David

It took a few tries, but Qitai managed to convince all four of his new roommates to dump out their cups of hot water back into the jug and sit down around the teapot. The boy wore an annoyed expression but it didn't translate into action.

Qitai poured out even measures into one cup after another in a precise, practiced keel. After each cup was poured, he could compare it against the previous one to ensure that no one received more tea than anyone else.

"Look," said David, while Qitai was midway through pouring the cup in front of him. "If I end up with a few drops less than everyone else, it's fine. I won't take it as a grave insult or anything like that."

It wasn't Qitai who answered him, but Kanhu. "Why should you ever settle for less than what everyone else is getting?" he asked, sounding genuinely confused. "Sure, a single mouthful of tea probably isn't going to be the difference in your success, but it's about the principle of the matter."

Alice had gotten bored long before the second cup of tea was poured. She was now amusing herself by tapping impatiently on David's shoulder.

David shrugged, partly agreeing to disagree and partly in a half hearted attempt to dislodge Alice, whose fingers were now tap dancing on his collarbones.

Kanhu didn't let it go. "Usually people who get scammed or shortchanged aren't the ones who are too nice to say anything, but those who don't realize they should have said something until it was too late," he said. "We're cultivators, you know. We're supposed to be selfish - no one's going to fight our battles for us."

Undoubtedly, this discussion was his plan to fill time, as Qitai compared the volume of David's cup to the four before it.

Alice had given up on fidgeting and had allowed her hand to rest on the back of David's neck.

Qitai scooted back and forth, with his face parallel to the teacups. "I think I've done it," he concluded, after triple checking a third time.

They picked up their cups in unison.

"You don't have to drink it quickly," said Qitai. "Though I do recommend it. While it's not going to lose any of the qi in it, tea isn't good when it's lukewarm."

David listened for the sound of the Song as he picked it up and took a few sips and heard something monotone and slightly agitated. He wasn't sure if he was relieved or disappointed that it tasted exactly the same as any green tea he'd had before, just at a higher temperature than he was used to.

It was boiling, and he could feel it in his throat. David looked around surreptitiously. No one seemed to be having the same reaction to the tea as he had. Kanhu had finished half his cup, as had Feiyan. Like David, Qitai and Alice were also sipping slowly.

"Tea's pretty hot, isn't it?" queried Alice suddenly.

"Not at all," said Qitai, looking more miffed than before. "If I'd started pouring immediately instead of waiting for all of you to gather around, it would have been perfect."

David had another mouthful, then realized that it was actually pleasantly warm until he swallowed.

The culprit was immediately obvious. Alice had been heating the back of his neck with their new cultivation technique.

She smirked at him over the top of her teacup.

David set his cup down lightly on the table. "Oh just you wait," he growled, placing both his palms against Alice's cheeks and recalling the Song.

She squealed and ducked, then leapt to her feet and bounded away, still sipping her tea as David ran after her, with his arms fully outstretched. He wondered idly if they were hot enough to fry an egg while cracking it open.

Alice vaulted over tables and cushions as David chased her around the room, until they ended up in a standoff on either side of the row of pewter jugs.

"Can't catch me!" she proclaimed, as they circled the jugs, still sipping. David heard Kanhu chortling in the background.

The surface of the water, a foot under his hands, gave David much needed inspiration. He bent his knees slightly, and scooped out as much water from one of the jugs as he could directly at her.

Alice yelped, dove to her right to dodge, caught the edge of a jug with her foot, and knocked it over - with the crash of breaking pottery and a loud splash.

David caught himself before he cursed aloud in English.

Everyone in the room stared as the water spread to every corner. Kanhu came to his senses first and rescued the cushions before they were soaked. Alice picked a shard of pewter out of her hair.

"I hear it's auspicious to break a plate when you move in with someone," said Feiyan weakly.

"That's a pretty big plate," said Kanhu. "We should probably ask the people at the Distribution Office about how to handle this."

"Logistics Office," Alice corrected immediately. She received a roomful of glares in response.

"Well, take us there, then," said Kanhu. He started stomping towards the door, then stopped after the first splash. Alice followed him out, hanging her head.

"I'm going to go make sure they don't get lost or something," said Qitai, leaving David and Feiyan.

The door closed.

"Are you going to go too?" asked Feiyan.

David shook his head and sighed.

Feiyan retreated to her room.

David looked up at the ceiling from his puddle and decided that this was quite possibly the most childish time to miss his mother. He was almost angry at himself.

"It's just a jug, you don't have to be so upset. We're not going to get into trouble for something like this."

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Feiyan was back.

"I'm not upset about the jugs," said David. That would be absurd.

She didn't say anything.

There was the sound of crinkling, he turned to look at her.

Feiyan was sitting on a table, folding a sheet of paper on her lap. The edge of it hung just over her knees. It was paper made of rice or bamboo - thin and almost translucent.

"What are you doing?"

Feiyan didn't respond - she just kept folding and tearing away bits of the paper.

"Open the door," she finally said, walking to the edge of the puddle. It was nearly half the size of the room now, and the water had collected in a corner. Even though the house’s floors were level, it had been built on a mountainside, and water trended downwards.

David walked across the room, over water and broken pottery, and pushed the door open. He still wasn't sure what the plan was.

"Stand somewhere that isn't in front of me," said Feiyan.

He complied, taking his place a few paces behind her.

Feiyan chuckled suddenly, an alien sound. David couldn't think of a single time the girl had actually found anything funny. "In Xijing, there's an old proverb that goes something like 'water flows downwards, man struggles upwards'. But after coming here I realized that it was probably taken from the Skybound Scripture," she said.

She stared at the water on the ground for a bit before she pinched the edge of the piece of paper that had been folded so many times it was as wide as a finger. She made a whipping motion with her arm, and it opened with a flap into the shape of a fan.

Feiyan drew in a breath and held it, then David heard the sound of the Song. It was a bit inconsistent in time and key at first, but as it grew in volume, it also grew more confident and accurate.

Feiyan gave the paper fan a gentle wave at the door. David would have believed the gentle swish that followed was from her wave the paper through the air, had it not come far too late relative to its motion. A clump of water and pottery that wasn't quite solid or liquid leapt off the ground, defying gravity, and funneled its way through the open door.

After a few moments, the majority of the debris exited the room and Feiyan let her arm fall to the side. She took long, fast breaths as if she'd run a marathon, then made her way over to one of the dry cushions.

“I hope no one was standing outside,” David said as he closed the door.

He made his way to her table and sat down across from her. “Everyone’s going to be really confused when they get back and there’s nothing to clean up,” David said. “So what exactly was that? Is that from one of the Paper Flowers’ Sutras?” David guessed. He thought it was a reasonable attempt. The Song was far more complex than the technique Qitai had come up with to heat his tea, and it involved, well, paper.

Feiyan shook her head. “It’s a secret,” she said. “And how could it belong to the Paper Flowers, when that sect has never shown any respect to Zhu Feiyan?”

She immediately looked horrified when she realized what she’d said, likely because she remembered telling him that the sect in question had tried to recruit her aggressively.

The horror became anger. “You’re not surprised,” she said, in a clipped tone.

It shifted to something sad and ponderous. “So you never believed me, or you never considered any of what I said impressive to begin with.”

David decided that saying nothing would be better than lying to her face, and certainly better than telling her the truth - that he never had a frame of reference for most of the things she’d boasted about to begin with and somehow still couldn’t believe them.

Feiyan took a deep breath, and for a moment, David hoped that she wouldn’t start wailing, but her voice came out small and tired. “Why can’t it ever go my way?”

David frowned. It seemed like things rarely didn’t go her way to him.

“I thought when the sect accepted me, it would be when it turned around. There would be a place for me, and-”

David opened his mouth to ask where all of this was coming from.

“Don’t,” said Feiyan. “You don’t have to be nice,” she said. “No one likes me here. You’re the only one who even tolerates me.”

There was something cold and matter-of-fact about the way she said it that drew a stark contrast to the way she normally went fishing for sympathy.

“I wish I could say I didn’t know why,” she continued.

She didn’t offer a reason.

“I’m sorry I approached you on the road in the way that I did.”

Now this was an easier topic to speak about than the sort of doublespeak Feiyan was engaging in. “Why did you approach us on the road?”

Feiyan blushed. But from the way she dug her elbows into the table, from the way she forced out the words a syllable at a time, from the way her eyes searched for the windows and doors, it was in pure embarrassment. “I saw you watching the sunrise from down the road and thought you were like me.”

“In what way,” asked David, when she didn’t continue.

“That you also felt trapped in this world, like you didn’t belong.”

That was alarming to hear, to say the least.

“It happened to me when my mother passed, three years ago,” she said.

David had forgotten he was talking to a melodramatic fourteen year old girl who was literally a princess. He felt a strange sense of relief that would have been very difficult to explain, had Feiyan noticed it.

“Fifth sister moved me from the Lotus Palace, away from my father. And he’s not noticed. I can rely on absolutely nobody in my family.”

“And your grandmother?” David asked. “Didn’t she give you a talisman or something? You said she put her heartblood in there or something? Isn’t that really special?”

“My grandmother,” Feiyan scoffed. “Grandmother cares just enough for Feiyan to send her a potted plant when Feiyan’s been robbed on the road.” She considered his other questions. “What do you know about heartblood?” she asked. “Do you know what it is, why it’s valuable?”

“You never explained it to me on the road here,” said David. He stood up and walked over to the two remaining jugs of water, expecting them to be full of debris and dust, but the water within was pristine.

“It’s something a cultivator only produces once in their lifetime. No matter how far you go and how long you live, you have a limited supply of it. It is a universal tradition to give your children some of your heartblood, if you’re a good enough cultivator to create a talisman that can house its power. Such a treasure can be expected to save your life once under any circumstance.”

“Any circumstance?” David began filling the teapot that Feiyan had abandoned earlier with water.

Feiyan nodded, with the deepest conviction.

“But if you never run into a situation where you use it, it’s the perfect gift for your own child. And if your child doesn't use it, they would pass it on too. My mother is not a cultivator of note, and my grandmother, who successfully formed her core, has never invited tribulation.”

“So whatever was passed onto you could not have been made by her. But someone in your family must have,” said David. He reached for the Song and was soon rewarded with the sound of boiling water.

“The threat is enough to scare anyone who doesn’t know much about my family,” said Feiyan. “And I can never, ever tell my family that it’s missing,” she whispered.

“Where do you think it is now?” David asked, as he poured her a cup of tea.

“Who knows?” said Feiyan.

“Maybe you’ll see it at the auction later tonight,” said David, who was suddenly unsure if Feiyan was trying to spin her life as a tragedy or if it was a legitimate cry for help.

Feiyan looked distraught. “I hope not. I’m certain at least one of my sisters will be there, and they’re going to think I’m the one putting it up for sale. Worse yet, what if one of my sisters buys it, I’ll never ever live it-”

There was a loud banging on the doors. Feiyan shrieked.

It was Qitai - just Qitai.

“Oh no,” said David. Qitai looked vaguely offended before it dawned on him too.

“How am I going to get in when no one’s here? We really didn’t think this through, did we?”

“We’ll figure something out,” said David. “Where’s the rest of everyone?”

“They ditched me to play mahjong in the atrium, and I couldn’t find the office,” said Qitai, who looked miserable.

“Of course they did,” said David.

Qitai peered around the room. “Where’s the-”

“Feiyan called on her most skillful, secret cultivation techniques and returned our living space to a place of beauty!”

“Right,” said Qitai.