Chen Lao was not a man who asked direct questions about indirect things.
This was, Chen Yi had calculated, a deliberate communication strategy rather than an oversight. His father had spent twenty years as a village herbalist, which meant twenty years of asking people about ailments they were embarrassed to name. He had developed the particular skill of asking around a thing until the thing answered for itself.
Chen Yi had always found it easy to see. He found it less easy to be immune to it.
It was a Thursday morning, four days after the visit to Elder Sun, and Chen Yi had come back from the cave later than usual — the triple-path session had gone three hours instead of two, the streams running steadier than before, something like a groove forming where before there had been only effort — and he had come in through the back door to find his father already at the table, drinking tea, with two cups poured.
Chen Yi sat down.
His father said: "You've been going out early."
Not a question. Not an accusation. An observation offered to the air, waiting to see if Chen Yi would pick it up.
"Yes."
"The cave behind the east patch."
Chen Yi looked at his father.
"I found it when you were four," Chen Lao said mildly, "and decided not to tell you because you would have claimed it immediately and I liked going up there to think." He drank his tea. "You started using it about three weeks ago."
"You followed me."
"I followed myself. Went up to sit and found a ten-year-old had already gotten there." A pause. "I didn't go in."
Chen Yi turned this over. His father had known for three weeks and not said anything and was saying something now, which meant something had changed in his father's calculus. He ran the variables.
"You've noticed a change," he said.
"You're eating more. Moving differently — more deliberate with your hands, like you're aware of them. And your eyes—" Chen Lao stopped. Looked into his tea. "Your eyes look older than they did a month ago."
He said this the same way he'd said you're forty-three back to himself. Not cruel. Just true.
"I'm cultivating," Chen Yi said.
His father nodded once. The nod of a man who had already concluded this and was waiting for confirmation.
"The examination is in three weeks."
"It will find nothing. The way I'm cultivating—" Chen Yi paused. He had explained it to Elder Sun. He could explain it to his father. But Elder Sun was a former cultivator who understood the Compendium. His father was a herbalist who understood the body. The translation would need to be different.
"Imagine," Chen Yi said, "that instead of planting one crop in your field, you plant twelve simultaneously. Same soil. Same water. All twelve growing at exactly the same rate, none shading the others. An examiner comes along, looking for the field with the most of one crop."
"He'd find an even spread," his father said. "Wouldn't register as any one thing."
"Yes."
His father sat with this.
"Is it safe?" he asked.
The honest answer was: not definitively. The safer answer was: I believe so. The answer Chen Yi gave was: "I've been careful."
His father looked at him for a long time.
"For what," he said finally. Quietly. "What is it for, Yi."
Chen Yi had been prepared for many versions of this conversation. This version — simple, direct, tired — he hadn't prepared for.
"Your meridian," he said.
His father put down his tea.
"The technique that can fix it is called Meridian Renewal Cultivation. The herbs required are high grade — not available here. The qi manipulation required is at a level that takes most practitioners six to eight years to reach." Chen Yi pressed his thumb into his palm. Held it. "I need five. Maybe four."
The kitchen was very still.
Chen Lao's hands were on the table. Big hands. Brown at the knuckles. Not moving.
"Yi," he said.
"Don't say it's not necessary."
"I wasn't going to."
"Don't say I don't have to."
"I know better than to say that." His father's voice was quiet. Something in it Chen Yi couldn't name — not sadness exactly, not pride exactly. Something that existed between the two, or underneath both. "I was going to say — don't rush it."
"The timeline—"
"I know my timeline." A pause. "I've known my timeline for two years, Yi. Elder Sun told me."
Chen Yi stared at him.
"I told him not to tell you." His father almost smiled. "He apparently disagreed."
"He didn't—" Chen Yi stopped. Revised. He had asked Elder Sun about the technique to fix it. Elder Sun had given him the third volume page without much convincing. Elder Sun had looked at his hands with qi-sight without being asked. Elder Sun had poured two cups of tea.
Elder Sun had known for at least as long as Chen Yi had. Probably longer.
"He didn't tell me directly," Chen Yi said slowly.
"No. That's not his way." His father picked up his tea. "Don't rush it. A cracked foundation takes down everything built on top. Your cultivation, your method — whatever you're doing in that cave — do it right. Do it fully. Even if it takes longer than you planned." He looked at Chen Yi over the rim of the cup. "I'll wait."
Chen Yi didn't know what to say.
He almost said I calculate you have twenty-two months at current rate. He almost said I won't need you to wait long. He almost said several things that were true and none of which were what the moment needed.
He said: "Your left hand is getting better."
His father blinked.
"The grinding. Left-hand rhythm is improving. You've adapted by forty percent in four days."
A pause.
Then Chen Lao laughed — the real laugh, the rare one, that started in his chest and made his shoulders move.
"You are," he said, "the strangest child in this village."
"Elder Sun said that too."
"We're both right."
His father drank his tea. Chen Yi drank his. The morning came in through the window and lit the dried herbs on the shelf and the good bowl that had been set out again, and the kitchen smelled of chrysanthemum and astragalus and whatever wood his mother had used for the fire, and everything was ordinary, and Chen Yi filed it carefully, the way he filed things he didn't want to lose.