Ch. 028| An Answer Beside the Question

Lin Que braced on his broom and did not lift his head. Those few fallen leaves under the eaves he swept very slowly, gathering them into the dustpan one by one, as though it were the most important thing under heaven.

Bai Heng stood before him, unmoving.

Having asked her "just who are you," she waited for his answer. She waited three breaths, and seeing him only sweep with his head down, she did not press, only fixed those eyes steadily on his face—like two needles, scraping inch by inch.

Lin Que ran through it swiftly in his mind.

Twenty or thirty people had stood outside the meditation cell just now; had she meant to expose him before them all, it was the work of a sentence: this menial's needle struck the vital gate for breaking through to the sixth layer, no pill-boy's first aid at all. She had not exposed it. To hold back a line that could pin him dead, and instead draw him to a secluded place to ask alone—this was not someone meaning to bring him to account. One meaning to punish him would not choose a moment no one could hear.

She had her own reasons.

Understanding this, the hand bracing Lin Que's broom eased half a measure.

"Senior sister, I don't understand these words." He set down the dustpan, eyes lowered. "A newcomer just entered to do menial work—who could he be?"

"Let's talk somewhere else." Bai Heng did not take up his words, but turned toward the deeper reaches beneath the eaves, her moon-white hem brushing past the steps. "It's windy here."

She did not look back, certain he would follow.

Lin Que watched her back, then glanced at the crowd not yet dispersed in the distance—Fang Qi was squeezed among them, craning his neck to ask how Chen fared after being carried off, wholly heedless of this side. Lin Que leaned the broom against a corridor pillar and followed.

What she meant to say in private, he had to hear. Only after hearing it would he know whether this threshold meant life or death.

---

At the corridor's end they turned into an empty courtyard, an old place for heaping oddments—waist-high broken vats, chip-cornered stone mortars, piled along the wall's foot. The slanting sun came in and lit the dust floating in the light.

Bai Heng stopped by a stone mortar and turned back.

"That needle of yours," she said, her voice pressed low yet falling word by word, "struck three inches lower-left of the center of Senior Brother Chen's back. That spot is the pass where the qi-channel turns its aperture when breaking through to the sixth layer. An ordinary true-lineage disciple, to find that spot, would study the channel-chart half a day and still mightn't strike the depth right. You shouldered through the crowd, didn't even look, and drove the needle in with a single stroke."

She stepped half a pace forward.

"I ask who you are, not to do anything to you. I mean to know—you didn't even look; how did you know where that spot lies?"

Lin Que did not answer at once.

The point of heat beneath his left eye, drained hard from saving the man just now, still swelled; only after rubbing it did he barely gather a thread. Following that thread, he gazed into Bai Heng's channels.

She was true-lineage, her foundation a great cut above the outer-gate crowd, her qi nourished thick and running even. But where the qi ran to one place—the stretch above the tanzhong, below the throat—each time it brimmed past, there it collapsed. She led the qi back, gathered it again, pushed it up again, and at that spot still it collapsed. Barred so many times, the channel had worn marks, like a threshold that could not be passed, holding her fast, dead, right here.

The channel's run at that spot, Lin Que knew.

It was the same manner of break as the narrow mouth of Chen's sixth layer. Only Chen cultivated the outer-gate version with one stroke cut, broken at the sixth layer; Bai Heng cultivated the true-lineage full copy, and this break was hidden higher, deeper—hidden until even her own school took it for her insufficient skill.

Lin Que's heart sank, but his face did not move. That even the true-lineage art was not clean—this he did not spell out. With Bai Heng's temperament, once she truly took it in she would investigate to the death; and reaching that hand, the first to be lost would be her.

But where she was stuck, he could say.

"Senior sister, at the stretch below your throat," Lin Que began, his voice flat, "does your qi always scatter there? Won't gather, can't push through. And you've cultivated more than a year at it."

Bai Heng's pupils contracted, suddenly.

"Everyone in your school tells you it's your mind unsettled, your skill insufficient," Lin Que said, watching her. "These years you've put in no small effort, yet at that one pass you've not moved a step. You've near come to believe it yourself—that it's you who fall short."

The courtyard fell quiet. The dust in the sunlight still floated.

Bai Heng's face whitened inch by inch. It was a thing she'd kept three years and never told a soul. First-rate foundation among the true-lineage, and yet stuck at a pass no one could explain, one even her master shook his head over. She'd thought it her own hidden ailment, her talent at its end.

"It isn't that you fall short." Lin Que spoke those words very lightly. "The spot where you're stuck isn't in you. It's in the art. At that stretch, the art itself lacks a stroke; the qi reaches there with nowhere to turn, so of course it scatters. It isn't that you can't cultivate higher—it's that this road was broken there to begin with."

Bai Heng's lips moved, and for a while no sound came.

In those ever-cold eyes there was first a tremor, then a welling-up of something hard to name—as though someone had gently shifted aside a crack in the stone that had pressed on her three years. Without thinking she raised a hand to press that spot above her tanzhong, her fingertips trembling faintly.

"You..." her voice was a little hoarse, "how did you see it?"

"This, senior sister, don't ask." Lin Que lowered his eyes. "That I can tell you where you're stuck is already leaking my own bottom. Ask further—and I can't explain it myself; and even could I, the moment this word got out, the first to lose his life would be me."

This was the truth. The origin of these flaw-seeing eyes, he could not explain even to himself—and even could he, he would not, at this moment, hand it to a Xuanzhao true-lineage to hear.

Bai Heng stared at him a long while, and in the end did not chase that one line. She was a clever person, able to hear which question, once asked, would drag them both under.

---

"You're right." After a long while, Bai Heng relented, her voice sinking too. "That pass, I've been stuck three years. My master said I was flighty and sent me into a sealed retreat in the back mountains to settle my temper. I settled it the better part of a year, came out and pushed again—still it scattered."

She paused.

"Senior Brother Chen's ordeal today—I've doubted it more than a day too." She looked up at Lin Que. "Among those cultivating the Xuanzhao Breathing Art in the outer gate, these past two or three years, more than one has fallen at the sixth layer. This year alone makes three. I asked the Pill Hall, asked the steward in charge of the archives—outer-gate disciples have uneven foundations; getting stuck at some layer is nothing strange in itself. But three men, all dying at the same layer, the same spot, the very same manner of counter-flowing qi? Where's the coincidence in that?"

Something moved in Lin Que's heart. What she'd traced, and what he'd seen in the deep scrolls, matched.

"What did you turn up?" he asked.

"Nothing at all." Bai Heng gave a cold laugh, a pressed-down fire in it. "I went to the Archive Hall to request the advanced annotated scroll of the Xuanzhao Breathing Art, to compare the qi-formulas past disciples used at the sixth layer. The archive-keeper said—'taken away from above.' I am true-lineage, and yet a request for the annotations of one outer-gate art, I couldn't command. Ask higher, and the steward in charge of outer-gate affairs called me in, saying, 'A true-lineage disciple—what business have you meddling in the outer gate's trifles? Mind your proper cultivation.'"

Reaching here, she stopped herself, seeming to feel she'd said too much.

But Lin Que caught every word. That scroll, he'd seen in the deep scrolls—the wall Bai Heng struck in the open was the very one he'd felt his way along in the dark.

"Senior sister, this that you're investigating," Lin Que began, weighing his words, "the higher-ups already have their eyes on you. Investigate further, and it does you no good."

"That's why I've come to ask you." Bai Heng looked at him, her gaze sharpening again—yet no longer the sharpness that would pin him dead. "I investigated a year and came away with a bloodied nose. You, with one needle, hauled Chen back from the gate of death. What even I can't get a handle on, you know clear as day."

She looked at him, straight on.

"I won't expose you. This skill of yours, I'll keep pressed down for you," she said. "But this, you remember. Chen's life you saved; hereafter, when another man falls at the sixth layer in the outer gate, you'll know in your heart—I want you not to simply act as though you don't."

Within the words "you remember" there was not half a plea; it was the tone the true-lineage habitually used to make a person consent. Yet as she said it, the hand clutching her sleeve had knuckles gone white.

"I'll remember," Lin Que answered.

Bai Heng looked at him, and in those eyes that would have pinned him dead, the sharpness faded. She looked at him one last time, turned to go, took two steps, and stopped.

"By the way." She did not look back. "The steward on duty noted down your name just now. He reported this morning—the higher-ups want to see you tomorrow afternoon. A menial who can save qi deviation. Weigh your answers yourself."

That said, the moon-white figure vanished into the corridor's shadow.

Lin Que stood where he was, and those swollen, aching eyes slowly narrowed. After a while he bent and picked up the broom leaning against the corridor pillar, and swept the fallen leaves under the eaves again.

Tomorrow afternoon's summons—there was no dodging it.

---

That night, before the menial-chores court put out its lamps, someone rapped in the dark at the door of the woodshed where Lin Que lodged.

It was the little junior who'd watched Chen's seclusion, called Wei An. He clutched a cloth bundle, and coming in first made Lin Que a long bow, so earnest he nearly knocked his head to the floor.

"Senior Brother Chen woke," Wei An said, his voice trembling. "The physician says his meridians are injured no lightly, that he'll nourish a year or more, and the sixth layer's not to be dreamed of. But his life... his life is saved. The first thing he said on waking was to ask who'd saved him. I said it was a menial; he wouldn't believe it, said a menial couldn't save qi deviation."

Wei An pressed the cloth bundle into Lin Que's hands, heavy.

"This is a small token from Senior Brother Chen—two vials of bone-setting, meridian-mending medicine, and..." he lowered his voice, "half a string of spirit stones, thirty of them. Senior Brother Chen says he's noted the debt of his life saved; hereafter in the outer gate, wherever a word from Wei An carries, senior brother, you've only to speak."

Lin Que gripped the bundle and did not push it back. Thirty spirit stones were no small sum to him; an outer-gate tie watched over by a true-lineage disciple, less still a thing money could buy. He took it—this was a favor that ought to be taken, and refusing would only breed estrangement.

"Give my thanks to Senior Brother Chen," Lin Que said. "Tell him to rest easy and convalesce."

Wei An nodded and nodded, but did not go, wringing his hands, seeming to have more to say.

"Senior brother," he said, hesitating, "I watched Senior Brother Chen's seclusion the better part of a month. Before he sealed himself away, he went once to the Archive Hall to borrow a book—he wanted the advanced annotated scroll of the sixth layer, to study before breaking through. He came back with his face bad—he said that scroll had been 'borrowed away by someone, not yet returned.'"

Wei An himself did not know what weight the words carried, taking it merely for an offhand remark. "He couldn't borrow it, so he had to charge through by his own skill alone. Had that scroll been there... perhaps he'd not have gone through this ordeal of qi deviation."

The hand with which Lin Que gripped the bundle tightened.

That advanced annotated scroll—Bai Heng couldn't command it: "taken away from above"; Chen couldn't borrow it: "borrowed away by someone." One said taken away, one said borrowed away.

The hand that withdrew this stroke hadn't even aligned its testimony.

【Ch. 028 End · the outer gate of the Xuanzhao Sect · the empty courtyard of the West Court → the woodshed of the menial-chores court】