David

In Dongjing, David came to believe that cultivators could not be understood like everything else. They were too complicated and inelegant and full of contradictions. Some even had Principles that demanded to be understood out of context of music, of rhythm, of poetry.

But in Tianbei, he’d realized that cultivators too were held together by a thread or theme, however discrete and mysterious. He wasn’t certain, but David thought that what he’d come into contact with could be a cultivator’s desire - their intent, their hopes and fears, comforts and hatreds, inspirations and biases.

The door flew open with a bang, shaking David out of his cultivation.

Kanhu moonwalked into the room, with a hand on his hip and the other holding up four silver ingots in the air.

"Who has two feet and never loses at mahjong?"

David chortled as Kanhu made his way over to the table with his back turned and plopped down onto the cushion across from him. The ingots landed on the table haphazardly. They were worth a hundred taels apiece. It was a lot to win in a few hands of mahjong.

"How's my Minghai Slide?" Kanhu asked, pouring himself a cup of tea. He gave it a sniff. "Smells like success. Where is everyone?"

"Qitai and Feiyan are in their rooms, cultivating. I was hoping you could tell me where... Mulan is."

"She's still playing, I think. I like to leave when I'm up after a big game," said Kanhu. "If you keep winning, then after a while no one wants to play and the bets get smaller and smaller. Keep winning the small bets and you get yourself beaten and kicked out," he said. He finished his cup of tea and went to his room.

The bells of Tianbei began to ring, soothing and strong. Maybe the house they lived in, with its well-made furniture and the comforting punctuation of Tianbei’s bells would grow predictable sooner rather than later, but for now, David was quite content sitting in a single spot and exploring the differences and repetitions of Songs and their sources.

After a little while, Kanhu came back to the living room carrying a brush, an ink well and a few sheets of paper. He arrayed them on the table next to David and then pulled his stack of Great Men and Great Scripture cards out of a pouch.

"What are you doing?" David asked.

"Now that I can afford it, I'm seeing what upgrades I want. At the very least, on the play, I could do with a better qi base - I have three standard opening plays that involve water and wood, and two that involve water and fire. I don't have any Everburning Forests, so if I want to make-"

David went back to cultivating, but he continued to nod politely as Kanhu explained the myriad problems he had with his deck. Some time during his explanation, Feiyan wandered out of her room and sat down across the table from David. She had her copy of the Skybound Scripture with her.

Alice returned late in the afternoon, with a glass bottle full of tapioca tea. She looked exhausted, but triumphant. "That was such a journey."

David folded his arms. "Weren't you supposed to get the people from the Logistics Office to clean up the place?" he asked, smiling slightly.

"Oh, right. Seems fine to me right now, though." She sat down on the floor besides David and leaned against him, resting her head against his shoulder. David smelled a touch of cinnamon from her drink. Feiyan glared at her bamboo sticks.

"I started the day down quite a bit," she said. "And I was going to leave with Kanhu, before I remembered we actually needed money for later."

Alice threw a glare at Kanhu, who was still rearranging his cards and making notes. "I lost two hundred taels to him."

“I did tell you to play at different tables,” said Kanhu, who'd made his way over.

“All the money I lost to you was in the first game,” said Alice flatly. “And you bet more money than you had.”

“You said that there was absolutely no way I was better at mahjong than you,” said Kanhu, smirking.

Alice gulped down her tea angrily.

“Are you going to tell me that I drew a statistically improbable hand and there was no chance you could have won now?” Kanhu grinned at her. “Perhaps, that I cheated in some way?”

Alice shook her head and scoffed. “I know I misplayed,” she muttered, pursing her lips. “At least three times,” she said, before a flurry of jargon that Kanhu clearly understood left her mouth in a single, minute long breath.

Kanhu offered more analysis, and Alice agreed, then they started finishing sentences for each other and agreeing with themselves for another minute while nodding more and more frequently.

“Nerd,” David whispered into Alice’s ear in English, far too softly for anyone else to hear.

She ignored him. Alice and Kanhu spoke faster and faster until they went through what must have been every play in the entire game.

“Alright, so I actually made three more errors that I hadn’t considered, and I should reevaluate more of the tiles I’m playing even after I’ve got a valid pattern I can win with in hand,” she concluded.

“I’m impressed,” Kanhu said. He finally stopped nodding to the conversation. “I have to admit that I thought you’d be a sore loser.”

Kanhu paused. “There are two types of people who play games like mahjong - those who are never lucky, and those who improve,” he said to Alice, with a wink that David misliked. “Sore losers and sore winners,” he explained. “I’ll just have to make sure you never win against me, so I don’t have to deal with that.

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Alice huffed and took a deep drink.

"If senior sister keeps drinking tapioca tea, she might become fat and unattractive. And that would be a real tragedy, wouldn't it? Besides, Feiyan hasn't had time to go down to Earth Peak, because she spent the whole time cleaning up senior sister's mess and she would really like to have some tapi-"

Alice pressed the glass bottle into Feiyan's waiting fingers with a scowl. "You could have just asked me to bring you one if you wanted it that badly," she said.

"But it tastes better when it doesn't belong to me," said Feiyan, batting her eyelashes at David.

Her hairpin glinted in the afternoon sun as Alice snatched the glass out of Feiyan's hands and downed the remainder in a single gulp.

"H-how could you do this to poor Feiyan!" the girl wailed. “There was barely any left of my tea to begin with!”

“It would have stayed yours if you’d chosen to drink it instead of chattering,” said Alice curtly.

There was a light knock at the door.

Kanhu got up from his cushion, where he had been arraying his Great Men and Great Scripture cards in various configurations over and over again, and threw the door open.

On the other side of it was Daoist Liang. Her hair had been done up, held together by a piece of white jade. From her ears dangled silver and amethysts, contrasting with the simple black robes of the sect that ended halfway up her thigh. Previously, she had worn the white robes of mourning, giving her an ethereal, unapproachable beauty. Her standard sect robes, however, changed her into someone more down to earth.

David wondered how long it would be before he was used to how cultivators, whose physical presence gave way to their self image, were shockingly attractive on the whole.

"It is time, juniors!" she proclaimed. "The Lantern Lighting might be the most important day of the year, but today is definitely the most fun. The first bell rings at sundown, so we'll have-" She stared at the sun through the window, "approximately half an hour to get ourselves in place."

Everyone looked up at her, but no one moved or spoke.

"Have any of you been to an auction before?" asked Daoist Liang, who had more energy than the rest of the room combined.

"Why of course," said Feiyan. "The House of Zhu is known for its generous spending in Xijing for treasures of all sorts. Every year, during the Sword Dialogue, my family bankrolls the biggest auction in the world, where people from all over get to register and sell their-"

"Right, right," said Daoist Liang. "Everyone loves getting scammed when spring approaches."

Feiyan pouted. "That saying is based on jealous rumors. Everything sold at the Sword Dialogue is verified by a hundred experts and-"

"Yes, yes," said Daoist Liang. "Regardless-"

"Tested for purity of quality if it's a medication and for authenticity if it's an artifact so that we can ensure-"

"How does the auction work?" asked Alice, a little louder than Feiyan.

"I'm glad you asked," said Feiyan, who assumed the question was directed at her. "On the evening before-"

"I meant the auction that we're going to right now," said Alice, with her hands on her hips.

"Oh."

Daoist Liang, who was wearing an amused smile, paused to see if Feiyan would continue spouting off about her family's event before she continued to speak. "Artifacts, weaponry and cultivation supplements - usually pills, are offered up by members of the sect into a registry. The first two rounds of the auction are generally populated with devices and products produced by Outer Disciples and Inner Disciples. Generally, Master Feng will buy anything that no one else is interested in, just to encourage innovation amongst the disciples."

"That's nice of him," said David.

"Well, sort of. If no one wants something, the starting offer is stricken from the books and begins again at a single silver tael," said Daoist Liang. "The junk is usually moved to the hundreds of storage rooms inside of Earth Peak and, effectively, lost forever. Sometimes you find old ideas and schematics that aren’t as worthless as they appear if you trawl through the storage rooms. You'll have to be an inner disciple to get the proper clearance for stuff made by outer disciples, and a core disciple to see the rest."

She tapped her fingers at the hem of her robe a little impatiently. "We should probably start walking."

Kanhu pushed open Qitai's door and David heard the Song as a deep drumming, along with a keening, medium pitched note that stopped abruptly - though the drumming continued, at a faster rate. "Gentleman Leng," he bellowed. "These humble servants remind you that the auction will be starting soon. Would you like to be carried or dressed?"

"Gentleman Leng’s my father," Qitai shouted back. "I'm not going - and don't distract me again or I'll carry you off the side of Sword Peak." He was quite irritated, if the agitation in his Song could be believed - it had lost some of its consistent beating and became slightly erratic. "I might have had a breakthrough."

"But-"

Daoist Liang perked up suddenly, sniffing at the air. "Close the door," she demanded. Before Kanhu could react, she was immediately beside him, pulling him away with enough force to send him flying towards David. David put his arms out and planted his feet as steadily as he could, then caught Kanhu by the shoulders. The impact still pushed him back a step.

By the time they'd righted themselves, the door had been firmly shut. "You should know better than to disturb a poison cultivator in an enclosed space," said Liang, looking supremely annoyed.

"Aren't you overreacting a bit?" moaned Kanhu, who was rubbing the back of his right heel. A deep skid mark in the pine floor traced the path he took across the room.

"That was incredibly dangerous," hissed Daoist Liang. "Judging only by the smell, if you'd done that at an unfortunate time you could have severely injured him, everyone in the house, or even crippled his cultivation," she finished with a whisper that was more dire than a shout.

"I didn't know," said Kanhu, looking vaguely horrified. "I didn't smell any-"

"Of course you didn't smell anything," snapped Liang. "You probably couldn't tell the difference between arsenic and toad venom if you ingested it."

David thought that was likely more difficult for most people than Liang would have estimated. "Is he going to be alright?" he asked, deciding that the change to Qitai's Song was definitely not a good thing.

"Almost certainly," said Daoist Liang, whose anger was spent. "In cases like this, with poison cultivators at least, generally the moment of trouble would have occurred when the door opened, or within seconds," she said.

"But the deadliest accidents are the ones when the cultivator in question stays distracted for long enough to forget that Qi will build and grow, or disperse and spread, in its natural state. The reputation of poison cultivators is unfair, but rooted in something very real and dangerous. A single drop to take a life, salt the earth, taint the lakes, extinguish a flame, annul any gold-"

"A single drop to reverse age, fatten the land, purify the seas, start a fire, create wealth," finished Alice, who had not only read many an esoteric text, but now remembered all of them. "Poison, metaphor for man, miserable and full of secrets, ecstatic with dreams and plans."

Daoist Liang had already opened the cherry red front door. "Perhaps a visit to the Southern Continent would be worthwhile if that verse could be learned there," she said. She gave them a small smile over her shoulder and beckoned for them to follow.