BOOK THE FIRST - OF THE EARLIEST RECORDS, RECORD I

BOOK THE FIRST

OF THE EARLIEST RECORDS

RECORD I: Concerning Yan Shuyue Before She Possessed Qi; Her Importunities Upon Deng Shun; the Condition of the Southern Wards in the Nineteenth Year of Chengyuan; and the Circumstances Under Which I First Thought Her Worth Recording

The first volume is thinner than I remembered.

This is perhaps an absurd observation, as I have handled it many hundreds of times and could give its dimensions without opening the cabinet. Yet there is a difference between remembering the existence of a thing and returning to the moment when it was all that existed.

One hundred and eighty-seven volumes presently stand in my archive under Shuyue’s name, not counting those materials I have already described. Before me now lies the first.

Its thread binding has loosened along the lower edge; the yellow paper has darkened at the corners; the first thirty leaves bear the slight warping left by a humid summer forty years ago. I have repaired the spine twice. Shuyue has repaired it once, badly, and denied doing so. The wine stain upon the rear cover remains a matter of disagreement between us.

The first entry occupies seven lines.

I shall give it presently, but the reader should understand what those seven lines did not yet contain. They did not contain a cultivator.

Yan Shuyue had not opened a meridian, gathered a breath of qi, entered a martial school, received instruction in a weapon, or achieved any feat which would have justified the attention of a serious historian.

She had no inheritance, no recognized constitution, no patron, no ancestor of consequence, no secret manual, no artifact waiting to acknowledge her, and no indication from Heaven that it had taken the slightest interest in her existence. She was nineteen years old. She worked for wages.

She lived with her parents, a younger sister of twelve, and a younger brother of nine in two rented rooms in the southern wards of the imperial capital.

Her household possessed, at the time I first made inquiries, one good winter quilt, three chipped bowls which matched one another, no land, no servants, no books beyond two primers and an old collection of popular stories, and a persistent difficulty meeting the price of lamp oil at the end of the month.

She was also approximately one hundred and seventy-five centimeters tall, which made her conspicuous among women of her district, and sufficiently attractive that I noted the fact despite its having no obvious bearing upon cultivation.

I see, upon rereading the early pages, that I noted it more than once.

This was unnecessary.

I shall continue.

The nineteenth year of the Chengyuan reign was, in many respects, an easier year than the present one. No foreign Heaven hung above the western horizon. No mountain fortress had yet fallen upon Xun.

Great Huan was at peace with every neighboring state worth naming, though this peace depended upon three border agreements, two marriages, one large annual payment which the Ministry of Rites insisted was a gift rather than tribute, and the mutual exhaustion of the northern princes.

The old emperor remained vigorous enough to terrify his ministers personally. Grain was inexpensive. Copper was not.

The southern canal had not yet been widened, the present New West Ward remained mostly vegetable fields and burial ground, and the avenue now occupied by six banking houses and a branch of the Imperial Armory was then a line of dyers, rope-makers, pawnshops, eating stalls, lodging houses, and residences built so closely together that neighbors could quarrel across opposite windows without raising their voices.

The capital was already vast. Those born into its wealth sometimes spoke of it as though it were a single city. This was the privilege of people transported by carriage.

To those who walked, it was several dozen cities pressed against one another and obliged by law to share a wall. The palace quarter knew one capital; the academies knew another.

Merchant families inhabited a capital of counting houses, warehouses, guild halls, and private dining rooms in which more business was conducted than in certain ministries.

Cultivators inhabited yet another, marked by sect compounds, training courts, medicinal markets, weapon streets, auction houses, dueling platforms, registered arenas, unregistered arenas, physicians specializing in injuries respectable people declined to explain, and restaurants whose prices increased according to the cultivation of their customers.

The poor possessed their own capital too.

Shuyue’s was principally south of the Third Canal.

Cultivation was not hidden from such people. This should be made clear. Children in the southern wards could look upward and see Azure Dragon disciples crossing roofs on light-foot techniques.

They saw imperial cultivators at festival processions, wandering martial artists eating at roadside stalls, sword lights above private compounds, spirit beasts carrying wealthy passengers through streets where ordinary laborers dragged handcarts.

They heard stories. They watched demonstrations through academy gates. They knew perfectly well that men and women could cultivate.

Knowing a door exists is not the same as being able to enter it.

A respectable martial hall required fees. A great sect required talent, fees, introductions, travel, equipment, and the leisure to train rather than work.

Even those organizations that boasted of accepting disciples regardless of birth generally expected such disciples to arrive clothed, fed, and capable of spending several years without sending half their earnings home. Medicines cost money. Weapons cost money. Teachers cost money. Time cost more than all three.

There were cheaper paths. There are always cheaper paths.

A porter who had served in the army might know a body-strengthening exercise. An escort guard might teach three saber forms for the price of wine. Retired soldiers instructed neighborhood boys in courtyards.

Street schools sold techniques of uncertain provenance. Manuals copied badly from better manuals passed through pawnshops until entire generations learned errors introduced by an inattentive scribe. Some of these methods worked.

Some injured their practitioners. Most occupied the enormous territory between uselessness and excellence where ordinary human endeavor has always lived.

Deng Shun belonged to this world.

Everyone called him Old Deng, though he was fifty-two at the time and disliked the adjective. Shuyue, being nineteen, considered fifty-two indistinguishable from antiquity. I, for reasons which need not concern this record, did not.

Deng had spent much of his youth and middle age accompanying caravans between the capital and the western provinces. He was never a celebrated martial artist. No sect claimed him. No poet wrote of him. He possessed neither astonishing talent nor profound comprehension.

He knew how to use a saber well enough to discourage bandits, how to handle a staff, how to fall from a horse without breaking his neck, and how to circulate qi through a modest breathing method which had preserved his joints better than those of most men his age.

He had reached no realm that would have impressed the Azure Dragon Sect. He could nevertheless have defeated nearly every untrained person in the southern ward without setting down his cup.

By the time I knew him he repaired harnesses and tack for a merchant stable near the West Canal and spent most afternoons at the Red Persimmon Tavern.

I lived above the Red Persimmon.

I had lived there for eight years.

This fact has occasionally produced the mistaken impression that I was poor. I was not.

The rooms were comfortable, the proprietor minded his affairs, the roof did not leak except during truly unreasonable rain, and the establishment maintained a private stock of wine far superior to what its prices suggested ought to have been available in that district. I saw no reason to move.

At that time I had completed my studies at the Imperial Academy and had declined several forms of respectable employment, which caused my younger sister considerable irritation and the neighborhood considerable speculation.

I did not then possess an occupation easily explained to people who considered occupation synonymous with salary. This troubled others more than it troubled me.

It was from my usual table near the rear window that I first noticed the girl who would later be called First Beneath Heaven.

Not upon her first visit.

Nor her tenth.

This is another correction I owe the record.

I did not look across a crowded tavern, see nineteen-year-old Yan Shuyue, and perceive destiny sitting badly dressed beside the kitchen door. No chord sounded. No spiritual light surrounded her. I experienced no revelation. If anything in Heaven recognized her, it had the courtesy not to inform me.

I noticed her because she would not stop coming back.

By the time I began writing, Shuyue had been pestering Deng Shun for slightly more than five months.

She had first approached him, I later learned, because she had seen him catch a falling wine jar.

This requires explanation only because Shuyue was nineteen.

The jar had slipped from the hands of a server and fallen behind Deng’s chair. He caught it without turning around, using one hand. The act was trivial. A trained child could have done as much. Shuyue, who at that time possessed no trained child with whom to compare him, concluded that he knew martial arts and asked him to teach her.

He refused.

She returned the next day.

He refused again.

This should have ended the matter.

Instead it became part of the tavern’s routine.

By the second month, regular patrons no longer turned their heads when Shuyue appeared after work, crossed the room, placed both hands upon Deng’s table, and asked some variation of the same question. The words changed. The intention did not.

“Teach me.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because I said no.”

“That isn’t a reason.”

“It is if I’m the one teaching.”

Another day:

“Teach me the breathing thing.”

“What breathing thing?”

“The one you do.”

“I breathe every day.”

“Not like that.”

“Go home.”

Another:

“I can pay.”

“With what?”

Shuyue placed nine copper coins upon the table.

Deng looked at them.

Then at her.

Then back at the coins.

“That is not enough to buy the wine you are interrupting.”

“I can get more.”

“You should buy dinner.”

“I already ate.”

She had not.

I knew this because I had watched her spend the preceding hour carrying sacks at the canal and then come directly to the tavern.

This is perhaps the point at which observation became something less accidental.

Shuyue has since characterized my conduct during these months as stalking.

I object to the term.

I did follow her.

Three times.

Possibly four.

The distinction depends upon whether walking behind someone for six streets because one has already intended to travel in approximately the same direction constitutes pursuit. I maintain that it does not. Shuyue maintains that my stopping when she stopped weakens this defense.

In any case, curiosity had become inconvenient.

A person may ignore an unexplained phenomenon once or twice. After five months, failure to investigate becomes negligence.

I began first with conversation, as civilized people generally should. The tavern proprietor knew her by sight. Deng knew her better than he admitted. Two laborers from the South Canal knew her because she worked beside them. A woman who sold steamed buns knew her mother. By the end of one afternoon I had learned enough to determine that nothing about her circumstances explained her persistence.

Her name was Yan Shuyue.

Her father worked wherever the day's labor was available, most often at a rope-yard and occasionally unloading timber along the canal. Her mother took sewing, mending, and washing from households that could pay. Neither cultivated. Neither belonged to a martial lineage.

Neither possessed secret ancestry waiting to emerge under dramatic circumstances. I mention this because such ancestries are often discovered after a person becomes important, usually by relatives who had shown no interest while importance remained hypothetical.

Shuyue was the eldest child.

She had begun working young.

At nineteen she earned most of her money at the South Canal freight yards, where her height and long limbs made her useful for loading and where her ability to read, though limited, occasionally earned her lighter work keeping tallies when the regular clerk was absent. Her literacy was not the product of schooling. The Yan family could not afford regular tuition.

She had acquired it by harassment.

This should not surprise anyone who has read more than the first page of this history.

At eleven she persuaded an elderly neighbor to teach her the basic characters used on market signs. When he attempted to stop after three months, she continued arriving at his door.

At thirteen she began exchanging errands for lessons from a copyist who lived two streets away. At fifteen she learned enough arithmetic from a shop assistant to discover that one of her employers had been underpaying her. She recovered the difference.

Her reading remained slow when I first knew her. Her writing was worse.

I find in the margin beside this observation a sample of her hand copied by me from a tally board at the freight yard.

It was dreadful.

The characters lean in three different directions.

Present circumstances do not compel me to revise this judgment.

Shuyue was poor enough that hunger had shaped her without yet damaging her.

She was tall, as I have said, around one hundred and seventy-five centimeters, with long arms and legs, broad enough through the shoulders to suggest what good food might eventually make of her, and at that time perhaps six or seven kilograms lighter than was healthy.

Her wrists were narrow. Her cheekbones appeared sharper than they later would. There was often a faint hollow beneath them toward the end of a workday.

She possessed thick black hair which she usually tied without skill, dark eyes set beneath strong brows, a straight nose, and a mouth particularly ill-suited to concealing opinion.

She was attractive.

I wrote then that she would have been more attractive if she slept properly.

This remains true.

What I failed to record adequately was her vitality.

Hunger did not make Shuyue languid. Hard work did not make her meek. Poverty had not taught her the graceful resignation which wealthier people often praise in the poor. She moved as though the world had personally offended her by being larger than the portion she had been given. She walked quickly.

She ate quickly when food was available. She argued with her whole body. She could stand after ten hours of labor and still possess enough energy to cross half the ward in pursuit of something she had decided mattered.

Cultivation mattered.

Why?

I did not know.

Neither, I suspect, did she in any form sophisticated enough to satisfy a philosopher.

She wanted it.

That was the first truth.

She had seen cultivators leap walls, cross water, break stone, wield weapons beyond ordinary strength, and live lives whose possibilities appeared to her wider than the one she had inherited. She wanted to know what qi felt like.

She wanted to understand what happened when a swordsman moved too quickly for her eyes. She wanted to stand upon a rooftop without fearing the fall. She wanted to know why a properly trained palm could crack wood while hers merely hurt.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

These desires were not unusual.

What was unusual was her refusal to accept that desire without access should conclude the matter.

The first formal entry reads as follows:

The girl returned to Deng’s table today. Her name is Yan Shuyue, nineteen years of age, of the southern wards, employed at the canal freight houses. She again requested instruction. Deng again refused.

She asked whether his refusal arose from her lack of money, her sex, her age, or his dislike of her personally. Deng answered that all four possibilities had become increasingly persuasive. She informed him that none constituted a martial principle. He threw a peanut at her. She ate it.

Seven lines.

That is all.

I had no intention, when writing them, of beginning a life’s work.

The next entry was written two days later.

Yan Shuyue returned at the seventeenth hour. She brought Deng steamed buns. He accepted two before asking what she wanted, at which point she expressed astonishment that he could have forgotten. Deng informed her that accepting food did not constitute acceptance of discipleship.

Shuyue replied that she had not asked to become his disciple and would be satisfied if he taught her only how to breathe. Deng said she already knew how. She said, “Not correctly.” He told her to leave. She remained until closing.

I had forgotten the buns.

I remember them now.

They were pork and chive, bought from the widow outside the south entrance. Shuyue could not comfortably afford six. She purchased six.

Deng ate four.

This strengthened my sympathy for her position.

The following week I began observing her more deliberately.

I did not follow her every day. I had my own affairs, however little those affairs resembled employment, and Shuyue’s daily life was repetitive enough that unnecessary surveillance would have produced unnecessary information. She rose before dawn.

She ate whatever breakfast the household possessed, usually rice porridge stretched thin and accompanied by pickled vegetable. She walked to the South Canal.

On days when freight was heavy she carried sacks, crates, coils of rope, bundles of cloth, jars, baskets, lumber, or whatever else came from boats too cheap to employ enough porters. On days when she could persuade the foreman, she checked cargo marks against the tally board.

Her reading made this slower than the work of a trained clerk and faster than the work of men who could not read at all.

She gave money to her mother.

She kept some.

This she spent principally upon food, household necessities, secondhand paper, and things relating to cultivation which were generally worthless.

The capital supported a flourishing trade in worthless martial literature.

A person could purchase, for three copper coins, The Seven Secret Principles by Which the Ancient Immortals Strengthened Their Bones. For five, One Hundred and Eight Methods of Gathering Heaven and Earth Qi Without a Master. For eight, a badly printed manual claiming to contain the first three forms of a sword art whose originating sect had never used any of them. Shuyue bought these when she could.

I examined three.

One was nonsense.

One contained exercises likely to injure the knees.

The third had copied six paragraphs from a legitimate military conditioning manual and surrounded them with lies.

Shuyue did not know this.

She practiced all three.

This was the first behavior of hers I considered genuinely dangerous.

She would rise before work and repeat movements copied from manuals she barely understood in the small yard behind her family’s rooms. If she could not determine a posture from the illustration, she tried variations until one felt less awkward.

She watched martial artists in public courts and reproduced their footwork afterward. She practiced staff movements with a broom handle. She once spent eleven evenings attempting to imitate an Azure Dragon stepping exercise she had observed from outside a training enclosure.

She failed.

Completely.

The exercise required internal qi circulation.

She possessed none.

Her younger brother nevertheless began imitating her.

Their mother stopped both before they broke a window.

The record for the twenty-third day of my observation reads:

Shuyue attempted again to persuade Deng. She has altered her argument. She now proposes that he teach her only enough to determine whether she possesses talent, after which, if she proves hopeless, she will cease bothering him.

This promise was clearly false.

Deng recognized this.

“You won’t.”

“I might.”

“You won’t.”

“If I’m hopeless, I’ll know.”

“You’ll decide I taught you badly.”

Shuyue considered this.

“That is possible.”

Deng told her to go away.

She sat at the next table.

I had begun by then to find the two of them entertaining.

The tavern had as well.

A minor economy developed around the question of when Deng would surrender. Qiao, the proprietor, refused to permit open gambling after one argument resulted in a broken stool, but private wagers continued.

The common prediction placed Deng’s capitulation before midsummer. A stablehand gave him until the Ghost Festival. One old woman who drank rice wine every third evening insisted Shuyue would still be asking at New Year.

I did not wager.

Money was not the obstacle.

I disliked the available odds.

It was during this period that I first spoke directly to Deng concerning her.

“She will not stop,” I said.

“I know.”

“You could teach her.”

“No.”

“You taught your nephew.”

“My nephew was eleven.”

“He was also lazy.”

“He was family.”

“He stopped after six months.”

Deng glared at me.

I drank my wine.

It was a particularly good southern vintage which Qiao had obtained through circumstances he declined to explain. Shuyue could have eaten for several days upon what the cup cost. I mention this because she had by then noticed.

Everyone noticed eventually.

My life above the Red Persimmon produced questions. I dressed simply, though not cheaply. I had no visible employment. I paid my lodging on time, bought good paper, ordered whatever food I wanted, and occasionally drank wine which did not belong economically in that district.

My parents visited. Their clothes gave rise to one set of theories. My education produced another. The fact that several persons attached to the palace knew me by name produced theories of a less sensible kind.

At this stage Shuyue and I had not been introduced.

She nevertheless referred to me, I later discovered, as “that suspicious rich woman upstairs.”

This was unjust.

I was not rich by any definition I considered meaningful.

The rest was fair.

I asked Deng why he truly refused her.

He did not answer immediately.

Then he said, “She thinks learning one breathing method changes everything.”

“Perhaps it will.”

“It won’t.”

“You cannot know that.”

“I know what I have.”

This answer interested me.

Deng knew his own limits better than Shuyue did. The breathing method he possessed was third-rate even by the generous standards of wandering martial practice.

It could strengthen the lungs, teach rudimentary qi awareness, improve stamina, and, if practiced for several years with discipline, perhaps open the first minor channels in a person of ordinary talent. It had no profound mysteries.

Its circulation was inefficient. Two of its transitions wasted gathered qi. Its final retention pattern was based upon a misunderstanding introduced, I suspect, by someone who had copied an older military method without comprehending the original.

Deng knew none of this.

He merely knew it was not a great art.

He had watched young people spend years chasing cultivation with poor methods and poorer resources. He had watched them injure themselves, lose work, borrow money, join bad schools, or discover that persistence does not obligate the world to provide talent.

I understood his reluctance.

Shuyue did not.

More precisely, she understood it and rejected the conclusion.

One evening Deng told her directly, “You are nineteen. You work ten hours. Your family needs your wages. Proper disciples begin younger, eat better, train every day, and have teachers who know more than I do. What do you think I can give you?”

Shuyue stood across from him in work clothes still powdered with grain dust.

“Something.”

“That is not an answer.”

“It is more than I have.”

Deng looked away.

This was the first time I believed she might win.

Not because the argument was clever.

It was not.

Because she had reduced the matter to its true scale.

She was not asking Deng to make her great.

She did not yet know enough to imagine greatness accurately.

She wanted a beginning.

Any beginning.

A person born inside a sect might find this difficult to understand. Those raised with access to cultivation often speak of choosing methods, masters, weapons, philosophies, lineages, and paths. Shuyue had none to choose among. She stood outside the entire structure asking someone to open the door by the width of a finger.

Deng continued to refuse.

She returned the following day.

At this point my entries became more frequent.

I record with some embarrassment that there are fourteen concerning her over the next nineteen days.

Most are trivial.

Shuyue arrived late because a cargo rope snapped at the canal. She has a bruise across the left forearm. Deng told her the injury proves she should rest. She answered that he could teach her a breathing method suitable for resting.

Another:

Shuyue asked Deng whether he would teach her if she beat him at dice. Deng agreed because he knew she was poor at dice. She lost four rounds and accused him of cheating. He was not cheating.

Another:

Deng attempted to leave by the rear door upon seeing her enter. Shuyue intercepted him in the alley. Qiao laughed sufficiently loudly that Deng has threatened to change taverns.

He did not.

Another entry concerns a fight.

This fight has no martial significance.

I include it because later accounts of Shuyue’s youth often commit the error of turning every act of violence into evidence of destiny.

A drunk laborer at the canal struck a younger porter over disputed wages. Shuyue intervened. The drunk laborer was larger than she was, considerably heavier, and had learned several wrestling techniques during military service.

Shuyue lost.

This should be preserved.

He threw her into a stack of baskets.

She got up.

He threw her down again.

She bit his hand.

He struck her in the mouth.

She hit him with a wooden tally board.

The foreman and three others separated them before matters became worse.

The drunk was dismissed for the day.

Shuyue lost half a day’s wages for participating.

Her lower lip split.

She came to the Red Persimmon that evening anyway.

Deng stared at her face.

“What happened?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re bleeding.”

“It stopped.”

“You lost a fight.”

Shuyue’s expression became offended.

“I didn’t lose.”

“Did you win?”

She considered this.

“No.”

Deng laughed until he coughed.

She waited.

When he finished, she said, “Teach me.”

I wrote that evening:

There is a quality in Yan Shuyue which I have not yet named. It is not courage, though she possesses some. It is not pride, though she possesses too much. It is not mere stubbornness, because stubbornness may remain still. Hers moves. Every refusal becomes another approach. Every failure seems to provoke alteration rather than retreat. This may amount to nothing. I find that I nevertheless wish to observe it.

I had forgotten writing that sentence.

It is perhaps the first important thing in the volume.

Not because I was correct.

I was not yet correct about very much concerning her.

But because this was the moment at which curiosity ceased to be casual.

Up to that point I had been writing about a young woman because she amused me. Thereafter I began preserving details.

I noted her hours.

I noted the books she bought.

I noted that she favored her left foot when attempting to imitate sword stances despite writing with her right hand.

I noted that she learned movements more quickly when watching them than when reading descriptions.

I noted that when she repeated a physical motion incorrectly, she rarely repeated the same error more than three or four times unless the error arose from something she could not perceive.

I noted that she had no ability whatsoever to sense qi.

Not “little.”

None.

This last observation amused me in retrospect.

At the time it supported Deng’s argument.

Shuyue could watch a cultivator circulate qi and see only the outward consequence. She could stand beside a low-grade spirit lamp and tell that it was warmer than an ordinary lamp, but not where its energy gathered. She could hold a cheap spirit stone and feel, in her words, “a sort of cold tingling,” which might have been qi perception or might have been expectation.

Nothing marked her as a prodigy.

Not yet.

This is important.

Greatness, when viewed backward, attracts invented beginnings. Once a woman has split mountains, people become reluctant to believe there was ever a morning when she could not sense a thread of qi inside her own body. Once she has mastered ten thousand weapons, it seems unsatisfactory that her first practice staff was a broom handle.

But history is under no obligation to provide satisfying beginnings.

Shuyue’s was ordinary enough that, had Deng remained stubborn for another year, this record might have ended after thirty pages.

He did not.

I know this because I have already lived the consequence.

The younger woman who wrote these entries did not.

On the thirty-seventh day after I began the separate record, Shuyue came into the Red Persimmon near closing. It had rained heavily. Her hair was wet, her sleeves were wet, the knees of her trousers were muddy, and she had apparently spent the previous hour helping push a freight cart out of a flooded lane.

Deng saw her.

“No.”

“I didn’t ask yet.”

“You were going to.”

“Yes.”

“No.”

Shuyue sat opposite him.

Deng ignored her.

She remained there while he drank one cup.

Then another.

Then a third.

Qiao began putting chairs upon tables.

Deng finally said, “Do you have nothing better to do?”

“Yes.”

“Then do it.”

“I’m doing this.”

Deng closed his eyes.

Shuyue waited.

I had seen her impatient in nearly every other context. She disliked lines. She disliked slow clerks. She disliked people who took too long to choose food when others were waiting. Yet before Deng she had learned patience of a peculiar kind. Not serenity. Never mistake the two. She sat vibrating with impatience and simply refused to leave.

At last Deng said, “If I taught you one thing, would you stop asking?”

“No.”

He opened his eyes.

“At least you’re honest.”

“If it’s useless, I’ll ask for another.”

“You don’t even know what useful is.”

“That’s why I need someone to teach me.”

Deng groaned.

Then he said something I did not record until afterward.

“You will make somebody regret this.”

Shuyue grinned.

“I’m hoping.”

Deng did not agree to teach her that night.

He lasted nineteen more days.

Those nineteen days occupy eleven pages.

I have read them twice this evening.

There are no miracles in them.

No revelations. No hidden elder descends. No divine inheritance chooses her.

Yan Shuyue remains throughout them exactly what she was when I first set brush to paper: a poor nineteen-year-old laborer with a family to help support, incomplete schooling, poor handwriting, several bad martial manuals, too little food, no cultivation, and an unreasonable conviction that lack of access was a problem which persistence might eventually solve.

At some point during those nineteen days, I purchased a new bundle of paper specifically for her. I did not regard this as significant. I had money. Paper was inexpensive. Curiosity deserved organization.

So I told myself.

The final entry I shall reproduce in this record was written three days before Deng’s surrender.

Yan Shuyue returned again. Deng asked whether she intended to spend the rest of her life doing this. She answered that if necessary she would, though she hoped he would show consideration for both of their time and yield sooner. Deng called her an affliction sent by Heaven. Shuyue said that if Heaven had sent her, refusing Heaven seemed unwise.

Beneath this, in smaller characters, I added:

I believe Deng will teach her.

I was correct.

I did not yet understand what that would mean.

Neither did Deng.

Shuyue, least of all.

At the time she possessed no qi.

It is worth remembering how briefly that remained true.