The Three Kinds of Vaults

The Shen way of passing things down is keeping the deathwatch: before the older generation stops breathing, the younger has to be at the bedside, and the point of it is to hear the one line left behind. That line is usually the crux of the fenjin craft.

That night Shen Zhaoye was the only one at the bed. He was twenty-one, his grandfather eighty-three, and the rest of the Shens were spread across Xi'an, Guangzhou and San Francisco; the calls had gone out 3 days before and the fastest of them was still on a plane. The old man went in order, palms first, then throat, then pupils — the palms scalding, as if just pulled out of a fire, the nails already gone blue.

The windows were shut tight, old newspaper left over from the winter before still stuffed along the frames. On the sill outside, the inherited dragon-seeking compass turned 7 full circles on its own in those 7 minutes, and the needle came to rest pointing dead at the ground beneath the coffin in the corner of the side room — a coffin the old man had prepared for himself 20 years earlier, covered with a length of hemp cloth whose color could no longer be told.

What his grandfather left him was 3 names:

There are three kinds of vaults in this world that must not be sited. The Masterless Vault. The Reverse-Dragon Vault. And — the Emperor's Molting Vault.

The first two the Fenjin school has guarded against for generations. Site a Masterless Vault wrong and people die; site a Reverse-Dragon Vault wrong and people die as well; both guard against a slip of the hand. On the third his grandfather paused longest, the pupils rolling toward the compass on the sill and back to him before he got the last 5 characters out.

The danger of the Emperor's Molting Vault turns on accuracy. Site it right, and a living man turns into something else. His grandfather never explained what 'something else' meant; he only said it over and over before he stopped breathing: these three vaults, do not touch them at all.

The red-ink line on that page of the Fragment says the same thing another way — the third vault will come to you. At twenty-one Shen Zhaoye took the whole of it for a dying man's rambling; 7 years later, on the lowest level of a nameless imperial tomb in Guanzhong, he understood what the old man had actually been afraid of.