Chapter 175

Chen Mo’s surprise lasts exactly an instant, the time it takes him to narrow his eyes in a gesture that is not that of someone who has seen something they don’t comprehend, but rather is the gesture of someone who has just received a new piece of information and is reorganizing their ideas, and he does it so quickly that I almost envy him.

And when he finally speaks, there is not a trace of scandal in his voice.

“You had your cards very well hidden”, he tells me.

He says it slowly, with a tone I take a second to recognize, because it is neither reproach nor surprise, but rather it is appreciation. The very concrete appreciation of a professional who discovers that the person he had been speaking with for half an hour has been hiding something important from him and has done it well.

“And I am not going to ask you how”, he continues. “But I am going to tell you one thing, and it is that that level of cultivation, at your age, is not normal in this part of the world.”

I keep the bowl where it is, suspended at the comfortable height at which I have left it, and I take a moment before answering, because I have had the answer thought out for a while but I want to give it to him in order.

“I had my reasons”, I tell him. “And they are exactly the same circumstances you have already told me you don’t want to know, so don’t worry, I am not going to tell them to you.”

Chen Mo lets the air out through his nose in something that is almost a laugh.

“I thank you”, he tells me.

“But there is a part I can indeed tell you”, I continue. “And it is that for a long time, hiding what I am capable of doing was the only sensible thing. It was not a preference nor an especially astute strategy, it was the only option I had on the table.”

I take the bowl with my real hands, because the effect is already achieved and because holding things with your hands, when you can, comes out cheaper.

“And I have spent since this morning traveling in a carriage with my head on other things and without realizing something fairly obvious”, I tell him. “That those circumstances were left behind and that I am no longer tied to them, so continuing to hide out of habit, when the reason for doing so no longer exists, is not prudence, it is simply foolishness.”

I make a brief pause.

“I needed you to give me a perfectly reasonable piece of advice to realize it”, I finish. “So, in part, this is thanks to you.”

Chen Mo listens to all of that without interrupting, and when I finish he nods once, with his head, slowly, and it is one of those gestures worth an entire paragraph.

“It is a good decision”, he tells me. “And besides it comes at a good moment.”

He finally recovers his bowl from the ground, rests it on his knee again and settles himself a bit.

“Because that is going to make your stay in the city of Sanjiang considerably simpler”, he continues. “I am not going to tell you that it is going to solve your life, but it is going to take off your back a good number of people who, otherwise, would have wasted their time and yours trying to find out what kind of kid arrives at the branch in the arms of a handmaiden.”

And there I realize that I have just received, free and without asking for it, a piece of information worth considerably more than the revelation I have made.

“Then I have to thank you”, I tell him. “And I don’t say it out of courtesy. You had no obligation whatsoever to give me any advice tonight, and you have given me three, counting this one.”

“I have given you one”, he protests.

“You have given me three”, I insist. “What happens is that two of them you gave without realizing it, which are usually the best ones.”

Chen Mo looks at me a moment with an expression I don’t quite decipher and then moves his head like one who decides not to argue with a client, so I take advantage of that movement.

“Since we are at it”, I tell him, and I make sure the tone is as polite as is possible for me. “Would you mind if I asked you some questions?”

And I notice perfectly how the question puts him on guard. Not much, barely just enough, but his right shoulder moves a finger’s width backward.

“It depends on the questions”, he answers me. “I have no problem at all answering whatever you want, provided they don’t involve secrets of the Tower of the Five Dragons.”

“That strikes me as perfectly reasonable”, I tell him. “And if at some moment I ask you something that falls into that category, tell me and I’ll move on to something else without it being necessary for you to give me any explanation.”

“It’s a deal”, he tells me.

And then I begin with the one I have been mulling over since this morning, when I saw the caravan.

“I don’t know whether this is a secret or not”, I begin. “But I heard that you are a delegation sent to the Sect of the Celestial Sun to negotiate the purchase of an article that, somehow, had ended up in their hands.”

Chen Mo does not react to the business of the article, which tells me quite a lot.

“And I have spent the whole day turning over the same thing”, I continue. “Because a delegation, in my head, is a group of important people with expensive clothing, letters of introduction and very little desire to carry bundles. And you are three carts, seven people and two tied tarpaulins. So the question is simple, why does a delegation look exactly like a caravan of merchants?”

And Chen Mo, at that question, smiles. But it is not the uncomfortable smile from before, nor the brief laugh from when I said the thing about Mei Ying, but rather it is an entire smile, of those that mean whoever wears it is enjoying themselves.

“Because we are a caravan of merchants”, he answers me.

And I stay looking at him with a face that must be considerably eloquent, because Chen Mo raises a hand to keep me from continuing to ask.

“Above all, at the Tower of the Five Dragons we are merchants”, he begins. “All of us. Me, those who are back there with the horses and the man who is going to receive you in Sanjiang behind a desk that costs more than these three carts put together. Merchants. Everything else comes afterward.”

He gives the wheel I have at my back a knock with his knuckles, and the sound rises up the spokes and reaches my shoulder blades.

“And a merchant does the math, so let us do it”, he continues. “From here to the branch there are thousands of Li. Months of road, between how long it takes to arrive and how long it takes to return. And in that time one has to pay for the horses’ fodder, one has to pay for the inns and one has to pay seven people who, while they are here, are not earning money anywhere else.”

He raises a finger.

“Now you tell me”, he says. “Does it strike you as reasonable to pay all that to go fetch an object and come back empty-handed save for that object?”

“Put that way, no”, I admit.

“Well, that is what those who sent me thought as well”, he tells me, and he shrugs his shoulders. “Despite the fact that it has been less than four years since the great shipment of merchandise that is made regularly along this route, for this trip they have sent a small cargo. Nothing out of this world, things that sell well here and that abound there, just enough for the trip not to be a hole in anyone’s accounts.”

And then he looks at me again with a touch of mischief.

“And along the way”, he adds. “A caravan that goes out full and comes back full draws no one’s attention. A procession of seven people that crosses half the world without carrying anything on them does.”

I nod slowly, with the bowl between my hands, because I have just realized that what this man is describing to me is, exactly, a business trip with an additional task added on.

And it strikes me as an impeccable approach.

Because in my other life I saw the same principle in operation a considerable number of times, although back then we called it something else and it consisted of a department taking advantage of the fact that someone had to be sent to a congress in another country so that, while they were at it, they would stop by the laboratory next door to pick up some samples that had spent six months in a drawer.

No one is ever sent to do a single thing, they are sent to do one thing and all the ones they can carry out along the way are added on.

“It is a very sensible way of doing it”, I tell him. “And it explains fairly well why the Tower has the reputation it has.”

“We have the reputation for fulfilling what we promise”, he answers me. “The business of the profits is only so as to be able to keep fulfilling it next year.”

And that sentence, for coming from a man who has spent twelve hours eating dust on a driver’s seat, is of a lucidity that makes me store it away for later.

I take another spoonful, and I take advantage of that time to prepare my next question, because that one I want to ask with care.

“I have another”, I tell him. “And this one is more personal, so if you prefer not to answer, absolutely nothing happens.”

“Go ahead”, he tells me.

“Some time ago a member of the Tower of the Five Dragons visited the Empire”, I begin, measuring every word. “A woman who called herself Master Mu. I had occasion to deal with her for a season and she left a fairly deep impression on me.”

I make a minimal pause.

“Do you know her?” I ask him.

And what happens next I did not expect at all, because Chen Mo laughs.

And he does not laugh with discretion, but rather he laughs heartily, throwing his head back, with a short and resounding guffaw that makes Du Heng lift his gaze from the fire from the other side of the clearing.

“Forgive me”, he tells me when he recomposes himself, and his voice still trembles a bit. “I’m not laughing at you, I assure you. It’s that the correct question would be another.”

“Which one?” I ask him.

“Whether there is anyone who does not know Mu Fei, the Divine Lightning”, he answers me.

And I blink, twice in fact, and stay a second with my mouth slightly open before realizing it and closing it.

Because I have seen that woman fan herself while she corrected a stroke of mine. I have seen her take books out of a sleeve, spend three straight hours explaining to me why a badly closed rune is worse than not putting it, and call me things no professor from my old university would have dared call me even in the worst of their weeks.

I have seen her, in summary, as one sees someone who comes to your house to give you private lessons, and now it turns out she has a nickname.

“Is she famous?” I ask him, and it comes out of me with a little voice I don’t like at all.

“She is a recognized genius on the central continent”, Chen Mo answers me with all the naturalness in the world, like one saying that water is wet. “And not only within the Tower, she is so on the entire continent.”

He gives the edge of the bowl a little tap with his fingernail.

“In fact, she is seventh in the rank of Celestial Dragons”, he adds.

And there I get completely lost.

“The what?” I ask him.

Chen Mo raises his eyebrows and then, almost immediately, makes a gesture with his hand as if he were apologizing to himself.

“No, you are right, it is normal that you don’t know it”, he tells me. “It is one of those things only known by people who have regular contact with the central continent. Here, at the edge, it is of no use to anyone, so no one tells it.”

He settles himself a bit better, and I notice that he is getting comfortable to explain, which is a posture I recognize perfectly because I have adopted it in a classroom many times.

“The rank of Celestial Dragons is a list”, he tells me. “A list that gathers all the geniuses under two hundred years of age who are considered capable of achieving the Ascension before turning three hundred.”

I stay a moment with that information going around, and the first thing my head does is translate it into something I understand, and what comes out is a magazine with a horrendous cover and a headline in large letters that says ‘The Hundred Geniuses of the Year’.

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After that vision, I have to lower my face and pretend that I am very interested in the bottom of the bowl for a couple of seconds, but when I lift my gaze again, I have already decided that I am not going to keep pulling on that thread, since it is something so far from my current situation that it is not worth worrying about something like that.

I will have time for that later, exactly one hundred eighty-seven years in fact, because there is something else that is intriguing me much more.

“Let me ask you something else, then”, I tell him. “Why have you called her the Divine Lightning?”

And Chen Mo, at that question, smiles again, but in a different manner, and suddenly I understand that I have just given him exactly what he was waiting for me to give him.

“That is her nickname”, he tells me. “Do you want to know how she got it?”

“Yes”, I answer him, and I say it so quickly and with so little dissimulation that Xia, who is crouched beside the fire scrubbing the wok, lifts her head all at once.

Chen Mo laughs again, more softly, and takes it calmly. He leaves the bowl on the ground, wipes his hands on his knees and adopts the posture of someone who has told this before and knows perfectly where the pauses are.

“Mu Fei, or Master Mu, as she prefers to be called, has a long history”, he begins, and there is a nuance of amusement in how he says it. “Before having the fame she has now, she was already someone. She was a Grand Master of Talismans, in fact, the youngest in history.”

He raises a finger.

“And that, understand me, is no small thing”, he continues. “It is a title that is normally obtained with centuries of work and that opens doors anywhere in the world where there is someone who knows what it means. But it is a fame of a very concrete type, so she was known by her colleagues, by those who buy talismans wholesale and by those who had enough money to commission something from her. Outside those circles, her name meant nothing to anyone.”

He makes a pause.

“And then, one day a Celestial Fragment opened”, he says.

And with those five words he has me absolutely captivated, although I try not to let it show.

“It opened suddenly”, Chen Mo continues. “Without warning, without prior signs and without anything that would permit foreseeing it. And upon opening, it dragged inside everyone who was close enough to the opening.”

He lifts his chin.

“And Mu Fei was close enough”, he says.

He picks up the bowl again, more out of habit than hunger.

“After that initial opening, there were many people who tried to enter”, he goes on. “A great many, as you can imagine. A newly opened Celestial Fragment is the kind of thing for which people do crazy things. But there was no way, since the Fragment seemed to be sealed from the inside, and everyone who tried came up against the same thing, a barrier that would not let them in.”

He makes a vague gesture with his hand.

“So, in the end, what always happens happened”, he continues. “Those who were in a hurry left, those who had money sent others to wait in their place, and with time the only thing that remained there was a small watch.”

And there he lowers his voice a bit, not because it is a secret, but because it is the moment when the story turns.

“But finally, almost a year later, the Fragment opened”, he tells me. “And out came Mu Fei.”

He stays quiet a second.

“The entrance closed behind her and then disappeared”, he adds. “So there was no need for anyone to ask anything, since it was clear that she had been the only survivor.”

I say nothing, because I have nothing to say, and because I have just realized that the woman with the infinite sleeve, and the fan, spent a year in there dealing with whatever was inside.

“But that is not the important thing”, Chen Mo continues. “The important thing is what she brought with her.”

“A treasure?” I ask.

“Techniques”, he answers me. “Some strange techniques no one had ever seen and that permitted her to create and manipulate lightning.”

And then he opens his hands, with the palms upward, in the gesture of one showing the end of a trick.

“And from there on, the rest tells itself”, he says. “Because a Grand Master of Talismans who, besides, can fill everything in front of her with lightning stops being interesting only to certain circles. So she kept rising, and along the way the name Divine Lightning stuck to her.”

And I listen to all of that and nod at the correct moments, but inside I have been thinking for a good while now because I remember that afternoon perfectly.

I remember being seated in front of her talking about Celestial Fragments, and how, without giving it the least importance, she put her hand into that sleeve of hers and took out a fragment of broken stone that she turned between her fingers to show me.

I remember the letters separated by dots and how the entire world stopped for me for an instant.

And I remember, above all, the naturalness with which she told me that she herself had entered one or another Celestial Fragment and that she kept it as a curiosity.

A fragment of stone with a Roman legionary dedication, kept in the sleeve of a woman who came out of a Celestial Fragment knowing how to handle lightning.

I have no way of proving it, none, and I am perfectly aware that I am constructing a building with two bricks, but it is that those two bricks fit so well that I find it practically impossible not to place them one on top of the other.

Because I have been stumbling upon the same thing in this world. Lianhua came back from some Egyptian ruins with a technique called Vision of Horus while I have in my head a technique that bears the name of the Celtic god who invented an alphabet.

The Celestial Fragments have their feet sunk up to the knee in the ancient cultures of my old world, and at this point the strange thing would be the opposite.

So if Mu Fei entered a place with inscriptions in Latin and came out of there handling lightning, then the question is no longer where those techniques came from, but what they are called.

And for a moment I permit myself the luxury of imagining that woman, with her fan and her face of being utterly bored, reciting the name of a technique with the name of Zeus.

Although no, not Zeus. Zeus would be from a Greek Celestial Fragment, and with a dedication from the legions involved, it would have to be Jupiter.

And I get an attack of laughter inside so sudden and so absolutely inopportune that I have to bite the inside of my cheek so that it doesn’t reach my mouth, because there is absolutely no way of explaining to Chen Mo why it amuses me so much.

There is, besides, another detail I keep to myself and that interests me even more.

Because lightning, according to the guide I myself translated, is an advanced element. And advanced elements are not obtained by wanting them, but rather they are obtained by fusing cores, and that can only be done in a step of cultivation that Master Mu, from what Chen Mo is telling me, had still not reached at the moment she entered the Celestial Fragment.

Which means that she does not handle lightning because she has a lightning core, she handles it because the techniques she took out of in there are capable of doing, without a core, something that is supposed to need one, which increases my suspicion about the sand technique, which is another advanced element.

And that, if I stop to think about it, is much more interesting than the nickname.

“You have gone very quiet”, Chen Mo tells me.

I lift my gaze and find him observing me with his head slightly tilted.

“I was trying to fit together the woman I knew with the one you are describing to me”, I answer him, and it is rigorously true. “And so far I am finding it difficult.”

“That happens to a lot of people”, he tells me.

“Precisely because of that there is something I still don’t understand”, I tell him. “And it is the following. If Master Mu is all that you have told me, if she is on that list and has that name and that nickname, then what the devil was she doing in a place like the Empire?”

And I realize that I have just referred in a contemptuous manner to the place where I have lived for thirteen years, but at this point in the day I really don’t care much.

“Because, with all respect for my homeland, we are at the edge of the world”, I add. “Here there is no Qi, there are no resources and there is nothing a person of that level could want.”

“There you are mistaken”, Chen Mo answers me right away. “There is indeed something.”

“What?” I ask him.

“Treasures of Heaven and Earth”, he tells me.

And he leans forward a bit.

“Mu Fei spends a considerable part of her time traveling the world searching for them”, he continues. “And not out of caprice, but because she needs them to complete the Celestial Fusion of the Core. And remote places, precisely because they are remote and because there is no one with sufficient level to reach them, are where from time to time something remains that on the central continent was carried off a thousand years ago.”

And that, I have to admit, makes all the sense in the world.

“And here comes the amusing part”, Chen Mo adds, and one can tell he likes this part. “Because the Tower has offered her Treasures. Many times and of the good ones, of the kind that any of us would not see in our entire lives.”

“And?” I ask him.

“That she has rejected them all”, he answers me. “All of them, without exception, while she scorns them calling them mediocre.”

He raises his hands in a gesture of absolute surrender.

“Her words, not mine”, he clarifies to me. “She says that she will only do the Fusion with Treasures she considers perfect, and that until the ones she considers to be so appear, she will keep waiting.”

He lets his hands drop onto his knees again.

“And she has been waiting so long that she has stagnated”, he continues. “So much, in fact, that she has been falling in the rank, because in her day she came to be third.”

And there I do raise my eyebrows.

“Third?” I repeat.

“Third”, he confirms to me. “And now she is seventh. And if she goes on like this, in a few years she will be tenth, and then she will no longer be there.”

He says it with a tone that resembles regret quite a bit, and I realize that Chen Mo, deep down, is on the Tower’s side in this argument, and I, to my own surprise, am not.

Because I have, although he doesn’t know it, some papers I translated from Egyptian and that say with all clarity what the Celestial Fusion of the Core does to a cultivator. That the Treasure you use at that moment is not an ingredient that gets used up, but rather that it is what is going to define your Qi, your body and everything you become afterward.

That that is the moment in which you decide what kind of cultivator you are going to be for the rest of a life that can last millennia, if the suspicions about the Celestial Realm after Ascending are correct.

And a decision like that is not taken in haste because someone is worried about the place you occupy on a list.

“Well, I support her”, I say.

Chen Mo lifts his gaze.

“I say it seriously”, I continue. “The Celestial Fusion of the Core is not just any stage, it is the decision that is going to condition absolutely everything she may do from that moment on. And if they offer her something that doesn’t convince her, accepting it so as not to fall behind would be ruining her own cultivation forever.”

I give the edge of the bowl a little tap with my finger.

“And ruining it, besides, in order to be able to stay on a list”, I add. “A list that, from what you have told me, is of absolutely no use for anything other than showing off about being on it.”

And then I look at him directly, because I want to see the face he makes.

“Or am I mistaken?” I ask him. “Tell me sincerely. Are the people on the rank of Celestial Dragons paid anything? Are they given resources, are facilities opened to them, are they gifted Treasures? Is there any real benefit to being there?”

Chen Mo opens his mouth, closes it again, and then passes his hand over his head, from his forehead to the nape of his neck, in a gesture that in any language of the universe means exactly the same thing.

“It gives a lot of prestige”, he tells me finally.

“Right”, I say.

“An enormous prestige”, he insists. “Being on that list makes everyone know who you are.”

“Right”, I repeat.

And I snort with all the sincerity of which I am capable, a short snort through the nose that comes out before I have time to evaluate whether it is a rudeness or not.

“Well then”, I say. “It is only good for showing off, exactly what I was imagining.”

And Chen Mo, to his eternal credit, does not take offense nor argue, but rather he chuckles between his teeth, moves his head and says absolutely nothing, which is the most elegant way that exists of granting someone the point.

And after that a silence falls.

It is not an uncomfortable silence, it is one of those that appear when two people have finished a topic and neither of the two is in a hurry to begin another, and it lasts long enough for the crackling of the fire to reach me, the noise of Xia putting away the pots and, very much in the background, the snort of one of the horses.

But finally I am the one who breaks it.

“I am going to ask you one last question”, I tell him. “And this one is purely practical.”

“Go ahead”, he tells me.

“What is the route going to be like?” I ask him. “Because I have spent the whole day stuck in a carriage without having the least idea of where we are going, beyond the fact that it is far from the Empire.”

And there Chen Mo changes.

It is a small but very clear change, because that touch of after-dinner conversation leaves his voice and he enters a firmer tone, that of someone who is talking about their work. And besides, upon doing so, he raises his voice a bit and turns his head just enough to include Lianhua and Xia as well, because evidently this concerns the three of us.

“We are going to travel by land as far as the city of Zibo”, he says. “It is the heavy part of the journey and I am not going to lie to you, since there are quite a few days like today’s, although starting tomorrow we will go at a normal pace and sleep at inns.”

He makes a pause.

“In Zibo a boat is waiting for us”, he continues. “And from there the rest of the route is by river as far as Sanjiang, which is excellent news for everyone, since a boat is, in every sense, much more comfortable than some carriages.”

And that, after twelve hours inside one, strikes me as the most beautiful promise anyone has made me in a long time.

“Go on, please”, I tell him.

“Sanjiang, as its own name indicates, is the intersection of three rivers”, he goes on. “And that makes it a moderately important commercial center for the whole zone, because everything that comes down any of the three has to pass through there without fail.”

He shrugs his shoulders.

“And for that reason the Tower has a branch in it”, he finishes. “It is not the largest we have, not by a long shot, but it is the only one there is on this side of the world because it is the best zone to place it.”

I nod slowly while I mentally place each piece where it goes, and I realize that, for the first time since I left my Pavilion stuck inside a cart of dirty clothing, I have a route.

It is no great thing. It is a line of land, a point called Zibo, a line of water and a point called Sanjiang, but it is infinitely more than I had this morning.

And then I realize something else, which is that it has been a good while since all the bowls were empty, that Xia has already half cleared away the fire, and that I have been keeping the man who leads this caravan entertained with my questions.

“Chen Mo”, I tell him. “Thank you very much for answering me.”

“It was not such a big deal”, he answers me right away. “And I thank you for having given me conversation, because after a day like today’s it serves to pass the time.”

But then he looks toward the carts, and one can tell that he already has half his thoughts there.

“Although now I have to go supervise the preparations for spending the night”, he adds. “The watches have to be distributed and the three of you have to be placed.”

“Well, go on”, I tell him immediately. “And don’t apologize again, please. That is considerably more important than a handful of questions that, besides, I can ask you at any other moment because, from what I see, we have months ahead of us.”

Chen Mo smiles, gathers his bowl from the ground and gets up with a creak of knees that a man in the Condensation of the Elemental Cores should have no need of whatsoever and that, I suspect, he makes on purpose out of pure habit.

“Rest”, he tells me with an inclination of the head.

And I stay where I am, with my back resting on the spokes of the wheel and the blanket underneath, watching how he crosses the clearing, plants himself in the center and begins to hand out instructions.

It is the most boring scene in the world and it calms me enormously, because people who organize themselves like that in the middle of nowhere on any given Tuesday are people who know what they are doing.

And with that tranquility in the background, I am left at last alone with what I have been wanting to do for a while, which is to try to join the image of two women into one.

On one side I have my image, that of a woman who struck her fan against her own shoulder with a rhythm I can still reproduce from memory and who one day decided to give me some earrings that today I have put back on knowing that they no longer work.

The woman who looked me in the face when I lied to her about the Latin and who decided, for reasons I still don’t entirely understand, not to insist.

And on the other side I have the one Chen Mo has just described to me. Mu Fei, the Divine Lightning, seventh in the rank of Celestial Dragons, the only survivor of a Celestial Fragment that swallowed everyone who was nearby and that a year later returned her, a master of Lightning, as if she were the king of the gods.

A figure that sounds like a legend, exactly the kind of name that is said in a low voice.

And there, while I look at the two of them, one on each side of my head, I finally ask myself the question that has been circling my head for a good while.

Why?

A woman like that could be anywhere in the world, she could even be on the central continent, in a hall full of geniuses and giving them master classes with which she would certainly earn a fortune.

And instead of that, she spent four months going to the Palace of an empire no one has heard of to correct the strokes of a ten-year-old girl who could not walk.

Charging, of course. And quite a lot.

But charging considerably less, I suspect, than a single hour of her time would have cost anyone on the central continent.

But I have just begun a road that, someday, will take me to the central continent, and once there perhaps our paths, as she told me when she said goodbye, will cross.

And then I will be able to ask her why she did it.