Chapter 197

The first thing I notice, while I am still half asleep, is that I’m not hot.

I don’t open my eyes, because I am not yet awake enough for opening them to seem like a good idea, but I notice it all the same. I have the sheet pulled up to my shoulders, which is something I don’t remember doing, and under the sheet I’m not sweating.

And that’s strange.

I lie still, with my head sunk in the pillow and the sound of the river on the other side of the wall, turning that over with the slowness of someone thinking with a head that is still drowsy.

The heat was the fault of the fire Qi surge, so if the heat is gone, the surge most likely is too.

I can’t say it catches me by surprise. Xia heard in the inn’s kitchens that it was a matter of a couple of months, or half a year at most, and Lu Zhiyu confirmed it to me sitting at my own table.

But what I think about in my drowsiness is that it catches me with stock on hand.

Because in my study I have Freezing Talismans I haven’t yet sold to the Tower of the Five Dragons. The same ones that were at the top of Lu Zhiyu’s list, and that, according to her, would keep selling like meat buns until the surge ended.

I lament for a while, without moving, which is the cheapest way of lamenting I know, but then, still half asleep, I find the consolation.

A Freezing Talisman nobody wants to buy is still useful to me, and as long as I have some left, I won’t have to make any more to keep drinking my iced tea.

Which is, all things considered, the only use I have ever truly cared about.

I am in the middle of that thought, halfway to falling asleep again, when something hard pokes into my cheek.

It doesn’t hurt, but it insists. It is a blunt tip, pressing just below my cheekbone, once and then again.

I swat it away.

“Lianhua”, I say without opening my eyes. “What was that for? You’ve never been so rough.”

And I settle my head back into the pillow, convinced I have closed the matter.

“I’m not quite sure how to take this”, says a voice that isn’t Lianhua’s.

“Not only are you ignoring me”, it continues. “But on top of that you mistake me for your maid.”

It is a woman’s voice, calm, and it sounds familiar to me, but for a second that is no use to me at all, because the only thing going through my head is that there is a stranger in my room.

Someone who is neither Lianhua nor Xia. Someone who has come into a house we chose precisely because the nearest neighbor is many meters of water away from us, and who has made it all the way to my bed without Lianhua hearing her.

And I am lying down, unarmed, with the nearest talismans in the sleeve of a tunic I’m not wearing.

I still have the Dragon’s Grip, which is good for many things, but I can’t think what good it is going to do me against someone capable of that, even leaving aside that I doubt the stranger is within its weight limit.

A stab of fear crosses my chest, but it lasts only that, a second, because a second later another one runs through me, and this one isn’t fear anymore, it’s terror.

Because I haven’t heard that voice since I was ten years old, and I have just remembered whose it is.

It is the voice that threatened to leave and never come back if it discovered I was lying, the one that spent more than an hour asking me questions, one after another, and the one that, when it was over, told me that I was the terrifying one.

I open my eyes, turn my head toward the side my cheek was poked from, and there, exactly as I feared, is she.

Standing a step from the bed, with her high bun held by a hairpin of jade and gold, the silk split between dark blue and crimson, and that smooth face on which there is no way of reading an age.

She hasn’t changed at all.

I have stopped being a princess, I have crossed a border and I have learned to make my own ink, and she is exactly the same as the day she ruffled my hair and told me to take care of myself.

She looks down at me while she toys with her fan, opening it a couple of ribs and closing it again, in no hurry at all.

And now I know what was poking into my cheek.

“Master Mu!” I exclaim, unable to hold it in.

Her name comes out of me considerably louder than my Etiquette teacher would have considered acceptable at this hour of the morning, but I am sure she would understand the mitigating circumstances.

“How…?” I begin. “When did you…? Why are you…?”

None of the three manages to become a whole question, and I am perfectly aware of it. But my head has decided to take up three lines of reasoning at once, and so none of them quite gets going.

“Here?” I finish, in a voice that perhaps comes out weaker than I intended.

Which isn’t much of a question either, but it’s the best I’ve got.

Master Mu lets me stammer until I run out of air, and then she smiles.

“Can’t I drop by to pay you a visit?” she tells me.

And it is that smile, the same one with which she used to walk into my study at the Palace without asking anyone’s permission, the same one with which she corrected me when I made a mistake, and the same one with which she tapped her shoulder with her fan while she decided what to do with me.

I have seen it so many times that, without my being able to help it, a wave of nostalgia washes over me.

I don’t know whether it should, but it does.

So I take a deep breath, dig my elbows into the mattress and push myself up as far as I can, which isn’t much, but it’s enough to stop looking at her with half my face buried in a pillow.

“Master Mu”, I tell her, and this time my voice comes out firmer. “Why are you here?”

Master Mu’s smile fades after hearing my question. Not all at once, but I clearly see her grow more serious.

“I am here because a certain young lady was about to bring a disaster down on herself”, she tells me. “And I have had to cross two continents at full speed to be able to prevent it.”

I stay looking at her, because it is clear she is referring to me. And if she is putting it so seriously, then whatever I have done, which I can’t think what it might be, must be quite serious.

I open my mouth to ask her what she means, but at that moment the door opens.

There is no knock, because Lianhua never knocks on my door in the mornings, so I see her come in as she comes in every day, and halfway through coming in she stops.

I don’t see her move after that; it is simply that where there was a maid coming to wake me there is now someone ready for combat, in the right stance and with both hands vanished inside her sleeves, which is where she keeps her weapons.

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And my stomach clenches, because I fear what is most likely to happen next, so, for an instant, I get ready to tell Lianhua to stop.

But before I can say anything her hands come back out of her sleeves, her shoulders drop a finger’s width, she smooths her clothing with a short gesture, crosses her hands in front of her and bows, with a bow measured to the millimeter.

“Master Mu”, she says. “Welcome. Had you let us know of your visit, we would have received you properly.”

She says it in her usual voice, flat and polite, as if finding Master Mu beside her mistress’s bed before breakfast were a minor change in the day’s schedule.

Master Mu watches her do all that, and I watch her too, in disbelief, since I had never seen her make such an abrupt change of attitude.

“You should learn some manners from your maid, young lady”, Master Mu tells me as she turns to look at me.

I sigh at her words, because I am in my nightclothes, my hair a mess, and even so I have just been failed in protocol.

“In my current position it is rather difficult for me to offer you a formal greeting, Master Mu”, I tell her. “But as soon as I am ready, I will.”

And since the only way to be ready is to start, I let myself fall back onto the pillow while I look for the beam that crosses the ceiling above the bed.

I reach toward it with the hands of the Myriad, so I lift away from the mattress, the sheet slips off me, and once I am in the air I straighten up until I am floating a couple of handspans above the mattress, upright, with my legs hanging straight beneath me.

And from up here, for once, I am the one looking down at Master Mu.

“Lianhua”, I tell her. “Help me dress. I want to give our distinguished guest a proper welcome.”

“Yes, Xiaojie”, she answers me.

She takes the clothes I am going to wear today, shakes them once with a sharp snap and comes toward me with them folded over her forearm. And to reach the bed she takes a detour she doesn’t take any other morning, just enough not to have to turn her back on anyone.

Master Mu, meanwhile, isn’t looking at Lianhua.

She looks at the beam, then at me, and then at the beam again, tracing with the tip of her closed fan the distance between the two.

“It seems you’ve found a use for the technique I gave you that I had never considered”, she tells me.

And she says it with a note of satisfaction she doesn’t bother to hide.

I remember the jade tablet, with its worn edges, and how she gave it to me saying it was something she no longer had any use for and had lying around somewhere. I never quite believed it, and the face with which she is looking at my beam doesn’t help me start believing it now.

Lianhua pulls my nightclothes off over my head, so I wait until I can see the room again before answering.

“It’s a use someone who isn’t in my situation would probably never have had to look for”, I tell her.

“On that I have to agree with you”, she answers me.

She taps her shoulder with her fan.

Lianhua hands me the tunic and puts on one sleeve and then the other while I place my arms where she needs them, because the ten hands of the technique are busy keeping me from falling and I have none to spare to help.

It isn’t the most dignified way to receive a master I haven’t seen in years, hanging from the ceiling and half dressed. But it is considerably more dignified than the alternative, which is being dressed lying down while she watches.

Although that dignity has an expiration date, and that date is precisely the problem.

“The only drawback is that I’m growing”, I tell her. “So before long I won’t be able to do this anymore.”

Master Mu, after hearing me, doesn’t even seem to wonder what I mean before answering me.

“That, in fact, has a very simple solution”, she tells me.

Lianhua, who has crouched down to take care of the lower half, doesn’t change her rhythm. But I, who know her, can tell she is listening with enormous attention.

Because she and I already had this conversation one morning at the inn, since it was Lianhua who supposed that, at one of the technique’s later stages, what would increase would be the weight each hand could lift.

But that was a supposition, and this is the first time I have in front of me someone who can tell me whether it was a good one.

“Is that very simple solution raising the technique to Expert rank?” I ask her.

Master Mu looks at me for a moment, and then smiles.

“It seems someone has been doing her homework”, she tells me.

I don’t clarify that the homework was actually done by Lianhua and that we made suppositions from there.

“Yes”, she continues. “At Expert rank, the weight each hand can manage doubles.”

She opens her fan with a turn of her wrist.

“So, unless you decide to follow a cultivation path with techniques that increase your weight, you shouldn’t have any problem”, she finishes.

I do the math again, although I already did it that day. Ten hands with double the strength come to two hundred catty, that is, weight to spare for all the growing I have left to do and, on top of that, enough free hands left over to be able to dress myself.

Only now it isn’t a supposition anymore.

But what doesn’t change is the road between that rank and me, which is still long. But a problem with a solution, even if it is a long-term one, is a far better problem than one with no solution at all.

And then I catch the other half of her sentence.

“Are there really techniques that increase body weight?” I ask her.

It comes out with more surprise than I intended, because until this moment it had never even crossed my mind that anyone might want something like that.

Master Mu lets out a snort that sounds far too much like contempt to me.

“Yes”, she answers me. “There are many.”

She closes her fan and points it at me.

“The Voracious Whale Technique, for example”, she continues. “It allows you to store part of the energy of the food you eat, and then use that energy to boost yourself in an emergency.”

She lowers the fan.

“But that storage increases the body mass of whoever uses it”, she finishes, and at the same time I notice a slight look of distaste on her face.

I listen to her hanging from the beam, and I can’t help thinking of Chōji Akimichi, from Naruto.

Of a kid with a bag of potato chips in his hand, out of a story no one else in this room has read, and whose clan technique, apparently, someone in this world has copied.

Lianhua adjusts my belt, smooths the fabric over my shoulders and takes half a step back.

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

Lianhua puts her arms around me, I let go of the beam while I come down into her arms, she carries me to the chair, which is waiting at the foot of the bed, and sets me down in it with her usual care.

I resettle myself, smooth my skirt over my knees and join my hands on my legs.

Now presentable, I lean forward as far as the chair allows me, and hold the bow for as long as is due to a master.

“Master Mu”, I tell her. “Welcome to my humble home.”

I straighten up.

“Would you do us the honor of having breakfast with us?” I ask her.

Master Mu taps her shoulder twice with her fan.

“I won’t say no”, she answers me.

Lianhua positions herself behind the chair and takes me out of the room while Master Mu comes out with us, her hands behind her back and her fan between her fingers.

Outside, the courtyard is as it is every morning. The posts in a row, the smooth sand in the corner, the kitchen door open and, on the other side of the walls, the river.

I watch Master Mu run her eyes over the posts, from one to the next, and not ask what they are for.

The smell of steamed buns comes out of the kitchen, because Xia has been in there since who knows what hour, but the air isn’t as it is every morning.

The air is cool. Not cold, just cool, in a way I had almost forgotten, and it gets in through my clothes as the wheels of the chair rattle over the stones of the courtyard, so I take advantage of it.

“Master Mu”, I tell her. “Has the fire Qi surge ended?”

“It has ended”, she confirms to me.

She takes a couple more steps before continuing.

“Although for the Empire it will still take several more months to end”, she adds.

I nod and ask nothing more, because the Empire is at the edge of the world, and it was clear that the end would arrive there later.

Lianhua takes me to the stone table, beneath the white magnolia, and stops the chair at the head, the place that is basically my official seat by now.

Above us, the magnolia still has its wilted leaves, because a single cool morning doesn’t repair the damage of several years.

“We’ve gotten into the habit of having all our meals here”, I tell Master Mu.

Master Mu looks at the table, looks at the benches and looks up, at the branches. Then she gathers her silk in one hand and sits on the bench to my right, with her back straight and without checking first whether the stone is clean.

“It’s a good spot”, she tells me.

She sets her fan on the table.

“I’ve known places whose owners boasted of their luxuries and which were far less pleasant”, she continues.

I incline my head to thank her, and try not to let it show how much I have just enjoyed hearing it.

Because this house is rented and that table was already here when we arrived. But it is the first house I have chosen myself, and the person who has just given it her approval is not one to hand out praise freely.

I turn my head a little to my left.

“Lianhua”, I tell her. “Let Xia know there will be one more of us at breakfast.”

“Yes, Xiaojie”, she answers me.

But she doesn’t go yet, and I know what she is waiting for, so I look at Master Mu.

“We always have breakfast all together”, I tell her. “But if it doesn’t seem proper to you, I can have my maids eat afterward.”

I say it in the most neutral voice I have, because it is what one has to offer. At the Palace it wouldn’t even have needed asking, because there a maid sitting at her mistress’s table in front of a guest would have been a scandal resolved even with physical punishment, though inflicted on those maids, of course.

Master Mu makes a short gesture with her hand, like someone brushing away an insect that is bothering her.

“It’s all the same to me”, she tells me.

I nod as if that were exactly the answer I expected, but inside I let out all the air I had been holding.

Lianhua, who I am sure was waiting for that very answer to know how many bowls to set on the table, inclines her head and goes off toward the kitchen.

Once she has gone, we are left alone.

Master Mu on her bench, me at the head of the table, and between us an empty stone table and the sound of the river.

Xia’s voice comes from the kitchen. First one question, then three more, in quick succession, and then nothing, but I wait for that silence to settle.

Master Mu doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to fill it. She looks at the magnolia, looks at the wall behind which the river sounds, and her fan stays where she left it.

Then I rest my forearms on the edge of the table and ask, for the third time this morning, the same question, since it clearly needs asking.

“Master Mu”, I tell her. “Why are you here?”

Master Mu looks at me, but she doesn’t smile, and she doesn’t pick up her fan either.

“I’ve already told you”, she answers me. “I had no choice but to come and prevent the disaster a certain young lady was about to bring down on herself.”