In his past life, whenever a product stopped performing in the market, Qian Fan’s company did the same four things every company did: held a meeting, blamed the customers, changed the color of the button, and maybe fired someone to take the fall.
Qian Fan did not have a meeting. He had a woodpile, a cart, and a great deal of time in which he preferred not to move at all. So he did what he had always privately wanted to do with a product that wasn’t working.
He tested it.
Three questions, the way he’d have written them on a whiteboard, if anyone in this world had even invented whiteboards:
What does the method actually do to my body?
What does it do when I hit something?
And why won’t the 5th layer open?
* * *
The first question took a week, and most of it happened on the hill. The cart was the best measuring instrument he owned. It weighed exactly the same every evening: two wheels, a bed of scarred boards, whatever wasn’t sold during the day, and his father’s secondhand kettle, which had not sold in three years, and maybe never would. The hill up from the market was exactly the same every evening too. Only Qian Fan changed.
On the first evening, after three good days in a row, with the coins breathing in his inventory and his well full to the brim, he pulled the cart up the hill alone while his father walked beside it, telling a neighbor about the plaster. He barely noticed the slope. At the top, his back felt like a new beam.
On the fourth evening, the night he’d restocked, with most of his silver turned into tins and talismans that breathed for him about as well as a brick, he got halfway up the same hill and had to stop.
He stood there with the shafts in his hands and his breath coming short, and felt it very precisely. Nothing inside him had broken. Nothing had gone. The strength was still there, all of it, exactly where it had been three days ago. It was the fuel that was low. It was like standing in a well-built shop with no stock on the shelves.
Layer, he thought, and fullness.
The layer was the building. It didn’t move. Whatever the method had tempered, it had tempered for good: his spine, his back, the bones down the middle of him that the qi walked through every night.
The fullness was the stock. It went up when he sold items, and down when he bought some. A good week filled the building to the rafters. A restock emptied it.
“Son?” said his father. “Are you all right?”
“Just thinking,” said Qian Fan.
“Good,” said Qian Hou warmly, and took one of the shafts, and the two of them pulled the cart the rest of the way together.
* * *
The second question, he answered behind the house three nights later, at the woodpile, after the family was asleep.
He had read the Qian Clan’s manual and studied its forms. He had not, until now, tried any of them in earnest, because trying things in earnest was how you ended up practicing. But a merchant who didn’t know his product when it hit something did not know what he was selling. Even in the instance that he will not be selling it, knowledge is knowledge, and knowledge is how you get ahead of the people around you.
He chose a log from the pine tree as thick as his thigh, stood it on the chopping block, and settled into the Weighing-Scale Stance.
Then he counted his assets.
He did it properly, the way he did every night: every coin, every tin, every jar of salve, the boy’s early payments, the eight silver taels and change of honest holdings, known, named, squared. He felt the weight of it settle behind him, the way a merchant feels the weight of a full storehouse at his back when he names a price.
Coin-Edge Palm. The hand held flat, the qi driven down the arm to the edge.
The arm was the hard part. The qi did not want to go there at all. Every night for six weeks, it had walked the rim, down the front, and up the spine, and over the crown, but never even once had the qi gone near his arms, and now he was asking it to leave the road and walk through a field. It went, grudgingly, thin and cold, a thread where there should have been a rope instead.
He struck.
Something cold went down his forearm ahead of the blow, like it was a coin that slid down a sleeve, and for one instant, the edge of his hand felt less like a hand than like the rim of a copper coin stood on its end: thin, hard, and faintly, unmistakably metal.
There was a sound like a cleaver going into a block, and the log of pine fell into two pieces and rolled off the chopping block in opposite directions.
Qian Fan stood very still.
Then he walked over, picked up one half, and looked at the cut. It was clean. Not split along the grain the way a hatchet splits wood. Cut, straight through, as if the edge of his hand had been the edge of a sharpened axe.
Qian Fan’s wrist began, slowly and then very quickly, to hurt.
He sat down on the chopping block, silently screaming, and held his hand.
[Host! That was excellent! 😊]
The wood was rotten; what are you talking about? Qian Fan thought.
[That was pine wood, Host! It was just cut last month, very recent. 😊]
It was rotten inside, he insisted. You can’t always tell from the outside. And even if it wasn’t, I don’t even have a thing to compare it with. Besides, what I’m testing is what would happen if I try auditing my assets, like how I cultivate every night, while testing techniques. If it was able to produce a good outcome, then that’s good; if not, then I already expected it.
The System said nothing, in a way that suggested that it would keep quiet even if it had a lot of things to say.
He waited until his wrist had stopped throbbing and his breath had come back, and then he set up a second round of pine. This time, deliberately, he counted only half of what he currently owned. The silver, and not the coppers. Not the tins, and not the boy’s payments.
The strike went two-thirds of the way through and stuck.
Interesting, he thought. Half, and it barely changed.
He set up a third round. This time, he counted only a tenth: the eighty-odd loose coppers, and nothing else, as if he were the boy he’d been six weeks ago.
The palm bounced off bark. A dent. A stinging hand. Nothing more.
Qian Fan sat on the chopping block in the dark and did his calculations.
Counting half had barely weakened the blow. Counting a tenth had taken almost all of it. So it wasn’t the coins, one by one. It was the scale. Every time the amount he counted grew tenfold, the weight behind his hands went up one step. From five silver to ten silver would barely register. From five silver to fifty silver would go up a magnitude.
That, he thought, was exactly how money worked. The first hundred coppers changed your life. The next hundred bought you a better kettle.
Qian Fan realized that the Ten Thousand Strings Qi-Gathering Art amplifies his abilities by magnitudes based on his assets.
He was reaching for a fourth round of pine when he had the idea that nearly cost him his arm.
His mother’s tin. Three parts out of ten of every sale for six weeks, and his mother’s own savings, which she kept in four separate places, two of which even the System didn’t know about. Almost three silver, all told, sitting in the house behind him.
It was the family’s money, which can be said to be practically his, according to some kids his age.
He counted it.
The moment he named it, the thread in his arm turned hot and sour, and a prickle ran up the inside of his wrist like ants were crawling beneath his skin. His palm, halfway through the swing, went numb. It struck the round of pine like a wet cloth, and he nearly fell over his own feet.
What is counted falsely does not settle.
He sat down in the dirt beside the chopping block and waited until he could feel his fingers again.
It’s not mine, he thought. Practically mine doesn’t necessarily mean it’s mine. Practically mine is not mine.
[That is correct, Host! Those are your mother’s funds. She would like you to know that she is aware of all four of her hiding places. 😊]
She said that?
[No. But I think that’s what she would say. 😊]
His well was nearly empty by then. Three honest strikes, and one false one, and a wrist that throbbed with every heartbeat. Four blows, he thought, and I’m a boy sitting on a chopping block. Not a technique. A purchase. You got one or two, and then you had to go back to work and earn the money for the next.
Qian Fan decided that it was a very fair product; even if he could never afford to use it often, it was a good product nonetheless.
He picked up the two halves of the first round of pine and looked at the cut again. It really was very clean.
[Would the Host like me to record this result? 😊]
No, Qian Fan thought. It’s a bad sample.
[How is it a bad sample, Host? 🤔]
It’s a rott—sure, record this one. I just can’t believe that someone untrained, such as me, can cut a log clean in half.
[Noted, Host! 😊]
And when he counted himself to sleep that night, he counted his holdings a little lower than they really were, just to be safe, of course.
* * *
The third question was the one that mattered, and it was the one he had been putting off.
The 5th layer’s gate had been full for two weeks. He could feel it the way you feel a door you’re leaning on: the qi settled against it every night, thick and patient, and it did not open or even budge at all.
The manual said that a layer was broken with what was held, not what was had. So he did it by the book. He did not restock, because restocking turned silver into tins, and the manual wanted the holding still. For three nights, not a single copper had left his holdings, and every night he sat on his thin mattress and pressed forward.
On the first night, nothing.
On the second night, nothing, but he felt where the nothing was coming from. His thighs ached as if he had walked uphill all day. His forearms throbbed the way they had after the woodpile. The surplus was pressing, and it was pressing somewhere that hurt.
It wasn’t the dantian. The storehouse was full, and heavy, and ready. It wasn’t the spine or the crown or the long road down his front; they had been tempered every single night for six weeks until they were as solid as anything can be in his body.
The problem was his arms and his legs.
When he pressed forward, the surplus went looking for somewhere to go, the way water in a full reservoir goes looking for the weakest board, and it found his arms and his legs and stopped there, against flesh and bone that had never once been trained in this life. It was like trying to open a new shop with the front room finished and the walls on both sides still made of paper. Not even bare concrete.
On the third night, he stopped pressing on and opened his eyes.
The walking is the refining, the manual said. What the walking touches, it tempers.
He looked down at his hands on his knees. Cold, as they had been every night since the first. The road ran down the middle of him and never once went near them.
The 5th layer was bone. He knew that much; every clan child knew that much. And a layer was not something you reached with the parts of you that were already ready. It was something the whole body had to reach together. His spine was a new beam. His arms and legs were sixteen years of a boy who had organized his entire existence around not lifting things.
The money had built the middle of him. It had not built the rest, and it never would. It couldn’t. His method didn’t go there.
Qian Fan lay back on his mattress and looked at the ceiling for a long time.
“The only thing money can’t temper,” he said at last, out loud, to nobody at all, “is my arms.”
There was a small, delighted pause.
[Would the Host like to see our fitness catalogues? 😊]