"Do you know the Eight Trigrams?" Lei Kung asked suddenly, in the middle of his lecture.
Daisy thought about it. She'd never made a formal study of them, but she had some vague impression, so she nodded to show she did.
"The East holds fire to be the Li trigram—one yang line, one yin line, then another yang line. Li is fire. Li is the middle daughter. Li is the pheasant. Li is the eye. Li means radiance, beauty. Do you follow any of this?"
Lei Kung was weary too. A K'un-Lun native had to master all of this before being taught chi—don't understand it? Go figure it out yourself. But with Daisy, a newcomer who'd joined late, he had no idea how deep her knowledge ran, and on top of that she was a "mute," so he had to stop and check every couple of sentences.
Daisy felt she grasped most of it. By Lei Kung's account, Li meant a beautiful woman with bright eyes, a touch fond of showing off, and a personality leaning toward the androgynous. Huh? That's a pretty good match for me. The ancient Eastern art of the trigrams really is something.
"The Li trigram symbolizes fire, but with two yang lines on the outside and yin within, it carries the sense of brightness—firm without, gentle within. It stands for the eyes and the heart. You must begin from inside, working from within outward, gradually drawing out the chi that is your own."
Lei Kung held forth at length, and Daisy listened in a daze—but begin from the heart, that part she caught.
"Li belongs to the East, so you'll sit in the East and feel your way slowly." With that, Lei Kung rose, pushed open the door, and left.
Daisy sat where she was for an hour. She felt only a thin barrier away from sensing the chi, yet she couldn't break through it no matter what. At last she had to stand and stretch—her legs had gone completely numb.
And she was hungry.
She stepped outside and looked around. The disciples who'd trained that morning had already cleared out of the courtyard, and not one of them had told her where the dining hall was.
There were no signboards along the way either, so Daisy could only widen her frequency range. At this hour, wherever the most people were gathered ought to be the dining hall.
Halfway there she ran straight into Danny Rand. She quickly waved, then mimed eating.
Seeing this once-aloof, mute older girl suddenly waving at him, Danny—never the quickest to react—was a little dumbfounded. Only after Daisy mimed it a second time did he point woodenly back the way he'd come.
Daisy had already walked some distance before he snapped out of it. "I'll show you the way!"
As they walked, Danny kept sizing her up. "You came from outside? They say the passage only opens once every ten years. You…"
His questions came fast and urgent. Even though he'd resolved to finish learning his art before leaving the mountain for revenge, Danny still hoped to hear something of the outside world.
But the moment he finished asking, he remembered Daisy couldn't "talk," and the frustration was enough to make him want to bang his head against a wall.
Daisy had little patience for this sort of dim-witted kid, and playing mute was an excellent excuse besides.
She answered most of his questions with a nod or a shake of the head. Her own focus had always been on the arms market and S.H.I.E.L.D. As for the Rand Corporation's current state, she knew only the public information from newspapers and media—nothing specific.
Still, under Danny's relentless questioning, she eventually picked up a twig and wrote a couple of consoling lines in the dirt.
"Thank you for telling me. The dining hall's just ahead—I'll head back now. Sorry." On learning he'd been "declared dead," Danny was crushed. He gave a slight bow and hurried off at a run.
"Haah… Saying things like that to him will only disturb his mind. You really are a troublesome one." Lei Kung stepped out from behind a tree. He'd left in a hurry earlier and forgotten to send Daisy to eat—and now look, trouble all the same.
Daisy didn't care in the least. Twig still in hand, she wrote in K'un-Lun script: "Isn't missing one's homeland simply human nature? Attachment is what drives us. Because we have something to hold onto, we keep protecting it, generation after generation, never ceasing. Isn't K'un-Lun the same?"
A future Director through and through—when Daisy wanted to talk, she could make her words downright eloquent. She not only whitewashed her own behavior, she flattered K'un-Lun in the bargain.
Lei Kung had cultivated for centuries, surrounded day after day by especially plain, honest folk. It was the first time he'd seen words turned so prettily, and the corner of his mouth lifted into a faint smile.
"The flame passed from torch to torch, never extinguished, ever renewed—is that the Will of Fire you've grasped?" Lei Kung wanted to return the flattery, though his phrasing came out a touch stiff.
Hearing those words—the Will of Fire—Daisy nearly coughed up blood. She hastily waved a hand, signaling they move on to another topic.
"The Yu-Ti asked me to put a question to you: do you wish to remain in K'un-Lun as a disciple, or as an elder?" Lei Kung asked as he led the way.
As an outstanding transmigrator from a certain unmentionable country, Daisy would never turn down a chance at promotion. Almost without thinking, she bowed her head and wrote, "I love K'un-Lun. I cherish the quiet and the timelessness of this place, and I'm willing to lend it my strength."
Her textbook corporate answer left Lei Kung baffled for a moment. Which is it, then? Would it kill you to just say so?
Luckily he'd lived several centuries, and his intellect was well above the ordinary. After thinking it over for a moment, he finally caught her meaning.
Lei Kung was pleased. "You're willing to stay on as an elder?"
Daisy looked at him curiously, nodded, then shook her head, and went on writing: "Didn't the Yu-Ti tell you about the Phoenix? I have to defeat Her out in the world. But I'll treat K'un-Lun as my own home."
By Crisis's calculations, K'un-Lun could serve as a waystation and a spatial anchor point. Once she went out into the cosmos, she could link to K'un-Lun's coordinates across enormous distances, then make a space jump for a quick return to Earth.
Loosely speaking, K'un-Lun was a lot like the "home base" in a video game.
With Daisy's stance made clear, Lei Kung warmed to her noticeably.
The two of them followed a long corridor toward the building Lei Kung called the Place of Nobles. They'd already strayed from the direction Danny had pointed her earlier, but Daisy sensed no ill intent from Lei Kung, so she calmly walked along inside with him.
The Ancestral Shrine, the Gate of the Immortal Realm, the Place of Nobles, the Tree of Immortality, the Bridge of Destiny—Lei Kung kept introducing the key sites of K'un-Lun as they went.
Tens of millions of years had passed, and the people of K'un-Lun took it all for granted, but Daisy could still pick out plenty of telltale signs.
That Ancestral Shrine was most likely the original alien vessel's main cockpit. The Gate of the Immortal Realm was, without question, the hatch. The Place of Nobles was the crew's rest quarters. The Tree of Immortality looked like the product of the ship's energy leaking out and fusing with some inter-dimensional lifeform, and the Bridge of Destiny resembled a particle accelerator…
A pity the vessel had long since exhausted its energy and was badly damaged—otherwise, flying it out to fetch the Power Stone would have been far less trouble.
Lei Kung led her into the Place of Nobles. The food here was excellent. Daisy alone polished off a whole roasted lamb—golden and glistening on the outside, its fragrance rushing straight up the nose, the meat soft and supple, fresh and tender. Having grown used to sausages and hamburgers, she was overcome by a tangle of feelings. Ever since the Maid moved into the villa, she hadn't even cooked Chinese food anymore, and it had been ages since Daisy last tasted Eastern cuisine.