"Hey, do you think the body keeps moving when you smash the head?"
"Why don't we test it."
THUD.
"OW! What the hell was that?"
"A stone — a stone hit my head!"
"Stones raining down, run—!"
"Aaa—!"
"How bothersome…"
The small child dropped from the branch with a huff, landing in the grass below. He had been on one of the middle branches of a great apple tree — a good branch, wide enough to lie across, shaded just right.
He had been having a perfectly decent nap until all that noise started.
He still had an apple in his hand. One of the smaller ones he hadn't thrown.
He took a bite and watched the older kids scatter down the path, rubbing their heads and looking at the sky with genuine suspicion, as though the heavens had personally pelted them.
"Whats the point of wasting energy on bullying a small snake anyway," he muttered to no one.
He tilted his head.
On the ground where the older kids had been standing, coiled and very still, was a small black snake. It had been seconds away from being crushed under a rock.
Its eyes were red. Deeply, clearly red, and bright with something that did not look like how snake eyes usually looked.
The child crouched down in the grass, dirt on his hands and probably on his face too, brown eyes wide and cheerful, and smiled.
"Hi buddy! Want some food?"
He held out a piece of the apple.
The little black snake regarded him.
This skinny poor human child who had been napping in a tree and thrown apples at people twice his size without any apparent concern for consequences. Who was now crouching in the dirt offering fruit to a snake that every person in every village from here to the mountains would call a bad omen and cross the road to avoid.
Curious…
Why would something like that save something like this.
The red eyes gleamed. Watching. Thinking.
***
"Disciple Ye Fen! Focus!"
My eyelids snap open the moment the master's voice cracks through the meditation chamber like a struck bell. This old geezer. Does he have to be so loud about it?
Snickering from around the room. The other disciples, heads still bent in perfect meditative posture, do not quite hiding their amusement.
Right.
I promised Xiao I would ascend with him. Which means studying. Which apparently means not falling asleep during the meditation class I specifically came to so I could study.
I rub my face and try to remember what I had been dreaming.
A black snake. Small , young, if I had to guess, coiled in the grass with those red eyes catching the light. Strange thing to dream about.
Dreams sometimes mean something, premonitions and signs and all of that, I know there are readers at the academy who interpret them, I could go find one, go through the whole process of explaining and waiting and—
Ah. So exhausting.
It was probably nothing.
The class disperses around me in the flowing, orderly way things at the academy always disperse — robes straight, postures correct, everyone moving with the grace of people who are very aware of being watched. From somewhere in the current of them I catch voices, carried over on the draft from the corridor.
"Who is that?"
"Hm? Oh — that's Ye Fen."
"I've never seen him before."
"That's because he never shows up."
"Then why is he here?"
"..."
The academy's halls swallow the rest of it. They are broad and high-ceilinged, the corridors lined with pillars of pale jade-veined stone that hum faintly with accumulated spiritual energy, centuries of cultivation absorbed into the walls themselves, so that the air here always carries that particular clean, slightly electric quality, like the moment before rain.
Light filters through latticework screens carved with heavenly motifs, casting shifting patterns across the polished floors.
The whole place was built to remind you, at all times, of what you are supposed to be reaching for:
The heavens…
I find it mildly oppressive, personally. But the acoustics are excellent for catching gossip.
Behind me I can hear the old master's sigh, long and weathered, the sigh of a man who has accepted something he cannot change.
I am already thinking about the meditation problem.
The class itself had been useless, or I had made it useless, which amounts to the same outcome. But the principle is sound enough.
Meditation is about listening. Turning inward, locating the hidden dimensions of one's own spiritual energy, learning to feel where it moves and where it catches.
And it is about focus, focusing the inner tranquility to truly sharpen one's senses in the outer world. Some say if you cultivate enough, and practice, you might even separate your soul from the heavenly body.
That sounds fun.
I just need somewhere quiet to actually do it.
I am still working through the options when I walk into someone.
Softer than the last collision, significantly. And shorter. A completely different experience from running face-first into Fan Yuan's solid muscular chest, which I am absolutely not still thinking about, and whatever warmth that memory produces is purely the indignation of a man whose bread was violated.
I shiver remembering the warm, wet sensation of his tongue on my finger…
Creepy pervert. Honestly that might be exactly why he got demoted. Desires and all — heaven frowns heavily on that sort of thing.
I look down.
A maid, crouched on the floor gathering the items that had scattered from her hands when I hit her, already apologising before I have said a single word.
"Ah — I'm sorry, let me—"
"N-no, disciple, please. It is my job as a maid."
"Nonsense." I crouch down beside her and lift one finger, letting the spiritual energy move through me into the scattered objects — a gentle, low-level levitation, nothing dramatic — and the items rise, settle, stack themselves back into her arms in a neat arrangement.
"There you go. The levitation should hold until you reach wherever you're headed."
She stares at the floating stack. Then at me. "But — such a feat should not be wasted on a maid's chores, disciple."
I tilt my head.
I genuinely do not follow the logic of that.
"Who cares," I say, and shrug. "What is the point of having these things if I can't use them to make things easier."
She goes slightly pink. Tiredness, probably — she looks like she has been carrying things for a while.
It is a simple thought but an honest one. I remember from the blurry memories of the past I had lived.
The weight of stacked wood on my back, the cold settling into the crops in winter, the exhaustion of people who work without stopping because there is no other option. I remember wishing, in a formless way, that things could be lighter for the villgers.
Maybe that was the reason why I wanted to learn levitation in the first place.
That and being able to float up to the high branches of the trees to nap.
So. They can be lighter now. Why wouldn't I?
Demons are locked away. Have been for centuries. What else am I supposed to use these abilities for — impressing people at trials?
"How can I repay your kindness?" she says, tucking a strand of hair back, eyes still wide.
Hm.
Actually.
"Do you know somewhere I can sneak in to meditate?" I lean down toward her with my best smile.
"Eh—!" She goes red immediately, nearly dropping everything again. "T-too close!"
I straighten up, blinking.
Did I do something wrong?