Chương 4Chapter 4: What Eyes Miss

Chapter 4: What Eyes Miss

Being a keeper, it turned out, was exactly like being a sweeper, except that now people watched Xiaoyu do it.

She didn’t mind the watching. She minded the questions.

“How do you do it?” a junior asked, trailing her around the second yard with a notebook, as if her whole life were a technique to be copied down. “Is it a bloodline? A secret art? Do you use your qi in a spiral, or—”

“I listen,” Xiaoyu said, for the twentieth time that week. “That’s all. I listen until I understand what they’re feeling. Then I help, if I can.”

“Yes, but how do you listen?”

“With my whole chest,” she said, exasperated. “I don’t know how else to explain it. You listen with your ears and hear hooves. I listen—” she pressed her palm over her heart meridian, “—here, and I hear why the hooves are running.”

The junior wrote it down. Xiaoyu could hear the brush scratching: listens with chest. She sighed. Cultivators. Give them a miracle and they want the manual.

Her new duties gave her one great gift: access. Keepers could enter yards one through seven unsupervised. Yard eight by request. Yard nine — never, for anyone below elder rank. But her keeper’s rounds took her past its wall twice a day now, instead of once, and at night she had an excuse to be out of the loft until the second bell.

So the visits continued. Warm food now, when she could manage it — Cook Liu had taken a shine to her after the marten incident and slipped her extra portions “for the beasts,” with a wink Xiaoyu could hear in his voice.

And the ancient thing ate, and talked.

It did not talk like a person. It talked like weather coming from far away — slow, immense, with long silences in which Xiaoyu learned to simply sit with her back against the cold wall and be company. Hong’er came too, eventually, after one terrified night spent entirely inside Xiaoyu’s collar. Now the fox sprawled across her lap during the visits, drunk on the spill of primordial qi that leaked under the gate, her tail-tip flame burning a lazy blue.

“Tell me about the pond turtle,” the voice said one night. “The one who thinks in centuries. He still lives?”

“Gui Lao? He mostly naps. He says the sect’s lectures put him to sleep in 1847 and he’s been catching up ever since.”

A vast, subterranean chuckle. “Good. Someone should out-stubborn this mountain. Ask him, next time, what the spirit veins taste like.”

Xiaoyu did. She asked the next afternoon, sitting on the pond stones with her feet in the cool water, while Gui Lao pretended to be a rock with unusual commitment.

“When did it change?”

Xiaoyu sat very still, with the pond water cold around her ankles.

That night, her hands shook so hard she nearly dropped the food bundle at the gate.

“It was you,” she said. “In the caves. The wounded giant was you.”

Silence from behind the wall. Longer than usual.

“Gui Lao talks too much for a stone,” the voice said finally.

“Were you protecting her? Your mate, while she—” Xiaoyu’s voice cracked. “The founder ambushed you while you were protecting her.”

Xiaoyu pressed her forehead against the cold iron gate.

“What’s your name?” she asked, for the dozenth time. “Your real name. Please.”

The silence lasted so long she thought he wouldn’t answer. Hong’er, asleep in her lap, murmured in a dream.

“Xuan Mo,” Xiaoyu repeated, committing the sound to the deepest part of her memory, where she kept the important things: her mother’s laugh, the cook’s lullaby, Bai Xue’s wrist-squeeze. “I’m honored.”

“It’s not stolen. Cook Liu knows.”

Above them, the warding script on the wall buzzed — and, for a moment, fluctuated. Xiaoyu felt it like a plucked string going briefly slack. Under the gate, the spill of Xuan Mo’s qi surged, warm as a hearth.

It happened again the next night. And the next.

On the fourth night, Xiaoyu understood, with a chill that had nothing to do with the mountain air: the chains were weakening. Not because of time. Because of her — because every night, for a few hours, Xuan Mo’s heart turned toward something other than grief, and the formation, which fed on his despair, lost its grip while he was — happy was too big a word. While he was less alone.

Somewhere in the sect, someone with instruments and ledgers was going to notice a dip in the spirit veins.

Somewhere in the sect, Sect Master Han Lie noticed everything.

She was still thinking it when a hand closed around her wrist in the dark — hard — and a voice she knew said, “I knew it. I knew the blind girl was sneaking somewhere. What are you doing at the forbidden wall, Little Yu?”

Deng. The disciple who’d tried to trip her. On night patrol. And his lantern was swinging up toward her face.

Behind the gate, the air went suddenly, terribly still — the stillness of a great beast deciding whether to roar. Xiaoyu felt Xuan Mo’s attention gather like a wave drawing back from the shore, and she understood, in a cold flash, that one careless word from her and Deng would die where he stood, and it would be her fault, and the whole sect would call the “guard dog” a monster forever.

So she did the stupidest, bravest thing she had done since the boar king.

She laughed. “Caught me,” she said, and pitched her voice into the exact register of a girl telling a joke she shouldn’t. “Don’t report me, please. I’m— I’m visiting my secret boyfriend.”

Deng’s grip loosened in pure disbelief. “What?“

“The eighth-yard boar handler’s apprentice. He’s on night watch and he brings me honey buns.” She swung the food cloth like it proved something. “You wouldn’t deny a blind girl her one romance, would you? You’d tell the patrol chief, and then I’d never marry, and then I’d haunt you.”

“You’re lying—”

“Obviously I’m lying,” Xiaoyu said cheerfully, “but I’m lying about which handsome boy, and you’ll never figure out which, so let’s both pretend you didn’t see me and you’ll get a honey bun out of it.” She pressed the remaining bun into his startled hand. “See? Romance pays.”

Behind the gate, Xuan Mo made a sound that might have been a choked roar or might have been the first laugh he’d had in three hundred years that wasn’t made of stone.

Deng stood there in the dark, holding a bun, entirely derailed. “You’re weird, Little Yu.”

“I’ve been told.” She smiled until he left, and only when his lantern had swung well away did she let her knees give out, and sit down hard in the cold dirt, shaking all over — with terror, and then, unstoppably, with laughter of her own.