Jiang Xiangyue

On the night of the harvest moon, the orphans who could afford such luxuries threw jugs of sorghum wine into Sky River. Most orphans in Ping'an couldn't name their parents and had no one to celebrate the autumn festival with, so they claimed the Jiang patriarch as their own.

Making offerings to an immortal was a dangerous practice. Immortals were who they were despite the auspices of heaven, so throwing in your lot with one was a naturally unlucky act.

There were those who took advantage of fate and fed this blind faith into their middle dantian to strengthen their will. At its best, this was a mutually beneficial experience - though one side stood far better. The echo of devotion wrapped itself around true believers like a blanket, giving them peace of mind - if nothing else.

At its worst, the relationship was exploitative. There were those who warped and twisted these strands of karma flooding in from the meek to steal good fortune and subvert gifts.

Xiangyue, who still remembered being an orphan, methodically severed any strands of karma from such worship as they arrived. He taught his children, and his children's children, that there were no desirable outcomes to piety of this sort.

None of them listened. His words were easily forgotten because Xiangyue was rarely ever around his family. When he did visit, they tried without success to hide their resentment from him.

It had taken many years for him to realize why they felt this way. To his family, there was no difference between an immortal ancestor and a dead ancestor. They were sure that he was withholding their inheritance from them.

Xiangyue may have given them the city of Ping'an, but it wasn't enough.

His family had expected him to solve that mystery known as the Dance of the Falling Leaves - a scripture with eighteen pieces and no solution, passed along on a series of tied bamboo sticks. And they'd wanted him to dig up Jianlan's grave and relocate her memorial so they could drink from the spirit spring beneath her tomb.

Xiangyue considered the question of his first song as he tuned the guqin that had been lent to him. It was a desperate instrument - one that smelled of disappointment and the loss of innocence, of being tricked and resorting to trickery. Those were his beginnings as well.

But those memories weren't as important as the time he'd spent with his beloved. The first song would have to be about her, and about the family they had started - no matter how they'd disappointed him over the years.

He looked around the courtyard for inspiration, then immediately wished that he hadn't. The copse of peach trees he'd planted some time ago had been cut down. The trees had flowered year round and so had been the favorite roost of vagrant geese who had missed the migration.

Xiangyue scowled. It was irrational to be angry about a bit of redecorating, but everything his family did seemed so petty. Those peach trees had been there for four thousand years. Thinking about it more would just make him angry for little reason, so he considered the music he had learned from the Falling Leaves instead.

He began to speak as he tuned the guqin, tightening and loosening the strings. "The Mulberry Tree branches five ways. The branch from which I flowered is the line of the Weavers. In the tradition of the Weavers, the musician will give a short introduction to his song."

He had chosen what he must play - a piece that had been scored in the oldest book of sheet music from the sect, compiled by Lady Wang in her youth. As he tuned his guqin, the girl tuned hers, matching each of his strings. She had a good ear - the answering echo of her instrument was as accurate as one could expect.

"The song I'm going to play for you today was heard when the pillar of records was raised by the first Weaver. No one knows from which of the great palaces she arrived, but she brought with her the meaning of culture to this world."

He tuned the final string and ran his thumb over the face of the instrument, plucking each string with his nail.

"This is a story of love and a story of family. The song's name is Departing Geese."

The Tide rose within him, an inevitability. He had, like the Weavers who had come before him, framed his world in the context of music. This was how he had disagreed with the sky.

Seven notes to the first bar and a measure of silence. Xiangyue had played the guqin since he was a boy of twelve, busking for taels in Xijing - the westernmost Linked City. Silence was a guqin player's best friend - the unsaid was as important as the notes he played. Out of this silence, he found his voice.

"The goose - he arrives carrying a branch."

The boy stared at the cracked memorial with a pity that he disliked. The girl's fingers twitched. Nine notes, a hesitation. The girl - Alice had responded with the second bar. Xiangye had played the guqin for many people - even in recent memory, but he hadn't played with anyone for a very long time.

He opened his mouth to continue the poem, but the boy - David let his voice ring across the courtyard.

"The goose - she preens as he returns."

Xiangyue was somewhat surprised. This was not a well known poem, and the song itself was often set in other pieces as a melodic idea rather than played alone. He played the third bar - a melancholic dance at the highest registers of the instrument.

"The nest - without child," Xiangyue accused.

To his credit, David suddenly looked stricken, as though the weight of what he'd done had caught him. Alice played the responding series of notes.

"To justice - an aberration," David admitted without a stutter. There were no frantic denials here. Alice, however, gave Xiangyue a look of intense vitriol. It asked him a reasonable question - how could you judge him without knowing what happened, just because Jiang Tiankong was his family?

The pattering rain kept time, so Xiangyue played on.

"The river - larger than the Han," Xiangyue said, with a careful patience. Alice responded with eight notes, a sarcastic demand for forgiveness.

"The geese - smaller than many birds," explained David. In the corner of his eye, Xiangyue saw one of his descendants with clenched fists. A wet purple ribbon tied to the spear he wore on his back trailed in the wind. How could someone who didn't even have the courage to ask for vengeance for his own family deserve respect?

Xiangyue played the final notes of the song and finished the poem. "Perhaps there will be no more meetings, but they still follow one another - flying."

In the distance, at the other end of the courtyard, the girl who had lent Xiangyue the guqin clapped enthusiastically. It died abruptly when she realized she was the only one to do so. Her friend, startlingly beautiful and dressed in green silks, pulled at her sleeve sharply and the girl ducked her head in embarrassment.

"I'm sorry I killed him," David said quietly. He looked up at the cracked carving of the mulberry flower. "And about Yu Jianlan. You must have really loved her."

Xiangyue looked at David, who stared at his hands silently.

"Are you going to kill him?" Alice asked, her fingers pressed against the wood of her guqin to the point they'd lost all color.

"I haven't decided."

"You'd best kill me too, if you do." There was a peculiar sound - one that he hadn't heard since he'd met the lightning. Xiangyue recognized it as the sound of many, many little silkworms, newly hatched, chewing on the leaves of a mulberry tree, spitting and spitting their cocoons, ready to die, ready to fly.

Xiangyue examined her. Alice wore the light grey robes and carried in her that same aloof disregard for the world around her that was common amongst the sons and daughters of the Mulberry Tree.

In the halls of the sect, there were altars in the back corner depicting people who were rarely named. There were many words written on them, but he recalled one particular line from a poem carved on the altar in the back corner - grudges held for generations, with no sure source of blame.

He could kill them both and be done with the matter. The strands of karma surrounding them worried him, though. Karma was not like fate, or retribution - it could be avoided and dodged but it rarely went away without resolution. It was really unfortunate that he believed in it.

Xiangyue could very well sever his own strands, but even at seventeen without fully formed foundations, those angry black lines that connected everyone and everything pointed into higher skies.

To become an immortal was to renounce the world and defy the heavens. He had never been afraid of any mountain and had never backed down from a fight. But to be human was to care for things built from nothing. If he didn't care that someone might seek vengeance on his family, then surely he couldn't justify killing this boy for his conflict with Jiang Tiankong.

Killing the girl was even further removed from what was acceptable to him. It would be the worst sort of vanity.

"It is your turn to play for me," he said. He would understand what he had to do when he heard her song.

Alice sat in silence for a few moments, playing with her nails in an off putting way. The sound of silkworms chewing in the darkness did not subside, but Xiangyue did not expect it to.

If anything, he was surprised that the girl was so well controlled in everyday life. Records from the sect indicated that those who discovered Principle early in their lives tended to plummet headfirst into them - unable to act in ways that ran contrary to them.

She began to retune the guqin, looking almost cheerful. "I've just realized, this might be the last song I ever play." Her eyes were slightly wet, but no tears fell. As quickly as they had come, they dried - resolve.

"I am Alice Chow," she said, in that language that she shared with the boy. He heard the syllables from earlier - when Alice identified herself. Her fingers found the pin in her hair. "I'm of the fifty ninth generation of the Falling Leaves."

The sound of thunder echoed in the distance. Another band of those inky black lines wrapped themselves around her - as deep the one he'd divined was a line between Alice and the Fourth String. Xiangyue blinked and thought inexplicably of when he'd first stepped into his old sect's courtyard, with the pillar of records rising into the sky.

A conversation he had with Sect Uncle Zhang in a recent century came back to him. If one were to live in a village with no knowledge of karma, would they be bound to their karma? There was circumstantial evidence that they would not. But if a visiting monk were to teach them about karma, their fates would be captured like the stones on a Go board - this was the nature of a force like that.

But these were simply premises which established a far more interesting question.

What would happen if the monk had taken a vow of silence? Would contact with the monk imbue cosmic weight onto the ignorant despite their lack of knowledge? Would this unknown oath that Xiangyue had just witnessed bind her if he were not here to see it?

"My only master remains a promise that must be kept. Today, I will play for you."

She retched, so suddenly he almost reached for the Tide. Alice swallowed lightly.

"In the tradition of the qin that I study, the musician also gives an introduction to her song." Xiangyue smelled the hint of blood in the air. He frowned. The girl had been injured. It didn't manifest until that surge of qi.

A deviation? In someone so young? In friendlier circumstances, he would have asked if he could diagnose her just on the basis of curiosity.

"The song I'm going to play for you today was written first for an ensemble featuring a fiddle. It features in many..." she paused. "It features in many performances. I cannot claim a long history for the song - only sentiment."

She tuned the final string.

"This is a story about the fleeting nature of life and the selfish hope of not wanting to be forgotten. The song is named Rain South of the River."

Wasn't this a little too on the nose?

The first notes rang out, proud and devilishly complex. Alice was using two strings to represent the erhu for which the song was written and the other ones to mimic accompanying instruments.

If this song could be considered a poetic hope that she could continue her journey, its performance could only be a garish question of whether it would be a shame if he were to kill someone who could play something so complicated on a guqin. This was the aesthetic duality of someone pleading for their life - a desperation that swung between beautiful optimism and unseemly begging.

In a way, even before she'd played the first note, Xiangyu had already known that he was going to spare her.

As the sound of silkworms suffused the song with her Tide, it became more than just a guqin. He'd expected this - she, too, could only be a weaver, a teller of Stories. In his mind's eye, he saw the world in which she had walked.

It was a world with great cities with buildings of steel and stone that rose into the sky as high as the Morality Palace, with mechanical snakes that burrowed through the ground which ate hundreds of men and spat them out at their destination, with lightning tamed to power a myriad of strange ambitions.

A world where nine generations passed in the span of centuries, where man could not see in the darkness so he lit his streets so brightly it blotted out the stars, where there were more lost languages than living ones.

A world that produced artists who knew with certainty that they were bound to die and so worked to prove that they were worth remembering, musicians who played for crowds of tens of thousands with instruments he didn't recognize, writers who feverishly penned fantasies of immortality.

A world without cultivation, where Principle was simply a proof of existence.

Alice finished the song by running a nail over the highest string in one final keening note. Any sharper and it would have been something ugly - but here it was plaintive and dramatic.

"You're an Ascender," Xiangyue whispered. "You're from a Seed World."

Xiangyue glanced at the crowd that had come to celebrate his grandson forming his Core, hoping to see someone, anyone, who had seen what he had seen.

Nothing. It was what he'd expected, in all honesty.

Alice nodded slightly.

How could he deny someone like that the chance to live forever? Someone who, had the Falling Leaves survived, would count as his disciple?

When Xiangyue turned to David, who was holding a stone flute between his fingers, he noted the hint of something smug in Alice's relieved smile and the way she grabbed at the boy's free hand. Truly there was no sight quite as sickening as young love.

"Will you also explain yourself to me?" he asked the boy, eyeing the flute.

"I'm not yet able," said David. "I've not seen the instrument I can play recently."

"You are not a Weaver," Xiangyue said, sure as summer rain. He thought of the way the boy's Tide rose with rhythm and rhyme, of the steady meter, the way it rooted itself into the world around him and compared him to those who had come before.

He had a strong suspicion.

"Have you heard the story of the brothers Cao?" Xiangyue asked. "It is an old fable passed down in the Falling Leaves, told when young disciples fight amongst themselves. In this story, the inheriting prince of a kingdom is a man ruled by fear and jealousy. The source of his emotions is his younger brother, a poet of great renown."

David frowned.

"One day, he summons his brother to court and demands that he compose a poem for him to show his respect for the Dragon Throne. But there was a catch - his brother would have to write the poem in the time it took to walk seven steps," said Xiangyue.

"The beanstalks are burned to boil the beans and filtered to extract juice. The beanstalks are burned beneath the cauldron. The beans in the cauldron sobbed, 'we were grown from the self-same root, why must we hound one another with such impatience,'" recited David.

"The brothers were Cao Pi and Cao Zhi, two amongst the Duke of Wei's twenty children. Cao Pi became the Emperor of Cao Wei as the Duke's oldest surviving son," David said, finishing the story.

Xiangyue watched the boy work out why he'd told him this particular story.

"Will I also have seven steps?"

Xiangyue nodded.

Silkworms - loud and angry, then quiet as a whisper as David took a measured step towards him, mumbling to himself under his breath.

A second step. The boy looked into the sky and then closed his eyes, exhaling heavily.

“Three,” said Xiangyue. David stared at the crowd and then at Alice.

“Four, five,” he continued counting as he watched David mumble beneath his breath. Regardless of the result, there would be no more death today.

“Six.” He heard the rhythm of the boy’s Tides speed up and settle over everything like mist - frantic, desperate.

"And the seventh?" Xiangyue asked, as unreasonable as can be.

David nodded, stepping forward one last time. He was barely a meter from Xiangyue now. The boy’s glare rightfully asked Xiangyue why this had been asked of him.

"We come and go from Cloud Mountain's village. In peace we carry on, dispersing, teaching. Heroes must always rush in fist first, making a scene in front of Sect Aunt's grave."

And so, he let the Weaver and the Warrior Poet go.