"Sit against the wall," Yun Qingshuang said.
Han Jiu sat against the wall.
She pulled the blanket off the bed frame, folded it twice, and put it on the floor in the middle of the room. Then she sat on it with her back straight and her palms facing up. It was the same position she had tried to teach him on the first day. He still couldn’t do it.
"What did you work out?" he asked.
"The part they never gave me."
"Which part?"
"I’ve been thinking about that for ten days." She turned one hand over and looked at it. "Every cultivation method has two halves. The first half is the circulation. That part is written on the jade slip, and that’s the part I taught you. Twelve folds. Anyone who can read can learn it, if they have the slip and enough time."
"And the second half?"
"It isn’t written down anywhere. A teacher who has already done it tells you in person, and they only tell disciples who reach the Foundation realm." She put her hand down. "I got the slip when I was eight. Every teacher in the sect knew I’d reach Foundation one day, so nobody was in a hurry to teach me the rest."
"So you were years away from the full method."
"I was years away from everything. That’s how sects work. They give you things on a schedule, and the schedule assumes you’ll still be there when the day comes."
"Then how do you know it now?"
"Because of you."
Han Jiu blinked.
"I don’t mean you’re clever," she said. "I mean this. I’ve practised the twelve folds every day for eleven years, and I never once had to explain them to anyone. Then you sat on my floor with your ruined hands and got the fourth fold wrong. You got it wrong in a way I’d never seen before. To understand why it went wrong, I had to take the fold apart."
"And?"
"And the twelfth one isn’t a fold at all." She flexed her fingers. "It’s a seam. The first eleven folds each lay down a layer of Qi and press it flat. The twelfth one seals the edges shut, so nothing can leak out between the layers."
Han Jiu understood, and his whole body went cold.
"It stops the leaking," he said.
"It stops the leaking."
"So how much less do you need now?"
"I don’t need less. My root still eats five times as much as yours does. That will never change. That’s just what my root is." She turned her palm over. "What changes is how much I keep. Right now, if I take in five, I only keep one. With the seal, I should keep half of whatever I take in."
He did the maths twice before he believed it.
"Five in, and you keep two and a half."
"Which means I cost twice as much as an ordinary cultivator, instead of five times as much." She let out a breath. "I won’t be cheap. Nothing will ever make me cheap."
"Twice is something you can survive."
"Twice is a person," she said. "Five times is a hole."
"And nobody ever checked this?"
"Coldpeak gave me a cold method because I have a cold root. It was the obvious choice. Nobody sat down and worked out what the second half would do to a root like mine. Why would they? They thought they had years." She looked at the shuttered window. "The whole assessment was built on one number. Five. If the number isn’t really five, then I don’t really cost a hundred and fifty thousand stones. And the three pages my uncle wrote about me are wrong."
Han Jiu opened the drawer behind his skull. He started counting frostmarrow into her hands, ten pieces at a time, because that was all his fingers could hold.
Two hundred and ninety.
Two hundred and forty.
A hundred and eighty.
"Stop," she said, when he had ninety left. "You’re not thinking."
"I have thought about it."
"You only have ninety pieces left, and there aren’t any more coming. You told me you had a lot. You don’t have a lot. This is all of it."
"I can get more."
"From wherever you got it before? I saw what that place did to you." Her hands were full, and she didn’t put them down. "Ninety pieces would keep me from getting weaker for four months. If this doesn’t work, you’ll have wasted all of that."
"Going from seventh stage to eighth costs sixteen hundred stones for a normal root," he said, and kept counting. "At five times, that’s eight thousand stones. That would be six hundred and sixty pieces of frostmarrow, and I’ve never had that many. Not even on the night I came out of the mine. But at twice the cost, it’s two hundred and seventy pieces." He shut the drawer. "And I have two hundred and seventy."
Yun Qingshuang looked down at the pile in her lap.
"You worked all that out while I was talking," she said. "You’re a very strange person."
Then she began.
She went slowly. She used five or six pieces at a time. After each group, she stopped and sat with her eyes shut, doing something inside her body that he couldn’t see.
Frost came, but only a little. It spread to the edge of the blanket and stopped there. By the tenth group, it didn’t even reach the blanket.
Nothing was leaking out.
By the hundredth piece, she had stopped resting between groups. The frostmarrow turned clear in her hand, one piece after another. The air in the room felt tight, the way it feels right before a storm.
’It’s holding,’ Qingshuang thought. For the first time in three years, her cultivation was going up instead of down. She was so happy that she nearly lost control of the seam.
After two hundred pieces, she started to shake. It wasn’t the small shake in her hands from the first night. Her whole body shook, even her teeth. But her hands stayed open and steady the whole time.
He started to say her name. Before he could finish, she said, without opening her eyes, "Don’t."
It happened at the two hundred and seventieth piece.
There was no crack and no flash of light. The tight feeling in the air just stopped, all at once.
Then Yun Qingshuang bent forward, put both hands flat on the floor, and started laughing.
Han Jiu had never heard her laugh before. It was an awful sound. It sounded more like being sick than being happy. He stayed where he was and let it happen, because he didn’t know what else to do.
When she finished, she stayed bent over her knees, with her hair hanging down onto the floor.
"Eighth stage," she said to the floor.
Han Jiu’s hands hurt. He realised he had been squeezing them into fists.
"I counted while you counted," she said. "Two hundred and seventy pieces. Before today, I would have needed six hundred and sixty."
She sat up. She looked exhausted, and very young.
"I’m still expensive. I want you to understand that before you get any silly ideas. But now I’m a person. This morning, I was a hole."
Then the system spoke.
[Recipient has advanced. Yun Qingshuang: Qi Gathering, seventh stage to eighth stage. Conditions met for the first tier up of the system.]
[System tier: 2. Return rate: fifty-fold.]
Fifty.
Not ten. Fifty.
’She grew stronger, and that’s what upgraded the system,’ he thought. ’Her growing was the condition.’
He checked the drawer. Twenty pieces of frostmarrow and one pill, the same as before. The system hadn’t paid him anything for tonight. It had only raised how much it would pay him next time.
He looked across the room at his wife. Her hair was stuck to her forehead with sweat, and her hands were still shaking.
"You’ve gone pale again," Yun Qingshuang said.
"It’s been a long day."
She let it go. Then her eyes stopped moving, and he knew she was thinking hard about something.
"I’ve made a mistake," she said.
"You just went up a stage."
"I went up a stage, and my uncle’s whole argument is that I can’t." She pushed her hair back with her hand. "Why does Yun Hai get to run the Yun Clan?"
"Because he was right about you," Han Jiu said. "The sect said you were too expensive. He wrote his pages. The family agreed with him. Everything he has now depends on him being right."
"And if the number was never really five, then he didn’t make a hard choice about a bad investment." She said it very calmly, and that was how he knew how angry she was. "He killed his own brother because of a mistake in the maths."
The back of Han Jiu’s neck went cold.
She looked at the barred door.
"Until now, he’s been happy to wait for me to die. If he finds out what happened in this room tonight, he’ll stop waiting."