Chapter 206

For a few seconds, neither of us says anything.

Master Shi keeps stroking his beard while, around us, the vestibule fills up with murmurs again, now that there is no longer any Master Qin to cut them short.

Finally he takes his hand away from his beard.

“Follow me”, he tells me.

And without waiting for me to answer, he turns around and heads down one of the corridors leading off the vestibule, which isn’t the same one Master Qin left by, and that, for lack of more information, already strikes me as a good start.

I give Lianhua a sign, and she needs nothing more, because before I lower my hand the chair sets off after Master Shi with the speed of someone who has no intention of losing sight of him. Xia starts moving an instant later, glued to my right, and the audience steps aside to let us through with the same discipline with which it stepped aside for him earlier.

Behind us, I notice the murmuring doesn’t die down. On the contrary, as soon as we enter the corridor it grows louder, as happens in any theater when the actors leave the stage and the audience can finally discuss the performance to their heart’s content.

The corridor is long, low-ceilinged like the vestibule and with the same gray flagstone floor. Doors open off it on either side, some closed and others ajar, and through the ones that are ajar I see rooms with long tables and shelves full of paper scrolls, and people who look up as soon as they hear the wheels.

Master Shi doesn’t look at us even once as he turns left at the end of the corridor, then right, then left again, and keeps walking at the same calm pace with which he crossed the vestibule, as if he knew perfectly well that we are behind him and didn’t need to check.

And I, just in case, commit every turn to memory.

It isn’t that I distrust him, but ever since I opened the Yin Gate, memorizing a route costs me the same as looking at it, and one of the few things I have learned in this life that serves me anywhere is that you never know when you will have to go back alone along a route someone has guided you down.

From the square, the building seemed wide, but not that deep. And yet we keep going, corridor after corridor, further and further into the interior of the guild, with fewer and fewer people and more and more closed doors until, finally, Master Shi stops in front of a dark wooden door, opens it and steps aside to let us through.

The room is spacious, considerably more so than any of the ones I have seen along the way, and it is practically empty.

There are no tables or chairs, only cabinets. Several of them, all identical, of dark wood and with their doors closed, set against the walls and spread around the entire room, as if someone had wanted to keep the center clear at all costs.

And the center is indeed clear, plainly showing that the floor is pale stone, but so smooth that the light reflects off it. And it isn’t the shine of something new but the shine of things that have been rubbed so many times that not a single rough spot is left on them, like the steps of the old churches of my other life, or a doorknob everyone touches on the way past.

Lianhua leaves me a few paces from the entrance and brakes the chair, Xia stays beside me, and Master Shi walks to the center of the room, turns around and clasps his hands behind his back.

“Normally, the guild entrance exam also includes a written test”, he tells me.

He pauses briefly.

“But you claim to be capable of creating six-vertex formations”, he continues. “So I have decided that, if you truly are capable of creating one, that alone is enough for the exam to be considered passed.”

I nod after hearing him, and then, without being able to help it, I lower my gaze to the stone floor, and at that moment I feel a shiver run through me, because I carved the formation at my house into wood, and even so I spent the entire morning carving.

But stone is another matter, and this particular kind, from the way it shines, doesn’t seem like the sort that lets itself be carved easily.

“Master Shi”, I tell him, and my voice comes out somewhat less firm than I would like. “I don’t know whether my techniques will allow me to carve a formation into stone.”

Master Shi stares at me for a moment, and then he laughs.

It isn’t a mocking laugh, like those snorts of laughter in the vestibule, but the short, sincere laugh of someone who has just been told something he didn’t expect to hear.

“Do you really think that, considering the space they take up, the time it takes to carve them and what each formation costs, we would require every person who wants to earn the certificate to carve one?” he asks me.

My mind goes blank for a second after his words, because put that way it is obvious.

A room like the one we are in, taken up for half a day by each applicant, the floor torn up with grooves after every exam along with a fortune in formation ink spent in those grooves, and all of it only to have to replace the entire floor before the next exam.

No guild could afford it, however rich it might be, but if it isn’t carved, I can’t think how it could be done.

“If that isn’t what’s required”, I ask him. “Then how is the formation done?”

Master Shi doesn’t answer me with words. Instead, he goes to one of the cabinets, opens one of its doors and takes out two things, which he shows me by raising them to the height of my eyes.

A brush and a jar of ink, which I stare at.

“Examinees are simply asked to draw the circle with an ink specially prepared to simulate the effect of the formation”, he tells me.

He sets the jar on top of the cabinet and smiles at me.

“Which, incidentally, also adds a difficulty to the exam”, he adds. “Because examinees have to be very careful not to smudge their own strokes as they go around the room drawing the formation.”

I look at the floor again after hearing him.

The stone, polished to a shine and without a single mark, has spent years, perhaps centuries, enduring a cycle in which every few days an applicant goes around the room drawing a complete formation in ink so that, shortly afterward, someone cleans it off and the next one starts over. That is how it has ended up the way it is now.

It isn’t a floor; it is a blackboard.

I look up at Master Shi, and this time my voice comes out firm.

“If that is the only problem, I can take the exam perfectly well”, I tell him.

I pause briefly.

“Although, apart from the ink and the brush, I am going to need one more item to be able to do it”, I add.

Master Shi raises an eyebrow, and for the first time since we met, he has the face of an examiner.

“What do you need?” he asks me. “And I warn you that anything too complicated would make you fail the exam outright.”

“It’s nothing unusual”, I reply. “I only need a rope of…”

And there I stop, because I don’t know the length, and I realize I have to calculate it right now.

My reach with the Myriad of Hands is eight Chi, so everything I have to draw with it has to fit within those eight Chi. And if I leave some margin, so as not to have to stretch the hands right to the limit with every rune on the edge, the circle should have a radius of seven Chi.

And a hexagon inside a circle has a property that in my other life was taught at school and that almost everyone forgot as soon as they left, which is that each of its sides measures exactly the same as the radius.

So six sides of seven Chi each.

“Of forty-two Chi”, I finish.

Master Shi blinks.

“That is a very long rope”, he tells me.

“It is”, I confirm. “If I had to carve the formation, I would use a much shorter rope and a perfectly straight board. But if what I have to do is draw it, a rope of that length is much more useful to me.”

I don’t explain why, and he doesn’t ask me either, although I am perfectly clear about it.

Because a board has to be placed side by side, lifting it and setting it down again, and on a floor full of fresh ink that is the best way to do exactly what Master Shi has just told me not to do.

Master Shi stays thoughtful, with two fingers on his beard again, and I can almost see him mentally going over some regulation that no one ever wrote with someone like me in mind.

“An ordinary rope, however long it may be, can’t be considered a tool that would cause an exam to be failed”, he says at last, although he says it more to himself than to me.

Then he nods just once.

“Wait here a moment”, he tells me. “I will go request it. There is bound to be one somewhere in the guild.”

And after those words he leaves the room, leaving the three of us alone, so for a moment none of us says anything.

“Forty-two Chi?” Xia asks me afterward, in a low voice, as if Master Shi could hear her from the corridor. “And what do you want such a long rope for if the circle is much smaller?”

“You’ll see”, I reply.

Xia frowns, because she never likes that answer, but she doesn’t insist as I release the brake, close my hands around the rims and push.

The chair rolls toward the center of the room, or toward what seems to me to be the center, because from my height, and with the floor shining like this, there is no mark to tell me, so I go by the cabinets, count how many there are on each side and brake when it seems to me there are more or less the same.

A quiet note: the author posts this chapter on NovelPhoenix, while this page reproduces it without consent; the source supports their work.

And since I know I am going to have to turn on the spot during the exam, I start practicing that movement.

I push the left rim forward and pull the right one back, and the chair turns on the spot. But it doesn’t turn cleanly, because when I finish the turn I am not exactly where I was when I started, but a little further to the right, so I reposition myself and try again, more slowly.

So I turn, correct myself and turn again. To one side, and then to the other. A half turn, a quarter turn, a full one. And little by little I learn how much I have to push one rim and how much to pull the other for the chair to turn in place without moving from it, since until now I hadn’t needed to do that.

Lianhua watches me from the door without saying anything, with her hands folded in front of her.

Xia, on the other hand, holds out in silence for a while, which for her is already a considerable effort, and then tilts her head.

“Don’t you get dizzy?” she asks me.

“Not yet”, I reply, and keep turning.

I don’t have to wait long anyway, because after a while the door opens again.

Master Shi comes in, and behind him comes a young-looking man in a plain robe with no embroidery on the sleeves who, judging by how he stays half a step behind Master Shi and how he looks at the floor before stepping on it, must be a low-ranking member of the guild. Over his shoulder he carries a coil of rope so thick that it hides half his face.

“Where would you like it?” Master Shi asks me.

“Next to my chair, please”, I reply.

The man crosses the room, sets the coil on the floor beside my right wheel, and as he does, he glances at me sidelong. At me, at the chair, at me again, and at my hands, which are still resting on the rims, as if trying to work out what on earth I could want a fourteen-meter rope for.

But after setting down the rope he straightens up, bows his head to Master Shi and leaves the room, and before going through the door he still throws me one last look over his shoulder.

Master Shi turns to me once the man has gone.

“Your handmaidens also have to leave”, he tells me. “No assistants are allowed during the exam.”

It is reasonable, so I don’t protest.

“Lianhua, Xia”, I tell them. “Wait outside, please.”

Xia nods and leaves without further ado, although she turns around twice before reaching the door. Lianhua, on the other hand, looks at me first, and I return her look and nod, because I know perfectly well what she is asking me.

Only then does she leave too, closing the door behind her, so Master Shi and I are left alone in the room.

“Well”, he tells me. “How do you intend to do it?”

“The first thing is that I need to have the ink jars within eight Chi of me”, I reply.

“That is no problem at all”, he tells me.

He goes back to the same cabinet as before and takes out several more jars, identical to the first, and stands holding them, looking at me, waiting for me to tell him where I want them.

“If you leave them on the floor within that reach, that will do”, I tell him. “Although a little far from the chair, if possible. As far as you can without going over.”

Master Shi doesn’t ask me why, but he no longer needs to ask, because now the curiosity is written all over his face.

He walks around me and sets the jars on the floor, one here and another there, at a distance he seems to measure by eye and that, when I reach for them with the Myriad, turns out to be just inside my reach.

Just inside the eight Chi.

And just outside the seven, which is where the line of the circle is going to be, so at no point will I have to pass a stroke over a jar or a jar over a stroke.

Master Shi finishes placing the last one, moves off until he is standing next to one of the cabinets, outside everything I am going to draw, and crosses his arms.

“And what formation are you going to create?” he asks me.

He pauses briefly after that question.

“And a piece of advice”, he continues. “Don’t try to show off. Do the one you have the best chance of creating successfully.”

“The Qi-gathering formation”, I reply.

Which, being the only one I have ever made in my life, doesn’t exactly leave me many other options I could consider completely safe.

Master Shi laughs softly after hearing me.

“I don’t know why we keep asking that question”, he says. “Nine out of ten people always choose that formation.”

He uncrosses his arms and indicates the floor with his open hand.

“You may begin whenever you like”, he tells me.

I take a deep breath, and begin.

The first thing I do is use the Myriad of Hands to take hold of one end of the rope, which rises from the coil and hangs suspended in front of me. Then, while I hold it in the air, I tie the brush to it with two turns and a knot that won’t come loose.

Then I measure, moving the brush away from me with the Myriad, slowly, letting the rope pay out from the coil until I reach the limit of the technique. And from there, I bring it back a little, just enough to leave that Chi of margin.

Then I grab the rope with my right hand, raise my arm, and from here on, it is exactly the same as what I did at home, except that instead of a burin, I am using a brush.

And here I have to concentrate, since I have to take hold of the first jar of ink with the Myriad of Hands, uncap it and bring it to the brush to wet the tip, but I manage it easily, so I then set the brush on the floor, pull the rope taut and begin.

The first mark of ink appears on the stone, dark and clean, and the brush begins to move around me, slowly, with the rope deciding the path for me.

When the ink in the brush starts to run low, I notice it in the stroke, which turns lighter and drier, so I stop the brush without slackening the rope, the hand of the Myriad comes back with the jar, I dip it, and I continue right from where I left off.

And so the circle advances.

When it passes behind me and drops out of sight, I don’t turn around, since, just as at home, I trust it, until the brush reappears on my left and the line of ink meets its own beginning.

I lower my arm, but before untying the brush, I have to make use of the measurement I still have in my hand.

From the knot at the brush to my fist there is exactly one radius, and one radius is exactly one side of the hexagon, so, without letting go of the rope, I make a mark right at the point I am gripping in my hand. Then, with two hands of the Myriad, I take that stretch as a measure and run it along the rope coming out of the coil, just as the cloth sellers at the market in my other life used to measure fabric by arm’s lengths, and at the end of each stretch I make another mark.

Six stretches, six marks.

Forty-two Chi of rope, with a mark every seven.

Then I untie the brush and let the rope fall to the floor, inside the circle, and before I do anything else, I touch the stretch of the line nearest to me with another hand. The ink no longer smears, so, at least for now, I haven’t smudged anything.

And now comes the part I asked for so much rope for.

The free end of the rope, the one the brush was tied to, I place on the line of the circle, right in front of me, and hold it with a hand of the Myriad. That is the first vertex. Then I take the first mark with another hand and bring it to the line of the circle, pulling taut the stretch between the two, and leave it there. That is the second.

And so on with the rest.

The third mark, the fourth and the fifth, each seven Chi from the one before, each with its own hand of the Myriad holding it against the stone and each on the line of the circle. And for the ones behind me, I push one rim, pull the other and turn the chair on the spot, just as I have just practiced, until they are in front of me.

Because if each side measures the same as the radius, and each mark lands on the line of the circle, the last mark has to fall exactly where the rope began.

And if it doesn’t fall there, one of the previous ones is wrong.

The first time, the sixth mark ends up a finger’s breadth from the end of the rope, so I turn the chair again, check the vertices one by one, leaning forward and tilting my head to see them from another angle, and find the culprit in the fourth, which is a hair inside the line instead of on top of it.

I correct it, and close it up again.

And this time the sixth mark falls right on top of the end of the rope, on the line of the circle, and the rope lies taut between the six vertices, forming a hexagon that, as far as I can tell from my chair, is perfect, while six hands of the Myriad hold the rope, one at each vertex.

With the seventh I take the brush, with the eighth I uncap the next jar, dip the tip and begin drawing the first side, with the brush running pressed against the inner edge of the rope, which serves as a ruler without ever needing to be lifted from the floor.

After a while, as I finish the second side and turn the chair to begin the third, Master Shi speaks for the first time since I started.

“Your method is rather curious”, he tells me.

“Actually, if I had to carve a real formation, I would use a perfectly straight board to guide the burin”, I reply without taking my eyes off the brush. “Rope is too flimsy for that task.”

Master Shi nods.

“Every formation maker has their own little tricks”, he tells me. “And yours are not the strangest I have seen.”

Then he laughs.

“Although those other methods wouldn’t actually be allowed in an exam either”, he adds.

And I, of course, am left intrigued, because I am dying to ask him what those methods are, so strange that they aren’t allowed in an exam and apparently even stranger than drawing hexagons with a rope full of marks.

But I bite my tongue, because every question I ask him now is a moment when I am not concentrating on the brush, and starting to chat about unnecessary things in the middle of an exam is the silliest way there is to fail it.

So I continue with the third side, the fourth, the fifth, with a turn of the chair between each one, until I finally finish the sixth and the brush meets the beginning of the first.

And the hexagon is finished, so I set the brush on the floor, outside the drawing, and then gather up the rope with tremendous care.

I don’t pull on it, because dragging it over the ink would be erasing with one hand what I have just drawn with the other. Instead, all the hands of the Myriad lift it at once, vertically, slowly, until the entire rope is suspended in the air above the drawing without grazing the stone.

Then I coil it in the air and leave it on the floor, outside the circle, next to one of the jars, where it isn’t in the way.

After that, I take a deep breath, because the circle and the hexagon are only the base, and the difficult part starts now.

I close my eyes and let the diagram of the formation appear in my mind, with every rune in its place, each with its size, its orientation and its distance from the next, and all I have to do is compare it with the circle and hexagon in front of me, like someone placing a half-filled-in drawing next to the original.

Only this time I am going to draw it in full.

At home I didn’t carve any of the filler runes, because the formation doesn’t need them to work and there was no one there to fool. But this is an exam, and I don’t have the faintest idea whether the guild considers those runes part of the formation or not, and I have no intention of finding out by failing or by asking, so today I am also drawing the runes that only serve as camouflage.

I open my eyes, one hand of the Myriad wets the brush, another holds the uncapped jar beside it, and I begin with the first rune of the first side of the hexagon.

Before the first stroke I activate Sensing the Qi, out of sheer habit, and I feel a faint, steady Qi in the ink, and I realize I don’t actually need to measure its density, so I deactivate it again.

But even so, I decide to go carefully, because not having to watch the ink doesn’t mean I can’t make a mistake with the stroke, and I haven’t come this far to fail because of a silly error.

I draw the first rune so slowly that it almost seems to take an eternity. The second, the same. And the third, and the fourth, each in its place on the hexagon, with the strokes the diagram dictates to me and not a single one more.

The usual problem persists, since the runes are spread all around me and, to write the ones that aren’t in front of me, I can’t ask anyone to move me.

But that is what I practiced for before starting the exam, so I push one rim, pull the other, and the chair turns on the spot, without moving from the center, until the next stretch is in front of me.

When I finish the runes of the hexagon, I start on the filler runes, of which there are quite a few, because the circle has to look full from the edge inward so that anyone who looks at it believes the important runes are there. And since they serve no purpose, curiously, they are the ones that demand the most attention from me.

Time passes without my noticing, while I realize I have emptied more jars than I expected, that my neck has gone stiff from so much leaning, and that at some point Master Shi has changed places, because now he is on my right and I don’t remember hearing him move.

He says nothing in all that time, and neither do I, until, at last, I finish the last rune.

I set the brush on the floor, outside the drawing, and go over all the runes from the chair, one by one, turning on the spot, in the same order in which I drew them and comparing them with the diagram.

I don’t find a single mistake, so I let out the breath I hadn’t realized I was holding, and look up at Master Shi.

“I have finished”, I tell him.

Master Shi, who hasn’t taken his eyes off the floor during the entire process, doesn’t answer me. He simply goes to one of the cabinets, opens a door and takes out a rod of pale wood, somewhat longer than his forearm, with so many runes carved along it that from here it looks covered in scales.

He goes to the edge of the circle where, without stepping on it, he crouches down and rests the tip of the rod on one of the vertices, at the exact spot where the hexagon touches the line of the circle, and presses.

The ink suddenly lights up.

Not little by little, but all at once. The circle, the hexagon, the real runes and the filler ones, all glowing on the polished stone with a dim, steady light.

I stare at it, fascinated, while Master Shi, without lifting the rod from the floor, examines the drawing from where he is.

I stop contemplating the drawing to look at him, and I see him move his gaze from rune to rune, slowly, from one end of the circle to the other, and every so often he lingers on one longer than on the rest, and with each of those pauses I feel my stomach clench a little.

Finally he lifts the rod from the floor, which makes the light go out, and the drawing returns to normal.

Master Shi straightens up, and when he turns toward me, he smiles.

“Congratulations”, he tells me. “You have correctly created a six-vertex Qi-gathering formation.”

He pauses briefly.

“And therefore, you have passed the exam”, he finishes.