knelt beside the bed and watched the thin film co up through Hao's skin the way water cos up through a wet stone, and I held my breath for the length of a slow count.
"His body is purging. It is not a sickness. It is a cultivation event."
"How can you be so sure?"
"Hao pulled the fire and smoke into himself the night Hekou burned. He drew it inward instead of letting it pass him by, the way a young cultivator will reach for any source of Qi he can find before he has learned what is safe to reach for and what is not. His body has been holding it since. Now it is processing what he took in, and it is expelling the energy through his pores."
Suyin listened to intently before responding.
"So his body is doing the right thing?"
I nodded.
"Is there any way for us to help guide the process along, then? To help him quicken the purifying?"
I thought about what she asked for a mont before responding.
"There is a cave I have been to before, three days' walk west. I went with Wei Bolin, Duan, and Gao Ren. I brought a spirit stone back, the sa one that we bartered to Zhu Rong," I said to her.
"The small dark stone?"
"That very one. It is condensed Qi. There is a chance another one in that cave could help Hao."
She did not answer imdiately. She was thinking.
"We do not know what a spirit stone is capable of, Liang. You have not used it on a person before."
"I will have to test it on myself first, then."
Suyin narrowed her eyes at . "Liang..."
"I will not be reckless, Suyin. I will bring Bolin and the cohort. We will be in a controlled environnt with people I trust, and I will test what the stone does before I bring one back to put under Hao's palm. Anything is possible with Qi. There is a chance it carries healing properties, and that is a chance worth testing."
She held my eyes for a long unhurried breath.
She rose from the stool.
I rose with her.
She crossed the half-pace between us and her arms ca up around my shoulders, and she pulled against her, and the kiss she gave was deeper than any she had given before. Her lips were warm against mine, and I returned the kiss for as long as she gave it, and when she drew back, her forehead rested against mine and her breath was uneven.
"Be careful, Liang."
"I will."
The cohort and Bolin were at the curriculum room when I returned. I laid the plan out for them. The cave three days west. A spirit stone for Hao. Cultivation training along the way, with the test of what the stone could do at the end of it.
Lin Zhi's eyes brightened at the words cultivation training before I had finished the sentence. Mu Renshu's shoulders set forward in the way they had set forward at the river the first ti I had nad the breath cycle. Cao Yan nodded once and reached for his pack. Sun Hai was already moving for his cloak.
I watched them. I had not expected the eagerness to land that hard. I had expected resistance, or hesitation, or at the least a question about the work they would be leaving behind. None of them asked. They wanted to go.
Bolin caught my eye over the top of Cao Yan's head as the boy was tightening the buckle on his pack. His mouth lifted at one corner. He had read what I was reading, and he had read it before I had nad it to myself, and the small lift at the corner of his mouth told he had been waiting for to see what he had already seen.
I took comfort in that.
We packed. I walked to the garrison and told Xu Bing what I was doing and where I was going, and Xu Bing took it to Fei Liao, who ca back with the permission written on a strip of paper that nad the trip as a cultivation training exercise under the Academy's authority and authorized to leave the village with five companions for the length of a half-quarter. I folded the paper and put it in the inside pocket of my cloak.
We were on the western road by the third notch.
The first day was overcast and the air was cold enough that the breath rose. We walked at the steady pace Bolin set, and I had the cohort run the breath cycle on the move, which they had not yet done. Holding the cycle while walking was a different thing from holding it sitting. The legs took so of the Qi the lungs were trying to pull. The cycle wanted to break itself against the rhythm of the steps.
Lin Zhi found the cycle first. She did it at the end of the first hour by syncing the inhale to her right footfall and the exhale to her left, and once she had the timing, she held it for the next two hours without breaking. Mu Renshu took longer. He found it by the second hour and held it shakily, losing it once at a bend in the road and finding it again within ten paces. Cao Yan did not find it on the first day.
He held the breath but he could not hold the cycle, and he kept losing the count against the steps, and by midday he had stopped trying to fight it and was simply walking and breathing without the cycle, which was the right call and which I told him was the right call. He would find it.
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Sun Hai did not speak for most of the day, but when I checked him at the third hour his breath was on the cycle, and when I checked again at the fifth it was still on the cycle, and Sun Hai had quietly beco the one in the cohort who got it without anyone watching him get it.
We camped at a bend in the road where a small stream ran cold under thin ice. Bolin had the cohort gather kindling while he built the fire, and I sat on a fallen log at the edge of the camp and ate cold rice from a wrapped cloth and watched them work.
Lin Zhi was talking to Mu Renshu about the cycle. She was telling him the trick about the footfall, and he was nodding, and Cao Yan was crouched at the kindling pile listening without speaking. Sun Hai was at the fire feeding it small sticks one at a ti.
Bolin ca to sit on the log beside .
"Lin Zhi has the breath cycle ahead of where I had it a month into the river training," he said.
"She does. Mu Renshu is steadier than I expected."
"The second-stage awareness on the first day. I had not seen that before."
"Cao Yan is slower."
"Cao Yan is steadier than he is fast. He will catch up. Sun Hai is the one to watch. He has not asked a question yet."
"He has not needed to."
Bolin nodded.
I let the camp settle.
"I am going to ask them to stay, Bolin. After the training is done. I'm going to ask them to remain in Hekou."
He looked at and he did not seem surprised.
"That is the right call."
"You think so?"
"I think it is plain to see. They hang on your every word. Three days ago they were students of cultivation. Tonight they are walking three days west with you toward a cave because you told them to walk. They are not students, they are followers."
He paused.
"What do you plan to do with them, exactly."
I thought about how to answer it. There was a clean answer and there was a true answer, and they were not quite the sa answer.
I gave him the true one.
"It never hurts to have cultivators loyal to you, Bolin."
He nodded into the fire.
He did not say anything else.
The second day was clearer. The cold of the morning lifted into a pale sun by the second notch, and the road climbed slightly through low rolling hills, and the breath ca easier than it had the first day.
I changed the training. The breath cycle on the move had been the work of the first day, and the cohort had it now, even Cao Yan, who found it at the second hour by abandoning the footfall trick Lin Zhi had taught him and finding his own timing on the in-breath. I gave them the channel work next. Walking and breathing while feeling the root channel run from the lower belly to the base of the spine. Walking and breathing while feeling the heart channel run from the sternum to the throat.
Lin Zhi held the root channel at the end of the third hour. Mu Renshu held it shortly after her, and he held it longer, because second-stage awareness had been giving him the edge it had been giving him since the first day at the river. Sun Hai held it without seeming to be working at it. Cao Yan got the root by the fourth hour and lost it twice and got it back. None of them had the heart yet, and I did not push for it.
We stopped at a stream at midday. Bolin filled the canteens. I walked a short way off the road and looked at the trees.
A young birch stood on the slope above the stream, no more than two paces taller than I was, with a low branch at the height of my chest that crossed the path of the morning sun. I stood at the base of the slope and looked at the branch.
The cohort had been walking and breathing for two days. They had the cycle on the move. They had the root channel on the move. They had asked careful questions about the work, and they had not yet seen what cultivation could do at the end of all the breathing and the channel work.
It was ti to show them.
I turned and called them up.
"Co here, all of you."
They ca. Bolin ca with them.
"Watch the branch."
They watched.
I put my palms together at the level of my sternum.
I felt for the small pool of Qi I had been holding in my dantian, the dense quiet warmth that sat below my navel and that I had been building since my channels had first opened by the river. I drew on it slowly. I let it move up through the channel that ran along the inside of my forearms to the place where my palms t, and I shaped it in my mind as I drew on it, visualizing water with the edge of a blade, concentrating the form down through my fingertips until the Qi was the shape of what I intended it to be.
I released it.
A thin line of water leapt from between my palms in the shape of a sword's edge, gleaming pale in the morning sun, and it crossed the half-pace between my hands and the branch in the space of a single drawn breath. The branch did not splinter. The branch did not crack. The jet passed through the wood the way a heated blade passes through silk, parting the white heart of the birch in one clean cut without resistance, and the upper half of the branch fell forward and dropped to the packed earth at my feet.
A thin line of sap welled along the edge of the cut on the standing stump, bright in the cold air.
"How," Mu Renshu said.
"Water."
I lowered my hands.
"Once a cultivator's training has advanced far enough, the Qi a cultivator carries will shape itself into the elent that is naturally his. So cultivators find the affinity early. So find it late. Mine is water. My channels opened on their own when I was younger, and I learned the cycle and the channel work with Hao on the bank of the Hekou river every morning for two months. I have wondered since whether the place I trained had shaped my affinity. I am not certain though, I am only telling you what I suspect."
"And ours?" Sun Hai asked.
I looked at the four of them. The pale sun was on their faces.
"That is the part I cannot answer yet, Sun Hai. None of you have shaped your Qi the way I just shaped mine. The work of finding the affinity may take so ti."
Lin Zhi's hands were still in front of her. Her eyes had not left the cut branch.
"Squad Captain Pei. My family grew barley. The fields outside Heying ran half a day in either direction, and I worked them every season since I was old enough to carry water to my mother. Could that have shaped what shapes in , the way you said the river shaped you?"
"It might have, Lin Zhi. I do not know. I think it is possible."
Mu Renshu spoke next.
"I grew up on the western reach garrison. My father is a quartermaster. The infantry I followed as a boy carried steel sabers and iron-shod boots, and the sll of the forge was on every man who ca through my father's stores. Would that lean toward tal?"
"It might lean you. It might not lean you at all. The garrison was a place. The forge was a place. The Qi that was around you when you were young will have done what it did, and I will not pretend to know what that was."
Cao Yan was looking at the ground. His shoulders had drawn down a fraction.
"I do not have certain answers for any of you. What I can tell you is this: the cave at the end of this road holds spirit stones. There is a chance that a spirit stone, when held in a cultivator's hand, can reveal what affinity the cultivator carries. I have not tested this yet, but I am going to test it on myself first when we reach the cave. If it works for , we will test it for each of you in turn."
The cohort was silent.
Lin Zhi nodded slowly.
Mu Renshu's shoulders settled.
Cao Yan looked up.
Sun Hai had already been looking at . He continued to look at .
I turned to Bolin.
"We move. We are losing the day."
Bolin gathered the cohort with a small gesture, and we returned to the road.
We camped that night at a hollow below a ridge, with the cave another half-day's walk to the west.
The cohort did not speak much at the fire. They were processing what they had been told, and they ate what Bolin had laid out, and they ran the breath cycle one more ti before they slept. Lin Zhi held the channel work the longest. Mu Renshu fell asleep mid-cycle and Bolin laid the second blanket over him without a word. Sun Hai slept against Cao Yan's shoulder, and Cao Yan did not wake him.
Bolin was on first watch. He ca to sit beside without speaking, and we watched the cohort sleep, and the cold of the ridge held the silence between us.
Tomorrow we would walk to the cave.
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