Chapter 4

Chapter 4: Chapter 4

Yan Shuo snatched his hand off the wall.

The threads of light snapped back into place at once, dull grey-green, lying flat in the rock as they had for a hundred years. The pulse beneath the stone faded. Somewhere far below, he thought he felt it reach for him one last time.

He forced the coal in his hidden dantian back under the water and held it there, breathing through his nose.

Then, slowly, he looked up the tunnel.

The second lantern beyond the curve was still dark. Not a shout or even a footstep. If the watcher had seen anything, he was keeping it to himself.

’Senior,’ Yan Shuo thought. ’What was that?’

’Hunger.’ Qin Wuyue’s voice was thoughtful, and much quieter than usual. ’That vein has been bled for generations. It’s starving. And you are, to a starving vein, something like the smell of rain.’

’Is that good or bad?’

’Both. We’ll discuss it later.’ A heavy pause. ’Your watcher is coming closer. Dig.’

Yan Shuo picked up the heavy iron pick and dug.

By midday he had filled four baskets but the quota was twenty.

The ninth level didn’t have a midday. It had lantern light, absolute darkness, and the endless, hollow clink of picks echoing from distant galleries. The heat crept up directly from the floor rock, thick and stagnant, soaking his rough robe straight through. His arms shook every time he raised the pick. Twice, he caught himself leaning heavily on the handle just to keep his eyes open.

He was hauling the fifth basket toward the cart track when the ground started to rumble.

He pressed himself flat against the wall. ’A cave-in,’ he thought. Then: ’No. Too steady.’ The rumble came closer, grinding and highly rhythmic, accompanied by a booming, off-key voice bellowing a song about a widow and a goat.

An ore cart came screeching around the bend.

The carts on the ninth level were massive iron tubs on wheels. A full one took three grown men to push uphill. This one was heaped so high with raw ore that loose rocks kept bouncing off the top. A single figure was pushing it, bent nearly double, his bare arms bulging with the strain, singing at the absolute top of his lungs.

The cart ground to a halt beside Yan Shuo with a metallic shriek. Its pusher straightened up and wiped his face with a massive forearm, smearing the mine dust into grey stripes.

He was about Yan Shuo’s age and half again as wide, with a square jaw, a crooked nose that had clearly been broken more than once, and a grin that took up most of his face.

"Well, look at that! A new face!" he said. His voice bounced off the tunnel walls like a drum. "Nobody’s new down here. Who’d you punch?"

Yan Shuo blinked. "I didn’t punch anyone."

"Then what in the heavens are you doing on nine?"

"An elder thought quiet work would suit me."

The young man’s eyebrows climbed into his hairline. He looked Yan Shuo up and down, taking in the shaking arms and the single, sorry-looking basket, and whistled through his teeth.

"Someone up top really hates your guts, brother." He stuck out a hand the size of a shovel blade. "Name’s Ruan Tie. My old man’s a blacksmith in Willow Ford. I put an inner disciple through a wall for calling my sister a pig-faced peasant. Got me two years down here on nine."

He didn’t sound sorry rather he sounded proud.

"Yan Shuo." He shook the hand and felt his knuckles grind together under the grip.

"How many baskets?"

"Five."

"Out of twenty?" Ruan Tie winced. "Old Hao will dock your rice if you come up short. Here."

Before Yan Shuo could object, Ruan Tie seized his basket by the rim, lifted it effortlessly with one hand, and dumped it onto the cart’s mountain of ore.

"I’ll take your loads up with mine. You dig, I haul. We’ll get you to twenty."

"You’ll get in trouble."

"Trouble?" Ruan Tie let out a big, booming laugh. "Brother, I’m already on nine. What are they going to do, send me to ten?"

He set his shoulder against the cart and shoved. The full iron tub rolled forward as if it were entirely empty, and he trundled off up the track, singing again. The widow in the song had apparently decided to marry the goat.

Yan Shuo stared after him.

’Interesting,’ Qin murmured.

’He’s strong.’

’He’s pushing a load meant for three men, uphill, for two years, on the starvation rice ration they give the ninth level.’ She sounded deeply amused. ’That’s not just strong. Something in that boy’s bones is asleep. Keep him close, brat. Friends are rare in our line of work.’

They made twenty baskets with a quarter hour to spare.

Ruan Tie hauled the last one up himself, then came back with two steamed buns from his own ration and pressed one firmly into Yan Shuo’s hand. They sat on an overturned cart outside the ninth-level barracks—a damp cave lined with bunks where the deep-shaft workers slept through their ten-day shifts—and ate in companionable silence.

"There’s a man following you," Ruan Tie said casually around a mouthful of bun.

Yan Shuo kept chewing. "Is there?"

"Thin fellow. Law Hall plaque under his work robe. Sat behind gallery seven all day with his lantern turned down, thinking nobody noticed." Ruan Tie shrugged broadly. "Not that he was hiding it well. I notice things. Who’d you really punch, brother?"

"Nobody. I just poured some wine."

Ruan Tie studied him for a long moment. Then he grinned.

"Must have been some wine."

He asked nothing else, which Yan Shuo found he liked very much.

That night, while the rest of the barracks snored, Yan Shuo sat cross-legged on his bunk in the pitch dark and listened to Qin Wuyue explain exactly how he had wasted six years of his life.

’Your mother sealed eleven meridians,’ she said. ’So you only had one. And every night you tried to cultivate through that one meridian using the sect’s standard method.’

’Every night,’ he agreed.

’The sect’s method is built to drag qi in by brute force. Twelve open meridians pulling together, like twelve men hauling on a rope. You were one man on a rope meant for twelve, pulling with all your strength, and moving absolutely nothing.’ Something almost gentle crept into her phantom voice. ’You’ve spent six years blaming your talent, brat, when the fault lay entirely with the tool in your hands.’

Yan Shuo said nothing. He thought of six years of nights. Sitting on a bunk exactly like this one while the others slept, circulating his qi until his single meridian ached, until his eyes burned, and waking every morning to find nothing had changed. The other service disciples had stopped laughing at him after his second year.

Not laughing. Pitying. Which was infinitely worse.

’The Scripture of Two Rivers has its solo Chapters,’ Qin went on. ’Even Twin Souls must cultivate alone most days. The first Chapter is called the Single Stream. It asks nothing from twelve meridians. It needs only one, and a stream that knows where it’s going.’

’Teach me.’

’Then close your eyes. And stop pulling.’

The Single Stream was the strangest thing he had ever attempted.

The sect’s method was all grip and strain. Qin’s method was pure patience. She had him open his one unsealed meridian and simply wait, the way a dry riverbed waits for rain, until the thin qi in the air began to seep into it on its own. Then she had him guide it, gently, in one long unbroken loop: down from his chest, through the ordinary dantian, and back up again. One stream. One direction.

Just flowing.

The first hour, nothing happened.

The second hour, he felt a trickle.

By the third hour, something had changed in the air of the barracks. Down here, a stone’s throw from the starving vein, the air carried a faint mineral sweetness he’d never noticed before. Old, stagnant qi, leaking from the walls where the vein ran close. The sect’s method would have choked on it. The Single Stream drank it like fresh water.

His meridian filled. The loop ran faster, smoother, growing a little brighter with each pass. The ember of his ordinary dantian—the small, sad coal that had barely glowed in six years—began to swell.

’Steady,’ Qin breathed in his mind. ’Don’t grab at it. You’ll want to grab.’

He wanted to grab. He clenched his jaw, held his breath, and forced himself to just let the stream run.

The ember grew warm. Then hot. Then it pressed outward against some invisible wall inside him—the very wall that had boxed him in at the first layer since he was thirteen years old.

The wall creaked.

And broke with a quiet snap.

Qi rushed into the space beyond it, filling his chest and his limbs with a sudden warmth that made his fingertips tingle. His senses opened a notch. He could hear the slow drip of condensation three tunnels away, smell the sharp iron in the rock, and feel, far below him, the dying vein turning in its sleep once more.

Qi Gathering, second layer.

Yan Shuo opened his eyes in the dark and sat very still.

Six years.

He pressed the heels of his hands hard against his eyes, pressing until he was sure his face would stay perfectly steady. The barracks snored on around him. Two bunks over, Ruan Tie muttered something about pork dumplings, and Yan Shuo laughed once, entirely silently, into his palms.

’Don’t get sentimental,’ Qin said. Her voice was suspiciously rough. ’The second layer is where most children start.’

’I know.’

’Good. Do it again tomorrow. And the day after. You have a great deal of time to make up.’

The next shift, Yan Shuo filled nine baskets by midday on his own.

His arms still ached, but the qi in his meridian carried some of the weight now, and the heavy iron pick bit deeper into the stone with every swing. Ruan Tie came by on his first cart run, saw the pile of full baskets, and whooped so loudly that a fine mist of dust drifted down from the ceiling timbers.

"Well, look at you! One good night’s sleep and you’re a whole new man!"

"Something like that." Yan Shuo said.

At the end of the shift, Yan Shuo walked back alone through the long tunnel toward the barracks. His lantern swung at his side. He wasn’t bone-deep exhausted today. Just tired in a good, honest way, for the first time he could remember. Ruan Tie had stayed behind to finish a final run on gallery three, and the watcher’s lantern had gone up the lift an hour ago for a change of shift.

He was humming the song about the widow and the goat when he rounded the last bend.

And stopped.

Four figures stood across the tunnel, blocking it from wall to wall.

The one in the middle wore the clean, unpatched grey robes of an outer disciple, clothes that had absolutely no business down on the dirty ninth level. He was tall and heavy-shouldered, wearing a sneer Yan Shuo knew intimately well from his years in the Outer Valley. His qi pressed against the stale air like a physical hand against a chest: Qi Gathering, seventh layer.

Zhao Kun. Elder Gu’s favorite errand boy.

The three thugs standing behind him cracked their knuckles in unison.

"Yan Shuo," Zhao Kun said pleasantly, stepping forward. "Elder Gu asked me to come down here and see how you’re settling in."

He smiled. And it was not a friendly smile. The smile of a butcher sizing up a prime cut of meat.

"He’s very curious to know how you hold up under pressure."