Chapter 184

I listen to Lin Quingyu’s question, which strikes me as not only perfectly reasonable but even indispensable, and I hasten to answer it.

“Yes”, I tell her without hesitating.

After saying that, I bring my hand to the bag, rummage inside without looking, find by touch what I am searching for and take out the jade seal.

But before doing anything with it, I realize something.

“Before we begin”, I tell her. “Would you mind if my companions sat down? Because I get the impression that I am going to be here quite a while.”

Lin Quingyu blinks, and for the first time since we came in she takes an instant to answer, as if that question were the only one of the whole conversation she had not expected.

“There is no problem”, she tells me. “Let them take one of the chairs from the wall and sit wherever they want.”

So I turn my head.

“You have heard her”, I tell the two of them. “Sit down, this is going to take a while.”

Xia obeys immediately. She takes off the backpack, leaves it on the floor between her feet and sits on the edge of the chair with her back very straight, like someone sitting in a doctor’s waiting room.

Lianhua does not move.

“Lianhua”, I tell her.

“I am fine, Xiaojie”, she answers me.

“I have not asked whether you were fine”, I tell her. “I have said sit down.”

And there is a pause of exactly one second, which is what it takes that woman to decide whether this is one of the things in which she contradicts me or one of the ones in which she doesn’t, but finally she takes a chair, places it to my left and a bit behind, takes off the backpack, puts it between her feet and sits.

Lin Quingyu observes the whole scene without saying anything, then looks at me again, and I can no longer tell whether what there is in that look is curiosity or something else.

“Do you have paper and ink?” I ask her.

She nods, takes a blank sheet from one of the piles and slides it toward the edge of the table along with an inkstone and a brush.

I don’t reach out my hand, mainly because I can’t reach, so I make the seal float, send it to the table and use it to stamp the paper.

And on the paper three characters remain.

遠行號

And then I bring the seal back, rest it on my lap and settle it there with my hands, which is a gesture I make on purpose, because one thing is to show what you can do and quite another is to make a display of it.

Lin Quingyu has watched the whole process, and she has watched it with a great deal of attention, following the seal with her eyes from beginning to end, but without saying absolutely anything and without changing expression.

Afterward she takes the sheet and does not look at it against the light, nor compare it with anything, nor take out any register. What she does is rest two fingers on top of the impression, leave them there a moment, and separate them.

“It is correct”, she tells me.

And I, who have spent since I left the Empire waiting for that moment and who had imagined something considerably more solemn, am left a bit thrown off, but it passes right away, because there is something much more interesting.

“May I ask you a question”, I tell her.

“Go ahead”, she answers me.

“How do you know that that seal is the authentic one?” I ask her. “Because you have just touched an ink stain with two fingers and it has taken you a second. And from where I am sitting, that has been too fast a verification for what is at stake.”

And Lin Quingyu, faced with that question, does something she had not done until now, which is to smile a little.

“Because the seal, in itself, is a small spiritual artifact”, she answers me.

She leaves the sheet on the table.

“It is not only a carved piece of jade”, she continues. “Its function is to leave a trace of Qi inside the ink every time it signs. A very faint trace, that dissipates in a few days and that can only be recognized if you know exactly what you are looking for.”

She leans back against the backrest.

“And the Tower’s personnel know exactly what they are looking for”, she finishes. “A forger can copy the characters to perfection, and I assure you it has been attempted. What they cannot copy is that.”

I listen to that whole explanation, lower my gaze toward the piece of jade I have in my lap and realize that there is something that doesn’t add up.

“Wait a moment”, I tell her. “That doesn’t add up.”

“Why not?” she asks me.

“Because I have not used Qi when sealing, and to use a spiritual artifact one has to activate it, or so I understand”, I answer her.

And Lin Quingyu nods as if that were the question she had been waiting for.

“Naturally you have not done so”, she tells me. “And there was no need.”

She joins her hands again.

“Think for a moment about who our partners are”, she continues. “The Tower of the Five Dragons has associated enterprises on the five continents, and many of them are in the hands of people who cannot use Qi personally. Merchants from families without cultivation, heirs who never opened a single gate, elders who lost it, contracted administrators. People perfectly capable of running a business and absolutely incapable of channeling anything.”

She shrugs her shoulders.

“So the seals are configured to absorb by themselves the Qi they need from the surroundings and spend it on their own account”, she finishes. “It is very little. So little that it is almost imperceptible, and someone who does not cultivate can use it because it takes it from the air and stores it.”

I stay silent after her explanation, because I have just understood what she is telling me, and what she is telling me is that someone, at some moment, sat down to solve the problem of half their clients not being able to sign.

And they did not solve it by obliging them to hire a cultivator, nor by making two classes of seal, a good one for cultivators and a worse one for everyone else, nor by asking them to travel to a branch every time a signature was needed.

They solved it by putting the solution inside the object itself, so that the user doesn’t even have to find out that there was a problem.

“It is a very elegant solution”, I tell her.

And I mean it, and it shows that I mean it, because Lin Quingyu inclines her head a bit.

“I thank you”, she answers me. “But the merit is not mine nor of anyone who works here today. It was an invention of the founder of the Tower of the Five Dragons.”

“How long ago?” I ask her.

“A long time”, she answers me, and then moves on to more serious matters. “And now, if you will wait a moment for me, I will bring you the documentation of the deal right away.”

She gets up, crosses the room to the two-section cabinet, opens one of the doors and sets about rummaging inside.

It takes her less time than I expected, which tells me that that cabinet is ordered in a manner she understands perfectly, and afterward she comes back with a sheaf of papers in her hand.

And here she does something I like, which is that she does not leave them on the edge of the table for me to stretch out my arm, but rather she goes around the table, approaches the chair and puts them directly in my hand.

“Here you have it”, she tells me.

“Thank you”, I answer her.

She returns to her spot, sits and says absolutely nothing more, so I begin to read.

And the first thing I come across, evidently, is jargon.

Tons of jargon, with its whereas clauses, its inasmuch as, its for the purposes of the provisions of the preceding section and the whole rhetorical apparatus that in my other life made a rental contract for thirty square meters take up nine pages.

And that, sincerely, reassures me, because I had spent two months fearing that here deals were made by word of mouth and a handshake, which is a thing that sounds lovely until the moment arrives to argue about what exactly was said.

But no, it turns out that the legal apparatus is a universal constant, and that in any world where there is enough money moving around there ends up appearing someone whose job consists of writing forty words where six would be sufficient.

But when I strip away the jargon on top, what there is underneath is surprisingly simple, since the ownership of the inventions continues to be, in principle and expressly, the House of the Long Journey’s. That is said three times and in three different ways on the first page, and that, coming from the party that has all the power in this negotiation, is no minor detail.

What the House of the Long Journey cedes, and cedes exclusively, is the use. That is to say, the manufacture, the sale, the exploitation and any agreement the Tower is capable of negotiating with whomever in order to get money out of those inventions.

And then there is the part I did not expect, because the Tower does not limit itself to selling. The Tower commits itself, in writing and in fair detail, to protecting the exclusivity of those inventions, and to pursuing whoever manufactures or sells products derived from them without its explicit permission.

And as I keep reading, I see that in the counterpart my share of the profits is established, which is a fifth of the net profits.

I stay looking at that number for a fairly long while, because my first reaction is that twenty percent is little, since of every five coins produced by a thing that occurred to me, four go somewhere else.

But then I breathe, do what one must always do in these cases and ask myself what the real alternative is.

And the real alternative is frightful.

Because the real alternative is that I, at thirteen years old and in a city where I don’t know a single human being, set up a manufacturing operation. That I look for workshops, that I hire people, that I buy the materials, that I argue prices, that I keep books, that I hire someone to watch over the one who keeps the books, that I set about selling, and all of it besides limited to this city.

And that, I already thought about once with the matter of the backpacks, arriving then at the conclusion that that was not what I wanted.

But besides, I can add another motive for not doing it, and it is that I have lost the protection I had in the Empire.

There, no one copied an invention of the Zhāohuán because copying something from the Zhāohuán was a crime against the imperial family, and that protection cost me absolutely nothing because it came included with the title.

But that title stayed behind with my flight.

So right now, and this is the naked truth, I am a kid without backing, who cannot walk, who goes about the world with a pile of ideas that are worth money and not a single way of preventing someone bigger than me from taking them.

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And this paper says that there is an organization with branches on five continents that commits itself to doing exactly that for me, so that number stops seeming little to me.

It is clear that what I am buying with those four coins out of every five is not a sales service, it is not having to dedicate a single day of my life to this and on top of that having someone bigger than me show their teeth to whoever approaches my inventions with bad intentions.

But even so there is a question I have to ask, and I have to ask it even if that means coming off badly, because in my other life I saw too many people sign things in order not to seem distrustful.

“Lin Quingyu”, I tell her, lifting my gaze from the papers.

“Tell me”, she answers me.

“The deal in itself does not strike me as bad”, I tell her. “I tell you seriously and not out of courtesy. The more I look at it, the better it strikes me.”

“But”, she tells me.

“But”, I confirm to her. “Here it says net profit.”

And I lower my finger to the line, although from where she is she cannot see it.

“And the problem with net profit is that it is very easy to manipulate”, I continue.

Lin Quingyu says nothing.

“I am going to say it to you with all the clarity of which I am capable, and I beg your pardon in advance”, I tell her. “I have spent three minutes looking at this contract and four different ways of rigging it without committing a single falsehood have already occurred to me. I can charge these inventions general expenses that don’t correspond to them. I can buy the material from myself through another company of mine at an inflated price. I can distribute a common cost among twenty products in such a way that these three get half of it. And I can, simply, have accounting so complicated that no one is capable of disputing it.”

I join my hands on top of the papers.

“So my question is not whether you do it”, I finish. “My question is how I can be sure that you are not going to do it.”

After that question I fall silent, and there is a moment, very brief, in which I prepare myself for her to take offense.

But she does not take offense, what Lin Quingyu does is lean back against the backrest, crosses her hands over her lap and answers me with a calm that leaves me fairly impressed.

“You cannot”, she tells me.

“I beg your pardon?” I ask her.

“That you cannot be sure”, she repeats to me. “Neither with me, nor with us, nor with anyone. In this kind of deal one can never be sure, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you in the first sentence of the conversation.”

She raises a hand before I say anything.

“But I am going to explain to you why it suits you all the same”, she continues. “And I am going to explain to you besides something you probably don’t know, which is that that fifth we are giving you is worse than what almost any other commercial house on the continent would offer you.”

And I blink, because that I certainly did not expect.

“Worse?” I ask her.

“Worse”, she confirms to me. “There are houses that would have offered you a fourth. And I know at least two that, for an invention like that of the mop, would have offered you a third without blinking, and would besides have paid you what they had forecast for the first year in advance.”

“And why then would I stay here?” I ask her.

“Because they would have offered you a third of a figure they themselves would invent”, she answers me.

After those words, she leans forward a bit.

“That is exactly the business, and there is no mystery to it”, she continues. “A high percentage of rigged accounting is a lovely number that is worth nothing. A lower percentage of clean accounting is money. And we can permit ourselves to offer worse margins than the competition precisely because we have spent centuries being the company that does not do it.”

She leans back again.

“And I don’t tell you this as a virtue, I tell you this as a business”, she finishes. “For the Tower of the Five Dragons, stealing from you would come out extremely expensively. You are the owner of a small company with three small inventions. We have commercial agreements that have spent thousands of years functioning with sects, with empires and with families that have spent generations renewing them, and all those agreements are sustained on a single thing, which is that no one has ever been able to demonstrate that we have done what you have just described.”

She shrugs her shoulders.

“Getting a few extra spirit stones out of you does not compensate, not by a long shot, for the risk of what that could do to our reputation if it became public”, she tells me. “And that, and not my word, is the only guarantee I can give you.”

I listen to all of that and let the air out slowly, because she has just given me the only answer I would have considered honest.

If she had told me that her house is honorable, I would have smiled and begun to worry. If she had told me that I can audit the accounts, I would have asked her who audits the auditor. But what she has told me is that it comes out more expensive for them to rob me than to pay me, and that, in either of the two worlds I know, is the closest thing to a guarantee that exists.

And besides, although I don’t intend to tell her, there is one thing she does not know and that weighs on me far more than her millenary reputation, and it is that Master Mu works here, so I do what has to be done, which is to take the sheaf of papers and send it back to the desk of the office.

“I am in agreement”, I tell her. “And I want it on record that I don’t say it out of resignation, I say it because after hearing you it strikes me as a good deal.”

Lin Quingyu nods.

“And while we are at it, I want that same deal to apply also to my future inventions”, I continue.

After hearing my words, I see how Lin Quingyu freezes.

She says nothing, but her hand is left halfway to the papers, and I see perfectly the moment in which a piece that had spent half an hour circling around her head fits into the place that corresponds to it.

“One moment”, she tells me.

“Tell me”, I answer her kindly.

“Are the inventions registered in the name of the House of the Long Journey yours?” she asks me.

“They are mine”, I tell her, confirming her question.

“I don’t mean that they are your property”, she tells me, and she says it slowly. “I mean whether you invented them.”

And I smile.

“I invented them”, I tell her. “All of them.”

I make a pause after that affirmation.

“It is exactly because of that that my mother created the company”, I finish. “She did not create it to have income for herself, she created it to secure me a future.”

Lin Quingyu stays looking at me a while, and it is not a look of incredulity, something I thank her for, but rather it is the look of someone who is recalculating the value of the person they have seated in front of them.

Afterward she clears her throat, and with that clearing of the throat she rearranges her posture, rearranges her tone and becomes again, in less than a second, exactly the functionary she was five minutes ago.

“In that case present them to me”, she tells me.

“I beg your pardon?” I ask her.

“The future inventions”, she answers me. “If you have any, present them to me and we will check them. It is what has to be done and it is my job.”

And I permit myself a very small smile, because I have just confirmed that this woman does not have to be pushed, that she is one of those who the moment they see a job set about doing it right away.

“Well it turns out that I have two”, I tell her.

I turn my head after those words.

“Lianhua”, I tell her. “The papers.”

Lianhua leans forward, opens the backpack she has between her feet, takes out two sheaves of sheets tied separately, gets up, leaves them on top of Lin Quingyu’s table and sits back down.

“The first sheaf is what my two companions have between their legs”, I tell her. “It is called a backpack.”

Lin Quingyu looks at Lianhua, looks at Xia, and then looks at the sheaf.

“It is a modification of the bamboo basket the peasants carry”, I continue. “It is made of leather, it is adjusted with straps to the shoulders and the waist, and that means it does not move from its place even if whoever is carrying it runs, jumps or crouches. It leaves both hands free and distributes the weight across the back and waist instead of making the shoulders bear it alone. There you have the patterns, the measurements and a report of improvements that were made to it after testing it in real conditions for several weeks.”

And here I raise a hand, because this part has to be said before and not after.

“But I have to warn you of one thing”, I tell her.

“I’m listening”, she answers me.

“In the Tianjing Empire, the manufacture of that object is already assigned to the Empire’s military department”, I tell her. “And there it is equipment of the Imperial Army, so that territory I cannot offer you.”

I fall silent after telling her that, and I notice perfectly the tension that comes over me while I wait for the answer, because I don’t know whether that brings the whole invention down.

Lin Quingyu, meanwhile, has taken the sheaf and is turning the pages.

And she does not turn them the way people turn papers that don’t interest them, but rather she stops at the pattern sheets, goes back once, looks again at the backpack at Xia’s feet and continues until, finally, she leaves them.

“That should not be a problem”, she tells me.

“Yes?” I ask her.

“No, as long as it is expressly stated in the contract,” she answers me. “Territorial exclusions are common; in fact, all your previous inventions already include that same exclusion. Besides, half the agreements that are made have one, and some are far more uncomfortable or complex than this one.”

She shrugs her shoulders.

“And I am going to tell you one more thing”, she adds. “That the army of an entire empire has adopted it is not a problem for the invention, but rather it is the best letter of recommendation you could bring me.”

I let the air out after hearing her, and I am reasonably sure that it shows.

“Good”, I tell her. “Then let us go with the second.”

And I point at the other sheaf, which is considerably thicker.

“The second is a ship”, I tell her.

Lin Quingyu lifts her gaze.

“A new type of ship, to be exact”, I continue. “With a piece that goes underneath the hull from bow to stern and a sail of a different shape, and those two things together permit advancing against a wind coming from the side, which as far as I know is something that theoretically cannot be done.”

And here I raise a finger.

“But before you look at them you have to know something”, I tell her. “Among those papers there is a sealed envelope.”

“An envelope?” she asks me.

“A letter”, I answer her. “It was written by Captain Shen Fei, who is the man on whose ship I have arrived in this city and who has spent half his life navigating this river. It is addressed to the person who is going to review those plans, and I have not read it.”

“I know who Shen Fei is”, she tells me, and then asks me a question. “Is it true that you have not read it?”

“No”, I tell her. “And I have not read it on purpose, because I asked him for a professional opinion and a professional opinion that passes first through the hands of the interested party is no longer worth anything.”

And it shows on Lin Quingyu that that has interested her more than everything I have said before, because she takes the ship’s sheaf immediately, opens it, finds the envelope, takes it out, looks at it on both sides and opens it with the edge of a fingernail.

I see how she begins to read it, and I, who have not the remotest idea of what it says, devote myself during that while to looking at her face, but I don’t manage to guess anything from her expression, since it does not change in the least.

When she finishes, she leaves the letter open on the table, takes the plans and goes over them, quickly, stopping only at two sheets.

Afterward she leaves the plans on the table again, beside the letter, aligns them with two fingers and does not say a single word about either of the two things, what she does is take a couple of blank sheets out of a drawer, wet the brush and set about writing.

“I will explain the procedure to you”, she tells me while she writes without lifting her gaze. “I am not the one to tell you whether these inventions are worth anything, because I don’t know about backpacks nor do I know about ships. What I do is this.”

She wets the brush again and continues writing.

“I issue you right now a receipt for the two inventions”, she continues. “Then I send them to people who do know about the subject so that they review them. And if they are considered to be a good business, they are approved, they are incorporated into the contract and it is communicated to you.”

“And if they are considered not to be?” I ask her.

“It is also communicated to you”, she answers me. “And we return the papers to you, we don’t keep what is not ours.”

And I, at that point, settle myself a bit in the chair, because now comes the part I have been thinking about for days.

“Lin Quingyu”, I tell her. “For the ship’s plans I have a special request.”

The brush stops.

“A request?” she asks me.

“A request”, I confirm to her.

She leaves the brush resting on the edge of the stone and lifts her gaze.

“Tell it to me”, she says.

“Those plans I did not develop alone”, I tell her. “And I don’t say it out of modesty, I say it because it is true and because if I did not say it I would be charging for someone else’s work.”

“Both Captain Shen Fei and Chen Mo dedicated several hours, over several days, to helping me improve the design with their opinions”, I tell Lin Quingyu. “And I cannot, with a clear conscience, appropriate their part of the work.”

“So my request is the following”, I finish. “Of my share of the profits from that invention, three points for Shen Fei and two for Chen Mo.”

Lin Quingyu looks at me.

“Of your share?” she asks me.

“Of mine”, I confirm to her. “Not of yours. If the ship enters the contract, I want the equivalent of a twentieth part of the total to be separated out of that fifth and distributed between Captain Shen Fei and Chen Mo.”

I make a pause after that before continuing.

“And there is a second part”, I add.

“Go ahead”, she answers me quickly, clearly intrigued.

“Neither of the two knows anything about this”, I tell her. “And I would like it to continue being that way until they receive the first payment.”

When she hears me, Lin Quingyu smiles, and it is the first smile I have seen from her since we came into this office.

“And why in secret?” she asks me.

“Because if I tell them now, the two of them will tell me no”, I answer her. “Shen Fei will tell me that he only answered a few questions and Chen Mo will tell me that they had already paid him for the voyage, which is what he told me ten minutes ago in front of you. And the two of them would have to argue with me, and I would have to insist, and the three of us would end up having an uncomfortable time.”

I shrug my shoulders.

“On the other hand, if one day a payment arrives that they were not expecting, there is no possible argument”, I finish. “Only a figure.”

Lin Quingyu takes up the brush again.

“It is a great gesture on your part”, she tells me. “And there is no problem in doing it, because the internal distribution of your share is your affair and not ours.”

And she sets about writing again.

“Although I warn you of one thing”, she adds without lifting her gaze.

“Tell me”, I answer quickly.

“That the day the payment reaches them, the two of them are going to know perfectly whom it has come from”, she tells me.

“I am counting on it”, I answer her.

And after those words, she writes for a fairly long while.

I, meanwhile, say nothing, because I have spent enough years of my other life on the other side of a desk to know that interrupting someone who is drafting is the fastest way that exists of making an error appear in the document.

After a while she leaves the brush, blows on the last sheet, separates the pile in two and holds out one part to me.

“This is yours”, she tells me. “It is the proof that today you have handed over those two inventions, with the date, the description of what was handed over and the number of sheets of each sheaf.”

The moment Lianhua sees that there are several, she gets up before I have time to stretch out my hand, takes them, evens them out by tapping the edge against her palm, puts them in the backpack and sits back down.

Lin Quingyu, meanwhile, joins the other part with the two sheaves I have given her, opens a drawer, takes out a flat wooden box, puts it all inside and closes it.

“As a general rule it usually takes around a month”, she tells me. “So I advise you to come back around here in a month to check whether they have been accepted or not.”

“In a month”, I repeat, and I decide that it is not too much time.

Afterward I settle myself again, because I have not finished yet.

“I have more inquiries to make of you”, I tell her. “About company matters.”

“Make them”, she answers me.

“The first is the most practical of all”, I tell her. “Can I send someone in my name to carry out procedures here?”

And I ask it for what anyone would imagine, which is that in this city there are staircases, that I am thirteen years old and cannot walk, and that the idea of every procedure of my company depending on my crossing half the city in person is fairly risky.

“That is very easy”, she answers me.

“Easy?” I ask her.

“Extremely easy”, she tells me. “You only have to draft a letter of authorization in which the concrete limits of what that person can do with that permission are stated, and seal it. And from that moment on, whoever brings that letter can do exactly what it says in it and absolutely nothing more.”

“And who decides the limits?” I ask her after hearing her answer, while I consider that there may be some kind of trap behind that method.