Chapter 230: The Split Old Pine

The white haze over the stones thinned slowly. The scorch marks spread outward in a ring from where Jiang Wan sat, with cracks running along the edges, smoke still curling up from the gaps. By early Wei hour, the smoke no longer rose; it crept eastward along the stone's surface. The clifftop reeked of burning—charred rock, scorched cloth, and a faint sweetness where pine resin had caught.

Xu Yan still sat at the innermost edge of the old pine, his back against the roots. The ledger lay open across his knees, both hands pressing down on the pages.

Jiang Wan opened her eyes.

She looked down at her hands first. Both lay on her knees, black ash dusted over the knuckles, fine white flakes on the backs that drifted off at a touch. She turned them over, turned them back, slowly flexed her fingers. Then she reached up behind her ear. The singed ends of her hair curled around her finger; she wound the strand once and let it drop.

One hand pressed against her lower abdomen.

The core was there. A heavy, solid weight. Qi moved through her meridians, and when it reached that point it swirled once before passing on. She held the pressure a while longer, then removed her hand and looked east. Someone sat beneath the old pine. She watched him for a moment and said nothing.

Two auras had been on the clifftop. Both had withdrawn until invisible; now only his moved outside. Qi gathered inward from all directions, advancing and halting, and at each halt he closed his mouth and waited for it to move again. He sat motionless. The column in the ledger was still blank.

Sunlight threaded through a break in the clouds and fell slantwise onto the eastern stones. By his reckoning, early Wei hour had passed. From the moment the core was unsealed until it went down at the fourth quarter of the Wu hour—the timing held within the limit. He had not miscalculated. He set that line aside in his mind first, then turned to the breath in his body.

Jiang Wan braced her hands on her knees and stood. She swayed once as she rose, one hand catching the edge of a scorched stone for support before she pulled it away. She looked down at the charred hem of her robe, pressed down a curled corner, and a smear of black ash came away. Then she moved slowly to the south end of the clifftop, choosing unburned stones to step on. She sat down on a patch of stone that was still cool, crossed her legs, and laid her hands back on her knees. To the south, Luoxia Town lay below. The river's glint was broken into segments by the wind. A few people stood at the town's street mouth, all tilting their heads north. They watched for a long while, and no one moved.

She watched the town street for a while, then closed her eyes. She did not call to him.

The heat in Xu Yan's chest had sunk by the end of the Wu hour, with no place to halt along the way. Now it felt as though someone had set a pot over a fire in his dantian—low flame, water slowly coming to a simmer. Qi drew inward, agonizingly slow. Every fraction gained brought heat to his face; the back of his robe, soaked through, pressed against the rock and cooled. Wind came up from the south, grazed his knees, lifted the corner of the ledger. He pinned it down with two fingers.

Holding it there—the breath moved down another stretch, then stopped.

He clenched his jaw and waited for it to descend again. His palms were slick; sweat soaked a dark patch into the page.

At the third quarter of the Wei hour, the sky flashed white again.

In the Medicine Hall courtyard, the people beneath the eaves had only just sat back down. When the sky whitened, one of the five stones in Bai Xiaoman's hand dropped onto the stone steps, bounced twice, and rolled into a crack. Shi Po stood up, ramrod straight. Huo Qing's left hand opened at his side, then closed.

The sound arrived late, closer this time. A thin layer of dust settled on the roof tiles; the string of dried chilies hanging under the eaves swung several times.

"Another one," Qi Qi said.

Du Xiaochuan crouched by the stove, counting one by one. "One. Two." He finished and looked up at Cheng Banshan.

Cheng Banshan stood in front of the prayer cushion, one hand braced against a veranda pillar. He stared at the cliff to the north for a long time.

"The Sect Master is on the cliff," Bai Xiaoman said.

"I'll go up and look," Qi Qi said, already stepping forward.

"Stay put," Cheng Banshan said. "No one goes up until the lightning is finished. Going up now is suicide."

"Elder Cheng, is this lightning—"

"We'll know when it's over."

Qi Qi stopped, one hand still gripping the pillar, knuckles white. Du Xiaochuan set down the fire tongs by the stove, stood up, then crouched back down, eyes never leaving the cliff. Qian Duoduo crouched by the kitchen door, pressing both hands over A Sui's ears. A He peeked out from behind him, looked once, and shrank back.

On the clifftop, that flash of light struck into the stone by the old pine's roots. A chunk of rock burst away, exposing raw white stone with a charred edge. Fragments skittered to the cliff's rim and stopped.

The tree split from the crown down. The crack ran all the way to the roots. The two halves leaned outward, then halted mid-fall—one canting west, the other braced against the eastern stones. Between them, bone-white splinters of wood jutted out, and the sharp sweetness of pine resin flooded down, drowning the burnt smell. Needles lay everywhere—on his head, his shoulders, a knee's worth.

Xu Yan was still sitting. The root he had braced against had split in two; he was leaning against the western half. The back of his robe was charred through, the edges curled and crumbling at a touch. A long ringing filled both ears, fading only after a long while. When it faded, he could hear the mountain wind, the sound of needles falling, everything except his own breathing. Both arms were numb from shoulder to fingertip, impossible to lift. He sat there and slowly exhaled the breath he'd been holding.

The wind smoothed the ledger page flat.

Two more lines had appeared at the bottom.

[Balance: Sect Master, Early Golden Core.]

[Balance: Heritage 45 points.]

He read the lines twice. The empty column beneath the five credit entries now had writing in it. He could not calculate which entry these lines had come from; he did not try.

He lifted his hands from the page and tested his fingers. The right thumb moved first. Then, one by one, all five fingers bent. He drew inward, and spiritual power rose from his dantian, but it scattered at his arms, dissolving into a diffuse heat that never reached his fingertips. He didn't force it. He laid his hands back on his knees.

The wind stirred the bed of needles piled between the two halves of the pine, and a shower of them drifted down.

Late in the Wei hour, Jiang Wan walked over from the south end. She didn't hurry. She paused just short of the old pine, looked up at the two halves of the tree, then came to him.

"So it got you too," she said.

"Yeah."

She didn't ask anything more.

She bent and picked up the full water flask from a crevice in the rock, pulled the stopper, and pressed it into his hand. He reached for it, but his hands were still numb; the flask tilted and water sloshed onto his knee. She lifted it back up, steadied it until his grip firmed, then let go. She took up her own flask, tipped her head back, drank, lowered it, and looked up at the split pine.

Xu Yan swallowed. His throat tasted of ash.

At the beginning of the Shen hour, the two of them descended from the clifftop.

The stone gully was treacherous. The rocks were wet, coated with a slick layer of moss. Jiang Wan went first, glancing back. "This one's loose." She stepped on it; the stone wobbled once and settled. Xu Yan pressed a hand down on it, steadied himself before shifting his foot. "The flat one below—step where I stepped." She kept calling out, her voice low, quickly scattered by the wind. Halfway down the gully, she paused, hand braced on the rock, waiting for her breathing to settle before continuing.

Once past the gully, she looked back every couple of steps. At the foot of the cliff, she asked, "Does your back feel burned?"

"Not really."

"Have Elder Cheng look at it when we get back."

Xu Yan answered with a grunt. His arms still hung numb at his sides, swinging when he walked too fast. He slowed; she slowed, too. They moved along the base of the cliff, one behind the other.

They skirted the formation-eye stone platform and passed around its east side. The five formation stones sat in their five-element arrangement; no one touched them. The stone door in the cliff face was invisible in the rock, its seam indistinguishable. The Branch's seal strip lay across it, both corners intact, untouched.

In the Medicine Hall courtyard, no one had sat back down.

Bai Xiaoman crouched at the edge of the stone steps and dug the stone out of the crack, wiped it twice on her robe front, and clutched it—five again. Shi Po bent down and stacked the five prayer cushions one on top of another. At the easternmost one he hesitated, hand in midair, then stacked it as well and carried the pile to the base of a pillar. Cheng Banshan stood in the middle of the courtyard, one hand behind his back, facing the cliff, saying nothing. Du Xiaochuan crouched back at the stove, picking bits of charcoal from the empty basket one by one. Qi Qi paced twice beneath the veranda; Cheng Banshan shot him a look, and he stopped.

"Movement," Shi Po said suddenly.

Bai Xiaoman followed his gaze north. Two dim shapes were descending through the stone gully, one behind the other, moving very slowly.

"Don't go up," Cheng Banshan said. "Let them walk on their own."

At the fifth quarter of the Shen hour, the two entered the Medicine Hall courtyard.

Cheng Banshan spoke first. "Those four—I've examined them all."

Xu Yan nodded.

Cheng Banshan came over and laid three fingers on Jiang Wan's wrist. He pressed a moment, shifted, pressed again. There was still a layer of black ash on her wrist; he didn't wipe it, pressing directly through the grime.

"Golden Core."

He withdrew his hand and laid three fingers on Xu Yan's wrist. This time he held a long time—long enough that no one beneath the eaves spoke. He changed position twice; the final press was heavy. When he finished, he withdrew his hand and straightened his sleeve.

"Golden Core."

He didn't ask.

Qi Qi stood in the back, mouth open, no sound coming out. Huo Qing took half a step forward from the veranda, looked at Xu Yan, nodded once, and said a single word: "Sect Master."

Bai Xiaoman walked over to Jiang Wan and studied her hair. "Senior Sister, a chunk of your hair burned off."

"I'll trim it later."

"There's still porridge in the pot," Shi Po said.

"Get him half a bowl first," Cheng Banshan said. "Small portions for both—their qi hasn't settled yet."

Shi Po answered and headed for the kitchen. Shao Ming set down what he was holding, came over to inspect the scorched patch on Xu Yan's back, said nothing, and went into the Medicine Hall. He came back with an old jacket, shook it out, and draped it over Xu Yan's shoulders.

Xu Yan pulled the jacket close and said nothing.

Qian Duoduo led one child out; the other he kept behind the door. A Sui ducked out from under his arm, ran up to Cheng Banshan, and tilted her head up. "Grandpa Cheng, it thundered."

"It's over now," Cheng Banshan said.

A He stood at the kitchen door, looking back and forth between the courtyard and the cliff to the north, holding the bowl steady in both hands. A thin thread of smoke still rose from the cliff behind the mountain, visible above the roof ridge, slanting in the wind, breaking apart in midair.

Qian Duoduo nudged A Sui behind him and craned his neck to look out past the courtyard.

At the Mountain Gate, Nie Bo stood. The broom was propped in his hand, its tip resting on the ground. He had not moved, had not swept. The wind lifted the hem of his robe and let it fall. The people in the courtyard talked and moved about, but he did not come over. The meal hour had not yet arrived, and he did not look toward the kitchen.

He said nothing at all.