Chương 3
BOOK THE FIRST - OF THE EARLIEST RECORDS, RECORD II
BOOK THE FIRST
OF THE EARLIEST RECORDS
RECORD II: Concerning the Capitulation of Deng Shun; the Six Returning Breaths Method; the First Gathering of Qi by Yan Shuyue; and the Circumstances Under Which I Informed Her That I Intended to Record Her Life
There are moments which acquire importance only because of what follows them.
At the time they occur, they may possess no grandeur whatsoever.
The beginning of Yan Shuyue’s cultivation was one such moment.
No comet appeared. No bell rang of its own accord. No ancestral tablet cracked.
The heavens did not darken; the earth did not tremble; no ancient spirit, having waited ten thousand years for a worthy inheritor, emerged from jade to inform her that destiny had at last arrived.
The capital continued its ordinary business. Officials argued at court. Barges clogged the South Canal. Rain fell intermittently throughout the morning.
A pig escaped from a butcher two streets east of the Red Persimmon and caused considerably more public disturbance than Shuyue did.
Deng Shun surrendered shortly after the seventeenth hour.
I use surrendered rather than agreed because the surviving record leaves little doubt as to the nature of his decision.
The entry is considerably longer than those preceding it.
This is the first point at which my notes concerning Shuyue ceased to resemble an amusement recorded between other matters and began, without my conscious permission, to resemble a proper account.
I shall reproduce most of it.
On the nineteenth day since my previous prediction that Deng would relent, I was proven correct.
Yan Shuyue arrived at the Red Persimmon shortly after the seventeenth hour. She had come directly from the South Canal and still wore the gray work trousers and coarse blue jacket used by the freight laborers.
The left shoulder of the jacket was stained with flour. There was a shallow cut across the base of her right thumb, apparently acquired from a broken crate.
She had eaten nothing since midday except half a steamed yam purchased from the stall opposite the rope market.
I know this because I asked Qiao, who knows nearly everything that occurs within three streets of his tavern and approximately half of what occurs within six.
Deng was seated at his usual table.
Shuyue sat opposite him.
He said, “No.”
She said, “I haven’t asked.”
He said, “You were going to.”
She answered, “Yes.”
Deng drank.
Shuyue waited.
This continued for some time.
At length Deng placed his cup upon the table and asked whether she understood that persistence was not talent. Shuyue replied that she had never claimed otherwise. He asked whether she understood that he was not a great master. She answered that she had observed this. He became offended.
She reminded him that he had been telling her the same thing for five months. He informed her that hearing a man acknowledge his limitations did not constitute permission to agree enthusiastically.
Shuyue apologized.
The apology lacked conviction.
Deng then asked what she expected him to teach her.
She said, “The breathing.”
He asked what she believed the breathing would accomplish.
She answered, “I don’t know. That is why I keep asking you.”
There followed another silence.
Deng looked at her for a long while.
Then he said, “If I teach you, you do exactly what I say.”
Shuyue did not answer immediately.
This was the first warning that negotiations had entered a difficult stage.
“Exactly?” she asked.
Deng said, “Exactly.”
“Even if I think something is wrong?”
Deng stared at her.
“You do not know enough to think something is wrong.”
“I might.”
“You won’t.”
“But if I do?”
At this point Qiao left the room because he had begun laughing.
Deng told her that if she altered a breathing method before she could even sense qi, he would strike her with a stool. Shuyue asked whether this constituted part of the instruction. Deng told her to shut up.
Thus did Yan Shuyue acquire her first master.
I stopped reading there.
It would be inaccurate to call Deng Shun Shuyue’s master in the sense that the word would later acquire. She never entered formal discipleship beneath him. No incense was burned. No bows were exchanged before an ancestral tablet.
Deng did not transmit a lineage, receive her name into a sect register, assume responsibility for her conduct, or demand the obligations traditionally owed by disciple to teacher.
Shuyue herself later referred to him alternately as her first teacher, Old Deng, that irritable bastard, and, during a particularly sentimental period following his death, Master Deng.
Deng would have objected to the last.
This did not prevent her from having it carved upon his memorial tablet.
His method was called the Six Returning Breaths.
The name sounds more profound than the method deserves.
This is common.
The Six Returning Breaths belonged to that enormous family of practical breathing arts which spread among caravan guards, soldiers, escort companies, itinerant martial artists, and provincial militias long before any living person could reliably trace their origin.
Deng had learned his version in his twenties from a caravan captain named Wei Zong, who had learned it from an uncle, who claimed to have learned it from a retired border officer. Whether this genealogy extended any further I never discovered.
It did not matter.
The method was neither fraudulent nor distinguished.
It worked.
Poorly.
That alone placed it above much of what was sold in the markets.
The principle of cultivation should perhaps be explained here, because what was elementary to Deng became decisive to Shuyue, and because those born among cultivators often speak of qi as though every reader were issued an understanding of it at birth.
All living things possess qi.
This statement is true and, by itself, almost useless.
Qi is not merely breath, though breathing may guide it; not merely warmth, though its movement often produces heat; not merely vitality, though vitality suffers when qi is damaged; and not merely some invisible fluid poured into the body from Heaven, as several popular primers continue to claim despite centuries of evidence to the contrary.
Qi is better understood as the capacity by which life, substance, intention, and the greater currents of the world may be brought into relation.
This definition too is incomplete.
All definitions are.
For the beginner, such subtleties are unnecessary. The first task is simply to perceive that which has always been present.
An ordinary person breathes and qi moves without conscious direction. Food becomes strength. Sleep restores. Blood circulates. Thought moves the hand. The body performs ten thousand transformations without asking permission of the mind.
Cultivation begins when some portion of these processes ceases to be entirely unconscious.
The cultivator learns first to distinguish inner qi from pulse, heat, breath, imagination, muscle tension, and wishful thinking. Then to feel the qi of the world beyond the skin. Then to invite a thread of that greater qi inward without allowing it to disperse.
Then to guide it through channels capable of carrying it, refine what has been gathered, settle it within the body, and repeat the process until what was once an occasional conscious act becomes a second circulation alongside blood and breath.
Every tradition dresses this differently.
Mountain sects speak of opening the inner gates.
Temple schools speak of returning breath to the original vessel.
Military traditions call the first stage tempering.
Certain southern schools describe the body as a lake.
A northern monastery whose terminology I have always disliked describes it as a house requiring tenants.
The body does not care what metaphor is preferred.
It either survives the process or it does not.
The Six Returning Breaths approached the matter conservatively.
Its first breath emptied.
Its second listened.
Its third drew.
Its fourth descended.
Its fifth circulated.
Its sixth returned what the practitioner could not safely retain.
Hence the name.
A beginner sat upright, loosened the abdomen, aligned the spine, placed the tongue lightly behind the teeth, and breathed according to a measured count. Upon the second breath the practitioner attempted no manipulation at all, but attended to the boundary between inner and outer sensation.
Upon the third, the breath was allowed to deepen until awareness followed it beneath the sternum. The fourth guided that awareness downward through three minor channels toward the lower sea of breath.
The fifth carried whatever qi had been successfully gathered through a small circuit around the lower torso. The sixth released excess tension and allowed unrefined qi to disperse rather than trapping it where the body could not yet accommodate it.
It was, for a crude method, unusually safe.
Deng did not know why.
Wei Zong had merely told him never to omit the sixth breath unless he wished to vomit blood.
The method’s weakness lay in precisely the same caution which made it suitable for soldiers. It wasted enormous quantities of gathered qi.
The transition between the third and fourth breaths caused nearly half the outer qi sensed by an untrained practitioner to disperse before descent.
The fifth breath forced the current through a turn sharper than necessary because some earlier version had been adapted for people wearing armor.
The final return emptied not merely unstable qi but a substantial portion which, with better control, could safely have been retained.
To a caravan guard seeking endurance, none of this mattered.
To a serious cultivator, the method was mediocre.
To Yan Shuyue, it was the first thing anyone had ever given her.
I resumed reading.
Deng did not begin instruction in the tavern.
Shuyue objected to this, having apparently imagined that after five months of persistence he would immediately reveal the mysteries of cultivation between the wine jars. Deng told her that anyone attempting first circulation while surrounded by drunk men deserved whatever deviation followed.
They went instead to the narrow courtyard behind the Red Persimmon, where Qiao stores empty barrels and where rainwater drains badly near the north wall.
I followed.
Shuyue noticed.
She looked at me for the first time with sufficient attention that I believe this may properly be called our first mutual observation.
She asked Deng, “Who is she?”
Deng answered, “Trouble of a more expensive kind.”
This was unfair.
I paused again.
It was not entirely unfair.
Shuyue looked at my robe, then my shoes, then the writing case in my hand. She had observed me before; I knew this from the expression with which she attempted to reconcile me with whatever theory she had formed. She said nothing further.
Deng ordered her to sit.
She sat cross-legged upon an overturned grain mat.
He corrected her posture.
He told her to close her eyes.
She asked why.
He told her that if she intended to question every instruction, he would revoke the agreement before the first breath.
She closed her eyes.
Deng then explained the Six Returning Breaths.
His explanation lasted approximately four minutes.
It was technically incomplete, physiologically imprecise, and contained one statement which was simply wrong.
I did not interrupt.
On rereading this sentence tonight, I find myself somewhat surprised that I did not.
Perhaps I possessed more restraint at twenty-three than I remember.
Perhaps I merely wished to see what would happen.
Deng told Shuyue that qi lived in the air and entered through the lungs.
This is not exactly true.
He told her that the lower sea lay three finger-widths beneath the navel.
This is adequate for beginners, though anatomical precision varies.
He told her never to force what she could not feel.
This was excellent advice.
Shuyue listened without interruption.
This fact deserves special notice.
Then she attempted the first cycle.
Nothing happened.
Deng told her to breathe normally.
She attempted the second cycle.
Nothing happened.
The third produced a slight elevation in pulse which Shuyue mistook for qi. Deng corrected her.
The fourth produced warmth in the abdomen. Again she believed this significant. Again Deng corrected her.
The fifth produced irritation.
The sixth produced greater irritation.
On the seventh, something changed.
Here my handwriting becomes smaller.
I remember leaning closer.
Shuyue had previously been following Deng’s count too forcefully, attempting to make every stage distinct by muscular effort. On the seventh repetition she ceased doing so. The shoulders loosened. The breath deepened. More importantly, her attention shifted.
There is a difference between a person searching for qi and a person noticing it.
The former grasps.
The latter permits.
Shuyue permitted.
The ambient qi within the courtyard was poor. The southern wards are dense with people, smoke, industry, sewage channels, cooking fires, livestock, and the residue of innumerable lives. Such places do not possess the clean currents prized by mountain sects. What qi exists is mixed, warm, often turbulent, and diluted by ordinary human activity.
Nevertheless, there was qi.
On Shuyue’s seventh cycle, a quantity no thicker than a strand of hair responded to her awareness.
It gathered first along the breath, not within the lungs but around the body’s outer boundary where intention and respiration overlapped. She noticed it. I know she noticed it because her fingers moved.
Deng did not.
He had closed his eyes to demonstrate his own breathing.
Shuyue inhaled.
The thread entered.
It dispersed immediately.
Her eyes opened.
“Again,” she said.
Deng later claimed that he knew at once she had sensed qi.
This is false.
His face showed no recognition whatsoever.
I was there.
The eighth cycle gathered nothing.
The ninth gathered another thread.
This reached farther.
Shuyue attempted to force it downward during the fourth breath.
The qi scattered.
She swore.
Deng struck her knee.
“Do not chase it.”
“It keeps leaving.”
“Because you chase it.”
“How do I make it stay?”
“You don’t.”
Shuyue stared at him.
Deng said, “You give it somewhere easier to go.”
This was the best thing Deng taught her that evening.
I have thought about that sentence often.
So did Shuyue.
Many years later, when asked by a disciple to explain the difference between control and mastery, she used almost the same words.
Whether she remembered their origin I never asked.
The tenth cycle failed.
The eleventh gathered qi.
The twelfth carried it beneath the sternum.
On the thirteenth, Shuyue found the upper entrance to the first minor channel.
This was early.
Not impossibly early.
But early.
Deng noticed this time.
He opened his eyes.
Shuyue’s brow had drawn tight. Her breathing remained steady. The thread of qi descended perhaps two finger-widths before losing coherence.
Deng said, “Stop.”
She did not.
He struck her forehead with two fingers.
The cycle broke.
Shuyue opened her eyes violently.
“Why?”
“Because I said stop.”
“I almost had it.”
“No. You almost forced it.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Pain tomorrow.”
“I can handle pain.”
“That is the sort of stupid thing young people say because they have only had small injuries.”
Shuyue looked ready to argue.
Deng told her the lesson was over.
She asked how long until the next.
He said tomorrow.
She stood too quickly.
The courtyard tilted.
Shuyue sat down again.
Deng laughed.
I did not.
This is false.
I did.
Only quietly.
The first lesson ended there.
If Shuyue had been ordinary, this would already have constituted respectable progress. Many beginners require days merely to separate imagined sensation from actual qi. Some require weeks. A person of modest sensitivity may practice an introductory breathing method for a month before successfully drawing outer qi into the body even once.
Shuyue had done so within an hour.
I did not yet call her a prodigy.
I had seen faster.
Much faster.
This sentence has attracted Shuyue’s suspicion whenever she has encountered it.
She is correct to be suspicious.
She has never received a satisfactory explanation.
I continued reading.
The next entry had been written the following morning.
It was nine pages long.
I had forgotten how quickly matters escalated.
Yan Shuyue returned before Deng.
This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.
She arrived at the Red Persimmon shortly after sunrise, despite not being expected until evening. Qiao told her Deng would not appear for several hours. She asked whether she might use the rear courtyard.
Qiao said yes on the condition that she move the empty barrels first.
She moved them.
Then she practiced.
I observed from the upstairs gallery.
She performed the Six Returning Breaths forty-one times.
This was too many.
She did not know this.
Deng had neglected to give her a limit.
I considered intervening after the twentieth.
I did not.
Here, too, I question my younger judgment.
At the time I had several reasons.
Most were poor.
The most honest was curiosity.
The first twelve cycles produced little.
Her fatigue from the previous evening remained. The channels had not yet recovered from unfamiliar pressure. She repeatedly mistook the residual warmth beneath the sternum for retained qi, though no stable qi had yet settled there.
On the thirteenth cycle she altered the length of the second breath.
The change was minor.
Perhaps one count.
On the fourteenth she repeated it.
On the fifteenth, again.
The result was a slightly longer interval between awareness of the outer current and the attempt to draw it inward.
More qi responded.
Shuyue noticed.
She altered the third breath.
I set the record down for a moment.
This, I believe, was the first time.
Not the first time Shuyue cultivated.
Not the first time she sensed qi.
The first time she did what would eventually define nearly everything that followed.
Someone had given her a method.
She had practiced it for less than one day.
And instead of asking only how to perform it correctly, she had already begun asking why it had been made that way.
I returned to the page.
On the sixteenth cycle she lengthened the second breath again and shortened the third.
On the seventeenth she reversed this.
The result was worse.
She frowned.
On the eighteenth she returned to the earlier rhythm.
Better.
On the nineteenth she changed the point at which she relaxed the abdomen.
No improvement.
On the twentieth she changed the inclination of the pelvis.
Minor improvement.
On the twenty-first she moved the transition between the third and fourth breaths half a count later.
The gathered qi descended farther.
She stopped.
Opened her eyes.
And said, to no one, “There.”
I remember that word.
There are sounds made at the beginning of enormous things which are unimpressive when written down.
Shuyue began again.
This time she performed Deng’s method incorrectly.
I use incorrectly in the narrow sense.
She was no longer following his instruction.
The alteration was small enough that Deng himself might not have perceived it. The pause between drawing and descent had been moved; the lower abdomen remained relaxed for slightly longer; awareness entered the first minor channel before the breath had fully changed.
The method improved.
Not greatly.
No heavens opened.
No spiritual whirlpool formed.
The difference in retained qi would have been laughable to a sect elder.
But it improved.
On the first morning after receiving a third-rate method, without teacher, manual, or theoretical education, Shuyue had identified one of its principal inefficiencies and partially corrected it by feel.
I did not understand then how characteristic this would become.
I understood enough.
At the twenty-third cycle Shuyue successfully carried a thread of qi through the first minor channel and into the second.
At the twenty-fourth she failed.
At the twenty-fifth she succeeded.
At the twenty-sixth she attempted to repeat the altered transition more aggressively and caused the qi to recoil.
She doubled over.
I descended.
This is the first time I interfered directly in Shuyue’s cultivation.
She did not know that.
She was crouched beside the grain mat, one hand beneath the ribs.
I asked whether the pain was sharp or dull.
She looked up and recognized me.
“You’re the woman upstairs.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why are you asking?”
“Because you have irritated the second channel.”
She stared at me.
This was careless of me.
I added that I had read about such things.
She continued staring.
Then she said, “Sharp.”
I told her to stop cultivation for the day, eat something warm, and not attempt the altered breath again until Deng examined her.
“How do you know I altered it?”
“You were breathing differently.”
“You counted?”
“Yes.”
Her expression changed.
“Were you watching me?”
“Yes.”
“From where?”
I indicated the gallery.
She looked up at my rooms.
Then back at me.
“How long?”
I judged this an inconvenient question.
I had, by this point, been observing her intentionally for approximately six weeks and unintentionally for several months before that.
The distinction did not help me.
I told her I had been taking notes.
She asked, “About what?”
I said, “You.”
There followed a silence.
Yan Shuyue, who had faced dockworkers larger than herself, shouted at armed men, and spent five months antagonizing Deng Shun without apparent concern for embarrassment, appeared genuinely unsettled.
“Why?”
I answered truthfully.
“I find you interesting.”
She said, “That’s worse.”
I had forgotten how early she said this.
The phrase has since become familiar.
I asked why.
She said, “If you were being paid, at least that would make sense.”
“No one is paying me.”
“Are you from the government?”
“No.”
“A sect?”
“No.”
“Did Deng ask you?”
“Certainly not.”
“My employer?”
“No.”
“My parents?”
“No.”
“Then why are you writing things about me?”
I repeated that I was curious.
She folded her arms.
“About what?”
I said, “What you will become.”
This sentence embarrassed me slightly upon rereading.
Not because it proved prophetic.
It did not.
Prophecy predicts.
I was merely curious.
Yet when one already knows the forty years which followed, ordinary curiosity acquires an appearance of foresight it did not possess.
Shuyue, fortunately, had no future history with which to misinterpret me.
She misinterpreted me in another direction.
“Are you making fun of me?”
I asked why she thought so.
This irritated her.
“Look at you.”
I did.
I found nothing immediately explanatory.
She gestured at my robe.
“That probably costs more than I make in a month.”
This was not true.
It cost more.
I did not consider correction helpful.
She continued.
“You went to the Imperial Academy.”
I had not told her this.
Apparently the tavern had.
“You sit around drinking wine that Qiao doesn’t even put on the board, and half the people here think your family owns three streets somewhere north of the canal, and you’re telling me you’ve decided the poor girl who carries sacks for a living is interesting enough to write down.”
I understood then.
This was one of the first occasions upon which Shuyue taught me something about the difference between what one intends and what another person has reason to hear.
I had considered my interest neutral.
To her, it resembled amusement from someone with the luxury to find poverty picturesque.
I disliked this interpretation because it was unfair.
I disliked it more because it was reasonable.
I said, “I am not laughing at you.”
She did not answer.
“Nor do I think your desire to cultivate is foolish.”
“Most people do.”
“Most people are permitted to be wrong.”
This almost made her smile.
Almost.
I told her that I had begun recording her before Deng agreed to teach her because I wished to know whether she would eventually wear him down.
“You wrote down five months of me annoying Old Deng?”
“Not all five months.”
“How much?”
I considered lying.
I did not.
“Enough.”
“That is not a number.”
“No.”
“You followed me too, didn’t you?”
“On several occasions.”
“That is stalking.”
“I was gathering context.”
“That is stalking with stationery.”
I remain opposed to this phrasing.
It was, however, memorable.
Shuyue asked to see the notes.
I declined.
She asked why.
I told her the handwriting was not yet organized.
This was partly true.
She accused me of writing something embarrassing.
This was entirely true.
Then she asked, “So what, you just keep doing this?”
I said, “I believe so.”
“Why?”
“Because yesterday you had no cultivation. Today you have damaged a minor channel while independently altering a method you learned less than twenty-four hours ago.”
“That sounds bad when you say it like that.”
“It was bad.”
“The change worked.”
“Until you forced it.”
“So you admit it worked.”
This was not the point.
I told her that if she intended to continue cultivating, I intended to continue recording the process.
She laughed.
Not kindly.
“My process?”
“Your life, perhaps.”
She stopped laughing.
I confess I had not intended to phrase it so broadly.
Neither had I, until I said it.
Even now I cannot say precisely why.
Perhaps because by then I had observed enough lives to know that beginnings are most valuable when recorded before anyone knows they are beginnings.
Perhaps because Shuyue had interested me beyond proportion to anything she had accomplished.
Perhaps I was bored.
This last explanation should not be dismissed.
Boredom has altered more history than official records admit.
Shuyue said, “My life.”
I said, “Yes.”
“You want to write my life.”
“If it remains interesting.”
This was poorly judged.
Her eyes narrowed.
“And if it doesn’t?”
“Then I shall stop.”
“Good.”
“You sound offended.”
“I am deciding whether I want you to stop now.”
“You cannot prevent me from recording things I witness in public.”
“I can throw your notebook in the canal.”
“You could try.”
I regret this sentence.
Shuyue heard it as a challenge.
She moved.
I moved the notebook.
She stopped.
Her expression became peculiar.
I had moved it faster than was appropriate.
Not vastly so.
Enough.
“You’re quick,” she said.
“You are injured.”
“That wasn’t what I said.”
“You should eat.”
This was the first time I deliberately redirected one of her questions concerning me.
It would not be the last.
I offered to purchase breakfast.
She refused.
I said I had already ordered too much.
This was a lie.
She knew it was a lie.
She ate anyway.
Presently, the matter seems almost absurdly small.
Outside my window tonight, imperial artificers are strengthening the western ward because another Heaven may descend upon us before morning. Shuyue is somewhere within the palace arguing with people who possess titles longer than Deng’s entire cultivation manual. Yet I remember that breakfast with particular clarity.
She ate two bowls of noodles, three buns, one egg, and the remainder of a plate of pickled vegetables.
I ordered more.
She accused me of attempting to buy consent for the chronicle.
I told her I had already begun the chronicle and was attempting to prevent her from fainting during her next lesson.
This distinction did not improve her mood.
Deng arrived before she finished.
He looked at Shuyue.
Then at me.
Then at the food.
“Why is she feeding you?”
Shuyue said, “Apparently she’s writing my life.”
Deng looked at me.
I drank my tea.
He looked back at Shuyue.
“Why?”
Shuyue pointed at him.
“Exactly.”
Deng laughed so hard that he had to sit down.
This delayed cultivation by approximately ten minutes.
When he recovered, he examined the pain beneath Shuyue’s ribs and confirmed what I already knew: no lasting injury had occurred. He was considerably less pleased when he learned she had practiced forty-one cycles.
“Who told you to do forty-one?”
“No one.”
“How many did I tell you to do?”
“You didn’t.”
Deng became silent.
Shuyue smiled.
This was one of the few occasions during their early relationship when she won an argument completely.
Deng responded by assigning twelve cycles in the morning and twelve in the evening and forbidding unsupervised experimentation.
Shuyue asked what qualified as experimentation.
Deng said anything not exactly as taught.
She asked whether breathing one count longer qualified.
Yes.
Changing posture?
Yes.
Changing the route?
Deng stared.
“Yes.”
“What if the route is inefficient?”
“You do not know what inefficient means.”
She looked at me.
This was troublesome.
“What?” Deng asked.
Shuyue said, “She does.”
I had not intended to become involved.
Deng turned toward me.
“You know cultivation?”
I answered carefully.
“I have studied it.”
This was true.
It remains true.
“What’s wrong with the route?”
I should have lied.
Instead I said, “The turn between the first and second lower channels is wider than necessary, and your transition after the drawing breath releases qi before descent.”
Deng stared at me.
Shuyue stared at me.
Qiao, from behind the counter, said, “I knew she was strange.”
I explained that these were elementary observations available in several texts at the Imperial Academy.
This too was true.
That I had known both defects before attending the Imperial Academy was not relevant.
Deng asked whether the method was dangerous.
“No.”
“Bad?”
“No.”
“Then leave it alone.”
This was, from his perspective, sensible.
Shuyue disagreed.
“If it can be better, why not make it better?”
Deng said, “Because you started yesterday.”
Shuyue opened her mouth.
He struck the table.
“Yesterday.”
She closed it.
For perhaps six breaths.
Then:
“How long until I’m allowed to make it better?”
Deng looked at me.
I looked away.
It seemed kinder.
The next six days occupy thirty-two pages.
This is the point at which I ceased pretending I was maintaining occasional notes.
My entries began to include diagrams.
I recorded breath counts, posture, duration, subjective descriptions provided by Shuyue, observable changes in pulse and heat, the routes through which qi appeared to pass, the failures, the headaches, the occasional numbness in her fingers, and the astonishing speed with which sensations initially incomprehensible to her became distinctions she could identify and reproduce.
I also recorded Deng.
This matters.
Shuyue’s talent did not render him irrelevant.
It made his judgment more important.
A poor teacher would have encouraged speed.
Deng repeatedly slowed her.
When she gathered more qi than before, he reduced her cycles.
When she wanted to force open a resistant channel, he forbade it.
When she asked whether pain was simply proof of progress, he told her this was the philosophy of idiots and people selling medicine.
When she tried to practice after a ten-hour shift without eating, he sent her home.
When she returned an hour later having eaten, he called her insufferable and taught her anyway.
By the third day Shuyue could identify outer qi consistently.
By the fourth she could gather it.
By the fifth she could descend a narrow thread through the first two minor channels without losing all of it.
By the sixth she reached the lower sea of breath.
The amount she retained there was microscopic.
This should be emphasized.
A senior cultivator would not have noticed it.
A trained disciple of the Azure Dragon Sect might gather more qi during the first minute of morning practice than Shuyue possessed after a week.
Yet Shuyue sat in the rear courtyard of a neighborhood tavern with tears running silently down both cheeks because, for the first time in her life, she could feel qi remain where she had placed it.
I recorded this.
She later demanded I remove it.
I did not.
The original entry reads:
At the end of the sixth evening, Shuyue completed the Six Returning Breaths without interruption and retained a stable thread within the lower sea.
She remained still after the final breath.
Deng told her she could open her eyes.
She did not.
He told her again.
Her hands were shaking.
I believed at first that she had overdrawn qi.
Then I saw tears.
Shuyue wiped them before Deng turned fully toward her.
He saw anyway.
Neither mentioned it.
After perhaps twenty breaths she opened her eyes and asked whether she was now a cultivator.
Deng said, “Barely.”
Shuyue laughed.
I have not heard that exact laugh from her in many years.
I stopped there.
The bells outside my present window had ceased for the first time since Xun.
The silence felt unnatural.
I read the final sentence again.
I have not heard that exact laugh from her in many years.
At twenty-three I had written those words only a few years later, when copying the original loose notes into the first bound volume.
Even then I had already begun distinguishing Shuyue’s laughs.
I do not know when this occurred.
Some knowledge enters a record before its recorder understands why it has been preserved.
I turned the page.
The next entry contained the first description of what would become a persistent problem.
Shuyue had begun improving the Six Returning Breaths.
Not replacing it.
Improving it.
Deng would teach the proper sequence.
Shuyue would perform it.
Then perform it again.
Then sit for some time with a look I would later learn to distrust.
Then ask:
“Why do we release here?”
Or:
“Why does the breath change before the qi reaches the turn?”
Or:
“If this channel is wider, why are we using the narrower one?”
Deng’s first answer to nearly every question was:
“Because that is the method.”
This answer ceased satisfying her almost immediately.
Within two weeks she had altered the timing.
Within three she had reduced the loss between drawing and descent.
Within five she had discovered that changing the fifth circulation according to whether she had worked that day reduced muscular cramping.
None of these alterations were profound.
All of them were hers.
The Six Returning Breaths had passed through the hands of unknown practitioners for perhaps centuries.
It entered Shuyue’s hands as a finished thing.
She did not understand the concept.
Years later, entire sects would accuse her of arrogance for the same habit.
A technique, to Shuyue, was never sacred merely because someone else had stopped changing it.
The first version of this philosophy appears in a conversation I recorded thirty-four days after her first successful gathering.
Deng had accused her of mangling his method.
Shuyue replied:
“It still works.”
“That isn’t the point.”
“Then what is?”
“It was taught to me this way.”
“Was it taught to the man who taught you exactly this way?”
Deng hesitated.
Shuyue saw it.
“So somebody changed it.”
“Probably.”
“Then why can’t I?”
“Because he probably knew what he was doing.”
Shuyue smiled.
“So I should learn what I’m doing.”
Deng pointed at me.
“This is your fault.”
It was not.
Not entirely.
By then, however, I had made my decision.
The loose notes became a bound record.
The bound record acquired dates, witnesses, cross-references, maps, copied documents, and observations beyond what any reasonable person would require for a young commoner who had been cultivating for scarcely a month.
I told myself that proper records should begin early.
This remains defensible.
I told myself that Shuyue represented an interesting example of self-directed cultivation outside established sect structures.
This was also true.
I told myself I was engaged principally in scholarship.
This was less true.
The simplest explanation was the one I had already given Shuyue.
I wanted to know what she would become.
She remained unconvinced that this entitled me to follow her.
Our dispute continued for several years.
I generally won through persistence.
She has always resented the irony.
At the end of the forty-third day of her cultivation, I wrote the first formal heading which treated the notes not as temporary observation but as a continuing work.
The page remains before me now.
The characters are neat.
Too neat.
I had not yet learned that a record which survives a person will inevitably become messy if it has truly accompanied her life.
The heading reads:
Records Concerning Yan Shuyue
Beneath it I wrote:
Subject: Yan Shuyue, female, nineteen years of age, resident of the southern wards of the Imperial Capital; common birth; no recognized lineage; no sect; no formal master; literate to a limited degree; employed in freight labor; presently instructed by Deng Shun in the Six Returning Breaths Method.
Then:
Reason for record: uncertain.
I have never corrected this.
The reason became clearer.
Not immediately.
Not all at once.
But the record remained.
So did she.