Chapter 225 (Patreon)

“Do you have all the talismans somewhere you can reach them easily?” I ask Xia, who is standing on the island’s dock with her arms crossed while I look at her from the boat.

“Yes”, she replies.

She says it drawing the word out, with a certain weariness and without uncrossing her arms.

“Good”, I tell her. “And remember that, if anything happens, you have to use the Communication Talisman immediately to let me know.”

At that point, I see Xia’s patience run out.

“You’ve already told me that three times this morning!” she tells me. “I know perfectly well what I have to do.”

She uncrosses her arms and points at the river with her open hand.

“And if you two don’t leave now, you’ll end up spending the whole morning reminding me of your instructions”, she finishes.

I open my mouth to answer her, and close it again because, worst of all, she is probably right.

Today she has decided to stay home, and I have no reason to tell her no. She is thirteen, she has one Gate open, and there is a formation on the house that only lets in whoever we want.

Not so long ago, I was the one who had no intention of leaving her alone on this island, and now she is the one sending me off.

In my other life, this is what parents did the first time they left a child home alone, with the phone numbers written on a piece of paper stuck to the fridge and the same warnings repeated ad nauseam.

It always seemed a little ridiculous to me, but now it turns out it is my turn to do the same, so I sigh and turn my head toward the stern.

“Lianhua”, I tell her. “Let’s get going.”

“Yes, Xiaojie”, she replies.

She casts off the line, sets her foot against the planks and pushes, so the boat moves away from the dock while I look at the bundle we have left on it, a couple of steps from Xia.

It is the sewing machine, wrapped in a cloth, so I use Dragon’s Grip to make the bundle rise off the planks, pass over the water and float beside the gunwale, on my right, moving along at the same pace as us.

Xia follows it with her eyes until it stops beside me, but then she raises a hand, waves it just once and turns toward the door of the house.

She doesn’t even wait for us to round the first island.

The Rong is a river full of islands, islets and rocks, and Lianhua navigates it as always, without hesitating at any bend, while I keep the machine close to the boat, high enough that the water doesn’t splash it and low enough that it can’t be seen from too far away.

But it is inevitable that it is seen.

A boatman coming the other way stops rowing as we pass each other, his oar half out of the water, and turns his head to follow the bundle until he loses sight of it. Shortly after, on a boat moored at one of the islands, two women who were unloading baskets freeze with one in midair, halfway between them, watching us go by.

I can’t blame them. In theory this is a city of cultivators, but I have yet to see anyone use their techniques as openly as I usually do when I have to carry something, so I always draw attention.

But traffic on the Rong has never been very heavy, and between one island and the next there are long stretches when we don’t pass anyone.

That changes when we leave the Rong behind and enter the Miao, because here there are all kinds of vessels, and Lianhua, who closed her eyes as soon as we entered it so she could watch everything from above with the Vision of Horus, rows among them as if she were alone on the river.

And, curiously, here we draw less attention.

On the Miao everyone minds their own business, and a bundle floating beside a small boat is just one more thing not to ram. The occasional boatman eyes it sideways, but only to work out where he can get past, and keeps rowing.

Which suits me just fine, because by now I have started to feel the strain.

It isn’t the weight, since the machine comes nowhere near what the technique can lift, but lifting something is one thing, and holding it in the air the whole way, without letting go for an instant, while the boat moves and every sway has to be corrected, is quite another.

First it is the usual pressure, that of having something squeezed tight right behind my forehead. Then the pressure turns into a throb, and the throb grows stronger with time.

Yesterday I told Lianhua that I was sure I could hold out as far as the dock, and I still am, but what I didn’t tell her is that I didn’t expect to arrive comfortably, nor did I want to.

So I grit my teeth and hold on, because I want to see whether this effort has the result I am hoping for.

Lianhua keeps rowing, the bank keeps going by, and when I finally recognize the usual landing stages and, among them, the dock from which we always set out for the Tower of the Five Dragons, the pressure has grown so much that it won’t let me think of anything else and is starting to become overwhelming.

Both my hands are clenched on the armrests, and then, when the dock is so close that I can make out the people on it, something gives.

Not in the bundle, or in my body, but inside my head, in that spot I couldn’t point to. It is the same feeling as on the morning of my birthday, with the ten hands of the Myriad closed around the beam in my room, that of a lock that had been there all this time and suddenly breaks in two.

And the bundle, all at once, seems lighter to me.

It isn’t that it weighs less now; it is that the technique is stronger now, which makes the throb recede until it is only a murmur, and the machine, which a moment ago I was struggling to keep at the height of the gunwale, now floats beside me with less effort.

I don’t need to test anything to know what has happened, because now I know what this technique does when it reaches Adept, which is that from this moment on, Dragon’s Grip can lift twice the weight.

In other words, a hundred kilos.

A smile escapes me, since my attempt has worked, and so I make no effort to hide it.

“Lianhua”, I tell her. “I’ve managed to improve Dragon’s Grip.”

The oar doesn’t miss a beat.

“Congratulations, Xiaojie”, she tells me. “What has improved?”

“Now I can lift twice the weight”, I reply. “Two hundred catties.”

Lianhua doesn’t answer me right away; she just takes one stroke, and then another, her eyes still closed, and I get the impression she is spending that time thinking.

“That is good, Xiaojie”, she finally tells me. “Because now the technique can serve you to defend yourself.”

She pauses briefly.

“Whether by lifting a possible attacker, if they fall within that weight”, she continues. “Or by using objects of considerable weight to strike with.”

She says it in her usual voice, flat and polite, but I only smile in response, because I have just told her I can lift a hundred kilos, and the first thing she has done is look for a way for me to use that to defend myself.

Shortly after, the boat touches the dock with a dull thud, and I pass the machine over the gunwale and set it down on the dock, on the planks, as carefully as I can.

Lianhua is already on her feet, so she takes me up the ramp, slowly, until she leaves me beside the bundle.

At this hour the dock is full, and a couple of stevedores have seen the machine arrive through the air and set itself down on the planks. They look at it, then they look at me, and then they go on loading their sacks.

Lianhua goes down to retrieve the ramp and comes back up, but this time she doesn’t take her place behind the chair; instead she stands beside me, looking around, until she seems to find what she is looking for.

“Wait a moment, Xiaojie”, she tells me.

And she walks off toward a man waiting a little farther on, where the planks give way to the stones of the street, standing beside a small cart.

They talk for a moment. From here I can’t hear what they say, but I see the man nod a couple of times, and then the two of them come toward me.

He is a broad-shouldered man, with his sleeves rolled up to the elbows, and when he reaches me he looks at the chair, the way everyone looks at it the first time, although he soon raises his eyes.

“Xiaojie”, Lianhua tells me. “This is Ruan Dashan. He is the person I have hired to take us to the Tower.”

The man bows.

“Miss”, he tells me.

“Thank you for waiting for us”, I reply.

The cart has two wheels, with an open bed at the back and a plank driver’s bench at the front, and between the shafts there is a mule that watches us arrive with very little interest.

Lianhua stops the chair beside the wheel and, an instant later, I am sitting on the driver’s bench, with my feet resting where Lianhua places them.

And the first thing I do is grab the edge of the plank with both hands, because a driver’s bench has no backrest, no armrests, nor anything designed for someone who can’t brace herself with her legs.

Behind me I hear them load the chair and then the machine, and I hear Ruan Dashan secure everything with a rope.

Then Lianhua climbs up and sits beside me, so close that her shoulder touches mine, and I feel her arm behind my back, just in case.

Ruan Dashan takes the mule by the halter, clicks his tongue, and the cart sets off.

The curious thing is that, from up here, I see the city differently.

I have spent more than a year seeing it from the chair, and from the driver’s bench I see over people’s heads, discovering details that used to escape me.

I am so absorbed that it takes me a while to notice that, at the first corner, the cart hasn’t turned where we always turn.

I look at Lianhua, but she is looking straight ahead, as calm as ever, so I pay attention to the side streets we pass on the left, and at the end of each one I see the same thing: colored awnings, smoke from braziers and people crammed between the stalls.

It is the market square, the one we have to cross every time we go to the Tower, and the cart is going around it.

But the detour isn’t very long, since a couple of streets later the ground changes from stone to flagstones, the first stone statues appear beside the gateways and, at the end, the street opens onto the usual square.

Ruan Dashan stops the cart in front of the doors of the Tower of the Five Dragons, unties the rope, lifts down the chair and sets it on the ground, and then lifts down the machine.

Lianhua, meanwhile, stands in front of me, I take hold of her shoulders again and she lifts me down from the driver’s bench into the chair.

I lean back until I feel the backrest against my back, since I never thought I would miss it so much on such a short trip.

Lianhua takes a few coins from her clothes and puts them in Ruan Dashan’s hand; he counts them at a glance, bows to us and leaves with his cart the way he came.

I use Dragon’s Grip on the bundle again, and this time I notice the difference from the very first moment.

Lianhua pushes the chair, we go through the doors, and the ground floor of the Tower welcomes us as always, so Lianhua heads in a straight line for the staircase, where the two guards step to either side of the first step with their small nod, although today their eyes stray to the bundle of the machine, which floats between the two of them at the height of their belts.

Once upstairs, Lianhua lowers the chair until the wheels touch the polished wood, and the talisman goes out, after which I look down the corridor we always take.

Lin Quingyu’s office is at the end, and it clearly has just enough room for the three of us to sit, so taking the bundle there would be silly.

“Lianhua, I doubt the machine will fit in Lin Quingyu’s office”, I tell her. “It’s best if you go and get her.”

Lianhua looks at the landing, the corridors and the staircase we have just come up, which is her way of deciding whether she can leave me here.

“Yes, Xiaojie”, she tells me, and goes off down the corridor.

I set the machine on the floor beside me as I am left alone.

On the landing there is a quiet coming and going of people in the Tower uniform with papers under their arms. Almost all of them look at me as they pass, then look at the bundle and go on their way without asking anything, which is one of the things I most appreciate about this building.

I don’t have to wait long, since Lianhua comes back down the same corridor, and beside her comes Lin Quingyu, who stops a couple of steps from me.

She looks at me, then at the bundle beside me, wrapped in its cloth, and then back at me.

“What is it you have for me now?” she asks me.

She asks it in the tone of someone who has already learned that my visits never end up being what they seemed at first.

I smile at her when I notice the tone of her voice.

“A headache for you”, I reply. “Because it’s something similar to the printing press.”

Lin Quingyu listens to me, and sighs.

That doesn’t surprise me. The first time she talked to me about the printing press, she did so with the frustration of someone who has something good in her hands and can’t manage to place it.

“Then I had better see it”, she tells me.

She turns around and starts walking, but not toward her office, rather toward the other side of the landing. I lift the machine again with Dragon’s Grip, Lianhua pushes the chair, and we follow her.

We don’t go far, since Lin Quingyu opens a door on that same floor and steps aside to let us in.

It is a spacious room and practically empty, with a couple of cabinets against one wall, a few chairs pushed against the opposite one and nothing else.

I set the machine down in the center, where Lianhua crouches beside it, undoes the cloth and pulls it off, revealing the wooden frame.

It is still as ugly as sin, and the trip hasn’t improved it.

Lin Quingyu looks at it, takes a step to one side to see it in profile, and then goes back to where she was.

“What is it for?” she finally asks me.

“For sewing”, I reply.

Lin Quingyu looks at me, then at the machine, and then at me again, repeating her gesture from the landing.

“Are you telling me you have invented a machine for sewing?” she asks me.

“Yes”, I reply.

I add nothing more, because there is nothing more to add, and that answer, so short and sincere, seems to disarm her, since she opens her mouth, closes it again, and whatever she was going to say gets stuck in her throat.

“And what is the machine’s advantage over a professional seamstress?” she finally asks me.

“First of all, I want you to see how it works”, I reply.

After those words, I signal to Lianhua.

Lianhua takes one of the chairs from the wall and places it in front of the machine. Then she slips the backpack off her shoulders, opens it and takes out a couple of pieces of fabric, quite a lot larger than yesterday’s scraps, after which she sits down, puts one foot on the treadle and places the pieces one on top of the other, under the needle.

And she starts sewing.

The needle goes down and up with that ticking sound like a wooden clock, and the fabric advances between her hands, straight and always at the same speed, without a single stitch repeated in the same spot.

I needed three attempts to produce a seam fit to be shown, but Lianhua handles it with a certain ease because yesterday, when she came back from hiring the cart, she shut herself in the dining room and practiced with it until well after nightfall.

I know because I could hear that ticking from my study.

Lin Quingyu, meanwhile, doesn’t take her eyes off it. She has moved a step closer, and she looks at Lianhua’s hands, the needle and the foot on the treadle, one after another, with the same attention with which she looks at everything I put on her desk.

Lianhua soon reaches the end of the fabric. She cuts the thread, takes it out of the machine, stands up and hands it to her.

Lin Quingyu takes it in both hands, examines the seam on one side, turns it over to see it on the other, and then grabs a piece of fabric in each hand and gives it a yank.

And then another, harder, but the seam holds through both.

“It may be a little faster”, she tells me. “But I do not see that it is worth buying a machine that will probably cost a great deal of money.”

She says it without any ill intent, and it is exactly what I supposed yesterday that anyone who saw it would think, so here I turn serious.

“In fact, this isn’t the machine I want to present to the Tower”, I tell her.

Lin Quingyu looks up from the fabric.

“It’s only a prototype”, I continue. “I made it to show how the real machine is supposed to work.”

Lin Quingyu looks at the machine, with its trestle and its treadle, and then looks at me.

“And why did you not make the real machine?” she asks me.

I don’t answer her; I just look at Lianhua.

“Take out the plans”, I tell her.

Lianhua puts her hand into the backpack again and takes out a stack of papers, which she hands to Lin Quingyu.

Lin Quingyu sets the fabric over the back of the chair to take it, and from the way she raises an eyebrow on receiving it, it is clear she didn’t expect it to be so thick.

She looks at the stack, looks at me, and starts leafing through the papers while I watch her face.

On the first sheet she makes an expression of surprise, but by the third the surprise has already begun to turn into something resembling alarm, and by the time she is ten sheets in, she has the expression of someone reading a language she doesn’t know.

Parts seen from the front, from the side and from above, each with its measurements, and diagrams of how each one fits with the ones around it.

She keeps turning pages until, suddenly, she stops at one that is clearly a drawing, and shows it to me by turning the stack around.

“Is this what all this tangle of parts diagrams you have given me is supposed to look like in the end?” she asks me.

I look at the drawing, which is obviously the finished machine, shaped like a small cabinet, just as I drew it before resigning myself to the fact that I wasn’t going to be able to build it.

“Yes”, I reply. “That’s the final appearance of the sewing machine.”

I point at the drawing with my chin.

“And don’t be fooled by its looks”, I continue. “I’ve calculated that someone used to operating it would be able to go three or four times faster than Lianhua just did with the one we have here.”

Lin Quingyu says nothing; she just looks at the drawing, then at the sewn fabric she has left over the back of the chair, and I watch her think about what I have just told her.

I can almost read her thoughts about how long it took Lianhua to sew that fabric, what that would look like multiplied by three or four, and how fast a seamstress is with her needle.

“That is a great deal of speed”, she finally tells me.

Although she says it like someone conceding a point she had no intention of conceding.

“If it weren’t much faster than doing it by hand, it wouldn’t be worth creating”, I reply.

Lin Quingyu sighs after hearing me.

“I can accept it”, she tells me. “But on one condition.”

She closes the stack of plans.

“The same one under which we are going to accept the ships”, she finishes.

I sit up straight in my chair on hearing that last sentence.

“Have the tests on the ship already finished?” I ask her.

“They are still running some more thorough ones”, she replies. “But I have received authorization to sign the contract.”

She pauses.

“Although, unlike with your other inventions, this time it was the Tower that had to develop the finished product”, she continues. “So your share of the profits, instead of starting at a fourth, starts at a fifth.”

“And from there it goes down, in line with the previous agreements on materials and enchantments”, she adds.

I nod slowly, because everything else I have handed over to the Tower could be manufactured exactly as it came in my papers. Of the ship, on the other hand, what I handed over was an idea with its drawings, and between that idea and a hull that floats there is more than a year of carpenters, tests and money that I haven’t put up.

“And I must warn you of something else”, she tells me. “The best-selling option will most likely be that of the ships with enchantments.”

She rests a hand on the plans.

“Because it seems the ship has been judged a great option for travel between continents”, she continues. “And no one in their right mind would travel between continents on a ship that was not protected by enchantments.”

Travel between continents, which is, come to think of it, exactly what the ships I took the idea from were used for most in my other world.

And which is also the tier where my share is smallest, so I understand perfectly why she takes the trouble to warn me, but right now I am interested in something else.

“That means that, since the Tower is going to have to build the sewing machine from scratch, its share would also start at a fifth”, I tell her.

“Yes”, she replies.

I shrug, since it seems acceptable to me.

“I have no problem with that”, I tell her. “I accept gladly.”

Lin Quingyu looks at me, her hand still on the plans.

“Do you not want to think about it a little longer?” she asks me.

I smile, since I imagine what she is really asking me.

“There’s nothing for me to think about”, I reply. “If I accept, I have a share of guaranteed sales.”

I point at the machine, in the middle of the room.

“And if I don’t accept, I’d have all the income from sales I can’t make on my own”, I continue. “So the choice is very easy.”

Because to build that wooden grandmother I needed two months, a dining room and a mountain of broken springs. To build the one in the drawing I would need a workshop I don’t have, craftsmen I don’t know and parts I wouldn’t even know whom to order from.

And to sell it, on top of that, I would have to convince someone that they need it.

Lin Quingyu listens to me, and smiles.

“I wish all my clients were like you”, she tells me.

After those words, and with the smile still on her face, she goes over to one of the cabinets and opens it.

Inside there are no clothes or boxes, but blank paper and writing implements, arranged shelf by shelf, so this room must be empty for a reason, and I suspect I am not the first person to be brought here with something that won’t fit in an office.

Lin Quingyu takes a few sheets, then takes a bottle of ink from a small pouch she wears at her waist, uncorks it and starts writing standing up, leaning on one of the cabinet’s shelves, in that quick handwriting that seems not to need any thought.

She writes for a good while, first some sheets and then others, and I don’t interrupt her.

When she finishes, she takes a seal from the same pouch and presses it onto the papers, one after another, after which she turns around and holds out two sets of sheets to me.

“The ship contract and the sewing machine contract”, she tells me. “These are your copies.”

I reach out, but I don’t get to take them, because Lianhua beats me to it. She receives them with both hands, looks them over at a glance and puts them away in the backpack, with the same care with which she puts away everything that bears a Tower seal.

Lin Quingyu makes no comment; she simply takes her copies, puts them together with the plans, leaves everything inside the cabinet and closes it.

Then she turns toward me, her hands clasped in front of her.

“Is there anything else you would like?” she asks me.

“Yes”, I reply. “Actually, I want to hire the Tower of the Five Dragons for a matter.”

Lin Quingyu raises an eyebrow.

In all the time I have been coming into this building, I have come to sell, to buy and to deliver inventions, but never to hire anything, and from her face, she didn’t expect it either.

“And what is that matter?” she asks me.

“I’ve created a new type of talisman”, I reply. “But to test it I need some artifact, or some formation, that can be activated by a cultivator at the Gate Opening stage.”

Lin Quingyu’s eyebrow, which was already raised, goes up a little more.

“Have you really invented a new talisman?” she asks me.

She asks it with a tone of surprise I didn’t hear from her even with the sewing machine.

“I have no knowledge of it existing”, I reply. “Although I could be wrong.”

Because the only thing I can be sure of is that it isn’t in any of Master Mu’s books, and however many books she has, the world is a good deal bigger than what is in them.

Lin Quingyu keeps looking at me with the same surprise a moment longer, then looks away toward the machine, still in the center of the room, and slowly shakes her head.

“That ought to surprise me less than the rest of your inventions”, she says under her breath.

She isn’t saying it to me, so I don’t answer her.

“And what is that talisman supposed to do?” she asks me.

“It’s supposed to inject Qi into its target, to replace the activation”, I reply. “So it can be used to activate, for example, spiritual objects or formations.”

I pause.

“And besides, it has a delayed effect”, I continue. “So it could even be used to activate those artifacts or those formations from a distance.”

Lin Quingyu says nothing, but she doesn’t interrupt me either.

“The problem is that I have no valid target at my residence”, I finish. “So the only thing I can do is hire the Tower to provide me with something I can use them on to see whether they work.”

What I have at my residence are two formations I can’t afford to damage and an artifact I can afford to damage even less, but I keep that part to myself.

Lin Quingyu turns thoughtful, but only for a second, because in that second whatever was left of her earlier smile leaves her face, and when she moves again, she is serious.

She goes over to the other cabinet, opens it and takes out a pale stone cube.

It is one of those cubes I have always seen in the offices of this building, on her desk and on Lu Zhiyu’s, looking like an expensive paperweight.

Lin Quingyu crouches, sets it on the floor a few steps from my chair, and moves away.

“Test it with this”, she tells me.

I look at the cube, since I have seen these cubes used to summon people, to pay for a box of talismans and to check an entire warehouse without anyone getting up from their seat, and for a while now I have suspected they are the closest thing to a computer that exists in this world.

And in my other life, nobody lent their computer to someone who came to test something on it without knowing whether it worked.

“Isn’t it far too valuable to go testing a talisman on it that may or may not work?” I ask her.

“Do not worry about that”, she replies without hesitating for an instant.

Yesterday I didn’t want to risk anything I have at home, but if the cube’s owner isn’t worried, I am not going to be the one to insist, so, finally, I sigh, reach into my sleeve and take out a small stack of talismans.

There are ten of them, all the same. The one from the trance and the ones I managed to draw last night, one after another and completely lucid, which was the only thing I still needed to know before coming.

I separate the top one and activate it, after which a hand of the Myriad takes it from between my fingers and carries it to the cube to stick it on one of its faces.

The talisman stays stuck to the stone, and for a moment nothing happens.

That is what is supposed to happen, but even so the moment feels a good deal longer than it is, with Lin Quingyu looking at the cube, Lianhua doing the same and me trying not to clench the armrests.

Then the runes on the paper light up and the cube starts to glow, with the same light with which it glows when someone from the Tower lays a hand on it.

Lin Quingyu comes closer when she sees the cube glow, crouches beside it and rests her palm on the top face.

She stays like that for an instant, her gaze distant, just as on the occasions I have seen her use it in her office, and then she smiles.

Then she withdraws her hand, and the cube goes dark again as she straightens up and looks at me.

“Congratulations”, she tells me. “You have invented a new type of talisman.”

She points at the cube with her open hand.

“I was able to use it without having to inject Qi into it personally”, she finishes.

I sigh with relief, and sink back against the backrest.

It works, and it doesn’t do something slightly different from what I believed, but exactly what I wanted it to do, but Lin Quingyu isn’t finished.

“And what led you to create that talisman?” she asks me with curiosity. “Because its applications, while useful, are also very limited.”

It is a good question, since any cultivator can touch an object to activate it without spending a sheet of paper, and yesterday Lianhua thought of quite a few situations in which it would be useful, but knowing her, I doubt any of them are fit to be told in this building.

I could answer her with anything, but this woman has just set down on the floor, without asking me anything, an artifact I wouldn’t have dared to lend, so I decide to be honest.

“I created it because I’ve designed a Qi-gathering formation that doesn’t need spirit stones to work”, I tell her.