⸻
"To assess someone accurately, do not watch"
"what they show you."
"Watch what they assume does not need showing."
"People reveal their actual values"
"in the things they consider too obvious to hide."
— Wei Shen, private cultivation notes, Year 11,867
The week Shen Lingyue had requested began the way assessment weeks always began: with both parties already doing the thing they had agreed to delay.
He had spent the first morning after their conversation in the study hall reorganizing his understanding of her, which was the same as assessing her, regardless of the label. She had spent it — he deduced this from the library request log Pei Dasheng had access to, checked with the discretion of someone who understood that information obtained through legitimate channels was only tactless if offered when unsolicited — requesting texts on Qi-signature analysis from the pre-consolidation archival section. Not the Star Hollow Way specifically. Qi-signature analysis in general, the old methodologies, the techniques that had been superseded by the standardized assessment tools the Celestial Court had introduced during the consolidation and that were, as a result, less well understood by anyone who had not gone looking for them deliberately.
She was assessing him. He was assessing her. They had agreed to do this for a week before the translation attempt. Neither of them had agreed not to begin immediately.
This was, he decided, the most promising sign he had seen so far.
✦
The assessment proceeded through oblique contact — not avoided contact, not the careful distance of two people who had agreed not to approach each other, but the specific quality of proximity that people maintained when they were in the process of deciding how close to get and were doing the deciding through accumulation rather than deliberate choice. She appeared at the study hall at the same hours he did, sat at adjacent or nearby tables, read her texts with the clean focus of someone who was actually reading them and not using them as cover. She did not initiate conversation. Neither did he. They accumulated each other in the peripheral vision of shared space, and what accumulated was data.
What he accumulated about Shen Lingyue, across seven days of peripheral vision and three direct conversations and the Qi-perception running continuously:
She was older than she appeared, which in a cultivation context meant her body age and her cultivation age were significantly misaligned — not in the way of Wei Shen's situation, where the misalignment was total and deliberate, but in the way of someone who had spent long periods at cultivation levels where the body's aging slowed without stopping. He estimated she had been at Foundation Forging sixth stage for at least four or five years, possibly longer. The secondary path she was running alongside the Foundation work had the density of something that had been developed over considerable time, not the thinner quality of recent secondary cultivation.
She had the habits of someone who had spent significant periods alone. Not the habits of someone lonely — she was comfortable in the compound's social environment and moved through it without friction — but the deep habits of a person whose primary relationship was with their own thinking. She ate quickly when she was absorbed in something and slowly when she was not. She made her own tea in a small portable setup she kept in her room rather than using the dining hall's common service. She kept her own hours on the practice ground, arriving before anyone else and leaving before the standard session began, her form in the water Qi exercises technically excellent and practically secondary to whatever she was actually doing in that hour, which his perception read as the secondary path's morning maintenance work.
She was careful. Not the performed carefulness of someone managing a presentation, but the deep structural carefulness of someone who had been in situations where carelessness had costs, and who had internalized the lessons of those situations without becoming rigid about them. The carefulness expressed itself in specificity: she did not make approximate statements. She said what she meant in the precise form that meant it. She did not round up.
On the fourth day, she came to the compound garden in the evening — not at the time when he and Cangxu used it, an hour later, after he had gone in — and sat on the eastern bench and did the secondary path's evening practice. He knew this from Cangxu, who had been in his room with the window open and whose perception had registered the ambient Qi shift.
"What did it feel like?" Wei Shen asked.
"Not like yours," Cangxu said. "Not like mine. Something different. The ambient Qi around the bench organized differently — not into distributed nodes and not into the hollow-space quality of the evening practice. It organized into — " He paused, reaching for accuracy. "Layers. Thin, dense layers, like pages. Each one carrying something different."
"Memory," Wei Shen said, half to himself.
"You think so?"
"The pre-consolidation texts on the secondary path types describe a cultivation method that organized Qi around memory structures rather than standard meridian pathways. Memory as the cultivation medium, not as a byproduct of cultivation." He looked at the wall. "It hasn't been in active practice for centuries. The Celestial Court's standardization didn't prohibit it directly — it simply required all outer disciples to use standard meridian-pathway cultivation as the foundation, which made memory-structure cultivation a secondary system at best." A pause. "She's been running it for a long time."
Cangxu was quiet for a moment. "She and I should meet," he said. "At some point."
"Yes," Wei Shen agreed. "At some point."
"Not yet."
"Not yet."
They sat with the evening, and did not discuss the timing further, because the timing was not yet available.
✦
The third direct conversation happened on the sixth day, in the section of the practice ground that was used for individual cultivation work rather than supervised curriculum sessions. She was there when he arrived. She watched him set up the morning exercise with the specific attention of someone who had decided to observe directly rather than through the peripheral channels they had been using.
He set up the exercise and ran it. He did not adjust the output level for her presence the way he adjusted it for the standard curriculum sessions — not because he had decided to show her more, but because calibrating the output for a specific observer required knowing what framework the observer was using to evaluate what they saw, and he did not yet know hers. He ran it clean. Let her see what there was to see.
She watched for fifteen minutes. Then: "The node structure. How many points?"
"Currently active: thirty-seven. The constellation has more, but the Foundation work at this stage has only engaged thirty-seven."
"It's not a water Qi constellation."
"No. The Ironcloud water Qi curriculum is compatible with it, but the architecture predates the water Qi tradition."
She looked at the ambient field with the quality of someone using a specialized assessment mode — not the standard Qi-sight that every cultivator developed, something more layered. He recognized it suddenly: the pre-consolidation Qi-signature analysis technique. She was using it on him.
"The frequency of the nodes," she said slowly. "Each one is different. They're not variations on a base frequency — each one is its own distinct resonance."
"Each node corresponds to a specific weight-bearing connection," he said. "The resonance is the connection's characteristic frequency. No two are identical because no two connections are identical."
She looked at him with an expression he had not seen on her before: not the measuring assessment that was her default, something with more texture. "You cultivate relationships," she said. Not a question. Processing.
"The Nightstar Path treats meaningful connection as a cultivation medium," he said. "Not in the metaphorical sense that some schools mean when they say this. Literally. The connections between the cultivator and the things they are genuinely connected to are structural components of the Core. They carry Qi. They strengthen with depth and weaken with neglect, the way other cultivation structures do."
"And if they're severed?"
"The node dims. It doesn't disappear — the constellation's architecture accounts for loss. But a dimmed node is weaker than an active one, and the connections between nodes carry less efficiently." He paused. "The path is not designed for isolation. I understood this intellectually for several lifetimes before I understood it experientially."
She held this. He could see her processing it through the memory-structure cultivation lens — layering it, filing it alongside whatever she was building in there.
"And the Gu," she said.
He looked at her. "How long have you known?"
"Since the practice ground on the third day. The ambient Qi has a secondary attentiveness to it that isn't yours. Something watching alongside you, with its own perspective." She met his gaze steadily. "I've encountered Gu cultivation before. Not recently. A long time ago."
"How long ago?"
A pause. She chose the accurate answer over the comfortable one, which was, he noted, the same choice he made when he trusted someone enough to make it. "Longer than you might expect."
He thought: she and I are more similar in situation than I initially assessed. The age misalignment I estimated from her cultivation density may itself be an underestimate. He thought: the locked notebook and the sealed case are going to be more interesting than I projected.
"Tomorrow," she said. "If you're ready."
"I'm ready. Elder Shou needs to be there."
Her expression shifted slightly. Not surprise — she had expected this variable, he read. "You told her."
"She asked to be present when someone attempted to read the stone. She framed it as protection rather than oversight."
"Is it?"
"Both. She's smart enough to know that protection and oversight are not mutually exclusive, and to frame it as the one that's easier to accept." He paused. "She is trustworthy. Not unconditionally — her trustworthiness operates within specific constraints that I understand. Within those constraints, she has been consistent."
Shen Lingyue considered this. "All right," she said. "Tomorrow. The same room she used for the senior assessment?"
"I'll arrange it."
She nodded. She returned to her own practice with the ease of someone who had said what they came to say and was done. He returned to the node exercise and thought about tomorrow and what it might open.
✦
He told Elder Shou that evening. She received the information with the settled quality of someone who had been expecting it and had already prepared.
"The translation technique," she said. "Do you know what it is?"
"Memory-structure cultivation," he said. "Pre-consolidation. The layered Qi-organization I see in her secondary path's output is consistent with a cultivation method that stores information in Qi-form using memory structures as the organizational medium. If the technique works as I think it does, she'll attempt to interface the stone's script directly with the memory-structure layer — using the Qi-resonance of what she's stored to find matching frequencies in the script and read the matches."
Elder Shou looked at him. "That's not a translation technique. That's a recognition technique. It only works if she already has the referents stored."
"Yes."
"Which means she has encountered this script before. Or something close enough to it that the frequency matching will work."
"Yes."
"And she has been carrying that encounter in her memory-structure cultivation for —" She stopped. She looked at the window. When she spoke again, her voice had the specific quality of someone revising a model and finding the revision significant. "How long has she been at Foundation Forging sixth stage?"
"At minimum, four years. Possibly considerably more."
"Memory-structure cultivation slows aging at the Foundation Forging level when the structure becomes sufficiently dense. The denser it is, the slower the aging." She looked at the tea in front of her. "A person with a very dense memory-structure layer could maintain Foundation Forging sixth stage appearance for a very long time."
"Yes," Wei Shen said.
"And a person who had encountered the molecular script of a pre-consolidation artifact a very long time ago and stored the encounter in a memory-structure cultivation layer —"
"Would potentially be able to access it again, given a close enough frequency match."
The room was quiet.
"How old is she?" Elder Shou asked.
"I don't know," he said. "More than her appearance suggests. Possibly significantly more." He paused. "She said, when I asked when she had encountered Gu cultivation, that it was longer ago than I might expect. She said it with the quality of someone choosing an accurate statement over a comfortable one."
"And you believe her."
"I believe she has a specific reason to be present in my vicinity that she has not yet fully disclosed, and that the reason is genuine rather than instrumental. The locked notebook and the sealed case are relevant. She will open them in sequence, as she's established — first the translation attempt, then what the translation reveals, then whatever the notebook and case contain." He looked at his own cup. "She has been carrying this for longer than six weeks. She came to the eastern islands for a reason. She encountered the scanning frequency there. She brought it here. The sequencing of what she's chosen to share and when she's chosen to share it is deliberate and internally consistent. Someone who is being instrumentally patient doesn't maintain that kind of consistency over the timescale I think she's been maintaining it."
Elder Shou was quiet for a long moment. Then: "Tomorrow. The hour of the Snake?"
"Yes."
"I'll be there before you."
✦
The stone was a piece of seafloor rock approximately the size of his fist, irregular in shape, dark grey with a matte surface that caught light without reflecting it. He had been carrying it since the first week of this life, wrapped in oiled cloth in the inner pocket of whatever he was wearing, a weight so habitual he had long since stopped noticing it the way he noticed things he had not yet integrated.
He set it on the low table in the room where Elder Shou was already seated and Shen Lingyue arrived exactly on time, which he had expected. She looked at the stone with the quality he had been waiting to see: not the first-contact quality of encountering something unknown, but the quality of encountering something remembered. Recognition. She covered it quickly — she was very good — but he had seen it.
"May I?" she said.
He nodded.
She picked it up. She held it in both hands, not turning it, not examining the surface in the way a scholar examined a text. Holding it the way someone held something they needed to feel the weight of before anything else.
Elder Shou was watching from her chair with the contained quality she maintained in situations where something significant was happening and her function was to be present rather than to direct.
"The script is on the internal surface," Wei Shen said. "You can't see it with standard Qi-sight. The characters are embedded at the molecular level."
"I know," she said. She closed her eyes.
The ambient Qi in the room shifted. He had expected this — the memory-structure cultivation's interface mode would reorganize the ambient field around her as a medium — but the quality of the shift was not what he had expected. It was not a concentration. It was a deepening. The room became, without any visible change, more present than it had been. More specifically itself. As if the memory-structure layer she was extending was bringing its own accumulated weight to bear on the environment.
He sat with his hands still and watched through the Nightstar Path's perception, which at this level of development could read the Qi-field interactions with something approaching full resolution.
What he saw:
The stone's embedded script — invisible to standard Qi-sight, a pattern of molecular-level Qi impressed into the rock over a very long time by something or someone — was resonating. Faint, almost imperceptible, the resonance of something that had been waiting for a compatible frequency to reach it. The memory-structure layer Shen Lingyue had extended was producing compatible frequencies. Not identical — not the script's own frequency, but close enough that the stone's dormant resonance was reaching toward them the way a sleeping person reached toward warmth.
The matching was imperfect. He could see the gaps — frequencies in the script that had no referent in her memory-structure layer, characters that were not resonating, sections of the text that were not being reached. But sections were being reached. Perhaps forty percent. Perhaps more.
She was very still for a long time.
Then something changed in the room. Not in the Qi-field — in Shen Lingyue herself. He read it in the quality of her attention, the way the memory-structure layer organized around a specific point, the way her breathing changed from the even cadence of interface work to something shallower.
She set the stone down.
She opened her eyes.
She looked at the stone with an expression that was, for the first time since he had met her, uncontrolled. Not dramatic — she pulled it back within seconds, with the evident practice of someone who had pulled things back many times. But in the moment before the control reasserted, he saw: recognition that was larger than the recognition of a script. Recognition of something the script contained.
"How much?" he asked quietly.
"Partial," she said. Her voice was level. She had recovered the level. "Significant gaps. I can tell you what the readable sections say, but the gaps mean the full meaning is — incomplete."
"What did the readable sections say?"
She looked at the stone on the table. She looked at Elder Shou, who was watching with the contained attention that was its own form of permission. She looked at Wei Shen.
"A name," she said. "A set of instructions. And a date."
He waited.
"The name is not readable to me — the frequency is there but I don't have the referent. Something very old. Something that predates the referents in my memory layer by enough that I can tell the frequency is significant without being able to read what it signifies." She paused. "The instructions are partial. What I can read: this stone is one of three. The others are — " Another pause. "The others are not where they were placed. They have been moved. The stone knows this. The script was written to be responsive — it's not static text, it updates."
"Updates," Elder Shou said, very quietly. Not a question. Absorbing.
"It has been updated since it was written. The most recent update is —" She looked at the stone again. "Forty-three years ago. The update records that one of the three stones has been recovered. That it is being held by a practitioner of the Nightstar Path." She looked at Wei Shen. "Wei Guanghan."
He kept his expression at the level quality he used for receiving significant information. "The other two stones."
"One is in the eastern island chain. Not on the seafloor — the update record implies it was moved inland, somewhere in the island chain's interior. The search operation that was scanning the seafloor —" She stopped. "They were looking in the wrong place. They knew the frequency but not the current location."
"And the third."
She looked at the stone for a long moment. "The third is missing from the script. The section that would record its location is in the gap — the frequency is outside the range of my referents. I cannot read it."
The room was quiet.
"The date," he said. "What was dated?"
"The original inscription. When it was written." She looked at him directly. "Four thousand three hundred years ago."
The number sat in the room. Considerably older than the Celestial Court. Older than the consolidation. Older than anything in the active cultivation records of the current era by a significant margin. Four thousand three hundred years ago, someone had written a script at the molecular level into three stones, designed the script to update itself, and placed the stones in the seafloor of the eastern coast.
"Who wrote it?" he asked.
"That's the name I can't read," she said. "But I know what frequency range it's in. It's the same frequency range as —" She stopped. She looked at the sealed case she had set on the table when she arrived. She looked at it for a moment with the quality of someone making a decision that had been pending.
She opened the case.
Inside was a piece of material that was not quite stone and not quite metal — something that had the density of old metal and the texture of old stone, smooth from age rather than from polishing, with a surface that looked blank until the room's ambient Qi shifted around it and revealed, at the molecular level, the same script as the seafloor stone. Embedded. Waiting.
"Where did you find that?" Wei Shen asked.
"The eastern islands," she said. "The same location where the three islanders were investigating. They didn't find this. I did." She looked at it. "This one I can read more of. The memory-structure layer has more referents for it. It's from the same source as the stone, but it's a different kind of document — not an index, not location records. A record of intent."
"Whose intent?"
She looked at him. She made the decision he could see her making — the decision to move from the staged disclosure she had been maintaining to the direct one. "The person who built the concealment array in Tidal Shore," she said. "The one you call the founding woman."
The room did not change. The Qi-field did not shift. Nothing visible happened.
Inside him, thirty-seven node points in the constellation-Core lit simultaneously, with the quality that the Nightstar Path's architecture produced when multiple load-bearing connections activated in response to the same stimulus. Not pain. Not shock. The specific resonance of a pattern becoming visible that had been present but unread.
He thought: I arrived at the biological distribution technique independently, from first principles, and found that it was identical to the principle the founding woman had built the array on. I arrived at it from the other direction, as he had told Old Peng. And now: the founding woman is the same person who wrote the script in three stones four thousand three hundred years ago and left a record of intent that Shen Lingyue has been carrying from the eastern islands.
He thought: she is not a mystery from my grandfather's past. She is a mystery from a time before any of the records I have access to. She is a mystery from before the Celestial Court. She is the beginning of the thread, not a node along it.
"What does the record of intent say?" he asked.
"Parts of it," Shen Lingyue said. "The readable parts." She looked at the piece in the case. "She knew someone would come. Not who — she couldn't know who, at four thousand years' distance. But she knew the frequency range of the path that would come. She knew what it was related to. She knew what it was building toward."
"She knew the Nightstar Path."
"She knew something that became the Nightstar Path. She used different words. But the frequency in the record and the frequency of your Core's constellation —" She paused. "They match."
Elder Shou had not moved. She was watching with the attention of someone who had been told they were standing at the edge of something large and was carefully assessing where the edge was.
"What was her intent?" Wei Shen asked.
Shen Lingyue was quiet for a moment. She looked at the piece in the case, at the molecular-level script visible now in the room's shifted ambient Qi, at the record of intent from four thousand three hundred years ago.
"To leave," she said. "Enough. For whoever came next, to find. So that the finding would not have to begin from nothing."
She looked at him.
"She built the harbor," Wei Shen said softly. Not to Shen Lingyue. To the stone on the table. To the room. To the distance of four thousand three hundred years between the writing and the reading.
"Yes," Shen Lingyue said. "She built the harbor. And then she built something else — the script is not only a record. It's a message. The readable portions end with something that isn't addressed to whoever found this specific piece." She looked at him steadily. "It's addressed to whoever holds the stone that records Wei Guanghan's recovery. To you."
He looked at the stone on the table. Irregular, dark grey, matte, the weight he had been carrying since the first week without knowing what it was.
"What does it say?"
"The script at the relevant section is outside my referent range," she said. "I can't read it. It's in the same frequency as the name I couldn't identify." A pause. "The unreadable name is the author's name. The message from her to you is in her own frequency. Something only the right reader can access."
"What frequency range is required?"
"Above what you currently have. Significantly above." She met his gaze. "I'm sorry I can't give you more."
"Don't be," he said. And meant it. "What you've given me is — " He stopped. He thought about what she had given him: the three stones, one here, one in the eastern islands' interior, one unknown. The founding woman's name out of reach, her intent partially legible, her message to him waiting for a key he would reach in years rather than weeks. The search operation looking for the stone in the wrong place.
He thought: in this life, the full picture is becoming visible. I said this in the fourteenth notebook and I meant it as aspiration. I am revising it to observation.
"You've given me exactly enough," he said.
✦
After Shen Lingyue left — she took the case but left the piece inside for him to study further, which was a gesture that had the quality of something decided rather than offered — Elder Shou sat in the room for a while without speaking.
He sat with her. The stone was in his hands. The room's ambient Qi was still settling from the memory-structure interface.
"Four thousand three hundred years," she said finally.
"Yes."
"She built the array in Tidal Shore."
"Yes."
"And wrote these stones. And left a message for whoever would come next, addressed to a specific frequency range that corresponds to your cultivation path."
"Yes."
Elder Shou looked at the table where the stone had rested. She looked at the window. She was doing the thing she did when processing something that required her to revise a large portion of her existing framework rather than add to it.
"The Nightstar Path," she said. "You said it was building toward a Daomerge outside the Celestial Court's cultivation order. Invisible to Heaven's Will because it's oriented toward what is not yet rather than what is."
"Yes."
"And four thousand three hundred years ago, someone who understood this path well enough to know its frequency range left materials for whoever would next arrive at it. In the seafloor. In an array. In a coastal village built as a harbor."
"Yes."
She was quiet.
"She wasn't building a harbor for you," she said. "Not specifically. She was building it for the path. For whoever the path would find."
He thought about this. He thought about twelve thousand years of lives and the question of what had been coincidence and what had been structure. He thought about the Nightstar Path's affinity for what it was related to, and what it meant if the path's affinity had been recognized four thousand years before he had developed it into its current form.
"She knew the path before I knew it," he said. "Or something that became it. She built for it without knowing exactly who would arrive." He looked at the stone. "That's not unprecedented, in cultivation terms — array builders have always constructed for ranges rather than specifics. But the range she built for is very precise. It takes — " He stopped. Started differently. "The frequency range of the Nightstar Path is not obvious. It is not a standard cultivation type. A person who knew it well enough to design for it had either developed it independently or had encountered a practitioner."
"Or was one," Elder Shou said.
He went still.
"The frequency in the record of intent," she said carefully. "Shen Lingyue said the readable portions' frequency range matched your Core's constellation. But she also said the unreadable name and the message to you were in a different frequency. The author's own."
"Yes."
"You have not yet read the author's frequency."
"No. I need a higher cultivation level."
"But Shen Lingyue described it as above the range of her referents. Not above yours — above hers. Whatever she has stored in the memory-structure layer is extensive. Centuries of encounters, at minimum." Elder Shou looked at him. "The author's frequency is above the range of someone who has been cultivating for centuries. What does that tell you?"
He thought about the unsigned founding woman's Qi-signature in Tidal Shore's array — the one he had read at Qi Awakening and identified as unprecedented, outside every cultivation tradition he knew across twelve thousand years. He thought about a person who had built for a frequency range that was the Nightstar Path's signature, four thousand years ago. He thought about what it meant if the author's own frequency was above the range of centuries of accumulated referents.
He thought: she was not a practitioner of something that became the Nightstar Path. She was something further along the same road. Something the Nightstar Path points toward.
He thought: the harbor she built was not for my level. It was for what my level is preparation for.
He thought: I have been building toward something for twelve thousand years. She arrived there before me. She left directions.
"It tells me," he said carefully, "that I have more to look forward to than I had calculated."
Elder Shou looked at him for a long moment. "You're twelve years old," she said.
"In this body."
"And you've just been told that someone four thousand years ago built a message for you that you're not yet advanced enough to read."
"Yes."
"How does that feel?"
He thought about it honestly. He thought about the thirty-seven previous lives and the accumulated frustration of reaching toward something and finding the ceiling. He thought about what it felt like to have been building toward an unprecedented Daomerge for twelve thousand years and to find, in the stone of a fishing village, that the unprecedented thing he was building toward had been reached before.
He thought: it feels like confirmation. Like the path has always been toward something real, and the evidence that it's real is older than the Celestial Court.
"Like having more questions than I arrived with," he said. "And better ones."
She looked at him. Something in the measuring quality of her attention resolved, not into a conclusion but into a different kind of attention — the attention of someone who had stopped measuring and started simply watching.
"Take care of yourself," she said. Not an administrative instruction. Something quieter.
"I will," he said.
He picked up the stone. It weighed what it had always weighed. It would weigh this for years more, until the cultivation level that could read the author's message, until the right key met the right frequency and the four-thousand-year gap between the writing and the reading closed.
He carried it, as he always had.
He went back to the outer compound and the fourteenth notebook and wrote until the lamp needed refilling, and then refilled it and wrote more, because the night was full and the questions were better than they had ever been and the morning would bring the curriculum and the practice and the patient increment of everything the next years needed to build.
He wrote: She was here first. She built the harbor for this. The frequency of the Nightstar Path is four thousand years old, at minimum. I arrived at it from the other direction — I built toward what she had already become.
He wrote: The three stones. One here. One in the eastern islands' interior. One unknown. The search operation looking in the wrong place, which buys time but not indefinitely. The second stone needs to be found before the search operation updates its methodology.
He wrote: Shen Lingyue has been carrying this longer than six weeks. The locked notebook has more. I will not press. She discloses in sequence, as she said she would, and the sequence is coherent. I will wait for what comes next.
He wrote: I have more questions than I arrived with. And better ones.
He closed the notebook. The night went on around the lamp in its quiet and full way. The young Gu Worm was very still, which was its quality when it was holding something significant, attending to it with the full appetite of something that had been watching since before he knew it was watching.
He thought: we have been here before, you and I. At the edge of something larger than the current model. You have always known what it was before I did.
He sent nothing. He did not need to. The quality of the Gu Worm's stillness was itself a response: yes. We have been here. This is what here looks like when the shape is finally visible.
He put out the lamp.
He slept.
— End of Chapter 23 —