Hao

> begin

Two fingers close on your wrist at the well, and your pulse jumps under them. A cold thread of something slides up your arm and tugs, like a fish testing a line. The man holding you is all grin and patched silk. A peddler's frame is strapped to his back: needles, charms, a cracked jade comb. **"Ah — there it is. Don't pull away, friend. I'm not robbing you. Yet."** He lets go and pats your sleeve smooth. **"Tao. Everyone knows Tao. You felt that? Of course you did. A spark, little one, right there in the meat. Rare down here. Rarer than honest rice-weights."** Behind you a rooster shrieks. Up through the mist the jade peaks hang like painted lanterns. He pulls a string-bound book from his robe and thumbs it open without meaning to show you. You see it anyway: three names. Two struck through in red. The last one, at the bottom, is written in a harder hand. *Tao.* He snaps it shut. The grin stays on, but his thumb is shaking. **"I owe a man up the mountain one name by market day. Courier comes at dawn. Yours would do nicely."** He leans close, breath sweet with clove. **"Or you help me find him another, and I'll tell you everything about this valley. Starting with Jin Hao."**

> Ignore him and go to the center of the village to cultivate

You turn your back on Tao mid-word and walk. Past the loom-clack, past the rice-paper doors, to the village square. There's a dry stone shrine there and a cracked millstone. You sit cross-legged on the millstone and close your eyes. Breathe. The cold thread Tao tugged is still in your wrist. You follow it in, up the arm, into the chest. This time it doesn't slip away. It pools below your navel, warm as a coal in ash. You push it back out along the same road, and it goes. Your palm, resting on the stone, grows hot. The moss under it curls brown. Footsteps slap behind you. Tao is puffing, his frame of needles rattling. **"You walk away from Tao? From Tao?"** He stops dead and stares at the scorched moss. **"Heavens. You did that without a teacher."** He crouches, too close, the book clutched to his chest. His thumb still shakes on its string. **"Listen. Courier's a quiet one. Black sleeves, wax token on his belt. He doesn't care whose name. He cares that it's fresh."** He swallows. **"Mine's been at the bottom for two moons, friend. Two."** At the edge of the square, an old man in a faded robe sets down his water buckets. He watches the burnt moss and says nothing.

> Continue Cultivating until the world started to crumbling on its own

You keep breathing. The coal below your navel swells, then splits into a hundred threads, and you drive every one out along the roads you've opened. The heat doesn't stop at your palm now. It goes down into the stone. Crack! The millstone's old split widens under you, a black seam racing outward. Grit hisses from the shrine's roof. A loose tile slides, drops, shatters on the flagstones. The moss in a full circle around you blackens and smokes. Your hands are steady. Your breath is slow. You open your eyes. Tao has scrambled back on his heels, needles clattering everywhere. **"The stone. You broke the stone. Sitting down!"** He laughs, too high. His eyes slide to the book lying in the dust between you. **"Friend, a spark like that, the mountain would pay for, they'd pay—"** He snatches the book up and fumbles a stub of charcoal from his sleeve. The old man is already crossing the square. He walks without hurry, buckets left behind, and plants one straw sandal on the open page before the charcoal touches it. **"Write that name, peddler, and the courier will want to know why it smokes."** Tao freezes, charcoal trembling. The old man looks down at you, at the seam in the millstone, at your hands. **"You pulled until the stone gave first. Not you. That's rare in a nobody."** He crouches, knees cracking, and presses two dry fingers to the hollow under your ribs. **"Here. You've a door here you haven't found. Want to know where it opens, or would you rather sit and wreck my village?"**

> choice-1

You ask him straight: where does it open? The old man's fingers stay pressed under your ribs. He nods once, as if you'd paid him. **"Not here. Behind."** He walks two fingers around your side to a knot of muscle beside your spine. **"Front door's a lie. You've been knocking on the wall. Breathe in, then push back, not out."** You do. Something behind your ribs gives like a latch. Heat pours sideways into a road you never felt, and your whole back goes warm as a sunned stone. The pressure in your belly eases. Room. There's room now. Tao's charcoal snaps in his fingers. **"You showed them. For free. Old fool, the courier counts heads like that—"** **"Then he'll count wrong."** The old man lifts his sandal, picks up the string-bound book, and shakes the dust from it. Inside the back cover, pressed into old wax, a black seal: a veiled face. He holds it out to you, not to Tao. **"Read whose list you're on before you run from it."**

> Greet the old man and say that I will return the favor

You bow to the old man, low and plain, the way your mother bowed to the rice-tax clerk. You tell him you will return the favor, whatever it costs you. He doesn't bow back. He presses the string-bound book into your hands instead and closes your fingers over it. **"Favors are debts. Debts get written down."** He taps the black wax seal. **"Pay me by not ending up in here."** Tao lunges a half-step, then stops himself and wipes his palms on his apron. **"That's mine, friend. My book. My neck."** His grin wobbles. **"You hand it back, I keep my mouth shut about the moss, the millstone, all of it. Fair?"** **"He'll keep nothing shut. He's frightened."** The old man turns toward the dry stone shrine and lays one hand flat on its cold lintel, like greeting someone. **"I hid a child in here once. From a black sleeve."** Tao goes white. The book's back cover is warm in your grip. Under the veiled face, scratched faint into the wax, something new has surfaced since the old man shook it: a single fresh mark, still soft.

> ✦ PerceptionTell her that you have no intetion of stopping her. "After all you are just a lovely woman trying to survive. You may go dear."

You tell her you have no intention of stopping her. "After all you are just a lovely woman trying to survive. You may go dear." Her jaw sets at "dear." But your senses catch the real thing beneath it. Her breath loosens at "go." Relief, not insult. She expected a blade, and she already knows where she would run. You name it. Her knees give the answer before her mouth does. **"You hear too much."** She plants a palm on the shale and drags herself upright. **"Then hear this. My slip reached the peaks. The Jin clan buys Azure Cloud's whispers by the jar. Jin Hao knows the name Ruo already. He is waiting for it."** She limps west, away from the black pine. She leaves a grey smear on every stone. At the ledge she looks back once and bows, shallow and exact. **"Go and be remembered, Ruo. He means to bury you."**

> ✦ PerceptionYeah see you around dear, we will meet again one day. I am sure.

You tilt your head back past the ledge where Lian vanished, past the torn mist, to the faint grey line of the Sky Pillar, and you say it to him, not to her. "Yeah see you around dear, we will meet again one day. I am sure." Your voice is small against the crags. It should die in the rupture-wind. It doesn't. Your senses are already reaching, and they catch the answer before it comes. High above, the clouds around the Pillar do not move, but the pressure in them does. A held breath. A hand that pauses mid-gesture. He heard you, and for one heartbeat he did not like the word *dear*. Inside your meridian, the wax hand twitches. You feel it the way you feel a lie in someone's throat: the softened palm clenching, wax squeezing between its fingers. A name pushes out of it, warm and wrong, not yours. *Jin.* Then a second stroke: *Jin Hao.* Then a thread of heat runs east through your chest, straight as a plumb line, past the third ruptured vein toward the burned valley. The hand has remembered something. It is pointing. In your pack, Tao's book stirs against your spine. You pull it free. The cold pages fall open by themselves, and on a blank leaf a fresh line crawls into being in faded brown: *Jin Hao. Owed to the Pillar.* Not struck. Not red. Owed. The crag-wind shifts. East, beyond the black pine, a sword-light lifts out of the smoke of the burned valley, jade-green and arrogant, swinging in a slow circle like a hunter testing the air. It stops. It turns your way. A voice rides it down the gorge, young, sharp, pitched so the whole valley hears. **"Whoever was shouting at the sky, come down to the dig and kneel. I know the name you're hiding."** A pause. Then, thick with a sneer: **"Ruo, was it? Come and let me write it on your stone."**

> ✦ PerceptionWell who is this unknown person?

"Well who is this unknown person?" You say it to the gorge, and you let your senses ride the hand's heat thread east, past the black pine, into the smoke. The sword-light is the loudest thing out there, so you look past it. You find the young man standing on it: jade-green robe, a clan sigil stitched in gold at the throat, a stance any sect would admire. His Qi blazes. Too evenly. It doesn't rise from his dantian. It seeps *in*, a thin grey wash drawn up through his soles from the burned valley floor, the leftover breath of the dead, painted over a core that has not moved in a long time. A lamp lit from someone else's oil. The wax hand in your meridian clenches again. *Jin Hao.* Then his head snaps around. He felt you looking. Your gaze touched his stolen Qi like a finger on a bruise, and now the whole valley knows someone is out here reading him. The sword-light dips. Below it, figures scramble out of the dig trenches: diggers in Jin grey, and behind them a huddle in ragged undyed cloth. Clearwater faces. A few who lived. They stare up the gorge toward your voice. **"You looked at me."** Jin Hao's voice cracks down the rock, sharper now, almost shrill. He steps off his sword onto the rim of the dig and plants a boot on a grave-stone still white with fresh chisel dust. **"Unranked trash doesn't look at a Jin. Do you know who I am? Jin Hao, of the Jin clan of the Eastern Ridge, and I've already carved half this valley's dead."** He smiles. You catch it under the smile: his left heel grinding into the ash, drinking harder, his Qi swelling to look bigger for the crowd. **"Ruo."** He says it slow, to the Clearwater survivors, tasting it. **"That's the name, isn't it? Come down, Ruo, or I start chiseling it onto *their* stones."** He snatches an old woman from the huddle by her collar and drags her to the open grave.

> ✦ Qi Guiding"Never heard of you, and not interested. Goodbye." I make a spear out of my Qi gathering all of it to make 100 KM long spear towards this so called Jin Hao

"Never heard of you, and not interested. Goodbye." You pour everything through your meridians and out of the palm. The Qi stretches, hardens, keeps going: a spear of light a hundred kilometres long, its tail past the horizon, its point dropping onto the dig. Boom! It drives through the ash beside Jin Hao's heel and nails the valley floor shut. The grey wash under his boots snaps off. His borrowed glow gutters. What's left is a thin, stalled core, plain for every eye in the trench. He lets go of the old woman's collar. She scrambles back from the grave. **"No — that's — I'm still—"** He claws at the air for Qi that won't come. The diggers in Jin grey step away from him. The survivors stare at his empty light. Far to the east, the spear's long tail shines over three provinces. On the Sky Pillar, a cloud turns toward it.

> ✦ Qi Guiding"Okay I'll be back to my cultivation and I hope these stupid brats stop showing up" Gathering Qi From All Around the world to improve my own world on my meridian core

You sink back onto the crag's foot, cross your legs, and pull. Qi comes from everywhere at once. The ruptured veins in the rock spit it, the void-cold seeps it, the ash drifts it up the slope. All of it threads into your meridians and spirals down to your core. The jade channels drink and widen. Something in your chest grows denser, heavier, like a stone settling into a socket cut just for it. Below, the ash of the valley stirs. A grey current lifts off the dig and runs uphill toward you instead of toward him. **"That's mine! That valley's Qi is mine!"** Jin Hao stumbles after it, grabbing at nothing. The old woman spits at his feet. **"It was Clearwater's, boy. Every grain of it."** One Jin digger drops his shovel. **"He's got nothing left. We're done."** Your core hums, full and steady. Jin Hao turns, white-faced, and starts climbing toward you with a chisel in his fist.