinhua finds herself almost relieved. Then, so faintly she might have imagined it, something low inside her stirs. It is not a flame, for it is too small and too deep, a warmth without light, a pressure like a name spoken from the other side of a wall. Her breath catches, and the sensation folds away at once. Her eyes open, to find her room is still as it was. Liu Yinhua remains very still, one hand pressed lightly beneath her navel. Outside, the final curfew bell begins to sound across the mountain.

Its voice rolls through the novice district, low and bronze and cold enough to make the lamp tremble. Liu Yinhua breathes in again and shuts her eyes once more. — - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - — Liu Yinhua wakes to the first bell. For a moment, she does not know where she is. The ceiling above her is pale wood instead of painted beams, and the room is too quiet, too cold, too clean of incense and perfume and the restless breathing of other girls sleeping nearby.

Her body knows it has slept badly before her mind gathers the reason for it. Her neck is stiff, one shoulder sore from the unfamiliar mat, and the thin blanket the sect provided has slipped down to her waist sometime in the night. The bell sounds again, rolling low through the novice district. She sits up. Grey morning presses against the paper window, thin enough that the pine outside is only a dark suggestion beyond it. The lamp has burned out.

The scroll lies where she left it, carefully rolled beside the mirror, and for a few breaths, Liu Yinhua only looks at them both in the cold light. Her hand lowers to her abdomen before she quite decides to move it there. The schedule scroll is shorter than the cultivation one, written in the same formal hand and far less concerned with whether the novice mistakes sensation for progress. Liu Yinhua unrolls it across her lap and reads by the growing light.

The first few lines outline the bell schedules, notable locations and other such necessities of learning here. It is nothing new so far, at least. There are other lines beneath, all sharp and simple. The process for token distribution, district boundaries, and a firm reminder that the residence areas are strictly gender-restricted. She reads it twice to be certain she has not mistaken anything. Formal intake would be handled in the morning, her housemates had said over dinner.

So, this morning, and the schedule confirms it, detailing the hall in which she was expected to be by the third bell. Liu Yinhua folds the schedule again and sets it beside the cultivation scroll. Her room is cold enough to make her fingers clumsy as she dresses, though the sect robe is warmer than it looks and sits well once she has smoothed the underlayers into place. It is plain compared to what she has worn before, but the cloth is good, the seams neat, the vermilion trim clean against the silver-grey.

She pins her hair with care, not elaborately, but tightly enough that it will not loosen halfway through the morning. The mirror shows her a dim version of herself. Liu Yinhua touches the rim, then leaves it on the shelf. The house is already awake when she steps into the common room, though neither of the other girls is there in full. Tang Mingxia's door is closed, but from within comes the faintest murmur of noise. Cultivating, perhaps, or meditating over the indignity of communal living.

Wu Cailan's room is open, her mat already rolled, and her bag shoved neatly enough against the wall that Liu Yinhua suspects the disorder yesterday had been more exhaustion than habit. The girl herself is gone. She eats quickly, standing near the counter with a small bowl of leftover porridge warmed just enough to loosen. It is thicker after the night and sits heavily in her stomach, but hunger is a worse thing than discomfort.

She washes the bowl when she is done, sets it with the others, and checks the room once before leaving. The lane outside is brightening by degrees. Mist clings low along the stone paths, caught around the bases of lantern posts and beneath the eaves of the novice houses. Other disciples are already moving toward the lower road, some alone, some gathered in little knots that seem to have formed with unnatural speed. Liu Yinhua sees the same early shape of hierarchy even here.

The ones with embroidered cuffs walk together. The ones with better swords are given more room. Those without such things move differently. Some hurry. Some keep their heads high and their sleeves neatly folded, while Liu Yinhua knows sometimes one must fake it before they gain it. Others watch the ground, trying to avoid any wandering eyes.

Liu Yinhua takes the path Tang Mingxia had pointed out the evening before, down past the stone basin at the turning, along the narrow terrace where frost or dew has gathered in the cracks, and then up again toward a building whose broad roof is visible above the smaller residences. The Lower Instruction Hall is not as beautiful as the sect's higher buildings. It is large, practical, and old enough that the dark wood has gone smooth under years of weather and hands.

Pale banners hang on either side of the entrance, each marked with the Vermilion Glass seal. A steward stands at the doorway, checking tokens. Liu Yinhua presents hers with both hands and receives only a brief glance in return before being waved inside. The hall is already half full, despite the early hour.

Rows of low benches and floor cushions stretch toward a raised platform at the far end, where a lectern stands beneath a hanging disc of red glass that seems to shift and stray beyond its edges when she looks too closely. Morning light falls through high windows in pale columns, catching dust motes in the air. The air smells of cold wood, oil, wet wool, nervous sweat, and the faint metallic tang of… something that she cannot place.

For the first time since arriving, Liu Yinhua sees the novice cohort gathered in almost its entirety. There are more of them than she expected, truly. Cultivators and immortals had always seemed so rare, so far away and high up that surely there could not be many of them. But here in the hall, she wonders if perhaps that was wrong. Enough that individual faces blur at first into colour and movement: grey robes, a variety of hair colours, pale hands, bright hair ornaments tucked into ornate styles.

Very few wear the sect given robes, which she is beginning to suspect is not a uniform but a more charitable item. She sees a tall girl with a silver clasp shaped like a crane half-hidden at her collar, whispering to two others who laugh too softly. A boy with a fine sword rests one hand on its hilt as if he wants everyone else to see it. Near the left wall, a cluster of rougher-looking disciples in plain robes speak in low voices, their words so low that Liu Yinhua catches only part of what they say.

One girl with cropped hair and a scar across her chin sits alone near the front, spine straight, eyes forward, ignoring everyone. Tang Mingxia is easy to find. She sits on the right side with two girls Liu Yinhua has not met, both well-dressed in fine robes. Tang Mingxia's green sash has been retied with careful precision, and her robes this morning are a soft, pale pink, and her hairpin gleams dark jade in the morning light.

She sees Liu Yinhua and inclines her head, polite enough, but there is no space beside her that has not already been taken up. Wu Cailan is near the back, seated on a bench with one boot tucked beneath her, speaking to a broad boy with dark red cheeks and a nervous expression. She lifts a hand when she sees Liu Yinhua, not quite a wave, and then returns to whatever the boy is saying. She can see from here the way the cut of the girl's robes is distracting him. There are open places scattered through the hall.

Too many of them are at the edges, where one may be ignored or cornered with equal ease. A few are near the front, which would be too visible in a way she does not yet know how to use. The middle seats are mostly taken, though not all. Liu Yinhua lets her eyes pass over the spaces before they linger on the people. That is when she notices the boy sitting near the centre of the hall.

There is too much room around him for that to be accidental, and yet he sits as if he has chosen the place rather than been abandoned to it. He is perhaps a year older than Liu Yinhua, with warm brown skin, gold hair bound back with a strip of red cloth patterned with golden flowers, and features too strongly cut to be called handsome in the soft way Suzhou men preferred, though he is handsome all the same.

His robes are soft orange-brown, the fabric dark and close-fitted, with a high collar and subtle stitching along the cuffs. No ornament hangs openly from him, but the lack feels deliberate rather than poor. There is a space on the bench beside him, wide enough for one person and left clear by every disciple who has passed it. Liu Yinhua sees two girls approach, slow when they notice him, then move on as if the next row had always been their destination.

A boy starts toward the same bench, catches sight of the red cloth in the boy's hair, and turns away with such speed that Liu Yinhua almost expects him to trip. The seated boy watches this happen with a mild expression. There is awareness in the angle of his shoulders, in the slight lowering of his gaze when others avoid him, but he does not bristle and does not shrink.

He has the air of a person who has been given a role in a play he dislikes and has decided, for the present, not to embarrass the rest of the cast by refusing it. Liu Yinhua does not know what that means. She knows that the space beside him is public, visible from several directions, too near the centre for anyone to trouble her quietly, and far enough from the front that she will not seem overeager.

It is also beside someone others are avoiding, which may mean danger, bad reputation, illness, arrogance, politics, or some rule she has not yet learned. She crosses the hall.