"Bang!"
Han Li clenched both fists, and one of them came down hard upon the top of the table.
"Open the bottle with a tool." That was the decision Han Li had reached after long and careful deliberation.
Resorting to brute force to pry it open had been a plan that had occurred to him almost from the start—a last resort, a means when no other means remained. It was simple, clear-cut, direct, and effective.
And yet, whenever he thought of how such a strange and beautiful little bottle could never again be kept whole and unblemished, Han Li felt a sting of pain in his chest, and reluctance welled up in him. Had there been any other way to open it, he would never in a hundred years have resorted to such crude methods.
Perhaps he could ask one of his senior fellow disciples for help, and together they might find a way to crack it open. But somewhere deep down, unwittingly, Han Li had already come to think of the bottle as his own treasure, and there was no way he was willing to let anyone else know of its existence. Besides, any person on the mountain could be its true owner. If word got out that the bottle was in his possession, what was to stop them from demanding it back? The little bottle was so handsome, so amusing, that at present he could not bear to part with it for anything in the world.
By now Han Li's curiosity had been thoroughly roused by whatever mysterious thing the bottle might contain. Deep down he knew it might well be empty—but even so, he was willing to gamble, to bet that whatever lay within would prove far more interesting than the bottle itself.
The more he thought about it, the itchier his heart grew, until it fairly ached.
Unless he unraveled the riddle locked inside that bottle, he knew he would not be able to sleep a single sound night.
Once his mind was made up, Han Li slipped quietly into the storehouse where the valley kept its odds and ends, picked out from among the tools a small but heavy iron hammer, and carried it back to his own room.
Back inside, he scrounged from a corner of the room a broken half-brick of hard blue stone, then searched out a fairly flat hollow in the floor. He laid the brick down flat in the hollow, settled the bottle across it nice and steady, and gripped the little hammer in his right hand. The head of the hammer hung poised in the air for just a moment—then it came down, decisively, upon the most bulging part of the bottle: its belly.
"Thunk!"
Afraid that a blow too mighty might ruin whatever was sealed inside, he let the first strike fall only gently, testing the hardness of the bottle to see how it would respond.
Seeing no trace of a crack, Han Li relaxed a little. It seemed he could hit it with greater force after all.
"Thunk!" Five-tenths of his strength. "Thunk!" Seven-tenths. "Thunk!" His full force. "Thunk!" Beyond his full force.
With each blow Han Li put more power behind it. The swing of his arm grew more and more exaggerated, and each successive hammer fell faster than the last. On the final stroke, half the bottle was driven straight into the brick. And yet the bottle remained whole and unblemished through and through, with not the faintest sign that any force could shatter it.
Han Li was stunned. Still unwilling to believe it, he reached out and ran a hand over the place the hammer had struck. There was not a single mark left upon it. Green and gleaming, the whole surface of the bottle stayed glossy and smooth.
This was far beyond anything Han Li had expected.
Only now did he truly confirm that this small bottle was a treasure out of the ordinary, and that it could never have been deliberately cast aside. In all likelihood its owner had lost it quite by accident. At this very moment, he imagined, the owner might well be searching the whole mountain over for it. If he wanted to keep it, Han Li reasoned, he would have to hide it away carefully and make sure no outsider ever laid eyes on it again.
In Han Li's way of thinking, so long as he had neither stolen it nor snatched it by force, anything he picked up off the ground was rightly his by right of finding. Had it been some ordinary object, he might well have returned it to the owner. But a bottle as mysterious as this was almost certainly dropped by one of those sons of wealthy families, or by someone on the mountain who held rank and standing—and Han Li held no very high opinion of either kind.
His family had been poor since he could remember; everyone had worked from dawn till dusk, and often they could not even scrape together one full meal a day. Within the Sect of Seven Mysteries, he had seen more than enough of the first sort—the rich young disciples who flung money around carelessly and squandered it on lavish food and drink, treating coin as if it were no more than dirt. Whenever he watched them, a dull resentment churned in Han Li's chest. What was more, these children of wealthy families looked down on the boys who had come up from poor villages, mocking and insulting them with their words at every turn. More than once the two groups had even clashed, and the boys had brawled among themselves. Han Li had taken part in one of those fights himself—and, worse luck, the martial-arts-trained rich boys had beaten him black and blue, so badly that he could not show his face outside. In the days that followed, he had been forced to rest for quite a while before he recovered.
As for those on the mountain who held a little rank and a little status, they had left him with no better an impression. From Protector Wang's acceptance of the bribe money his uncle had offered, to Wu Yan's relying on Vice Sect Leader Ma's influence to walk straight into the Seven-Absolutes Hall, he had not personally witnessed many of the mountain's great figures. But the grand and lofty image of such personages that as a boy he had once carried in his heart had by now all but collapsed.
For objects lost by either of these two sorts of people, Han Li was not merely unwilling to return them—he even felt a mischievous urge to hide them away.
With that thought, he immediately took down the little leather pouch that hung about his neck. His mother had sewn it for him from a scrap of animal hide before he left home, stitched to keep out water and dampness, meant to carry the peace charm she had given him on a wild-boar's tooth, in the hope that it would keep him safe from harm, free of illness and misfortune.
Han Li loosened the mouth of the pouch, dropped the bottle and the peace charm in together, and drew the drawstring tight. Then he hung the bag back around his neck.
When all of that was done, he looked around him. No one was in sight. Only then did he square his shoulders, pat the pouch that bulged faintly beneath his clothes, and feel satisfied that no one would take notice of him.
It was only then that he felt the weight settle in his heart, and no longer feared that some mischance would bring the owner searching for the bottle and demand it back.
Han Li quietly put the hammer back where it belonged, then strolled about Spirit Hands Valley with a studied air of unconcern, as though nothing at all had happened, until the sky had gone quite dark. Only then did he drag his injured foot back to his lodgings.