Ch. 014| Qinghe's Trouble

Xu Qinghe lived at the dead end of a secluded alley on the north side of the market town.

It was the last courtyard left after the Xu family's fall. The old plaque over the gate still bore the character "Xu," though most of its lacquer had flaked away; the yard was empty but for a single main hall and one side room, with the old materials for drawing talismans piled in a corner. The grandeur of a talisman house from the old days had shrunk to this scrap of ground, and the one girl who kept watch over it.

In the middle of the courtyard stood an emptied stone platform. Xu Qinghe said it had once been the Xu family's house-warding talisman array platform, where in years past a great Green Seal array had stood, guarding the whole estate. After the fall, the array's materials had been sold off one piece at a time, until all that remained was an empty platform, pooled with rainwater and fallen leaves. A talisman house passed down through several generations, fallen to this point, and in the end it leaned on nothing but a girl of seventeen or eighteen, setting up a stall on West Street, holding it up one talisman at a time.

In the center of the main hall sat an old wooden box. Xu Qinghe washed her hands before opening it and lifting out a yellowed booklet from within—the Xu family's ancestral register, the root of the Green Seal-Script Talisman.

"All my family's Green Seal-Script Talismans are in here." She spread the register open carefully on the table. "That flaw you spoke of… see for yourself."

Lin Que washed his hands too, and bent to look.

The register was packed dense with the talismans' forms, stroke orders, and mnemonic verses, with annotations from generation after generation of talisman cultivators written alongside. Lin Que knew nothing of talismans, but the moment these eyes of his swept across it—

The heat beneath his left eye stirred, several times over.

More than one flaw.

That set of Green Seal-Script Talismans was split into upper, middle, and lower volumes. What Xu Qinghe drew was the most basic one from the upper volume, its flaw at the third turn. But on the more intricate forms of the middle and lower volumes, Lin Que saw more flaws—some flawed in the brushwork's intent, some in the mnemonic verses, one after another, hidden beneath those yellowed annotations.

Those annotations had been left by the Xu family's talisman cultivators across the generations. Lin Que could not read the talismans, but he could read the helplessness in those words—"the seventh turn of this talisman, attempted many times without success, in doubt," "the middle volume's finish scatters its qi again and again, to be completed by those who come after," "the ancestral method may have omissions, dare not alter it rashly." Generation after generation of the Xu family had struck the same wall, had each set it down and left it for those after them, yet not one generation had been able to mend that flaw back. To mend this flaw, one needed a pair of eyes that could see it; the Xu family, across several generations, had simply never produced such a pair.

And these flaws broke off "clean."

Like his own tattered Breathing Scroll, like Xu Qinghe's Green Seal-Script Talisman, every flaw on this Xu family register broke off with an abnormal evenness. That evenness did not look ground out by the years; it looked instead as if someone had taken the same blade and, one cut at a time, carefully severed each piece away.

This thought, Lin Que pressed down deep in his heart. He could not say it in front of Xu Qinghe. To say it, he would have to explain how he saw it; and besides, "someone deliberately cut away the Xu family's talismans" was too large a thing to say, so large that he himself had not yet touched its edges.

He only pointed to that one flaw in the upper volume: "This one, I can help you mend. The rest will have to come slowly."

Xu Qinghe was about to speak when a sound of footsteps suddenly came from beyond the courtyard.

"Is Qinghe home?"

A middle-aged man's voice, courteous on the surface, but with a condescending edge pressed beneath it.

Xu Qinghe's face darkened in an instant. She swiftly rolled up the register, stuffed it back into the wooden box, and said to Lin Que in a low voice, "My clan-uncle. You go to the side room first, and don't make a sound."

Lin Que did as told and slipped into the side room, looking out through the crack in the door.

The one who came in was a finely dressed middle-aged talisman cultivator—silk robe, jade pendant, the set of talisman brushes at his waist ten times more refined than Xu Qinghe's. Xu Qinghe called him Xu Wenchang; he was a collateral branch of the Xu family, and these years, drawing talismans for wealthy households, he had lived far more comfortably than the main line.

He came through the gate, his gaze sweeping one by one over that empty courtyard and the lacquer-flaked old plaque, a faint, barely perceptible smugness hanging at the corner of his mouth. In the old days when the Xu main line flourished, he as a collateral branch had had to watch the main line's face; now that fortune's wheel had turned, the more often he came, the fuller he played his "I told you so" airs.

"Qinghe, ah," Xu Wenchang said, hands clasped behind his back, pacing the empty courtyard, his tone pained, "Uncle is doing this for the good of the Xu family too. Your line, by the time it reaches you, can no longer draw the Green Seal-Script Talisman—this past half-year, who in the market town doesn't know? The Xu family's name can't be smashed on this."

His words turned: "A thing like the ancestral register, left in your hands, is a pearl gathering dust. Better… hand it to your uncle for safekeeping. My line, at least, can still draw talismans, can still face our forebears with a clear conscience."

"Clan-uncle," Xu Qinghe's voice was cold as ice, "the register belongs to the true line of my branch. My father, on his deathbed, placed it into my hands with his own."

"Placed into your hands, yet you can't draw the talisman." Xu Wenchang sighed, the dagger showing at the bottom of the bag. "Let's do this, then. In three days, the people of the Xu collateral branches will all come, and you and I will each draw a Green Seal-Script Talisman. Draw it true, and the register stays with you; draw it not—then don't blame your uncle for showing no mercy. By clan rule, the register goes to the line that can carry it on."

Xu Qinghe clenched her fist.

This was a trap. Xu Wenchang had reckoned for certain that she could not draw the talisman—the whole market town had seen it with their own eyes this past half-year. In three days, with all watching, when she failed to draw it, the register would pass to the collateral branch fair and square.

But Xu Wenchang did not know: she could draw it now.

And yet she understood at once that this matter was not so simple. Her clan-uncle's choice of "a public contest" was itself a play, staged for the Xu collateral branches, banking on her inability to draw. If she suddenly drew it true, it would wreck her clan-uncle's calculation, but the question hard on its heels was this—a person who couldn't draw it for half a year, how does she manage it within three days? Her clan-uncle would not believe she had trained it up on her own. He would investigate, would press her with questions, would follow that mended guide-stroke straight back to the one who had helped her. Keeping the register and shielding Lin Que had become two ends she had to hold up at once.

In the side room, Lin Que had thought of this layer too. The moment Xu Qinghe drew the Green Seal-Script Talisman in public, everyone would ask: she couldn't draw it for half a year, how did she suddenly manage? Who helped? An old talisman cultivator like Xu Wenchang, with only a close look at that mended guide-stroke, might well see the something amiss in it.

The thread would wind back to these eyes of his again.

Xu Wenchang dropped his words and was about to leave. At the courtyard gate he suddenly turned his head, giving the side room a meaningful glance—Lin Que's heart leapt up at once. But Xu Wenchang only swept it with a single look, did not go in, and threw down a line: "Qinghe, in three days, don't disappoint your uncle. And don't… get clever." Then off he strode.

That line, "don't get clever," was plainly a guard against her finding someone last-minute to cheat. So this clan-uncle was not entirely a fool; this scheme was a notch more troublesome than Lin Que had thought before.

Xu Qinghe stood in the yard a long while before returning to the main hall, looking at Lin Que as he came out of the side room. She did not ask him—the backbone of a girl from a great house kept her from opening her mouth on that. But the flicker of struggle in her eyes, Lin Que saw plain and clear.

Lin Que did not answer at once. His gaze fell on a dust-covered old rack in the corner of the main hall—on it sat some of the Xu family's heirloom relics, mostly worthless talisman implements. But among them, a palm-sized green-jade paperweight gave off, in his eyes, a thread of qi extremely faint, yet extremely pure.

That thread of qi… he knew it. It ran the same way as the living qi within the broken jade—pure, and faintly able to mend that flaw of his at the fifth layer of Qi Condensation.

The ledger in Lin Que's heart ran through its figures swiftly. To help Xu Qinghe keep the register, he would have to risk exposing the eyes; but if he pulled it off, what the Xu family would owe him was a debt of gratitude vast as heaven. That green-jade paperweight, that register hiding countless flaws—to him, both were beyond price.

What was more, the small doubt in his heart burned hotter at this moment. The Xu family's Green Seal-Script Talisman, his own Breathing Scroll—the break-edges of both were abnormally even. Under this heaven, how many "methods" had been severed by the same blade? Could the flaws on the Xu family register, one after another, be a loose thread-end—follow it, and reach that blade? The thought was too far, too large, yet with that register spread open before him and those flaws lit bright in his eyes, he could not help but think it.

Helping Xu Qinghe: by feeling, he could not bear to watch someone like himself resign to fate; by gain, it was the sect-gate, the green jade, that register. Feeling and gain both pointed down the same road. He had no reason not to walk it.

"Miss Xu," Lin Que spoke, "that contest in three days—do you want to win?"

Xu Qinghe raised her eyes.

"I do." She said it word by word. "I dream of it."

"That mended guide-stroke, drawn in public, will show." Lin Que said slowly. "But what if… we let that guide-stroke be hidden where others can't make it out?"

Xu Qinghe was stunned. She looked at this medicine boy before her—a stranger three days ago, who now had become the one and only hope for keeping the last bit of the Xu family's root.

"You have a way?"

"I do," Lin Que said. "But I have to see one thing first."

"What?"

"Your clan-uncle's line of the Green Seal-Script Talisman." Lin Que looked at her, word by word, "The talismans he draws come from the same ancestral register as yours. His—where its flaw lies, I have to see clearly too."

Xu Qinghe's eyes lit up, little by little.

She understood. Her clan-uncle's Green Seal-Script Talisman came from the same flawed register, so his talisman, too, must be flawed somewhere, must have a place it couldn't be drawn whole—only that her clan-uncle's cultivation was high, his qi ample, and he had pressed that flaw down, papered it over.

All at once she saw the true deciding move of this contest: whoever's flaw shows first, loses. However high her clan-uncle's cultivation, so long as that talisman was flawed too, that flaw would have its moment of showing. And in this whole market town, the only one who could see a talisman's flaw down to the last hair was the medicine boy before her.

"He supplies a year-round house-warding talisman to the Qian estate east of the city," Xu Qinghe said quickly, "and that talisman is pasted right on the Qian estate's gate."

"Then it's easy to manage." Lin Que looked in that direction, already beginning to reckon in his heart. The contest in three days—the "flaw" he wanted, he had to lay eyes on first, before then.

Xu Qinghe looked at the side of his face, and the flutter of panic her clan-uncle had stirred up settled, little by little, in her heart. Half a year, and for the first time, someone stood on her side, reckoning with her this seemingly lost game—even if that someone was only a medicine boy of unknown origin.

【Ch. 014 End · North Alley of the Market Town · the Xu Residence】