Cultivating Common Sense In A Xianxia World Chapter 33: The Foundation

The stonemasons arrived on the third day of autumn.

Seven of them, from a Western Reaches contractor settlent two weeks west of Hekou, with two oxcarts of tools and enough dressed stone to begin three foundations. Their foreman was a compact woman nad Ru who walked the training ground periter before speaking, pressed her heel into the soil at four points, and told the northern flat was workable.

Gao Ren was already there. He had been waiting for the stonemasons the way he waited for ore shipnts, standing at the northern edge of the flat with his arms folded.

He and Ru spent the first hour arguing about the cultivation hall's foundation depth, but by midday they were working off the sa plan.

I left them to it and went to et the Luan cousins.

They had been housed in the two buildings east of the Pei household since arriving in the days after Mother's burial.

Ten people total who had backgrounds as healers, farrs, and there was a carpenter nad Luan Fen who had finished his assigned building in eleven days and was already asking what to do next. I had been managing the integration from a distance through.

They told stories of Mother while I did their intake.

They knew the girl she had been in Chenjia, the apprentice who had been too serious for her age and then suddenly warm when she thought no one was watching, the one Sun Ai had called her best student while complaining that she asked too many questions. They had stories I had never heard. They produced them without being asked, over the rice and salted fish Tong Lian had sent over.

A woman nad Luan i, the oldest of the cousins, told that Mother had stolen a jar of preserved ginger from the kitchen as a girl and blad it on the cat. I had not known there had been a cat. I had not known she had been the kind of child who stole things and blad them on animals.

I found myself laughing at the thought it.

Luan i looked at while I was still laughing and said, simply, "She wrote letters about you."

I asked what she said.

"That you were the difficult one," Luan i said. "Though she ant it as a complint."

I believed that.

The integration work moved quickly. Luan i and a younger healer nad Luan Shen took the clinic rotation alongside Liu Jun, which freed Suyin for the school preparation work she had been wanting to spend more ti on. The three farming cousins joined the labor rotation imdiately and one of them, a quiet man nad Luan Guo, improved the eastern field drainage within a week by redirecting two irrigation lines.

Luan Fen the carpenter had already begun on the classroom building before the stonemasons arrived. I had given him the dinsions and the load requirents and he had looked at the plan for no more than five minutes before he morized the layout.

With the influx of skilled workers, I was able to work more on the curriculum layout.

The cultivation hall on the northern flat was accessible from zone one, with capacity for thirty students in group sessions.

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The classroom at the gate end of the training ground, listed in the construction plan submitted to Administrator Wen's office as a supply manifest reading room for military practitioners, was what I had been looking forward to the most.

The spirit stone stayed under the floorboards. I was not ready to explain it yet and the construction tiline didn't require it.

Three weeks into the build, Hao found at the river when the sun was setting by the river.

He sat next to on the bank while I kept running the channel work I'd been doing, the slow circulation that traced the ambient signature, feeling the river's field the way you felt weather coming before you saw it. My mind was adrift attempting to categorize what my current strength level was. Would this be considered Qi Refining? It was hard for to tell, especially since I had refined my Qi flow through my Mai, but I hadn’t pulled ambient Qi into my Dantian yet, if I even knew how to feel for it.

Hao waited until was done with my rumination before asking, "What are we going to call it?"

"The school?”

"It needs a na," He picked up a stone and turned it in his hand.

"We're not naming it after ourselves," I said to him pointedly.

"I wasn't going to suggest that." He threw the stone and it skipped four tis.

I looked at the river. At the fork where the two currents t and moved together south. The geography that had given the village its na and given the village's people their best training ground as well.

"The River Fork Academy," I said finally.

Hao turned the na over in his mind, and then he smiled at and nodded. “River Fork Academy, huh? I like it.”

"And what’s even better,” I began to say while I stretched my arms out, “Is that the stonemasons are ahead of schedule.”

I thought about Luan Fen, who had arrived with nothing but a cloth satchel and a family na and had imdiately begun contributing to the school’s foundation. They truly wanted to be apart of sothin bigger than themselves.

"Mother wrote letters about us. Apparently she used to give them to any wandering rchants that were headed back that way.”

So that’s how she did it, I thought to myself.

"I know. Luan i told as well."

He smiled. We sat with the river for a while, both of us probably thinking the sa things, about how much we still missed our Mother, and how being around her clan only made that pain worse so days, while other days it made it far easier to bare.

"Co inside when you're done, Wei Suyin wants to see you," he said. He stood and walked back toward the village, and the dark closed behind him, and the river kept moving.

Suyin was still at the table when I ca in.

She had the Luan family docuntation spread in order, chronological from the left, margin annotations in compressed script, the pages weighted at the corners with two ink stones and a small knife she used for herb preparation.

She had been cross-referencing the cousin intake records against the Western Reaches administrative frawork that Wen's office had supplied three years ago, building a formal record that would satisfy a review without exposing anyone.

I sat across from her and pulled the cultivation hall layout toward . We worked without speaking, which had beco the ordinary texture of evenings like this over the weeks.

I looked at the stack of records she had organized, the intake docunts, and the family histories the cousins had provided.

"How long did this take you?" I asked her.

"Several evenings." She moved to the next page. "The Luan cousins helped. Luan i has a family ledger going back four generations. I wanted the clinic records to reflect that as well."

I looked at the notation she had drafted. She had understood what the records needed before I had. This was a pattern I was accustod to and had stopped finding surprising.

In my previous life I had done this kind of work alone. Sat with borrowed lamps and old construction reports from three different administrative periods, trying to understand ancient systems without anyone to cross-reference my work with, and without anyone across the table to pass a completed page to.

"Hao and I decided to na the school ‘The River Fork Academy,’" I said.

She looked at . "That's the na?"

I nodded.

She considered it. "It feels right," she said after so thought. She returned to the records. "What is the school going to be docunted as?"

"A school of cultivation and martial arts serving the Western Reaches military and the surrounding civilian population."

She looked up at and rightfully suspected that there was more to it than that. "And what is it actually?"

"A communal space for people to learn," I explained.

Suyin picked up her brush and wrote the school's na at the top of the intake record in her precise handwriting.

River Fork Academy. Established in the third year of the Western Reaches eastern contract, Hekou settlent.

She set the brush down and looked at it.

The River Fork Academy existed on paper now.