[Would you like to begin? 😇]
Let’s start, Qian Fan thought.
The manual arrived the way everything from the System arrived: all at once, and already in his hands.
It was thinner than he expected: old paper the color of weak tea, bound with a faded red cord. The characters ran down each page in straight columns, stiff and upright, like men who had never once in their lives been asked to smile for a photo.
The only light in the room came from the System’s panel, hovering politely beside his shoulder. He found this insulting and read by it anyway.
The first page was a preface. He skimmed it the way he had skimmed ten thousand terms and conditions in his last life, and one line snagged on the way past.
Every other road burns what it gathers. What is kept, breathes.
He read that one twice.
The second page was a verse. Someone had written at the top of it in a much different and crankier hand: To be committed to memory before the practice begins.
Heaven is round. Earth is square.
The coin takes the shape of both, and belongs to neither.
Round without, that it may pass from hand to hand.
Square within, that the string may hold it.
Man, too, is a coin.
Qian Fan looked down at himself, a thin boy in a patched shirt sitting cross-legged on a thin mattress, and decided that if he was a coin, then he was a copper.
The verse went on. Gold and Metal are one word. Draw it in through the square. Walk it round the rim. Return it to the storehouse. There was something near the bottom about rich men and poor men, but he was already turning the page.
Chapter One. The Centre. Knowing Wealth.
The fool counts coins. The merchant knows them.
He smiled. He had been counting coins since before he could walk, in two different lives. Whatever else this was, it was going to be easy.
He turned to the last page.
Here the gift ends.
Beneath it ran a single line of characters so faint he could not make out one of them. Water damage, maybe. Or a sect that had not paid its copyists.
OR…a greedy system that makes its Host pay for everything.
The four quarters and the rim are not given. They are sold. A merchant who gives away the whole of his goods is no merchant, and this is a sect of merchants.
After that came five more chapter titles, each alone at the top of an empty page.
Chapter Two. The East: Growing Interest.
Chapter Three. The South: Scattering Wealth.
Chapter Four. The West: Touching Gold.
Chapter Five. The North: Hidden Gold.
Chapter Six. The Rim: The Whole Coin.
[🔒 Full access: 40 silver taels! 😊]
Four hundred years ago, Qian Fan thought, somebody invented the free trial and wrote it into a holy book.
He respected them enormously. A merchant is greedy indeed; what more of a sect composed of merchants.
* * *
He did it by the book.
He sat with his spine hung like a string from heaven. He rested his hands on his knees, palms up, the centres of them open to the sky. The manual called them the Palaces of Labour. In this life, his hands had never done any.
Then he summoned his wealth and counted it.
Five silver taels. Seventy-eight copper coins. One Qi Condensation Breakthrough Pill. One Marrow Cleansing Pill. Four Lesser Body Tempering Pills. One towel. Correct to the last copper, because it was always correct to the last copper, because he is Qian Fan.
Nothing happened.
He counted again. Nothing.
[Would it help if I displayed your holdings, Host? 😊]
[Current Holdings: 5 silver taels, 78 coppers. 1x Qi Condensation Breakthrough Pill. 1x Marrow Cleansing Pill. 4x Lesser Body Tempering Pill. 1x Towel 😊]
The numbers were right. He held them in his mind, exactly, perfectly.
Nothing.
He went back to the third page and found the line he had skimmed, waiting for him like a bored receptionist at the counter.
The lord who is told his wealth by his stewards gathers nothing.
What the fuck does that mean…
He looked at the panel. The panel glowed back at him.
“You’re the steward,” he said.
[I prefer “Wealth Management Partner.” 😊]
Fine, Qian Fan thought. Not counting. Knowing.
Round without, square within. He almost laughed, because he knew this one. Every company he had ever worked for had taught it to him in a windowless room with free biscuits. Friendly on the outside. Firm on the inside. Smile at the customer; never move on the price.
The whole secret of an ancient sect was customer service.
So he tried again, and this time he valued his things the way he would have valued them across a counter. The breakthrough pill: eighty silver, easily, to the right buyer. The marrow pill: twenty at least.
Something stirred.
A thread, thin and cold, slipped in beneath his navel, exactly where the instructor had always told forty children where the Sea of Qi would be located. It tasted, impossibly, of copper, as though he had been holding a coin in his mouth.
Gold and Metal are one word.
Oh, Qian Fan thought. That’s what it meant.
The thread began to sink.
Then it stopped, and hung, and grew heavy, like wet sand. A hot prickle ran up the inside of his left arm, and the thread soured.
What is counted falsely does not settle.
Eighty silver to the right buyer. And who, exactly, was the right buyer? Where in Wutong City could a vegetable seller’s son sell a Qi Condensation pill without the whole market asking where he’d found it?
He had priced it like a man selling. He didn’t own it like a man selling. He owned it like a boy with a secret.
He opened his mouth to correct himself.
“Son? You still up? I thought I heard you talking.”
The thread snapped. It went out of him like a coin dropped down a well, and he felt it go all the way to the bottom, and heard nothing at all.
A circle broken cannot be mended. Begin again from the first coin.
Qian Fan closed his eyes. “Yes, Father.”
The curtain moved. Qian Hou put his head inside the room, saw his son sitting cross-legged in the dark with his palms turned up and his lips still shaping numbers, and paused.
“Praying?”
“...Yes.”
His father nodded slowly, with deep approval. “To the God of Wealth?”
If you can count it as one.
“...Yes.”
“Good,” said Qian Hou, with feeling. “Good boy. Put in a word for the radishes.” He began to withdraw, then added, “Your mother’s still up too. Must run in the family.”
The curtain fell back.
Qian Fan sat in the dark, extremely annoyed, and listened to the house settle.
And through the thin wall, he heard his mother.
He had heard her every night of his life and never once listened. A low murmur at the edge of sleep, the small clink of coins moving from one pile to another. He had always assumed she was counting.
She wasn’t.
“Radishes,” Liu An was saying softly. Clink. “Tuesday. The fat man with the handcart.” Clink. “Mending. Widow Luo’s grandson, the trousers with the knees gone.” Clink. A pause. “And this one.” A longer pause, fond and exasperated. “The day your father overpaid the rice man, and the rice man gave it back.”
She never said a number.
She didn’t need to. She knew them.
The fool counts coins. The merchant knows them. To count is to know how many. To know is to know how much.
Qian Fan found the rest of it on the third page, and this time he read it slowly.
A coin has three faces: what it will buy, what it was bought with, and what it may yet become.
He put the manual down and began again from the first coin.
* * *
Not a number. A coin.
Thirty coppers from a porter with a ruined back, still warm from the man’s pocket. Twenty-five from a skinny boy who had counted them out one at a time and run off as if he’d been handed a sword. Thirty from an old woman who had told Qian Fan he had an honest face, which had made the system giggle. Twenty-five from a red-faced lackey who had chanted “Young Master Wudi is invincible!” until his voice gave out, paid from a very thin purse. Thirty more from the porter, who had slept through the night for the first time in years and wanted two jars, and had looked into his purse, and then at the sky, and bought one.
Sixty-five gone again across the cart to a boy with a bundle of embroidery. He didn’t regret them. He found he knew them exactly as well as the ones that had stayed.
And three coppers, still warm from a pouch they’d sat in for less than an hour, that had bought a boy a thirty-silver book and a hundred and four weeks.
Five silver taels that had fallen out of a gift and cost him nothing at all. He knew that too. It was also a kind of knowing.
A jade-green pill that nobody in this city would buy from him without asking questions he couldn’t answer. Worth, tonight, in his hands, an honest and miserable little number, and a great deal of worry.
Four brown pills. Eating one would help him. It would also leave him one fewer thing to count. He decided not to think about that yet.
One towel, which had been free, and which he valued at nothing, because he did not trust it.
The thread came.
It came in cold and heavy through the square below his navel, tasting copper, and this time it did not hang. It sank, slow as a stone through still water, down to the Meeting of Yin at the root of his body. Then it turned and began to climb.
Up his spine it went, through the Gate of Life between his kidneys, one bone at a time, like beads pushed up the wire of a reckoning-board. Somewhere between his shoulder blades, a vertebra that had ached every evening for a year settled into place with a small click he felt rather than heard.
The walking is the refining. What the walking touches, it tempers.
It crossed the crown of his head, the Hundred Meetings, a faint pressure like a thumb resting there. It came down over his brow, his throat, his breast, and it was warmer now, much warmer; the cold metal in it cooked slowly into something that felt, unmistakably, like his own.
It never went near his arms. His hands lay on his knees, palms to the sky, exactly as cold as they had been all night.
The thread reached the square again, and wanted to settle.
It couldn’t.
It hung just above the Sea of Qi and waited. Qian Fan knew that kind of waiting. In his last life, he had stood at a thousand counters while somebody on the other side held out a hand.
It wanted a receipt.
So he squared it. The coppers, every one: true. The silver: true. The green pill, at its miserable honest price: true. The brown ones. The towel.
Still it hung.
He went through it again, and felt the thread lean, the way a column leans when it doesn’t add up. Coppers. Silver. Green. Brown. Towel.
Grey.
The Marrow Cleansing Pill. Twenty silver taels, sitting in his inventory, forgotten entirely because it smelled like a pond.
The moment he named it, the thread sank an inch.
One more thing. He knew what it was before he reached it.
The debt. Thirty silver, over a hundred and four weeks.
Thirty silver, he thought, and the hot prickle ran down the inside of his arm again, sharp as a misstitched seam.
Thirty silver was the price. It wasn’t what he held. What he held tonight was a hundred and four lines on a scrap of pattern paper, a first payment not due for two weeks, and the word of a boy who has read every clause.
Do not count what is owed to you as what is held. A debt is a promise, and a promise is not silver.
Owed, he corrected. Not held.
The prickly feeling faded.
The thread dropped the last inch through the square and settled into his belly, the place where the instructor had always said the Sea of Qi would be, and where Qian Fan, in sixteen years, had never felt anything but lunch.
It did not burn there, the way the other children described it. It did not roar or spin. It sat down the way a coin sits down on a stack, and stayed.
His dantian, he realized, was not behaving like a furnace.
It was behaving like a room with shelves.
He opened his eyes.
It was not much. Less than an hour of horse stance would have given him, and the horse stance would at least have hurt, honestly. But it was his. And he had not lifted even a single finger to get it.
Qian Fan lay back in the dark, cultivating by inventory, and began, silently and helplessly, to laugh into the crook of his elbow.
[Host? 😊]
Nothing, he thought. It’s perfect. Go away.
He lay there a while longer, smiling at the ceiling, and let himself think about forty silver taels for the rest of it.
The taste of copper on his tongue went sour.
Not the clean taste of the thread. Something flat and bitter, like biting a coin at the market to test it and finding lead underneath the plating.
Qian Fan swallowed. The feeling still stayed.
Oh no, he thought. It’s going to do that every time.
* * *
He did not sleep. He kept catching himself going back through the coppers, the porter, the boy, the old woman, and the three for the book, and discovered that, for the first time in two lives, counting kept him awake instead of putting him to sleep.
He fell asleep near dawn, which meant he was late to morning cultivation.
The training yard was already full when he slipped into the back row. Fifty side-branch children held their horse stances under the bamboo cane, breathing on the instructor’s count. In for four. Hold for two. Down to the dantian.
Qian Fan sank into his stance and breathed with them, out of habit.
Almost nothing came.
Not nothing, exactly. A little. The way a tea comes from a leaf that has already been used three times. Yesterday, the morning air had given him the same thin, ordinary warmth it gave everyone else. Today it ran through him like water through a sieve.
[The centre replaces ambient absorption, Host! 😊]
What?
[It was on the second page! 😊]
The line near the bottom of the verse, about rich men and poor men, that he had skimmed on his way to something more interesting. He could see it now, perfectly, the way you can always see the clause after you’ve already signed.
A rich man gathers anywhere. A poor man gathers nowhere.
He did the arithmetic, which was short. Five silver, seventy-eight coppers, some pills and a towel. By the standards of the Jinhe Merchant Sect, he was a poor man.
He had traded the air for his own purse. And his purse was very small.
“Qian Fan,” said the instructor, passing behind him. “Adequate.”
“Thank you, instructor!” said Qian Fan while saluting with his fist and palm.
* * *
He saw it on the way out.
Qian Xiaotian was at the well beyond the fence, hauling the first buckets of the day. He moved differently. Not dramatically; none of the children filing out of the yard even glanced at him. But the pole sat straighter on his shoulders, and he came up the slope without the small hitch he’d had in his step for two years.
Halfway across the stable yard, Elder Qian Zhuo was shuffling toward the storeroom with an empty basket.
Qian Xiaotian put the buckets down. He crossed the yard, stopped three paces from the old man, and bowed. Not the quick bow clan youths threw at elders in passing. A full one, from the waist, held.
Qian Fan stopped walking.
“Elder Qian,” Qian Xiaotian said. “Thank you. For yesterday.”
Elder Qian Zhuo looked at him with mild confusion. “Eh?”
“Your advice. In the market yesterday.”
The old man’s face cleared into the pleasant, empty expression of a man who had been asked about something he had entirely forgotten. “Ah. Yes. Good, good.”
“I understand now. About looking closer.”
“Mm,” said Elder Qian Zhuo, who was thinking about cabbages.
“I won’t forget it.”
“Don’t forget to drink water,” the old man said kindly, patting his shoulder as he shuffled past. “You young people never drink enough water.”
Qian Xiaotian stared at him with profound, thunderstruck reverence, as though he had just been handed a second piece of wisdom folded inside the first, like a message in a dumpling.
Then he went back to his buckets, and Qian Fan stood at the fence with his mouth very slightly open.
[Host? Your heart rate—]
He thinks the old man gave him the manual…
[Technically, the old man told him to look at a shelf. 😊]
He thinks the old man knew what was on the shelf, Qian Fan thought. He thinks a hidden master noticed a nobody carrying water, took pity on him, and steered him toward a treasure without ever saying a single thing. Because that’s what happens in the stories. That is exactly what happens in the stories.
And it also looked like Qian Xiaotian gained an enlightenment…
[Is that a problem, Host?]
Qian Fan considered it.
A protagonist with a mysterious benefactor. A benefactor who was old, forgettable, and entirely uninterested in explaining himself. A benefactor who, if anyone in this city ever questioned him, would blink and offer advice regarding hydration.
Nobody would ever look past him. Not the clan. Not the main branch. Not whoever came asking one day why a boy with a trash talent was able to start climbing the stairs toward immortality known as cultivation.
Thinking of it, it’s not a problem. It’s a cover.
It was, in fact, the single best piece of luck he’d had in this world, and he hadn’t even paid a single copper for it.
And somewhere underneath that thought, small and cold, and not entirely welcome, was another one.
Then why do I feel like the old man is getting paid for my work?