Moving In and Forward

"How- how did you get here?" Jian sputtered.

"I walked? Well, I drove to Jicheng."

"People aren't supposed to be able to get in here at all."

"Well then, you really need to evaluate your security procedures," I shrugged. "Nothing even tried to stop me."

"Nothing is sufficient to stop most people."

That made no sense to me, so I assumed it was Jian being cryptic as usual and continued. "I'm here because I want to be your apprentice."

"My apprentice." I was pretty sure he was laughing at me.

"I think you can teach me things. I'm a good student, mostly. And I need to learn."

"And what do you need to learn so badly, Blaser? Martial arts? The magic you seem to envy so much in your opponents?"

"I'm not jealous!" I snapped, and Jian looked amused again. "I mean, it's cool and all, but I like science. More predictable."

"What do you propose to learn, then?"

"I need to know… Well. Can I explain some background first?"

"If you insist."

I tried not to get distracted. I kept seeing movement out of the corner of my eyes.

"So when I was fourteen, my dad gave me this puzzle. It wasn't really complicated, but my dad didn't pay a lot of attention to me so I wanted to solve it right away…" I trailed off, noticing that Jian's jaw had gone slack.

"You were the one who loosed her."

This was not how I had been planning for this to go. "Well, technically."

"'Technically?'"

"I didn't know there was a prisoner! I thought it was just, you know. A puzzle."

"Do I even want to ask how you came to have the box?"

He shrugged. "My dad found it in the attic. He said it must have been in mom’s family for a while."

Jian lifted an eyebrow and studied me for a moment. "What was your mother’s family name?"

"Rose. Why?"

"That explains it, though I wouldn’t have expected either Jack or Amelia to leave it uncared-for."

"If I explained it, how about you explain it to me?"

"How about I escort you out of my lair?"

"Wait! No! I can help you! I know-" I swallowed hard. "I know where Xiu He is." I tried not to linger on the thought of her name- I didn't want to catch her attention.

He raised an eyebrow at me. "Do you? I'm listening."

"She… When I released her - by accident - she was like a, a ghost. She didn't have a body."

"Yes, you mentioned that you'd released her." He didn't raise his voice, but I could still tell he was furiously angry.

I could feel her stirring, though, and I was to finish. "Please, let me-"

"By all means, continue," Jian said through his teeth, which looked a lot sharper than they had a minute ago. It occurred to me for the first time that he might actually kill me.

I tried to continue but my jaw was clamped shut.

No, you brat, you'll ruin everything!

"Blaser, I'm losing my patience."

I supposed it was too much to hope I'd get through this without waking her. I screwed my eyes shut and shoved her back with all the will I could muster.

With some relief, I was able to rush through the rest of the explanation. "She took mine. My body. She's in my head."

"So this is all some plan of hers to… do what, exactly? Get in my lair?"

"No, no. I've got her pushed back for now, I'll have a hell of a migraine later. No, I need your help. I want to get rid of her."

"You pushed her back?" Jian looked thoughtful. "You know, Blaser, you're a great deal more interesting than your enemies give you credit for."

"Thank you?" I wasn't entirely sure it was a compliment, but it was the closest I'd ever gotten from him. "Does that mean you'll help me?"

"I suppose it does."

Despite the blinding headache I knew I would have later, I felt hopeful for the first time in months.

I followed Jian deeper into the ancient building, through a door and into a disused room. It was covered in dust and one wall was lined with carefully-stored scrolls.

"Will this do as a workspace?" Jian asked, and I looked around the room, startled.

"A workspace?"

"What you ask me to teach you is no simple solution, Blaser. It will require considerable personal effort and study on your part. Based on what I've observed of you, I'm going to start you on alchemy."

"That's not really what I had in mind."

"Do you want my help or not?"

I thought about it for a long minute before answering. "I do."

Jian smirked. "Then start cleaning. I'll as some water spirits to help you mop."

He walked away. As my head began to throb, I wondered what I'd gotten myself into.

–

The "grand tour" of Jian's palace took quite a long time. I knew bits and pieces of legends about him and about the building that had been destroyed in his betrayal, but I never imagined I would be able to tour it, or that so much of the great palace would be intact.

I'm sure I annoyed the crap out of him with all my questions, but he continued to put up with me, mostly answering them with information that didn't make much sense, occasionally glaring at me imperiously and making sure I regretted asking. I was trying to figure out the pattern as to whether I'd get one answer or the other.

"I think you'll particularly like this room. Unlike most of the palace, it was never here before the… incident. But I think you'll like my library."

The door opened into a room that seemed entirely too large for the building - it was too wide and too tall to fit in with the rest of the architecture. We'd passed a few other areas that also seemed to defy the laws of physics, but for the most part Jian had glossed over them.

Inside there were row after row of shelves and cubby holes, and all of them were filled with neatly rolled scrolls or bound sheafs of pages, books and treatises and all sorts of records.

"This is your library?"

"Yes. Well, I suppose you can argue whether it's truly mine; it was here when I arrived. I'm told it's both something one of the ancient emperors destroyed in the name of rewriting history and an annex of an even larger library."

"That's… that's amazing."

"I don't know how much of it you'll be able to read," Jian admitted. "Much of it is different from the modern languages you know. But you're welcome to look. There's a fair amount that's more recent as well." He pointed toward some shelves where all the books seemed to have more modern hanzi and less antique binding.

"Oh? How's that work?" I couldn't picture him running down to the market to shop for books.

Jian shrugged. "I'm not entirely sure where they came from - they appeared only a few years after I arrived. Considering everything else is material that I'd either never heard of or been told didn't exist, I imagine it's been destroyed for one reason or another."

"Destroyed?"

"Oh yes," Jian smirked. "Nothing in this library exists anywhere else because nothing in this library exists."

–

It had been a long day with nothing in particular to show for it. Jian had walked me through all of it - walking meditation, sitting meditation, standing meditation. Silent. Chanting. Raking the crumbling edge of existence outside. And this wasn't the first day we'd spent like this, in the unending pursuit of a quiet mind and that certain spark that he'd promised could keep Xiu-he at bay.

"Please, Jian, can we stop? I don't think I'm getting anything out of this." I'd been sitting long enough that my knees ached and I imagined I knew every bump in the cold floor.

"You'll never be able to do a damn thing until you learn to focus!" he snarled.

"I'm just not magical, Jian! This is a waste of time!"

Jian turned away from me. "You're terribly sure of that for someone who hasn't really tried."

I nearly jumped to my feet. "Hasn't tried? I've been doing this for days now. Weeks! Of sitting! Concentrating! Being useless!" My joints were stiff when I stood, though, and I had to stretch. I felt it took some of the dignity away from my argument.

"You don't believe it."

"I can't just make myself believe something that isn't true."

Jian shook his head. "I've seen men believe all kinds of things that aren't true. I have every reason to believe it's easy."

"Ha. Very funny." I glared at him.

"Sit."

I just stood there, arms crossed, probably looking for all the world like a spoilt brat of a child.

"Sit, Blaser."

I bit my lip.

"Sit down or leave, but you will do one or the other."

I sat.

"Good. Now I'm going to show you something," he said, coming over to me and taking my right wrist in his hands. He massaged my hand, probably feeling for pressure points - I felt him push on two or three spots - and then drew his fingertips along the sensitive skin of the inside of my forearm.

I shivered at his touch, and realized how I must have looked just in time to blush in embarrassment. That feeling didn't last long either, though, as the sensation of his touch on my skin was replaced by a tingling feeling. At first I thought he'd put my arm to sleep with his use of pressure points, but slowly something came into focus around my hand.

"You have to understand that all possibility is inside you, and inside everyone. Some people can reach it more easily than others. It's still there."

Silver lines like snakes of liquid mercury swam through the air around my hand. When they crossed, sparks flew, red orange in front of my face. This, now… this I felt. A thrill ran up my spine.

"Now do you believe me?"

It was beautiful. It was a rush of excitement. I nodded, wordless, knowing he expected to be acknowledged. And I knew, in the depth of my heart, that it was Jian doing it for me, making me feel better. Nothing this amazing could actually come from me.

But it meant the world that he wanted me to think I could do it. That, I thought, was something I could believe in.

–

"I have things to tend to today, Robin, but I have a training exercise for you while I'm busy. I want you to read this book," Jian continued.

"That doesn't sound so bad."

He handed it to me. I opened it up and flipped through it. "Um, Jian, what is this?" None of the hanzi looked familiar. Not that I was particularly good with ancient languages, but usually I could at least identify them.

"It's an alchemical treatise."

"Is it in code or something?"

HTechnically it wasn't in code, but a dialect of Chinese that hadn't been spoken in several hundred years at best was probably close enough.

"That just makes it a challenge," I muttered as I went to work, scanning each page into my computer. Once that was done and I had returned the document to Jian's library, I started cross-referencing it against other ancient texts available online, looking for similar hanzi.

"'My Greatness by Juemiao Chui,'" I worked out the letters on the cover. At least, I was pretty sure that was a name. Even by ancient standards, it was a bit… flowery.

I started reading the manuscript as the translation completed. It was a treatise on alchemy, obviously, but much of his work was encoded in a metaphor about blacksmithing,which I guessed was the job he'd been trained for. Most of the great alchemical texts I'd heard of used natural metaphors, so this caught my attention.

About a fourth of the way through, I realized I was wrong. The metalwork was the alchemy for him. Now I was hooked. Wood produced the fire, earth insulated, water quenched. Metal was the key, he wrote, but overlooked by most because it was the tool and the product.

The way he described it, it sounded like he'd learned to understand metal so well that he didn't need the other elements. His understanding sounded so familiar to me. No wonder Jian had given me this to read.

I lost track of time as I read through the translated text, taking notes for myself to refer back to later. I didn't even notice when Jian came in.

"Playing on your computer instead of doing what I asked?"

I jerked up to look at him. "Oh! Jian! I'm almost done."

"Almost… done?" I didn't really register his confusion.

"Yep, the translation software only has about twenty five more pages, and it's getting faster as it goes because the database of known characters is getting larger. It's fascinating reading! I can see why you thought I'd like it."

"Blaser, I didn't tell you to use the computer to translate it. It's intended to be an exercise for your mind," Jian shook his head.

"It was! Programming the matching algorithm was hard."

"It's also supposed to show you the value of repetitive work for meditation."

"Do you think those thin, brittle pages scanned themselves? That was repetitive!"

Jian looked thoughtful. "And you're reading it?"

"Well, duh."

He sighed, but this time the look on his face looked as much pleased as it did resigned. "Well, then, tell me what you've learned so far."