Chapter 194

The dark blue cauldron takes up the center of the workshop, resting on its three short legs, with its bulging belly and its thick rim, and although it arrived yesterday, I still haven’t grown tired of looking at it.

I am in the doorway, sitting in my chair, with Lianhua behind me, and from here I don’t need to go in to see everything.

Right next to the cauldron is the preparation table. On top of it, in a row, the mortar, the knives, the cutting boards and the bowls, arranged from largest to smallest, which is the same way Master Mu taught me to arrange them.

And on the walls, the shelves.

The herbs are stored in wooden boxes, each with its label and placed in the exact order in which they appear in Master Mu’s books, because that is how I intend to look for them.

But what I like most isn’t the order, it’s the distance.

Because all those boxes are less than eight Chi from the spot where my chair will go when I work beside the cauldron. Lianhua measured them with me one by one, just as she measured the posts in the courtyard, so I will be able to take any of them with the Myriad of Hands or the Dragon’s Grip without having to move.

“It’s perfect”, I tell her.

“I’m glad you like it, Xiaojie”, Lianhua answers me.

I stay looking at the cauldron a moment longer, and I won’t deny that it tempts me. The herbs are there, the cauldron is there and I carry the book on ink inside my head.

But today I haven’t come to work here, because of all the plans I wrote in the sand of the courtyard, there is one that has been waiting since long before I left the Empire. And today, at last, I have everything I need for it.

“Take me to the other room”, I tell her.

Lianhua turns the chair without saying anything, we cross the courtyard beneath the magnolia and stop in front of the door next to my bedroom.

Lianhua opens it, pushes the chair inside and stops two paces past the threshold.

The room is almost empty.

There is no furniture, no boxes, nothing hanging on the walls. Only the floor of wide planks, old but well fitted, the light coming in through the window and, right in the center, a low chair, solid and plain, which Lianhua has placed there so that I can comfortably do the work I am going to need to do.

But on looking at that empty floor, for a moment, a different formation from the one I intend to draw appears in my mind.

For a moment I remember the diagram Lianhua copied in the pyramid in the Fragment. A room in which there was no formation, because the whole room was the formation, with runes on the floor, on the walls and on the ceiling, and with papyri that said that not even that was all of it, because that room was nothing more than a piece of something much larger.

But I discard it almost the very instant it comes to mind, since it is far too complicated for someone who has never engraved a formation in her life, not to mention that it has runes I don’t even know the purpose of yet. And because, even if I knew, I still wouldn’t have the faintest idea how on earth all the formations that make it up connect to one another.

Starting there would be like learning to lay bricks by building a cathedral.

So today it’s something simpler, although I am sure that whoever created the formation of my old home, if they heard me call it simple, would have a fit on the spot.

“Put me in the low chair”, I tell her.

Lianhua pushes the chair to the center of the room, brakes it beside the low chair, lifts me carefully and sets me down seated with her usual care.

Next Lianhua takes my chair out of the room and leaves it outside, beside the door, where it won’t be in the way, and then comes back with the material, which the two of us arrange around me.

She sets the material on the floor while I reposition it with the Myriad, until everything is laid out in an arc in front of me and in the exact order in which I will use it.

The cord, the burin, a long and perfectly straight board, the inkwell of ordinary ink with its brush, the jars of formation ink I bought at the Tower and the groove cleaner, which is a narrow spatula, barely wider than the groove itself, and whose mere existence says quite a lot about how often people who engrave formations make mistakes.

When we finish, I stay looking at the floor.

Custom says that first a circle is drawn as a guide, that the real figure is laid out inside it and that afterward the circle is filled with runes that serve no purpose whatsoever, so that anyone who looks at it believes the important runes are on the edge.

I am not going to put in filler runes, so, in theory, I don’t need the circle, but drawing a hexagon with nothing to tell you where the vertices go is asking for trouble. With the circle on the floor, on the other hand, the six vertices only have to touch the line, and half the work is already done.

So the circle has to be made, even if only to make my later work easier.

And since I don’t trust myself to draw it perfectly on the first try, I fall back on the oldest trick in the world.

At the digs in my other life it was used to lay out anything round. A stake driven into the center, a taut cord and a point at the other end, and you get a circle not even a compass could improve on.

But here, the stake is me.

“Lianhua”, I tell her. “Tie one end of the cord to the handle of the burin. With a knot that won’t come loose.”

Lianhua does it without asking, with two turns and a knot I don’t even see her tie, and puts the other end in my hand.

Because the Dragon’s Grip can only hold one thing, and that thing has to be the burin.

I make a loop at the free end, so that the cord can turn inside my fist without tangling, hold it in my right hand and raise my arm above my head.

Then I close the Grip around the burin, move it away from me until the cord is taut, tilt it until the point touches the wood and press down.

The point bites into the plank with a dry screech, and in front of it the first shaving rises, thin and curled.

I have left the cord somewhat shorter than my reach to give myself some margin, so the burin advances without interruption, and I keep pushing it around me, slowly, letting the cord decide the path.

Because that is the beauty of the trick, that I don’t have to know how to draw a circle, I only have to keep the cord taut at all times.

And that, which seems the easiest part, ends up being the hardest, because my arm starts to tire before I reach the halfway point, and if I move it, the circle moves.

So I grit my teeth and keep going even when the burin passes behind me and I can no longer see it. I feel it through the Grip, I feel the cord pulling on my fist and I hear the screech of the wood at my back, but I don’t see it.

But I don’t need to, because the cord guides it for me until the groove finishes going around, reappears on my left and meets its own beginning.

I lower my arm, and for a moment I devote myself solely to shaking out my hand.

“Lianhua”, I tell her afterward. “Can you look at it from above to see whether it’s done right?”

Lianhua closes her eyes after hearing me, just long enough to use the Vision of Horus, and then opens them again.

“It’s a perfect circle, Xiaojie”, she tells me.

She says it in the same tone in which she would tell me it has stopped raining, but I know that if it had a single crooked stretch, she would have told me in that same tone, without sparing me the where.

I release the Grip, undo the knot with two hands of the Myriad and leave the cord coiled by the wall, where it won’t be in the way, because I no longer need it.

Next come the board and the ordinary ink.

I lift the board with two hands of the Myriad, rest it on the floor and, using it as a ruler, with a third I dip the brush in the ordinary ink and begin to draw the hexagon.

First the vertices, six small marks on the line of the circle. Then the sides, one after another, with the board resting from vertex to vertex and the brush running along its edge. And when I finish the sixth, I place the board on each side in turn, mark with ink where it reaches and compare it with the next.

Two of the vertices don’t convince me, so I correct them and compare again.

And when all six sides measure the same, and the hexagon finally looks like a hexagon and not like something out of a nightmare, I declare myself satisfied.

But ink is only a drawing, whereas what the formation needs are grooves.

And for cutting grooves, the Myriad is no use. Each hand is precise, and it is nimble, but it doesn’t have enough strength to sink a burin into the wood and drag it in a straight line without it slipping away, so I have to go back to the Dragon’s Grip.

But the Grip only holds one thing, and if it holds the burin, it can’t hold the board.

“Lianhua”, I tell her. “I need you to hold the board for me along the lines on the floor.”

Lianhua kneels beside the first side, outside the hexagon, careful not to step on any line, and presses the board firmly against the ink stroke.

I place the point of the burin on the first vertex, rest it against the edge of the board and push, so the shavings begin to come off and the groove advances along the wood of the board to the next vertex.

Lianhua moves the board to the second side, I carve the second, and so, side by side, with Lianhua circling the hexagon on her knees and me turning my head so as not to lose sight of her, we close the figure.

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Without much trouble, which, for something I am doing for the first time, almost worries me more than if I had had some.

When I finish the sixth side, Lianhua moves away and I stay looking at the floor.

A hexagon inside a circle, carved into the wood, with the shavings still scattered around the grooves.

The base of my Qi-gathering formation.

And then I take a deep breath, because I know the hard part begins now, and that in this part Lianhua can’t help me at all, so I leave the board beside the cord, where it won’t be in the way.

“Lianhua”, I tell her. “Clean the floor and stand off to one side, please.”

“Yes, Xiaojie”, she answers me.

She gathers the shavings with a broom she wields with the Myriad so as not to step on the grooves, cleans the grooves themselves with some threads she creates with one of the techniques she bought at the bookshop, carries everything out to the courtyard and comes back to stand by the right-hand wall, with her hands crossed in front of her.

I close the Grip around the burin again, and before bringing it to the wood, I close my eyes and let the diagram of the formation appear in my mind.

I don’t need the physical book. I have it here, with every rune in its place, each with its size, its orientation and its distance from the next, and all I have to do is compare it with the hexagon I have just carved, like someone setting a picture to be filled in next to one that is already complete.

When I finally feel ready, I open my eyes and begin.

I carve the first rune so slowly that it almost seems to take an eternity. The second, the same. And the third, and the fourth, each in its place on the hexagon, along its sides, with the strokes the diagram dictates and not a single one more.

Although, of course, I don’t carve any filler runes, because the formation doesn’t need them to work, and there is no one here to fool.

But there is one thing the diagram doesn’t solve for me, and it is that I can’t get closer to look at what I’m doing.

The runes are spread out around me, at some distance and on the floor, so I see them lying flat, almost edge-on, the way you see an inscription carved into the floor of a hall when you read it from the doorway. Everything nearby looks large, everything far away looks squashed, and a stroke that is straight in the diagram looks crooked here simply because I am looking at it badly.

So after each stroke I lean forward, tilt my head and look at it from another angle, and only when I am sure that what I see is what I meant to do do I move on to the next.

And I am more grateful than ever to have the Yin Gate open, because without the heightened perception it gives me, half of those grooves would be nothing to me but a shadow in the wood.

For the runes behind me, I ask Lianhua to move me, and, careful not to step on anything, she comes over to me and moves me along with the chair.

The light keeps shifting across the floor but I don’t notice; I only notice that my forehead itches, that my back is soaked and that I have been breathing through my mouth for a good while.

And when the morning has already ended, I carve the last rune and then stay still, with the burin still held above the wood.

Afterward I go over all the runes from the chair, one by one, in the same order in which I carved them, and compare them with the diagram.

Fortunately I find nothing, which means I don’t think I have made any mistake, so I release the Grip, leave the burin on the floor beside me and wipe my forehead with my sleeve.

Lianhua doesn’t move from the wall, because right now any step inside this room is a step that could spoil something by accident, but a cup with a little tea rises from a tray at her feet, crosses the room above the hexagon without brushing anything and stops in front of me while, behind it, a bun comes along on its plate.

“Rest a little, Xiaojie”, she tells me. “If you hurry now, the only thing you’ll achieve is making a mistake out of tiredness.”

She’s right, and I know it, so I take the cup in both hands.

“Thank you”, I tell her.

The tea is lukewarm and tastes heavenly to me.

And the bun, even better.

But when I am halfway through it and Lianhua is busy finishing cleaning up the new shavings, Xia appears in the doorway with a plate of dumplings and stops dead on the threshold, with the tips of her toes just short of the first plank, because this morning Lianhua told her not to go past it, and told her in a tone that admitted no argument.

“Are you finished?” she asks me.

“Halfway”, I answer her.

“And does it work?” she asks me.

“I haven’t put the ink in yet”, I tell her.

“And when is it going to have ink?” she asks me.

“When I finish the bun”, I answer her.

Xia looks at the bun, looks at me and nods, like someone who has just been given an official date.

A hand of Lianhua’s Myriad takes the plate from her to put it within my reach, and Xia disappears.

But she comes back a while later, with some strips of pickled radish, and then with a bowl of roasted peanuts, and then with more tea, because she has calculated that I will have finished the first by now, and the worst of it is that she has calculated correctly.

Each time she stops at the same spot, asks me two or three questions and Lianhua’s hand crosses the room with whatever she has brought. And each time I eat it, because I am hungry and because Xia is the one bringing it, but there comes a point when this snack starts to look suspiciously like a three-course meal.

So when I see her appear for the fifth time, with something steaming in her hands, I raise a hand.

“Enough”, I tell them. “Both of you. I’ve recovered.”

Xia looks at Lianhua and Lianhua looks at me.

“Really”, I add.

Lianhua nods, gathers up the cups, the plates and the bowl with the Myriad and floats them to the door, where Xia takes them one after another and carries them straight outside, with the steaming plate still balanced on top of everything else.

I watch Xia disappear and concentrate, although what comes now doesn’t require strength but delicacy, so this time I use the Myriad.

One hand takes the first jar of formation ink, another removes its stopper and I bring it to the first vertex of the hexagon.

And before tilting it, I activate Sensing the Qi.

Because the ink of a formation isn’t only ink, as it is in talismans; it is the path along which the Qi is going to run, and if at one point in the groove there is too much and at another too little, the Qi builds up where there is a surplus and gets stuck where there is a shortage, and everything I carved this morning will have served absolutely no purpose.

So I pour it almost drop by drop, with a maddening slowness.

The ink enters the groove, runs a little and stops. I feel its Qi with the technique, just as I feel it in the ink of talismans when I work in my study, and as soon as I feel that a stretch is thickening more than it should, I lift the jar, let it spread and continue a little farther along.

It’s like filling an irrigation channel with water without it overflowing at any point, only the channel is the width of a thread and the water costs a fortune.

I fill the hexagon properly on the first try, although I leave the circle as it is, empty, because it was only a guide and a guide doesn’t need ink.

Then I begin with the runes, and in the runes, as was inevitable, every now and then one comes out wrong.

In one a thicker drop forms in the middle of a curve. In another, the ink doesn’t reach the end of a stroke and leaves it half done. In another, which is behind me and which I fill looking over my shoulder, it spills a little over the edge of the groove.

And each time it happens, I move the jar away, take the groove cleaner with another hand of the Myriad and run it along the groove until all the ink is out. Then I wait for the wood to be clean and start that rune again from the beginning.

The afternoon advances just as the morning did, without my noticing.

The first jar runs out, and then the next, and when I reach the last rune, the one in my hand weighs so little that I have to tip it almost all the way for anything to come out, but fortunately it is enough.

And by mid-afternoon, with almost all the ink I bought at the bottom of those grooves, the formation is finished.

I let out the air very slowly, and with it goes some of the nervousness I have had since Lianhua left me in this chair.

“Done”, I tell Lianhua.

“Congratulations, Xiaojie”, she tells me.

“Don’t get ahead of yourself”, I answer her. “It still has to be tested.”

I reach into my sleeve and take out two spirit stones.

Two, not one, because this version of the gathering formation needs them to work. In exchange, if the book isn’t lying, it is considerably more powerful than the one I had in my cultivation room at the Palace, which made do with a single one.

With a gesture, I float them to their places in the hexagon and leave them seated there, after which I activate the formation while crossing my fingers mentally.

The ink lights up.

First it is a faint glow in the two stones, which then spreads along the grooves of the hexagon, side by side, and from the hexagon passes to the runes, one after another, until the whole formation has that dim, steady light the one in my cultivation room at the Palace had.

And around me I feel the Qi begin to move toward it, which means it works.

I stay looking at it for a good while, and as I look at it, I realize something I didn’t expect, which is that once finished it looks considerably less impressive than I thought.

Every formation I have seen in my life was full of runes right up to the edge of the circle, crammed against one another, with that intimidating look that made you think only someone who had devoted their whole life to them could ever come to understand one.

And mine, without all those filler runes, is a hexagon with a lot of runes along its sides and an empty circle around it.

But I didn’t make it to impress anyone, nor to keep the secrets of a guild I don’t care about, so I decide that the simpler, the better.

After that thought, I turn my head toward Lianhua.

“Now I’m going to use it for real”, I tell her. “With the Resonance.”

Lianhua waits for me to finish giving her my orders.

“I want you to go out and check how the void feels from outside the island when I use it”, I continue.

Lianhua nods once, turns around and leaves the room.

I am left alone in the center of the hexagon, sitting in the low chair, with the formation glowing around me and my hands resting on my knees.

Before starting, I go over what I am going to find.

The fire Qi surge is still here, so a good part of the Qi the formation draws is going to be fire, and that is of no use to me at all. And since this house is on an island, surrounded by water on all sides, water Qi is going to be considerably more abundant than normal, and that is no use to me either, so I will have to make do with what I can.

I wait a little, to give Lianhua time to get out and position herself wherever she needs to while the formation gathers more Qi.

Then I close my eyes, begin to meditate, and what I see leaves me open-mouthed.

Because since we arrived on the island I haven’t cultivated a single time, precisely so as not to leave a void without knowing how far it would be noticed, so the last thing I remember is loose particles of Qi, like drops of water moving with the current that carries them.

But that isn’t what is around me; what is around me is so much Qi, and so densely packed, that I can barely distinguish the particles from one another unless I look very closely. Between what there is in this area to begin with and what the formation draws, they are so tightly pressed that they touch one another, and the only thing I can compare it to is a light mist that fills everything.

A mist that feels warm where there is fire Qi, cool where there is water Qi, and that everywhere else simply seems to exist.

But I haven’t come to watch a spectacle, however fascinating I find it, so I bring my attention to my stomach, to one of those seven pressure points I have felt since the night I finished the Body Tempering and that until today I had never touched.

The Earth Gate.

Because I agreed with Xia that I would start opening it, and today is the day I am going to start.

I activate it, and the Gate begins to absorb particles, or rather, it begins to absorb the mist.

But that isn’t what I have come to test, so I draw the neutral Qi rune in my mind.

And as soon as the rune is complete, I feel that familiar hum filling everything and, as always happens, the Gate’s pull is magnified and the whole mist sets into motion.

Not the particles nearest to me, but all of it around me at once, from every direction and from my entire area of influence, converging toward me as if I were, as always, a black hole.

And I can’t help remembering those documentaries about black holes in which they are always shown swallowing those clouds of gas that, for some reason, are supposedly always in their vicinity.

But the mist of neutral Qi surrounding me grows thinner and thinner, until it stops being a mist and they are loose particles again, which the Gate keeps catching one after another as they enter the formation until the surroundings are emptied, as always.

Around me only the fire and water particles float now, loose, with no one paying them any attention, so I cut it off before the Resonance starts squeezing the two stones dry.

I release the rune, let the Gate settle, open my eyes and wait for Lianhua to come back.

She isn’t long, because I soon hear her footsteps in the courtyard and, a moment later, she appears in the doorway.

“How does it feel from outside?” I ask her.

“The void can be felt across the whole island”, she tells me. “But beyond the island, it only affects a small stretch of water around it.”

She makes a very short pause.

“So the only way someone would notice is if they were watching this island precisely to see whether something like this happens”, she finishes.

I let out the air through my nose, because that is exactly what I wanted to hear, and more than I dared hope for.

But Lianhua hasn’t finished.

“Although you should also be careful not to drain absolutely everything, Xiaojie”, she continues. “There came a moment when there wasn’t enough Qi left to keep up the Vision of Horus.”

And I fall silent a moment, because I hadn’t thought of that, and if I empty the island of neutral Qi, none of us will be able to use techniques until there is a minimum available for them.

In the Palace we had never noticed because we hardly used techniques day to day, but here it is clearly something I need to control.

“I’m sorry”, I tell her. “It hadn’t occurred to me.”

Lianhua inclines her head, and with that she considers the matter closed.

But I don’t, because the formation is still there calling the Qi of the whole island to fill itself again, and as soon as I look at it I forget my embarrassment while a smile escapes me that I don’t bother to hide.

“Then now all that’s left is to check how long the formation takes to fill up again while we keep up the routine of activating and deactivating it to get rid of the excess build-up of fire Qi”, I tell her. “So we know how to divide up the shifts.”

After those words I pause for a second.

“And then also remember not to drain absolutely everything”, I add. “So that we can keep using techniques.”