“Oh, do be careful with those,” Astronomer Wu fretted, wringing his hands.

He winced and clenched his legs as the movement of the horse beneath him bounced him again in his saddle. Whoever it was who had said that one never forgot how to ride should have been denounced for lacking rigor in their testing because boyhood lessons were most certainly not coming back to him.

The soldiers ahead, who were now carefully pulling the wagon holding his supplies back up from where the cliff had crumbled under its wheel, gave disinterested grunts.

“What are we moving that can't be contained in a storage ring, Astronomer?” asked the voice beside him.

“Qi-sensitive lenses and refractors,” he answered, swaying in his saddle. Bump, bump, went the horse, and he clutched the reins. He was quite sure the wretched beast was laughing at him. “The spatial qi in a storage array will taint them irrevocably.”

He chanced a look at the man beside him. Captain Dun was a handsome fellow, an officer of the Argent Peak sect military. His mail and plate was polished to a shine, and his oiled beard was extraordinarily well-kempt. All told, he seemed a refined fellow at first glance, but Astronomer Wu was not fooled.

Military. Not even once. He had learned that lesson already.

“We’re making this passage in such a vulnerable state for a few bits of glass?” Captain Dun asked dubiously, proving his point.

“No, we are doing this so that I might oversee the construction of a new observatory in the south, which might allow the art of astronomy to be advanced in countless ways!” Astronomer Wu nearly bit his tongue as the horse rocked him halfway through his speech.

“Yes, of course. My apologies,” Captain Dun said.

He sniffed, knowing he was being humored. Still, as they trundled around a curve in the mountainside, he would have been willing to leave it at that.

“What good is all the stargazing anyway? You can divine a bit with them, but you don’t need a big, fancy building for that.”

He blinked in surprise at the question from one of the soldiers guiding the wagon. Then, he grinned. Someone who actually wished to learn! Would miracles never cease?

“A good question. It’s true that astrological arts do not require the ability to study heavenly bodies in detail, instead being concerned with the movements of those bodies in relation to the vault of heaven, but astronomy is itself a most useful field of study in understanding our world!”

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“Is that so? What do you learn that is useful to us on the ground?” asked the captain.

Astronomer Wu pursed his lips. These simple folk would not be satisfied with more academic answers. “To begin with, the main purpose of this outpost is to track the provenance of heavenly stones.”

“Eh?” asked the soldier. “Like falling stars?”

“In layman’s terms,” Astronomer Wu allowed. “Ah, you might be familiar with the tale of your own Elder Shi Ying bringing down a mountain-sized stone from the heavens in the great battle with Ogodei?”

That earned some recognition. He would hope so given the crater that absurdity had left. The doings of sovereigns were truly frightening to contemplate.

“Of course we’re familiar with it,” one of the soldiers said.

“I’d always assumed the esteemed elder conjured the stone from her own qi with the Sect Head’s help, or perhaps raised it from the ground and cast it back down,” Captain Dun said casually, eyes scanning the sky. “You mean to say that there are stones just floating about in the sky? Why do we not see them?”

“Ah, but they are not in the sky. They are above it,” Astronomer Wu answered, awkwardly pushing his spectacles up as the damnable beast he was riding jostled him again. “And they are so far away that even a mountain seems but a pebble. There are countless such objects strewn in the darkness between the lunar and terrestrial spheres. These foreigners in the south call them the blood of the sun, the remnants of His battles. I would like to confirm this. Do not many old legends speak of fabled weapons forged from metals that fall from the sky?”

“A holy spear of sunmetal would probably scare those bastard corpse eaters,” grunted a soldier. “Not like any of us’d get a hold of one though. It’d be locked up in the Bao’s vaults faster ’n you could spit.”

Astronomer Wu coughed into his hand. “Well, yes, they will certainly remain valuable even if I can discern which stones contain metal and which are mere stone. All the same, this has value even to you, yes?”

“It seems so,” said the captain, seeming mollified. “You said the foreigners think they’re the sun’s blood, and I can see that. The priests say He fights for us at all times, and even the best warriors bleed. But why don’t they fall here too then?”

“That is one thing I hope to learn, gentlemen,” Astronomer Wu said with some pride. “I am not certain these foreigners are wholly correct.”

“That so?” questioned the captain.

The conversation paused as they reached a steep part of the hill. Ahead, the plateau where the outpost and observatory would be built loomed, the lines of construction already visible on the stony plain.

Astronomer Wu did not speak until all the grunting and heaving had finished and they were once more on level ground. The wretched mare he rode had not managed to spill him from his seat even when cantering up the cliffside they had just mounted.

“Yes, I wonder if some are not older still. They might be remnants of even earlier wars,” he mused. “I wonder what one could learn from a stone that had lain untouched since the day it was cast from the Nameless Mother’s skin.”

That earned him a sharp look and some muttered prayers.

But the astronomer bore it. Superstition or not, just imagining such a chance was beyond invigorating!