My Sect Is Down to Seven People

Chapter 4: The Spirit Root Ledger Column

Qian Duoduo squatted on the steps below the Mourning Hall folding paper money, one sheet, then pressing each fold flat, using his palm when pressing wasn't enough. A Sui copied him, but every corner on hers came up curled. A He pulled a sheet from her hands and said if they burned it like that, the dead wouldn't recognize it as money. The two bickered on the same stone, their voices kept low—so low it was somehow louder than usual.

Xu Yan came around the east end of the Main Hall. The coffin sat there, fresh lacquer not yet set, the tung oil smell pressing down on the medicine smell, unable to cover it. Half a length of white cloth was draped over the coffin head, its corner hanging down to the brick floor.

From the Mountain Gate came the sound of a broom, stroke after stroke, never once breaking rhythm.

"Steward Xu." Qian Duoduo dropped the paper money and stood, one knee popping. "Coffin seven taels, burial clothes eight qian, incense, candles, and paper money two qian. Eight taels, not a single copper off."

He then counted through it again on his fingers, counted a third time before finally lowering his hand.

Xu Yan nodded and went back to the Accounts Room. He spread the ledger on the desk, flipped to the page for the Dragon hour of the 2nd, and found the half-line of blank space he'd left himself. That half-line was his doing: eight taels of silver out, the exact figure left blank for Qian Duoduo to fill in on his return. He dipped the brush in ink and wrote each figure in: coffin seven taels, burial clothes eight qian, paper money and incense two qian, total eight taels. Out of twelve taels, four remained, matching up with the first half-line. He drew a horizontal line beneath the character "Total"—drew it straight.

Qian Duoduo followed him to the door and wiped his hands twice on his apron. "Steward Xu, should I still cook the morning porridge?"

"Yes," Xu Yan said. "But no need to set aside a bowl for the Old Sect Master."

Qian Duoduo stood there blank, only responding after a pause, his voice a little thick. "Oh." He took two steps back, then turned again. "Senior Sister finished her midday bowl. The kitchen's keeping hers warm for tonight."

"Keep it."

"I only bought two qian of paper money," Qian Duoduo added. "Sprinkling from the Mountain Gate all the way to the Back Mountain tomorrow morning—will that be enough?"

"Enough. Stop when you reach the East Slope. Don't scatter it into anyone else's fields."

Outside, Qian Duoduo swatted each of the two bickering children on the back of the head. The courtyard got quieter.

The door to the Accounts Room was nudged by a wine gourd.

Cheng Banshan came in, one sleeve empty, his other hand setting the gourd on the corner of the desk. He glanced at the ledger. "Filled it in?"

"Filled it in."

"The kid counted three times," Cheng Banshan said. "Even more carefully than you do."

"Careful is good." Xu Yan set the brush into the brush rest.

Cheng Banshan didn't leave. He looked at the stack of old ledgers on the cabinet, then at the thin account book by Xu Yan's hand. Its edges were neater than the others, sitting on top of the old ledgers.

"You took it out again."

"Just leafing through."

"Find anything?"

Xu Yan paused. "Not yet."

Cheng Banshan reached over and pulled the thin account book to himself, flipped through it with two fingers, page by page, and stopped in the middle. Xu Yan watched his eyes—they followed the paper downward, and everywhere they went was blank.

"When I was young, I pressed a wet cloth over it all night," Cheng Banshan said, closing the book and pushing it back. "Wouldn't flatten out, and not a single character appeared. The old men on the mountain said it was the Founder's ledger."

"The Founder's ledger. No one can open it?"

"Can't open it." Cheng Banshan picked up his gourd, tilted his head back for a drink, his Adam's apple bobbing twice. "The Old Sect Master tried. For twenty years. Every time he finished, he'd sit right here, sit for a long while. I asked him what he was looking at. He said he was checking the balance."

He let out a short laugh, breath carrying the smell of wine.

"Where in that book would there be a balance." He knocked the gourd against the desk corner. "The numbers in the ledgers—you'd do better trusting your own memory than those. The accounts on this mountain, I watched the Old Sect Master write them, stroke by stroke, until they became what they are."

Xu Yan said nothing. The thin account book had been pushed back to his hand, closed. The middle page Cheng Banshan had flipped to was white as paper that had never known a brush.

Cheng Banshan walked to the door and stopped. "There's still a batch of medicine warming on the stove in the Medicine Hall. A waste to pour out, but nobody's left to drink it."

Xu Yan looked at the desk corner.

"Leave it." Cheng Banshan hung the gourd back on his belt and went down the stone steps, his footsteps carrying all the way to the far end of the Front Courtyard.

The courtyard fell quiet. From the East Courtyard came a single sound: a sword sheath tapping stone, unhurried. After that, a long silence before the next tap.

Xu Yan shut the door and pushed the stack of old ledgers aside. The thin account book was the same size as the others, but its paper was yellower, the edges worn glossy from handling. He set it alone on the desk and blew once. Dust rose from between the pages and scattered into the light.

He started flipping through.

The first page held the two lines from the night of the 1st. Further on, one page stood alone with Jiang Wan's name on it; everywhere else was blank. He turned page after page, past thirty-some empty sheets, and then the paper's rough edges weren't trimmed even—newly cut, it seemed. He pinched a corner and lifted, and the next page was blank too. Eventually he lost count, so he flipped from back to front instead. The last page was blank. Turned it over—there was another blank beneath it.

He closed the account book and ran his hand along the spine, thin enough to grip in one fist. Opened it again. Only those same few lines of writing, the rest still blank.

He turned instead to the front of the old ledger to look at Fang Henian's writing. One line per year: owes Sect Alliance rank silver 70 spirit stones. Thirty lines over thirty years, the handwriting nearly identical, only the strokes loosening as the years went on; in the final years, "70" was squeezed tight, as if the hand holding the brush had little strength left.

"What are you recording?" he asked the ledger.

No answer.

"Balance thirty points." His finger tapped the paper. "What is a point."

The space below that line was still blank.

Xu Yan picked up the brush and dipped it in ink. His thinking was simple: it was an account book, so it ought to have an entry of his own in it. For ten years he'd recorded firewood, charcoal, one lime purchase when the price rose by three qian—every entry had a person and a number, but he himself had never been in the accounts. Ten years he'd ground ink and never once written down a line for himself.

The brush hovered over the paper a long moment. He could have tested with someone else's name first—there were several names on this mountain ready to hand. He pressed the brush down slightly, then lifted again. In the end, he wrote his own first.

He wrote his surname: Xu.

The ink landed, the paper drank it in, the character faded, and the paper turned white again.

[Debit: Heritage ten points, open audit.]

His hand stopped in midair. Open audit. Those words—he had never seen them in this Accounts Room.

[Debit: Heritage one point.]

A second entry followed. Before he could even figure out what the first deduction was for, the account had been debited again. Thirty points, two deductions, and he had no idea where either one had gone.

The ink on the desk was still wet. Outside the window paper, the sun had swung west, its color shifting from white to yellow. Voices rose again in the Front Courtyard—A He arguing whether paper money should be cut crosswise or lengthwise, the sound rising and falling until Qian Duoduo quieted it.

He pulled the account book closer.

The writing on the page changed.

[Audit: Xu Yan. Qi Condensation Third Layer. Strengths: bookkeeping, photographic memory.]

[Audit: Spirit Root column—deficient.]

[Debt: one spirit root. Creditor:]

And below that, nothing.

The inch of blank space after "Creditor" was clean—so clean. Not a shadow of ink, as if at that exact point the brush had been taken from the writer's hand.

Xu Yan sat there staring at those few lines. Read them twice through. The third time he read them backward, from the blank space back up to the character for "Debt." He reached out with a fingertip to rub at that character. The paper was smooth, the ink long dried into the fibers, impossible to rub away. He closed the book, opened it again—the characters were still there, not one of them gone.

The verdict at his Spirit Testing that year was "Defective Spirit Root." Later, when Fang Henian brought him up the mountain from Luoxia Town, he'd said only two things the whole way. The first was "the wind's strong on the mountain." The second came only when they reached the Mountain Gate: "The Accounts Room needs someone who can count."

Counting—that was short. Cultivating—that was abundant.

So he cultivated too. Before breaking through to the Third Layer, no one on the mountain watched over him, so he recorded his breathing practice times on the backs of old ledger pages, a full year's worth before he'd go back and compare. The year he broke through the Third Layer, Fang Henian poured him half a cup of wine and said, "Slow is fine." Slow is fine—he'd held onto those words for many years. By the fifth year of slow, he didn't quite believe it himself anymore.

The spiritual qi would reach the point just above his Sea of Qi and stop. Like a wall you couldn't feel, couldn't push. Every day he did his breathing, every day he crashed into that same spot, and when he was done, he went back to recording the day's accounts. This morning, sitting on the Mountain Gate threshold with that half-bowl of spirit rice porridge, the little thread of spirit qi it nourished had traveled to the same place and stopped.

Spend enough time in an Accounts Room and you learn: the character "debt" means something to be repaid. If you owe someone, you write the creditor's name in. If you don't, the entry is incomplete; and incomplete entries can't be reconciled at year's end, which means no one sleeps.

In ten years, he'd never borrowed money from anyone, nor anything else. The mountain had its debts of kindness: Qian Duoduo had saved him flatbread, Cheng Banshan had saved him wine, and the Old Sect Master had left him a room for his accounts, a ledger, and a single sentence. He kept all these in his heart, but he had never once recorded them as debt.

Earlier, Cheng Banshan said the Old Sect Master had read that book for twenty years just to check the balance. What the Old Sect Master saw was blank. Now when Xu Yan's turn came and he opened it, the page had numbers: thirty points, two deductions, and one spirit root recorded as owed.

He pressed his finger onto the character "Debt."

"Owed to whom."

The book rustled, just once, as if someone had breathed on it from underneath.

[Balance: Heritage nineteen points.]

Xu Yan stared at this line. After a long moment he pulled over the abacus, then pushed it away. He didn't need it—his mind was faster than the beads. Thirty points, open audit ten points, the other entry one point. Thirty minus ten, minus one.

On a sheet of scrap paper on the desk he wrote out vertically: thirty, ten, one; drew a line; below the line wrote nineteen. The numbers checked out. The book might be sparse with words, but its math had never been wrong.

Then he went through the old ledgers front to back, page by page, looking for any line in the Old Sect Master's accounts that said balance. He searched thirty years of entries. Income, expenditure, debt—never a balance. Fang Henian had kept the books for thirty years and turned this mountain into a ledger with only outflow, no inflow.

He rose and lit the lamp. The wick had been trimmed; as it burned it gave off a scorched-bean smell, the same as the lamp oil in the Old Sect Master's room. In the light, the characters on the page were still those same few lines. No more. No fewer.

Xu Yan stared for a long time, and then it occurred to him that these lines belonged exactly where they were. In his stacks of old ledgers, shortfalls had their own way of being written, debts their own way: owed to whom, how much, cleared in which year—every entry could be set down cleanly. Only this one entry was his own: the spirit root written as debt, the creditor left blank. What he would eventually fill into that column, he hadn't the faintest idea right now.

He pulled a fresh, unused book from the stack of old ledgers, opened it to a blank page in the middle, and re-wet the brush with the last of the ink.

Copying that line, he wrote it out stroke by stroke:

One spirit root. Creditor:

On the final stroke of the character for "creditor," he lifted the brush. That inch of paper still had nothing added to it.

He set the brush in the brush rest and sat watching that inch of blankness. From the East Courtyard, the sword sheath tapped the stone again.