Dao of Language

I have had my eyes closed since Lianhua lit the formation, seated in the low chair while I make the Yin Gate, thanks to the Resonance, absorb all the neutral Qi there is in the room, which unfortunately is not too much because of the fire Qi of the surge.

And then, without prior warning, the Gate trembles, so I stay very still while I pay attention to the phenomenon with the part of my mind that is not occupied in maintaining the flow of Qi.

Although I have already lived it before when I opened the Yang Gate, that does not make it any less surprising, since it is not a physical tremor, it is something more intimate and strange, an internal shudder, a vibration located exactly in the center of my forehead, a couple of fingers above the space between my brows and with just enough depth that my brain doesn’t quite know whether to situate it in the bone, behind the bone or directly nowhere at all.

And of course, the moment I identify the exact point I cannot help being surprised, because that point has a name in half a dozen traditions of my old world. The ajna of the tantras, the eye of wisdom, the seat of the soul that Descartes went and placed precisely in the pineal gland for reasons that always struck me as more poetic than anatomical, and a list of mythologies so long all coinciding in the same square centimeter of forehead that, when I was studying, struck me as somewhere between quaint and slightly suspicious.

The third eye, that one spoken of in every poorly documented popular science book that reached the shelves of airport bookstores.

Which leaves me with the uncomfortable impression that my old world did not entirely invent that idea, but rather inherited it from somewhere and then spent a few millennia embellishing it until making it unrecognizable.

But it is a fascinating thought to have at another moment and absolutely useless to have now, so I push it aside firmly and go back to focusing on the only thing that matters, which is to keep making the Yin Gate continue absorbing Qi.

I absorb until the internal tremor of my forehead grows, becomes a sustained pressure that does not quite hurt and then, without radiances and without any of the nonsense the novels of my other life would have invented for the moment, the Gate yields.

And the first thing I notice is the clothing.

I clearly notice the fabric of my tunic resting against my shoulders and my arms, a fabric I have had on since this morning and that until three seconds ago formed part of the background sensations one normally ignores but that now, suddenly, has texture, has weight and has a very concrete way of grazing the nape of my neck every time I breathe.

The second thing is the smells, which assault my nose unexpectedly. The ink of the wardrobe, the wax of the wood of the floor, the soap with which Lianhua washes her hands. Something sweet and distant that comes from the kitchens and that my brain identifies as frying.

And the third thing is the sounds, which is when the matter begins to be aggressive, because all at once I can hear Lianhua’s breathing from the other end of the room, an insect against a paper panel of the corridor, some muffled footsteps two rooms beyond, the creak of my own clothing, my own pulse beating in my ears as if someone had decided to place a small drum inside my skull.

I let out a long sigh, because I know perfectly what comes next.

I stop cultivating, dissolve the rune of the neutral Qi, open my eyes and what I see surprises me more than everything previous put together.

Because in my previous life I had twenty-twenty vision, with the corresponding ophthalmological examination and the petty satisfaction of being the only one in the department who didn’t wear glasses. And in this life I have had the same, or so I believed, until this precise instant.

Now I am looking at the door and I can count the grains of the wood. I can see the marks of the adze that roughed it out who knows how many years ago. I can distinguish, at the edge of the door’s panel, the individual fibers of the paper. And I can see the exact point where the collar of Lianhua’s uniform has a patch that, until today, I would have sworn did not exist.

A quick and not entirely rigorous calculation tells me that this must be somewhere around twenty-ten vision, which, translated from the language of ophthalmological charts to the language of normal people, means that I now see at twenty paces what a healthy person sees at ten.

And it is not only the distance, it is everything, since it is an integral improvement as the manual said, and for the first time I have the sensation that the manual was falling short.

And of course, my brain, which faced with the transcendent always finds a way to lower the bar, decides at that moment that what is truly urgent is to ask Xia later for a tray of cakes to check how my sense of taste has changed.

Because if this has done that to my eyes, I want to know what it does to a red bean cake.

But the thought lasts me little, because just when I am beginning to enjoy it I realize that the sensory overload has stopped being interesting and has begun to be frankly uncomfortable.

Everything screams at once, everything demands attention at the same time and at the same volume, without any part of my head deciding what is important and what is not, and all at once I understand, with a disagreeable clarity, that what I have is not a superpower, but a filtering problem.

So I do the only sensible thing that can be done and I relax against the backrest of the low chair, breathe deeply, count the seconds and begin with the exercises Lianhua recommended to me when I asked her, weeks ago now, what she had done upon opening this same Gate.

They are simple exercises, almost disappointingly simple, and they consist of something as unspectacular as choosing a sensation, naming it, recognizing it and placing it in a corner of my mind.

And the moment I begin to do it I notice the difference, because the Yin Gate has not only given me senses, it has also given me the capacity to handle them, and that capacity is noticed exactly here, in the ease with which I can take each stimulus, label it and put it in a drawer without it coming out again two seconds later.

It is like the difference between a desk on which everything is strewn about and a desk with filing cabinets.

It takes me a good while, and I certainly have the absolute certainty that I am going to need considerably more than a while to get entirely accustomed, but after that while the world has stopped bombarding me with an overexposure of stimuli and has gone on to speak to me in a reasonable tone, and that, for now, is enough for me.

And the moment I feel calm, and since I am who I am, I immediately decide that the moment has arrived to set about testing things.

Because the manual was very clear on the matter and said that the Yin Gate increases the five senses, the capacity to process data and also memory. And that third thing is, by far, the one that to any other person of this world would have seemed the jewel in the crown, because remembering everything is worth more than almost any technique.

But for me, in principle, that should have a limited application.

Even so I check it and I go searching in my head for a handful of things, such as for example the exact number of steps the courtyard of the house in Xi’An had, a concrete page of a book of talismans I read years ago, with its ink stain in the lower margin, the complete shopping list I made in my other life the last day I set foot in a supermarket.

And the result is exactly the one I expected, which is that now I can remember better the images that could be associated with the texts, although they don’t reach the quality with which I remember those texts.

So I am about to consider the matter settled, mentally catalog it as the only wasted gift of the batch and move on to something else, when it occurs to me to try to bring out two memories at once.

And it works.

I stay very still, with the two pages open inside my head at the same time, both equally sharp, without either blurring to make room for the other, and I understand all at once that I was measuring the wrong thing.

Because my Blessing has never been a memory in the sense in which people use that word. My Blessing is an archive, complete, ordered and without losses, and as an archive it was already perfect yesterday and continues to be so today.

But that archive had a minuscule reading table, of just the right size for a single open volume, so that I could go fetch anything in the world, yes, but I could only have it in front of me one at a time, and what the Yin Gate has just done has not been to enlarge the archive, it has been to enlarge the table.

I check it with the same stubbornness with which I check everything else, so I remember two pages at once, without any effort.

Three, and all three remain legible.

Four, and I can still walk my attention among them without any of them blurring at the edges.

Five, and all five hold firm.

And when I stretch my mind to place the sixth, the sixth appears for an instant and then carries the other five away with it, like someone who stacks one plate too many and stays looking at the mess.

That seems to be my limit, so with that resolved, I move on to what is easiest to measure, which is numbers.

I pull on my Blessing and take out of memory the first mathematics book that occurs to me, one of those manuals of applied statistics that made me suffer at university but that afterward was of no use to me at all, and I begin to make calculations mentally.

First silly things. Multiplications of three figures, then of four, then square roots with decimals, something that in my other life would never have occurred to me to attempt without a calculator followed by a table of logarithms.

Then a standard deviation over a series of twenty values I remember from an article about datings that I reviewed in its day, and afterward the complete calibration of that same series, with its intervals and everything.

And the further I advance, the more I surprise myself, because it is not that I now calculate quickly, it is that I calculate without effort. The operation appears finished, in the same way that one does not calculate that two plus two is four but simply knows it, and that sensation applied to a square root of six figures turns out so absurd that I have to do it three times just to convince myself that I am not making it up.

And there, while I check the result for the third time, I finally confirm something I had been suspecting for years.

Because it always struck me as incomprehensible that in this world the abacus did not exist, and I attributed it to historical chance, to that capricious lottery that makes some obvious ideas take millennia to occur to someone.

But it was not chance, it is that the elites of this world have a calculator stuck inside their brains.

Anyone who has opened the Yin Gate, that is to say, anyone who matters, anyone who governs, anyone who decides, does not need an abacus for anything because they can do those calculations in their head while they drink their tea. And to those people it matters exactly nothing that the peasant, the shopkeeper or the scribe of a provincial office cannot do them, because the peasant’s problem is not a problem they have to resolve.

Tools are invented when someone with power has a problem, and here whoever has the power does not have that problem.

I let out a sigh that has nothing to do with cultivation and, to get that kind of thought off me, I direct my gaze to the floor of the room where, before beginning the session, I left the material for the next test prepared.

Ten sheets of paper, arranged in a wide fan and each with its pen and its inkwell beside it, so I don’t delay any longer and concentrate on the technique of the Myriad of Hands.

But I don’t begin with all ten at once, because I am not so idiotic as to jump directly from two to ten and spend the afternoon with a migraine, but rather I begin with two, which was exactly my limit before opening the Yin Gate.

The two pens rise, dip themselves, descend onto their sheets and write, each stroke firm and clean, without tremors, without proportions dancing and without the least hint of a headache.

I add the third and it keeps working.

I add the fourth, and it keeps working, and there I am already smiling like an idiot while four pens write four pages around me with a multiple scratching that fills the room.

I add the fifth, and here I stop.

Not because it fails, because it keeps working perfectly and the five pens continue writing without a single hesitation, but it is that at the exact moment in which the fifth joins the ensemble I notice with total clarity that that so-strange sensation of doing several things at once has reached its ceiling.

It is not pain, nor is it fatigue, it is simply the tranquil certainty that the wall is there and that pushing it today is not going to bring me anything good.

So I stay at five and, while the five pens keep sliding across the paper, I devote a while to examining the sensation, because it is the strangest thing I have experienced in my two lives and I want to understand it.

And the strange thing is that it is not dividing the mind, since I expected something similar to splitting into pieces, to having five small versions of myself each doing its task, and it is not that at all.

I continue being one, whole and without the least sensation of fracture. What has changed is the attention, which has stopped being a spotlight that illuminates one point to become something that can illuminate five at once without any of them being left in shadow.

If I had to describe it, I would say it is like writing on five keyboards at once while I look at a computer screen split into five windows, each with its text advancing on its own.

But the more I think about it, the more I convince myself that that image falls short, because the truly different thing is not the number of windows, but where the capacity to attend to them comes from.

And then the good comparison occurs to me, the one that fits.

Before I was a single-core processor. I could do several things, yes, but doing the same thing those old computers did, which was to jump at full speed from one task to another giving the illusion of simultaneity, and that illusion was paid for with a cost at each jump, which was exactly the stab that pounded my temples every time I tried to write more than two pages at once.

But now it is as if I had several cores running in parallel, and that reflection, inevitably, leads me to another.

Because I ask myself whether this is what someone from a cyberpunk world would feel if they had had an auxiliary computer implanted in their brain. Not an external apparatus one consults, but something integrated, indistinguishable from oneself and that simply does certain things automatically.

I shake my head at this thought, because I could spend the afternoon on this and I have already checked what I wanted to check.

The five pens finish their lines, separate from the paper, descend gently and remain resting beside their inkwells while I release the Myriad of Hands and the room recovers its silence.

And then I turn toward Lianhua, who is standing to one side of the door, at that exact point from which she can watch at once the entrance and me without need of moving her head, and by her posture I know that she has contemplated each and every one of my tests without pronouncing a single word.

“That’s it”, I tell her. “I have finished opening the Yin Gate.”

Lianhua inclines her head in that gesture of hers that is worth a reverence.

“Congratulations, Zhāohuán Wen”, she tells me, and then, without leaving a single second of margin, she moves on to the practical.

“But it would be advisable for you to take it calmly over the next few days”, she adds. “Until you learn to control and regulate the new intensity of your senses, you are going to go through fairly uncomfortable moments.”

“How uncomfortable?” I ask her.

“Loud noises that startle you without motive”, she begins to enumerate with that report-like precision she employs whenever she has thought something out beforehand. “Flashes of light that leave you blinded an instant upon turning your head toward a window, smells that turn out unbearable to you without anyone else noticing them, and it is probable that food will taste strange to you for a time, even dishes you have known your whole life.”

I nod slowly while I make a mental inventory of everything she has just told me and decide, with a certain sorrow, that there goes my plan of the cakes.

“I understand”, I tell her. “And don’t worry, I don’t intend to attempt any work these days. It would be absurd to set about drawing runes if I startle every time someone closes a door on the other side of the pavilion.”

Lianhua nods, evidently satisfied with my good sense, which gives me the perfect opening to spoil it for her.

“But I don’t intend to shut myself in a dark room to wait for it to pass”, I continue. “Because I get the impression that that would be exactly the opposite of what must be done. If the problem is that I don’t know how to filter, the solution is not to remove the stimuli, it is to have many and learn to order them. So the logical thing is to go out to the courtyard, or to the park, and receive the whole avalanche until my head learns to filter efficiently.”

Lianhua listens to me until the end, as always, and only when she is sure that I have finished does she answer me.

“It is true”, she admits. “Doing it that way would be much faster.”

She makes that pause of hers that always means the nuance is missing.

“But you would also suffer many more discomforts and inconveniences”, she finishes. “And quite a few more than you are imagining right now.”

I let out a muffled laugh at her words.

“The discomforts are all the same to me, Lianhua”, I tell her. “What is not all the same to me is spending two weeks without being able to create talismans.”

And since I see that she is waiting for an explanation, I give it to her.

“I have finished reading the books on formations”, I explain to her. “All of them. And now I want to begin doing tests, and the tests cost money because material has to be bought. So I need funds, and the funds, as of today, come out of talismans.”

Here a sigh escapes me that has nothing contained about it.

“Because the allowance I have as a minor is simply lamentable”, I add with all the bitterness the occasion deserves. “And at this point I am no longer even ashamed to say it. I only hope that with the age of majority at fourteen the increase will be substantial enough to be able to reduce the dependence I have on selling talismans. Because I have spent years financing myself like a street artisan, and it is beginning to become tiresome.”

Lianhua lets me finish, and then she does exactly what she does whenever I am about to build a castle on sand, which is to pull the rug out from under me very politely.

“You should not go by your brothers’ way of life, Zhāohuán Wen”, she tells me.

“And why is that?” I ask her as I raise an eyebrow.

“Because a great part of what they spend does not come from their allowances”, she explains to me. “Their mothers provide it to them, and their mothers, in turn, receive it from their families. The official allowances are similar for all the Emperor’s children, with the variations that correspond to the post the court has assigned them.”

And I stay a moment in silence digesting that, because it makes all the sense in the world and explains a pile of things I had spent years failing to explain to myself.

In the end I let the air out through my nose.

“In other words, the advantage is not imperial bureaucracy”, I summarize. “The advantage is having a fat thigh to hold on to.”

“I would not have expressed it that way”, Lianhua answers me, with that exquisite neutrality she employs when she agrees with me but does not intend to say so aloud.

“I know”, I tell her. “But it is what it is.”

And with that I consider the conversation closed, because there is no sense in lamenting something I am not going to be able to change until a year from now, and I lower my gaze toward the floor of the room, where the ten sheets are still strewn about.

“That’s enough for today”, I announce. “And if I am going to have to get used to this, the sooner I begin, the better.”

Lianhua is already approaching when I give her the destination.

“Take me to the courtyard where my mother paints”, I tell her.

She stops half a pace before reaching me, and although her face does not change in the least, that half pace already tells me that she is evaluating the choice.

“It is a controlled environment”, I explain to her, although I know perfectly well that there is no need to explain it to her. “There is light, there are plants, there are smells, there is the noise of water and there are people moving about, which is exactly what I need. But it is a place where no one is going to come ask me questions and where I can have a bad face without that leaving the Pavilion.”

And here comes the part that truly matters.

“And above all, because if I appear looking like I am about to vomit, my mother is not going to ask me why”, I add. “It will be enough for her to look at me once to imagine perfectly what has happened and, with a bit of luck, she is going to limit herself to telling Lingxi to lower her voice.”

Lianhua doesn’t argue, she limits herself to leaning over, surrounding me with her arms, lifting me from the low chair and depositing me in the wheelchair, where she settles my legs in their spot and reviews the folds of my tunic.

Afterward she positions herself behind the handles and begins to push.

But the moment we cross the threshold of the room, the entire Pavilion falls on top of me all at once.

The corridor smells of waxed wood, of paper and of that hot dust that is no longer going to leave, the wheels of my chair sound over the boards with a rattling that until today struck me as comforting and that now seems to me the passage of a cart loaded with stones, the light that comes in through the panels obliges me to squint and, from some impossible-to-determine point, there reaches me the conversation of two handmaidens who are talking about a fish.

I clench my teeth, breathe deeply and begin with the exercises to filter my surroundings, because it is clear that these are going to be some very complicated days.

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