Li
A plum tree grew in front of the little house her parents had built on the outskirts of Ox and Rooster village. A li tree. That was considered unlucky. It grew no taller than a man, but bore many fruits. Her father had planted it long ago, because that was his name and her grandfather's name and so forth. She was named Li as well. Li as in 'plum', not li as in 'leave'.
The Li family makes our own luck - don't listen to the old women in the village.
She was nearly eight years of age - the only soul in Ox and Rooster Village to awaken. It took contributions for a village to send their first cultivator to a sect and there was little silver to spare. But the Li daughter had bright eyes, a good sense for danger and the love of all of those who met her. A cultivator could change the fortune of her entire village, if she remembered where she was from. Li as in 'plum', not li as in 'leave'.
Winters are hard in the village - please come back at every chance, you might never see mother again if you don't.
They gave her a change of clothing and a sharp little knife of iron. She was to set off with her father at dawn, with the small fortune of forty taels - enough to reach Song Mountain with three meals to spare. Song Mountain was one of the Nine Great Sects, on the western bank of Immortal Lake, in the city of Huzhou. They took in girls who were as beautiful as mutton-fat jade - but only if they were also as bright.
But she did not make it out of the door. That night, her mother fell sick. It was an ill omen for travel. She would still be eight in the spring - and she would become one of the famed beauties of Huzhou then.
And then everyone fell sick. The old women who had given her silver for lodging and food whispered sick truths about cultivators to anyone who would listen. They were harbingers of disaster who defied the heavens and lightning struck them down.
Tribulation. Retribution. And a word she understood. Leave.
The old women left first. And then her mother. All of the mothers. All of their children. All of the men.
And then her father. She found the strength to bury her family in graves as deep as her knees, but no further. That night, she burned her fingers boiling beans, so she ate the fruit off of the plum tree. When the next day dawned, her fingers were unburnt but the village stank.
And then she fell sick. Her eyes blurred yellow and her nose ran red. Soft spots on her turned blue as the sky, then purple like plums and then black. She forgot the names of the old women. And then her mother. And then her father. Every morning, she would crawl to the tree and then she would stand by her own power. And then she would cut down a plum with her sharp little knife and eat on her knees. Li as in 'plum', not li as in 'leave'.
She wished that she had gone to Huzhou. She wished she had left Ox and Rooster Village to die.
When she'd cut the final plum that remained and eaten her fill, she did not crawl back into her bed. She continued to kneel. She looked up at the heavens and began to pray. She prayed for her wrongs to be pardoned when she put her hand on the Wheel and begged for forgiveness for her mother, for her father and for Li. And she begged for the heavens to let her leave.
She was bowed beneath the tree when the man wandered into Ox and Rooster Village, humming a merry tune.
He was bare of foot and dressed in rags. The color in his eyes had washed out with age. He was a beggar, a vagrant, a man without a home. A plain ring encircled his right thumb. When he stood over her, she was glad he was a beggar - he wouldn't mind the way she stank. He asked for her name, but she'd forgotten that too.
The beggar asked if she wanted a name.
She nodded. The beggar asked if she was sure. She nodded again.
The beggar took a flower from the plum tree and ran it beneath her nose until its petals were red. He dug his fingers into the ground beside her family's tree and found its heart, a clump of roots that fit in his hand. He walked to their well and dropped both of them in. Then, he took her little knife and dropped it into the well too.
The beggar drew water from the well, clear blue and bright, and turned the pail over her. Everything returned to their normal colors for her, everything but Ox Rooster Village.
Your name is Li Qingshui.
Li as in leave. Qing as in clear. Shui as in water.
Do you believe in Iron?
She thought of that little knife.
She did.
Li Qingshui
Master liked to tell stories. He had a story for nearly every century he had lived - and many for the first. He'd been raised by the streets of Xijing. His awakening happened with two of his friends - Little Dream and Little Fish. They were orphans too. At fifteen, he sold wine he brewed himself to the whorehouse where Little Dream danced and Little Fish played music.
Master insisted that he was the least talented cultivator of the three, by a margin which hard work could not bridge. Her master had the habit of telling her outrageous secrets when he drank, and he drank a lot. But no matter how deep he sat in his cups, he never said anything more than that about the pair.
After a few decades, she'd decided that the story was just a story. Neither of the characters had been real people.
Li had never met anyone as talented as her before she'd gone to some core formation party for the scion for a family that ruled a city along Sky River. The city was younger than her Master, but also nicer than its age would imply.
Now, Li was fully confident that both Dream and Fish did, in fact, exist.
After seeing the way her traveling companions spoke to young masters and immortal ancestors, the way they wrapped their qi around fifth realm cultivators and ancient artifacts powerful enough to be left on a major roadway, Li had a pretty good idea of what happened to Master's childhood friends.
Li hoped her new friends didn’t end up like Dream and Fish.
When pushed, the girl had given the immortal her name. Alice. Before Li and Chan had caught them on the road again, this had been the topic of discussion. They’d both tried and failed to pronounce it, though Changshou had a little more success with the boy’s name. David.
When the pair thought she wasn’t listening, they spoke in another language, the language those names must have come from. Hindsight explained the slight peculiarities in the way the boy had spoken in the common tongue, especially the way he tended to misorder his words.
David also had the tendency to identify himself when he gave his thoughts. When she’d met the boy at the ceremony, she’d believed it to be the egotistical, reflexive way someone like Changshou would include his own name before every thought. But speaking with him for a while proved that he was humble, if opinionated, and strangely respectful towards those who couldn’t cultivate.
Alice’s speech was similarly strange. She used many words which were only found in formal writing or records and had trouble expressing herself without saying a lot. From the way she spoke that strange language, it was clear that her thoughts were constantly outrunning her speech.
And even that blockheaded Jiang scion had noticed that David’s accent wasn’t one anyone had ever heard before. Stranger still, Alice’s accent was completely different from the boy’s.
None of this compared to the peculiarity of the hours they’d spent at the bookstore. They were as unapologetically educated as the brattiest princes at her sect, but Li was completely certain she’d watched both of them learn how to read.
“So why have you found it so difficult to establish your foundations?” asked the girl. And indeed she was just a girl - Alice had seventeen years to her name and no regard for Li’s pride.
Li reminded herself again that Alice wasn’t as much of a smug bitch as she presented. She could almost hear Changshou’s stupid voice. ‘You might be angry right now, but remember - we don’t choose who our friends are.’ Whenever Li got mad, her brain would quote Chan Changshou and she would get madder.
She studied Alice’s face. There wasn’t a shadow of derision or pity, proof positive that the girl was trying her best not to hurt her feelings. That implied one of two things - that Alice didn’t respect Li, or worse, she pitied her. Or both.
No one had ever accused her of being reasonable.
“You can’t help,” said Li.
David spoke up. “How can you be sure of that?”
That ranked amongst the most casually arrogant questions she’d ever heard. “Don’t you know who my master is?”
David nodded slowly, as if she were a slow child. “He travels the Middle Continent in disguise, healing the sick and impoverished.”
Heat rose to Li’s cheeks.
“The oldest member of the previous generation who has yet to ascend,” continued Alice.
Li folded her arms, if only to stop herself from reaching for the sword at her waist. She glared.
“The Hero of a Thousand Lotuses, who saved everyone from the dogs to the princes of Xijing from the Blood Plague with-”
David stopped. The grin slid away from his face when he realized she didn’t find it funny. “That was uncalled for,” he admitted. Alice didn’t disagree with him, but she didn’t apologize either.
“I’ve been stuck here for a while,” Li said. “Always running up this hill. Sometimes I wonder how I got here.” She turned to them. “You’ve never been in a bottleneck, have you?”
Alice shook her head.
“When did the two of you awaken?” Li asked, afraid of the answer.
They gave an almost imperceptible shake of the head in concert. The wind whistled through the bamboo that surrounded them on either side of the road.
“A little while ago,” David said, suddenly fascinated with the plant life.
Perhaps it was better for her sanity if she didn’t know.
“I was eight years old when my master took me from my village. We walked twelve hundred li from a little village near Huzhou to the Iron Scripture. Had he chosen to fly instead, we would have arrived in a few hours. But by the time we reached Bei’an, he’d seen over a hundred patients and I’d learned enough about the world to begin Foundation Establishment.”
It had gotten darker. It was still early in the afternoon, but now that the sun wasn’t directly above them, the light found it difficult to pass through the dense bamboo.
“I asked him to recount the dao of transformations to me. Master refused. It’s tradition for the young disciples of my sect to crawl on hand and knee into the Cubic Crucible at least once, to receive the Iron Scripture. Or try.”
David frowned. “You told us the other day that there were fifteen hundred characters on each face of the cube, right? That’s a lot to ask of a child.”
Li nodded. “Fifteen hundred and twenty one. Thirty nine lines of thirty nine words - imprinted onto each of the walls, the ceiling and the floor, with a hundred and twenty six words missing from the entrance to bring the total to nine thousand.”
“And you were expected to memorize it?” asked David, appropriately perplexed.
“Nobody is expected to memorize it,” said Daoist Li, exhaling. “It was recorded a hundred and fourteen generations ago, in the written word of the time - with words that have long been lost. I suspect most immortals would be unable to read it.”
They both frowned at her, in askance.
A rueful smile found Li’s face. “But for me, it was even less likely. I was born to a family of farmers, the only person in my village to awaken. I hadn’t been taught to read.”
“As tradition goes, I spent three days and three nights in the room. The sect was all I had, so I spent every single minute trying to find a word I recognized. I was afraid they’d know if I didn’t. I later learned that most children just spent that time cultivating.”
She chuckled. “When I heard the bells on the dawn of the fourth day, I crawled back out into the Ancestral Hall. All the elders who weren’t away from the sect had been gathered by my master - an old rule. There were maybe two or three faces that weren't actively hostile. In less than a decade, Master will celebrate two hundred centuries spent wandering the earth. In this time, he’s taken one disciple.”
“Just one student in twenty thousand years,” Alice whispered, entranced.
Li nodded and pointed at herself, hoping her best sneer would hide the terror she felt. “He doesn’t believe he’ll survive his tribulation. I am blessed to have been born on the eve of his death.” She clenched her fists.
“When Master was seeing me off on the day I left for Ping’an, the Widow of Tianbei Valley invited the lightning.” Li took a deep breath. “Master killed her senior brother when they were young, and she killed two of our Peak Masters in retaliation,” said Li. “They’ve failed to kill each other more times than there are days in a year.”
Li threw her hands into the air with visceral disgust. “That suicidal old man actually watched the tribulation. He said he owed it to her.” She shook her head. “He thinks she might have failed, even though no one can be sure. I’ve never seen him look that upset before.”
David nodded.
“He’s always said that he should have cultivated something that wasn’t the dao of transformations to form his foundations. The verses he chose were too narrow in scope.”
“The dao of transformations?” Alice asked.
“It is the favored scripture of elementalists, of doctors, of demonologists. It describes the nature of every possible pair of the eight trigrams, and names them. My sect has collected many writings on it. It’s the scripture all of our peak masters cultivate. Some of the verses are common knowledge. Qian - the essential yet great, advancing and true,” Li explained.
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“Oh! That’s from the Book of Changes. I know it,” said Alice. She bit her lip and tilted her head slightly, then brightened. “Origin and nine - the dragon hides, still unused. Nine and second - seeing the dragon afield, he advances to meet greatness. Nine and third - he toils ceaselessly, in vigilance, without error. Nine and fourth - from the depths ascend, free of blame. Nine and-”
Li’s hands trembled. “Where did you hear that from?” she asked, as casually as she could.
Alice, who was idly tracing the lines on David’s hand, shrugged. “Read it a while ago. My memory’s been pretty good recently. Really, really good, actually.”
“How much of it do you remember?” Li asked. Her tone didn’t change.
“Bits and pieces,” said Alice, noticing the shift in mood. “Sorry for interrupting your story.”
Li was becoming more and more sure that the likelihood of violent death was directly correlated to time spent with David and Alice. “I’ve heard that it is considered unwise to recite cultivation scriptures in public places,” she said, as if anyone had ever needed to tell her.
Alice nodded placidly, a sure sign that she would forget Li’s advice immediately. Well, no one could blame her for not trying her best to protect the girl.
“Master chose the twenty-fourth transformation as his foundation,” said Li. “He said they were divinations spanning progress and setbacks, good and evil, fortune and forgiveness, with great breadth but little flexibility.”
It made almost no sense to David, as she’d expected - and far too much sense to Alice, whose hairpin caught a strand of sunlight as they continued on the Iron Road. “Fu - Prosper! Cleansed within and without, unblamed by friends. Circle for seven days, find gain in all aspects.”
Now, it was one thing to know Qian - that was the first transformation and was included in every copy of the dao of transformations, however incomplete. It was quite another thing to know Fu.
As an inner disciple, her master had discovered the verse inscribed on the tomb of an emperor’s physician from two dynasties ago. He’d found a cave steeped in Yin energy so thick it had frozen the blood in his veins. There had been a cobra - wider than an old oak and as long as a building was tall, that her master had escaped narrowly. Only two living people, Master and his sole inheriting disciple, had ever spoken the name Fu. Three, now.
“You can’t know those words,” Li hissed, grabbing Alice by the collar.
David gave her a sharp look, searching for violence in her posture. Something about her fear must have leaked into her eyes, because he sighed and a tenseness in his muscles melted away. Alice, who she’d grabbed without a thought, didn’t even react.
“You can’t ever let anyone know that you know those words.”
They’d stopped walking.
“Why is this a problem?” Alice seemed genuinely confused.
Li let out what was definitely not a whimper of frustration. “Don’t you know what happens to talented young cultivators who have secrets they shouldn’t? Have you not heard the horror stories of maidens locked in towers for thousands of years, for just a scrap of knowledge? Immortals diving from the high heavens to crush empires for a single manual?”
The pair nodded slowly, which was more infuriating than disagreement.
“Just because it’s worked out for you so far doesn’t mean it’s going to continue to work out,” said Daoist Li. “It’s true that the first immortal I've ever been near was the Ping’an patriarch, but you don’t get smoke without a fire.”
Her eyes darkened. “Amongst the common folk, immortals are worshipped and loved universally, but even their stories are full of questionable material at best. But cultivators tell ten cautionary tales for every story involving a fortuitous encounter.”
She’d ranted for so long that she was now breathing heavily. “For every cultivator with the bearing of the Jiang ancestor, there are a hundred like his grandson,” she concluded.
The pair found a familiar expression - impassive, accepting. Respectful.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Li growled in a supremely unladylike manner. “I know the score. I’m one of you,” she said. “That’s the face I make when I’m trying to convince my master not to beat me with a stick.”
David pinched his brow, angling his face downward to hide a smile. The absurdity of the situation caught up with Li and now she was smiling too, which both made her more angry and took the bite out of it.
Alice widened her eyes and stared into Li’s chin. Her lower lip trembled. “I’m very, very sorry, and I’ve done wrong! I will never ever do it again. Thank you for your guidance-”
They all started laughing and laughing in the darkening bamboo forest. When they quieted down after a few moments, David was wearing a more earnest face.
“What is wrong with your master’s scripture?” he asked.
Li sighed. “While the stances of a single martial form obviously can’t create a satisfactory worldview, it’s not a stretch to think that the description of human life and the myriad changing movements of qi could be enough,” she said. “But it falls to a unique issue - one of deterministic outcomes.”
She looked at Alice, who was chewing on her lower lip in thought. It was difficult to keep the accusation out of her voice. “As you must know, there are only eight lines in that verse of the transformations.”
David, who’d formed his foundation off of four lines with five words apiece, looked worried. “Is that going to be a problem for me as well?”
Li shook her head and shrugged. “No? Maybe? If you run into issues, it won’t be the one that my master has. His verses are specifically excised from a greater whole and separated clearly.”
Alice hummed, as they considered the problem together. “I’d bet that your master can’t make leaps of logic and clever analogies to the other transformations. A poet references many other poems - and more than just poetry, when he composes. The transformations, by contrast, are self-contained and deliberately separate,” she offered. “Since your master specifically picked Fu, he unpicked the other ones.”
Li nodded. That was consistent with the frustrations she’d heard before.
“You’re afraid that by picking specific pieces of the Iron Scripture, you’ll be unpicking other parts of it,” guessed David, relating her master’s problem to Li’s own difficulties. “You have full knowledge of what it entails, you’re unsure as to what will be important.”
“It’s far more grim than that, and has something to do with the Iron Scripture itself,” said Daoist Li. “If I were to recite it, you would not remember it if you tried your very best. Even for me, the scripture refuses to stay put. Things I learned years ago have vanished from my memory entirely and new meanings dance within reach.”
She got the narrowed eyes she’d expected.
“If I had to guess, you don’t remember it as words,” said David. “You remember the scripture as images, and you’ve spent years and years trying to make words written in a script you don’t recognize into something coherent.”
He nodded, partly at her, partly to himself. “And then when you put it all together, it makes no sense. That’s why you mentioned it was out of order.”
Li shook her head. “Even worse than that,” she said. “When they become words, they don’t stick in my mind.”
She took a deep breath and settled on a passage to prove her point. It was one that she’d mistakenly believed was the start of the Scripture for many years. “Crown of stars - stone heart, city of bone - bestow the link. We write our songs beneath the moon. Works we made must leave the world, chain our fates.”
Li waited for the reaction she’d always received - a disoriented confusion when someone tried to interpret it, or repeat it back to her. She wondered how the verse would sound the next time she thought of it. It was always slightly different.
The sound of wind rushing past bamboo was the only sound that could be heard as the pair wrestled with the words.
Alice’s annoyance was clear when she broke the silence. “It’s like that stone in the road,” she said. “I think I can, but I think I shouldn’t.”
She turned to David. “This has the same flavor as that incident.” Alice pouted.
He wasn’t listening to her. His eyes were still screwed shut and lines were visible on his forehead - so deep was his frown.
Unlike Alice, who’d said something similar to her master, David looked less confused than hard at work. He was leaning from side to side and counting something with his fingers as his lips moved soundlessly.
When David spoke, it was in that other language. “Star-crossed and crowned, our cities were paired. With hardened hearts and fathers we shared. Reach for the night by tune or rhyme, carry the faith through space and time.”
He jerked, surprised, then looked up at the sky as if something unusual had appeared. Li followed his gaze, but found nothing. After a few moments, David looked resigned rather than alarmed.
“Heresy is one way to describe it, I suppose,” he muttered, then turned to Li. “I don’t remember any of what you said to me, only what I ended up with, which I don’t like. I could have done a better job.”
Li, who hadn’t understood a word, shrugged. “Why don’t you fix it, then?”
David scowled. “I don’t want the sort of trouble we might get in if I fix it.”
Li wasn’t sure why he thought he would get in trouble, but she knew she shouldn’t have been giving away verses of her heritage anyway. She’d recited lines like these to her master and many of the elders in her sect.
Only the peak master at the Hall of Furnaces had been able to retain any words at all - and he’d had a similar reaction to Alice. He’d been sure that he would encounter a deviation if he explored the ideas within the words before he finished Severing.
Unlike her peak master, Alice was still interested in helping. “What exactly are the contents of the Iron Scripture, descriptively?” asked Alice. “The specific verses may escape you, but…”
Li tried to compile the many thoughts she’d had over the years to work out what she believed.
“You don’t have to answer if it’s a secret or something,” said Alice, looking as though she’d be very disappointed if that were the case. Li’s trepidation at committing that universal taboo of leaking sect secrets must have shown on her face.
After a few moments of thought, Li decided she wasn’t really worried about the incident coming to light. They were well beyond the point of prohibition now - and if anyone else could learn enough of the Iron Scripture to figure out that she’d discussed it with outsiders, they could replace her as the inheriting disciple.
Honestly, if anyone else from her sect could learn a single verse, perhaps Li wouldn’t have spent decades of her life running in place.
“It depends on where you start reading,” she said, because it was true. “It can’t just be anywhere - sometimes you end up with nothing but gibberish. I’ve concretely received a sword form and a martial form from it.”
Li thought of the fight in Dongjing’s Hall of Foods and was struck with a sudden regret. She could have bullied Changshou over dispersing his sword-light with her bare hands.
“That’s not the important part of it,” said David, barely louder than the wind.
Li realized with a start that he was likely the only other person in the world who knew any of the scripture other than her, and this was a singularly unique opportunity. And here she was thinking about Chan Changshou. Even when he wasn’t present, he found a way to sabotage her.
She considered David’s opinion and found that she agreed. “You’re right about the martial arts. As for the verse I read you, I’m not sure if it’s a historical record or-”
“Or a command. Orders from long ago,” he interjected. David was not her master, and did not possess the infinite patience to let her figure things out verbally.
A deep silence fell over them. David had closed his eyes again - but he was noticeably less vexed compared to when he’d been translating or rewriting the verse. He still showed signs of frustration once in a while - a quick shake of his head, an unconscious shrug.
The minutes drew on.
“I could listen to you recount the entirety of the Scripture, but,” David began. He’d been silent for long enough that he startled both Li, who had been watching him like a hawk, and Alice, who had been playing with his sleeves, with her own sleeves, with her hair, with his hair, with his flute...
“But?” Li parroted as the silence stretched on again.
David let out a deep sigh. “But it would be very pointless, I think. I do have some questions.”
Li made a motion for him to ask.
“You said in Dongjing that there was only one language - the language of the stars in the sky. What did you mean by that?”
“It’s a name that’s used for the common tongue,” Li said. She didn’t see how that could be relevant.
“Who or what decided that?”
Li considered the comments the scattered musings of her master on the subject. “It’s a warning in many scriptures and sutras. It’s engraved, somewhere important - usually, in every sect of note, everywhere. Not just on other continents, but in other realms too - if accounts of the few immortals who’ve ascended from the Iron Scripture can be believed. But it’s common knowledge amongst cultivators of worth.”
“Has this always been the case?”
Li had no answer for him, but Alice did. “Remember what Uncle Jiang said when we introduced ourselves? It has been the standard in every realm for many aeons,” she quoted, making her voice as deep as she could. “Even the most iconoclastic rebels in the far Fields don’t slide into that familiarity when they adopt another language.”
Though the way she’d said it sounded silly, what she’d said was clearly important because David began nodding and nodding. Li saw the shadow of triumph on his face.
“The Iron Scripture doesn’t actively resist transcription or memory,” David declared.
Ridiculous. That was an exact description of what it did. There could be no other possibility. Li steeled herself to hear the most boneheaded explanation ever conceived.
“The Iron Scripture slips our minds and whoever else you’ve tried to recite it to. That’s not because the scripture doesn’t wish to exist. The world doesn’t wish it to exist.”
It would appear that she had a choice to make - either Li had to reject her immediate instinct that he was right or she would have to admit that some kid had figured out the scripture after hearing a single line of it. She could easily believe the world didn’t want the scripture to exist - it was clearly an unfair place.
David didn’t notice the war waging in her mind. His face bloomed into a smile as he delivered his proof. “This seat has written the Scripture in iron, not because the Linking Mnemonic cannot subvert iron, but because iron remembers its true form.”
Perhaps if Li was from a good family and had also been educated at a young age, she would also have lucky coincidences like him. David wasn’t that special - if she’d cultivated the dao of transformations, she’d be searching for her Nascent Soul right now. Who did this kid think he was? Just because an immortal said some nice things to him-
“So what is the true form?” asked Alice, reminding Li that her original question of the specific contents of the scripture hadn’t been answered.
Her question had interrupted Li’s attempt to frame the situation as an insult to her good character, her master and her ancestors. She felt a tinge of guilt. They were unsatisfied with uncovering such a truth and were still trying to help, even as Li defamed them in the depths of her mind.
Treason, then. She had already said enough for her life to be forfeit - abolishing her cultivation would be too light a punishment. “The Iron Scripture tells the story of a time when tools were made of bronze and there were only a handful of cultivators on each continent,” said Daoist Li.
Alice nodded at her, prompting her to continue.
“On the northern tip of the Middle Continent sits the city of Bei’an. The city spans the entirety of Black Dragon Peninsula and watches over the Dragonstrait. At the tip of the peninsula sits a lonely mountain. Before the city existed, a sect was born within the mountain. Before the sect rose, the mountain had no name.”
There was something flattering about having the pair hang onto her every word. These were things she could not discuss with any of the cultivators who she did consider friends. When Li spoke with her master, he was always the one to tell stories.
“When the mountain had no name, it was a mine. It was not the first mine, but it was the first of its kind - from there our ancestors discovered an ore that did not require the addition of tin buried in the frozen north to form a malleable metal.”
“Iron,” whispered Alice.
Li nodded, smiling. “Heavy and strong and dark is iron - and unyielding. Bronze bends with little effort - and so did the empires who challenged the iron from this mountain. The Iron Scripture starts not with the story of a great man but the fury of the downtrodden who swung at the walls beneath the mountain. It is the lament of the unworthy who burned themselves smelting it. It is the fear of the first shapers who were used to test the sharpness of the swords they forged.”
David and Alice, who had a strange love for the common folk of Dongjing, already hated the faceless villains in her story.
“Before the dynasty of the Dun Emperor who Pushed the Waves, there was the dynasty of the Xi Emperor who Broke the Chains. But just as the Dun Emperor would unite the continents in trade despite his name, the Xi Emperor would bind the world with the Linking Mnemonic. This is why the Iron Scripture exists - it is the legacy of those who named Anvil Mountain. It is the memory of those who passed the mandate by putting their masters to the sabers they forged. It is the testament of those who gave the Xi Emperor swords.”
“And even if the edicts from the Dragon Throne demanded the slaughter of scholars and sect masters, even if every book would burn, iron would remember its true form,” finished Alice, in words Li wanted to use.
“Not written in the Scripture are the records of the sect,” said Daoist Li. “Once upon a time, every disciple cultivated the Iron Scripture and used it to build their foundations. Only one sect older than the Iron Scripture survives to this day - and we claim more immortal ancestors than any of the Nine Great Sects. But we have forgotten the old ways. Since the Dun Emperor, we have believed this not to be the fault of the stars but a fault of our character.”
After she spoke, Daoist Li came across a moment of revelation. The Iron Scripture had no beginning or end because it was not meant to be read in a chain unbroken. It was not meant to be linked into a consistent narrative of the world. It was not history according to an emperor.
Each of the founders of the sect, numbering in the hundreds, had contributed their advice to those who would follow them. It detailed tricks of metalworking which would make a sword shine on a moonless night, gave directions to flowers grown on cliffs long eroded into the sea to please a lover, insisted on the superiority of mooncakes made with a recipe long lost, exposed intricate ways to fleece taels off fat merchants in the Old Capital.
There was more to the Scripture than just parables explaining the secrets of qi. These were the hopes and dreams of people who knew they would never have the right to invite the lightning, people who lived in interesting times.
And some of these secrets were matters of cultivation that Li had eagerly learned. From the winding description of a dull drumming pickaxe hitting a vein, Daoist Li had learned to shatter stone with her bare hands. From the complaints of that keening wail of metal crossing a whetstone, Daoist Li had learned to swing a sword. These matters were not more important than the others.
Her foundation could not be the words she found most profound in the Iron Scripture. It needed to be the one thing that bound the lives of those who had written the Scripture together.
“I need iron.”