Ch. 029| The Higher-Ups' Man

The summons came down after breakfast.

A menial foreman from the outer gate hunted him down to the woodshed and dropped a single sour line: the hour of the Monkey that afternoon, the supervisor's office—Supervisor Pei wanted to see him. Then he threw Lin Que a glance, one that swept over his face, an ill-concealed curiosity beneath the disdain—how had a floor-sweeper drawn the notice of a supervisor?

Lin Que answered that he would come, but his heart sank.

That the shift steward had taken down his name, he had expected. But a name taken down, reported upward, had come back at the level of Supervisor Pei himself. An outer-gate supervisor, who held the assessments, assignments, rewards and punishments of the several hundred disciples of the outer gate, was a man that even the shift stewards did not always get to see. For a newly admitted disciple's rescue of one qi deviation, he wanted to see him in person.

A matter worth two words of praise, a supervisor would not attend to himself. What he wanted to see clearly was what this newly admitted disciple was really about.

---

On the way to the supervisor's office that afternoon, at a turn beneath the corridor eaves, a moon-white figure came toward him.

It was Bai Heng. She seemed merely to be passing; her steps did not halt, and as she brushed past him her voice dropped very low, so quick it was almost impossible to catch:

"What Supervisor Pei means to probe is not how you saved the man."

Lin Que kept his eyes lowered, made no answer, and did not slow his step.

"It's whether you can see it—that thing you were not meant to see." The hem of Bai Heng's robe had already slipped past his side; the last few words drifted into his ear. "Before him, you saw nothing."

She was already far away.

Lin Que closed his hand around the few silver needles in his sleeve, then slowly loosened it.

Those words were her repaying him a favor—yesterday she had said "I'll cover for you," and today she had first handed him Supervisor Pei's true intent. She had spent a year probing the deaths of outer-gate disciples and run headlong into this wall that was Pei; what this supervisor shielded was precisely the thing beneath those deaths that no one was meant to see through. And now a newly admitted disciple, of all people, could pull a man back from that threshold with a single needle—what Pei wanted to probe in seeing him, Bai Heng understood better than anyone.

---

The supervisor's office lay in the innermost courtyard of the outer gate, quiet, with two old pines before the door. When Lin Que was led in, Supervisor Pei was seated behind his desk, leafing through a register of disciples.

He was a man of some fifty years, fair-faced, with three wisps of thin beard, and eyes that always seemed to hold a trace of a smile. He set down the register and raised his eyes to Lin Que, and that smile spread across his face, warm and mild, like an elder regarding a junior.

"So it's you—the one who saved the Chen boy from that qi deviation." Supervisor Pei's voice was unhurried too. "Sit."

Lin Que did not dare sit, only bowed and stood in attendance. "In answer to the Supervisor—this disciple is only a new hand doing odd jobs. I am not worthy of it."

"You saved a man; how are you not worthy?" Supervisor Pei waved a hand, the smile unchanged. "I heard from the shift steward that you parted the crowd and, with a single needle, pulled a man back from the gates of hell. A qi deviation that even the true-lineage senior sister the outer gate keeps could not suppress—you, a menial, and one needle did it." He paused. "This skill—who did you learn it from?"

Here it was.

"A pill shop." Lin Que kept his eyes lowered and gave again, picking out the essentials, the same account he had spoken before the crowd the day before: three years of odd jobs at the Hundred Herbs Pill Shop in the market, where rogue cultivators often deviated in their cultivation; the shopkeeper had taught him a few crude tricks of pricking with needles to vent the qi, and with enough prickings the hand grew practiced.

"Oh?" Supervisor Pei was intrigued. "Then tell me—that needle for the Chen boy, where did you stick it?"

Lin Que's heart tightened.

This question was the real one. If he could answer with a precision like "the crucial aperture of the sixth layer's turning, lower-left of the back," that would give him away—how would an apothecary boy have the measure of the vital gate of the sixth layer of a true-lineage art?

"This disciple… can't say for sure." A pill-boy's awkwardness showed on his face. "Saving a qi deviation—there's no such nicety at a pill shop. You just follow that counterflowing qi with your fingers, feel for wherever it bulges most, is most blocked, and near there find a soft spot to stick the needle in, open a seam to vent the pent force, and the qi retreats on its own. Whether it lands or not is half practiced hand, half luck. That day… I just happened to hit it. Had I missed, that senior brother was a dead man anyway."

He said it all haltingly, half-understanding, exactly the tone of a pill-boy who only knew how to jab by feel.

Supervisor Pei watched him, and in those smiling eyes something was weighing.

"Happened to." He slowly repeated it, then smiled again. "True enough. A physician's needle is three parts craft and seven parts luck to begin with."

Lin Que kept his eyes lowered and did not take up the words. He knew this was not over.

Sure enough, from the porcelain dish on his desk Supervisor Pei picked up a pill and held it out: "Since you've knocked about a pill shop, you know medicine. This is the qi-nurturing pill the outer gate issues by the month. Take a look—how is it refined?"

Lin Que took it with both hands.

It was a monthly-allotment qi-nurturing pill—the same batch of thing he had seen in the pill-hall's waste dregs. At his fingertip's touch, before the heat beneath his left eye had even risen, the flaw had already struck into his sight: half a flavor drawn out of the medicinal nature from the root, so that the qi-nurturing broke off at a certain point and could rise no higher. It was the same trick as that seam in the Xuanzhao Breathing Art. The same hand.

He saw it clear as day.

"This disciple is shallow." Lin Que cupped the pill in his palm, looked at it twice, sniffed it in a show, looked again, and at last shook his head. "A pill refined in the true-lineage pill-hall—how would this disciple understand its ways? I only feel that… the scent is pure and true, and the pellet is rolled round and whole. Far better than those black workshops in the market. A fine pill."

He returned the pill with both hands, his face wearing the honest, wholehearted admiration of a pill-boy who has seen something fine.

Supervisor Pei took back the pill, rolling it between his fingertips, his eyes never once leaving Lin Que's face.

That gaze was like a needle, trying to pick something out from the bottom of his eyes. Lin Que let him look; his eyes were clean and clear, holding only the stiffness and awe of a newly admitted disciple before a supervisor.

After a long while, Supervisor Pei set the pill back into the dish, and that trace of scrutiny faded.

"A fine pill." He repeated Lin Que's words and smiled, as if he found the remark amusing. "Yes—it's a fine pill."

He set down the pill and, leafing through the register, suddenly asked again: "At your admission assessment, you tested at the fourth layer of Qi Condensation. In these days since you came in, any progress?"

Lin Que's heart went cold.

He was now at the fifth layer of Qi Condensation—that layer he had forced open in that dead-end alley of Qingqi Market, driven to a corner by Sun Heng, with the pure qi of the green-jade paperweight. He kept it hidden on him, had not breathed a word of it to anyone. A disciple who had entered barely a month and had quietly broken through a layer without a sound—that was even more glaring than saving a qi deviation.

"I dare not claim progress." Lin Que kept his eyes lowered. "The menial's work is miscellaneous—sweeping by day, and by night I'm so worn out I can't still my mind to sit. I'm still grinding away at the fourth layer; my qi-sense is steadier than when I entered, but the layer hasn't moved up."

The qi was indeed steadier; as for the layer, it had long since quietly moved up—that line he kept back. On the register on Supervisor Pei's desk, in black and white, his four layers at the assessment were recorded; so he spoke on along those four layers, adding not one jot more.

Supervisor Pei gave an "Mm," swept another glance over the line with his name, and did not press further.

---

"This skill of yours—sweeping floors is a waste of it." Supervisor Pei took up the register again and made a stroke on it with his brush. "Many disciples of the outer gate practice their arts, and deviating and harming the qi happens every year. The herb-lodge is short a hand to tend the injured. Henceforth you needn't sweep floors—go to the herb-lodge and attend, assisting the one who manages the medicines."

Lin Que's mind turned swiftly. A supervisor would not stoop to change the assignment of a newly admitted disciple with his own brush. This stroke was a reward, and also a placing of him under the eye.

"Thank you, Supervisor, for the favor." He bowed and accepted; he could not decline, and must not.

"Go, then." Supervisor Pei opened the register again, no longer looking at him, and added leisurely, "Henceforth, if there are more qi deviations in the outer gate, tend to the saving as you see fit. Save them, and it's their good fortune; fail to save them—" he smiled, "—don't overreach, either. Some fires are carried in a man's fate, and cannot be saved."

Some fires are carried in a man's fate, and cannot be saved.

Lin Que lowered his head and withdrew from the office. That seam someone had drawn out—in this supervisor's mouth it became a light, floating phrase: "a fire carried in one's fate."

---

Withdrawing from the supervisor's office, as he passed the two old pines in the front courtyard, Lin Que came face to face with a party entering.

Leading the way at the front was the steward-disciple of the supervisor's office, bent at the waist, stepping sideways, his whole face reverent. The man he led wore a blue robe and strolled through the gate at an unhurried pace.

Lin Que lowered his eyes and stepped aside to the corridor pillar, letting the party pass first.

As the blue robe swept past his side, the corner of his eye caught the edge of that cuff—a very inconspicuous dark pattern, whose lay he recognized. That time in Qinghe's shop in the market below the mountain, he had already seen this dark pattern once.

It was the blue-robed man. The meridian-cutting hand.

The steward-disciple led the blue-robed man nowhere else but straight to the very room Lin Que had just come out of. As they were about to enter, Lin Que heard the disciple's lowered line:

"The Teacher has come; the Supervisor is waiting."

The door of the room closed behind the blue-robed man. Within that door, moments ago, had sat the supervisor questioning him; now it was that "Teacher" who went in, and the supervisor waited.

Lin Que lowered his eyes, stood at the corridor pillar for one breath, did not dare look longer, and followed the corridor toward the herb-lodge. Since the supervisor had assigned him the post, he must go and take it up now.

---

The herb-lodge stood at the northwest corner of the outer gate, several tile-roofed rooms knocked into one, the medicinal air thick enough to choke. Lin Que reported the supervisor's assignment; the one who managed the medicines was a hard-of-hearing old man who narrowed his eyes and looked him over head to foot, asked nothing more, and only pointed at the herb-roller in the corner and a row of decoction pots waiting to be brewed—meaning, set to work first.

Seven or eight plank beds were laid out in the lodge, with five or six injured lying on them. As he ground the medicine, Lin Que swept his eyes over them—those taken in were not only sixth-layer. Two were injured deviating while forcing the sixth layer, their meridians burst along the same course as Senior Brother Chen's; a few others were hurt lower, having forced only the fifth, the fourth layer before their qi-channels collapsed at some node, leaving them sprawled and unable to stir on the beds.

That seam at the root of the art—every layer above it went crooked in turn. The harder one practiced, the earlier one was hurt; and that half-flavor flaw in the monthly-allotment pill pushed from below. Those who fell were carried one by one into this herb-lodge, sprawled on the plank beds, waiting to be nursed.

On the innermost bed lay Senior Brother Chen. Wei An kept watch at the bedside, just then changing the damp cloth on Chen's forehead; looking up and seeing Lin Que, he started. "Senior Brother? How is it you're here…"

"The Supervisor assigned me to the herb-lodge."

Wei An was first taken aback, then a trace of gladness showed; he lowered his voice and tilted his head toward Chen. "That's a fine thing, then. Senior Brother Chen woke once last night, asked who had saved him, and before I could answer he sank back into sleep. The physician says he's badly hurt, and these next days he'll have to lie half-conscious like this to recover. When he truly comes round, he'll surely want to see the man who saved his life."

Lin Que looked at that still-sunken face on the bed and made no reply. He took up the medicine-grinding work, rolled up his sleeves, the few silver needles at his wrist pressed against the skin.

Henceforth every man carried down from that seam would pass through these two hands of his.

【Ch. 029 End · the Xuanzhao Sect's outer gate · the supervisor's office → the herb-lodge】