The fitness catalogue was worse than he had feared.
[Beast-Blood Tonic. Crude strength for two hours. “Smells like the inside of a boar.”]
[Ox-Hauling Grip. Carrying and grappling form. 3 silver taels. “Unglamorous; genuinely useful.” 😊]
[Reinforced Straw Sandals. “Will not survive a spirit rat. Nothing at this price will.”]
[Reinforced Shoulder Pole. 25 coppers wholesale. “Customers report comfortably carrying four buckets.”]
Qian Fan lay on his mattress in the dark and read it twice, the way a condemned man reads the charges.
These are just random things…
[May I recommend Ox-Hauling Grip, Host? It is exactly what your arms need! 😊]
It costs three silver taels.
[It is an investment in yourself!]
I already have a free book with three forms in it, Qian Fan thought. The forms are free. The arms are the problem. The Ox-Hauling Grip might help me, but I don’t have enough silver to justify buying that instead of investing it in more stocks that can earn me more.
[The Beast-Blood Tonic—]
It’s borrowed strength that smells like a boar. No. Besides, that for sure has side effects that can backfire later on.
There was a pause.
[The shoulder pole is twenty-five coppers.]
Qian Fan closed his eyes.
He bought the pole.
* * *
It arrived in his inventory overnight: a length of pale ash with iron caps on both ends and two hooks, perfectly balanced and so obviously good that he had to scuff it with sand before anyone could see it.
The next morning, the laziest boy in the Qian clan went to work.
He carried crates from the house to the cart himself, instead of waiting for his father to do it. He pulled the cart down to the market himself. At midday, when the water jar at the stall ran low, he took the new pole and two buckets and walked to the well, filled them, and carried them back, up the slope, through the crowd, without stopping.
Then he did it again.
It was, he reflected on the second trip, shoulders on fire and thighs shaking, the stupidest thing he had done in two lives. He had died of overwork once. He had been reborn into a world with a System that sold miracles on credit. And here he was, carrying water.
[You are doing wonderfully, Host! 🎉]
I am just doing manual labor.
[Yes! 😇]
The problem was simple. His method walked his spine and his skull and the long road down his front, and tempered everything it touched. It did not walk his arms and legs. So his arms and legs would have to be tempered the way every other child in the clan tempered them: by being used until they complained, and then used some more.
Money could not buy his arms. Only work could.
He did the calculations every trip and hated it every single time.
* * *
His father was overjoyed.
Qian Hou watched his son carry the first two buckets up the slope with the expression of a man watching a miracle performed by a very unlikely saint. By the afternoon he had told the tea seller. By the evening he had told the tea seller’s cousin, the butcher, and a woman who had only stopped at the stall to ask for directions.
“He carries the crates now,” Qian Hou told her proudly. “And the water. All on his own. I always said he had it in him.”
“He’s sixteen,” said the woman, who had not asked anything.
“Sixteen!” said Qian Hou, as if this proved everything.
His mother was suspicious.
Liu An watched her son haul the cart up the hill on the third evening, sweating and silent, without once asking for help, and she did not say anything at all until they were home and the cart was put away.
The son who had, for the last sixteen years, frequently pretended to be sick to escape the daily morning practices in the field, the son who, until the day before the awakening ceremony, just slept while sitting on a crate behind the family cart and never once attempted to sell to a customer. As the mother of that son, she naturally was suspicious and had been looking at him as if he was about to tell her that he made someone’s daughter pregnant; and that was why he was working hard.
Then she put a bowl of rice in front of him, sat down across the table, and looked at him the way she looked at a coin that she suspects to be fake, or that there’s something wrong with it.
“What is it,” she said, “that you want?”
“Nothing.”
“Nobody carries water for nothing. Especially you.”
“I just want to get some exercise and get stronger,” said Qian Fan.
“For what?”
Qian Fan opened his mouth and found, for once, that he had no product to sell her.
His mother looked at him for a long moment. Then she leaned forward, just slightly, and lowered her voice.
“Is this,” she said, “Zhou’s idea?”
* * *
The pills were the worst part.
He had four Lesser Body Tempering Pills in his inventory, left over from the gift pack. They were exactly what a boy in his position needed: small, brown, and full of the kind of crude qi that went into the arms and legs and made a day’s labor count for two. Any other clan child would have eaten them the first night and thanked the heavens.
His method told him to keep them.
A pill eaten was gone. A pill kept breathed a little for him every night, forever. And a pill’s qi was borrowed qi, the kind that filled a body quickly and tempered it badly, and left a debt in the foundation that came due at the worst possible gate.
He took one out on the first night, when his shoulder hurt so badly he couldn’t sleep, and held it in his palm for a long time.
The copper on his tongue went faintly sour, as if even thinking about it was a small, bad purchase.
He put it back.
Instead, he went out to the woodpile after the family was asleep and did the thing he had been avoiding since the library. He drilled. And the next night, he did it again.
Weighing-Scale Stance, until his legs shook so badly he had to sit down in the dirt. Up again. Stance again. Coin-Edge Palm against the air, slowly, a hundred times, until the edges of both his hands were raw and his forearms burned. No counting. No weight behind it. Just the forms, done badly and then done slightly less badly, the way the free manual had meant them to be done by every child in the clan who had nothing else.
The qi did not want to follow. For the first four nights it sat in the middle of him and watched.
On the fifth night, after an hour of stance with his legs screaming, he felt it move. Just a thread. Down from the root of his spine, into his left thigh, as far as the knee, and back. Cold and thin and entirely unwilling. But it had gone somewhere new.
He sat in the dirt beside the woodpile with his legs shaking and laughed silently into his sleeve.
* * *
The old woman with the knees was at the well on the sixth day.
She came for water every morning, it turned out, with a small wooden bucket and a great deal of patience, and she watched the vegetable seller’s boy lower his two buckets on his brand-new shoulder pole with the frank interest of a woman who had outlived most of the people who might have told her not to stare.
“You’re carrying your own water now,” she observed.
“Yes, grandmother.”
“Good. Young people should.” She waited while he hauled up the first bucket. “My husband carried water until he was eighty. Died with arms like a tree trunk. Very handsome in the coffin.”
Qian Fan did not know what to say to that, so he said nothing, and hauled up the second bucket.
The old woman looked past him, out toward the east gate, where the road ran down between the fields.
“The iron wood’s gone quiet,” she said. “Did you hear? My grandson says that even birds have stopped flying above that forest. Just like back then when I was a young woman.”
“I heard something like that.”
“Mm.” She nodded slowly. “My mother used to say, when the iron wood goes quiet, something in it is flowering.” She hooked her little bucket onto the rope and began to lower it. “She said to stay away when it happened. She never said why. Old people never say why.”
“No, grandmother.”
She began, very softly, to hum something under her breath while the rope paid out: an old tune, the kind grandmothers use on children who won’t sleep. Qian Fan caught only the end of it. Thousand graves, one more to be.
“You have an honest face, young man,” the old woman said. “Don’t go near it.”
Qian Fan hoisted the pole onto his shoulders and started back up the slope. He did not think about the iron wood again that day. There were buckets to carry. It went into the drawer in his head with the porter’s cousin and the dogs, among the things that didn’t matter, and he had nothing to use that information on.
* * *
By the end of the week, his hands were no longer cold when he sat to count.
Not warm. But not cold. The thread that had gone down his thigh on the fifth night went down both thighs on the sixth, and on the seventh it went into his arms as well, as far as the elbows, grudgingly and thin, as though it were walking a road that had only just been cut through the forest and did not trust it yet.
So he pressed.
Three nights, holdings still, not a single copper down. That was the rule. He stopped restocking. He sold what he had and let the crate be empty.
The first night, the gate held, but it held differently. The surplus pushed and went looking for somewhere to go, the way it had before, and this time, when it reached his arms and legs, it didn’t stop dead. It hesitated. It leaned.
On the second night, at the worst possible moment, the System held a sale.
[ ✨ FLASH SALE! ✨ Fire-Starting Talismans, bulk lot of fifty, forty percent off! Two hours only! 😊]
Qian Fan, halfway through the count, opened one eye.
That was a good price. That was an excellent price. Fire-Starting Talismans were his steadiest seller; though nobody ever thought of writing songs about them, and Qian Fan didn’t think anyone ever would, even if they sold every single week without fail. Fifty of them at that price would pay for themselves twice over by the end of the month.
And they would turn nearly four hundred coppers of clean, breathing coin into a crate of paper tonight, on the second night of three.
[One hour and fifty-eight minutes remaining! 😊]
No.
[It is an excellent price, Host!]
I know it’s an excellent price. That’s what makes it a test.
[It’s not a test. It’s a sale.]
Every sale is a test, Qian Fan thought, and closed his eyes again, and went back to the count, and did not look at the timer once for the next two hours, which was the most discipline he had shown in either of his lives.
Although the sale would have netted him more money, during this time, specifically this time, momentum is more important than sales. A chance in cultivation, once missed, may never come again; sales come and go; and surely will come back again in another time.
On the third night, he pressed, and the gate opened.
It did not happen all at once. It happened the way a stuck door opens when the whole house shifts on its foundations. The surplus came up out of the storehouse, cold and heavy and coppery, and instead of walking the rim, it went everywhere. Down both arms to the fingertips. Down both legs to the soles of his feet. Into the new roads he had cut with a week of buckets and stance and raw-edged palms, and through them, and out the other side.
And then it sank.
Not into the dantian, but into the bone.
He felt it go into every bone in his body at once: the long bones of his arms and his thighs, the small bones of his hands and his feet, the spine and the ribs and the skull. It went in the way water goes into dry ground. It filled them. And his bones, which had been ordinary bones for the last sixteen years, began very slowly to ache.
It was a deep ache, far inside, the ache of something being made heavier than it had been. Not painful. Enormous. He sat on his thin mattress in the dark with his palms up and his eyes closed and felt his own skeleton settle into him, bone by bone, like coins settling into a stack that had been stacked wrong and was now, at last, being stacked right.
When it stopped, he was heavier.
He could feel it in the mattress underneath him, in the floorboards under the mattress. He weighed the exact same; he was almost sure of it. But he sat on the world differently now. More of him touched it. He gained depth.
[Congratulations, Host! 🎉 Body Tempering, 5th layer! 🎉🎉]
Qian Fan opened his eyes.
His hands, lying on his knees, were warm.
* * *
In the morning, his father found him already at the cart, loading crates.
Qian Hou stood in the doorway in his sleeping robe with his mouth slightly open. Then he turned, went back into the house, came out again with his outer robe on, and went next door to tell the neighbor.
Qian Fan heard him through the wall while he tied down the last crate.
“...every day now. Crates. Water. The cart. Honest work, at last. I always said he’d take an interest in honest work. Hmm. Hmm,” said Qian Hou while nodding and smiling proudly.
Qian Fan finished the knot, pulled it tight, and picked up the shafts of the cart with arms that no longer ached, and did not correct him.
He had not taken an interest in honest work.
He had taken an interest in going through the gate.