On the second evening, Xu Hao discovered that emptying his mind was an excellent way to remember everything he had ever regretted.
The argument with Professor Lin over a mistranslated shipping record returned in remarkable detail, including the precise shade of red the man's ears had turned when Xu Hao produced the original document. Then came the kettle he'd boiled dry in his office, an unpaid electricity bill, and a student whose dissertation he'd promised to read before the end of the month.
He wondered whether the student had sent another reminder.
He wondered whether there was still an office to send it to.
The thought remained long after the others faded.
"Little brother?"
Xu Hao opened his eyes. Er Bao sat across from him on the rock, watching without impatience. Below them, the fire had burned low enough that Da Bao was adding wood with the enthusiasm of a man settling an argument.
"Anything?" Er Bao asked.
"Several old grudges. One forgotten bill. I believe I've also remembered where I left a book that went missing three years ago."
"No Spirit?"
"Not unless it was hiding in the book."
Er Bao stood and offered him a hand. Xu Hao accepted it, then winced as his knees straightened.
"You sat longer tonight," Er Bao said.
"I used to sit in an archive for ten hours at a time. Nobody ever congratulated me for that."
"Perhaps they should have."
Da Bao looked up from a bowl of roasted roots. "Did you find it?"
"No."
"Try earth. Earth is reliable."
"You are both an excellent advertisement for it."
Da Bao took that as a compliment and offered him a root.
It was scorched black on one side and almost raw on the other. Xu Hao accepted the smaller half.
* * *
The following morning, Er Bao brought five pebbles to the flat stone beside camp.
They looked alike. All were grey, smooth enough to have come from the stream, and small enough to fit together in Xu Hao's palm.
"Put them in order," Er Bao said. "Lightest to heaviest."
Xu Hao weighed each in his hand. One was plainly heavier. Two others were so close that he had to exchange them several times before deciding.
He lined them up.
Er Bao changed the positions of three.
"I disagree," Xu Hao said.
"Then check."
"Do you have a set of scales?"
"A what?"
Xu Hao spread his hands. "Never mind."
Er Bao lifted the stone he'd placed first and pressed it into Xu Hao's palm. "Close your eyes."
The pebble was cool. A small rough patch caught against his thumb.
"Tell me what you notice."
"It's a stone."
"I noticed that much."
"Grey, I think. Unless closing my eyes has changed its colour."
Er Bao waited.
Xu Hao turned it slowly between his fingers. There was the weight, the grit lodged in one small crack, the place where water had worn an edge almost flat. Nothing else. He tried to imagine the sensation Er Bao must be waiting for, then caught himself.
"I can tell you which side is rough," he said. "I can't tell you how much Spirit is inside it."
"Good."
"Good?"
"You didn't invent an answer."
Xu Hao opened his eyes. Er Bao was watching him seriously.
"When I was young, Father would put stones like these beside our bowls before breakfast," he said. "We weren't allowed to eat until we'd put them in the right order."
"An unforgiving household."
"Da Bao ate first anyway."
From the cooking fire came an indignant shout. "I only did that once!"
Er Bao didn't raise his voice. "You did it often enough that Father started counting the bowls."
Da Bao muttered something about unfair witnesses.
Er Bao put the pebble down. "Father could feel the earth Spirit within each stone. I couldn't. I spent weeks guessing and telling him what I thought he wanted to hear."
"What changed?"
"He gave me a bucket."
"A bucket?"
"I carried water from the stream every morning. When I stopped trying to impress him, I began to notice the ground under my feet. Not much. Just a difference between wet stone and dry soil that had nothing to do with how they felt against my skin."
Xu Hao looked at the row of pebbles. "And that was your element?"
"That was the beginning of noticing it. I still had to learn what it meant."
Da Bao wandered over with his breakfast bowl. "I could tell the stones apart."
"You remembered where Father put them."
"It worked."
"Until he changed them."
Da Bao gave Xu Hao a wounded look. "My own brother remembers nothing good about my childhood."
Xu Hao picked up a pebble. "I can sympathise. My mother kept records of every foolish thing I did."
"Did she show them to people?"
"Frequently."
Da Bao brightened. "Then she and Father would have got along."
Er Bao seemed to notice. He swept the pebbles back into a little pile.
"We can try again tomorrow," he said. "But don't confuse recognising weight with sensing Spirit."
"I won't." Xu Hao hesitated. "Could I mark the stones first?"
"With what?"
He borrowed a blackened twig from the edge of the fire, drew a different line on each pebble, and had Er Bao mix them while he looked away. On the second attempt, he identified the heaviest correctly by touch. The next three defeated him.
It wasn't cultivation. It was, however, something he could test.
Er Bao let him make a third attempt before carrying the stones away.
"Enough."
"One more?"
"You'll only remember which scratch belongs to which stone."
Xu Hao glanced at the marks he'd made.
He set the twig down.
* * *
After supper, Xu Hao asked how strong the brothers actually were.
Da Bao sat taller at once.
"Strong enough to carry you and our packs up the mountain."
"I was there. I meant cultivation."
Er Bao cleared a patch of dirt with his hand and drew five circles in a line.
"Dust," he said, tapping the first. "Everyone begins there. Nine layers."
Xu Hao leaned over the drawing. "Nine? Within the first realm?"
"Yes. After Dust comes Firefly. Then Bright Moon. Blazing Sun. Star River."
He named each one carefully enough for Xu Hao to repeat it.
The first names were almost gentle. Dust, Firefly. Then the scale grew steadily more absurd, until Xu Hao was looking at a circle called Star River and wondering what a man at that level was supposed to do with an ordinary road.
"Are there realms beyond those?"
"Yes."
"What are they called?"
"Names you don't need yet."
"That sounds like something my professors said whenever an examination was approaching."
Er Bao smiled and left the circles alone.
Da Bao tapped the fourth one. "We're here."
"Blazing Sun?"
"Both of us."
Xu Hao studied the two men. He had seen one of them raise an earthen wall against a snake and the other take a boar's head off with a single stroke. They lived under a leaking shelter, complained about salt, and argued over lost boots.
Nothing about their lives suggested that they belonged near the top of any system.
"And the boar?" he asked. "What realm was that?"
"Below us," Er Bao said. "The beasts near camp usually are."
"Usually?"
"Farther in, you'd find creatures we would avoid."
Even Da Bao made no joke about that.
Xu Hao glanced into the trees beyond the fire. Yesterday he'd been pleased to discover a town existed. Tonight he was increasingly aware of the distance between that town and his ability to reach it alive.
"Suppose I reached Dust Realm," he said. "Would that mean I could defend myself?"
"Better than you can now," Er Bao replied. "It wouldn't mean you were safe."
He drew two figures beneath the first circle, one carrying a club and the other a bow.
"A man who knows his weapon may defeat someone with more Spirit. A man who thinks his realm makes him invincible will eventually meet somebody willing to correct him."
"Especially," Da Bao added, "if the other man has a bigger club."
Xu Hao regarded the figures.
Xu Hao stared down at Dust, the smallest circle. At this point, he'd settle for discovering enough power to stop losing arguments with tree roots.
* * *
That night, Xu Hao tried meditating alone.
He sat beneath the broad ledge above camp. The rock held the day's warmth, and the firelight reached him only as a faint amber glow between the tree trunks. Da Bao was mending a strap below. Er Bao's sharpening stone rasped steadily over his sword.
Xu Hao let the sounds remain where they were.
He did not try to imagine earth moving beneath him. He did not summon a flame in his thoughts or pretend the wind belonged to him. Er Bao had been right about the pebbles: knowing what he wanted to find was not the same as finding it.
His breathing slowed.
He thought briefly of the manuscript that had brought him here. The broken seal. The last patch of lamplight on his desk. Then he let the memories go.
A long while passed. Or perhaps only a few minutes.
The rasp of the sharpening stone stopped.
Xu Hao noticed because he could still hear the stream.
Then he could no longer hear the stream either.
The weight of his legs vanished. So did the roughness of the rock beneath his palms.
He opened his eyes.
There were no trees.
Darkness stretched around him, vast and strangely clear. It wasn't the blackness of a moonless night. He could see into it without finding walls or a ceiling, and he knew, without understanding how, that there was a floor beneath him.
He tried to rise. He couldn't tell whether he'd moved.
"Er Bao?"
There was no echo. He wasn't even sure he had made a sound.
Something pale hung in the distance ahead.
As he looked, it resolved into a writing brush, suspended with its dark bristles pointed down. Beside it floated a deck of blank white cards. Their edges were aligned so neatly that they might have been cut from a single block.
Xu Hao stared.
He had been expecting an element. He had prepared himself for a faint warmth, an unusual pressure in his chest, perhaps the first hint of a power he could learn to control.
Instead, someone appeared to have left him stationery.
He approached the brush, though he felt no movement in his feet. Its handle was pale and slender, the sort he'd seen in old paintings. The cards bore no markings at all. No symbols, no pictures, not even a border to tell him which way up they belonged.
He reached for the brush.
It remained just beyond his fingers.
He reached farther. The gap did not change.
He tried the cards instead, concentrating on the nearest corner. They stayed exactly where they were.
"Hello?"
Neither object reacted.
Xu Hao tried to remember everything Er Bao had told him about innate powers. This looked nothing like earth or fire or wind. It looked like a room waiting for a man who knew how to use it.
He was not that man.
A dull ache formed behind his eyes. He tried once more to touch the nearest card, and the ache sharpened until the white edges blurred.
The hall disappeared.
He was back beneath the ledge, hunched over his knees. Cold air scraped into his lungs. He caught himself with both palms against the rock.
Da Bao's voice came from below.
"Little brother? Are you ill?"
Xu Hao rubbed his temples and climbed carefully to his feet. His legs felt as though he'd been sitting on them for hours.
"Possibly."
Da Bao came closer, peering at his face. Er Bao followed, the sharpening stone still in his hand.
"Did something happen?" Er Bao asked.
"I think I found my power."
Da Bao's eyes widened. "What is it?"
Xu Hao considered the question. He could describe the hall, the emptiness, the objects floating out of reach. Somehow the simpler answer seemed less ridiculous.
"A writing brush," he said. "And a deck of cards."
Da Bao blinked. "Can they fight?"
"Not that I've noticed."
"Can you throw them?"
"I couldn't touch them."
Da Bao thought about this, visibly trying to find some encouraging use for an untouchable deck of cards.
"Well," he said at last, "perhaps they'll become useful."
Xu Hao gave him a tired smile. "That makes two of us hoping."
Er Bao said nothing.
He stood a little behind his brother, the sharpening stone motionless in his hand.
Da Bao glanced back at him, his smile fading.
Er Bao was staring at Xu Hao.