Ch. 012| The Woman with the Broken Talisman

After breaking into the fourth layer, Lin Que spent two days letting his injuries settle.

His left eye still went dry now and then, and the dead, sunken qi in his dantian hadn't fully dispersed. But he couldn't sit still. The lump of rift crystal tucked against his chest was a scalding treasure—out in the world it couldn't be bought for a fortune, yet every day it stayed on him was another day of danger. He had to turn it into spirit stones early, into enough savings to leave the market for good.

The only question was whom to sell it to, and how. That was something he had to weigh. Han Bosheng's line through Well-Bottom Lane ran too deep; the moment the rift crystal showed itself, there was no telling whether the "someone up top" who bought pills might trace it back to him. He decided to test the going rate on West Street first—Lame Yu had run that talisman stall for half a lifetime, and there was no talisman-crafting material he hadn't laid eyes on. Asking him was the surest way, and the least conspicuous.

When he reached the stall, a small crowd had gathered in front of it.

They had all clustered around a girl tending another stall beside Lame Yu's.

The girl was seventeen or eighteen, dressed in blue cloth washed pale yet starched bolt-straight, a set of talisman brushes hanging at her waist, their shafts worn to a shine and bound up neat and tight—plainly never out of her hands a single day.

She was delicately featured, with an oval face and the kind of paleness bred from years bent over a desk drawing talismans; her brow stayed faintly furrowed out of habit, as though she were forever turning over some problem that wouldn't come undone. Fallen on hard times she might be, but that upright posture, that brush-holding hand, still carried the bearing drilled into her by a family of talisman-scribes—the cold, clean sort of beauty that wore no powder yet made a person look twice.

On the low table before her, talisman paper was laid out, with paperweight, inkstone, and cinnabar all arranged without a hair out of place.

She was drawing a talisman.

Lin Que knew nothing of talismans, but he could tell this girl had real skill. The wrist of her brush hand was steady as if it had no bones in it; with a single stroke, the cinnabar ran across the paper even and alive, the lines on the talisman looking as though they were growing out of the paper of their own accord. The few customers waiting for talismans all watched with held breath.

Lin Que watched, fixed in place too. He had spent three years mending pills, and no one understood "the last step" better than he did—a pill refined to its final turn, a talisman drawn to its final stroke: however well the rest was done, one slip here and it was all ruined. Watching the girl's brush move down stroke by steady stroke, he found himself sweating on her behalf.

One stroke, two strokes, three strokes… the talisman came to its final turn.

In the very instant the last stroke was about to close, her brush gave a sudden hitch against the paper.

The cinnabar bled out with a "spat," and the line that should have closed the talisman broke.

The whole talisman was ruined.

The girl's face went white in a flash.

"Miss Xu," one customer said, knitting his brow and weighing the coppers in his hand, "that's the third one already. I'm in a hurry. Never mind, never mind—I'll find another shop."

Several of them drifted off, shaking their heads. As they turned away, someone muttered under his breath, "The Xu family name—by her generation, you could say it's been smashed."

The girl heard it. She didn't turn around, didn't argue, only bit her lip and slowly crushed the ruined talisman into a ball. She didn't cry; she gathered up the talisman paper on the table sheet by sheet, her movements very steady—but Lin Que saw that the fingertips folding the paper were trembling.

Lame Yu sidled up to Lin Que and dropped his voice. "The Xu girl. Xu Qinghe."

"The Xu family?"

"In the old days they were a talisman-scribe house with a real name—passed down the Green Seal-Script Talisman through a good few generations, and potent it was. Then somehow they fell apart, lost it all bit by bit—the manor, the fields, the spirit veins—and by this girl's generation all that's left is one set of inherited talisman methods and her own life." Lame Yu let out a sigh. "The girl's real gifted in the talisman arts, no mistake—been better than her peers at drawing since she was small. But somehow, these past six months, eight out of ten of those inherited Green Seal-Script Talismans break on the final stroke. Her customers have all run off."

He shook his head. "Her mother's side has put out word too—say she's hit the ceiling of her talent, that the Green Seal-Script Talisman ends like this in her hands, that more practice is wasted practice. Telling her to accept her lot and marry off early and be done with it."

Lin Que followed Lame Yu's words with his gaze. The girl was tucking the ruined talisman into an old wooden case, its corners worn pale, a family crest with the character "Xu" still carved on the lid—an article of old aristocratic standing, now sunk along with its owner to a low stall on West Street. From the bottom of the case she counted out a few coppers and paid Lame Yu for the stall space, counting very carefully, unwilling to give one too many or one too few.

Fallen this far, and the bones hadn't caved in yet.

Hit the ceiling of her talent. Accept her lot.

Those words pricked Lin Que like a needle.

The two years he'd been stuck at the third layer of Qi Condensation, the people of the market had said the very same of him: his roots and bones had hit their ceiling, a pill-boy's fate was a pill-boy's fate, just accept it. If not for that piece of broken jade, that flaw he'd mended back, he'd most likely still be beneath the third layer even now, accepting the fate someone else had fixed for him.

His gaze fell, against his will, on the ruined talisman clenched in the girl's hand.

The point of heat beneath his left eye stirred.

Ever since he'd come out of the rift and these eyes had been tempered with a layer, he saw not only the flaws in living things—he saw the flaws in talismans too. Before, a talisman to him was only a blur that raised the hair on his neck, never coming clear; now, on that crumpled, ruined talisman, flaw-lines lit up before his eyes one after another, as plain as looking at a fully ripened Death-Black Pill.

Her hand hadn't trembled.

That Green Seal-Script Talisman was flawed at the third turn.

Lin Que had been wholly ignorant of talisman-drawing before, but these eyes let him "see" the truth of it: a talisman, from first stroke to closing, had an unseen "qi-vein" threading between the strokes, one stroke pulling the next, and only when the final stroke held did the talisman come into being.

But the qi-vein of this Green Seal-Script Talisman broke off a length at the third turn. It was as if, when this set of Green Seal-Script methods had been handed down, it had come up short a stretch of brush-intent in itself. The qi-vein of whoever drew it ran to the third turn, lost its pull, and that last stroke naturally hitched, naturally broke.

The longer Lin Que looked, the colder his heart grew. This flaw was hidden deep, not the least of it in plain sight—brushwork, cinnabar, talisman paper, not a fault to be found in any of them; the flaw lay only in that qi-vein no one could see. An ordinary talisman-cultivator could spend a whole life and only ever believe his own craft fell short, that no matter how he practiced he could never get past that one stroke. Short of a pair of eyes that could directly "see" the qi-vein, see the flaw, this flaw had no solution at all. Small wonder the Xu family had declined generation upon generation, with not a single one of them able to mend this inherited talisman back whole.

It was exactly like his own tattered Breathing Scroll.

That set of Green Seal-Script Talisman methods of her family's had come up a stroke short the very moment it reached her hands. However well she drew, the qi would reach that flaw at the third turn and fail to connect—and it had nothing whatever to do with her talent.

What made it crueler still: the better she drew, the fuller her qi ran, the more savagely it broke at the third turn. Hand it to someone of middling talent with thinner qi, and by the third turn the qi would have weakened—perhaps it could still be fudged through. As it was, her talent was too good, and that very fullness of her own qi was what made it break, sheet after sheet.

Lin Que stood there, an unspeakable feeling churning in him.

This girl and he were the same kind of person. Stopped cold by a flawed thing, and the more able you were, the harder you fell, and in the end everyone still pointed at your nose and said, "It's you who can't do it."

That feeling, Lin Que had tasted for two whole years. When you're called a worthless thing, the hardest part is that you're holding back a swell of defiance in your chest and yet can't produce a shred of proof—you can't put into words just where you fall short, and you can only watch, helpless, as others take that fate on in your name. Looking at Xu Qinghe now, he was looking, across two years' span of time, at the boy he'd once been: clutching a Death-Black Pill, with nowhere left to turn.

He opened his mouth.

That flaw—he could not only see it; he had even faintly gotten a feel for where the missing stretch of brush-intent ought to be mended in—just as he had once mended the flaw in his own method.

But with the words on his lips, he swallowed them back down.

What standing did he have to speak up? A little pill-boy who sold medicine, telling a talisman-cultivator born to a scribe house, "Your inherited talisman is flawed, flawed at the third turn"? Whether she believed it was one matter; if she pressed him with a single question—"You, a pill-boy, how can you see the flaw in a talisman?"—the secret of these eyes would be laid bare on the spot.

These eyes were the only stake he had right now, and his greatest vital gate as well; not a fraction of it could be let slip—least of all in front of a girl of unknown origins from some old house.

Besides, what was he after, helping her? She was born to an old house, he was a market pill-boy; their two roads had not the remotest thing in common. Better one trouble less than one trouble more.

But that flaw burned before his eyes, burned until his heart itched. He had seen countless flaws in his life, mended countless flaws; this was the first time he had seen a flaw grown into a living, breathing person—and one who, like him, refused to accept her lot.

There was another layer he didn't speak aloud, even to himself, though the thought turned over in him: however far the Xu family had fallen, they were after all a talisman-scribe house passed down a good few generations. What he needed to gather right now was spirit stones, but once he left the market, he'd also need a stake to stand on his feet in some larger place. A declined house with depth to it still; a debt of gratitude that could set Xu Qinghe's Green Seal-Script Talismans standing again—perhaps that was a door no one else could lay a hand on.

But the sight of that girl, gathering her things and drifting off bereft, brought back to him the self he'd been two years ago: hoarding a Death-Black Pill, called a worthless thing, and yet refusing for the life of him to accept his lot.

If, back then, there had been someone willing to tell him one thing—"It isn't that you can't do it; it's that scroll of yours that came up a stretch short"—would these two years have gone a little easier for him?

"Uncle Yu," Lin Que said suddenly, his voice pressed very low, "that Miss Xu—does she set up here often?"

Lame Yu shot him a glance. "Every few days. What are you asking that for? It's not as if you've any use for her talismans."

"Just asking." Lin Que lowered his eyes and tucked the lump of rift crystal a little deeper against his chest. The matter of the rift crystal—he wasn't going to bring it up today.

He watched Xu Qinghe's retreating back vanish into the press of people at the far end of West Street.

The flaw on that ruined talisman still burned before his eyes. Flawed at the third turn—he saw it clear as day, and he'd gotten a feel for how that one stroke ought to be mended back in.

Mending a single talisman was no hard thing for the Lin Que of now. The hard thing was that one act of speaking up—the moment he spoke, these eyes he'd hidden for years would crack open a gap toward a person he didn't know at all, and there'd be no drawing it back.

Whether or not to open that mouth, whether it was worth running the risk of exposing his eyes for a girl he'd never met—that, he hadn't yet made up his mind on.

【Ch. 012 End · the talisman stall on West Street】