The Broken Knife

Apparently, Gaoda and Raff were bored enough that they decided to go hunting, leaving Chi Yincang to protect Lianhua in the den. They were supposed to return sometime before dinner, but in the meantime, Kaz and Lianhua had some relatively private time during which to speak.

“You were right. The stairs were all so close together that it was a simple matter to hire a local kobold to show us the way.” Lianhua told him, settling back on a fluffy thing she called a ‘pillow’ as she sipped tea from a small, fragile cup. “The Stoneborn controlled the first six, and then the rest belonged to the Copperstrikers.”

Kaz shook his head. “By tradition, the stairs don’t belong to anyone. The tribes control the levels at the top and bottom, but the stairs themselves are a sort of neutral zone. So long as someone remains on the steps, they’re not supposed to be attacked or prevented from going up or down.”

Lianhua’s eyes brightened, and she pulled a little book from the pouch at her waist. A tubular thing dangled from it by a strip of cloth, and she tapped this to her tongue before touching it to the page. A dark line trailed the tip, creating runes, and Kaz leaned forward in fascination.

When she was done writing, the human looked up, noticing Kaz’s interest. She held up the tube with a smile. “This is a ‘pen’. It holds ink inside, and lets it out slowly. It’s less messy than chalk, and easier than using a burned stick. It lasts a lot longer, too.”

Kaz nodded. “We make something similar using boiled beetle shells, though Oda never taught me the recipe. She taught Katri to write using a hollow reed dipped into it, but I’ve only ever used chalk.”

“Oh! Of course. I saw Katri’s book.” Lianhua tilted her head. “I asked Pilla if I could read hers, actually, but she said she didn’t have a book. She doesn’t even know how to read or write!”

“No one outside of the Deep knows how to read,” Kaz told her. “At least not that I know of. I think we only have the book because we rose recently. Once it breaks or is damaged, I doubt it will be replaced.”

Lianhua looked sad, her fingers lingering on her little book as she tucked it back into her pouch. “That’s too bad. A scholar’s job is to educate, so maybe someday I’ll come back here, and bring lots of books. I could open a school for kobolds!”

Kaz nearly laughed at her innocent enthusiasm. “You could try. I doubt anyone would attend.”

She looked crestfallen. “Why not? Reading is a delightful pastime, and you can learn so much without ever leaving your home.”

“Up here, every hand is needed,” Kaz said, trying to find a gentle way to dissuade her. “Males hunt, guard, and train. Females protect the den, and power the lights, cookfire, and a dozen other things that make everyone’s lives easier. Everyone is busy from the beginning of the day to the end, including the puppies, who do everything from fetching water to gathering plants. No one has time to read, and there’s nothing we need to learn that we aren’t taught from the time we’re born.”

“Maybe they’ll want to learn,” Lianhua insisted. “Like you!”

Kaz glanced away, sighing. “It wouldn’t matter if they did. The only reason I can even talk to you is because Katri allowed it. If Oda had sent me on my spirit hunt, I would have been a full-fledged warrior, and too useful to be spared. Katri would have sent another pup with you, and I don’t know any who are as foolish as I have always been.” He left unsaid that he now doubted his sister expected him to return, though he wasn’t sure why she had chosen to send him away.

Lianhua reached out and tapped his forehead, then glanced meaningfully at his belly, where his cracked core sat. “But you’re so smart. And…”

Kaz held up a hand, which caused the little dragon curled in his lap to hiss softly. “I’m a very strange kobold, then,” he said, and Lianhua huffed a frustrated little laugh.

“All right, all right. It’s not worth arguing about. I think Pilla might surprise you, though. I’m sure kobold tribes can be as different as human towns, depending on their leaders.”

He shrugged. “That’s true. Oda was a strict and ambitious chief. Everything we did was an attempt to return to our ‘rightful place’, or a desperate scramble to recover after one of those attempts failed. When I was young, I spoke to other gatherers, and even a few warriors from other tribes, and their chiefs were more lenient. The larger a tribe is, the more there is to do, but there are also more hands to do it. It always seemed that those kobolds were happier than the ones in my tribe. Perhaps their chiefs would be more willing to spare a few of their people in hopes that they would learn something useful.”

Lianhua leaned back on her pillow, smiling as she listened to him, and Kaz’s ears lowered slightly as the silence stretched after he finished speaking. At last, he asked, “Did I say something wrong?”

She shook her head. “It just seems like you’re more confident now. Before, you carefully weighed every word, as if deciding whether it was worth the risk of speaking. I don’t know what happened to you, but you’re safe now, and I like the result.”

Kaz ducked in embarrassment, but he looked back at their conversation and realized she was right. He had spoken more since they entered this hut than he had in the several days they traveled together before. Part of it was that there was no one else around, but part of it…

He looked down at the dragon in his lap. He could tell she was awake and listening, though her eyes were closed. Gently, he stroked her back. “It was quiet, in the tunnels,” he said, without looking up. “We were lost, and I wasn’t sure we’d ever find our way back. I started talking to Li, just to hear someone’s voice, even if it was my own. I think I talked more than I ever have to anyone, and it became a habit.”

Lianhua was solemn now, and she nodded. “I know I said it before, but I’m very glad you’re back, and I’m also happy to listen to whatever you have to say. Though… I doubt Gaoda would say the same.”

He chuckled. “I only spent a week in silence. It can’t wipe away the lessons taught by a lifetime.”

The human smiled, then looked around. Reaching into her pouch, she withdrew the cylinder of chalk and quickly sketched a rune on the ground between them. She murmured a word, and Kaz saw a dome of onyx light spring up, growing until it surrounded them completely. In his lap, Li perked up, opening her eyes and staring around.

Surprised, Kaz sent a picture of the dome as he saw it to the dragon, who responded with a similar image. In her vision, the ki was a pale gray, and seemed more like a diaphanous bubble than a solid shell, but she could see it.

When he looked at Lianhua again, she was examining them both with a bright, curious gaze. “I thought so,” she said with satisfaction. “You feel different to me. Your core is different, I think. Kaz, what happened to you?”

So Kaz told her as much as he dared. He left out the shattering of his core, but told her about his poor, weak channels, and the constant effort he had to maintain in order to keep them intact and his cycle flowing, though it had become second nature after several days. He also told her about the new node of power in his chest, though he didn’t tell her he could now constantly see the ki in and around him. She seemed to believe he could only sense it, like she could, and if that ability was as rare and precious as she claimed, he thought it best not to tell her he could do even more. He certainly didn’t tell her about his urge to eat Li’s core.

When he was done, Lianhua sat back, and her expression was a mixture of astonishment and pity. She shook her head. “I don’t know how you’re alive. Your ki exploding like that… A student kills themselves at my school that way, almost every year. It’s usually a first year, who gets so frustrated by their failure to advance that they try to force it, and destroy their channels in the process.

“Usually, advancement is a series of long, slow steps. It sounds like you’ve managed to open your middle dantian, and begin the body tempering process, but your channels couldn’t handle the increased flow. The only thing I can think of to do is continue forward. If you completely temper your body, your channels should be strengthened as well, allowing you to use the power you’ve accessed prematurely.”

Kaz leaned forward eagerly. “How do I do that?”

Lianhua sighed. “Honestly? I don’t know. I can show you what I’ve learned, but I’ve never been all that interested in body tempering. I would far rather spend my time solidifying my spiritual foundation, though I know I’ll need to temper more eventually. My family mostly uses spiritual pills to aid the process, so I’ve never worried about it too much. Gaoda and Chi Yincang would be far better teachers than me in this respect.”

Kaz’s gut churned at the very thought of asking either of the males for help. Gaoda would probably laugh in his face, and though Chi Yincang was more of an enigma, Kaz doubted the male would go out of his way to help.

Clearly, Lianhua understood this, because she smiled apologetically. “Still, you can start by meditating. Think about your dantians, and the cycle of ki flowing through your body. Imagine compressing them even further-”

He tilted his head. “Compressing?”

She looked startled. “Didn’t I tell you that? No, I guess I didn’t. We barely even got to talk about meditation before we were interrupted. Yes, the goal of every cultivator is to increase the amount of ki they can hold in their dantians.”

She broke off a piece of her chalk stick, rubbing it until it crumbled into pure white powder, heaped in the palm of her hand. Lifting it, she gave a little puff, and the powder blew into the air. “Ki is like this chalk. It’s everywhere, all the time, though some places have more, while others have less. A cultivator is simply someone who has the ability to pull it into their body and use it. No more, and no less.”

She drew a rune on her palm, murmured a word, and the powder swirled toward her like iron shavings to a lodestone. When all the chalk dust sat in a pile again, she curled her fingers around it, squeezing so tightly her knuckles grew white.

“Each cultivator is born with one or more dantians already open.” She tapped her fist to her forehead, then her chest, and finally her abdomen. “The ki they take in is stored there, and the amount they can hold determines their strength. The size of the dantian is unchanging, and though the others can be opened, they’ll never be as large as the ones we’re born with.”

She opened her hand, revealing the chalk, which was now a roughly triangular clump with creases and grooves where her fingers had pressed it together. “Through meditation, training, and the assistance of divine herbs and pills, we’re able to compress the ki so more can fit inside our dantians. There are some great sages who were born with mediocre capacity, but who have managed to master compression techniques until they far surpass those born with more.

“The more ki we can compress, the more powerful we become, until our bodies are so saturated with it that we are more ki than flesh. At this point, we are all but immortal, and eventually, we can choose to become divine, which is the goal of every cultivator.”

Kaz tilted his head. “Why?”

Lianhua, who had fallen into the strange way of speaking she had when she was teaching, almost jumped. “What do you mean, why?”

“Why would you want to be divine?” he asked. “Wouldn’t that mean you just became ki, and not yourself anymore?”

She blinked. “I… don’t know. But everyone wants to be a god.”

Kaz’s ears lowered. The only god kobolds believed in was the mountain itself, but Ogden often swore by the husede god, and he had explained the concept to Kaz. “Aren’t gods beings who are too powerful to care about this world any more? I don’t think I’d want to live like that.”

Lianhua opened and closed her mouth a few times before saying, “I’m not sure that we’re talking about the same thing, but I can see your point.” She looked very thoughtful, and her fingers twitched toward her pouch like she wanted to take something out of it, but she didn’t.

“Still, the point is that meditation may help you,” she said finally. “Compressing your ki is at the heart of every refinement technique, including body refinement. If nothing else, meditating will help you strengthen your image of reinforcing your channels, which is already-” She shook her head. “Frankly astonishing, in and of itself. I’ve never heard of anything like it.”

Kaz nodded thoughtfully. He hadn’t really tried meditating since that time, lying in the sticky water by the woshi’s pool. He’d been too busy just surviving, for one thing, but he also wasn’t convinced that it would help him much, since he couldn’t pull power from his surroundings, the way the humans did. Still, he certainly hadn’t tried ‘compression’ before, so it was worth the effort.

A knock sounded at the door, and Lianhua quickly swiped her dusty hand through the chalk rune on the stone between them. A wide streak of white obliterated it, and the black dome snapped out of existence, the ki that made it up swirling and vanishing into soft gray mist.

Chi Yincang opened the door a crack and said, “The young master has returned.”

Lianhua thanked him, and the male let the door close again.

Sighing, Lianhua stood. “I suppose we should find out what the mighty hunters brought back this time. Yesterday it was one of those lopo, though a much smaller one than the one that nearly killed me.”

She paused, her cheeks growing pink. “When we see them, don’t worry if I act a little… strange. It was hard to convince Gaoda to wait for you, so I told him I was still suffering from the aftereffects of the lopo’s poison, and I needed to rest before we entered the mid-levels.”

Kaz nodded, his tail wagging slightly. He had wondered how she convinced the others to wait, and he was happy that she thought enough of him to lie for his sake.

Lianhua smiled at him, then opened the door.