Elder Sun's study smelled of old paper and something medicinal that Chen Yi had identified as dried astragalus root kept in the bottom left drawer — Elder Sun used it for his joints on cold mornings and was apparently unaware that the smell permeated everything within six feet.
Chen Yi had been in this room twice before. Once to return a borrowed reference text. Once because Elder Sun had summoned him to discuss what he described as Chen Yi's habit of being places he hadn't been invited.
The second visit had been more productive than the first.
"The sect examination," Chen Yi said now, standing in the doorway because he'd knocked this time and Elder Sun had told him to come in and he'd come in exactly as far as seemed necessary. "How does the instrument work."
Elder Sun looked up from the scroll he was reading. He was a man who gave the impression of fragility — white-haired, hands that shook slightly in cold weather, robes that had been patched and re-patched until the patches outnumbered the original fabric — but his eyes were steady and sharp and he watched Chen Yi the way a man watches something he can't quite categorize.
"Good morning," Elder Sun said.
"Good morning. The instrument—"
"Sit down, boy."
Chen Yi sat. There was one chair across from Elder Sun's desk that visitors were apparently meant to use. It was slightly lower than Elder Sun's chair, which he had decided was deliberate. He sat in it anyway.
Elder Sun put down his scroll. "Why do you want to know how it works?"
"I'm trying to understand what it will find when it tests me."
"It will find no spirit root. The same as last time and the time before." Elder Sun's tone was not unkind. "Not every child has one. Most don't. That's simply—"
"I know that's what it's supposed to find," Chen Yi said. "I'm asking what it actually measures."
A pause.
Elder Sun studied him.
Chen Yi waited.
"The examination bead," Elder Sun said finally, "is a qi-reactive crystal. When a cultivator — or a child with latent cultivation potential — channels qi into it, the crystal resonates with the dominant elemental affinity in that qi and displays the corresponding color. The examiner reads the color."
"Dominant," Chen Yi said.
"The strongest affinity present."
"What if there is no dominant affinity."
Another pause. Longer.
"Then the bead doesn't react," Elder Sun said. "Which is what happens when a child has no cultivation potential."
"Or," Chen Yi said carefully, "when a child's cultivation potential is distributed equally across all elemental affinities simultaneously, resulting in no single dominant signal."
The study went very quiet.
Elder Sun's steady eyes had gone very still. He was not looking at Chen Yi the way people looked at children who said interesting things. He was looking at him the way people looked at things that weren't supposed to exist.
"That's not possible," Elder Sun said.
"I know. That's what the Compendium says. Third volume."
"You've read the third—" Elder Sun stopped. Started again. "The third volume is not available to—"
"You had it on the second shelf. I was returning the almanac. I had six minutes." Chen Yi pressed his thumb into his palm. "I read quickly."
Silence.
Outside, the morning went on without them. A rooster. The blacksmith's apprentice. The Widow Meng's dog, still convinced the world needed its opinion.
"Show me your hands," Elder Sun said.
Chen Yi held out his hands.
Elder Sun looked at them for a long moment. Not at the skin — at something under it. His eyes had the slightly unfocused quality of a cultivator using qi-sight, which Chen Yi had read about and had not yet learned to do and had been waiting for the right moment to ask someone to explain.
Elder Sun's hands, which usually shook, were very still.
"Three weeks," Chen Yi said. "Approximately."
"You'll kill yourself."
"I've modified the breathing sequence. The fourteen in the Compendium all forced a primary path to lead. I'm not doing that."
"You can't not do that. The human mind cannot hold three separate—"
"Mine can," Chen Yi said. "My memory doesn't discard information to make room for new information. It keeps everything simultaneously without conflict. The same mechanism that allows parallel path cultivation is the same mechanism that allows me to remember every word of a text I read for six minutes three months ago." He paused. "I'm not being arrogant. I've been checking my own progress for three weeks. No feedback loop. No dominant path. They're running alongside each other."
Elder Sun was quiet for a very long time.
Then he stood up. Went to the second shelf. Took down the third volume of the Heavenly Compendium.
He opened it to a page in the appendix that Chen Yi hadn't been able to reach in his six minutes.
Turned it around.
Set it on the desk between them.
The page described, in precise classical notation, a hypothetical cultivation method called The Unified Root. The author had marked it theoretical. Impossible in practice. The final notation read: requires a mind that does not forget, does not favor, and does not fear contradiction. In three thousand years of recorded cultivation history, no such mind has been documented.
Chen Yi read it.
Read it again.
"It's not theoretical," he said.
"No," Elder Sun said quietly. "It's not." He sat back down. His hands were shaking again. "The examination bead will show nothing."
"Yes."
"The examiner will reject you."
"Yes."
"And then what?"
Chen Yi closed the book carefully.
"Then I go home," he said. "And I keep going."
Elder Sun looked at him for a long moment.
"Why are you telling me this?" he asked.
It was the right question. Chen Yi had been sitting with the answer for the whole conversation, waiting to see if he needed to say it.
He did.
"Because I need someone to know," he said. "In case something goes wrong." He paused. "And because you're the only person in this village who would understand what I just told you and not try to stop me."
Another long silence.
"You're ten years old," Elder Sun said.
"Yes."
"This could kill you."
"I know."
"Your father—"
"Has two years," Chen Yi said. "Probably less now. I need six." He looked at his hands. "I've already decided."
The study held them both.
Outside, the day went on.
Elder Sun reached over and poured two cups of tea from the pot on his desk. Set one in front of Chen Yi.
He didn't say anything more.
Neither did Chen Yi.
They drank tea, and the third volume sat between them, and the morning light moved slowly across the study wall, and it was enough that one person knew.