David

The owner of the Hall of Foods was a burly, middle-aged man with a thick beard and a thicker chef's apron, who bowed and scraped in the lantern light. The chef insisted that Daoist Chan had done nothing wrong. In response, Chan insisted on paying for any and all damages caused by his 'irresponsible juniors'. The man tried to claim that everything Chan itemized was previously damaged. Chan would have none of it.

"Gentleman Cai, you recognize me don't you? I almost worked here - it was going to be cultivating or washing dishes with your granduncle. This neighborhood is my home."

It was easy to forget that Daoist Chan was in his seventies.

"I'd argue that this place has some of the best food on the middle continent - maybe the best," said Daoist Li.

Gentleman Cai nodded happily.

"So Changshou must have been a better dishwasher than cultivator!"

It got a laugh out of Alice, at least. Daoist Chan said nothing, choosing instead to press a pair of gold ingots the size of his fist into Cai's hands.

"So what are the chances that they'll be back to make trouble?" asked David as they exited the restaurant.

"They'll have forgotten where the fight took place in a few hours time," said Chan, but he looked worried.

"And what about you? Will you be okay?"

Chan sneered. "The hall elders and peak masters have never approved of the way we throw our weight around in Dongjing. Hypocrites. They did the same when they were inner disciples. If any of them had been present, Yue and his little friends would have gotten far worse of a beating than I gave them."

He looked up into the night sky. "The Clear Skies has been dying since the last dynasty," he admitted. "We haven't had an immortal ascendant since our great traitor stole the Cloudburst Manual. In these five continents, it's the dream of every cultivator to join one of the Nine Great Sects, but in reality, if you're talented enough to be recruited by one, you're talented enough to be recruited by any of them."

Chan turned to Daoist Li with a trace of bitterness. "It's far better to have a scripture that no one can read than a scripture that no one can find."

"Staying is a waste of your talent," she replied. "I've always thought that was the case. Your Sect Master won’t take a student and all of your Peak Masters are a joke."

Chan shrugged. "I grew up in Dongjing," he said. "And given the current crop of talent, I'll be the Sect Master one day. And if I ascend, when I ascend, I'll get the manual back. Or find a better one."

"Speaking of getting things back," said Alice, "we have a name and a face to go with the saber now."

Li nodded. "If we go now, we might catch Junior Shen on the road."

"Looks like I'm going to have a suite that's nicer than the sect lodgings all to myself tonight!" said Daoist Chan with a jaunty grin. He turned towards the direction of the hotel.

Before he could go, David grabbed him by the sleeve. "That girl, that girl who was playing the guzheng," he started. "Lingling, her name was. The one that academies weren't good for."

Daoist Chan nodded fervently. "I'm going to recruit her to the sect as my named disciple."

They had the same idea.

"Some people are meant for greatness," said Daoist Chan. "And I do like the idea of having a little apprentice to play music and make tea. I'll tell stories to her and show her powerful cultivation techniques and she'll cry when I Ascend - but I'll always watch over her."

"What is wrong with you?" Daoist Li rolled her eyes.

"You can be her Aunt!" said Daoist Chan, firing on all cylinders. "And when you come around, she'll ask you for advice; and in your dying breath you'll pass her some secret technique - something she'll use to avenge me when I've been murdered in the Starfields chasing glory."

"What do you mean in my dying breath? And what do you mean to avenge you? I hope she steals your scriptures and runs away with a loser from Tang Mountain. Pei," she shouted, spitting at Daoist Chan's shoes. Li turned away from him deliberately and stalked off along the road.

"Path Friends," said Daoist Chan, under the light of the moon, "this is where we must part, and in the words of one of our world-famous plays, parting is such sweet sorrow."

David and Alice stared.

Chan coughed awkwardly and stared at Li's retreating back in the distance. "You should probably catch up to her."

With that, David and Alice gave him a wave in unison and followed Li in a brisk walk, hand in hand. She turned twice to see if they were still following her, but kept moving at the same pace, sensing that they wanted some privacy.

When Chan was out of earshot, David spoke at last. "I wish we could have stayed here for longer. It's a nice city," he said.

“I shouldn’t have slept that night in the inn,” said Alice. “We don’t need to. I just missed dreaming.”

“What did you dream about?”

They walked on for several moments before Alice finally responded, choosing English. “There’s the right answer to that question and there’s the actual answer. I wish I could say I dreamed about home, about Dad, about actually seeing my violin again.”

The easy confidence dropped away from her as she stared into the distance. “My nightmares used to be about missing finals because the train broke down. About being the only person to ever be kicked out of Electric Zoo for having a bad fake id. About bursting into tears during my early admit interview at Yale.”

“But.”

Alice gave him an impish grin. “But now, I dreamed about you.”

David suddenly remembered how lovely Alice was - with her rants that rose in an emotional crescendo, with her casual assumptions of excellence. With her unabashed declarations of love.

Wordlessly choosing to pretend they’d dated for a long time for the sake of cover stories taught them both easy intimacy. Selling that lie had left behind moments like these - reflections on the world they’d lost and the search for common ground.

“Wherever we are, wherever we’ll go, it’s better with you,” said David.

The moment hung in the air, priceless and precious, as they walked against the wind.

“Li said continued use of English would be dangerous,” Alice said in Chinese, with a dash of mutiny, a dash of regret.

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David shook his head savagely. “At risk of making yet another stupid oath, if anyone’s got problems with where I was raised then they can make problems with me.” English. He took especial care to exaggerate every quirk that came with growing up in Brooklyn - chopping consonants off the end of long sounds to smash them against the following word and using contractions that weren’t standard.

Alice, who grew up in the same neighborhood and never actually spoke like that outside of handball courts, threw his own words back at him from that short, intense fight over the Scripture of the Uprooted. “That’s just too reckless.” She didn’t mean it, if her smile could be believed.

“I’ve been thinking about something How-Dare-You-Call-Me-Old Uncle Jiang said since we left Ping’an,” said David, who was now considering what they’d learned about the nature of the heavens.

“Oh?”

“When you told him you didn’t believe in karma,” David said. “He said that was ‘good’.”

“Was it angry-mom good, or actually good?” Alice shot back immediately. Given the cultural scarcity of compliments in their families, the word for good was predominantly used as a sarcastic ‘alright’ by familial authority figures.

David frowned, hoping that Alice hadn’t actually forgotten the immortal’s words. “He said that karma was whimsical, and often twisted by people who could do so for nefarious reasons. And more importantly that if you ‘start’ believing in it, that it’s hard to stop.”

She batted her eyelashes at him. “Have you ever met anyone as intelligent, attractive or correct as yours truly? Somehow a boy is trying to convince me that I was right.”

Alice glared into his theatrical sigh before her face took on a cast of suspicion. “Are you telling me not to go after the saber?” The sudden tiredness on her face clearly said she didn't want to fight about it. The tightening of her fingers, intertwined between his own, implied she would fight about it if necessary.

David shook his head. He had been ready to run after Jing without regard for Wen’s survival in a heated moment - not his best. Alice should have known he wouldn’t object.

“At least the way I chose to live, there’s something way more important than karma or retribution or other things people pretend to understand,” he said, seriously. “And that would be a promise.” David hoped that he sounded as admirable as he had in his head.

They’d long left the city center, Winds of Spring Tower, behind them as they travelled north by northwest. Dongjing had thinned into suburbs once again. Here on the outskirts, the houses were spaced nearly a hundred meters apart and carefully constructed - each of them the size of Mayor Lin's compound in Cloud Mountain City.

For every door, there was a pair of servants in various colored, crested uniforms and in various states of boredom. A few stood at their posts, but most of them were crowded around mahjong tables and Go boards set up in front of some of the mansions along the brown-brick road.

Daoist Li used one of the more exciting gatherings beside the road as an excuse to let them catch up.

"Pong!" someone shouted at the table as they approached. Three of a kind. There was a hush.

“Mahjong?” asked the man who had shouted. From a hundred meters, David could see genuine bewilderment on his face as he claimed victory by saying the name of the game.

“Mahjong!” the man repeated emphatically after rubbing his eyes. He flipped his thirteen tiles face-up. Li joined in on the cheers as the player showed an absolutely despicable hand - literally every tile belonging to the suite that was marked thematically with the four winds.

David, who understood the game well enough to be mad he rarely won, was pretty sure there wasn’t a higher scoring combination than the one revealed.

Li joined them as they passed the growing crowd listening to the dramatic retelling of the plays made in the game by the winning bodyguard.

“Do either of you play?” asked Li, who didn’t pause for confirmation. “I’m pretty decent but my luck is average at best.” She fell into a fairly technical discussion about Mahjong with Alice, who did in fact play.

David tuned it out entirely. This was about as interesting to him as when some of his friends had gotten into poker and decided that was the only thing they would ever talk about.

He chose instead to listen to the sound of the Song and repeat the poem he’d composed at the behest of Jiang Xiangyue in his head.

After an hour passed, Alice and Li had moved onto which of the four seats they found most auspicious at the mahjong table with tangentially relevant Feng Shui principles. David had made little headway in his attempt to sort the conflicting bits and pieces they’d learned about cultivation from dubiously reliable sources.

After the next hour, David was also unclear on whether he hated mahjong or feng shui more, but he’d found new ways to interpret the poem he’d written, which annoyed him. That felt like the wrong side of pretentious.

Every twenty or thirty minutes, they passed an Inn on the road, but the majority of the scenery consisted of bamboo forests and sleeping villages.

Li, who was distinctly passionate about the obvious good fortune provided by the Cardinal East while drawing tiles, abruptly lost interest in her own point. “Are you trying to rebuild your Foundation?”

David realized a little too late that she had been talking to him - after Alice had poked him in the ribs with her free hand.

“What?” David asked, startled. “Mahjong is a game of skill? Late summer is the time to center your earth qi with the lucky number five? Buy jade, it’s the only non-fiat currency?” he tried, certain one of his attempts would be relevant.

“Definitely don’t buy jade when you can’t tell whether it’s valuable,” said Alice who was mad he’d even said that as a joke.

“If it’s as pretty as you are, any price is a bargain,” said David.

Alice squeezed her eyes closed and shook her head. “ Shut up, that was so corny. Fairy Li wanted to know if you were trying to rebuild your foundations.”

David gave Li a blank look, threw a quick glance at Alice, then settled on the truth. “If I’m going to be entirely honest, I don’t even know what Foundation Establishment is.”

“What?” Daoist Li, who had learned in the past day that David and Alice weren’t actually joking when they said things like that, looked miserable.

Li opened her mouth several times as she considered how to vocalize her despair. She finally settled on disappointment. “Cultivation is too hard.”

She gave a mirthless chuckle. “I should have been a card shark. Or maybe I could have a career as the core dish-dryer at the Hall of Foods with inner dishwasher Chan Changshou.”

David and Alice shrugged in unison, because it would have been very rude to laugh.

Daoist Li suddenly looked troubled. “In truth, I’m not sure how to explain Foundation Establishment. When I hear it, my mind supplies all the various names for it I’ve heard over the years. Contemplating, according to those who worship the pieces of the trigrams as individual deities. Walking, in old traditions of the Martial Dao, like the Iron Scripture. Everyone understands you if you refer to the process as having taken a step on the Path.”

She exhaled heavily. “But that doesn’t actually mean anything to anyone. Master says that it is a personal analogy for qi which governs how you interact with it in a formulaic way. But that was no help to me. In his youth, he cultivated the Dao of Transformations, the set of laws which govern the way the five elements interact, like any doctor would. Most people build their foundations off of a specific martial arts form within the scripture they practice.”

David thought of the Zhou Family Fist and of the incomplete and improperly transcribed Dance of the Mulberry Leaves. He frowned.

“That’s considered incredibly stupid. Describe the difference between metal qi and wood qi with the eight divine stances from the scripture written by the colorblind core formation headmaster of some awful Dongjing tuition scam.” Daoist Li sneered.

She looked annoyed, bitter even. “In hindsight, it’s obvious after seeing the two of you. What single scripture compares to the universal language of music? What set of stances could claim the flexibility of poetry?”

Alice managed to gather her thoughts. “It is the punctuation by which you may write in the language of qi - a framework undiluted by progress because it is created off rigid rules.”’

This was why the Falling Leaves did not teach a martial scripture for foundations, why Xiangyue carried a guqin on his back, and why Zhou considered himself a terrible teacher.

“I’ve spoken for as long as I could to stave off this admission - that I’ve wasted the majority of my life,” said Daoist Li. “I should have been playing mahjong instead of cultivating behind closed doors. It would have been more helpful.”

David disagreed for what was only partways a stupid reason. There had been a Go game in the sky during a failed ascension. It would be far more ignoble to lose a game of Mahjong with the heavens - and a lot less fair, given the involvement of luck.

Daoist Li had spoken her piece and had begun cultivating again, if the hum of her Song could be trusted.

It was Alice’s turn to be angry. “I should have bought some ink and paper in Dongjing to score Rain in Jiangnan,” she muttered.

The anger turned into a mixture of horror and relief. “You know, it could have been worse. The song I played could have been bad.”