The Eye of Flaws

A knack for seeing the flaw. Where the breathing of an art runs wrong, which ingredient in a pill formula clashes, which stroke of a talisman has broken the qi, where an array leaks — to these eyes all of it turns into a thin orange light, the shape of a gap.

It starts from that point of heat under the left eye. Stare at a thing that is wrong and the heat rises first, and then the place where the thing is spoiled comes up slowly, like a stone under water. Qi is orange to these eyes, fine as embroidery thread. The flaw is where that thread breaks, or where it joins unevenly.

It is a delicate thing. Close objects and dead objects come clearest, and anything further off blurs. Look long and the temples start to throb, and by the tenth-odd pill the sight has already begun to go black. There are only a few such looks in a day; past that it is like a needle going into the eye socket. Push on regardless and the eye first goes dry, then runs, and after that it runs blood. A night without sleep, or a round already spent in the daylight, and what is left of the day’s ration is thinner still.

Different things are far from equally easy to read. The flaw in a pill is the easiest to pick out, surfacing at a glance. A talisman means reading that vein between the strokes which carries the qi, and that takes staring at the whole sheet. The flaw in an array or in a ward hides in the base pattern cut dead into the stone, and has to be traced along the lines an inch at a time until the tracing stops somewhere, and that is where the force is caught. Living people are the hardest — in the early years a look at a living man gave nothing but a blur, like watching somebody through dirty water, with no telling where the flaw was or where the hollow.

The limits go one layer further: it can point out where the gap is, how deep it runs, which way it splits, and it gives not one word of how to mend it. Seeing is not solving. The mending still comes down to trial and error, to materials, to running one’s own meridians into the thing again and again.

The deeper the looking, the higher the cost — after the one time he looked inside his own meridians, the back of his head was dull for half a day. As for where these eyes came from, the one who has them cannot answer either. Early on he once said too much, said the neighbour’s newly laid stove had a crack in it that could not be seen; the stove did come down 3 days later, and the one who had spoken was driven out as a bringer of bad luck. From then on these eyes learned their first rule: seeing a thing does not mean it has to be said.