David

The entrance hall to the stadium was enormous and crowded in a way that nothing else in this world had been. If someone had shown a picture of it to David before he'd stepped foot onto this realm, he would have assumed it was some Chinese city's equivalent to New York's Madison Square Garden.

The ceilings were at least two stories high. The walls were cut from brightly polished white marble. Hundreds of ornate lamps of curved bronze and thin glass hung from dark steel sconces circling the room, spaced inches apart. They reminded David of the everburning Yin Fire lamps back at his own sect. But even though they occupied the same register with their Song, these lamps were tangibly warm and lit the entrance in a golden glow.

Thousands of people were gathered here, within touching distance of one another. They were congregated in groups, talking loudly, laughing, singing along to the song that leaked in through the doors on the far side of the hall, of the same make as the one they'd entered the stadium through. These doors were even larger and set directly in the center of the opposite wall. Above the door was a single word carved into the marble - Stage.

"Welcome to the Bird's Nest," said Shishi. The three of them had been forced into a tight clump to avoid the passing traffic.

"I've been here twice since joining the sect," said Wen, in David's ear. "I've never seen a crowd this large."

"Liu Na must be a pretty good singer," said David, thinking of how excited the girl who sat next to him on the cart ride had been.

"She's decent," said Shishi, in a tone that implied that she didn't think much of Liu Na's singing.

David continued to examine the room as they began to move through the crowd of bodies at a snail's pace.

Metal sheets in silver or gold, each the size and shape of a piece of printer paper, gleamed from beneath some of the lamps, twenty five feet off the ground. Words had been engraved onto each of them, none of which made a lot of sense. After he read a few of them, David realized they were names.

"Do you see my plaque?" asked Shishi. She pointed at one on the far wall. "Disciples who successfully ignite are memorialized in silver, and disciples who survive their Earthly Tribulation are set in gold."

"And if they ascend?" David asked.

"Different room," said Shishi. "We don't want to disturb our ancestors with all of this," she said, sweeping a hand in front of her.

All around the edges of the room were vendors who stood behind waist high mahogany countertops, flanked by shelves piled high with goods.

The ones manned by disciples in red sold souvenirs - shirts, dolls and little slips of jade that David now recognized to be records. The ones manned by disciples in blue sold paintings, some arranged on easels and some propped up on the shelves.

Vendors who didn't wear the colors of either sect sold food and drink. Noodles were blanched in baskets full of boiling water, skewers rotated over coal pits and syrups were poured over ice shavings. The most popular counter - and the largest - was to David's left, fifty feet from the door.

Beer - two taels a mug. Plum wine - five taels a mug. Baijius - Luxiang - eight taels a cup, Mixiang - nine taels a cup, Fenjiu - fourteen taels a cup.

There was no line - just people jostling each other, trying to avoid other concertgoers with their arms full of cups and make their way to the bar.

"You won't have to get in line if you want something to drink," said Shishi. "Someone will take your order at our table."

They were slowly but surely making their way through the entrance hall, but the density of the crowd only increased. David craned his head to stare past the wide open marble doors on the far end of the hallway. Most of the people in the entrance hall were funneling towards the doors. Nothing but what he presumed were the flashing lights of the stage were visible past the wall of bodies.

"That's the way to the floor," Shishi said, dragging him by the sleeve. "We'll be going that way." She pointed at another set of marble doors in the corner to their right.

Moving against the crowd was much harder than moving with it. After David and Wen had nearly gotten lost in the surge of people more than once, Shishi looped her elbows around their’s and simply forced her way through. When they finally arrived, the marble doors slid open and the three of them tumbled through.

“That was unpleasant,” said Wen, as the doors slid shut behind them. David didn’t agree. There was something comforting about the press of people that reminded him of rush hours.

The sudden silence was absolute, oppressive.

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"Now, if you two weren't here with me, I would be trying to find someone who could sell me a handful of dancer's dust," lamented Shishi.

"What's that?" asked David, for both of them.

"Take sassafras flowers, grind them into a fine powder and dissolve them in oil, then shock the solution with any qi with a bright yang polarity, and crystals will start to form. Grind up the crystals and you've got dancer's dust. It lingers like a bitter poison on your tongue and stings like a knife in your nostrils, but after that fades, you'll see impossible colors and fall in love with everyone you meet."

When she saw the concern from both David and Wen, she pouted. "I can't imagine how else I could enjoy a Liu Na concert."

“Is that what it takes?” David asked, as mildly as he could, as they began to walk down the hallway.

The hall they stood in was thin and long and, in the distance, curved and bent to hide the other half of it. On the walls were frames and frames of what should have been portraits, like a museum exhibit, but despite the little metal plaques under them, the portraits were empty. There was writing on the plaques - but it was not in the Language of the Stars in the Sky, as most writing was - nor was it in Chinese, or any alphabet that David recognized.

Shishi chose to ignore the question, pivoting away entirely. “Welcome to the Hall of Portraits.”

“I’m going to ask the obvious question,” said Wen. “Where are the portraits?”

This, too, was what David was more interested in. There were so many portraits, but all of them were blank canvases.

“Now that’s a question that everyone would like to know the answer to,” said Shishi. “Turn around.”

She pointed at the empty frame over the entrance to the hall. “There’s very good records of what each and every portrait depicted, from the start of the sect. Each portrait was, allegedly, of the Singing Maiden. The number of frames total sixty four, and thus the collection is known as ‘The Sixty-Four Incongruities’. That one was the very first, named ‘Girl Plays a Guqin’, the oldest known work of the Blind Painter.”

David stared at the flowing script on the portrait’s plaque, lines and curves and bends in no language he’d ever seen before.

“Is ‘Girl Plays a Guqin’ the translation of that?” David asked, pointing to the plaque. “What script is it written in?”

“It is a phonetic script - written not like our language - in unique characters, but as a series of letters and phonemes which produce the sound of the word.”

So, it was like English. David felt a bubble of excitement in his gut. “What’s it called?”

“The records refer to it as ‘Upper Refraction’.”

David heard the sound of the Song - chords that had resolved themselves into a cadence, snares that had built something beautiful. Five-seven-one. Innocence has passed us by. David turned to Wen, to Shishi, to see if they’d heard anything, but of course there were no outward signs.

David found himself consumed by the need to hear the Song present in this very room, the Song that hadn’t been sung in living memory. “Can anyone read it or speak it?”

“Of course not,” said Shishi, chuckling. “It would be a high heresy to read any of the dead languages of the Far Fields, but especially this one.”

“Heresy?” David asked, as they began walking again. He was disappointed.

The words of Li Qingshui echoed in his mind - You must remember this well - there is only one language, and that is the language of the Stars in the Sky.

“It’s one of those things that will make your disagreements with the sky that much more difficult,” said Shishi. “In the years of turmoil that followed the Rebel cleaving the house of Xi, the Painter descended from the stars above, son of a different sky.”

David threw a quick glance at Wen, who looked far more interested than before.

“He took the name Dun and hid in the islands of Minghai to cultivate. One day, he met the Singing Maiden and fell in love with her because of how beautiful her voice was. Together they derived the scripture known as the Truth of Heart.”

The three of them turned the corner in the U-shaped room and at its far end, David could see one portrait that was still intact.

It was a painting done in oils on canvas of a girl. On her back hung a guqin with snapped strings, in her right hand was a sword pointed at the cloud cover above. In her left hand was a little mirror.

“Seventeen years ago, the second to last portrait disappeared,” said Shishi. She pointed at the remaining one, over the far doors. “That is the only one that remains. Its name is ‘Desperation’.”

The expression on the girl’s face wasn’t one of fear or resolve, but rather she wore a grim, disrespectful sneer.

“It goes by another name as well, which is ‘The Peony Draws the Third String’.”

“The Third String?” asked David.

“No one knows if it’s the name of the sword she wields, or a reference to the guqin on her back.”

David took a second look at the guqin - indeed all the strings were snapped except for one of them.

“Anyway, all of this is neither here nor there,” said Shishi. “Just the dusty old history of two of the Great Sects.” The doors they now stood in front of slid open, blasting them with the sound of Liu Na’s concert.

Liu Na stood on a stage that jutted out onto the water with a small moat separating it from the dancefloor. She was dressed in the red robes of Song Mountain Sect. Behind her, her fellow disciples played lutes and strings and drums. Her voice was bright and clear - a pop voice. It would have been a hit back on earth.

Unlike the other side of the venue, which was characterized by thousands of sweaty concertgoers pressed up against one another, dancing and singing, the section of the arena that the Hall of Portraits had opened up to was filled with scores of little tables around which the disciples of Song and Tang Mountain sat. They were fenced off from the general populace with chest-high dividers that disciples in red robes guarded.

Though David could see those red and blue robes in the large crowd, most of the cultivators in the city of Huzhou were seated calmly in this section. Shishi dragged him along to one of the tables, but David found it difficult to appreciate the concert - his mind stayed on ‘Desperation’ and the girl with the sword in the last remaining portrait.