Ostium, Demon Lands

At the heart of the Demon Lord’s Palace there was a garden. Cherry blossom trees lined its pebbled paths. It was late spring and the trees were in full bloom, a festival of pink under a clear blue sky. The Lord stood there in perfect silence, watching a single blossom sag, droop, and at last break from its branch, drifting once, twice, thrice to land in his waiting palm. Just as he’d known it would.

He wished for a flower, but there was no need for a ladder. He knew these trees intimately, had tended them since they were saplings. He was in the business of knowing. So that when the time was right, all he needed to do was reach out a hand.

He had gone to great lengths to import this breed, found only in the human Emperor’s gardens. Some things you owned for others’ sakes—a great Palace, like this one, overflowing with gold, burdened with the weight of crystal chandeliers.

Some things you owned for your own sake. Gently he set the flower on the ground.

The paths were made of pebbles which the Lord spent an hour each day raking until they were perfectly smooth. He found it meditative.

A cloaked figure shambled up this path now. A snout poked out from the garment. His servant Caius; a lesser demon, still prone to feral fits. The more powerful the demon, the more human they seemed.

At a distance the Demon Lord could’ve been mistaken for a human—quite a beautiful one. The only things that’d give him away were his tail and his striking red eyes, which all demons had.

“We have new reports,” said Caius. “Two weeks ago, the child broke through to mid Qi Condensation.”

“That is… disturbing,” said the Lord. “I’ll have to revise my projections.”

By his projections, it should’ve taken a year longer. Most human children had yet to awaken.

“And he’s begun martial training. Our plants report his learning a basic Martial Technique at a glance. He is charismatic as well—all he meets speak well of him. Left unchecked he’ll become a figure to shake the realm.”

“Then it truly is as I feared,” sighed the Lord. “We’ll have to dispatch him early. Prophecies are such fickle things. Inevitable, yet they can be delayed, perhaps indefinitely… if he will not fulfill it, let it be another. These things seldom go in ways we can expect or predict.”

Caius nodded. “Another thing—his sister, the girl. Ruyi. She has achieved Mind-Sense—at the age of seven.”

The Lord stilled. “That is remarkable.”

“She has since made her first successful brew. She is the youngest human in five hundred years to achieve such a feat. Usually I would not include this in my report, but….”

“You thought I, in particular, would have an interest in the matter. Of course. Seven years, how many months?”

“Eight months, twelve days.”

“Then she has beaten me by two months.” The Demon Lord smiled, tickled. “Remarkable indeed… Still, with no core the child is little more than a curiosity. She means nothing to my plans.”

“Should I cease observing her?”

“No,” said the Lord. “Continue. I appreciate a little whimsy. You may go.”

Caius dissolved into the shadows.

The Lord glanced inward, observed the ripples on the placid lake of his mind. Why had he said that? Strange. He was not usually given to trifles. And yet…

He had a feeling. A flower sagging on a branch.

Over the centuries, he’d learned to listen to feelings like this.

***

4 years later…

Ruyi felt she’d been judged by a different standard ever since birth. It was true even in Alchemy.

Gao made her succeed a thousand times in practice before she could attempt a simple brew. It was a matter of safety.

“If I make a mistake, I suffer little more than a blackened face,” said Gao. “Perhaps a missing limb in a nastier brew. If you mistake, I will be scraping your organs off the walls.”

Ruyi had chafed at it at first, but she had to admit it was true. She had no qi to protect her. She had to rely on herself.

Which was nothing new.

They brewed in an underground chamber Father had built for her sake—her own little lab, just outside the mansion. Steel walls, blast proof, with a grille at the top to let out smoke. There she had made her first Healing Elixir, her first antidote, her first poison. Each of which father displayed behind glass in the entrance hall. You’d almost think he was proud of her.

She still slept in the guest rooms. On banquet nights she was still not allowed to make an appearance. Not that proud of her. But in three years she’d made quite some progress, in Alchemy and in his estimation.

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After her first healing elixir she had this fantasy that she’d conquer all Alchemy in a year. She was prone to such fantasies. It turned out a basic low-grade healing elixir was by far the easiest brew. Increase an elixir’s grade, and increase an elixir’s specificity, and the brews grew orders of magnitude more complex.

Gao’s teaching style had also slowed her. Gao did not teach her one elixir or one class of elixir. Most alchemists had their specialties and were mediocre everywhere else—but Gao sought to teach her alchemy, which she defined as an intuition borne out of relentless practice. Commoners memorized. Geniuses felt. When she’d asked if she was a genius—a little cheekily—Gao had said, “Idiot girl. What do you think?” and cuffed her over the head, which was about as close you could get to a compliment from the old lady.

In three years she’d graduated from basic brews to intermediate ones. Now, under Gao’s supervision, she brewed a mid-grade antidote to Lion’s Bane.

Gao gave the flame: she opened a tiny case and a spark leapt out, lighting the wood. Then she poured into the cauldron the foundation of nearly every brew—a healthy serving of Spirit Water. When Ruyi dipped her stirring rod in, reached through it with her Mind Power, the Water was a blank canvas in her mind’s eye.

Slowly, she added in color.

“What’s the hardest thing you’ve brewed?” she asked. Gao never spoke of her normal life. Ruyi was beginning to suspect she didn’t have one. Every so often she’d prod, trying to eke out a detail, and every time Gao gave her nothing.

Sure enough—“Focus!” snapped Gao.

“Please. I can do this drunk, blindfolded and drugged—ow!”

Gao had pinched her. Now she was wagging a finger. It was impressive how much disapproval she could fit in her one working eye. “That ego will be the death of you.”

“That pinch was more distracting than anything I said,” Ruyi sulked. “And the brew’s still going well, isn’t it?”

Gao sighed. “I stoppered the Essence of Blue Lightning. It was the brew which earned me the title of Master. It has been years since I have attempted anything near as complex.”

“Really?” Ruyi frowned. “What do you do all day?”

“I am a research Alchemist,” sniffed Gao. “Research. It is in the name. I publish tomes through the Guild. I distribute my findings to the Alchemy community. I discover, document, and theorize on the properties of ingredients and their possible uses. I push the boundaries of alchemical knowledge. That is what I do all day.”

“Hmm,” said Ruyi. “Sounds like a bunch of nothing to me.”

She yelped. But it was worth the pinch.

“Try spending a day doing what I do. Let’s see what you think then, idiot girl.”

“Can I?” asked Ruyi, excited. A little too excited, since she almost lost the brew then—she righted it before Gao could notice.

“No.” Gao turned away, muttering to herself. “She makes a few basic elixirs, and she thinks she’s the Heavens’ gift to Alchemy. Pssht.”

A pause. She saw Gao crack a faint smile.

“Perhaps after you get your Alchemists’ license. Give it a few years. Then we’ll see.”

Silently, Ruyi cheered.

There was no elixir that could grow one’s core. It was one of the first things she’d checked. Dozens of tomes said the same—once one is crippled, once one’s core is broken, it is impossible to recover.

Gao had one thing right. She did have an ego. She had to, to think all those textbooks were full of nonsense. Then again, Gao said the same—written by stodgy old coots with no imagination. Who were they to tell Ruyi what she could and could not do?

***

For ten years Ruyi had lived within the same dozen or so li.

Then one day, for no reason as far as she could tell, Father said over dinner, “Would you like to see Jin’s match? It is the finals.”

Until that point, she had been studiously avoiding news of Jin’s martial exploits. She was vaguely aware he was defeating boys far older than he in some important tournament. The whole city was watching, apparently. Jin was perhaps the only tolerable boy she knew.

He grew steadily less tolerable the more she thought about his martial exploits. One time the wind from one of his fists had knocked over an old family tree by accident. She’d tried kicking that tree, back when she was convinced she could become a martial warrior through sheer grit, and got nothing but a bloody shin for it.

At Father’s words she leapt to her feet, swallowed a gulp of hot soup, and nearly screamed, “Yes!”

Which was how she found herself in a carriage. Not a pretty painted wooden thing, like the ones Father took on official visits. This was a boxy brute, all steel plates. It looked like it was built to take a beating.

“In,” was Father’s only word.

To her surprise, there were already people in the carriage. A tall man in a swanky gold-lined silk robes and a fluffy-haired boy in the same garb, only smaller. The boy looked to be about her age—perhaps a little less. The man gave her a cursory glance. The boy stared rudely, mouth a little open.

“This is Duke Shen, our neighbor, and an old friend,” said Father, sliding in. She was not aware Father had friends. People came and drank and spoke with him, but that had never seemed the same thing to her.

“We are to escort him and his son to the match.” Father latched the door shut.

“And who is this?” asked the Duke.

“My daughter,” said Father. No hesitation. She felt unreasonably happy to hear him say it to someone else. A duke, no less. Father’s face was so carefully blank you could hardly tell he was ashamed of her.

“I didn’t know you had a daughter,” said the Duke. To which Father merely grunted. “This is my son Kai,” said the Duke.

“Hello,” she said, turning to the boy, pretending she hadn’t noticed him staring at her this whole time. He jerked in his seat, red-faced, and looked out the window—as though she hadn’t said a thing! He wouldn’t meet her eye. He seemed determined to pretend she didn’t exist.

There was little she hated more than being ignored.

The carriage croaked into motion. It was so clanky and grumbly it spared her from any conversation, thank Heavens. Father and Shen began talking about politics things scarcely more comprehensible than the carriage’s clanking.

As they passed the white walls which split Jade Dragon City in two, it was as though they’d passed into a new realm of darker colors. The Lower City was everything the Upper City was not. Streets were filthy and uneven rather than paved and swept. Buildings were small and squat, not tall and sleek. People were hunched rather than proud. They scurried instead of strutting, and their eyes were yellowed, their mouths checkerboards of blackened teeth.

Most striking was the space. The Upper City bathed in green fields—neighbors could be tens of li apart. But in the lower city you could hardly wave an arm without striking someone. Buildings shot out of other buildings like cancerous growths, crowding out the sky; it all looked on the verge of toppling.

It was loud, too, loud with people and their banging and grumbling and shouting. And it introduced to her flavors of stink she hadn’t known possible.

And through it all the boy kept looking at her when he thought she wasn’t looking. She’d let her eyes drift over, and suddenly he’d be looking out the window. Or at his feet.

Was he mocking her? It was getting on her nerves.

Near the end of their ride, she caught him in the act. “Why are you staring at me?” she snapped.

It was like she’d struck him. His face went red, his eyes went wide and blinky. His lips began to tremble. Suddenly he seemed on the verge of tears, the little wimp.

“S-s-sorry!” he cried. His voice was surprisingly soft. “It’s just—” He looked at his feet, blushing hard. “You’re really pretty…”

“Oh,” she said, sitting back. She… supposed that was forgivable. She wasn’t sure what to say. Maybe it would have been polite to say, “Thank you.” Instead she sniffed, “I know.”

And began studiously staring out the window. Now her face was red too.

He didn’t dare look at her for the rest of the ride, to her disappointment.