Chapter 216 (Patreon)

I look at the spirit stones feeding the formation with Sensing the Qi active and find them exactly as I expected to, a little less full than yesterday at dusk when Lianhua placed them, but so slightly that, if I hadn’t paid attention then, I couldn’t tell the difference.

The Qi leaves them slowly to run through the formation without getting stuck in any stretch and without piling up in any corner, with the same boring regularity with which water runs through a well-made irrigation channel.

And that boring regularity, when it comes to a formation, is exactly what I want.

I push the chair a little farther around the trunk, just enough for the next stretch of runes to come within my reach, and that way I go all the way around, stretch by stretch, going around the outside of the benches when I reach the table, and in none of them do I find anything that isn’t working the way it should.

Behind me, meanwhile, I hear Xia set something down on the stone table. Then something else, and then the clink of bowls being stacked.

I have been hearing her come and go from the kitchen for a while as I circled the tree, and from the smell that reaches me here, today there is congee.

“It’s ready, Wen”, she tells me. “It’s going to get cold.”

I deactivate Sensing the Qi, turn the chair on the spot and push it to the head of the table, into the gap between the two benches, and stop.

From here, if I look down, the line of the circle passes a handspan from my right wheel, exactly where I decided yesterday it had to pass so that no one would have to sit and eat on top of a formation.

Meanwhile, Lianhua comes out of her room and sits on the bench to my left, and Xia, after handing out the bowls, sits on the one to my right.

Rice congee with salted egg, a plate of pickled vegetables and a basket of steamed buns, which are still steaming when Xia lifts the cloth covering them, revealing that they are divided into Lianhua’s portions and Xia’s and mine.

I pick up my chopsticks and, as I stir the congee to cool it, I keep glancing sideways at the circle, because even though I have already checked everything twice, I am still a little afraid that it will fail at the worst possible moment.

But the formation works. And it works exactly as it should, which means that if someone shows up here wanting to stir up trouble, they will have no choice but to knock down one of the walls.

And a wall that is now considerably harder than before doesn’t come down quietly, so the noise would wake us and give us time to prepare before anyone managed to set foot in the courtyard.

Besides, with a little luck, it would also draw the attention of the people on the surrounding islands, along with any boatman passing nearby, and in a city where almost everyone has some cultivation, a crowd of neighbors leaning out to look is the last thing anyone wants when they have come to do something without anyone finding out.

Xia, who has finished her first bun before I have even tasted the congee, wipes her fingers on the cloth and looks at me.

“And now what are we going to do, Wen?” she asks me. “We have the formation now and there are no guards. What’s next?”

“Cultivate”, I reply. “And develop without drawing attention.”

Xia blinks, as if expecting something more.

“But that’s the long-term plan”, I continue. “Today I’m planning to go see Lin Quingyu.”

“Why?” she asks me. “Has something happened with the Tower? Did she send you a message? Is it about the talismans?”

“Nothing has happened”, I tell her. “It’s that I’m growing.”

Xia frowns, because she clearly doesn’t see what one thing has to do with the other.

“And some of my clothes are starting to get uncomfortable”, I continue.

Which, to be precise, isn’t some of my clothes, but one very specific garment. The brassieres Jiǎngshī Yun made me before I left the Empire, which have now started to get too small for me.

“So, instead of looking for a seamstress on my own, I’m going to go see Lin Quingyu”, I continue. “To see whether the Tower of the Five Dragons is interested in the brassiere.”

I say it, and I can hear for myself how unconvinced I sound.

“Although I doubt it”, I add. “But if they are interested, I’ll be able to order new ones through her.”

Because the problem I saw with it on the first day is still the same, which is that each one has to be made to the measurements of whoever is going to wear it, and that is exactly the opposite of what interests a trading company that sells by the thousand.

“And if they’re not interested, well, I’ll look for someone who can make them”, I continue. “Because I’m starting to need new ones.”

I point at Xia with my chopsticks.

“And you’re going to have to replace yours soon too if you keep growing at that rate”, I tell her.

Xia says nothing to my words; she simply lowers her eyes to her bowl and goes on eating breakfast, with her ears a little redder than a moment ago.

“And since I’m going and I’m trying to sell the impossible, I’m also going to take the plans for the chair”, I continue. “In case they’re interested.”

I tap the armrest.

“Although I don’t have much hope for that either”, I finish.

It is then that Lianhua, who until now has limited herself to eating in silence, rests her chopsticks on the edge of her bowl.

“Xiaojie”, she tells me. “Why do you not give them the plans you were designing for the Emperor?”

I freeze with my chopsticks halfway to my mouth.

“You yourself considered that they had a great deal of potential”, she adds.

I sigh, because I knew that at some point someone was going to ask me, and if someone was going to ask me, it had to be her.

I set my chopsticks on top of my bowl.

“They’d certainly accept them right away”, I reply. “Practically with their eyes closed.”

I pause.

“But precisely because they have so much potential, I didn’t want to give them to the Tower in the first place”, I continue. “And after Master Mu’s visit, even less.”

Xia raises her eyes from her bowl, and curiosity gets the better of the embarrassment of a moment ago.

“Why, Wen?” she asks me.

I lean back while I look for a way to say it without it sounding bigger than it is, even though it is just as big.

“Because anyone halfway intelligent would immediately realize the potential of what I gave my father”, I reply.

And as I say it, I can’t help thinking about what steam meant in my other life. First came the looms, then the factories, then the ships and the trains, and in little more than a century the whole world became unrecognizable, with cities growing up around chimneys and people who had never left their village crossing an entire country in a single day.

Although I also have my doubts that here it will be quite so decisive. In this city I have seen a man carry on his back a load of firewood that in my world would have needed a mule, and carry it whistling, and a world where a person’s strength can grow like that, along with the whole matter of powers, doesn’t need machines the way mine did.

But even if it doesn’t change everything, it will change enough.

“And as soon as it started to become known, it’s very likely that a lot of people would try to find out who created it”, I continue, setting those thoughts aside.

Xia says nothing, so I go on.

“Before, I didn’t give it to the Tower because I didn’t really trust them not to try something when they saw that technology”, I tell her. “And ever since Master Mu told us that the Tower, like any organization, has its rats and its cockroaches, I’m even less willing to hand it over.”

Xia sets the bun she had in her hand down on the table.

“Is it that serious?” she asks me.

And she asks it slowly, without her usual hurry, and cautiously.

“Yes”, I reply. “I’m sure that anyone who realized its potential would start looking for me with every resource within their reach.”

I don’t add anything to soften it, because she has been with me too long to believe it.

“That’s why I would rather it stay what I meant it to be”, I continue. “A farewell gift for my father and for the Empire.”

For an instant, I see again the box of pale wood I left in my study at the Pavilion, and the instruction that it not be delivered to him until a month had passed since my departure.

“Besides, this way, if anyone goes looking for that invention, they’ll have to deal with the Empire”, I continue. “And with the Sect of the Celestial Sun.”

I shrug as much as the backrest allows me.

“And if even so someone shows up making too much trouble, there’s still the guardian beast”, I add. “Who will simply have to stop dozing in his nest and do his job.”

And I have no trouble picturing him raising his head in his golden nest at the top of the Wutong, asking who has dared to disturb him.

Xia says nothing more, although she stays looking at me for a while before going back to her bowl, but Lianhua, on the other hand, does.

“If you believe it is the most sensible course, Xiaojie, then it is best to do it that way”, she tells me.

And she picks up her chopsticks again, which for her is the way of declaring a conversation over, so we finish breakfast without returning to the subject.

Xia clears away the bowls while Lianhua goes to the study and comes back with the copies of the plans for the chair, all of them, from the first one Jiǎngshī Zhao Liang made me to the one I am using now, with the notes on the spiritual materials of the wheels, the axle and the rims, and puts them in the backpack along with the copies of the brassiere patterns.

At the courtyard gate, before the front wheels reach the threshold, I feel Lianhua’s hands on the handles of the backrest, so I let go of the rims and rest my hands in my lap.

As we pass beneath the lintel, I feel absolutely nothing, which is exactly what is supposed to happen when whoever is crossing has permission, so that part of the formation is clearly working correctly too.

At the island’s dock, Lianhua sets the ramp between the planks and the gunwale, takes the chair down it slowly, fits it into the anchoring on the bottom of the boat and checks the fastenings with a tug. Xia sits down beside me and holds on to my armrest just in case, as always, and Lianhua casts off the line, pushes the boat away from the dock with her foot and begins to row.

When we have gone a few meters, I turn my head toward the island, since if there is one thing we didn’t do yesterday, it is check how everything looks from outside.

But from here all that can be seen is the wall and, above it, the crown of the magnolia. Not a gleam, not a glow, nothing to say that this house is any different from what it was two days ago, because the protection of the Unbreakable Walls should only be visible as a slight distortion when you are very close, so that part works correctly too.

At the city dock, Lianhua takes me up the ramp and pushes the chair, and it is on the dock that I notice it for the first time.

A stevedore looks up when the wheels touch the planks, lowers his eyes and goes on loading his sack. Two women talking beside a pile of baskets look at me, say something to each other and go back to talking about whatever they were talking about before. And a little boy points at the chair, but his mother doesn’t even stop; she just lowers his hand without breaking stride.

They still look at me, that hasn’t changed, but they no longer stop to look at me.

I suppose that is what comes of having passed along the same route several times. In my other life, when they put a new statue in a square, the first week everyone stopped to take pictures of it.

A month later, it was part of the scenery and was only good for pigeons to perch on.

And for once, being part of the scenery feels like a promotion.

We reach the Tower of the Five Dragons without any trouble. Lianhua crosses the ground-floor hall in a straight line toward the staircase on the left, and the two guards at its foot, instead of asking where we are going, move aside to either side of the first step before we get there, with a slight nod, which makes me think that Lianhua’s trips to the Tower have achieved something more than selling my talismans.

Lianhua takes out a Minor Levitation Talisman and sticks it on the side of the chair so we can go up to the second floor, where we head straight for Lin Quingyu’s office, and Xia goes ahead to knock on the office door.

“Come in”, comes from inside.

The office is exactly the same. The tall window on the left, the two-section cabinet at the back, the row of chairs against the walls and the solid table in the center, with its piles of papers lined up and the stone cube on the right.

Behind the table, Lin Quingyu looks up and sets down her brush.

“Sun Wen”, she tells me. “Welcome. Please, sit down.”

Xia takes a chair from the wall and places it to my right, and Lianhua takes another, places it to my left and a little behind, takes off the backpack, sets it on the floor at her feet and sits down, while I push the chair up to the edge of the table.

Lin Quingyu looks at my new chair with curiosity, although she says nothing.

“Well then”, Lin Quingyu tells me. “What brings you here today?”

“First of all, I’d like to know how things are going with the ship”, I tell her.

Lin Quingyu clasps her hands on the table.

“They are still finishing building it”, she replies. “But it is expected to be ready for its first trial in a few months.”

A few months. Which isn’t nothing, but it is considerably less than I feared the last time I asked.

“I’m very glad”, I tell her.

“So am I”, she replies. “But I imagine you have not come all the way here just to ask me about the ship.”

“No”, I admit. “Actually, I’m here to offer you a couple of inventions. Although I don’t know whether they will interest the Tower of the Five Dragons.”

“Which ones?” she asks me.

And since what I want most right now is to get it over with as soon as possible, I turn my head slightly toward Lianhua, who leans down, takes the bundle of chair plans out of the backpack, gets up and sets it on the table.

“The first is the plans and the ideas for my chair”, I tell her. “Including the version I use right now, with the spiritual materials it needs.”

As I say it, I remember the artisan from the Ten Thousand Trades Quarter who was the one who came up with the idea of putting the spiritual material only where it was needed.

But the ship was different. Shen Fei and Chen Mo helped me design it, whereas all he did was build what I had already drawn before I set foot in his workshop, rims included, and he charged me a fortune for it, so he has already been paid, unlike the two of them.

Lin Quingyu doesn’t touch the plans; she simply looks at me and sighs.

“We can accept them”, she tells me. “But do not expect it to sell.”

“Why?” I ask her.

“Because any injury that forces someone to use something like this, and that an alchemist’s pill or a healing technique cannot cure, is an injury that the cultivator who has it is going to try to hide at all costs”, she replies. “They would feel so ashamed of being seen as disabled that they would shut themselves away.”

She pauses briefly.

“Or they might even be capable of taking their own life”, she continues. “Or be forced to do it, so that their injury would not cost their family, their sect or whoever is around them any reputation.”

I stare at her after her words, since she has said it in the same tone in which she explained the printing press licenses to me, like someone explaining a figure she doesn’t like but can’t change.

“It can’t be that serious”, I tell her.

“Never underestimate what many people are capable of doing to keep their reputation”, she replies.

And on hearing that sentence, I remember that I have heard it before.

Master Mu said it to me, sitting at the table in my courtyard, in almost the same words, right before describing to me all those people who would come looking for me simply for being her disciple. Young people she rejected as disciples, families and sects who resented her, people who wanted to take advantage of her fame.

And until now, to be honest, I had only paid attention to the numbers.

But now, with Lin Quingyu’s sentence still hanging in the air, I realize that almost none of them would come looking for me because of anything I had done to them. Most of them would come out of resentment, for some prestige they believe Master Mu made them lose by rejecting them or their children, and that they intend to recover at my expense.

And if there are people capable of crossing half a continent to recover a prestige they believe they have lost, it isn’t so hard for me to believe that there are people capable of dying so as not to lose the one they have.

The artisan who made me this chair asked me whether I wanted it for a few months, like the litters people commissioned from him to carry someone seated until the pill or the healer did their work. In this city, no one builds something like what I use to last forever, and now I know why.

I sigh at that thought, but I decide to go on with the deal.

“Even so, I’m giving them to you”, I tell her.

Lin Quingyu raises her eyebrows slightly.

“When I designed it, all I wanted was to make my life easier, and the lives of people like me”, I continue. “And if someone, somewhere, finds their life a little easier because I handed over these plans, that’s enough for me.”

I rest my hands on the edge of the table.

“I’ll even accept the same margins as with the backpack”, I add. “In case anyone orders a chair made entirely of spiritual materials, and not just the wheels. Or even one with some enchantment, such as, for example, being able to move on its own.”

I pause.

“Although I don’t know whether that last one can be done”, I finish.

“With the same exclusion, I understand”, Lin Quingyu tells me.

“With the same one”, I confirm. “The Tianjing Empire stays out in all three tiers, unless you reach an agreement with the people in charge of making it there.”

Because there, the chair already exists; Jiǎngshī Zhao Liang’s workshop has been making it with my permission since I was little, and as far as I know there are people at court who get around thanks to it.

“That seems fine to me”, Lin Quingyu tells me. “I agree.”

She picks up the plans and leafs through them quickly, stopping only for a moment on the last sheet, the one of the chair I am sitting in. Then she takes a couple of blank sheets from a drawer, dips her brush and writes without looking up, with that quick handwriting that seems to need no thought.

When she finishes, she blows on the ink, separates one of the sheets and lets go of it.

The sheet doesn’t fall; instead, it crosses the table floating a handspan above the papers and comes straight toward me, and I take it out of the air and see that it is the receipt for the plans, with her name at the bottom.

Lin Quingyu, meanwhile, opens a wooden box she has at one side of the table, puts the plans inside along with the other sheet and closes it.

“And what would the other thing be that you want to offer me?” she asks me.

I sigh again.

“This is somewhat more complicated to explain”, I tell her.

Lin Quingyu waits after my words, although I notice she seems intrigued.

“It is an undergarment for women”, I continue. “It replaces the Xiyi, and it is much more comfortable.”

I signal to Lianhua, who opens the backpack again, takes out the copies of the patterns and sets them on the table in front of Lin Quingyu, one beside the other. The pieces, the measurements, the cups, the cord and the explanations I wrote with Jiǎngshī Yun so that anyone could copy it.

Or so I thought, since Lin Quingyu looks at them one by one. She turns the second sheet sideways, turns it upright again and spends a good while looking at the third with her brow furrowing more and more.

In the end, she looks up at me.

“I cannot understand anything of what is here”, she tells me. “Do you not have one of these garments to show me?”

“I’ll show you one right away”, I reply.

And I bring my hand to the fastenings of my tunic, but I only manage to undo the first before Lin Quingyu raises both hands.

“What are you going to do?” she asks me.

And she asks it in a voice considerably higher-pitched than any I have ever heard from her.

“If you want to see the garment, it’s best to see it on”, I reply. “Otherwise, you can’t understand how it works.”

Which is the plain truth. On paper, a brassiere is a few pieces of fabric with strange shapes. Worn, it is understood at first glance, but before I can go on with the second fastening, I feel a hand on top of mine.

It is Lianhua’s, who has gotten up without my hearing her.

“It is better if I show it to her, Xiaojie”, she tells me.

I look at her, and she holds my gaze without moving her hand away.

“Are you sure?” I ask her.

Lianhua nods just once.

So I fasten the closure again while she steps aside, next to a wall, loosens her clothes with a few short movements and opens them just enough to show the brassiere.

It is one of the ones Jiǎngshī Yun made. Pale silk, a few discreet embroideries along the edge, the firm cups and the cord disappearing behind her, toward the knot at the back, although it is clearly tighter than normal, which I imagine is something Lianhua requested so that it won’t get in her way when she fights.

Lianhua stays still, with the same face with which she waits for her tea to be served.

I, on the other hand, look at Lin Quingyu, prepared for anything. For her to turn red, for her to look away or for her to ask us, with all the politeness in the world, to leave her office.

But she does none of that; instead, she gets up, goes around the table and approaches Lianhua until she is a step away from her, and looks at the brassiere up close, the seams, the shape of the cup and the cord, with the same attention with which she looked at the backpack patterns on the first day.

Then she turns her head toward the patterns still lying on her table, and looks back at Lianhua.

And to my surprise, she doesn’t look with the polite interest with which she usually looks at my inventions, but the way someone who has struck gold would look.