The Martial Library Hall opened a week after the ceremony, exactly as the instructor had promised, and the whole intake of newly awakened Qian youths turned up in their best robes, as if the building itself could be impressed.
It was a tall, dim hall at the back of the main compound, with a carved lintel, a great deal of dust, and a board beside the door that nobody needed to read, because every child in the clan had been reading it since the age of eight.
CONTRIBUTION POINTS
Sweeping the ancestral hall — 1 point
A day in the herb garden — 2 points
An overnight gate watch — 3 points
.
.
.
Below that, in newer paint:
Techniques, first floor — starts at 200 points
Qian Fan read it the way he had once read his pay stubs in EasyNow Financial.
Points were earned by labor, spent only inside the clan, and handed out by the main branch, which decided every month who got the paid tasks and who got the stables. A boy who was picked reliably earned a hundred points a year. A boy who wasn’t picked earned nothing. A basic technique cost two hundred points.
In his last life there had been a word for this: company scrip. You paid the workers in a currency that could only buy things at the company store, and then you set the prices at the company store.
He had forty-one points. That was what remained of eight years of being picked occasionally, after his mother’s cough, his father’s fall from the cart, and a new vegetable knife.
The elders arranged the intake in the order of ceremony results. The blue glow stood at the front. The greens stood in the middle. Qian Fan stood where the greens thinned out, which was where he had been standing, one way or another, for sixteen years.
At the very front, Qian Wudi wore white silk embroidered with silver clouds and positioned himself so that the light from the high window fell on him, which took real effort in a dim room.
“Nine hundred points,” one of his lackeys was telling everyone within their reach. “Nine hundred.”
Of course, thought Qian Fan.
* * *
The senior elder cleared his throat, and the hall went quiet.
“By the custom of this clan,” he announced, in the voice elders use when they want even the walls to remember what they said, “every child of the Qian Clan will receive the clan’s method without charge. The Body Tempering Realm edition, today. The Qi Condensation edition, on the day you can earn it. The Qian Clan gives its children the path, the whole road to the peak of cultivation.”
A murmur of pride went through the greens. Qian Fan took note of the phrasing. The whole road. It was a very good line. Somebody must’ve been paid to write it.
“And by the same custom,” the elder went on, “the highest result of each year’s Awakening may take any single work from this hall, from any floor that they have been given access to, without charge.”
Qian Wudi stepped forward before the elder had even finished the sentence.
Qian Fan had to admit that it was a good step. Confident, unhurried, faintly bored, as if the prize were a formality he was graciously allowing the clan to perform. The lackeys drew breath for the chant.
Then the door opened, and the whole room turned around.
The young man in the doorway was perhaps seventeen and thinner than he should have been. His robe was plain and very clean. He held himself like someone who had been on guard somewhere for a long time and forgotten how to stop. There was a healing cut along his jaw, and he did not seem to know it was there.
“Qian Mo,” someone whispered, and the name went round the hall like a coin passed hand to hand.
Everybody knew it. The clan’s prodigy, sent away on missions since the moment he was able to. He was sent away on a mission that was rumored to be so dangerous that only Qi Condensation Realm experts were allowed to take part in. He had missed his own Awakening ceremony because of it. There was a story about him, the kind nobody repeated in front of an elder: that somewhere out there, while still at Body Tempering, he had killed a man at the Qi Condensation Realm while he was out on a mission.
The person that the clan was grooming to become the next Qian Lingyun.
The senior elder’s face did something complicated and settled on pride.
“Qian Mo,” he said. “Come forward. You hold this year’s highest result.”
Qian Wudi was still standing in the patch of window light, one foot slightly ahead of the other. For a long moment, nobody told him what to do.
Then Qian Mo walked up the middle of the hall, walking past Qian Wudi, who was frozen in place, and then he wasn’t.
Nobody insulted him. Nobody looked at him at all. He was simply in the way, like the way a bench is in the way, and Qian Mo went around him as if he were mere furniture, and somewhere in the middle of it, Qian Wudi found that he had stepped aside. The room had never been about Qian Wudi at all. It had only been waiting for the right person to step into the spotlight.
Qian Mo did not bow to the elders. He did not look at the first-floor shelves. He climbed the stairs that nobody in the vicinity had been allowed to climb, and the whole hall listened to his footsteps cross the floor above.
At the foot of those stairs, on a stool beside a broom, Elder Qian Zhuo was sleeping with his mouth slightly open, a string of drool flowing. Qian Mo stepped past him on the way up, and would step past him again on the way down. Neither noticed the other. They were, Qian Fan thought, the only two people in the building who didn’t care about anyone who was watching.
Qian Mo came back down with a single thin book, unbound, its title turned toward his chest. As he passed, Qian Fan caught one glimpse of its edge. Every margin was crowded with notes in a strong, slanted hand, as though somebody had argued with the book on every page.
Qian Mo nodded once to the senior elder, which was more than he gave anyone else, and walked out without a word.
The senior elder stood in the silence afterwards with the look of someone with pride, as if he was given face by someone he acknowledged.
[Credit Check: Qian Mo. Unavailable. Subject’s cultivation realm exceeds the Host’s rank. 😊]
A clan that spent two years sending its best son somewhere to die, called it an investment, and then threw him a party in a library. Qian Fan had worked for companies like that.
* * *
After that, the queue moved like the way a queue moves when the interesting part was already over.
Qian Wudi recovered by spending loudly. He walked the first floor with his lackeys trailing behind him, touching the spines of the books and dismissing them, until he stopped at a lacquered case near the back.
“Thunder-Splitting Palm,” he announced, as if he had written it. “Eight hundred points.”
“Young Master Wudi is invincible!” Said the lackeys in unison while in the formation of a superhero sentai team about to fight the villain.
“No shouting inside the library,” said the senior elder, and the lackeys immediately shut their mouths.
[Thunder-Splitting Palm. Three forms: Rolling Thunder, Splitting Sky, Thunder Descends. “An adequate palm technique. The name is the best part of it.”]
[Note: The Qian bloodline leans toward the metal element. This technique is thunder. 😊]
Does that matter?
[In terms of sales? No! 😇]
Qian Fan watched a young master who had just been moved aside like a bench spend his father’s points on a technique with a flashy name. He would need something bigger to shout about by next month.
[There is a Fourth Form, Host. It is sold separately. 😊]
Qian Fan filed that information away, the way he filed everything.
The greens came next. Most had between thirty and a hundred points, and most of them stood in front of the two-hundred point shelf for a long time before shuffling over to the clerk’s table, where a stack of identical books sat waiting.
The Qian clan cultivation manual, Body Tempering edition. All nine layers, free, exactly as promised. The whole road.
It just wasn’t the same copy for everyone.
The stack on the clerk’s table had been copies that were standardized to be understood even by the average clan member. Every page was correct, but every page was also slow and was clearly meant for those with average talents. Somewhere upstairs, Qian Fan suspected, sat the book from which all these copies originated, and he suspected that someone out there possessed the founder’s copy that had all the secrets to cultivating the founder’s path.
The Qian Clan founder was commonly thought of as a mere scheming merchant, but according to the clan records, he was also a legendary cultivator that made his name throughout the region and had cleansed Wutong City of his enemies, and established the foundations on a mountain of corpses. That same cultivation method used by the founder was also said to be followed by Qian Lingyun, the millennium genius of the clan who was said to be more powerful than even the Qian Clan founder himself.
Nobody here was denied the road. They were only denied the good copy. It was, Qian Fan thought, a good move by the clan to arm themselves with tons of clan members who can, instead of only a few clan members who have the capability. It was an undeniable fact that quantity is power, but at the same time, it is also an undeniable fact that quantity has its own limits.
He took his copy with a grateful bow.
He would never run its breathing. His method had already replaced the normal method of getting it from the air, and his body could only drink from one well. But while the queue shuffled on, he flicked to the back and found what every Qian child learned before anything else: three forms, drawn in faded ink.
Weighing-Scale Stance. Coin-Edge Palm. Steelyard Sword, Three Cuts.
Metal cuts, said the first line under the diagrams. Metal holds.
He read the page on Coin-Edge Palm, the hand held flat, the qi driven to the edge until the edge became a blade, and something at the back of his tongue went faintly, unmistakably coppery, as if the page had recognized him.
He closed the book.
On his way past the shelves, he let his eyes rest for a moment on two spines: Iron Ox Fist, Crane Stance Form. Techniques for the arms and legs. Two hundred points each.
Free, he thought, weighing the book under his arm. Three techniques for the arms and legs, for nothing, from the same clan that wanted two hundred points for those. It wouldn’t hurt to look.
He only had forty-one points and a free book with three forms in it. He kept walking.
* * *
Qian Xiaotian came in at the very end.
He was still wet at the collar from the well. Qian Duoduo, whose job it had been to tell the ungraded, had only apparently told them that morning, which was a way of telling them without telling them in time. Xiaotian didn’t look surprised. He was used to this feeling of being unwanted and ignored by his relatives. He stood at the back of the hall with nothing in his hands. Two years of stable duty had been a punishment, and punishments earned no points.
The reason for the punishment? Even Qian Xiaotian had no idea. Just suddenly, one day, it was decided by someone that he did something, in which case, even the decider might not even know what he did.
Zero. Qian Fan didn’t need the System to tell him.
Xiaotian walked to the clerk’s table, took a copy of the free manual, and bowed to the elders with exactly the right depth of gratitude. One or two of the greens snickered. The trash, taking the charity book.
They didn’t understand yet what he would do with it. He would read every page tonight, twice, the way he read every clause of everything, and then he would drill the three forms at the back until they wore grooves in the air.
The whole road, for nothing. It was the only thing that the clan had ever given Qian Xiaotian, and he was the only one in the room who fully appreciated it and who would make sure to use all of it.
A customer who kept his cards close and always made sure he got full value out of everything that he was handed. Qian Fan approved, the way he’d approve of a well-kept ledger.
* * *
The last useful thing happened at the door.
A broad, earnest boy from the side branch stood there with one hand pressed to his shoulder and the expression of someone who had done calculations and found out that he disliked the answer. Qian Tie. White glow. Picked for tasks often because he never complained. Ninety-one points, a shoulder he had been holding for a week, and nothing on the first floor he could afford.
“There’s a problem with my shoulders,” Qian Tie said when he caught Qian Fan looking. “The apothecary wants twelve points. I was saving these for the Iron Ox Fist.”
“Twelve, huh,” said Qian Fan sympathetically.
“I won’t have two hundred for another year anyway, or maybe longer than that.” He laughed, not very convincingly. “I can’t earn more with these shoulders of mine. The points aren’t even worth anything outside the clan anyway.”
Qian Fan went very still, the way he used to on the phone when a customer said, I don’t really need it; I just wanted to ask.
Points bought nothing outside the clan. Everyone knew that. They were for the library four times a year and the apothecary every morning, and a boy saving for the library couldn’t afford to spend them at the apothecary with their astronomical prices, and a boy who needed the apothecary couldn’t wait for the library.
Points moved freely among clan members. Nobody had ever policed it, because no one with spare points had ever thought they were worth anything.
“Tell you what,” Qian Fan said. “My family’s stall has bone salves for sale. Better than the clan apothecary’s for shoulders. I’ll bring you two jars tomorrow, and a liniment for the bruising.”
Qian Tie brightened. “How much?”
“Twenty points.”
The boy actually laughed. Twenty points for seventy-five coppers of real goods he could rub into his shoulder tomorrow night, when everyone knew points bought nothing outside the clan. He thought that he was robbing the vegetable cart with the owner unaware.
They shook on it.
Walking out, Qian Fan did the sum properly. On the street, what he’d promised came to about four coppers a point. At the clan apothecary, twelve points bought a consultation and a course of pills that would normally cost them two or three hundred coppers anywhere else. Thirty bought a month’s worth of spirit herb rations from the storehouse.
Inside the clan, a point was worth five or six times what it was worth outside. The only thing standing between the two prices was that nobody had ever thought to stand there.
He thought about his mother’s cough and his father’s back and the apothecary that opened every morning. Then he thought about how many side-branch children were holding points they couldn’t spend and needing coppers they didn’t have.
Points were a currency. Currencies could be traded. And he had just become the only money-changer within the Qian Clan.
* * *
Qian Mo was sitting on the steps outside.
He hadn’t gone far. He sat with his back very straight, and his eyes closed, the thin book on his knee, resting the way a blade rests in its sheath: not tired, exactly, just put away until needed. People stepped around him on the stairs without quite knowing why.
Qian Fan walked around him too.
He didn’t mean to look at the book. He was a merchant, and he had a hint of an idea that it might possibly be one of the most valuable objects being kept in the Martial Library, and it was lying on a stranger’s knee with its margins full of someone else’s arguments, and his eyes went to it the way water goes downhill.
One look. A heartbeat too long.
Qian Mo’s eyes opened.
They were very dark, and entirely awake, and they were looking at Qian Fan. Not at his robe, or his face, or the free book under his arm. At him, the way a guard looks at the one person in a crowd who glanced at the gate. He felt like he was being scrutinized down to his individual pores.
Qian Fan kept walking at exactly the same pace, because that was what you did when a customer caught you looking at his purse.
Behind him, nobody said anything. After ten steps, he allowed himself to breathe.
[Host, he noticed you. 😊]
I know, but I think your existence has been compromised.
[That is impossible, Host. Nobody can ever notice me except for you. 😇]
I know that too, Qian Fan thought. That’s what worries me. I didn’t need a System to be noticed by someone problematic. I did it with my own eyes, and I didn’t even have a clue what runs through that guy’s mind.