The tea on the stove had gone cold twice by the time Li Xuan opened his eyes.
He lay on the straw mat in the Fourth Aisle with Elder Gu’s coat folded beneath his head. The Moon-Vein Stones overhead had turned from the pale blue of dawn to the gray of evening. His body felt like a house after a flood, everything where it belonged and nothing quite dry. The seed in his abdomen was a faint, steady ember, and he lay a long while simply feeling it burn.
"Awake, are you?"
Elder Gu sat on his stool with the wine gourd untouched at his feet and a chipped porcelain cup held between his palms. His hands were not quite steady. "A day and a night. I had begun to think I would have to bury you in the kiln."
"Senior." Li Xuan sat up slowly. "The tea?"
"Cold. Twice." Gu grunted. "I will not warm it. Do it yourself, if you are so clever."
Li Xuan almost smiled. He took the red-clay teapot, cupped both palms around its belly, and drew a thread of Qi from the seed. It crept down his arms, fine as a hair. This time the water warmed evenly, left palm and right alike, in about the time it took Gu to drain his cup.
Even, he thought, with a small private satisfaction. The thread is learning to be led.
He poured for the old man, and then for himself.
"The Crown Prince?" Gu asked quietly, looking into his cup.
"Gone."
"The Ancestors?"
"Awake." Li Xuan’s voice was calm. "Three of them, behind a blood-red dome, with my father pouring his blood into the array. They are waiting for the first snow."
Gu nodded slowly. He did not seem surprised. "Aye. I felt them wake, like a cold hand laid upon the back of my neck." He took a long sip. "That old fossil in the Sanctuary still owes me a cup of wine, you know. He does not remember it. I do."
Li Xuan looked at him. The old man looked at the lamp. Neither of them spoke of it.
"The upstairs is a kicked anthill," Gu went on in his usual rasp. "The capital gates are shut. Thirty thousand royal guards walk about like men with a hook in the heart, and not one can say why. The court has posted a notice that the Crown Prince is ’in seclusion.’" His grin was thin. "They are as good at lying as ever, which is not very good."
A soft, even tread sounded far above, on the spiral stair.
Li Xuan did not rise. He laid two fingers upon the last rune beneath his desk and drew back a thread of Qi, and the Veil, which had spun every stranger in circles for a month, turned aside to let one walker pass.
The footsteps came straight down the aisle without a single wrong turn.
Ji Ling’er stepped into the lamplight in her white-and-silver robes, with the silver veil across her face and a pale frost mist curling at her ankles. Aunt Liu came a step behind, carrying a lantern, and kept her eyes lowered. Both of them bowed.
"Senior Li." There was quiet reverence in the Saintess’s voice. "The shadow guards of the capital have laid down their weapons. The ministers wait at the foot of the white jade steps and dare not come nearer than thirty paces to the Stair. Everyone in the capital is afraid, and no one knows of whom."
"Sit, Saintess." Li Xuan gestured to a low stool. "I have only tea."
She sat, and accepted a cup. For a time none of them spoke.
"There is something else," she said at last. "A notice has gone up in the outer districts. At the new moon, every household’s register will be called for, under a ’grain and labor levy.’ The Ministry of Rites will not tell me what the levy is for. My master’s agents say it is not grain, and not labor."
"Blood," Li Xuan said.
Her cup stopped halfway to her lips.
"The Nine-Dragon Blood Lock Array is hungry, and thirty thousand guards are not enough to fill it." He said it as a man might read out a figure from a ledger. "They mean to feed it from the people."
Aunt Liu drew a sharp breath. Ji Ling’er set down her cup very carefully.
"What do you need of us, Senior?"
"Nothing that would break your master’s word." Li Xuan looked at her. "Do not meddle in the affairs of the royal house. Only be in the outer districts at the new moon. A guest of honor of the Feathered Frost may stand wherever she likes. It is hard to bleed a street while a sword that has seen the sea is standing in it."
Behind the veil, her eyes widened. She had not told him her master’s words. She had told no one.
Then the corners of her eyes crinkled, and she bowed low. "Senior has sharper ears than I thought."
"Only a good memory for the sayings in the old books."
She rose. At the edge of the lamplight she paused.
"And the throne, Senior? When the Sanctuary is clean, who will wear the Dragon Crown?"
Li Xuan turned the teapot a quarter-turn in his palms.
"My father will remain upon it until his mortal life ends. He wished to be an Emperor. Let him stamp the decrees." His voice was soft and mild. "The taxes of the sixteen provinces will be halved. The shadow prisons will be dismantled. The lower floors of the Archive will be opened to every scholar in the realm."
Ji Ling’er stared.
In the cultivation world, when a peerless master took an empire, the custom was to seize its spirit-veins, slaughter the rival lineages, and build a ruthless sect to bleed the land for resources. This man spoke of tax cuts and public books and quiet libraries.
"Most masters," Li Xuan said, as though he had heard her thought, "have not spent three months among tax rolls. I have seen where the grain goes."
She bowed again, deeper, and said nothing more. Aunt Liu took up the lantern, and the two women went back up the dark aisle as lightly as they had come.
When their footsteps had faded, Li Xuan drew the thread of Qi back into the rune and the Veil closed over the stair again like water over a stone.
Gu was looking at him. The old man’s cloudy eyes were bright in the lamplight.
"A month," Gu said, "to learn to carry a river, and you are talking about the price of rice."
"A man should know what he is fighting for, Senior." Li Xuan drank the last of his tea. "Otherwise he only becomes the thing he fights."
"Hmph." Gu looked away, and for a moment his mouth moved as if to say something else. "And after? A boy who can sweep an empire clean cannot stay in a cellar forever."
"I will not," Li Xuan admitted softly. "Great Liang is small. The Historical Weight of this floor is nearly all read. To seek the higher Dao, one must find older books."
"The Great Wilderness." Gu’s clouded eyes flickered with a rare trace of memory. "The Nine Great Sects beyond the border."
"In time. First, I must clean what the founding ancestors left behind."
He rose and walked to the far northern wall.
There had been a false shelf there for three months, heavy with moldering ledgers, which he had swept around and never moved. When the Stair opened beneath the plaza, it had swung aside of its own accord, and behind it stood an iron door set into the mountain bedrock, rusted and crusted with dust, its face carved with dragons that had been asleep for three thousand years.
On his desk, the green compass that had once belonged to Du Mo trembled on its side. Its needle pointed at the door.
The Imperial Dragon-Vein Vault, Li Xuan thought. The thing the dynasty was built around, and the thing three men have died to find.
Gu had followed him, step by uncertain step. "Whatever is behind that," the old man said, low, "the dynasty was built to keep it shut."
"Then perhaps it wants knocking."
He did not use an imperial key. He did not recite an incantation. He laid his right palm flat against the rusted latch.
Hum.
The ancient, familiar chime rang in the depths of his consciousness, deeper and clearer than any he had heard before, like a great bronze bell struck at the bottom of a lake.
[Location Verified: Great Liang Imperial Origin Dragon-Vein Vault (Historical Weight: 3,000 Years of Imperial Luck).]
[Milestone Sign-In Available! Triggered 1000-Fold Monarch Multiplier!]
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Li Xuan stood very still, his hand upon the cold iron.
A thousand-fold. He thought of a cup held beneath a river. He thought of nine pills in ten that killed their takers. He thought of a month, and of a man who leaned on a broom to stand.
The prompt hung before his mind’s eye, patient as stone.
Behind him, Elder Gu held his breath.