Chapter 27- Letters From Eight Directions

Dear Brother Zihao,

The soft breezes of late summer ruffle the tall grass and the Dustless Lotuses bloom in the cool waters of quiet ponds. The bees drinking the nectar have no idea that autumn’s chill is already in the air. I wish I didn’t, but since we got Senior Sister Lan’s emergency message, the whole of the Bamboo Medicine Hut is feeling the cold press of a blade at our back.

On behalf of all of us, thank you so much for everything you did for Sister Lan. She wrote in a hurry, but we could all tell she considers you and Daoist Hong the heroes of the disaster at the Copper Roof Inn. She also made a point, underlined, that what saved her life and her honor was practicing her one skillful thrust. Anyone who was starting to forget the lesson you demonstrated in the flesh of Technically-Senior-Brother-Ho has been running around between the practice fields like they were injected with chicken blood. The guards are getting a lot of extra income teaching lessons.

I’m practicing too. I don’t like it. It feels wrong, that a healing hand should kill. But I don’t think you like it either. It’s just necessary. So I remember your face, the desperation in your eyes as you tried to show us how hard we needed to train. How much pain we could accept and still live on.

I wanted to learn a rope dart art like you, but I was eventually persuaded to learn the spear. The guards swear by them, and I will admit that I like the danger happening on the other end of a long stick from me.

I’ve been burying myself in all the things you have sent me about the Art of Wind and Water. Since I broke through to Level Five, the Elders have given me special permission to spend less time on my normal chores and more time studying arrays. It’s been wonderful, but now I see natural arrays everywhere. I don’t know if that’s good or bad.

Daoist Lan also made very certain that the whole sect knows to look for anyone trying to exterminate villages, any sudden disappearance of children, and any stories about people trying to crown or welcome a new emperor. It sounds unbelievable, but she wasn’t joking and word is that Ancient Crane Mountain is starting to make some big moves inside the kingdom. Well, I expect you know more about that than I do.

It sounds like you are rushing back towards the Capital. Stop by our little place. The grass has grown long under the willow tree, and birds gather together to warm themselves against the coming cold.

Shu Xiaoling

Dear Junior Brother Tian,

It’s hot and dry and the wind scours the rocky sands like it hates each and every grain individually and collectively. I completely agree with the wind on this. The Redstone Wasteland continues to be a complete waste of space. I know perfectly well there is a whole ecosystem at work in here, and I don’t care. I want it to all fall directly into Hell. Once I am safely out of it, anyway.

Look, this is awkward, but thank you. Your letters have been something I look forward to, and I always wonder what mad thing you are going to send me next. I now have the oddest assortment of branches, interesting rocks, bits of glass, silk, leaves, egg shells, and now fishscales. It probably looks like litter to people who don’t know, but to a crafter, they are all puzzles. Each can be used in different applications, some well studied, others barely glanced at.

I keep busy.

Actually, I’m really damn busy.

They fitted me with my new prosthetic three weeks ago. It’s… well, it’s not great, but it exists and it works better than the old one, so that means that I can hold things AND work on them at the same time. Properly, I mean. So that makes it great. Naturally, I’m designing my own arm to replace it. There is the minor difficulty of not knowing how to do any of the things involved with making a functional prosthetic arm, but it’s another problem to keep my mind busy. My body is grinding blades and cutting cloth.

Things have been fairly quiet around Depot Four. Not completely peaceful, because this is the Wastes, but more quiet than not. We have been rearming, repairing and refitting. I’m not up to heavy work, but I can cast arrowheads and grind blades and make the ointment soaked bandages they are starting to use in the hospital. I can’t make hard armor yet, but I can soak linen in flexible glue and cut the pieces to make linen armor, and pass it off to another crafter to finish.

I’m not a waste. And my dao path isn’t broken. When I’m capable, you just write me. Whatever you need, I’ll make.

-Li

Dear Martial Nephew Zihao

I think you The view out my window is one of swaying pines and thriving fields. There is a babble of sweet water in a brook nearby, and at this point I’d quite like to see it. I’m sick to death of my room, and they are still leery of wheeling me outside the bounds of the hospital. Which I wish to Heaven I didn’t agree with.

I think you might be misunderstanding how “trade” is supposed to work. Good start with buying the Fifty Year Old White Eyebrow Tea. Makes sense, good price to resale value, promising start. Selling a tea experience is a totally valid value play, and I did say it was about trading for things that improve your cultivation, not maximizing returns. So, not how I would have done it, but reasonable.

Except “I find good people, invite them to a tea session, and our conversations inevitably result in my learning something interesting or useful” is not “trading.” It is, at best, emotional blackmail, but since I know you are genuinely just serving tea because you like someone without worrying about what they could give you, it doesn’t even reach that threshold. I am apoplectic that you are managing to then track down the things they talk about, accumulating a frankly bizarre inventory of tradable goods.

I’m not going to touch on you handing all the actual trading work to Niece Liren. Yes, merchants will aim to maximize their profits, but as I keep telling you, they can smell fear. You need to move with confidence, and that means practicing…

I ran the numbers. It offends every fiber of my being, but you are currently averaging an 800% return on investment per ounce of tea. Hang on to those Blue Goose feathers and the chest of Palgon dates. If you don’t sell them before you get this message, I want you to sell them to a sister of mine in West Town Convent. Ask for Sister Hsing.

Keep writing, your letters cheer me up even if they make me mad.

Auntie Wu

Dear Rat Bastard Tian

The scenery here in the Courtyard remains highly colorful. Very goddamn colorful. I try to make a beautiful background screen for Lil’ Mei and Sis’ Su, but damned if people don’t keep trying to drag me onto center stage. Do you have the faintest idea how many fights I have been in over the last four months? I, and I mean this seriously, I have done more fighting in four months at the Five Elements Courtyard than I did in four months on the red sands.

It is genuinely obscene, I use the word precisely, obscene, how many elegant young masters think they are somehow entitled to possess Lil’ Mei, and would ‘condescend’ to keeping Sis’ Su too. Possession being variously defined. We have been correcting their misunderstanding.

They send their fond regards, by the way. Mei and Su, I mean. Not the young masters. For some reason, your name has become a taboo amongst the younger generation here. But hey, “Heart Killing Sky” is a hell of a nickname.

Lil’ Mei has been cheerfully settling grudges, playing the kind of social games that make my head ache and would be entirely inexplicable to you. Sister Su just calls them out, and if they won’t duel, she follows them around and loudly reads essays, with footnotes, references, appendices and codicils, about their moral, physical, spiritual and hygienic failures.

She got a little printing machine, hand cranked. She’s gotten very fast at setting the type, and has started commissioning new blocks of characters in different handwriting for extra emphasis. Sis’ Su has all her little printing blocks organized, categorized and regimented better than a unit of Imperial Guardsmen. She prints fliers, and distributes them widely, even commissioning missions to other Immortal Grottos (which is what they call their subsidiary temples.) The fliers come with attached bibliographies and a table of citations, as well as lists of women whom the young masters have failed to satisfy. She usually includes the ‘gentlemen’s’ mothers, but notes that the disappointment is merely inferred based on the totality of evidence.

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