The fresh faces from foreign parts grew ever more numerous, and with them the inns and wine-houses did a brisk business. Away on the Fuliu Street and the Peach Leaf Lane, many young scions of the great houses had begun quietly to leave the town — clever early-blooming youths, nameless sons of concubines, loyal household-born servants; the scion of the great clan, Zhao Yao, among them. Only the child of Mud Vase Lane, Gu Can, was the exception, singled out at a glance by the River-Cutting Perfected Lord Liu Zhimao.
Chen Ping'an fetched his basket and fish-basket and made for the stream. With folk about he would not practice; only alone did he begin, recalling every motion of Miss Ning's walk and walking out those six paces over and over. When he had first imitated her, it had been so clumsy as to be worse than ordinary. In truth, a strange mistake lurked in the lad's perception: from the porcelain kiln he had found his eyes sharp but his hands slow — his sight too keen for his limbs to keep up. So where another might match three or four parts of her walk on a first try, Chen matched one or two — yet beneath those eight or nine parts of not-resembling hid one part of rare spiritual likeness. Ning Yao knew nothing of this; and even eight or nine parts would not have struck her as marvellous, for her eyes rested only on that far, untrodden horizon and the unreachable peak of the sword.
Chen rested beneath the gallery bridge's tablet. Twelve shichen make a day; even at five or six of practice he could manage at most three hundred repetitions, a hundred thousand a year, ten years to finish a million. "I should manage ten years," he murmured. Though he had let slip no strange feeling, the diviner Lu Chen's parting words — laying bare the poisoned arts of Cloud Mist Mountain's Cai Jinjian — weighed heavy. Chen had never told Master Lu or Miss Ning that after Cai pressed his brow and slapped his heart, he had already felt his body run askew; he had lingered long at his own gate to fortify his resolve to fight Cai to the death. For in those days, Lu Chen said, the youth was too still and deathly, eyeing life and death more lightly than most.
By "the Pointing" of the martial way, Cai Jinjian had forced the lad open against his will: his body became like a house without gate or door, open to take in more yet bound in every storm to collapse the swifter. So Lu Chen judged Chen might live only into his thirties. The later slap ruined the root of his cultivation — the heart is a cultivating man's great pass, and once that gate fell its working was sealed, cutting Chen's great road and hastening his decay. Worse, with the gate open he could not cultivate long-life arts to mend it; and even tempering his flesh in the martial hall, one false move would drop him into that cursed circle where "practicing external boxing draws evil spirits." What he most needed was an art that nourished vitality in a slow, long stream.
All his hope lay in that Han Shan Manual Ning Yao so disdained — after the walking stance came the standing stance, "the sword-furnace," and the sleeping stance, "the thousand autumns." But he dared not practice blindly; he had only stolen a few glances, meaning to have Miss Ning inspect it first.
"Walk the right path, and however dull your comprehension, each day you still progress. Walk the wrong path, and the cleverer the harder you try, the more wrong." Such were Liu Xianyang's words, his weight on the last: "You, Chen, are the first sort; that quick-witted little scholar Song, the second; only I, Liu Xianyang, am the true genius." But when he bragged so, old Yao happened to overhear; the old man, who always favored Liu, flew into a rare rage and chased him through a sound beating. Since then Liu never spoke the word "genius."
Chen rose and climbed into the corridor of the bridge, and far off noticed a knot of four or five folk guarding one woman. He saw only her side: she sat on the balustrade, feet dangling over the stream, eyes closed in rest, fingers twined in strange postures — and it felt to Chen that, eyes shut, she were using her heart to look at something. He turned and went down the steps to wade the stream, carrying two nested baskets to return the smaller to Master Ruan's smithy. Far down the bridge the knot saw the shabby lad take himself off and exchanged knowing smiles, mute for fear of breaking that "peer of years'" water-gazing mind.
That method had its root in Buddhism, later adopted and refined by many sects. But the Baoping Continent had long been a land of the ending dharma; after several Buddha-suppressing catastrophes the dharma had waned for nigh a thousand years, far below the Confucian and Daoist. "One hears of Perfected Lords and Celestial Masters, never of dharma protectors and great virtuous ones" — such was the state of things, though the sects that drank of Buddhism's benefit were numberless. Chen crossed, heard shouts from the bridge, and did not mix himself in.
At Master Ruan's smithy Chen stood by a well and had someone fetch Liu. Before he looked for it, Liu came running and dragged him off, low-voiced: "After you pick your stones, come wait at my courtyard for that lady — the one whose son wears bright red, the pair we saw at the mouth of Mud Vase Lane. Say nothing; hand her that big chest; she'll give you a bag of money — count it, twenty-five copper coins, not one short!" "Have you lost your mind?! Why sell the heirloom to an outsider?!" "A grand future is laid before me — why miss it?" Chen doubted this was Liu's true intent. Liu whispered: "She buys our ancestral armored heirloom; that master and servant want a sword scripture. Grandfather warned me on his deathbed: when truly at the end of my rope the armor may be sold — not for a beggar's price — but the sword scripture, even at death, never admit it lies with us. I sold the armor on one more condition: she must persuade that burly old man not to trouble me a while, until I'm Master Ruan's disciple." "Why not stall her? She can't break the door down." "The armor could be sold anyway; at a fair price things are steadier — maybe Miss Ning needn't risk herself." "How do you know the price is fair? Regret it later?" Liu grinned: "In all our years, when has a decision of mine come to regret?" He kicked the basket: "Hurry — I'm returning it to Master Ruan. Come watch me kneel and offer the teacher's tea." Chen hesitated; Liu laughed: "Blast you — am I selling your heirloom, or your wife?" Chen handed it over: "Won't you think again?" Liu took it and, without warning, leaped high in a showy spinning kick, landing steady: "Impressive, no? Scared?" Chen answered with a curse.
Well away, Chen gathered stones, but with his mind heavy and the water low his haul was slender — twenty-odd snake-gall stones, none that caught the eye. He set his basket in the grass, turned, and practiced the walking stance. A trip there and back, and his heart tightened: at the hidden spot crouched a small lad, a stem of dog-tail grass between his teeth — Granny Ma of Apricot Blossom Lane's grandson, long taken for a fool, whom her sharpness had made the town's punching bag. This halfwit, his true name Ma Kuxuan long forgotten, was strange: bullied, he never complained nor cringed, his face ever flat, his eyes cold; no child would play with him, and he loved best to watch the clouds from a rooftop. Chen had never bullied nor pitied him, for he felt Ma Kuxuan was no fool at all but, to the bone, like Song Jixin and worse — both seemed quietly waiting, telling heaven it owed them much which they would one day claim. Owed a copper, Song Jixin might demand a tael of silver; Ma Kuxuan, even a tael of gold! Chen saw nothing ill in it; he simply cared for it not.
That lad, no longer the fool of old, said with a smile: "You're Chen Ping'an of Mud Vase Lane — you live next to Zhigui?" Chen nodded. "The stream has fallen," the lad went on, "and good stones remain only in the deep pool under the bridge and the water hole at Qingniu Bei; your lot won't hold the qi. Some make a whetstone, an inkstone — still good things… but no use telling you." Chen hummed. "You were boxing in the stream?" Chen was silent. Ma Kuxuan's eyes glittered: "So you're no fool either — a kindred spirit." Chen walked around him, shouldered his basket, and went ashore. The lad spat the grass: "That fist framework's no good; no flower will blossom."
Ma Kuxuan, not turning: "Retrieved our military school's token?" A man behind laughed: "Mind you call me Teacher from now on." The lad ignored him: "Will you show me that miniature sword tomb?" It was the military grandmaster with a sword on his back and a suspended tiger-tally, who claimed to come from Zhenwu Mountain and had once said he would fight the little junior-uncle of the gold-and-jade sect. "Not yet," the man said, vexed: "Why deliberately ruin that woman's water-gazing mind? Such a thing makes a dying enemy for life!" "The great way is hard; if it can't bear even this, how dare it long for carefree eternity?" "You haven't even entered the door, yet dare such talk!" "On this road, should I meet a chance to break a realm, I'll give that woman word of it; then Teacher, don't interfere." "Do you know, opportunities are great and small. Measure every man by your own rule and one day you'll meet a bigger fist; if that one, in ill humor, breaks your bridge of longevity, how will you stand?" "Then I'd bow to fate!" The man mocked himself: "I'll reason with you no more — piping to a deaf ox." "How did that fellow learn the virtue of the stones, and take up boxing?" The man turned stern: "Ma Kuxuan! We are orthodox sword cultivators of the military school — one sword to break ten thousand laws — but never kill the innocent, never oppress the common, never trip a fellow walker out of envy!" The lad stretched: "You overthink — that fellow, unless he provokes me, is none of my business. These folk's attainments will be a stepping stone at my feet. Envy? I'd thank them." The man said helplessly: "Zhenwu Mountain won't know peace." "What rank do you hold there?" "Not on that; it would damage the face." The lad rolled his eyes, and the man let it pass. There was one thing he left unsaid: the geniuses of this world are of many kinds, and so are its talents. That straw-sandaled youth, in his plain six-step walk, had his whole body suffused with the intent of the fist.