It happened at the trough, on the thirtieth morning. Qian Fan knew the date because he had been standing at the training-yard fence at the time with nothing to do but count the days passing by, because even if he did horse stance all day, the results would be extremely minuscule since the Ten Thousand Strings Qi-Gathering Art has a different way of gathering qi.
Morning cultivation had just ended. Fifty side-branch children were filing out of the yard in the direction of breakfast, and Qian Fan, who had spent an hour in horse stance gathering almost nothing from the air, was among them, rubbing the backs of his legs. Beyond the fence, on the slope that ran down from the well to the stables, Qian Xiaotian was on his fortieth trip of the morning with two full buckets on a pole across his shoulders.
And coming the other way, with the sun behind him and four lackeys behind, was Qian Wudi.
Qian Fan knew the shape of what came next the way he knew the shape of a scam call in its first three words. A month ago, by that same trough, Wudi had tipped over one of those buckets with his foot, and the whole side branch had heard about it by dinner. Young masters did not have many ideas; they didn’t need to. They had one idea, and they did it again when they were bored.
Wudi had been bored for the past three weeks, since the library. Since he had been moved aside like a bench in front of the whole intake and then walked out with an eight-hundred-point-worth palm technique that nobody had been impressed by, because the only person anyone was talking about was Qian Mo.
And even Qian Wudi had no power over Qian Mo.
Which is why a young master who has been embarrassed by someone he cannot touch needs someone lower to stand on. And there was nobody lower than the boy with the buckets.
[Credit Check: Qian Wudi. Body Tempering, 8th layer. 😊]
[Credit Check: Qian Xiaotian. Body Tempering, 6th layer. Clan record: 2nd layer. 😊]
Two layers of difference, Qian Fan thought. The 6th was the top of the Body Tempering Realm middle tier, while the 8th was deep inside the inner one. The difference between the tiers seemed like an insurmountable wall.
He did not climb the fence. He was a 4th-layer radish seller with a bad back and weak arms, and there were five of them. Merchants did not fight. They watched the market, and then they put a price on what happened.
He did, however, stop walking.
* * *
Qian Xiaotian set the buckets down by the trough, unhooked the pole, and straightened, and Wudi was there.
“Stable boy,” Wudi said pleasantly.
Xiaotian said nothing. He had learned a long time ago that it was better to stay silent than respond to Qian Wudi.
Qian Wudi looked at the full bucket at Xiaotian’s feet. Then he smiled, the way he had smiled a month ago, and drew back his foot.
Xiaotian didn’t think much about it. He had spent every night for three weeks at the kiln with the free book’s forms, until they lived in his legs instead of his head, and his legs moved on their own. His weight sank, his knees softened, his heels settled into the mud like the pan of a scale coming to rest, and he put the side of his foot against the bucket just as Wudi’s boot arrived.
The bucket rang.
It did not tip. It did not slide. A single wave slopped up to the rim, hung there, and went back down, and not one drop went over the edge.
The yard went very quiet.
Qian Wudi looked at the bucket. Then he looked at his own foot, as if it had betrayed him. Behind him, one of the lackeys drew breath for the chant and thought better of it.
“Oh,” said Qian Wudi softly. “Oh, I see.”
He stepped back and settled into a stance that had cost his father eight hundred points.
Xiaotian understood then, with the flat clarity he brought to calculating, what would happen in the next few moments. Qian Wudi was two layers above him and a tier higher, with a real technique and a full dantian, and Xiaotian was a stable boy with a free book, a sealed wall under his heart, and a body built out of buckets. If he ran, he would be beaten in front of the whole side branch. If he fought and lost, he would be beaten worse, and the clan would take his stipend for brawling, and the medicine would stop.
If he fought and did not lose, he did not know what would happen. Nobody did; nobody ever thought that was even possible.
He stayed right where he was.
“Rolling Thunder!”
It was a good palm. Say that for him. The qi came off Wudi’s shoulder in a surge Xiaotian could feel from three paces away, shoving the air ahead of it so that the dust on the slope jumped, and every child at the fence flinched.
Xiaotian didn’t. He sank lower, weight in his heels, and let the palm arrive.
Thunder pushes. He had understood that from the very first time he saw Wudi train. It wanted something to move. It shoved, and whatever it shoved went flying, and that was the whole of it.
So he gave it nothing to move.
He turned his shoulder a finger’s width into the blow and took it there, on the round of the muscle, and braced himself. Under his skin, the qi rushed outward along every road that the Iron Hide had spent four weeks widening, and for one instant, his shoulder and arm went a dull, faint gray, like iron under ash.
The palm landed with a sound like a fist on a temple bell.
It found a body that had spread itself too wide to be moved: the force went straight into his shoulder and out of it, down his back, down his legs, into the mud under his heels, and whatever was left of it went sideways into the trough, which boomed like a struck drum and split along one plank.
Xiaotian had not moved.
The water in the bucket at his feet shivered. It did not even spill a single tiny drop.
Qian Wudi’s face contorted.
“Splitting Sky!”
Closer. Faster. Low, under the guard, aimed at the ribs—and Qian Wudi had learned something. He didn’t push. He struck and snapped the palm back, and the qi in it didn’t shove; it shook.
It landed, and the gray, dull color came up across his ribs, and it seemed like it didn’t matter.
Iron could turn a push. Iron could not stop a shudder. The shock went into the iron and rang through it like the way a strike rings through a bell, and the ringing was inside him. Xiaotian felt his ribs flex inward, felt the bone bend to the edge of breaking and hold, felt Iron Hide take the blow like the way a road takes a loaded cart: badly, loudly, and still there afterwards. The breath went out of him in one hard grunt. His heels slid a hand’s width through the mud, two grooves behind him like the tracks of a plough.
It was at this moment that Qian Xiaotian learned that the Iron hide might protect his skin, but it could not save him from damage inside his body.
Still, he did not go down.
A scale that tips too far falls over. A scale that is built right swings, and swings, and comes back to rest. He was like an iron spring; although he might be swung hard and bent, he’ll still bounce back. And bounce back he did.
Somewhere at the fence, a small child said “Oh,” out loud, and was immediately hushed.
Qian Wudi was breathing rough now. His qi had been loud and generous for two techniques, the way everything about Qian Wudi was that he’s loud, and isn’t afraid to be, and Xiaotian could hear, under the breath, the difference between a dantian that was full and one that was exhausted.
Qian Wudi had one technique left in his arsenal. Everyone in the yard knew it, because Qian Wudi told them the names often enough.
Qian Xiaotian had three, and he had revealed none of them.
“Thunder Descends!”
Wudi came off the ground with both hands raised, the full weight of him and all of his remaining qi coming down in one overhead palm, the kind of blow that was meant to end things once and for all, and loud enough to tell the whole world that this technique was the one that annihilates.
Qian Xiaotian raised his right hand, flat, the edge turned outward.
The first form that every Qian child learns. The one from the free book. Coin-Edge Palm: the hand held flat, the qi driven from the dantian’s cold wall around through the roads Iron Hide had widened, down the arm, out to the edge, until the edge didn’t feel like a hand anymore.
Metal cuts.
The two palms met, and there was a sound in the yard like a cleaver going into a chopping board.
Qian Xiaotian went back three full steps, and the third step put his heel against the split trough, and he stopped there, arm numb to the shoulder, the edge of his hand split and bleeding, his ribs felt like they cracked.
Qian Wudi went back one step. Then he looked at his palm.
The skin across his knuckles had opened in a clean, straight line, as if someone had laid a knife against it. Blood ran down his wrist into the white silk of his sleeve.
Neither of them moved.
Qian Wudi had nothing left; Xiaotian could see it in the shake of his arms. Xiaotian had one more strike in him, but with the state of his internal injuries, he wasn’t sure that the strike would even land. Qian Wudi’s techniques were the perfect counter to the Iron Hide. Qian Xiaotian would seem unscathed on the outside, but the inside was a mess that was riddled with ruptures and internal injuries.
Since Qian Wudi had no gas left to execute one more move, and Qian Xiaotian would collapse any second now, Qian Xiaotian realized that they were at a standstill.
* * *
“What,” said a voice from the top of the slope, “is going on down there?”
It was the morning instructor, with his bamboo cane, and behind him, two junior elders who had come to see what the commotion was all about.
The instructor came down the slope and looked at the scene: at the split trough, at Qian Wudi’s bleeding knuckles, at the stable boy with mud to his ankles and blood on his hand, at the full bucket standing by the trough with not one drop spilled.
“Qian Wudi,” the instructor said. “Explain.”
Qian Wudi explained, at length. It involved the words “disrespect” and “stable boy” and “provoked”, and the instructor listened to all of it with the patience of a man who had been listening to young masters for thirty years.
Then he turned to Xiaotian.
“That palm,” he said. “Where did you learn it?”
“It’s from the clan manual, Instructor,” said Qian Xiaotian, saluting with his fist and palm while bowing. “The Clan’s standard manual, the free edition. The first form.”
A murmur went along the fence.
The instructor looked at him for a long moment. Then he looked at one of the junior elders, who looked back, and something passed between them that Qian Fan, watching from the fence, recognized immediately. It was the look two managers give each other when a product they had written off starts selling.
“The clan’s method, huh,” the elder said slowly, “is sound. It has always been sound, but has been ignored by the young ones because they think that free means bad. Diligence is the only difference here.”
“And guidance,” muttered someone at the fence.
The instructor pretended not to hear that. He made the two of them bow to each other, which was the clan’s way of pretending nothing had happened.
Xiaotian bowed correctly.
Qian Wudi bowed badly, in a manner where you could see how insincere it was, and looked at the stable boy over the heads of four silent lackeys, with his bleeding hand wrapped in the ruined silk of his own sleeve.
“The competition,” he said, clearly, so the whole yard could hear it, “is in sixty days. Enter it. Please. There will be no one to hide behind, and no instructor going to save you.”
He smiled.
“And there, I’ll finish you off in front of everyone.”
* * *
The conflict between Qian Xiaotian and Qian Wudi spread inside the Qian Clan’s residences the way that neighborhood aunties' rumors about someone’s daughter getting pregnant: extremely fast. The boy had been seen bowing to Elder Qian Zhuo at the well. Everybody knew that. The Elder was always seen around the stables. The Elder was always around the storeroom. The Elder had been at the library, asleep at the foot of the stairs. Everywhere Qian Xiaotian had gone, the Elder had been there.
By breakfast, half the side branch knew that a hidden master might have been teaching Qian Xiaotian in secret. A boy with blocked meridians standing toe to toe against the clan’s most notorious young master was unheard of, and this was the only explanation that the people could come up with.
By lunch, the other half knew which one.
The clan’s youth went abuzz about the potential of the clan’s official cultivation technique. Some went and tried studying diligently and thought that if a trash can could stand against Qian Wudi using these techniques, then what about them?
Qian Fan, who knew exactly how much of a fraud the Elder had been, and how much their speculation was wrong, said nothing at all and went to open the stall.
[Host,] said the System as he walked, [the clan is crediting Qian Zhuo and the clan manual. 😊]
As it should. It’s a good book. As for the Elder, he’s a good lightning rod, Qian Fan thought.
He did not say what he was thinking underneath, which was that he had just watched a thirty-silver investment go against Qian Wudi’s eight-hundred-point technique, in which case, unbeknownst to the other clan members, Qian Xiaotian was combining the two techniques he had in order to strengthen each other. The iron hide made his body harder and iron-like, while the Qian Clan techniques utilized that iron-like property to sharpen Qian Xiaotian’s body like a sword.
From this revelation, Qian Fan thought that there were techniques that synergize well to produce a stronger outcome.
As a merchant, he thought that he could take note of this to upsell more people in the future, such as offering a bundle to customers.
* * *
Qian Fan saw him again at dusk, on the way back from the market with the empty cart.
The water duty was done. The buckets were stacked. Xiaotian came out of the stables with his arm tied up in a strip of old cloth and walked, not toward the side-branch quarter where his mother was, but the other way, past the end of the east wall, out toward the fields, where the old charcoal kiln sat crumbling in the long grass.
He walked as if he had gone to the place many times before, with precision and flow that showed he had already memorized how many steps and how long it would take to get there blindfolded. He did not look back to see if anyone was watching him. He had never felt the need to.
Qian Fan watched him until he was out of sight, and then he pulled the cart the rest of the way home.
He did not follow. It was none of his business where a customer went at night. But he filed that information away in the back of his mind, because it was the kind of thing a merchant remembered: where people went when they didn’t want to be found.