Alice

The next morning dawned but not with the blue skies and mist that Alice had come to expect.

Something was strange about this sunrise. The world had become faded and washed out. The air was clear, but a muted, ponderous silence blanketed the world. When Alice's palms found the wood of the deck, she received a static shock. Somehow, everything had acquired a latent potential that lashed out indiscriminately.

This intrusive, all encompassing change did not seem to affect the rays of the sun breaking through the openings in the storm clouds. But there was something unnatural about this too.

The light did not disperse and find the places it did not go. It observed boundaries in the way light could not - should not. The rays divided the world into black and white, into light and shadow, arrayed like pieces on a chessboard.

No, not chess.

These beams of light, intense, angry and too defined, parted the storm one after another over the world every few seconds. Alice closed her eyes and tried to imagine what it would look like if she could see the shape of the clouds from a bird’s eye - from the stratosphere or further.

This was a game that she hadn’t played. Weiqi. Go. This was a Go board.

Her breath quickened. Someone was playing the most important game they ever would, it seemed.

The sound of distant thunder woke the last person still sleeping on the ship upon the first peal - it must have. If it hadn't, the quickly muffled scream from Wen might have. His eyes were wild.

"Blue, clear and bright," said David, in English. "For us, at least."

Alice felt a measure of relief. David, unlike the ship, unlike the river, the wind - had not lost anything in the storm.

"What?" That was Jing, confused and groggy. Jing didn't understand. He probably wouldn't have understood what David had said even if David had spoken a language they shared.

A deep, primal fear rose in Alice as the thunder roared again. It was still as distant as it had always been - just far louder. She quashed it ruthlessly. If David could stand tall, so would she.

David didn't bother to explain, staring in the sky, stock-still-cut-from-stone-wise-and-cold. What he called his Song, what she knew as his Story was strong and loud. He stood, facing west by northwest. The storm that covered the world must have come from that direction.

Alice stood as well and stretched, humming that familiar melody which had brought them the Lightning. She carefully found a place beside David and slipped her hand into his, twining their fingers together.

"A-are the two of you mad?" asked Wen, clutching the mast between him and the unseen eye of the storm. "Don't you know what this is? Don't you know what will happen if we attract its attention?"

David usually hid the deep contempt he held for Wen in the name of politeness, but it covered his face now. "It's not here for you."

Wen trembled, like the ship, like the river.

David was staring into the distance again, hearing things no one else heard. He gave a soft sigh. "It's a shame."

More rays of light opened up the clouds.

His grip on her fingers tightened slightly - still gentle, but sad. Alice continued to hum the prevailing theme of Guangling San. It was a small, worthless kind of solidarity. She could have done far better. She could have taken out her guqin. But Alice did not dare. There were some things that just weren’t meant to be.

The thunder roared.

"It's not fair,” said David, to Alice, to the sky.

“She shouldn't have lost just because she couldn't let him go," he muttered. He no longer seemed larger than life, no longer showed that resolve - it dove back into him and disappeared. Alice stopped humming and wondered if she, too, looked younger than she was.

In an instant, the storm clouds were gone, as if they'd never been there. The sound of the waves crashing on the rocky shore, the sound of birds in the distance and wind on the floodplains, had never left - but they seemed important again. Sky River was the same idyllic place it always had been, no longer bent under the weight of the Heavens.

The pieces had been cleared from the board.

Wen found his courage now that the storm was gone. "You- you" he sputtered, a finger pointed at David. "You could have gotten me killed," he howled.

"What in the name of the emperor is going on here?" asked Jing. Everyone ignored him.

"Have the strength of character to bear witness," David hissed at Wen, livid. He turned towards the north and west again. "This is the road you claim to have chosen."

Wen returned the sneer that David had given him during the storm. "You are too unreasonable. To risk the wrath of heaven amidst an ascension. Even someone laying siege to the gates - someone with a nearly formed nascent soul, would not do something like this. Lighting your qi like a beacon.”

He raised his voice even further. “Courting death!"

Alice folded her arms. Wen made her angry in an unfamiliar way. There was something so small and hypocritical about him - caught between what he'd said under the stars and what he said now. "It's really easy to talk about things like this when you can't be heard, isn't it?"

Wen snorted and walked over to the railing, staring into the clear water of the river.

Jing had finally pieced together what had happened. "Did someone become an immortal?" He looked in the direction David had been facing.

David shook his head. "She died trying."

Jing was a little bewildered. "What do you mean, she?"

David shrugged a little listlessly, unsure of what Jing was asking.

"Who was trying to ascend?" Jing asked.

David looked as confused as Jing was now. "How could I possibly know who called the Lightning?"

Jing threw his hands into the air. "But then how did you know it was a woman?"

"Oh." David frowned slightly. "The thunder was mocking her for not saving him. Petty. But it worked.” He looked tired. “It wasn’t the time for her to be questioning her Principle." He paused. "Maybe I shouldn't have just assumed?"

He realized everyone was looking at him with a deep concern. Wen's fear had returned, at least in part.

David was starting to look a little irritated, so Alice squeezed his hand lightly - reassurance. "Let's just pretend none of this ever happened," she said to Jing - and also Wen, who was looking over the railing again.

"Agreed!" Jing decided. He scrambled over to the rigging with some false cheer and started adjusting the sails. Within moments, the wind grew louder as they picked up speed.

"We'll talk when we're alone," Alice whispered into his ear. She didn't trust Wen and Jing was far too talkative for his own good.

Alice brightened suddenly. "I'm going to teach you how to play your flute," she decided. She leaned over and picked up the instrument, which David had stowed between the mast and her guqin case. She quickly wiped it down with the hem of her robe and handed it to him.

David took the flute and gave it a long look, then placed his lips onto it and blew.

There was no sound. He tried again. And then again. He stared at it.

Alice couldn't help it. She chortled. "You've never played a woodwind before, have you."

David scowled and let Alice take the flute back from him.

"It happens to everyone their first time," said Alice. She grinned at him. "Watch my lips."

He blushed for her, just right.

Alice looked around. Wen was still sulking - hanging over the railing like a bat. Once in a while, he would turn to look at her. No, not her - her saber. After a while, he began pacing once more. Jing was pretending to steer the ship, something they all knew was unnecessary. Alice supposed that there was something intimate about this that was hard to watch.

She demonstrated the technique with as much exaggeration and technical accuracy as she could muster, and played the flute, closing one hole after another on the face of the flute - a pentatonic scale. Alice knew David played classical piano, where the use of the scale was rare, but that came with a distinct advantage anyway. It could be produced by only hitting the black keys.

She watched David mimic her movements as she played, twisting his lips and tongue in an almost comical manner. It may have looked a little absurd, but she'd reserve her laughter for if - when - he failed to make a sound from the flute.

Alice handed the flute back to him. To her surprise, something that was almost a note came through.

"I should have expected this," said Alice, with a little sniff. "You're always surprisingly competent."

David pulled the flute away from her, grinning. "Why do you sound so mad?"

Alice rolled her eyes. "I'm not mad. Why would I be mad?"

He sidled up next to her. "I'm not mad. Why would I be mad?" he parroted.

"I hate you," she decided, pouting. "Play your flute. Also, straighten your back when you play. You look like a camel."

It had passed into the afternoon by the time David was satisfied with his progress for the day, even though he still struggled to play the minor scales which required him to find a byzantine series of open and closed holes.

The instrument was designed to play every defined note - but it wasn't easy to do so. The differences in musical tradition were just too great. Alice thought that maybe he'd be a little more appreciative of how much effort she'd put into learning how to play Swan Lake.

"Shut up," David said, drawing out the words with great suffering. "Of course you figured it out faster. You play every instrument decently well and I play one instrument incredibly well."

Alice glared. "I do everything incredibly well." Because she did... Kind of. She did!

Wen had gotten over his annoyance by the time Jing started to hand out the only meal there was on the ship - dense buns of unseasoned flour and water which had been steamed and then wrapped in cloth. They were cold and most of the moisture had gone out of them, so they were as hard as rocks.

Alice was glad she wasn't hungry, though that thought gave her pause. She'd last eaten at the mulberry grove before they had even arrived at Cloud Mountain City. It'd been many, many hours. David took a bit of his bun and chewed slowly.

The chewing continued for nearly half a minute - long enough for Jing to finish most of his own bun.

"Gross," said Alice. Jing looked a little crestfallen. "Not the bun," she clarified. She pointed at David who was still chewing.

"It's hard to get used to at first," admitted Jing, who had finished his meal by the time David was sure he wouldn't choke to death if he swallowed.

"What sort of Daoist needs to eat?" asked Wen, looking to have an argument again. He popped open a small pouch which he wore on his waist. Inside were a dazzling array of pills - of many sizes and shapes. It would have looked out of place even at a music festival.

Wen selected a capsule carefully and popped it into his mouth. He chewed on it, then made the face of someone who had chewed on a pill, and then swallowed, making the face of someone who had swallowed a pill that they had chewed on.

"What was that?" Alice asked.

Wen burped. "An appetite suppressant. And a nutritional supplement." Even from this distance, Alice could smell the chalky must of an unused classroom - hints of cardboard and loam.

Alice pointed at him. "You’re the sort of Daoist who needs to eat."

"As if any of us actually had to eat since qi condensation." The sneer on his face turned into something a touch more vulnerable. "I just hate feeling hungry," he said. Then he became annoyed again, gave an unintelligible grumble and went back to pacing.

"Why do you eat?" David asked Jing, who clearly knew how to use qi in at least some capacity. Alice still didn't have the slightest idea how people could figure out what someone else's cultivation base was. She didn't think David did either. Jing was the first person who had offered up the information as a boast.

Jing shrugged. "Never really thought about it. To break up the monotony? Habit? Sometimes I forget and then I get the feeling that I'd forgotten about something important but it'll keep bothering me until I have a meal."

It was a summary example of Jing's charm, so of course David made sure she knew that he thought that was stupid. It was flattering, really.

It would be more flattering if David were actually the jealous type. This was a bit of an act, after all. Alice liked to think that he only went through with this kind of pageantry to make her feel good about herself but she knew that this was simply the way he entertained himself. If they had been dating back home, it would have been the source of endless insecurity. Here, though, the real proof that David cared came from moments of crisis - not from when he was humoring her.

"I still like eating though," said Jing, after a few moments of silence. "Nothing like arriving at a distant port and trying a dish that an old city's been proud of for an aeonspan. A hundred thousand years is a long time to figure out how to cook something well."

Moments like these that cropped up once or twice every hour really reminded exactly how different this world was from her home. Generations were measured in thousands of years rather than decades.

"I wonder if they'll let the general public eat for free at the Core Formation celebration," Jing said. "Ping'an does a pretty good braised duck, for how young the city is."

"How young is the city?" David asked, before she could.

"Oh, somewhere between ten and twenty thousand years. Patriarch Jiang started his family here because of how close it was to his sect, but ascended way sooner than he thought he would is the story. It's been growing pretty steadily since."

Alice wasn't sure how old Jing was but it was well implied that he wasn't more than a decade their senior. There was something surreal about the scale of time that was difficult to put to words. Twenty thousand years before she had been born, civilization hadn't been invented yet.

Alice looked at the dirt roads alongside the river. It made sense, almost. Anyone who would have invented the fixtures of modern life cultivated instead of, well, inventing the fixtures of modern life. And then the talented ascended. To where? Probably wherever Wen had been convinced he had come from.

"Speaking of Patriarch Jiang, word from Ping'an is that there's a huge scandal," Jing said. Jing was the sort who loved huge scandals.

Alice also loved huge scandals.

“Just three days ago, less than a week before the ceremony, the Patriarch is still nowhere to be found.” Jing was delighted. “Now why is that important? Remember, Young Master Jiang is the inheriting son of the Jiang family and the third person to make it to Core Formation in the entire history of the clan.”

“How improper,” whispered Alice, incensed. David’s expression was the dictionary definition of nonplussed. Alice frowned, her fun a little spoiled.

She considered the matter more. "Three people, in twenty thousand years?" That had to be pretty terrible, right?

Jing nodded. "Including the Patriarch." He looked thoughtful. "Though aren't most families of talented cultivators like that?" He was asking her, because he thought she had come from what he had called a Great Sect.

Alice shrugged.

"I suppose the families who are connected to specific sects usually have a lot of talented children and abundant resources to give to them. But while three is on the low end, there's not usually many cultivators of note from the same family. Young Master Jiang's the real deal though. He's only eighty."

Wasn't Zhou in his late eighties and didn't his core get shattered over seventy years ago? Alice frowned. David caught her eye, so she winked at him.

"So normally, at least in this part of the world, people throw huge parties where they invite everyone who's still alive in their families back whenever anyone forms a Core. In a family like the Jiangs, it could be the start of a new era of prosperity. Even if the young master never opens a meridian, he'll still live for a few thousand years."

Jing spun the steering wheel aimlessly. "The Jiangs will go from having to bend over backwards pleasing the families who run the local cities to bossing them around, so people are being as rude as possible while they still can afford to insult them.”

Alice nodded. It made perfect sense, no matter how much David frowned about it.

“It makes sense that he wouldn’t show up though. Patriarch Jiang is very, very young for an immortal from..." Jing stared at Wen. "From a lower realm like ours. A generational talent no matter how you look at it."

"I've never seen an Ascension before this morning," said Jing.

"Well, you still haven't," said Alice, more flippantly than she actually felt. David grimaced.

Jing nodded. "I knew that most people fail their breakthroughs, and everyone knows that's the hardest one, but I thought whoever had the guts to do it were likely to succeed.”

“Scary.” David didn’t sound scared.

Jing stared into the distance. “For someone to live for so long, find their Principle and then fail their ascension? Makes me glad I don't bother cultivating.”

Jing swallowed, looking away. “I'm just trying to get rich and die happy."

The hours passed as David continued to practice playing his flute. Alice went back to her Stories, moving a glacial pace. She hadn't tasted blood in a while and she would like it to stay that way. Wen continued to pace and Jing continued to steer - or pretend to.

When the afternoon sun took on the color of an egg yolk, the concentration of homes and businesses grew fivefold - then tenfold. They had entered Ping'an.