Chương 10Chapter 10: Eyes Wide Open

Chapter 10: Eyes Wide Open

The truth, it turned out, was a beast of its own — huge, and impossible to put back in its cage once it was out.

Elder Mo called the assembly on the third day after the fire, in the courtyard where a boar king had once charged a blind girl and stopped. Every disciple who could walk was there. So were the beasts. That was Xiaoyu’s condition, and she had not negotiated it: If we’re deciding the mountain’s future, everyone who lives on it gets to be present for the deciding.

Han Lie did not attend. He had sealed himself in the Spirit Hall the night of the fire, and on the second day the guards found the hall empty — a window open, a travel bag gone, and a note that said nothing anyone didn’t already know. The Sect Master had looked at a sect that would have to survive on honesty, and chosen to be somewhere else.

Elder Chen, whose medicine vault had held a roc’s egg, resigned before he could be dismissed. He wept in front of everyone, which surprised them all, himself most of all.

So it was Elder Mo who stood on the dais — acting sect master by acclamation, an old lame man with one good eye — and told the whole story. The founder. The ambush in the caves. The ninefold chains. The veins. Three hundred years of prosperity bought with a stolen life.

The courtyard was very, very quiet when he finished.

“The veins are fading,” he said. “Elder physicians give the grounds a week before they go fallow. The sect can scatter. That is the honest option, and nobody will be blamed for taking it.” He paused. “Or it can stay. And learn to live on what is given, instead of what is taken. That option belongs to our beasts to grant — or refuse.”

He turned. “Xiaoyu.”

She walked to the center of the courtyard. She did not need her broom to navigate it anymore — not because her sight had changed, but because the bridge in her chest had changed everything else. Through Xuan Mo’s resonance, she felt the courtyard like a held breath: hundreds of hearts, beast and human, all beating in the same cold morning.

Xiaoyu did what she had always done. She asked.

Not in words first. In resonance — the question broadcast through her open meridian to every beast present, clear as a struck bell:

The answer did not come all at once. It came the way weather comes.

The Ironback Boar King went first — ambling forward with its whole sounder behind it, up to the very edge of the dais, where it lay down in the morning sun with a sigh like a house settling. Staying, its contentment said. The wallows are good here. And the girl with the soup is here.

The lightning marten darted down from a roof beam and claimed Xiaoyu’s neck, where it had always belonged.

The cloud colt — the Heaven-bloodline prize of the selection — came and stood at her other side, and bumped her shoulder with its nose, hard, the way it had the first day. Claimed, it said, shamelessly. I already chose. I was the first.

About half the yard’s great beasts chose the wild. Xiaoyu felt each departure like a door opening: the serpents to the deep rivers, the stone badger (slowly, philosophically, chewing a fence post for the road) to the low hills, creatures whose natures had never fitted stone walls and never would. Nobody raised a hand to stop them. Zhao Feng stood at the open gate himself, holding it wide, his sword planted point-down in the dirt, and bowed to each one as it passed.

It was the staying, though, that changed the air. One by one, the beasts who remained stepped forward and gave — a wisp of qi, offered freely, the way a friend offers a hand. The cranes gave. The wolves who had stayed gave. The old pond turtle, from his pond, gave a slow, riverine contribution the size of a house and then went immediately back to sleep.

Freely given, it was nothing like the flood the chains had stolen. It was smaller. Gentler. A spring instead of a river.

But a spring doesn’t run dry from being drunk out of a cupped hand.

The physicians came back within the month with shaking hands: the veins had not died. They had changed. Where the stolen torrent had scoured them bare, the small, steady offerings had begun to line them with something new — slower, yes, humbler, yes, a Foundation-stage disciple might need an extra year now — but theirs. Clean all the way down, for the first time in three hundred years.

The sect renamed itself that spring. It kept the old name on the gate, because names are heavy things — but underneath, in smaller characters that Elder Mo carved himself, it added a line:

—

Zhao Feng came to her in early summer, when the rebuild was nearly done.

She was in the second yard — her yard now; the Beastheart Hall, the disciples called it, when they thought she couldn’t hear — teaching a knot of juniors to muck a pen without frightening the foals. He waited until the lesson ended. That, in itself, was new.

“Teach me,” he said.

She tilted her head. “Teach you what, Senior Brother?”

“Don’t call me that.” He shifted his weight; she heard his boots scrape. “Teach me to listen. I know I may never hear what you hear. My meridian isn’t —” He stopped, and she could feel him choose the honest words over the proud ones, the way a man tests ice. “I know I may only ever get as far as trying. But I’d rather spend ten years trying badly than one more day with the talismans.”

Xiaoyu was quiet for a long moment. Somewhere nearby, Hong’er was teaching the marten to steal ribbons. The sun was warm on her face.

“Sit down,” she said at last, and sat cross-legged in the straw herself. “Breathing first. Listening is mostly breathing and not being in a hurry to be obeyed.”

“That’s it?” He sat, awkward in his fine robes. “That’s the great secret art?”

“That’s the whole of it,” Xiaoyu said gravely. “Don’t tell anyone. Ruins the mystique.”

He laughed — really laughed, startled and young — and for the first time since she’d known him, Zhao Feng’s qi rang bright and clean, with nothing scorched underneath at all.

—

On the last evening of summer, Xiaoyu climbed the hill behind the ninth yard.

There was no ninth yard anymore. The wall had come down in the spring — she’d insisted, and knocked the first stone loose herself — and the place where a Primordial beast had been chained for three centuries was a meadow now, with a pond going in where the chains had pooled, for Gui Lao’s retirement.

Xuan Mo was waiting at the top of the hill. Free beasts came and went as they pleased, and he pleased, often, to be elsewhere — the deep caves restored, the wild valleys reclaimed, an old grief slowly becoming an old life again. But he came back, too. As often as he left. That was the whole point of a gate that stands open: things come back through it because they want to.

“Describe it,” Xiaoyu said, settling into the grass beside his vast foreleg, Hong’er in her lap, the marten asleep around her neck.

“Try anyway.”

He was silent a while, gathering himself the way he did — the ancient weather of him.

Through the bridge in her chest, she felt what he felt: the warmth arriving, the dew lifting, a thousand beasts across a healing mountain lifting their heads to the same light. Her meridian sang with it — a low, golden resonance she had never heard before and somehow knew instantly, the way you know your mother’s voice.

She had never seen the sunrise.

That morning, she heard it.

And it was golden.