Chapter 198

I stay looking at her, because it is the same sentence she said to me in the bedroom, almost word for word, and it still explains nothing to me.

So I go over, quickly, what I have done since I got off the boat. I have rented a house on an island, sold a great many talismans, negotiated the contracts for the backpack and the ship and gotten myself a certificate.

It is the list of someone trying to make a living, and however much I turn it over, I can’t find anything in it that would justify someone crossing two continents at full speed.

But the one saying it is Master Mu, and I doubt Master Mu has come all this way to play a joke on me, so I choose my words carefully.

“Master Mu”, I tell her. “I don’t think I’ve done anything that would draw so much attention as to bring a disaster down on myself.”

I say it slowly, and I leave the end of the sentence a little open, in case I am the one who is wrong.

Master Mu sighs after hearing me, and as she lets it out her gaze drifts over the wall, toward where the river sounds, as if what she were looking at weren’t in this courtyard but considerably further back.

“In fact, everything that is happening is, in part, my fault”, she tells me.

And I, who had prepared myself to hear the list of my mistakes, am left not knowing what to do with that sentence.

“When I gave you the Tower of the Five Dragons token, I thought you would stay in the Empire forever”, she continues. “Because of your situation.”

She lowers her eyes to my chair for an instant and raises them again.

I don’t take offense, because there is nothing to take offense at. I remember perfectly how she told me the day she left, with all the delicacy she is capable of, that she didn’t know whether I would ever be able to leave the Imperial Palace, or even the Empire.

And that day I didn’t know either.

“I never imagined you would run off as soon as you could”, she tells me. “And even less that your mother would create a company for you with the letter of recommendation.”

She rests two fingers on the table, beside the fan, but doesn’t pick it up.

“A letter I had the leader of the caravan I was escorting give her, precisely to avoid any connection with me”, she continues.

She withdraws her fingers.

“So that token, I believed, was in principle only going to be used for what I told you when I gave it to you”, she finishes. “To get advantages at the regular auctions held in the Empire.”

I don’t answer right away, because what she believed she was giving me was one auction every ten or fifteen years in an Empire where the Tower doesn’t even have a branch. That is, a small advantage for a girl who was never going to move from where she was.

But the girl has moved a great deal more than she believed back then.

I open my mouth to ask her what is wrong with that, but I don’t get to, because at that moment Lianhua and Xia come out of the kitchen.

Lianhua comes first, with a large tray held in both hands, and Xia behind her, with the teapot.

Xia stops two paces from the table, looks at Master Mu and bows without the teapot’s lid so much as moving.

“Master Mu”, she says.

And nothing more, which, coming from Xia, is almost an event, since she barely knows her.

Master Mu answers her with a nod, and the two of them begin to serve.

Lianhua goes around the table along its long side, the same detour she took in my bedroom so as not to turn her back on anyone, and she sets the first bowl of porridge in front of Master Mu, naturally. The first cup is hers too, and Xia fills it with the teapot held in both hands, without spilling a drop.

Then me, and then them.

In the center of the table remain the platter of steamed buns, still steaming in the cool air, and a plate of pickled vegetables.

Lianhua checks that the edge of the stone is at the height of my forearms, moves my chopsticks a finger’s width closer and sits on the bench to my left. Xia waits for her to sit before sitting down beside her.

No one touches anything until Master Mu takes a bun.

She breaks it in two, eats one half without any hurry and then looks at Xia.

“Did you make these?” she asks her.

Xia nods.

“They’re very good”, Master Mu tells her. “It’s been a while since I had such a good breakfast.”

Xia’s ears turn red, and then the rest of her face.

“Thank you, Master Mu”, she says, in a voice considerably quieter than usual.

Then she lowers her eyes to her bowl, and leaves them there.

I take a bun to hide my smile. Because I have seen Xia throw a cloth in my face and take offense because a guest left without tasting her food, and this is the first time I have seen her left with nothing to say.

We eat in silence for a while.

The porridge is hot, the air is still cool, and for a few minutes this looks a great deal like any ordinary breakfast, if one manages to forget who is sitting on one of the benches.

But Master Mu hasn’t come only to have breakfast, and as soon as she rests her chopsticks on her bowl she looks at me again.

“As I was telling you”, she tells me. “When I gave you the token, the last thing I expected was for you to run off from the Empire.”

She takes a sip of tea.

“Or for Guifei Xiang to have created a commercial company associated with the Tower of the Five Dragons”, she continues.

She sets the cup on the table.

“Or, to top it all off, for you to decide to fuse that token with the company”, she finishes.

To my left, Lianhua keeps eating at the same pace, which is her way of listening with enormous attention.

And I remember Lin Quingyu’s office, and how little time it took me to decide. A fourth of the profits instead of a fifth, and a discount that anyone I sent with the seal could use.

It still seems like a good deal to me; it’s just that after Master Mu’s words I begin to suspect there is a great deal more involved than I believed.

“I was notified as soon as it happened”, Master Mu tells me. “So I had no choice but to drop everything I was doing and set off at a run to get here as soon as possible.”

And that notification is what I find hardest to swallow at breakfast.

Because I knew all the Tower’s branches communicate with one another. I knew it because it is exactly what allows me to collect my income at any of them. But it never occurred to me that my name could travel along the same road my money travels.

Master Mu makes a slight pause, and then smiles, although barely.

“Although, come to think of it, I should almost thank you”, she continues. “Thanks to that I’ve been able to get out of teaching the bunch of incompetents I had been assigned as students.”

Xia freezes with her bun halfway to her mouth.

I feel a pang of pity for that bunch, whoever they may be, and it doesn’t last long. Because I had this woman to myself for four months, and I know perfectly well what it is like not to live up to her expectations for an entire lesson.

But I am still stuck at the same point, since I can’t understand what the problem could be. A token, a company and a seal. In my other life, that was merging two customer accounts into one, and the worst that could happen to you was that the bank started sending you letters in duplicate.

And then I remember Chen Mo.

That conversation on the road, how little it took to get him talking, and everything he told me about the woman I now have sitting at my table, and if the problem isn’t in what I’ve done, perhaps it’s in whom I’ve done it with.

So I rest my chopsticks on my bowl and ask it with all the delicacy I am capable of.

“Master Mu”, I tell her. “Do those problems have anything to do with your being a Grand Master of Talismans? Or with your nickname, the Divine Lightning, and your place in the rank of Celestial Dragons?”

Master Mu looks at me, and the smile, which until now was little more than a gesture, becomes evident.

“It seems someone has done her homework again”, she tells me.

“It wasn’t exactly difficult”, I answer her. “I only had to mention your name once, and I was practically told your whole story.”

And there her smile goes.

Not all at once, just like in the bedroom, but it goes.

“You’re right”, she tells me. “It has to do with the matter for which I earned that nickname.”

She looks at the bowls, the platter of buns and the cup in front of her.

“But that isn’t a subject to tell over breakfast”, she continues. “It’s better left for afterward.”

And she does seem to set it aside, picking up the other half of her bun as if the previous conversation had never existed, and she asks me how my stay in the city is going.

I answer that it is going well, which is the truth. We have a house and we have work, and in the time I have been here no one has tried to kill me, which is more than I can say of the Palace, although I keep that last part to myself.

And since she keeps looking at me, I tell her about the certificate.

I tell her that the Tower couldn’t sell my talismans without it, that this city’s Talisman Makers’ Guild is called the Pavilion of a Thousand Strokes, and that the examination was twenty theory questions and one talisman.

I also tell her that the examiner had failed me before letting me into the room, and that when he read my answers, instead of asking me for a basic talisman like the others, he asked me for a Cutting Wind.

Master Mu lets out a snort.

“And?” she asks me.

“They recorded it as a perfect examination”, I answer her.

She nods once, as if any other result would have been unacceptable.

“There was an Elder watching from a gallery”, I continue. “When I finished, he came down to find me, asked me who had taught me and offered to make me his disciple.”

“And what did you answer him?” she asks me.

“That I already had a master”, I tell her. “And that it wasn’t my place to go around saying my master’s name without permission.”

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Master Mu looks at me a moment longer than the sentence lasts.

She says nothing, and I can’t read what is in that look, so I go on.

“He gave me a message for you”, I add. “That I should tell my master, from him, that it was a job well done.”

“I don’t need anyone to tell me something I already know”, she answers me with a certain note of pride in her voice.

And I have to lower my eyes to my bowl, because she has said it exactly the way I imagined in the vestibule of the Guild, except that she left out the tap on the shoulder with her fan.

Shortly afterward we finish breakfast.

Xia stacks the bowls, Lianhua gathers up the platter, the plate, the teapot and the cups, and between the two of them they leave the stone table as empty as it was before, with Master Mu’s fan in the same spot where she left it.

When they come back from the kitchen, they don’t sit down.

Lianhua stands to my left and a little behind, which is where she always stands when there is a visitor, and Xia stays beside my chair, with her hands crossed in front of her.

Master Mu looks at the two of them.

“Sit down”, she tells them. “It’s better that you both hear what I have to tell.”

Lianhua doesn’t move, because she is waiting for me to tell her.

And I take my time telling her, because a story that can’t be told over breakfast isn’t going to be a pleasant story, and Xia is twelve years old.

“Master Mu”, I tell her. “If what you’re going to tell is what I imagine, perhaps Xia shouldn’t…”

I don’t finish the sentence, because a hand comes to rest on top of mine, on the armrest.

It is a small hand, with fingers rough from the kitchen.

“It’s all right”, Xia tells me.

She says it in a low voice, without any of her usual haste.

“Remember what happened to my family”, she continues.

And I can’t find anything to answer her.

Because I found this girl in an alley in Xi’An with broken ribs, a month after four families killed, in a single night, everyone who bore her surname. Xia doesn’t need anyone to explain to her what people are capable of; she has known it since she was six.

I sigh, turn my hand over beneath hers and squeeze it for a moment.

“All right”, I tell her. “Sit down, both of you.”

Lianhua returns to the bench on my left, and Xia sits beside her, with her back straight and her hands in her lap.

Master Mu waits until they are both still, and then looks at me.

“Do you know the story of how I was dragged into a Celestial Fragment?” she asks me.

“Yes”, I answer her.

Chen Mo told it to me. A Fragment that opened without warning, that swallowed everyone who was nearby and that stayed sealed from the inside for almost a year, and from which only she came out.

“And I suppose that, besides, that was where you got the fragment with that strange language you showed me”, I add.

I say it with the most innocent face I have, a face that cost me a great many Acting lessons, because I know perfectly well what is written on that stone, and it is one of the few things I have never told her.

“That was where”, she confirms to me, and says nothing more about the stone, which I silently thank her for.

Then she looks at the three of us, one by one.

“Before going on, I have to tell you about a part of cultivator society that is seldom spoken of”, she tells us. “And when it is spoken of, it is in a low voice, with fear or with contempt, depending on who is speaking.”

She pauses.

“Demonic cultivators”, she continues. “Or diabolical, or heretical, or evil, or any of the countless labels they are given.”

“I’ve heard them mentioned before”, I tell her. “But I’m not very clear on what they are.”

And the first time I heard them mentioned was from her, in my study at the Palace. I never got to ask her, because a moment later the sky turned red and we had more urgent things to talk about.

I have had that question on my list of pending matters since I was ten.

“They are cultivators who believe in increasing their own power whatever the cost”, she answers me.

The contempt shows in her voice, and she does nothing to hide it.

“People who would be capable of killing every inhabitant of a city if by doing so they could increase their own cultivation”, she continues. “Even if only by a fraction.”

To my left, Xia has stopped moving.

“And that isn’t a theory”, Master Mu tells us, and there is no contempt in her voice anymore, only seriousness. “It is something that has happened many times.”

She rests her open hand on the table.

“Because there are techniques and rituals, considered forbidden practically everywhere, that serve that purpose”, she continues. “And not only that. There are also techniques that allow things like tearing their victims’ gifts from them to keep for themselves. Or extracting people’s techniques from their minds in order to acquire them.”

I think of everything I carry stored inside my head, and how little I would like someone to come and take it out of me.

“That kind of cultivator is normally hunted down as soon as one is found”, she tells us. “But they’re like cockroaches, and more always appear.”

She withdraws her hand from the table.

“Above all because the promise of a quick increase in power, at a price that almost always someone else will have to pay, is too tempting for some”, she finishes.

A price someone else pays.

And as I listen to her, I can’t help thinking that I already know this story.

It is this world’s version of the Homunculi and their network across Amestris, in Fullmetal Alchemist, with an entire country turned into an ingredient for the Philosopher’s Stone. Or of the harvesting of souls in Soul Eater.

The difference is that those were volumes or videos I closed when it was time to go to sleep, and this is the reality I am having to live in.

And a shiver runs down my spine, so I join my hands on top of the table to keep them still.

“I’m grateful to you for telling me what I might come across”, I tell her, and a trace of that fear I can’t get rid of comes out in my voice. “But why are you telling me this as part of your story?”

Master Mu looks at me.

“Think about it”, she tells me. “When I entered that Celestial Fragment, I was a Grand Master of Talismans with a certain fame. But beyond my rank within the local Talisman Makers’ Guild, I had no backing at all.”

She makes a very brief pause.

“And when I emerged from it, I came out with powers no one had ever seen”, she continues. “What do you think happened then?”

I don’t need to think about it much.

A woman alone, with no one behind her, who comes out of a place no one else has come out of, with something no one else has, in a world where there are people who know how to pull your techniques out of your head.

“They began hunting you”, I answer her.

Master Mu nods, satisfied.

“You were quick to realize it”, she tells me. “And considerably quicker than I was in my day.”

She says it without any bitterness, and that is what makes me think she used up all the bitterness a long time ago.

“Fortunately, what I had to go through inside that Fragment to survive was enough to let me withstand my first attackers”, she continues. “But from that moment on I became the target of a great many cultivators who wanted the powers, or the objects, I had brought out of there.”

She grows a little more serious still, which is something I didn’t think was possible.

“And those who began hunting me weren’t only the demonic cultivators”, she tells me. “Many of the sects that call themselves righteous sects did so too.”

She joins her hands on top of the table.

“Only they didn’t do it directly”, she continues. “They approached me with smiles and good intentions, while hiding their daggers to try to catch me off guard.”

What she tells weighs, and it scandalizes me, but it doesn’t manage to surprise me much.

In my other life I heard too many similar stories, although with far fewer powers involved. Someone finds something very valuable, and the first to arrive are the thieves, and the second are the so-called friends.

I look to my left.

Lianhua is as imperturbable as ever, with her hands in her lap and the same face with which she would listen to a shopping list.

But Xia isn’t.

Xia is listening with her eyes fixed on a point on the table, without asking a single question, and she has the face of someone who is remembering something.

And I fear I know what. I fear this whole story looks far too much like what happened to her family, so I promise myself I will talk to her properly when all this is over.

Then I look back at Master Mu.

“And what happened after that?” I ask her.

“The next part isn’t all that important to tell”, she answers me. “I simply faced everyone who came before me.”

She looks toward the wall for a moment.

“Those who came to tear out my techniques and those who came to take my treasures from me”, she continues. “Those who wanted to face me to make a name for themselves. And those who were simply jealous of my achievements.”

She lists them without dwelling on any of them, and I remember what she told me the day of her auction. That, despite all the fine words, there always comes a moment when you can depend only on yourself and on the power you have.

Now I know where she learned it.

Master Mu looks at me again.

“Earlier you mentioned the rank of Celestial Dragons”, she tells me.

“Yes”, I answer her.

“Do you know the specific requirements for getting onto that list?” she asks me.

“I only know that they’re supposed to be the geniuses under two hundred years old who have a chance of Ascending before three hundred”, I tell her.

Master Mu lets out a snort.

“That’s correct”, she tells me. “But do you know how it’s calculated who is worthy of being in that rank?”

“No”, I answer her.

“It’s based solely on strength”, she tells me, and her tone has filled with irony. “The stronger you are, the higher you are on that list.”

She pauses.

“And that strength is measured by the number of corpses each member of the list leaves behind”, she finishes.

No one says anything. Xia asks no question, Lianhua doesn’t change position, and I stay looking at Master Mu, waiting for her to add that she was exaggerating.

She doesn’t add it.

“Every member of that rank is backed by all the corpses they have climbed on to reach that height”, she continues, and the irony has given way to contempt. “And the worst of it is that practically all of them actively seek new confrontations and new fights, just to be able to keep their place on that miserable list.”

I swallow.

In my other life there were lists like that too, of universities and researchers, and there were also people who did very ugly things to climb one place. But often that consisted of signing papers they hadn’t written.

And when Chen Mo told me about this list, I did the math. I came up with a hundred and eighty-seven years, which was what I had left before I could no longer get onto it, and I did it the way one tells a joke.

But no one told me what the price of admission was.

“You once reached third place”, I tell her, with all the caution I have.

Master Mu lets out another snort.

“I got there in the days when I had to kill everyone who wanted to take what was mine”, she answers me.

She doesn’t say how many there were, and I don’t ask her.

“But, fortunately, one day I managed to create a unique talisman”, she continues. “With it I caught the attention of the Tower of the Five Dragons, and thanks to that I entered its structure.”

And for the first time since she began telling all this, her face eases a little.

“After that, a couple of warnings were enough, and a couple of exemplary lessons from the Tower about what happens to those who attack its members”, she tells me. “And at last they left me in peace.”

She makes a short gesture with her hand.

“Except for the occasional ambush, or the occasional attempt to make things difficult for me, because fools always exist and always will”, she adds, in the same tone in which someone else would talk about a leaky roof.

“So, thanks to that, and fortunately, my place among the Celestial Dragons has been falling”, she finishes. “Since I have no interest in being compared with that bunch of maniacs.”

Chen Mo gave me another explanation for that fall, one that had to do with certain Treasures she refuses to accept. I suppose both are true, and that each person tells the part they can see from where they stand.

After her words, silence envelops the courtyard, broken only by the sound of the river’s water on the other side of the wall.

I let it last a while, because it isn’t a story one can answer quickly.

But the question the morning began with is still unanswered. So I resettle myself in the chair, resting my weight on the armrests, and ask it for the fourth time, even if in other words.

“Master Mu”, I tell her. “I still don’t know what all that has to do with your appearing to save me from a disaster.”

Master Mu looks at me.

“Can you imagine how many enemies I’ve made with my actions over the years?” she asks me.

The answer is obvious, and even so it comes out of me with a doubt at the end.

“Many?” I answer her.

“That’s correct”, she tells me. “And besides the enemies who hate me for my actions, I also have various groups of people who bear me a grudge for another reason.”

She twists her mouth a little.

“They wanted me to take on as disciples their spoiled fools of sons or daughters”, she continues. “While boasting that they were geniuses at creating talismans.”

“And I always turned them all down”, she finishes.

All of them, she tells me, while I remember the four months she spent correcting my strokes in my study, and I begin to see where this is going.

Then Master Mu, at last, picks up her fan from the table.

“That said, it’s better to get to the heart of the matter”, she tells me. “And explain to you what thornbush you’ve walked into thanks to what you did with the token.”

She opens it a couple of ribs and closes it again.

“Even if it is, partly, the fault of both of us”, she adds.

And I sit up straight, because when this woman has her fan in her hand is when the lesson begins.

“The kind of token I gave you is of a very limited class”, she tells me. “And besides, it is bound to the person who gives it. That is, in this case, to me.”

She points at me with her closed fan.

“So, by handing it to Lin Quingyu, you made it clear to her that I had given you that token in person”, she continues.

And I see Lin Quingyu again with the token in her palm, her fingers closed over it and her eyes at mid-height, and the way she afterward set it on the table, with the same care with which one sets down an egg.

She asked me whether I knew who had given it to me, and now I understand what she had just read and why she was asking.

“And not only that”, Master Mu tells me. “Since those tokens are very limited, it meant that I held you in very high regard.”

She taps her shoulder with her fan.

“Then, to add even more fuel to the fire, you fused the token with the seal of the House of the Long Journey”, she continues. “With which the House of the Long Journey automatically became a company connected with me. And in a very close way.”

Another tap.

“And as if all that weren’t enough, on top of it you started selling talismans to the Tower of the Five Dragons”, she tells me, and she marks the end of the sentence with the tip of her fan against the stone.

She leaves it there, resting on the table.

“After all of the above, what do you think anyone would think about the young woman selling talismans to the Tower, given her more than evident closeness to me?” she asks me.

I don’t need to think about it much.

I have spent years calling that token a VIP membership, and it turns out it wasn’t a club card, it was a letter of introduction with her signature. And I stapled it to my company and started selling, with that signature on the door, precisely the product she is famous for.

I sigh.

“I would think that person is, at the very least, a disciple of yours”, I answer her.

“That is exactly the problem”, she tells me.

She opens her fan with a turn of her wrist.

“The Tower may look like a monolithic organization that controls everything”, she continues. “But, like every organization, it has its rats and its cockroaches.”

To my left, Lianhua doesn’t move.

She was the one who told me, at this very table, that the Tower doesn’t talk. And I suppose it’s true, until someone finds the right person and the right price.

“They are purged whenever they’re detected”, Master Mu tells me. “But if I hadn’t come to set things in order personally, in a way I can’t tell you because it falls within the Tower’s secrets, someone, at some point, would have taken to selling a piece of information.”

She closes her fan.

“That Master Mu had a disciple in the city of Sanjiang”, she continues.

I feel the edge of the stone table under my forearms, cold, and I realize I am pressing them against it.

Because not long ago, sitting in this very spot, I said that the only thing that would change was that the girl in the strange chair would be a little more famous, but I had no idea how much.

“And from that moment on, a certain kind of people would have begun to appear en masse in this city”, she tells me. “Young people angry because I didn’t take them on as disciples. Members of some family or sect with a grudge against me. Or simply people who want to take advantage of my fame.”

She looks at me, then at the chair, and then at me again.

“All of them looking for you to challenge you to a duel”, she finishes. “So they could boast of having defeated the disciple of Mu Fei, the Divine Lightning.”