Cultivating Common Sense In A Xianxia World Chapter 32: The Key

We buried Mother.

The ground behind the house was soft from autumn rain. Gao Ren said this was fortunate, and Zhao Ping said it was the earth itself making room for her.

I didn't say anything.

I had helped dig the grave the previous afternoon alongside Hao and Shan Pei and two of Mother's cousins whose nas I was still placing, and the work had been good the way physical labor was good when you needed a distraction.

We placed her beside Father.

His marker was a flat stone, worn smooth now by years of weather, the character for his na was still readable if you knew where to look. Hao found a piece of river slate and scored her na into it with a blade. He set it at the head of the turned earth and stood back and looked at both markers side by side.

The village gathered together.

Gao Ren with his daughter Gao Shu at his side.

Zhao Ping and his son Zhao Jun.

Duan and the Wei brothers.

Wei Bolin and Liu Jun.

The garrison soldiers from the eastern ridge, six of them in their Western Reaches uniforms, standing at the back of the gathering to pay their respects because they had eaten Mother's food and received her dicine.

Wang Su, who had arrived on his autumn trade run and had stayed to pay his respects as well.

Mother's cousins from Chenjia stood together in a quiet group.

Suyin stood beside . She had taken my hand before anyone spoke, and I had closed my fingers around hers.

Hao spoke.

He talked about the ridian maps she had drawn on bark sheets and pressed into his hands when he was sixteen. How she had never once asked for recognition for any of her work and had seed genuinely baffled when Suyin called her mother for the first ti.

I stood at the grave and listened and thought about the morning I had arrived in this body.

The unfamiliar ceiling. A woman I had never t standing in the doorway asking if I wanted rice porridge. She hadn't known yet that she was watching her son wake up with another person’s soul embedded within the body, but she had fed anyway.

She had taught the twelve ridian pathways that beca the foundation of everything we built. She had pressed her hand flat against my chest in the last months of her life and told the chains weighed you down even when they were removed.

She had known.

She had looked at her son and seen two people living in the sa vessel, and she had loved both without asking either to explain itself.

In my previous life, I had grown up without anyone. I never knew my mother, and I never knew my father. I had read about the kind of maternal love that existed in novels, mostly, and assud it was an exaggeration writers used because the real version was too ordinary to depict.

It wasn't ordinary.

I didn't speak at the grave because I didn’t have the words to say, but Hao did a good job, he always did.

The condolences ca through the day.

Suyin found first after the gathering had dispersed.

She didn't say anything when she reached . She put her arms around and held tight in her embrace. I stood there with my face turned toward the field, then put my arms around her and held on too.

After a while she pulled back and looked at .

"She told to take care of you," she said.

"I heard."

She placed her hand onto my cheek and I leaned into the touch. "I intend to honor her words."

I pulled her back into a hugging embrace and held her a second longer. Then I said into her ear, "Does that an I can keep holding your hand?"

She pulled back and laughed in a way that surprised her.

"I'll write up a contract," she said with a smile, and then she squeezed my hand once more before letting go.

"I'm here for whatever you need. But right now I need to go prepare the clinic. It...it helps …" She wiped the tears that began to form in her eyes, and I knew then that she, much like , needed to keep her mind busy.

"Go," I said. "I understand."

She walked back toward the clinic.

Later that day, Liu Jun clasped my arm at the elbow and said that Mother had told him, the week before she died, that he had exceeded every expectation she'd had for him when he first picked up a mortar. All I could do was nod and tell him that he exceeded my expectations as well.

Wang Su delayed his departure by four days without explaining why. He ate with the household, helped repair the western palisade along with Ma and Tao and Gao Run, and on the third evening he sat with Hao's family until the fire burned down and the children had fallen asleep. He clasped my arm the morning he finally left, loaded his cart, and rode north.

That evening I sat with Hao's household.

The main room of the Pei house was fuller now.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

Chen i had organized the sleeping arrangents for Mother's cousins across two of the neighboring buildings, and the household itself had contracted back to its own people, which turned out to be more than I had registered while I was away.

Hao's oldest adopted son, who was eleven now and had decided sowhere along the way to be serious about things, brought tea without being asked and sat down nearby.

His na was Pei Chen, and his younger brother was Pei An. They called uncle, which I had not arranged or expected, and which produced an unfamiliar pressure behind my sternum every ti I heard it.

Tong Lian's daughter who was still small enough to be held, reached for my sleeve from her mother's arms and I turned to her and let her grip my finger instead. She seed satisfied with that.

Wei Ru sat across the fire from . She was quieter than the others and had always been.

Hao's youngest, barely walking, pulled himself upright using Shan Pei's leg and then imdiately sat down again with an expression of great surprise.

I stayed until the children were put to bed and until the house was quiet and Hao ca and sat beside with two cups of the last of Wang Su's rice wine and handed one.

We didn't speak, we just drank in silence while looking up at the stars, and when we were finished drinking we went our separate ways. He had went inside, and I went to the river.

The stones at the bank were round and flat, worn smooth by the current over a long ti. I had found this throwing spot in the first weeks after arriving in this body and had returned to it hundreds of tis when I needed sowhere to think.

The skill itself was older than that. In my previous life I had learned it at a reservoir outside the city, alone on a Saturday afternoon with nothing better to do and no one waiting for anywhere. I had practiced until I could get nine skips on a good throw. It was a useless skill and I had been quietly proud of it for years and never had anyone to show it to.

I threw the first stone.

Seven skips. The water settled into rings.

I kept my back to the village. My eyes were still doing that whole crying thing, which at this point had beco a hinderance to . I had spent years in both of my lives to keep such feelings buried inside, but now I had no control over it, and I really didn’t like not being in control. I recognized that I was grieving for the mother I didn’t know in my past life, and the mother I had grown to love in my current life.

I threw another stone. Eight skips.

Hao approached the river and sat down at the river bank.

I tossed a third stone and counted eight skips again.

"You're crying," Hao said.

I wiped my eyes. "I'm skipping stones.”

"You can do both."

I didn't argue. I threw another stone and watched it cross the water and thought about Mother's hand on my chest.

"Show how you do that," Hao said.

I looked at him. He was watching the stone in my hand with genuine interest.

"I've tried doing it before but I could never get it right," Hao admitted.

I found a second flat stone near my foot and handed it to him. "Angle and spin. The flat face has to hit the water at a shallow angle or it sinks. Hold it between your thumb and forefinger along the edge, not across the flat. When you release it, twist your wrist forward so it spins. The spin is what keeps it up."

Hao looked at the stone, adjusted his group, and then threw it.

Five skips.

"That's the most I've ever gotten."

"The spin does most of the work. You were throwing too hard before. Force pushes it into the water, but you want to slide it across."

He found another stone and tried again. Six skips. He made a sound of quiet satisfaction.

"This is harder with qi," I said. "When your cultivation reflex is active you put more force into everything without noticing. I've been working on a variation where you push a thin layer of qi across the water surface ahead of the stone instead of adding force to the stone itself."

"That would be exceptional for training," Hao said while looking at . "You could build a whole exercise around this."

I looked at him.

He raised his eyebrows. "What?"

"You sound like ."

He smiled. The first full one since the burial, arriving despite itself, which was exactly what mine had done.

"I've had a good teacher," he said.

We sat with the river for a while, then he said, "When Father died, I didn't understand how you could be so calm. I thought the grief had done sothing to you." He turned a stone over in his hand. "I thought you were cold."

I looked down at the river and thought back to that mont. That had already felt like a lifeti ago.

"Now I understand that you were prepared for it before I was.” He looked at the water. "But this ti you weren't. You ca ho and it hit you all at once."

"She was different," I said. "Father's death I had processed beforehand. I knew what a conscription march looked like and what the outcos could be. With Mother I kept thinking there was a solution I hadn't found yet. I wanted to control sothing I couldn't control."

"Letting go, can be very hard," Hao said.

I nodded as I felt the evening breeze sweep across the landscape.

"All ten of her cousins that arrived here want to stay," Hao inford . "I’m not sure if you knew this or not, but Mother's clan na is Luan, but there isn’t much for her people to inherit anymore. The village has been shrinking for years."

"Then they inherit what they make here,” I replied without thinking. "Mother's cousins are our cousins. That's the whole of it. And it shouldn't only be them. Hekou has always been a gate that stayed open."

Hao was quiet for a long mont before a smile brightened his face.

"You must be feeling better already," he said.

I couldn’t help but feel the darkness lift off of . "Sowhat."

Then I was suddenly reminded of Father’s people as well.

"Do you have anything on Father’s family?"

Hao shook his head. "Nothing. The n who brought back Father's body knew his na on the tablet. Not where he was from before the conscription."

I reached into my bag. The oilskin map was there, folded flat. I pulled it out and unrolled one corner until the northern section of the eastern territory was visible, the cluster of small villages along the old conscription roads.

Hao looked at it. "Where did you get this?"

"Commander Xu had it made for .” I traced the road north with one finger. "I can't be certain which settlent was his. But the scale is right. We have a starting point now." I folded the corner back. "We can go through it properly when there's ti."

He looked at the oilskin in my hands. Then at the markers behind the house, visible from here as shapes against the late sky.

"She wanted both clans here," he said. "Mother's people and Father's people all in one place."

I agreed.

We stood and walked back toward the village together.

The house was quiet when I spread the map across the table.

Everyone else was asleep. I unfolded the oilskin and weighted the corners with two cups and a grinding stone and looked at what Xu's mapmakers had rendered.

I found Chenjia first. East of the river fork, a small mark. The Luan family's village. The origin of everything Mother had known and taught, now represented in Hekou by ten cousins who would need hos and work and a community.

I looked for Father's settlent. The cluster of villages north of the conscription road, near where Administrator Wen had described the old Qinghe recruiting routes. One of them was probably it. I couldn't be certain which.

I traced the road west. Past the contracted settlents. Past Hushan with its grain depot. Through the checkpoints and the river crossings and the widening infrastructure of Lord Shen Yue's administration, all the way to where Lanyu's pale stone walls would be.

Then I traced the road east.

Past Hekou and toward the border also toward ishan prefecture, where Prefect Shen Yang had gone quiet and where Lord Shen Yuan of Qinghe’s forces were repositioning along the border.

I pressed my fingertip to the passage between east and west.

Whoever held ishan controlled this road. Every village east of the crossing, including Hekou, including the unnad settlents where Father's family might still be alive, including every community that had been stripped and burned and conscripted by Shen Yuan's administration for countless years, all of it sat on the eastern side of that passage.

If Lord Shen Yue held the crossing, the eastern territory ca into the Western Reaches administration.

And if the eastern territory ca under that administration, the people in it would be less available to Lord Shen Yuan of Qinghe.

I had to accept the truth of it - whether ishan fell to Lord Shen Yue of the Western Reaches, remained under the authority of Prefect Shen Yang, or was absorded into Lord Shen Yuan’s Eastern Territories, it would be us in Hekou that would never truly be free.

ishan was the key to our independence.

We had to take it.