Chapter Seven A Testament to Why They should’ve Used Less-Confusing Terms in Metaphysics

CHAPTER SEVEN

A TESTAMENT TO WHY THEY SHOULD’VE USED LESS-CONFUSING TERMS IN METAPHYSICS

Wood boosts speed. Fire boosts strength. Earth boosts firmness. Metal boosts sharpness. Water boosts fluidity.

Sitting cross-legged on my bed as if I’m meditating, I mentally repeat the list of internal boosts the five types of qì can confer on spirit metal. I recall from Sima Yi’s piloting lessons—with a bitter taste in my mouth about ever trusting him—that each type of spirit metal differs in whether it’s better at channeling external manifestations or internal boosts. In the Fire-type Vermilion Bird, it was all about external manifestations. It was good at blasting Fire qì in powerful bursts, Wood qì like crackling lightning, or Metal qì like zapping lasers. Now I must adjust to the other end of the spectrum, where Earth-type spirit metal can’t manifest qì externally at all. Even Qin Zheng’s freezing power requires contact to work, despite the legends saying he could freeze whole herds of Hunduns at once. The coldness that exudes from him is just the surrounding air dropping in temperature, the way it would around a block of ice. However, if he were to put on the Vermilion Bird armor, he could indeed unleash his Water qì in a chilling black wave that freezes on a mass scale. Which would be pretty ironic when the armor is called a Fire type. Sometimes these metaphorical names get very confusing. Honestly, can Qin Zheng blame us for offloading the thinking onto drab old men who eagerly study metaphysics for years? The five types of qì can have twenty-five unique interactions with the five types of spirit metal, and exponentially more when multiple types of qì are involved. Give me a break.

…Except if I can’t drill this into my head and match Qin Zheng in piloting skill, I’ll always be at his mercy.

Ugh.

Eyes closed, I concentrate on trying to channel my dominant Metal qì out from my spine.

Metal boosts sharpness.

Theoretically, it’ll let me etch fine details into my armor, such as clean splits down the arms, legs, and torso so I can take the pieces on and off. My inability to make the armor budge is causing serious problems. I had to get creative to use the bathroom, and the jutting shoulder guards are preventing me from sleeping on my side.

The mild coolness of Metal qì flows through the network of meridians in my body, yet it’s like there’s a clog where my spine meets my armor. I can passively feel the armor pieces as if through a sixth sense, but the sensation is dull, and I can’t move them. My only progress has been figuring out I can attach the strings veiling my lower face to the sides of my mask near my ears so I can eat in peace.

Fire boosts strength. Fire boosts strength. Fire boosts strength.

A second circuit of my meridians floods with heat. The interlacing of Fire and Metal makes me hot and cold at once. I keep it up because Fire qì is more conductive than Metal qì, and therefore has a better chance at channeling into my armor. I sustain the surge until it feels like I’m in battle, my jaw gritting to the point of trembling, sweat beading on my forehead. I try conducting my qì at the highest spirit pressure I can manage. I try slowing it down, like rain soaking through earth. I try pulsing it like the blood in my arteries. I try summoning a third type of qì, Water or Wood.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

I collapse against the headboard with an indignant howl.

If only the Iron Widows were never wiped out and suppressed. What I would do for a competent female mentor like General Mi…

Would it be possible to build a new generation of female pilots commanding their own Chryalises? The current most powerful female pilots like Qieluo and Wei Zifu are all locked in Balanced Matches. Splitting them from their partners would doom more concubine-pilots, something I’m not willing to suggest. Finding new candidates would require making the army do a sweep for girls with high spirit pressures, something they haven’t taken seriously, since girls aren’t conscripted like boys are. When a mobile testing team came to my village when I was fourteen, they only made vague estimates for us girls, while the boys got full rounds of tests.

But if they do a proper sweep, the girls will surely be urged to join the war—the last thing I want to think about right now.

I’m lost in a fantasy of how different my life would be if I lived in Qin Zheng’s era when a knock raps on the door. It’s familiar by now, after so many meal deliveries.

“Come in,” I call out.

Wan’er elbows through the door, hauling a sack of books I asked her to get. I peek at the new guards outside. If the books prove useful, they just might help me overpower those guards if I need to.

“My lady, here’s a good selection of texts on qì, spirit metal, and Chrysalises.” Wan’er drops the sack on my bed, breathing hard, and wipes her forehead. “Please forgive me for taking so long. I got held up by Secretary Gao when coming back into the palace.”

Every ligament in my body goes rigid. “Secretary Gao?”

“Yes, my lady. He wanted to inspect the books. He urges you to be cautious with what’s brought in from the outside, though he suggests you start with this tome…” Wan’er digs through the sack and hands me a thick book with a worn cover.

I take it, heart pounding. Yizhi wouldn’t have rifled through this book for no reason. A musty, smoky scent blooms in the air as I flip through its yellowed pages. I don’t know what I’m looking for until I spot it—a tiny slip of paper with a line of handwritten text.

Tomorrow noon, estate temple .

Letting no reaction show on my face, I snatch the paper and hide it beneath my covers under the guise of adjusting them. Yizhi has to mean his family’s ancestral shrine, though I’m not sure where it is in the estate. Asking Wan’er at this very moment would be too suspicious. I snap the book closed and pretend to consider its title, printed in a white box on its plain blue cover. I can’t read half the characters in it.

“If I may, my lady, I agree with Secretary Gao’s suggestion,” Wan’er says. “Master Yan is a must-read.”

“Is that so?” I say distractedly. “Who’s Master Yan?”

“Oh, the philosopher Zou Yan of the pre-unification era. That’s his Theoretical Foundations of Metaphysics . Some of the ideas in it are outdated, but as a starting point, it has no equal.”

My thoughts snap away from Yizhi and temples. “You’ve read this yourself?”

Blushing, she lowers her head. “Yes, my lady. I checked out that same copy from the Chang’an Public Library ten years ago.”

“You read this at fourteen ?” I leaf through the book again. It’s full of complex characters never reached in my rudimentary reading lessons from Yizhi. “How? Who taught you?”

“It was my mother, my lady.”

My attention drops to her unbound feet, steady in embroidered slippers. I had the impression that only women from pompous families have the opportunities to be educated at a scholarly level, and those women almost always have bound feet, or they’d get shunned in marriage negotiations with other pompous families. So how did Wan’er end up as an unbound servant?

“How did your mother learn?” I keep questioning.

Wan’er nibbles her lip. “My grandfather was once a Sage, my lady. But then he…got caught up in political turmoil. It happened when I was a baby.”

“A Sage?” I sit straighter.

Now things make sense. A disgraced family would see no point in binding their daughter’s feet when they’ll never have any good marital prospects again.

“Grandfather gave a lot of support to worker unions, so the big corporations lobbied for the other Sages to take him down on bogus charges,” Wan’er says with a distant look in her eyes. Then she gives a start. “Not that I’m asking for a pardon!” She waves her hands. “I mean, I submitted an appeal to His Majesty, but I’m not trying to nudge you into supporting it or anything, my lady.”

“I could, if you want. I can’t promise he’ll listen, but I could try. What’s your grandfather’s name?”

“Please, don’t.” She puts her hands together. “I don’t want to jump the line because I happen to be your servant. I’m hoping this new government will move away from only doing things for people with connections. That’s what my grandfather would truly want.”

“All right, if you’re sure. He sounds like one of the good ones, though.”

“So I’ve heard.” Wan’er’s gaze drifts up.

Some believe the most enlightened among us ascend to the Heavenly Court once they die. On the slim chance that’s true, I hope her grandfather’s spirit can help Shimin in some way.

I tap the book thoughtfully, then hold it out to her. “Could I hear you read the first page of this out loud?”

“Oh, of course, my lady.”

She takes the book and passes the test with astonishing grace, narrating the complicated passages as fluidly as a scholar-bureaucrat.

When she finishes, I gulp through a tender knot in my throat. “Your mother taught you well.”

“She’s read to me since I was very little.” Wan’er returns the book and folds her hands in front of her blue pleated skirt. “Even though our family fell into its…situation, she raised me to love books as much as she does, everything from romances to epics to philosophy.”

Lucky .

I weigh my options. Getting closer to her comes with risks, but my own shoddy reading skills won’t get me anywhere with these books. I can’t turn down the benefit of learning from someone with deep political knowledge, which I’ll need to challenge Qin Zheng’s power.

“Will you teach me, too?” I ask.

Her eyes spring wide. “Would that be allowed, my lady?”

“ Allowed? ” I snap, deliberately harsh. For her own safety, I can’t get overly friendly with her. Qin Zheng will use her against me the moment he senses my heart softening. “I’m to be the Empress of Huaxia. What I do is at my own discretion. Bring that chair over and sit down.”

Wan’er hurries to do so, apologizing when the chair briefly scrapes the floorboards.

“We’ll read this entire book together,” I say, opening it between us.

She takes a steadying breath and starts again from the beginning. Her finger glides across the text while she narrates it slowly. I follow every character she sounds out, mentally correcting my assumptions about their pronunciations. When I hum in confusion at a sentence, she explains it in her own words.

The introductory chapter explains the theory that the universe created itself out of primordial chaos—the hùndùn —by organizing into cycles of yīn and yáng, dialectical forces that give sense to the world. Without up, there is no down. Without summer, there is no winter. Without day, there is no night, and so on. Turns out this Zou Yan is the one to blame for popularizing the concept of the wǔxíng , from which the types of qì and spirit metal get their confusing names. Referencing five key substances in nature, he attempted to identify five distinct kinds of forces that arise from interactions between yīn and yáng. The flourishing force of Wood, the destructive force of Fire, the steadying force of Earth, the honing force of Metal, and the tempering force of Water.

As Wan’er’s lesson goes on, a muted rage grows inside me. How much more would she know if her family hadn’t been ousted from grace, if she’d had more teachers than her mother alone?

“I bet you could be a scholar-bureaucrat if they let you take the civil service exams,” I mutter during a lull between sections. It’s absurd that she’s so smart, yet she’s stuck being a servant.

Wan’er gives a frail smile. “I’m honored to simply serve you, my lady.”

“Are you? If I changed the policies so women can take the exams, wouldn’t you go for it?”

“You could really do that?”

Such bright hope lights up on her face that I flinch. “I…I mean, I could try.”

When her expression wilts, I say, in a firmer tone, “I will do whatever I can to improve things for women. I didn’t fight my way into this position just to let things stay the same.”

“I hope so, my lady.” Wan’er tames her reaction this time, but I don’t miss the visible effort it takes for her to keep her mouth from curling at the corners.

The mood feels right for me to casually ask the question searing at the back of my mind. “By the way, there’s a temple in this estate, right?”

“Yes, near the northern perimeter, I believe. Why do you ask, my lady?”

“Oh, I just think whatever’s ahead for Huaxia, it’ll be a rough road. I want to ask for a blessing from the gods.”

Obviously, I don’t use the same excuse with Qin Zheng.

“At least let me send off my old partner before we get married,” I say when I get him to visit me the next morning. “He’s haunting me. Let me go burn some incense for him. I can’t stop thinking about what the gods have done to…”

I’m not even lying. Every night, I’ve gotten dragged through dreams of mangled flesh and broken bones.

To my surprise, Qin Zheng doesn’t push back on letting me leave the bedchamber for this.

“Fine,” he says, looking distracted. “But General Dugu must accompany you, and she must bring you back promptly. No detours.”

Something’s not right. His skin is almost translucently pale, and the under-eye circle visible on the unmasked side of his face is dark as a bruise. He doesn’t make any snide comments when I grudgingly admit I’m having trouble taking off my armor. I wish I could’ve held out longer, but my feet are encased in its boots, and they might fester if I don’t change the bandages soon. My pride is not worth blood poisoning.

I expected Qin Zheng to make me beg, but he touches his gauntlet to my armor without delay and mentally carves out seams that’ll let me take the pieces on and off like magnets. He seems so unwell, I start wondering if freezing himself for over two centuries has had some side effects.

“So what actually happened to your face?” I ask, recalling something going wrong with it as he woke up, which led to him donning that mask.

“Ah. Turns out I had a minor stroke while I was thawing,” he grumbles. “Explains why my mind felt so foggy for those initial hours.”

“You had a stroke ?” I exclaim, more alarmed than I want to be. I may be plotting his demise, but having it happen before I’m ready would create a whole lot of new problems. I don’t know if I should be cheering for or against his health.

He shrugs. “The complications have largely passed. I’ve taken a liking to this mask, however. The cameras of this future are too powerful. They capture everything ,” he says, with a hint of horror.

I think of the grainy black-and-white photos and footage I’ve seen of him, in which I never noticed any scars. Going from being perceived as a fuzzy, blurred figure to being broadcast in full-color high-definition must’ve been quite the shock.

“Are you camera shy?” I mock him just a little. “You could get a makeup artist to put some foundation and concealer on you so you look less…pallid.”

Shooting me a glare, he touches my mask. The veil strings I pinned near my ears drop back over my lower face. “Keep this down when you go outside.”

I don’t bother protesting. This is a minuscule price to pay to see Yizhi.

“Seriously, when was the last time you slept?” I question. “Shouldn’t you be resting more after having a stroke ?”

“I’ve done enough sleeping.” He huffs, eyes closed and fingers on his brow. Then he leaves without further dallying.

It’s the first time he came by this room without insulting or threatening me.

Huh. So there is such a thing as being too busy to be an asshole.