Chapter 185

Lin Quingyu looks at me after I ask her the question and, once again, instead of seeming bothered by the question, she simply settles herself in her chair before answering me.

“You”, she answers me. “You can write them with whatever detail you feel like. You can authorize someone to withdraw funds up to a certain amount. You can authorize them to collect documents and not to sign anything. You can authorize them for a single day. We are not going to dispute the content with you, we only check the seal.”

And I stay silent a moment, because she has just described to me the equivalent of a power of attorney, and she has described it in four sentences and without giving it the least importance.

“Well it certainly is easy, yes”, I tell her.

Then I move on to the question I have spent two weeks avoiding asking myself aloud.

“Second inquiry”, I tell her. “How much money does the House of the Long Journey have available right now?”

And Lin Quingyu, instead of looking for a book or calling anyone, extends her hand toward her right and rests it on top of that cube of pale stone that I have spent half an hour mentally cataloguing as a paperweight, and after doing so the cube lights up.

Upon seeing that, I forget about my money for a few seconds, because what appears on the faces of that cube that I can see is the most complex grouping of runes I have seen in my life.

And I don’t say it just to say it. I have had Master Mu’s earrings in front of me, I have had the diagrams of the pyramid’s formation in front of me, and I have spent the last year with my nose stuck in the Shangshu’s books. And this does not resemble any of that.

There are circles, which is proper to an enchantment, but they do not surround anything. And there are closed geometric figures, which is proper to a formation, except that they are inside the circles and not the other way around.

That is to say, it has elements of two disciplines at once, and the sensation of being in front of something I don’t understand, knowing that I could understand it if I knew more, is, without any doubt, the best thing that has happened to me today.

“Your currently available funds are seventy-three spirit stones”, Lin Quingyu tells me after a few moments.

And I take my eyes off the cube upon hearing the figure.

“Seventy-three?” I ask her.

“Seventy-three”, she confirms to me.

I say nothing for a second, and that second becomes fairly long for me because I came with a figure in my head, and that figure was larger.

Not much larger, because I have spent months telling myself not to get my hopes up, but certainly larger than seventy-three, and right now I am doing the calculation of what the Sect’s tablets cost me and a fairly depressing comparison is coming out.

So I ask the question with all the care of which I am capable, because I want information and I don’t want to sound like a girl complaining.

“Lin Quingyu”, I tell her. “Does that mean my inventions sell poorly?”

And she raises her eyebrows.

“Poorly?” she asks me. “No. On the contrary, they sell very well. Above all the mop, the abacus and the games.”

“Then I don’t understand it”, I tell her.

“You understand it perfectly”, she answers me. “What happens is that you have not yet done the math.”

And she rests a finger on the table.

“Tell me one thing”, she tells me. “How much is a mop worth?”

“Little”, I answer her. “That was the idea.”

“Very little indeed”, she confirms to me. “And that was an excellent decision, I tell you truly, because it is exactly because of that that so many are sold. But it is impossible to sell a mop for a spirit stone, so however many we may sell to the shops or middlemen who buy them from us, the price never comes to scale that much.”

She leans back.

“So those seventy-three stones are not the result of a good deal”, she continues. “They are the result of thousands of small sales, one by one, over a couple of years, and of going about gathering all that small change until converting it into something more tangible.”

And I close my mouth, because I have just felt fairly idiotic.

Because that I knew. That I knew perfectly, and I knew it because I decided it. I was the one who spent months insisting that an invention only four nobles can afford is of no use at all, and the one who chose hemp instead of metal knowing perfectly well that hemp breaks sooner, and the one who said aloud that I wanted any handmaiden of a modest house to be able to buy it.

“And there are two more things you should know”, Lin Quingyu continues, who fortunately does not seem to have noticed how long I have been silent.

“Tell me”, I say so that she continues.

“The first is that the market for those products is still spreading”, she tells me. “Until now they have been sold on this continent, but distribution to the rest is being prepared, and when that happens the figure is not going to grow a little, it is going to change scale.”

“And the second?” I ask her.

“The printing press”, she answers me.

And there she makes a pause I don’t like at all.

“Of the printing press, two licenses of use have been granted in total”, she tells me. “Only two.”

“Only two?” I ask her.

“Only two”, she confirms to me. “And not because we don’t want to grant more, but because convincing a possible client is devilishly difficult.”

And here, for the first time, I notice that there is a point of professional annoyance in her voice, and it is an annoyance I recognize perfectly because it is that of someone who knows they have a good thing in their hands and cannot manage to place it.

“The problem is that one has to explain to them what it does”, she continues. “And when you tell them that it is a machine that copies books, the client does the math of what a copyist costs them. And they work out that a copyist is cheaper, so they look at the price of the license and leave.”

She shrugs her shoulders.

“What they don’t see is the second calculation”, she finishes. “Which is that with that machine they don’t make one cheaper book, they make a thousand cheaper books. And until they have seen the thousand books, there is no humanly possible way for them to understand what they would want them for.”

I listen to that and an internal laugh comes over me that I don’t let out, since that problem, in the Empire, I solved by presenting the Emperor with a book in front of the entire court as a gift.

But right now, outside the empire, I cannot do that, so clearly my inventions are in a promotional phase, a phase in which one devotes oneself to building a market that does not yet exist.

And expecting an explosion of riches in that phase is not optimism, it is believing in miracles, so I let the air out.

“Agreed”, I tell her. “I have understood it, and I thank you for having explained it to me.”

“It is my job”, she answers me.

“Then let us go to the practical part”, I tell her. “I would like to withdraw fifty of those spirit stones, if it is possible.”

“It is perfectly possible”, she answers me.

And she rests her hand on the cube again, which lights up once more, and this time she leaves it there a longer while as she looks at one of the faces.

Afterward she withdraws it.

“They will bring them to you right away”, she tells me.

And then she joins her hands.

“Any more questions?” she asks me.

Yes, there is one more, and I have left it for last on purpose, because I have spent years without knowing exactly what I have, so I put my hand in the bag, rummage among the jade tokens, take out the one I want and send it to the table.

And the token crosses the air and alights in front of her with a very soft little tap.

“Someone handed me that a few years ago”, I tell her. “They told me it was in my name and that it would guarantee me the best treatment in any relationship I had with the Tower of the Five Dragons. And until today I have had no way of checking whether that was true or whether it was a kind way of saying goodbye.”

Lin Quingyu looks at the token, and there, for the first time in the whole conversation, the professionalism leaves her face, because she picks it up, puts it in her palm, closes her fingers over it without quite squeezing and stays absolutely still for three or four seconds with her eyes at mid-height, evidently concentrating on the token.

And when she finishes, the surprise she had at the beginning has clearly multiplied, since afterward she opens her hand and leaves the token on the table very slowly, first looking for a piece of table that is empty and placing it on top with the same care with which one sets down an egg, and that gesture tells me more about that token than any explanation.

“Do you know who gave you this?” she asks me.

“I know”, I answer her, and I say nothing more.

Lin Quingyu looks at me a second, decides not to ask, and that is the exact moment at which this woman finishes winning me over.

“Very well”, she tells me, and she breathes. “I will explain to you what you can do with it, because you can do two things and they are fairly different.”

She raises a finger.

“The first is to use it just as it is”, she tells me. “By showing it, you obtain a fifth off any transaction you carry out with the Tower of the Five Dragons. Any one at all, at any branch on the five continents and without limit of amount.”

I open my mouth, but she goes on.

“Now the drawback”, she continues. “And it is that it is not transferable. The token is tied to you, so that discount is only applied if it is you who carries out the transaction in person. It is no use for another person to bring it with a letter from you, nor is it any use to send it with your handmaiden. You have to be present.”

I close my mouth again, because that greatly limits the use of the token for frequent use.

“The second option is the interesting one”, she tells me.

“I’m listening”, I answer her.

“You are the proprietor of a commercial company associated with the Tower”, she tells me. “That means you can fuse that company’s seal with the token’s privileges.”

She raises two fingers.

“And if you do it, two things happen”, she continues. “The first is that the House of the Long Journey stops receiving a fifth of the profits of its inventions and goes on to receive a fourth.”

I stay very still when I hear that advantage.

“The second is that the discount goes down”, she tells me. “The purchases and sales made to the Tower in that company’s name would have a tenth part instead of a fifth.”

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She lowers her hand.

“But in exchange, that tenth part stops depending on you”, she finishes. “It goes with the seal, and since the company’s tasks can indeed be delegated by means of a letter of authorization, any person you send could buy, sell and carry out any other procedure with that discount applied, wherever you may be.”

After that explanation, she falls silent and does not add any recommendation, nor any tag line, nor any of those phrases people add when they want you to choose a concrete option.

She simply lets me decide.

And I stay thinking, but not much, because the moment I finish listening to the second option I already have it fairly clear, and I only stay silent for the while it takes to check that I am not missing anything out of haste.

But I already have the decision practically made, since those extra points on the profits are applied to a figure that today is small, but that is small because we are in the promotional phase, and this woman has just told me, in great detail, that distribution to the rest of the continents is being prepared.

So the question is not how much those points are worth today, the question is how much they are going to be worth in ten, or fifty years, which is an amount of time that in this world, with people living as long as they live, is practically nothing.

“I want to fuse them”, I tell her.

Lin Quingyu nods at my words.

“It is a good decision”, she answers me. “Above all thinking long term.”

And then she extends her hand.

“But for that I am going to need you to hand me the seal and the token for a while”, she tells me. “Because the modifications have to be made on the seal.”

After hearing her, without hesitating half a second I make the Jade Seal float from my lap to the table and set it down beside the token.

And at that precise moment there is a knock at the door.

“Come in”, says Lin Quingyu.

After giving permission, there enters a man of about thirty, with the Tower’s uniform and a cloth bag in his hand, who crosses the room, leaves the bag on top of the table making a noise that sounds like glory to me and turns around.

“Wait”, Lin Quingyu tells him.

The man stops.

“I have an errand”, she tells him.

And she takes a small sheet, writes four lines, folds it, takes a little cloth pouch with a cord out of a drawer, puts the seal and the token inside, closes it and holds out the two things to him.

“To the fourth floor”, she tells him. “And you wait for the answer.”

The man takes the note and the little pouch, makes an inclination and leaves, closing the door behind him.

After that, Lin Quingyu turns toward me.

“Now we will have to wait a while until they return the modified seal”, she tells me. “So if you have more questions, this is the moment to ask them.”

I take a few seconds, because I have about forty and because I have to order them by urgency and not by curiosity, which is not the same thing.

“I have two”, I tell her at last. “And the first is the most urgent one I have today.”

“Tell me”, she says.

“I need a place to sleep tonight”, I tell her. “Something temporary, only until I can find a more permanent place. And I would be extremely grateful if you recommended one to me yourself, because I don’t know this city.”

Lin Quingyu answers immediately, without thinking about it.

“There is one in this very plaza”, she tells me.

“In this plaza?” I ask her.

“On the north side there is a lodging house that is affiliated with us and that has an agreement to lodge our visitors”, she answers me. “It is not cheap, but it is clean, it is safe and they are not going to overcharge you, because the day they overcharged someone who comes from this building their agreement would be finished that very afternoon.”

After those words, she makes a pause.

“And it has a second advantage that will probably interest you”, she adds. “Which is that it is less than two hundred paces from this building.”

I stay silent an instant, because I did not expect that she had taken my problems into consideration.

“I thank you”, I tell her, and I mean it.

“And the second question?” she says to me.

“The second is larger”, I answer her. “And it is that I need someone to tell me how this city works. And I am not talking to you about curiosities nor about pretty places. I am talking about who commands, which neighborhoods are avoided, to whom one does not raise one’s voice and what things that in my Empire would be a rudeness are here an insult.”

I make a pause before continuing.

“Because I have to live here”, I finish. “And I would like not to commit a grave error the first week.”

And Lin Quingyu, faced with that, joins her hands and looks at me with a bit of pity.

“That information exists, it is in writing and it is updated”, she tells me. “And it has a cost of five spirit stones, which can be debited directly from your company’s funds.”

I let out a sigh at her words because I was expecting it.

Chen Mo told me so on the deck of the ship this very morning, with a smile that kept widening as he told me.

But then I think about the alternative, which is to learn this city on the basis of putting my foot in it, and about what it costs to correct certain mistakes.

“Debit them”, I tell her.

Lin Quingyu nods, and does not make any comment or any gesture of approval, something I am grateful for.

“The written guide will reach you”, she tells me. “It is long and has far more detail than I can give you from memory.”

She settles herself.

“But since we have to wait anyway, I am going to tell you the essentials right now”, she continues. “And the essentials come down to two things. What the people of this city are like and who commands in it.”

I position myself well in the chair, rest my forearms on the armrests and prepare myself to listen, because this is exactly what I have come to buy.

“Sanjiang is a city of cultivators”, she begins. “And I don’t say it as a manner of speaking, I say it literally. It is built by cultivators and for cultivators, and everything else came afterward.”

“But there must be ordinary people”, I tell her.

“A great many”, she answers me. “The immense majority, in fact. There are hundreds of thousands of people in this city who do not consider themselves cultivators, and they would tell you they are not if you asked them in the street.”

She raises a finger.

“But they all have some cultivation, just as in your Empire and just as everywhere”, she tells me. “The difference is that here the bar is considerably higher. The majority have not finished the Body Tempering, that is true, but the most advanced of that group even have one or two gates open.”

And I keep that sentence, because one or two gates open, in the Empire that was a full-fledged cultivator, and here it can be any shopkeeper at all.

Or an innkeeper, although with those one never knows whether to pay attention to the clichés of my world.

“And then there are the sects”, she continues. “And this is where you have to pay attention, because it is probably from the sects that problems will come to you if you have any.”

“I’m listening”, I tell her.

“This city is governed by three”, she tells me. “And I am going to tell you first the fact that will serve you for everything else, which is the ceiling. The elites of those three sects are, at most, in the Refinement of the Elemental Body.”

Here she makes a pause to see whether that tells me anything, and it tells me a great deal, but I keep it to myself.

“And that means their normal disciples will be fairly far below”, I continue for her.

“Exactly”, she confirms to me. “Most of the outer disciples are around the Condensation of the Elemental Cores. And the inner ones, in general, around the Harmonization. That is the range in which almost everyone who crosses paths with you wearing a sect’s emblem is going to move.”

And to me, while I listen to that, something crosses my mind that I don’t intend to say aloud, and it is that my handmaiden finished condensing an elemental core eleven nights ago.

“The three sects are the following”, she tells me.

And she raises a finger.

“The Sect of the Autumn Waters Sword”, she tells me. “Orthodox and of swordsmen. Nothing but swordsmen, and very proud that it is nothing but that.”

She raises the second.

“The Sect of the Jade Dew”, she continues. “Also orthodox. Alchemists and herbalists.”

And she raises the third.

“And the Sect of the Nine Currents”, she finishes. “Which is, by an enormous difference, the largest of the three. It has representation of all the immortal arts except alchemy and herbalism, because that is the Jade Dew’s competence and that distribution has been established for a long time.”

I nod slowly after hearing her, because that, translated into a language I understand, is a cartel.

Three organizations that divide up a territory and that besides have divided up the disciplines so as not to step on one another, and the fact that that third one expressly renounces an entire sector means that there is an old agreement, written or not, that the three find more profitable to respect than to break.

“And what are they like?” I ask her.

“What are they like in what sense?” she asks me.

“In dealing with them”, I answer her. “You have spent years here and you have had to attend to all three. If tomorrow I cross paths with one in the street, what is it advisable for me to know?”

And Lin Quingyu, faced with that question, smiles again.

“That is exactly the correct question”, she tells me. “And it is the one almost no one asks.”

She settles herself before answering me.

“Those of the Autumn Waters Sword are the most tranquil of the three”, she tells me. “They don’t usually look for problems, they don’t usually raise their voices and, if you don’t touch their sword nor talk to them about swordsmanship as if you knew something about it, you are not going to have a single incident with them in your life.”

She raises the second finger.

“Those of the Jade Dew are the most arrogant”, she continues. “And I don’t say it out of antipathy, I say it because it is a fact known by everyone in this city. They take enormous pride in being alchemists, and there is a part of them that takes too much pride.”

“And how does that manifest?” I ask her.

“In that they take for granted that something is owed to them”, she answers me. “Because they make the pills everyone needs, and there are those who conclude that, because of that, the rest of the world is permanently in debt to them. If you have to deal with one, address them formally, don’t argue about alchemy and never correct them in public.”

And she raises the third.

“Those of the Nine Currents are unpredictable”, she finishes. “And not because they are strange, but because they are too many. When a sect is that large, there is no way for all its disciples to resemble one another, so there everything depends exclusively on the character of the person you happen to get. I have come across the most polite people in this city and the most disgraceful, and the two of them wore the same emblem.”

I listen to all that and realize that she has just given me, in three sentences, something worth considerably more than five stones, because she has just told me with whom I can relax, with whom I have to measure my words and with whom I can predict nothing.

“And about the city itself”, I tell her, “what do I have to know?”

“The size”, she answers me immediately.

“The size?” I repeat the question.

“The size”, she confirms to me. “Because it is what most disorients those who arrive from places like your old home.”

She turns a bit toward the window.

“Sanjiang is crossed by the Miao River, which is the one that has brought you here”, she tells me. “And near the center of the city, the Miao joins with two of its tributaries, the Xun and the Rong. That is where the name comes from.”

“The Miao is about forty Li wide”, she continues. “The Xun is about twenty. And the Rong is the smallest, at about fourteen.”

“And how many people live here?” I ask her, and my voice comes out a bit strange.

“There is no census”, she answers me. “No one has ever counted this city and no one is going to. But the estimate we use, and we use it because we need it for our work, is a couple of million people.”

And I stay silent at the figure, a couple of million.

In my other life, that was not a large city, that was an enormous city. And here, without modern sewers, without trains, without absolutely anything I would take for granted, there are two million people living on top of three rivers.

That makes me remember what I thought from the deck of the ship, when I had spent an hour looking at buildings and the docks had still not appeared.

And it turns out I fell short.

“And then there is the last group of cultivators, which I did not include in your previous question because they don’t belong to any of the Sects”, Lin Quingyu says.

“Tell me”, I answer her.

“The first are the local forces”, she tells me. “Families from here who have some relative with a high rank in one of the three sects. They don’t command in the city, not by a long shot, but they command on their street. And some of them, near their ancestral houses, behave like petty tyrants.”

“And nobody does anything?” I ask her.

“As long as they don’t overstep, no”, she answers me. “And they know perfectly well where the line is.”

She raises her hand.

“And the second group are the wandering cultivators”, she tells me. “And of those there is an enormous quantity, because this city is a center of commerce and the wandering ones go where the money goes. Some live here permanently, others spend a season, others are passing through and finally there are those who have come expressly to do business.”

She shrugs her shoulders as she lowers her hand.

“And about that group I can tell you absolutely nothing useful, because one cannot generalize”, she finishes. “In that group there is everyone from people who have not finished the Body Tempering to people whom it would not suit you to look at twice, and they wear no emblem to tell you.”

I keep that last sentence because it is the one that truly matters to me, since I am, formally and for the last two months, exactly that.

A wandering cultivator.

That is to say, that the category into which I have just been put is the only one in this city about which nothing can be said, and I cannot manage to decide whether that protects me or leaves me completely exposed.

I am in the middle of that thought when there is another knock at the door.

“Come in”, says Lin Quingyu, interrupting herself mid-discourse.

The door opens and the same man as before comes in with the same little cloth pouch, which he holds out to her over the table.

Lin Quingyu takes it, opens it and takes out the seal, looks at it fixedly, turning it between her fingers, searching the base and the four faces, for considerably longer than I expected.

Afterward she takes a blank sheet, wets the seal and uses it.

After doing so, she rests two fingers on top of the impression exactly as she did before, leaves them there a moment and separates them while she nods to herself.

Next she does something I did not expect at all, which is that she lets go of the seal, but the seal does not fall, but rather stays floating a handspan above the table, crosses the air slowly and comes directly toward me, and I catch it out of the air with both hands out of pure reflex.

“Does that surprise you?” she asks me.

“A little”, I confess to her.

“I work with papers all day”, she answers me, and she shrugs her shoulders. “It is useful.”

And with that she considers the meeting concluded, because she takes the pile of papers she had half-finished before we came in and puts it in the center of the table.

“And now, if you will excuse me, it turns out that with everything you have brought me today I have a great deal of work to do”, she tells me. “Two inventions to send for review, a contract to modify and a distribution of income to draft in such a way that no one finds out who shouldn’t.”

Next she points at the man, who is still standing beside the door.

“Wei Chun will accompany you to the lodging house”, she tells me. “He will see to it that they know who you are. And he will besides hand you the written guide to the city, which is the one you have paid for and which has, I assure you, far more details than I have been able to give you here from memory.”

And I, faced with that, make the most courteous inclination I can make from a chair, which after years of practice is fairly courteous.

“I thank you for your time”, I tell her. “And I thank you especially for having explained things to me instead of dispatching me.”

“It is my job”, she answers me again.

“Right”, I tell her. “Well I assure you I have known a great many people who had that same job and who did not do it.”

And then I add what I truly want to leave said before going out that door.

“And one last thing”, I tell her. “As soon as I am settled, I am going to come back.”

Lin Quingyu lifts her gaze.

“Not to ask how the papers are going”, I continue. “I am going to come back to talk about what else the House of the Long Journey and the Tower of the Five Dragons can do together.”

Lin Quingyu stays looking at me a second and then takes up the brush.

“Then I will be waiting”, she tells me.

And with that we take our leave.

Xia gets to her feet with a leap and throws the backpack over her shoulder. Lianhua gets up, places the chair against the wall in the exact spot from which she took it, and afterward, before positioning herself behind me, reaches out her hand and takes from on top of the table the cloth bag with the fifty spirit stones, which she puts away without saying absolutely anything and without anyone having asked her to.

And after that, we follow Wei Chun’s figure out of Lin Quingyu’s office.