David

When nothing else grabbed him, David turned his attention to the Song. Since the morning after Fairy Guan’s lesson, he had barely moved from his cushion in the living room.

Even though he still wasn't sure if what he was doing even counted as cultivation, listening to the Song for long stretches of time was pleasant. It was easy to lose himself in that expansive fractal of interlocking beats and melodies that made up every part of the living world - they were unfailingly interesting and ever changing.

While David listened, Alice played. David wasn’t sure if she cultivated while playing, or by playing, her guqin. The only thing he was sure of was the endless spitting and weaving of the Silkworms. She drew in the Song of anything and everything - from Earth Peak, from the pine floors, from Feiyan and Kanhu, when they were in the living room.

Once in a while, one of their roommates would open their doors, and then shut them again when they realized Alice was still playing. Neither Kanhu nor Feiyan could stand listening to Alice’s music when she was cultivating.

A day and a night passed in a blur.

When the second dawn approached, so did Leng Qitai and everything he owned.

David invited him in, then knocked on Kanhu's door because Kanhu and Qitai were friends, and on Feiyan's door because it was only polite. Alice continued to play, but the Silkworms were silent.

As Kanhu and Feiyan stepped into the living room, Qitai collapsed onto a cushion opposite David with a harrowed stare.

“They were just sitting there, doing nothing, watching me cultivate for hours and hours,” he muttered, undoubtedly referring to the creepy twins. “They weren’t doing anything else. If there’s no space for me, I’ll live in the bathhouse.”

"You're in luck," said David. "We happen to have a spare room."

Feiyan pouted and began to whine, but when no one paid her any attention she marched into the room that they'd designated for storage space, lifted the box of cultivation supplies her family had sent her, and moved it to her own.

"I brought tea," said Qitai, who looked infinitely grateful. He seemed more excited about it than anyone else. He reached into a pouch and extracted a fist-sized urn from it. "This is meant for celebrations and I'm feeling quite celebratory right now."

Qitai threw open the red door and dragged in pewter jugs, each wider than his thigh and high as his stomach, one after another - three in total.

When the disciples had explored their new living situation, the empty bath-house with no visible plumbing had led David to wonder where they’d be getting their water from. Cultivators had no need for food or water, so David expected it to be annoying to find any. Qitai had evidently accounted for that.

"Are those yours?" asked David.

"What?" queried Qitai. "No, of course not. These are from the sect. They're delivered every morning."

David supposed they might have missed the first jug - and they hadn't been outside since returning from the bulletin. He strode over to the jugs and examined them. A helpful note had been stuck onto one of the jugs with some sort of tree sap that dried out and lost its adhesiveness the moment David removed the note.

"Welcome, new disciples. More water can be delivered if anyone in the house is in need. Please inquire at the Logistics Office within Earth Peak. Any time of day or night is fine," David read aloud. He paused. "Nice."

By the open door, the Songs of Earth Peak rushed into the room, seeping into the previously enclosed space. It should have been confusing, but since that day when he had composed and recited a poem of his very own to Uncle Jiang, David had noticed a pattern in the qi that comprised the world. And qi was an apt name - it really was the breath of the world. As his ear for the Song improved, David began to recognize the singular motifs that dominated the qi of most living things and natural phenomena.

But it was still distracting, if pleasantly so now. David reluctantly closed the door and turned towards the sound of clinking and clattering.

Apparently, Qitai already knew more about the living room than they did. He had reached under one of the tables and produced cups, one after another, until he finally found a teapot.

Unlike the pewter cups in the house they'd stayed in before the Lantern Lighting, these were fired ceramics of pristine white and cobalt-blue porcelain. Depicted on them were scenes of cultivators with long beards in conflict with demons and demonic cultivators. Not a single cup showed identical art. The teapot had a dragon of that deepest blue coiled about it, with its handle shaped into a tail and its spout shaped into its head.

Back home, they would have looked out of place anywhere but in a museum. Here, they were jammed under the table in the equivalent of a college dorm.

Qitai removed the bronze cap from his urn and used it to measure the tea leaves, transferring one capful after another into the teapot. "The Lengs of Dongjing have always produced tea on our two hundred mou of farmland." Chinese acres - Alice probably knew the conversion rate to actual acres.

David then realized he didn’t have a strong idea of how large an acre was to begin with.

"Early in the summer, we leave the city to live at our ancestral home for a moon or two - it's built over some caves of note. If it had been the home of a spirit beast, it's long gone, and if it was the resting place of a great artifact, it's long been looted. But the qi in the soil for two li around the caves remains inhospitable to all but three species of tea shrubs."

Qitai carefully sealed the urn, then took the teapot and a cup over to the jugs of water. "Green Leng is the most expensive tea you can find, at least in Dongjing - it is not only rich in qi, as all valuable teas are, but is prized for the specific balance of qi when properly brewed. While some teas will cause harm to certain cultivators, Green Leng is a universal delight," he said, as he measured eight cups of water into the pot.

"I have tea as well!" Feiyan announced as she emerged from her room cradling her own urn, which was many times the size of Qitai's.

"It's not nearly as impressive," she said quickly, when Qitai looked at her expectantly. “It’s not even for cultivation,” she lamented. “But it smells nice, and I like the taste.”

Qitai smiled. "That's the best reason to drink tea," he said. "You can probably find more pots and cups under the other tables."

Feiyan went searching and was immediately successful. Her set was also of porcelain, but was a single color - closer to eggshell than white. She haphazardly dumped a handful of tea into the pot and gave it a happy sniff.

"So we might have a bit of a problem," hazarded Alice. "Don't you need the water to be hot?"

"Well, I do have a little bit of a trick. I came up with it myself, using basic cultivation principles," said Qitai, sounding proud. His smile widened and he raised a hand. "During Qi Condensation, we're taught the names and locations of each of the apertures and meridians on the body."

Feiyan nodded enthusiastically.

"Are we, now?" muttered Kanhu.

If pushed, David could probably remember the three or four primary meridians that Li had mentioned. Alice raised her hand and began poking at it with an index finger.

"What's the difference between a meridian and an aperture?" David asked.

Qitai began laughing, until he realized David was serious. "What do you mean, what's the difference between- What? But you're- You're in Core Formation!"

David shrugged.

Qitai thought a bit and then gave a weak chuckle. "This must be the famed Southern humor. Forgive me for being uncultured, I haven't travelled-"

"I'm not joking."

The possibly priceless teapot fell from Qitai's fingers. Luckily, it was only a few inches off of the table, and landed with a hearty thunk. "How do you even cultivate?"

"Who knows. It would be nice if someone actually could answer my question though," David said with a wry grin.

Feiyan began to point at parts of her body. "Xin" - the heart. "Fei" - the lungs. "Xinbao" - David wasn’t sure what a heart wrapping was. "Sanjiao" - the esophagus. "Xiaochang, Dachang" - the upper and lower intestines. "Pi, Shen, Gan" - the spleen, the kidneys and the liver. "Dan, Pangguang, Wei" - the gallblader, the bladder and the stomach. "Those are your primary meridians," she said.

David refrained from rolling his eyes. "You could have just said 'your organs'."

"You're the one who asked, senior brother," Feiyan huffed. "Each meridian has a yin or yang nature and-" she struggled.

"And a polarity," said Qitai. "Both yin and yang have lesser or greater polarities. There's also fading yin and bright yang. Don't ask me what that means, that's a question to ponder after Core Formation. Opening a meridian comes with a tribulation, and passing qi through an open meridian will change the nature of it. In what way? I'm not sure."

"I'm not going to remember any of this," said David cheerfully. "So what's an aperture?"

"How does qi enter your body?"

David frowned. "Through my ears, I'm assuming."

Qitai pinched the bridge of his nose. "You've got to be kidding me."

David supposed he'd never really thought about it - though it was certain that he heard the Song.

"Apertures are the points on your body where qi can enter and leave," said Feiyan, who sounded exhausted. "Each one has an elemental nature, and trends yin or yang. Different apertures are more or less effective at different times of day, each aperture connects to at least one meridian, some connect to multi-"

She stopped. "You're not listening, are you?" she accused, folding her arms. “Feiyan is wasting her breath.”

Out of the corner of his eye, David saw Alice frowning. Alice was definitely listening, and would probably remember all of this. Kanhu was similarly silent through the entirety of the impromptu lecture, deep in thought.

"I'm just going to show you the trick," said Qitai, who had had more than enough. "Observe." He pointed at two spots at the bottom of his palm. "These two." He moved his finger up to two of his knuckle bones. "And these two."

"Two pairs of first and second phase fire apertures," offered Feiyan.

"If you draw in qi through the first set and release it through the second, you'll produce a consistent source of heat."

Qitai placed his palm against the teapot and closed his eyes. David listened for the sound of the Song and noticed a monotone hum - he noted the pitch and timbre of the note, and that Qitai was counting under his breath.

Little puffs of steam began to rise from the spout of the teapot, and suddenly a new Song could be heard - the tea, indeed, had qi in it.

"We'll let it sit for a few minutes before we pour it," said Qitai.

David took one of the porcelain cups from the table and filled it with water, drawing in and releasing the Song, trying to hit that same hum he'd heard from Qitai. Compared to the Dance of the Falling Leaves, or Wen's frantic chanting that closed his wound back in Ping'an, this was many orders of complexity down. But it was something Qitai had created himself.

The cup grew hot in his hand, and the water began to churn and roll.

"It works," David proclaimed, feeling almost guilty that he hadn't given a single thought to meridians or apertures in this process. “It works.”

That prompted the other three to grab their own cups and gather around the jug. After a few moments, thin trails of steam rose up from the circle out of each cup.

Alice leaned over to whisper in English to David, looking as excited as he felt.

"We're fucking wizards."