Chapter 33 – The Foundation

The stonemasons arrived on the third day of autumn.

Seven of them, from a Western Reaches contractor settlement two weeks west of Hekou, with two oxcarts of tools and enough dressed stone to begin three foundations. Their foreman was a compact woman named Ru who walked the training ground perimeter before speaking, pressed her heel into the soil at four points, and told me the northern flat was workable.

Gao Ren was already there. He had been waiting for the stonemasons the way he waited for ore shipments, standing at the northern edge of the flat with his arms folded.

He and Ru spent the first hour arguing about the cultivation hall’s foundation depth, but by midday they were working off the same plan.

I left them to it and went to meet the Luan cousins.

They had been housed in the two buildings east of the Pei household since arriving in the days after Mother’s burial.

Ten people total who had backgrounds as healers, farmers, and there was a carpenter named Luan Fen who had finished his assigned building in eleven days and was already asking what to do next. I had been managing the integration from a distance through.

They told me stories of Mother while I did their intake.

They knew the girl she had been in Chenjia, the apprentice who had been too serious for her age and then suddenly warm when she thought no one was watching, the one Sun Ai had called her best student while complaining that she asked too many questions. They had stories I had never heard. They produced them without being asked, over the rice and salted fish Tong Lian had sent over.

A woman named Luan Mei, the oldest of the cousins, told me that Mother had stolen a jar of preserved ginger from the kitchen as a girl and blamed it on the cat. I had not known there had been a cat. I had not known she had been the kind of child who stole things and blamed them on animals.

I found myself laughing at the thought it.

Luan Mei looked at me while I was still laughing and said, simply, “She wrote letters about you.”

I asked what she said.

“That you were the difficult one,” Luan Mei said. “Though she meant it as a compliment.”

I believed that.

The integration work moved quickly. Luan Mei and a younger healer named Luan Shen took the clinic rotation alongside Liu Jun, which freed Suyin for the school preparation work she had been wanting to spend more time on. The three farming cousins joined the labor rotation immediately and one of them, a quiet man named Luan Guo, improved the eastern field drainage within a week by redirecting two irrigation lines.

Luan Fen the carpenter had already begun on the classroom building before the stonemasons arrived. I had given him the dimensions and the load requirements and he had looked at the plan for no more than five minutes before he memorized the layout.

With the influx of skilled workers, I was able to work more on the curriculum layout.

The cultivation hall on the northern flat was accessible from zone one, with capacity for thirty students in group sessions.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

The classroom at the gate end of the training ground, listed in the construction plan submitted to Administrator Wen’s office as a supply manifest reading room for military practitioners, was what I had been looking forward to the most.

The spirit stone stayed under the floorboards. I was not ready to explain it yet and the construction timeline didn’t require it.

Three weeks into the build, Hao found me at the river when the sun was setting by the river.

He sat next to me on the bank while I kept running the channel work I’d been doing, the slow circulation that traced the ambient signature, feeling the river’s field the way you felt weather coming before you saw it. My mind was adrift attempting to categorize what my current strength level was. Would this be considered Qi Refining? It was hard for me to tell, especially since I had refined my Qi flow through my Mai, but I hadn’t pulled ambient Qi into my Dantian yet, if I even knew how to feel for it.

Hao waited until was done with my rumination before asking, “What are we going to call it?”

“The school?”

“It needs a name,” He picked up a stone and turned it in his hand.

“We’re not naming it after ourselves,” I said to him pointedly.

“I wasn’t going to suggest that.” He threw the stone and it skipped four times.

I looked at the river. At the fork where the two currents met and moved together south. The geography that had given the village its name and given the village’s people their best training ground as well.