The ancestral hall was full. Han Zhengyuan sat at the front of it. He looked ten years older than he had at the wedding, and Han Jiu wouldn’t have believed that was possible.
Elder Yun Hai sat beside him in a guest’s chair, holding a cup of tea.
"The Yun Clan will be staying in Greypine Valley for thirty days," Yun Hai said, before anyone else could speak. "To keep an eye on the marriage. Purely because we care about our daughter."
He put the cup down.
"Of course, if we find out that the bride has been treated badly, then the marriage has failed. And the Coldpeak Sect will hear that the Han Clan can’t follow a simple order."
He smiled at Han Jiu over the edge of the cup.
"And of course, if the bride injures her husband or his family, the way I hear she did this morning, then the Han Clan can’t control what it was given. So the marriage has failed. And the Coldpeak Sect will hear about that too."
The hall went silent.
Han Jiu looked up at his grandfather. His grandfather looked back at him. For the first time in seventeen years, the old man didn’t look away from his ninth grandson.
"An order," Han Jiu said.
Yun Hai blinked and looked at him.
"At the gate yesterday, you told everyone that my grandfather begged for this marriage. You said it loudly, in front of three hundred people. And you enjoyed saying it."
"Boy," said Han Zhengyuan. It was a warning to stop talking.
"He didn’t beg." Han Jiu’s mouth was still bleeding, and he found that he didn’t care. "The Coldpeak Sect ordered this marriage. They put both clans’ names on the same piece of paper. The fight over the mines, and the eleven dead men on that road, cost the sect two seasons of new disciples from this valley. The sect got tired of the trouble."
Nobody in the hall said anything.
That silence was the answer.
"Nobody wanted this marriage," Han Jiu said. "Your clan didn’t want it either. You had to hand over the only child you ever thought was worth anything, and you couldn’t admit that out loud in front of your own people. So you dressed her in red, put her on a supply cart, and let three hundred strangers laugh at her. That way, the story is that the Yun Clan threw something away. Not that the Yun Clan was told what to do."
Elder Yun Hai’s face didn’t change.
But he put his tea down, and he didn’t pick it up again.
"You talk a lot," he said, "for a young man who showed two bulls at his own wedding."
"People tell me it’s the only interesting thing about me."
"Thirty days," said Yun Hai.
Han Jiu understood then. That was the real punishment.
Once every year, three sects sent people down into Greypine Valley to look for new disciples.
They set up a measuring stele in the outer courtyard. Every young man and woman who wanted to leave the valley came and stood in front of it.
The stele couldn’t make anyone show more power than they wanted to. It could only prove that the number they showed was real, and not faked.
The number you needed was forty.
It had been forty since Han Jiu’s great-great-grandfather was a boy. All three sects used it. A smaller sect couldn’t ask for less, or it would only ever get the boys the bigger sects didn’t want.
If you showed forty bulls, one of the sects took you in as an outer disciple. They gave you a cultivation method much better than anything a small clan like the Han could afford. They gave you pills when you needed them. They gave you spirit stones every month. In return, you worked for the sect, did the jobs they gave you, and kept getting stronger.
If you showed two hundred and fifty-six, you became an inner disciple, and all three sects fought over you.
If you showed two, you went back to sweeping out a storeroom.
The Coldpeak Sect was the closest. It was only three days up the north road. Coldpeak took nine out of every ten people this valley ever sent away. A poor boy from Greypine with no name always walked to the nearest mountain that would feed him.
"Ninth grandson."
"Grandfather."
"Thirty days." Han Zhengyuan’s voice was tired and empty. "If there is one more problem, the council will cross your name out of the family records. Then they’ll hand you both over to Elder Yun, to deal with as his own family business. Do you understand what I’m telling you? Not just the words. What the words really mean."
"Yes, Grandfather. You’re telling me that when it happens, you won’t be able to stop it."
The old man’s jaw tightened.
"...Then go," he said. "And find a way to keep that woman fed and quiet with nothing at all. This clan isn’t going to give you a single stone. Not one. Don’t come to my door and ask me for one, because I’ll have to say no in front of the council. And I’d rather not have to do that."
Han Jiu bowed, and left.
...
The frost pools were an hour’s walk up the north track.
There were six black pools in the rock there, where the mountain’s cold spirit vein came up to the surface. Moss grew on their walls. An alchemy shop bought it for two coppers a bundle, and even then, they still tried to pay less.
Han Jiu stood at the edge of the first pool with his sleeves already rolled up. The cold came off the water, and he worked out the numbers.
He needed to show forty bulls in thirty days.
The third stage was four bulls. The fourth stage was eight. The fifth stage was sixteen, which was one iron bull. The sixth stage was two iron bulls, which was thirty-two. And thirty-two still wasn’t forty.
So the honest way to reach forty bulls was the seventh stage. Four iron bulls.
There was one other way. A better cultivation method would double everything he showed. A spirit technique would multiply it again on top of that. With either one of those, the sixth stage would get him past forty easily.
But small clans only gave out cheap, mortal-rank methods. And a spirit technique worth learning cost even more than spirit stones did.
He knew what every stage cost. Everybody did, the same way everyone in a poor family knows the price of rice.
A hundred stones to reach the fourth stage. Two hundred for the fifth. Four hundred for the sixth. Eight hundred for the seventh. The price doubled at every stage, all the way to the top of Qi Gathering.
All together, that was fifteen hundred spirit stones.
Then he doubled it again, because of his root.
Han Jiu stood very still and let that number sink in.
Thirty days in this freezing water, with his hands going numb up past the wrist, earned him one low-grade spirit stone. Three thousand stones would take two hundred and fifty years of cutting moss.
And there it was. The truth he had managed to avoid looking at for four whole years.
Nobody got stronger by working like this. Nobody ever had. He didn’t have two hundred and fifty years.
Han Bo hadn’t earned the eighth stage. He had been fed it, four hundred stones at a time, out of a vault that three hundred people spent their whole lives filling up. Every cultivator in the Six Valleys who had ever become anything had been carried there on somebody else’s money.
That was exactly what the Coldpeak assessor had explained to Yun Qingshuang’s father. Kindly. One line at a time. Like a man explaining a bad harvest.
That was how the whole world worked. Han Jiu had never seen it clearly until this morning.
Cultivation wasn’t a mountain you climbed by yourself.
It was a bill that somebody else had to agree to pay.
His stipend was gone. His clan wouldn’t spend a single stone on him. His wife burned five stones for every one she managed to keep.
And he had three.
Han Jiu looked down at the black water. He didn’t put his hands in it.
The system paid him back ten times whatever something had cost him. Ten times, for now. The message had said this was the first tier. It had also said ten thousand times, somewhere far above, on a ladder he didn’t understand yet.
But the system only multiplied things. It didn’t create them out of nothing.
Ten times nothing was still nothing. And moss was the smallest thing in the world.
He turned his back on the pools and looked north, up the track. Over the top of the ridge, the old Greypine mine shafts stood boarded up behind Yun Clan seals.
The good parts of the mine had gone to the Yun Clan, along with everything else. But the old tunnels on Han land still had ore in them, deep down, where the mountain had collapsed and crushed the tunnels shut. Nobody dug there. It wasn’t because it was forbidden.
It was because the men who went in didn’t always come back out.
Han Jiu rolled his sleeves back down.
He needed to get his hands on something big. Something that would cost him a lot more than moss.