Chapter 215 (Patreon)

Shen Bai’s hand is so large that, when I shake it, mine disappears inside it up to the wrist.

To offer it to me he has had to lean down, since from the chair my hand reaches more or less the height of his belt, right beside the hilt of his saber, but he does it without seeming to mind, just as he has every time he has had to talk to me over these three months.

“Thank you very much for having guarded the house all this time”, I tell him. “Thanks to you and your men, these three months have been much calmer than they could have been.”

Shen Bai lets go of my hand as he straightens up, and from up there he looks at me with one eyebrow slightly higher than the other.

“And you don’t want to reconsider keeping us on?” he asks me. “For our part, we can stay as long as you like.”

Behind him, the six men he has brought with him wait by the courtyard gate, with their weapons at their belts, and judging by the way they glance at one another as they hear him, I don’t think the question is his idea alone.

I shrug as much as the backrest allows me.

“Unfortunately, my funds aren’t infinite”, I reply. “And I only needed you while I arranged other solutions.”

Which is true, but it isn’t the whole truth.

Because his men, with their pay and their food, add up to an amount of spirit stones that sends a small shiver through me every time I see it written in the account book. But there is another reason I am not going to tell him, not today and not ever, and it is that during these three months I have had to cultivate the way everyone else does, which is like going from driving a Ferrari to driving a minivan.

A crowd of outside eyes is too many eyes for the Resonance.

Shen Bai nods slowly, like someone who was already expecting the answer and only asked so that he could say he tried.

“It’s a shame”, he tells me. “My men and I are going to miss the meals a great deal.”

And as he says it, he looks at Xia.

Xia is on my right, with her hands clasped in front of her and her face very serious, and when she notices that Shen Bai is looking at her, she gives him a bow.

It is the measured bow Lianhua taught her at the Palace, the one for thanking someone for a compliment without implying that she expected it, and she does it without saying a single word.

Because during these three months she has cooked, both for us and for whichever of Shen Bai’s men were on watch at the time, without complaining even once, and I suspect they have been some of the best weeks of her life, with the pantry full, the kitchen fire always lit and a whole crowd of stomachs willing to try any new dish she came up with without a word of protest.

The night we decided to hire them, the first thing she said was that we would have to buy more provisions, and she was absolutely right.

Shen Bai looks back at me.

“Honestly, it has been a pleasure working for you”, he tells me. “Compared with nearly everyone who has ever hired me, you may well be the best I’ve had.”

I didn’t expect that, and for a moment I don’t quite know what face to make.

On the excavations of my other life, I learned very early that a laborer who eats well and gets paid on the day he was promised digs twice as much as one who doesn’t, and that this has very little to do with kindness and a great deal to do with common sense. So, if paying on time and feeding people well makes me the best boss Shen Bai has ever had, I would rather not imagine what the others were like.

“Thank you for your words”, I tell him. “And I wish you the best of luck in your next job.”

“I appreciate it”, he replies.

He inclines his head, first toward me and then, somewhat less, toward Lianhua, who has been standing on my left the whole time without moving a finger, and turns around.

His men step aside to let him pass and follow him one after another, and in a moment the courtyard, which for these three months has always been a little fuller than it should be, is ours alone again.

The footsteps move off along the stone path that goes around the island, toward the dock, while Lianhua crosses the courtyard to the gate and closes it.

I stay looking at the wood for a moment, and then turn the chair on the spot to face the two of them.

Three months.

Three months of classes with Master Shi, of books open on the desk in my study until the lamp oil burned out, and of diagrams drawn and erased over and over in the rectangle of sand in the corner of the courtyard until I found the right combination.

“Well”, I tell them. “It’s time to start creating the formation.”

All the seriousness Xia had with Shen Bai vanishes at once when she hears me.

“And which one are you going to use, Wen?” she asks me. “Have you decided yet?”

“In the end I settled on the Unbreakable Walls Formation”, I reply.

I raise a finger.

“The first thing it does is make the walls it’s carved into more resistant”, I continue.

I raise a second finger.

“And the second is that it adds a Qi protection both above and below those walls”, I continue. “Which, besides blocking the way, redirects the force of any attack it receives toward the physical wall.”

I lower my hand.

“So any attack against it is the same as trying to knock down the wall itself”, I finish.

In other words, no one is going to be able to climb over the wall or dig a tunnel under it, and anyone who wants to get in without permission will have to knock down a wall that will be considerably harder than before, with all the noise that makes.

Xia, however, looks disappointed.

“I thought you were going to surround the island with a barrier that protected all of it”, she tells me, and from the way she says it, I suspect she has spent three months imagining it.

“There’s also a formation that does that”, I tell her. “The Celestial Rampart Formation.”

Xia’s face lights up, so I hurry to continue before she gets her hopes up too much.

“But it has the small problem of consuming a great deal more Qi to stay active”, I continue. “And it cancels any blow it receives by consuming Qi directly.”

I rest my elbow on the armrest.

“So it’s very useful when you don’t have any wall to carve the Unbreakable Walls one into”, I continue. “But basically, it works by burning money.”

Every blow, one more bit of spirit stone gone. And in a city of several million inhabitants, I have no trouble imagining someone bored throwing stones at it from a boat just to see what happens while I pay for every one of those blows.

“And besides, it has two other drawbacks”, I add.

Xia tilts her head.

“The first is that it would be outside the walls”, I tell her. “So if someone wanted to visit us, they couldn’t get to the gate to knock, and we would have to put up a bell or something like that to let us know from outside.”

And I imagine Lu Zhiyu, in her Tower uniform and with her back straight, standing on the dock and ringing a bell until someone deigns to let her through, and the image doesn’t convince me at all.

“And the second is that the barrier is very visible”, I continue. “According to the book, it’s a bright golden color. The Qi protection of the Unbreakable Walls, on the other hand, is almost invisible, and can only be seen as a slight distortion when you’re very close.”

Xia falls silent, and it isn’t one of those silences of hers that last just long enough to catch her breath before the next question, but one with a furrowed brow and her eyes fixed on the wall, while she turns over everything I have just explained to her.

“Then what advantage does the Celestial Rampart have over the Unbreakable Walls one?” she asks me at last.

It is a good question. In fact, it is the same one I asked myself the first time I read about those two formations.

“That the Unbreakable Walls one needs walls”, I reply. “And besides, it only lasts as long as the walls it’s carved into can hold.”

I pause.

“The Celestial Rampart, on the other hand, can be put anywhere”, I continue. “And, in theory, as long as you can supply it with enough Qi to pay for all the attacks it receives, it’s indestructible.”

After that, I point at the courtyard walls, one after another.

“But with perfectly good walls right here, it would be a shame not to make use of them”, I finish.

Xia follows my hand with her eyes, from wall to wall, as if she were seeing them for the first time.

“If you think it’s best, okay”, she tells me. “But it’s a shame the island won’t glow golden.”

She says it with such seriousness, the same with which she bowed to Shen Bai a moment ago, that I burst out laughing.

I can’t help it, since I picture the island in the middle of the Rong glowing like a lantern, half of Sanjiang leaning out of their boats to look at it, and every gang in the city wondering what we have in here that is so worth guarding.

Lianhua doesn’t laugh, although she hasn’t said anything during the whole conversation either, since she has limited herself to listening on my left, with her hands clasped in front of her.

“Lianhua”, I tell her. “Go to my study and bring me the materials I have ready.”

“Yes, Xiaojie”, she replies.

She heads for the study while I rest my hands on the rims and push toward the center of the courtyard, where the magnolia is.

The wheels rattle over the tiles, including the ones the masons laid in front of my room, which can still be told apart from the rest because they are somewhat lighter, and I haven’t gotten even halfway there when I hear the study door open and close behind me.

Lianhua catches up with me right away, with a bag hanging from her shoulder that looks stuffed to bursting, and by the time the wheels stop beside the trunk, she is already at my side, holding it out to me.

I take it and set it on my lap, and it is heavy enough that I feel it on my thighs.

Xia, who has followed us, looks around her. The stone table, the benches, the trunk of the magnolia and, beyond them, all the doors that open onto the courtyard.

“And why do you have to make it here?” she asks me. “Wouldn’t a more hidden spot be better?”

“Because the formation has to be made in the most central spot possible”, I reply. “The one that goes here is the one that controls all the others.”

I raise my eyes to the branches.

“And besides, formations of the Range branch are always stronger if they’re created around an important point”, I continue. “Or around something that has special relevance.”

There is no need to say anything more, because if there is anything on this island with special relevance, it is this tree.

Xia nods slowly, like someone fitting a piece into place, and then she lowers her eyes to the tiles around the trunk and frowns again.

“And are you going to be able to carve it into the stone?” she asks me.

By way of answer, I open the bag and take out a long wooden case, and when I open it on my knees, inside there is a set of tools of a black so intense it seems to swallow the morning light. Burins of various thicknesses, a couple of fine chisels and a groove cleaner, all of them the same matte black from tip to tip.

“That’s why I spent a fortune commissioning a set of formation-carving tools made of spiritual materials”, I tell her. “So that it would be easier for me to do it.”

Lianhua sets the rest of what the bag holds on the ground, and I arrange it in the exact order in which I am going to use it. The cord, the inkwell of ordinary ink with its brush, the jars of formation ink and, on top of everything, the black case.

And then I stay looking at the ground, since in my first attempt at creating a formation I went straight to making the grooves, but now, thanks to Master Shi’s classes, I know that everyone first makes a drawing to guide them as they work.

Then I think about how to do it, since in the cultivation room the stake the cord turned around was my arm, but this time the center isn’t me, it is the magnolia, so I ask Lianhua to tie a loose loop around it, slack enough to turn with the cord without winding up, and I tie the brush to the other end.

I move it away slowly with the Myriad, letting out the cord, until the tip reaches just the edge of the stone table and benches, and there I stop it. The bigger the circle, the more room I will have for the runes, but I don’t want anyone to have to sit and eat on top of a formation, so the table and the benches stay exactly at the edge.

I dip the brush in the ordinary ink and begin to draw.

I move the chair around the tree, outside the line, and the brush moves with it, ahead of me, with the taut cord deciding the path. Along the stretch by the table, where the chair doesn’t fit between the benches and the line, I have to go around the outside and let the brush continue on its own, held by a hand of the Myriad almost at the limit of the little over two and a half meters the technique reaches, until the line meets its own beginning again.

Next is the square, where the difficult part is that the sides of the square have to be parallel to the courtyard walls. But fortunately, I don’t need to measure for that, since the joints between the tiles already run parallel to them.

That means I simply place the end of the cord on the line of the circle, take the mark to another point on the line with the stretch between them pulled taut, and then slide the two hands of the Myriad at the same time, slowly, along the circle, until the cord lies exactly parallel to the nearest joint.

That is the first side.

The other three, after that first side, are easy, but even so I check them twice until I am completely sure.

Then I trace the lines in ordinary ink following the cords, and when I finish, I have in front of me, around the trunk, a circle with a square inside it, with one of its sides so close to the table and the benches that it grazes their edge.

And now come the runes.

I close my eyes and let the diagram of the central core appear, with every rune in its place along the four sides of the square, and before opening them I make the last decision of the morning.

I am going to put in the filler runes too.

In my cultivation room I didn’t put them in, because no one but us goes in there. But this formation is out in the open, in the middle of a courtyard that anyone who comes to see us walks through, whether it is Lu Zhiyu or the next masons I have to call, and one without them would draw too much attention for being too simple a formation.

I open my eyes and begin to draw.

First the real runes, along the sides of the square, in ordinary ink. Then the filler ones, which fill the circle to the edge, packed tightly against one another, and which, since they serve no purpose, curiously turn out once again to be the ones that demand the most attention from me.

By the time I finish drawing them all, the magnolia’s shadow is no longer on the table, but off to one side.

And then I open the case.

The first burin weighs less than it looks, and when I rest it on the tile with the Dragon’s Grip and push, it sinks into the stone almost as easily as the old burin sank into the wood of my cultivation room. The groove comes out clean, with straight edges, and the only thing it leaves behind is a fine gray dust.

I stay looking at it for a moment, and for the first time since I paid the fortune they cost me, my remorse disappears completely.

I carve the sides of the square, the real runes and, afterward, all the filler ones, turning the chair around the tree every time I run out of the stretch in front of me. And when I finish carving them, I start on the formation ink.

I do this part with the same maddening slowness as the first time, with Sensing the Qi active and pouring it almost drop by drop, because if one stretch of the groove has too much and another too little, the Qi will pile up where there is too much and get stuck where there is too little.

The difference is that this time I don’t have to clean a single rune, and I don’t know whether the credit goes to practice or to the three months of classes, although I am inclined to think it is both in equal parts.

When I finally fill the last groove, the sun passed over the magnolia a good while ago, and Xia, who left at some point, comes back and starts setting the table so that I will eat something, at which point my stomach decides to remind me that I haven’t eaten anything since breakfast.

We eat quickly and in silence, since I want to keep going so I can finish before the day is over, and the next thing is to start on the walls.

The secondary formations are considerably smaller than the central one, and each one goes in the center of its wall, on the side facing the courtyard. Master Shi made it very clear in his classes, since each secondary formation has to have two others within its reach so that they can all create a chain between them, and with four walls that is easy because each one has another on either side.

Four links creating a chain around the magnolia.

I push the chair up to the first one, leave it facing the wall and draw the formation in ordinary ink at a height I can reach with my own hands, but as soon as I push against the wall with the burin to start carving, the chair rolls back.

Not much, barely a few centimeters, but I stop in time and sigh, since I thought I could make the secondary formations without resorting to techniques, but before I can even think about starting to use the Dragon’s Grip, I feel a hand on the backrest.

Lianhua says nothing, and I haven’t asked her to. She has simply positioned herself behind the chair and is holding it, and when I push the burin against the stone again, the chair doesn’t move an inch, as if someone had nailed it to the floor.

“Thank you”, I tell her.

“You are welcome, Xiaojie”, she replies.

And that is how we do the four walls, me carving, Lianhua holding the chair and Xia watching it all now and then as she peeks out of the kitchen door.

The ink, on the other hand, gives me more trouble than on the floor, because filling the grooves vertically without the ink spilling is much more complicated, and I have to go even more slowly, stretch by stretch, letting each drop settle in the groove before adding the next.

But finally I have only the last formation left, the one that goes on the lintel of the gate, and its function is to tell the formation where one may enter with permission, which is the only thing that distinguishes a protected house from a walled-up one.

The lintel is a little over two meters off the ground, so I decide to use the Dragon’s Grip even for the drawing, since it has more reach, and that way I can move back far enough to do it without practically craning my neck straight up.

First I make the drawing, although I ask Lianhua to be the one who holds the ink next to the brush with the Myriad of Hands, after which I go on to the carving.

When I go to pour the ink, I realize that the formation is out of the range of Sensing the Qi from where I am, and from directly below I can’t see it well either, so I ask Lianhua to lift me by the waist so I can see it up close while I pour the ink.

When I return to the formation around the magnolia, the sun is already setting behind the walls, and the whole courtyard has turned orange.

I bring the chair up to the side of the square that faces the gate, until a particular group of runes is right beside the wheel.

Only someone who knew where to look could tell them apart from the filler ones.

“To finish, we have to let a drop of blood fall on a specific spot in the formation”, I tell them. “Here.”

I point at the center of the group of runes.

“That will give us permanent permission to cross the formation”, I continue.

Then I look at Lianhua.

“And for you and me, it will also let us control who can pass through the gate and who can’t”, I tell her.

Lianhua nods just once, after which I look at Xia.

“You won’t be able to do that for now”, I tell her. “But when you open your first gate, you’ll be able to as well.”

Xia just nods without saying anything, after which I hold my hand out toward Lianhua and extend a finger.

Lianhua takes one of her weapons out of her sleeve and pricks my fingertip just enough to draw a drop, so I grip the armrest with my other hand, lean out over the wheel and let it fall onto the rune.

Then she pricks herself, without changing her expression, and then it is Xia’s turn, who holds out her hand just as I did and presses her lips together when the tip pierces her finger, although she doesn’t complain.

Three drops, one beside the other, which the stone drinks up almost immediately.

“Lianhua”, I tell her. “Put a spirit stone in each of their places.”

Lianhua takes out four spirit stones and places them one after another at the four vertices, in the hollows I carved this morning right where the square meets the circle.

All that is left is to activate it, so I lean out of the chair as far as I can until I touch the formation with my fingertips while, on my left, Lianhua takes half a step toward me just in case.

And then I activate it.

All the runes of the formation light up at once, and for an instant the ground around the magnolia glows with a dull, steady light, while in the center of the four walls and above the lintel something answers by starting to glow at the same time.

Although, a moment later, everything goes dark.

I straighten up in the chair, and then I feel it.

It is a small sensation, similar to learning a technique from a jade tablet, when the knowledge appears all at once and settles in as something I have always known.

But it isn’t the same, because this time nothing appears that I will have to practice later. It is more like suddenly realizing that I have a key in my pocket that wasn’t there this morning, since I understand how letting someone cross the barrier works, or how to prevent it, just as I know how to open or close a hand.

I turn my head toward Lianhua.

“Do you have that feeling too?” I ask her.

“Yes, Xiaojie”, she replies.

I nod, satisfied, and let myself drop back against the backrest.

I look at the courtyard walls, one after another, with their formations in the center that no longer glow and that from here can barely be made out, and at the closed gate, with its own above the lintel.

Three months of guards, of classes and of spending a large part of the money I earned from the talismans like water.

“At last we have protection that doesn’t depend on anyone else”, I say.

Lianhua looks at me, very seriously, after I say those words.

“That will be so as long as you remember not to absorb the Qi it uses, Xiaojie”, she tells me. “Remember that it needs that Qi to keep working.”