"Yes," Ethan said. "I think they existed."
Professor Lin looked at him. He had put down his tea but hadn't moved — the kind of stillness that meant he was listening with more than his ears.
"Not the way mythology describes them," Ethan continued. "Not immortal. Not supernatural in any meaningful sense. Just — people who got further than most people got." He paused, choosing the words carefully. "The old texts describe what the end of the path looked like from the outside. Someone who had gone very far, doing things that made other people afraid of them, or in awe of them. And then over time, the story of what they *did* became the story of what they *were.* The mythology wasn't a lie. It was a translation that lost something in the process."
Marcus was very still on his side of the table.
"So the immortals," Professor Lin said, "were just people."
"Very strong people. Possibly the strongest humans who ever lived. But people."
"And therefore?"
"And therefore they're gone," Ethan said. "Everything that lives ends. If they were human — even human at a level we don't fully understand — they're long dead. The mythology outlasted them."
A silence. The koi moved in the pond outside. Somewhere in the courtyard, a leaf detached and fell.
Professor Lin smiled — a quiet, complete smile, the kind that came from recognition rather than surprise.
"That," he said, "is more or less what I believe." He stood, unhurried, and went to the bookshelf along the far wall. "Which is why what I'm about to give you matters."
---
He came back with a sheaf of papers.
Not ancient — ordinary office paper, handwritten in the professor's precise, slightly compressed script, covered on both sides. He set them on the table in front of Ethan and stood back.
"The photograph," he said. "The bamboo slips on the stone table. I'm the one who translated them."
Ethan looked at the pages. Then at the professor.
"How many?"
"Enough." Professor Lin glanced at Marcus. "I'll tell you what I told Ethan when I first gave him the earlier pages: if your *cai qi* practice isn't solid, don't read past the first section. The later material assumes a foundation that takes years to build. Without it, attempting the techniques will cause serious damage. I am not being dramatic when I say this."
Marcus picked up the sheaf, looked at the first page, and set it back down with the careful expression of someone respecting a fence they can't see the other side of. "How serious?"
"The kind that doesn't fully heal," the professor said.
Marcus nodded slowly. He didn't pick it up again.
Ethan turned the first page. The handwriting was the same style as the pages he'd been reading for the past weeks — the earlier translation, the preliminary material. This was continuation. The next section.
"The bamboo slips," he said. "Where were they?"
"An excavation. Pre-Qin tomb, roughly twenty-four hundred years old." The professor sat back down. "I was part of the team that found them. I was younger. I thought the danger was in the excavation — the instability of the site, the usual risks." He shook his head. "The danger came afterward."
---
The room had gone quiet in a particular way.
"Several organizations had been tracking this tomb for years," Professor Lin said. "Some of them had academic interests. Most of them didn't. When it became clear what was in it—" He stopped. Considered. "The slips were extraordinary. The bamboo itself shouldn't have survived. It was a species that doesn't exist anymore — or didn't, until New Star's surveying teams started finding things in places where they shouldn't be, which is a separate matter." He moved on. "We got the slips out intact. And then the people who wanted them found out we had them."
Marcus leaned forward. "What happened?"
Professor Lin set down his cup and reached for the collar of his shirt. He undid the top two buttons, matter-of-factly, and pulled the fabric aside.
The scars were at the left side of his chest — two of them, fist-sized each, slightly sunken, the skin puckered in the specific way of damage that had been severe enough to change the underlying architecture. One of them was slightly higher. The other was a few centimeters below his ribs.
He covered them again and buttoned his shirt.
"The higher one is from a hand," he said. "A fist, to be precise. A practitioner who had gone significantly further along the old path than most people manage. The lower one is from a weapon — modern, high-caliber." He picked up his tea. "The bamboo slips were worth both of those, to the people who wanted them. I survived because the team moved faster than the attackers expected. The slips did not stay with me."
A long silence.
"The translation did," Ethan said.
"The translation was already in my head." The professor glanced at him. "I spent three years verifying it before I wrote any of it down. By then, the organizations that had the slips had no particular reason to believe I'd retained anything useful."
Marcus said nothing. He was looking at the papers on the table.
"The technique in those later pages," Professor Lin said to Ethan, "is unlike anything in the program's curriculum. The program's materials were genuine — authentic fragments from reliable sources. But they were fragments. This is a complete lineage. A complete root method, from foundation to—" He paused. "As far as I can verify, from foundation to what the text calls the Inner Landscape."
Ethan looked up.
"*Nei jing di,*" the professor said quietly. "The Yellow Court Inner Landscape. The texts describe it as a meditative state beyond ordinary cultivation — a threshold, not a destination. What's on the other side of the threshold, they're less clear about." He looked at his hands. "I suspect that's because the person describing it had no vocabulary for what they found."
---
Marcus broke the silence with the question he'd been building toward for ten minutes.
"All the good material," he said. "The rare texts, the authentic lineages, the things that actually lead somewhere — where is it now?"
"New Star," Professor Lin said. "Mostly. The financiers spent decades and considerable resources acquiring everything they could find on Old Earth. Tomb excavations, private collections, monastery archives, folk lineages. They were thorough." He looked at his cup. "If Ethan wants to continue on this path beyond what I've given him, he'll need to get there. The material that would take him further is not on this planet."
"So he needs New Star to study the old arts," Marcus said flatly, "because New Star took the old arts."
"That is an accurate summary."
Marcus made a sound that was not quite a word. Then: "And what's New Star's use for all of it, if they've decided the old path is obsolete?"
"That," the professor said, "is the second question."
He set down his cup. He looked at neither of them in particular — looked instead in the direction of the window, the dark courtyard, the night beyond.
"The old arts have been studied not just as practice but as material," he said. "Several biological research institutes have analyzed certain techniques and compounds and applied the findings to life-extension work. Some of that research has produced results. Measurable results. So the old arts have practical value even to organizations that have stopped believing in the path itself." He paused. "But that's not what I mean by the second question."
"Then what do you mean?" Ethan asked.
Professor Lin was quiet for a moment.
"Twenty years ago," he said, "there was no *anshen* tree on New Star. That's a plant — small, white-barked, its leaves have a faint scent and a documented effect on mental clarity and cellular aging. It's extremely rare. Extremely expensive. We've been using derivatives of it in the program's food supplements for the past three years." He looked at Ethan. "You've been eating it."
"I know."
"Twenty years ago, it didn't exist on New Star. The planet had been surveyed. Thoroughly. It wasn't there." He paused. "Then it appeared. Not cultivated — discovered, in a region that was supposedly uninhabited wilderness. Along with several other species that had no known origin and no evolutionary relationship to anything in New Star's biosphere." He was very careful with his next words. "Species that have some relationship to things described in certain pre-Qin texts. Things that were apparently native to a location that the texts describe in ways that don't correspond to any known geography."
The room was very quiet.
"You think they found something," Marcus said slowly. "Not a path. A *place.*"
"I think they may have found another world," Professor Lin said. "Or found a way to access one. I have no evidence. I have inference from a set of facts that don't fit together in any other way." He paused. "The supernatural phenomena on New Star — the documented incidents that have no framework — I believe they may be coming *from* somewhere. Leaking through, in some fashion. And the reason the old arts were abandoned is not that they don't work. It's that the people running the program decided there was a faster way to reach whatever's on the other side of that particular door."
Marcus sat back in his chair. He had the expression of someone who had stopped finding things surprising and had started simply trying to keep up.
"If that's true," Ethan said quietly, "then the rare species — the *anshen* trees, the compounds — they're coming from there. Through whatever connection exists."
"That would follow," the professor said.
"And if the old arts help someone reach that place independently—"
"Then the old arts become very interesting again," the professor said, "to certain parties. Which is one of several reasons I'd recommend a degree of discretion about your continued practice." He looked at Ethan directly. "The slips weren't taken quietly. I am not the only person who knows a translation exists. I am probably the only person who knows *where* the translation is."
Ethan folded the papers and put them in his jacket.
---
They stayed another hour.
Professor Lin made more tea and didn't push. Marcus asked careful questions and received careful answers. Somewhere in the middle of it, the professor retrieved the photo album and turned it to the first page — the woman, the painter, the singer, the one he'd been carrying a photograph of since he was eighteen — and he looked at it with the expression of someone making a decision.
"There are people I haven't spoken to in a long time," he said. Not to either of them. More to himself, or to the woman in the photograph. "People who are in positions to do things I can't do from Old Earth."
Neither Ethan nor Marcus said anything.
"I'll see," the professor said. And closed the album.
---
*They walked back across the empty campus in the dark, the papers inside Ethan's jacket, the air cold and still.*
*"Another planet," Marcus said.*
*"He said he wasn't sure."*
*"He was sure enough." Marcus walked in silence for a moment. "You know what that means. If he's right. If there's a place where— if the phenomena are coming from somewhere real, and the old arts are one of the routes that can reach it—"*
*"I know," Ethan said.*
*"You've been on the right road the whole time," Marcus said. "They just couldn't see the destination from where they were standing."*
*Ethan said nothing. He put his hand against the outside of his jacket, feeling the slight weight of the folded pages.*
*He was already thinking about what came next.*