“It’s just…” Jiang Xingzhou waved a hand. “Never mind. You wouldn’t understand even if I explained.”
“This old one truly does not understand,” the old man admitted honestly. “But since Your Excellency has come, you may as well take things as they are. Such is fate. It cannot be forced.”
“Fate?” Jiang Xingzhou laughed. “I get yanked out of my home for no reason, dumped in a place I’ve never seen, and meet an old man who knows nothing, and you tell me that’s fate?”
“All things in this world arise from cause and fate.”
“Then tell me, who started this cause? Why won’t he come see me himself? Sneaking around like that, is he afraid to show his face?”
The old man was stumped. He picked up his teacup, took a sip, and said nothing.
Watching him, Jiang Xingzhou grew even more irritated.
“Fine, let me ask something else.” Jiang Xingzhou propped his arms on the table. “You say you’re going to help me refine some kind of power. After it’s refined, then what? What can I do?”
“The power within Your Excellency is vast.” The old man set down his cup, his expression turning a little more serious. “This old one has lived many years and never seen strength so deep and thick. Once it is refined, Your Excellency may step onto the path of cultivation. Then flying to the heavens and burrowing into the earth, moving mountains and filling seas, all will be within your reach.”
“Will it help me pay off my mortgage?”
The old man blinked.
“This old one does not know.”
“Then can it send me back?”
“No, not that either.”
“Then what am I cultivating it for?” Jiang Xingzhou spread his hands. “What use is flying and burrowing? I don’t deliver takeout. What use is moving mountains and filling seas? I’m not in real estate development.”
The old man opened his mouth, then found he had no idea how to respond.
“Your Excellency has a rather… distinctive way of speaking.”
“That’s how I’ve always talked.” Jiang Xingzhou picked up his cup and took another sip. “Is that how everyone talks around here? ‘A moment ago, thus and so,’ ‘Your Excellency, thus and so,’ ‘this old one, thus and so.’ Can’t you speak like a normal person?”
“This is how we normally speak.”
“Then you must live pretty tiring lives.”
The old man stroked his beard and suddenly smiled.
“Interesting. This old one waited here a long while, and never expected to meet someone like you.”
“How long have you waited?”
“I don’t remember clearly.” The old man looked up at the peach trees. “A few hundred years, perhaps.”
Jiang Xingzhou nearly choked on his tea.
“A few hundred years?”
“Yes. The peach blossoms of the Taoxi Realm bloom and fall, fall and bloom again. This old one has long lost count of how many times.”
Jiang Xingzhou set down his cup.
“You just sat here, drinking tea for hundreds of years, waiting for someone you didn’t even know?”
“Precisely.”
“Didn’t you get bored?”
“I’m used to it.” The old man refilled his tea. “Besides, today didn’t I finally meet you? Your Excellency’s words aren’t the pleasantest, but you came in the end.”
Jiang Xingzhou looked at the old man and found, suddenly, that he had nothing to say.
An old man had sat in a grove of peach blossoms for hundreds of years, just to wait for him.
This old man didn’t know who he was, didn’t even know what he’d been brought here to do, and just waited.
He knew he didn’t have that kind of patience.
He’d call the delivery rider to hurry him along if his takeout was even a few minutes late.
“Fine.” Jiang Xingzhou spun his teacup a turn. “Then tell me, this refining-the-power business, how does it work?”
“Your Excellency is willing?”
“I’m already here, and I can’t go back. If I don’t cultivate, am I supposed to stay here drinking tea with you until I’m old?”
The old man’s eyes brightened.
“Does Your Excellency speak truly?”
“Truly,” Jiang Xingzhou said. “But on one condition.”
“Please speak, Your Excellency.”
“Try to keep your words simple. All this ‘Your Excellency’ and ‘this old one’ gives me a headache. My name is Jiang Xingzhou. Just call me by my name.”
The old man thought about it.
“Very well. Young Master Jiang.”
“Fine, better than ‘Your Excellency.'” Jiang Xingzhou stood up and rolled his shoulders. “Let’s begin. How do we refine this power?”
The old man stood too and walked to the open ground in front of the wooden cabin.
“Young Master Jiang, please come here.”
Jiang Xingzhou walked over and came to a stop in front of him.
The old man extended his right hand, pressed his index and middle fingers together, and touched them to the center of Jiang Xingzhou’s brow.
The instant the fingertips touched, Jiang Xingzhou felt as if his forehead had been scalded.
Not a real burn, but a heat surging outward from within.
The heat traveled down from the center of his brow, through his chest, through his belly, out to his limbs.
His hands began to go numb, and his feet too. His whole body felt as though it had been steeped in warm water.
“The power within Young Master Jiang is truly remarkable,” the old man’s voice came to him. “This old one has only guided it slightly, and already there is such a stir.”
Jiang Xingzhou wanted to say something, but his mouth wouldn’t open.
The heat raced everywhere inside his body, and wherever it went, numbness followed.
It wasn’t pain but numbness, numbness that made him want to scratch, yet he couldn’t lift his hands.
After about the time it took to drink a cup of tea, the old man finally withdrew his hand.
Jiang Xingzhou swayed and nearly lost his footing.
“Done?”
“Only the beginning.” The old man walked back to the low table and sat down, picking up his teacup again. “Young Master Jiang’s strength is too vast to be refined in a single day. From now on, at this hour each day, this old one will help you refine it for one shichen. In about seven days, you will begin to glimpse the way.”
Jiang Xingzhou flexed his fingers.
His fingers were still numb, but it was a different numbness from before, a faint tingling, as if something were seeping out of his fingertips.
“Is this that power?”
“Precisely.” The old man nodded. “How does Young Master Jiang feel?”
Jiang Xingzhou looked down at his hands.
“Hard to say. A little numb, a little warm.”
“That is the flow of spiritual power. Once you can guide it yourself, the numbness will pass.”
Jiang Xingzhou lowered his hands and looked around.
Peach blossoms still fell. A faint wind blew. The distant mountains were still green.
Nothing had changed, and yet it seemed everything had.
He suddenly thought of that dream again.
The moment Li Yuan clenched his hand, dark red light burst forth.
Jiang Xingzhou frowned.
“Old man.”
“Hm?”
“I want to ask you about someone.”
“Please.”
“Li Yuan. Have you heard this name?”
The old man’s hand paused as he held his teacup. Small as the movement was, Jiang Xingzhou noticed it.
“Where did Young Master Jiang learn this name?”
“Answer me first. Have you heard it or not?”
The old man was silent a while, then set down his teacup.
“I have,” he said. “It is a name from very long ago. So long ago that in all the Six Realms today, there are probably few left who still remember it.”
Jiang Xingzhou’s heart beat half a beat faster.
“Who is he?”
The old man raised his head and looked at him, and the light in his eyes grew deep.
“He is a god. And a god who rebelled. The greatest calamity in the Six Realms was caused by him.”
The wind suddenly picked up, sending peach blossoms flying everywhere.
The bells under the eaves rang all at once.