Chapter 174

I have spent the whole day discovering new things, such as, for example, that a passenger carriage without anything resembling suspension, a dirt road with the surface of a grater and twelve straight hours of rattling are three elements that, separately, are endured without too much problem, and that combined produce something that in my other life would have had its own section in some international convention.

Although the bun, to be fair, was nobody’s fault.

It was given to us by the woman who got into the carriage with us at the door of the inn and who since then has not pronounced a single word all day.

Mid-morning she took out a cloth package from among her clothes, opened it over her knees, offered the buns to the three of us with a gesture of her hand and then ate hers looking through the crack of the little curtain, and that has been, literally, the only interaction we have had with her since we left the capital.

But right away I notice a change. First it is a man’s voice that lets out a short and dry shout that from in here reaches me deformed by the tarpaulin and by the noise of the wheels, followed by a change of rhythm in the hooves of the horses, since they lose that monotonous regularity I have been listening to since the sun came up while that rhythm shortens and, finally, stops.

I look through the crack of the little curtain with curiosity and see that night is falling while the woman who has traveled with us gets up from her seat without saying anything, brushes off her skirt with two strikes of her hand and speaks for the first time all day.

“Take the chance to get down as well and have supper”, she tells us. “We are going to stop here.”

And after those words she gets down and disappears from my field of vision.

I look at Lianhua, then at Xia, and permit myself a small smile.

“That strikes me as an excellent idea”, I say. “If I stay seated here a minute longer I think I am going to take root.”

Xia gets up with a leap with the energy of one who has spent twelve hours holding herself back to get down first, and the moment she has her feet on the ground she stretches with a very inelegant groan that draws a guffaw from me on the inside.

Behind her Lianhua gets down, and the moment she is outside she turns toward me and holds out her arms.

“Carefully”, I tell her as I lean toward her. “I think that if you fold me in half right now, some part of my body is going to break.”

“Don’t worry”, she answers me.

She takes me out of the carriage with ease, and once I am outside, she stays still a moment with me in her arms and looks around her while I realize that she is searching for a place where the ground is not on a slope, there are no stones that will dig into me and I will have my back resting against something solid.

And when she finds it, she heads there without hesitating.

“Xia”, she says as she walks. “Take a blanket out of the backpacks and put it on the ground, beside the wheel.”

Xia shoots off toward the carriage, gets inside, I hear her fiddling with the buckles and she comes out again with a folded blanket under her arm that she unfolds on the ground and places against the rear wheel of the passenger cart, smoothing it afterward with her hands with more care than is probably necessary.

Lianhua crouches, seats me on top of it, settles my back against the spokes of the wheel until she finds the angle that satisfies her and then places my legs, stretching them out so that I am more comfortable.

“Are you comfortable?” she asks me.

“Much more than five minutes ago”, I answer her, and it is true.

So I settle in, rest my hands in my lap and look around me, so I confirm that the horses are unhitched, and two of the men occupy themselves with them with a meticulousness that surprises me. They pass their hands over their legs, lift their hooves one by one and check them, rub their backs with handfuls of dry grass, and only after all that do they bring them water.

And I am contemplating the men’s tasks when I see that one of them separates from the group and comes toward us.

It is the oldest of the four, the same one who asked Lianhua to identify herself this morning in front of the inn, who approaches without haste until he stops at a correct distance and, to my surprise, does not speak to Lianhua, he speaks to me.

“I apologize”, he tells me with an inclination of the head.

I lift my gaze toward him, surprised, because absolutely nothing occurs to me for which this man would have to apologize to me.

“Why?” I ask him.

“For the stop”, he answers me. “Normally, when we do this route, we stop at inns along the way and our passengers sleep under a roof and with a bed.”

He makes a brief pause and his expression becomes a bit more uncomfortable.

“But we were instructed that we had to get as far from the city as possible the first day”, he continues. “And to manage that we have had to go at a faster pace than we normally keep, so now we have been left between two inns and there is no way of reaching either of the two before it is full night.”

After his words, I understand his apology, and I also understand, along the way, quite a few things about this day that I had not quite fitted together. The fact that we have not stopped to eat, the fact that no one has gotten down to stretch their legs a single time.

All of that was not these people’s normal way of traveling, it was the result of an order that someone gave on our behalf such as, for example, my mother, or more probably, my father.

“We have no problem at all”, I tell him, and I make sure it shows in my voice that I mean it. “Truly. I can sleep on the road all the time that may be necessary, and if that means we put more distance between us and the city, then that is exactly what I want you to do.”

The man looks at me a moment, and I notice perfectly how he loses some of the tension he has.

It is a very small gesture, barely anything, but it is there, and it makes me realize that he has probably spent half a day turning over this moment, imagining the reaction of a passenger to whom no one has explained why she is going to sleep on the ground.

“I thank you”, he tells me. “Not everyone understands it as well.”

“I can imagine”, I answer him.

And taking advantage of the fact that we are already speaking, and above all taking advantage of the fact that this man seems disposed to treat me like a person instead of like a bundle that has to be transported from one place to another, I decide that it is about time to resolve a matter that has been bothering me since this morning.

“Since we are at it”, I tell him. “There is one thing I would like to ask you.”

“Go ahead”, he answers me.

“We are going to spend quite a lot of time together”, I tell him. “And I have spent the whole day without knowing what any of you are called, which, apart from turning out uncomfortable for me, means that in my head I have you all classified as the man with the horse or the woman from the small cart, so it would be good to know your names.”

The man listens, and then he smiles with a discomfort so evident that I almost feel sorry for him.

“Yes”, he tells me. “Yes, you are completely right, and I should have told you this morning.”

He passes a hand over the back of his neck.

“But with the haste of the departure it also didn’t seem a good idea to set about making introductions while the luggage had to be loaded and we had to reach the gate before a line formed”, he continues. “And afterward there has been no occasion.”

“Well, there is one now”, I tell him.

The man nods, turns a bit toward the clearing and begins to point with his chin as he speaks, with that naturalness of one accustomed to introducing people who are thirty paces away and occupied with something else.

“I am Chen Mo”, he begins. “I lead this caravan.”

He lifts his chin toward the man who is lighting the fire.

“That is Du Heng, who takes charge of the fire and the provisions”, he continues. “The one with the black horse is Pei Gang, who handles the animals and always goes in the first cart.”

He points toward the second merchandise cart, where a man considerably younger than the other three is untying a corner of the tarpaulin.

“And that is Luo Shi, who occupies himself with the cargo and with the accounts of the cargo, which are not the same thing even though they seem it”, he goes on explaining to me.

Afterward he turns a bit more and points toward the group of three women, who are taking things out of the small cart.

“Mei Ying is the one who has traveled with you today”, he says.

“I had already gotten the idea that she was the most talkative of them all”, I comment.

And Chen Mo lets out a brief and sincere laugh that rejuvenates his face by ten years.

“Mei Ying is the one who has done this route the most times”, he tells me. “And when I have traveled with her, I have heard barely three sentences, and that counting the ones from this morning.”

He lifts his chin again.

“The one taking the pots out of the cart is Qiu Yue”, he continues. “And the youngest, the one with the green kerchief, is Hong Xiu.”

And that’s it, that is the entire census of the people with whom I am going to share the road for who knows how many days.

Chen Mo, Du Heng, Pei Gang and Luo Shi. Mei Ying, Qiu Yue and Hong Xiu.

I repeat them once mentally in the same order in which he has given them to me so as to be able to pair them up better.

“Thank you very much”, I tell him. “Now I know who I am looking at.”

And then, while I look toward the fire that Du Heng has just managed to light, something occurs to me.

“Chen Mo”, I tell him. “Since we have begun to talk, I have a proposal to make.”

“I’m listening”, he tells me.

“One of my companions is a cook”, I tell him pointing at Xia with my head, who at that moment is crouched checking something inside the carriage and who therefore has not the least idea that I have just gotten her into this. “And she is good. I don’t say it out of courtesy, I say it because I have eaten her food for years and I know her cooking perfectly.”

Chen Mo turns toward Xia with his eyebrows raised.

“So if you provide the ingredients, she can prepare supper for everyone”, I continue. “For the seven of you and for the three of us.”

And what happens next is of an absolutely disarming honesty, because Chen Mo’s face lights up, but then he clears his throat, recomposes himself and adopts a considerably more formal tone.

“That would be a good idea”, he tells me, and the effort not to sound enthusiastic is almost moving. “We would be grateful to you.”

He makes a pause and adds, now with less ceremony.

“When we are on the road we usually eat travel rations”, he explains to me. “And if we are in a great hurry, like today, not even that, but rather we take Fasting Pills directly.”

Upon hearing him, unable to help it, I give a small start, because Fasting Pills have a very concrete place in my head, and that place is that of rare and expensive things.

The first time I heard of them was from my mother’s mouth, many years ago now, in a carriage and after having been unconscious for ten days, and she described them to me as something not very popular precisely because of what the alchemists charged to manufacture them.

The second time was on a road not very different from this one, from the mouth of a disciple of the Sect with the friendliness of a closed door, who explained to me that they carried them so as not to lose time cooking during missions.

And on both occasions I placed them mentally in the same package, the package of the things used by the Imperial Guard, by sect cultivators, and that the rest of the world never sees in their life.

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But it turns out that this man has just mentioned them exactly as a truck driver would mention a gas station sandwich, which means that at some point of my reasoning there is an error, and that that error consists of having deduced how an entire world works from the only two windows I have had to look through.

Upon realizing that I call myself quite a few things, all of them deserved, because any two-bit archaeologist knows that, if you excavate exclusively in royal tombs, you will end up concluding that everyone was buried with gold.

But I don’t say any of this aloud, evidently, because I have no reasonable way of explaining why the mention of a pill has provoked a crisis in me, so I limit myself to turning my head toward the carriage.

“Xia!” I call her.

Xia pokes her head out the little door instantly.

“Take out the cooking utensils”, I tell her. “You are going to make supper for everyone.”

“For everyone?” she asks as her face lights up.

“For everyone”, I confirm to her. “Ten people.”

And then she disappears inside the carriage with a noise she has no need whatsoever to make, comes out of it with her backpack hanging from her shoulder, crosses the clearing at a speed that would have made her deserving of a reprimand from Lianhua in any corridor of the Pavilion and plants the bundle on the ground, beside Du Heng’s bonfire, with the solemnity of a general installing his campaign tent.

From there she begins to take things out while Du Heng observes her deploy an entire set of kitchenware, and with the expression of a man who has seen many things on the roads but not exactly this.

Meanwhile, at my side, Chen Mo clears his throat.

“I apologize”, he tells me. “But I have to finish checking that everything is in order before it is full night.”

“I have not the slightest intention of interrupting your duties”, I answer him. “Occupy yourself with them, please. I am not going anywhere.”

Chen Mo takes his leave with an inclination of the head and goes off toward the carts, and I stay where I am, leaning against the wheel, with the blanket underneath and with an idea circling me for a good while now.

I lift my gaze toward Lianhua, who has positioned herself standing to my left at that exact point from which she can watch the entire clearing without turning her head, and I do my calculations.

Right now I am in the middle of a road, at a distance from the capital I don’t even know how to calculate, with seven carriers, two handmaidens and a bonfire.

And if a wild Disciple suddenly comes out from among the grass with the face of one carrying out a mission of the utmost importance, then frankly I no longer have much more to lose, because that would mean they have been following us from the beginning and that everything else made no difference.

So I make a gesture to her that I agreed with her long ago, and Lianhua simply nods and uses the technique of the Golden Chains of Ogma, so a golden line appears an instant later between the two of us.

And to my relief, only between the two of us, which means we are alone on this net.

“Lianhua”, I begin. “I have been wanting to ask you a question since this morning.”

“I’m listening, Zhāohuán Wen”, she answers me.

“The seal”, I tell her. “The jade seal you showed Chen Mo in front of the inn. Why did you have it?”

And there is no pause before the answer, which tells me that she has been waiting for this question all day.

“I took it out of your hand”, she answers me. “When I came in at night to check how you were, you had fallen asleep with it in your fist and it was digging into your side, so I put it away.”

“You could have left it on the little table”, I tell her.

“I could have”, she admits. “But first thing in the morning I came across Guifei Xiang in the corridor, and I took that opportunity to comment to her in private that I had it.”

“And what did she tell you?” I ask her.

“She explained to me what it was”, Lianhua answers me. “And afterward she told me that I should keep it until you asked me for it.”

And there she makes a very brief pause, that pause of hers that does not mean doubt but rather means that what comes next is literal.

“Her words were that she feared you might forget it”, she adds.

And I, leaning against a cart wheel in the middle of a road, with my face perfectly expressionless because there is no need to move a single muscle to speak through this technique, laugh inwardly with an urge I have not had in days.

Because of course she said that.

“My mother knows me too well”, I tell her.

Lianhua does not answer me, which almost means that she agrees with me, or with my mother, or perhaps with both.

And then, still smiling, I realize something else, because she has just called me Zhāohuán Wen, like this morning, like yesterday and like every day since I have memory.

“Lianhua”, I tell her. “There is something we have to fix.”

“Tell me”, she answers me.

“I am no longer the Zhāohuán”, I tell her. “That title stayed in the Pavilion along with the chair. Right now I am a thirteen-year-old girl who is traveling, and a thirteen-year-old girl who travels does not have that title.”

I make a pause.

“So you are going to have to start calling me by my name”, I conclude.

And Lianhua, with absolute seriousness, grants me the point.

“You are completely right”, she answers me. “It would be a grave error for someone to hear me use that title, and I thank you for pointing it out to me.”

And I am about to congratulate myself on how easy it has been, when she adds the following.

“From now on I will call you Xiaojie”, she tells me.

And I open my mouth to complain, but since I am not using my mouth I close it again, which leaves me without any recourse whatsoever to express what I feel at this moment.

“Lianhua”, I protest. “That is not my name.”

“No”, she concedes.

“It is a form of address”, I insist. “It is literally the same problem.”

“It is a form of address any servant would use with the daughter of a well-off family”, she answers me with an exasperating calm. “It draws no one’s attention and reveals absolutely nothing.”

And the worst of all is that she is right, and that she knows it.

“Even so…”, I begin, and then I notice that she is smiling.

“If you prefer it and it strikes you as better, I can call you Furen”, she tells me.

Those words make a shiver run through me.

“No”, I tell her immediately. “No, that is worse. That is much, much worse. For thirteen years I have heard Lingxi call my mother Furen, and if you call me that, every time you open your mouth I am going to feel as if I were my mother’s age.”

And I notice perfectly how Lianhua holds back a laugh, so I sigh as I accept the defeat that, if I am honest, was decided before the conversation began, because asking Lianhua to stop treating me with formality is more or less the same as trying to make a waterfall flow upward without using the Ascending Dragon.

“All right”, I tell her. “Xiaojie. But let the record show that I don’t like it.”

“I note your reluctance”, she answers me.

And a short and soundless guffaw escapes me, something that obliges me to lower my face a moment and pretend that I am arranging my skirt so that no one in the clearing wonders what the girl by the cart is laughing about on her own.

When I recompose myself, I return to the matter that truly matters.

“Lianhua, another thing”, I tell her. “The seal. When we finish having supper and can do it without anyone seeing us, give it back to me.”

“Do you want to carry it on you?” she asks me.

“I want to keep it in the little bag where I carry the jade tokens”, I answer her.

Lianhua nods a single time, without saying anything more.

And since she says nothing more, and since I have had the technique active longer than is necessary, I let the Qi go and the golden line goes out between the two of us so that I can devote myself, from that moment on, to watching Xia cook.

After a while, Xia straightens up, wipes her hands on her skirt and announces to the four winds that supper is ready.

And what happens next has quite a lot of a stampede about it, since the seven members of the caravan approach the fire with their own bowls, which had been ready for a while now, and Xia goes serving them one by one with the ladle while she maintains an expression of importance that I would like to see in some functionaries of the court.

Lianhua waits for them all to finish and then approaches, takes two bowls, comes back, sits at my side on the edge of the blanket and holds one out to me.

“Thank you”, I tell her.

And I take the first spoonfuls without saying absolutely anything, since it is a simple meal. Grain, vegetables, salted meat cut very thin and a base of something I don’t entirely identify. But it is hot, and after a day like today, that is practically a definition of happiness.

I am halfway through the bowl when I notice that someone is approaching, so I lift my gaze and there is Chen Mo, standing a few paces away, with his bowl in his hands and with the unmistakable attitude of one who has spent a while deciding whether to approach or not.

“If you don’t mind”, he tells me. “I would like to have a few words with you while we have supper.”

“There is no problem at all”, I answer him, and I point out to him the piece of blanket that is free. “Sit down.”

Chen Mo sits, not on top of the blanket but on the ground right beside it, with his legs crossed and the bowl resting on one knee, and for a couple of spoonfuls he says nothing.

“It is nothing serious”, he tells me at last. “I simply wanted to take the chance to give you some advice, if it interests you.”

“Any advice you want to give me is welcome”, I answer him without hesitating. “Right now I am in a situation in which I cannot permit myself the luxury of rejecting any kind of advice.”

Chen Mo nods, as if that were exactly the answer he expected, and begins.

“I don’t know the reason why you want to leave the Empire”, he tells me. “And I want to make clear from the beginning that I also don’t want to know it.”

He swallows a spoonful before continuing.

“In this job one transports a lot of people who don’t want to be where they were”, he adds. “And the day I begin asking why, it is probable that my bosses will decide that they can no longer trust me.”

“Yours strikes me as an excellent policy”, I tell him.

“It is”, he confirms to me. “But that doesn’t take away from the fact that one has eyes.”

And then he turns his head toward Lianhua, who is still seated at my side with her bowl and who doesn’t even blink upon noticing herself observed.

“Your handmaiden’s cultivation is more than sufficient”, he says. “With her at your side, in the Empire nothing is going to happen to you, and outside the Empire neither, provided you don’t get into where you shouldn’t.”

Afterward he looks at me again.

“But yours is not”, he tells me without any kind of roundabout. “For a journey like this and for a stay outside the borders, being simply at the beginning of the Gate Opening is insufficient. And it is even more so considering that you are carrying with you a girl who is still in the Body Tempering.”

And I listen to all of that while I take another spoonful, without changing my expression a millimeter, because the earrings are doing exactly what Master Mu designed them to do.

But at the same time, and out of pure curiosity, I do something I had not done until now with anyone and I use Sensing the Qi.

I concentrate my attention on him, let the perception settle and wait for the technique to return its information to me.

And what it returns makes me stop the spoon halfway, since the man I have seated a hand-span away, with a bowl of grain on his knee and his boots full of the dust of twelve hours of road, is not below Lianhua, he is at her level.

And not only that, but there is something in the density of what I perceive, something I wouldn’t know how to explain in words but that I notice just as one notices that an object is heavier than another without need of checking it, that tells me he is probably a point above.

Which means, without any doubt whatsoever, that Chen Mo is in the Condensation of the Elemental Cores, and that besides, very possibly, he already has one or more cores formed.

While I do all that calculation in the time it takes me to bring the spoon to my mouth, Chen Mo, absolutely oblivious to having just been audited, continues with his advice.

“That is why what I advise you is to hasten your cultivation as much as you can”, he tells me. “I don’t ask miracles of you, but if you manage to have at least one gate open, things change quite a bit.”

“Why one gate in particular?” I ask him.

“Because with one gate open you can already use techniques”, he answers me. “And someone who can use techniques can defend themselves. Maybe badly, maybe little, but they can.”

He leaves the bowl a moment on the ground.

“And the important thing is not what you may be able to do”, he adds. “The important thing is that others don’t know what you are capable of doing. A target that can respond and one isn’t sure with what stops being an easy target, and the majority of the people who dedicate themselves to that only look for easy targets.”

And there, after an instant, I ask the question that truly interests me.

“Is it so important not to seem defenseless once I am outside the Empire?” I ask him.

Chen Mo takes a while to answer, and he takes long enough that I have time to understand that he does not like the answer, and when he finally speaks, he does so with a care he had not used until now.

“In the cities there is always someone in charge of maintaining order”, he tells me. “A guard, a strong family, a sect with interests in the zone, whatever it may be. In the cities, normally, a problem has someone to resolve it.”

He makes a pause.

“But you have your special circumstances”, he continues as he lowers his gaze toward my legs.

It is an instant, nothing more, and there is neither pity nor morbid curiosity in that gesture, it is simply a man pointing out a fact in the most economical manner possible before lifting his gaze again.

“It is almost certain that you are going to come across people who decide that those circumstances give them free rein”, he finishes. “And I don’t refer only to the roads, but I also refer to innkeepers who charge you triple, to merchants who give you short change because they know you are not going to go after them, and to other things considerably worse that I don’t need to detail for you.”

He picks up the bowl again.

“And against that there is no guard that serves”, he concludes. “There are only two things that work, one is to have someone behind you who frightens people, and that one you already have. The other is to have yourself a level of cultivation that makes many think twice before attempting it.”

And I listen to all of that, let a few seconds pass and sigh because the popular wisdom of my old world does not lie.

I spent a considerable part of my adolescence reading stories in which a handful of people obtained powers and in which, immediately afterward, there appeared someone disposed to use them to do harm, and for a long time it struck me as a narrative convention, a comfortable excuse for having someone to punch on page twelve.

But unfortunately I know it was not a narrative convention, it is the result of a statistic, because when a sufficiently broad group of people gains power, there is no need for any of them to be evil in the grandiose sense of the word, but rather it suffices that there exist the same percentage of imbeciles, of bullies and of swindlers that exists in any human group of that size, only that that percentage has discovered that now their imbecilities have much greater reach.

Supervillains do not appear because the world is unjust, they appear because they are inevitable, so with that idea perfectly settled in my head, I leave the bowl on the ground, to my right, and bring both hands to my ears.

And while I have my fingers there, thinking, I tell myself that the earrings protect a secret that until now only brought me problems.

But if during this journey someone decides that the girl who cannot walk is an opportunity, then the secret is no longer going to serve any purpose, because at that point the problem will no longer be that they discover my level of cultivation, but that they will be trying to act precisely because I maintain that secret.

So without hesitating further, I take off the earrings and stay looking at them in the palm of my hand.

They are minuscule. Two pieces of silvery metal with a pearl each, the type of jewel any handmaiden could wear without anyone dedicating a second look to her, and that was always the idea.

But for me, in that palm, there are not two earrings, there are months of classes with Master Mu, there is a finger touching my chest and telling me that I already had my dantian formed, and there are three years of a cultivation I should not have been able to have and that I have only been able to have because that woman decided to give me an artifact she said she had lying around somewhere.

Of course, as if something so concrete for my situation were going to appear out of nowhere.

I look at them a moment longer and afterward, with all the tranquility in the world, I put them back on despite knowing that they are no longer going to work again.

And the moment I finish, I lift my gaze to look around me, so I realize that Lianhua is looking at me.

She has said nothing, she has not moved and she still has the bowl in her hands, but there is something in the way she has inclined her head that tells me she approves of my decision.

And Xia, who is crouched beside the fire with the ladle still in her hand, looks at me with her eyes like saucers and her mouth slightly open, because she does know perfectly what I have just done.

Afterward I look at Chen Mo, who has watched my maneuver with curiosity and a certain confusion, but who, clearly, has still not realized anything.

And then I smile openly and without dissimulation, with a smile I have not shown to anyone outside my Pavilion in thirteen years while I use the Myriad of Hands.

The bowl I had left on the ground rises and comes toward me while the cup of tea they served me a moment ago lifts from the blanket and remains suspended at a comfortable height for drinking.

While I do this, I notice the exact moment in which Chen Mo’s eyes open in surprise, and how they pass from the bowls to the cup and from the cup to my face while his hand stays still halfway to his own bowl, and I see, above all, how all the tranquil assurance he had as the man who had spent ten minutes explaining the world to a kid is erased from him all at once.

And taking advantage of that silence, I tilt my head a bit as I smile at him.

“Does this level of cultivation strike you as sufficient?” I ask him kindly.