Ch. 015| The Talisman Wager

The day before the contest, Lin Que went to the eastern part of the city.

On the vermilion-lacquered gate of the Qian estate hung a house-warding talisman painted by Xu Wenchang. The talisman was painted with flair, the cinnabar full and rich—at a glance, the work of a master's hand.

But when Lin Que's left eye swept across it, that talisman, too—had a flaw.

The same as the one on Xu Qinghe's: the flaw lay in the third turn. It was only that Xu Wenchang's cultivation was high and his qi abundant, so when he came to that flaw at the third turn, he used brute force to shove the severed qi through. The talisman was made, and it looked impressive, yet that flaw had not been mended—it had merely been pressed down by overwhelming qi, papered over.

Lin Que stared at the talisman for a good while, and the longer he looked, the more he made out the trick of it. Xu Wenchang's qi was far more abundant than that of an ordinary talisman-cultivator; and precisely because it was abundant, he had never once "broken" at the third turn, and so had never once suspected this set of talismans was flawed. That fine store of qi of his had become, instead, the very thing blinding his eyes. Strong to the utmost—sometimes that sees one's own flaw even less than being weak.

Lin Que stood before the Qian estate's gate and looked for a long time. In his mind, the game laid out on the board had settled into place.

Xu Wenchang had no idea that this set of Green Seal-Script Talismans of his was flawed as well. All his life he had relied on a store of qi more abundant than other people's to force that flaw down—and having forced it down for so long, he himself had come to believe the talisman was simply meant to be painted this way.

Strong qi can press down "made," but it cannot press down "made true." No matter how full the cinnabar, a flawed talisman would always have that one patch left empty within its spirit.

---

Back at the Xu residence, Lin Que told Xu Qinghe what he had seen.

"Your clan-uncle's talisman is flawed at the third turn, the same as yours," Lin Que said. "He doesn't know it. He presses it down with qi, so he gets it made, but the talisman is hollow."

Xu Qinghe's eyes lit up, then dimmed again. "So… in a contest of 'making it,' I might not beat him. His cultivation is higher than mine; he paints faster, and better-looking."

"Then don't compete on making it," Lin Que said. "Compete on the talisman's spirit. Your talisman has the flaw mended, it's truly whole; his is hollow, and one test will expose it."

"But if I suddenly make mine, he'll surely ask how I could."

"Then say you spent this past half-year shut away studying the ancestral manual, and grasped a lost stroke." Lin Que looked at her. "You're the true line of the Xu family. Studying the ancestral manual is fully within your right. No one can call it cheating."

Xu Qinghe fell silent for a moment. This account left Lin Que entirely out of it. She raised her eyes to him, her gaze complicated—this medicine-boy had even worked out a way for her to conceal herself.

Over the next two days, Xu Qinghe shut herself in her room and practiced that mended drawing-stroke. The hard part was not the mending—Lin Que had pointed out the spot, and she grasped it at a touch; the hard part was the "hiding." That drawing-stroke was not in the ancestral manual, and laid down even slightly too heavy, anyone who knew the craft would see at a glance it had been added afterward. She had to hide it within the original brushwork, light enough to be nearly invisible, yet just enough to draw the severed qi back together.

She ruined over a hundred sheets of talisman-paper, her fingertips worn red. By the night of the second day, that drawing-stroke went down as if grown of itself, like a part of the Green Seal-Script Talisman from the start. Lin Que looked it over once and nodded. "Like this, your clan-uncle won't be able to tell." That night, for the first time, Xu Qinghe felt that the thing that had pressed on her chest for half a year had loosened.

---

The day of the 3-day term arrived.

Seven or eight people from the Xu branch line came, crowding into that small courtyard. Xu Wenchang, in a brand-new silk gown, had the matter well in hand. Lin Que blended in among the idlers loitering outside the courtyard gate; no one paid any mind to this half-grown medicine-boy.

The courtyard was small, and with so many people it felt cramped. These few who had come from the Xu branch line were each dressed respectably, and there was a watching-a-show contempt in the way they looked at Xu Qinghe—in their eyes, today's affair was no more than a formality, a wait to watch the true line's last girl fail to paint a talisman in front of everyone and meekly hand over the ancestral manual. Xu Qinghe stood behind her own low table, her back ramrod straight. Watching that figure from within the crowd, Lin Que remembered the first time he had seen her on West Street—it had been like this then too: fallen into the dust, yet her bones had not collapsed.

Xu Wenchang spread out paper before the assembly. "Qinghe, as agreed, each of us paints one Green Seal-Script Talisman. Whoever fails to make it, by clan rule—"

"Clan-uncle," Xu Qinghe suddenly spoke up, "merely making it is no skill. The Green Seal-Script Talisman is a talisman for warding a house and guarding the body; if it doesn't work once painted, then however good-looking, it's waste paper. Better that after we make them, we test the talisman's spirit on the spot. Whoever's talisman holds its spirit and guards steadily—only that one counts as the winner."

Xu Wenchang was taken aback, then sneered coldly. His cultivation was a full cut above Qinghe's; in talisman-spirit he feared her even less. "Fine," he said haughtily. "It shall be as you say."

The two of them each spread their paper and lifted their brushes.

Xu Wenchang's strokes came fast and steady, and at the third turn, that abundant qi gave a shove and forced the talisman to completion, the cinnabar full, the bearing impressive. The few from the branch line all cried out in praise.

Xu Qinghe painted slowly. At the third turn, following the method she had practiced for 3 days, she added that drawing-stroke ever so lightly, then let it flow into the finish. Her talisman looked far plainer than her clan-uncle's, but—it was made.

No one understood better than Lin Que how perilous that one stroke had been. As Xu Qinghe laid down that drawing-stroke, her wrist paused for an instant, almost imperceptibly—that was the precise measure she had practiced for two days, carved into her bones. The few from the branch line saw only that she painted slowly, painted plainly; not one of them saw that beneath that plainness was hidden a stroke that mended a flaw six generations had failed to mend. From within the crowd, Lin Que quietly let out a breath.

Xu Wenchang's pupils contracted. "You… how did you make it?"

"Studying the ancestral manual, I grasped a stroke," Xu Qinghe said calmly. "Has clan-uncle forgotten? I am the true line. The ancestral manual is in my hands."

Now to test the talismans' spirit.

The two talismans were pasted side by side on the wooden post in the courtyard, each driven by its maker's circulating qi.

Xu Wenchang's talisman lit up first, its talisman-light the brighter—his cultivation was higher, after all. The branch line gave another round of cheers.

But that talisman-light, having flared for an instant, came to the flaw at the third turn as it drove onward—and suddenly stalled.

Just as Xu Qinghe used to break at the third turn, the talisman-light of Xu Wenchang's talisman gave a "snap" of a flicker right there at the third turn, and dimmed. The light scattered, and on the face of the talisman, that flaw, all this while pressed down by overwhelming qi, was exposed before everyone.

The moment that flaw was bared, the once-full cinnabar on the talisman's face began, from that third turn, to dim and crack inch by inch, like a finished face suddenly splitting down the middle. The few from the branch line who had been cheering had their cheers catch in their throats.

And Xu Qinghe's plain talisman, though its light was faint, glowed steadily, from beginning to end, with not a single stall, not a single break.

The whole courtyard fell dead silent.

Lin Que stood within the crowd, betraying nothing. In this match, from start to finish he had not touched a single stroke of a talisman, yet the outcome was one he had decided—of all the people in this courtyard, he alone could see the flaw in each of the two talismans. Xu Wenchang had won at "painted with flair," and lost at "not painted true"; and of this, in all the market town, only Lin Que saw it plainly.

Xu Wenchang's face went from red to ashen. He had painted Green Seal-Script Talismans all his life and had never seen his own talisman scatter in public. What alarmed him more was this—Qinghe's "plain" talisman was actually more whole, more steady, than his own.

"Impossible…" he murmured. "This talisman…"

He wanted to say something, but could not get it out. In front of the Xu branch line, he could hardly say, "The talismans I've painted all my life were flawed all along"—that would be tearing down his own stage.

"Clan-uncle," Xu Qinghe said, gathering up the talisman, her voice calm, "the ancestral manual stays with me."

Xu Wenchang stared at her, stared a long while, and in the end said nothing more. With a flick of his sleeve, he led the branch-line people away. As he left, the way he looked at Qinghe was no longer that earlier look of looking down from on high—it was wariness, and rancor too.

This clan-uncle would not let the matter rest hereafter. But for today, at least, the ancestral manual was kept.

Once the people had dispersed, Xu Qinghe found Lin Que mixed in among the idlers.

"This debt," she said, looking at him deeply, "I, Xu Qinghe, cannot repay."

"You can repay it," Lin Que said. "On that shelf of yours there's a green-jade paperweight. An old one, worth nothing. Give it to me, and we're square."

Xu Qinghe was stunned. "That paperweight? That's the most worthless old thing in the house. What do you want it for?"

"It suits my hand," Lin Que said, lowering his eyes.

That green-jade paperweight was, in others' eyes, a worthless old stone. But in Lin Que's eyes, the thread of pure qi inside it was the vital gate for his breaking through to the next layer. The Xu family owed him an enormous favor, yet he had picked only the "most worthless" thing—this way, Xu Qinghe would remember the debt, others would think nothing of it, and the thing he wanted would not draw attention. Three gains in one stroke.

Xu Qinghe stared at him for a good while. She had already learned: whatever this medicine-boy wanted, he had his own reasons; what he wouldn't tell, she wouldn't ask. Only, in her heart, she set it down—this medicine-boy of unknown origin had today preserved for her the last root of the Xu family, the thing her father had entrusted to her hands on his deathbed. This debt she would remember all her life.

She turned and went inside, fetched that dust-covered green-jade paperweight, and solemnly placed it in his hand.

The green jade settled into his grip, and that thread of utterly pure living qi ran along his palm, answering faintly to the flaw at his fifth layer of Qi Condensation.

The thing for breaking through to the next layer was in hand.

"Lin Que." Xu Qinghe suddenly called out to him as he was about to leave. "The Green Seal-Script Talismans of my Xu family—the upper, middle, and lower scrolls—still have many flaws… Can you mend them?"

There was a light in her eyes of one who had burned her boats. The flaw her clan-uncle had bared in public today had made one thing utterly clear to her: the reason the Xu family had failed for generations to make their talismans was that this set of talisman-methods had, from the root, had a stretch of it severed by someone. She wanted to mend it back, one flaw at a time.

Lin Que looked at her and did not answer at once.

To mend back the whole set of Green Seal-Script Talismans was a great undertaking, and also a road that would bind him, the Xu family, and that ever-growing riddle of "the severed methods" tightly together. Yet at the end of that road, what awaited him—besides the gate and the bond—was that riddle he wanted more and more to uncover: just who, in the end, had severed the methods of this world.

"I can," he said. "But not today."

Lin Que tucked that green-jade paperweight away against his body. The jade was cool, and that thread of pure qi, through the cloth, answered faintly to the flaw at his fifth layer of Qi Condensation.

Xu Qinghe saw him to the courtyard gate, then suddenly called him back, drawing from her sleeve a neatly folded sheet of talisman-paper and pressing it into his hand. "A Green Seal-Script Talisman I've newly made whole—it wards the house and repels evil. Take it—be careful on the road."

This was the first talisman she had mended whole, its qi-channels smooth and ordered. At the touch of Lin Que's fingertip, the qi on that talisman ran smoothly along, with not a single break. He gave it a squeeze, cupped his hands in farewell, turned, and walked into the flow of people in North Lane.

Behind him, that vermilion-lacquered gate of the Xu family slowly closed. This gate of the great clans—he had, in the end, pushed open a crack.

【Ch. 015 End · the Qian Estate, Eastern City / North Lane of the Market Town · the Xu Residence】