David

Dongjing was a city with many trees - badgers and cats and ferrets peeked out from the piles of leaves left behind by the autumn chill. It was also a city bright with light pollution, but by the time the carriage had escaped the center of the city, the rain had stopped and the stars scattered across the night sky were fully visible.

David quickly discovered that the Iron Road was the only well-paved road leading to or from Dongjing. The highway to Huzhou was cobbled and broken with use. Ditches dug along the side of the road had collected deep puddles from the recent rain. From these ditches, the stench of manure rose directly into his nostrils.

The carriage ride was slow and bumpy. Only four gigantic wooden wheels supported a cart seating nearly forty people, half of whom continued to sing in a chorus. What they lacked in tune, they made up for with volume. David was tempted to jump off the carriage and walk himself.

The only thing that stopped him was the girl sitting next to him trying to make conversation. David felt it would be a bit too rude to run ahead into the distance.

"So how did you fall in love with the music of Liu Na?"

David shrugged.

"The first time I heard her songs, I was ten years old - just shy of a decade ago. If you look at the releases from Song Mountain, you'll know that most of the greats don't often produce more than a single song every century, and we're blessed to live during the debut of the greatest singer in living memory, the voice of her generation!"

It seemed that Yanyan hadn't really wanted to know the ways David allegedly appreciated her favorite singer, which was quite a lucky thing.

"Isn't it crazy?" the girl whispered. "That cultivators from the Great Sects consider a single generation to be so many years?"

David nodded. "Isn't it?" he echoed.

"But even though she's a cultivator, it's clear that Liu Na cares for her mortal fans the most! She's not like those aloof beauties she calls her seniors."

"She's not?"

Yanyan smiled happily, which was a little concerning. She clearly didn't understand polite disinterest. "Do you see this?" She dug a well-manicured hand into a pocket in her skirt and fished out an oblong block of jade.

At first glance, it was about as long as David's pinky and half the thickness. The base color of it was a spring green, but unsightly blotches of brown and red littered all of its surfaces. If Alice were here, she'd likely be able to tell him in great detail about the value of jade by color, but even to David's untrained eye, it was obviously nothing special.

The workmanship also seemed shoddy - the visible faces of the slab weren't well polished, like most jade jewelry - instead they seemed ground down, almost fuzzy. David wondered idly if Yanyan had dropped it too many times and it was just in poor condition, but as he continued to look at it, he realized suddenly that it was no ordinary piece of jewelry.

The piece of jade resting in Yanyan's palm wasn't worn from mistreatment - it was covered with a shocking number of precise little scratches and indents - thousands and thousands of them. Indeed, if they hadn't been neatly organized into standardized rows and columns by the hundred and contained in a well-defined rectangle on the face of the slab, David didn't think he would have even noticed that the markings were intentional.

While the original rock had likely been about as common as jade could be, it could only have been carved by the hand of a cultivator.

Yanyan flipped it around on her palm and hid it from view with her finger theatrically. "Guess what's on it."

David really did wonder. The scratches he'd seen, however impressive, did not sing the Song. The jade piece didn't seem like a cultivation relic at all, but he could be wrong.

Yanyan lifted her finger from it.

Two characters had been scored hurriedly onto the back side of the jade slip. Liu Na.

Of course.

"Nice," said David. He tried to sound enthusiastic, because he was still curious as to what the piece of jade could possibly be.

"You're not from around here, are you?" asked Yanyan.

“I’ve been to Dongjing before, but it’s my first time visiting Huzhou,” said David, frowning slightly. The tone of pity in her voice was vaguely annoying.

"It's not that I'm judging you,” she said quickly. “I just didn't recognize your accent - not everyone's fortunate enough to be born in Dongjing, nothing wrong with being from somewhere else.”

Backhanded apology given, Yanyan immediately launched into what she’d wanted to say. "You're probably wondering how someone like me got my hands on an original Song Mountain record, aren't you?"

It wasn't some kind of array and it certainly wasn't a relic for use in cultivation. This was an autographed cd.

“It’s actually far more common around these parts than you’d think,” said Yanyan. “I’ve heard that anywhere in the world outside of Dongjing and Huzhou, records are quite rare and record players even more so. If you don’t have a player of your own, there are music stores in Huzhou and you have a handful of silvers to spare.”

“I don’t personally own records I can play if I did buy one,” said David. He decided that if it was actually just a few silvers, he’d probably buy one anyway, just to figure out how it worked.

Yanyan beamed at him. “While records are pretty expensive even fifty li away in Dongjing, they practically give them out for free in Huzhou. Sometimes literally! Some of the outer disciples of Song Mountains who haven’t debuted yet wander the streets giving out samples of their singing or playing.”

David wondered if it was likely that he’d be accosted on the street by someone trying to give him their mixtape.

“It’s a tradition as old as time. Everyone who follows the music scene knows that Peak Master Hsui has increased her standing reward by a spirit stone a year for anyone in the world who can return to her any single one of the hundreds of samples she handed out from before her debut!”

“What’s the prize gotten to?” asked David.

“Almost five thousand,” Yanyan whispered. “You could buy an entire neighborhood with that kind of money. If I worked until the day I died and ate nothing but salted rice, I wonder if I could save even ten spirit stones.”

Song Mountain’s Peak Master Hsui was clearly as old as the ones from the Ascending Sky, then.

“The fabulous wealth of cultivators is beyond the imagination of normal folk like us.” She winked at David.

David tried his best to ignore that awkward cocktail - too mild to be guilt, too ephemeral to be embarrassment - that was the sum of assumptions and attitudes adding up to the girl who sat beside him. He gave her as sincere a smile as he could muster.

They lapsed into a companionable silence. Thankfully, Yanyan had either run out of things to say or had spent all her frenetic energy monologuing.

“I’m going to take a nap,” said Yanyan. “You should too. There’s going to be a few acts before Liu Na sings - her set’s always at sunrise.” She immediately closed her eyes and put her head against David’s shoulder.

David shifted away from her gingerly. It was an agonizingly slow, if practiced, motion he’d acquired from years of experience with mass transit.

Yanyan leaned deeper into his shoulder. She wasn’t asleep. David resisted the urge to sigh and began looking around in boredom.

Mostly everyone on the right side of the carriage’s center aisle were indeed napping. They were mostly David’s age or a few years older, and they’d sung along with what David assumed were Liu Na’s greatest hits.

By contrast, the seats on the left side of the carriage were filled with older travelers - men and women with graying hair and tired eyes. Some of them were also asleep, but most stared past the driver and her horses into the horizon. All of them, awake or asleep, clutched onto their red vouchers for dear life. Their destination would likely be the gambling halls rather than the concert.

A man who looked to be in his seventies ate a mantou, a steamed loaf of bread that fit into his palm, a crumb at a time. He picked at it so often the cloud-white loaf had become gray from the dirt and dust on his hands.

A woman the age of David’s mother counted the silvers in her purse, clasped her hands, looked upwards and said a prayer, then counted the silvers in her purse again, then prayed again, counted, prayed, over and over without pause.

Most of the twenty-odd gamblers were also eating, counting coin or praying. Those who looked skyward for divine intervention found not the heavens but a yellowed canvas roof. The roof had already proven useless at keeping the rain out, so David assumed it only existed in service of the advertisements painted on its underside.

Most of the ads were three lines of haphazardly painted blocky text. The first lines usually named a business or promised some sort of service. The second lines attempted to give directions, but not a single ad had a clearly addressed location. Every single ad spent a line of text congratulating whoever was looking at it for winning money.

David took a second look at the faces across the aisle and sincerely hoped everyone on the bus would win money - even if it would only be a temporary escape from that quiet desperation most of the gamblers carried in their shaking hands.

Sufficiently depressed, David peered out the window over Yanyan’s head. The road remained cobblestone and the scenery had become more rural - a patch of farmland or forest sat between every street lined with homes. The many-storied pagodas that characterized Dongjing became less and less frequent, replaced with stout and squat temples shaped from stone into domes and cones.

No matter the shape of the temples, they shared two common features - large, thin wooden doors that came in pairs. They were twice David’s height and just wide enough to pass through easily. The top half of the doors were carved through into so many rows of silhouetted figures they had become windows.

And these were figures carved onto the doors were ones that David almost recognized - some divine, some demonic, some mundane. Not a single temple on the road shared a carving with another - in fact, few even shared the same style, but the subject matter remained consistent. Each carving was a story of something - the origins of the world, a morbid parable, a symbolic history of some cultivation technique.

Behind the story windows, each temple shared something else - an enormous statue. After David had seen a few of the temples, it became clear to him that the statues were not a feature of the temples - rather, the temples had been built around them. The varying height of each and every temple matched the statue within. There wasn’t a single statue that didn’t occupy the vast majority of space within the structures.

David recognized none of the subjects depicted by the statues, but the style of sculpture immediately recalled the less offensive nickname Chan Changshou had ascribed to Huzhou - the City of Bodhisattvas. His mother had always worshiped one Bodhisattva in particular - Guanyin, who represented compassion and mercy.

The road was now some kind of bridge - stone or wood - more often than not. Any stretch of road that didn’t cross over some body of water instead avoided one by winding over dry land. Almost every patch of this dry land was occupied by a temple and in each temple stood a Bodhisattva.

By the time David could see the twin peaks up ahead - Song and Tang Mountain, locked in a stare across the lake for which the city was named - he’d counted nearly fifty temples and still hadn’t recognized a single Bodhisattva in any of them.

He shifted in his seat to stare at one such temple the carriage had just passed and Yanyan buried her face into the crook of his arm.

David scowled. He missed Alice.