The monastery sat halfway up a mountain slope in some kingdom whose exact number in the long line of them he'd lost precise count of somewhere back around the sixth or seventh, its halls half-swallowed by mist most mornings, its resident monks unbothered by a traveling physician who asked, politely, whether he might shelter through the worst of the coming winter in exchange for whatever medical help the mountain's small farming village below might need through the cold months.
They agreed easily enough, and it was there, in a monastery too remote for its own name to have reached Wei Baishan's map, that Li Fan met the old monk who painted.
He'd noticed the man before he'd noticed his work — elderly, silent through most meals, spending whatever hours the monastery's routine left him free sitting before a low table with brush and ink, producing images so spare that Li Fan mistook the first one he saw for unfinished. A single mountain peak, most of the page left blank around it. A crane, three careful strokes suggesting its whole body.
"You think I've left something out," the monk said, without looking up, the first words he'd spoken directly to Li Fan in the two weeks they'd shared a roof.
"I think there's a great deal of empty page," Li Fan admitted.
"The empty page is the mist. The distance. Everything the eye understands without needing it drawn." The monk set his brush down and studied the crane a moment longer before setting the page aside to dry. "Most men look at a mountain and see a mountain. A painter looks at a mountain and sees where the light stops and the shadow begins, sees which parts of it the mist has already claimed and which parts still belong to the eye. Paint everything you see, and you've painted nothing worth looking at twice. Paint only what matters, and the empty page does the rest of the work for you."
Li Fan spent the following months learning to see the way the monk saw, sitting beside him through long mountain silences, sketching poorly at first and then less poorly, until the crane's three strokes stopped looking like laziness and started looking like the only three strokes the bird had ever actually needed. He didn't become a painter in any way that would have impressed a real one. But something in the way he looked at a room afterward had changed — the exact angle a lamp's light fell across Old Sun's old journals, the precise distance at which a stranger's face on the road first became readable rather than merely visible.
The zither came from a different corner of that same winter, a young woman who'd retreated to the monastery after some grief the monks never explained and Li Fan never asked after, her instrument the only thing she'd carried up the mountain with her that wasn't strictly necessary for survival.
She played most evenings, alone at first, until curiosity got the better of Li Fan's usual restraint and he asked, plainly, whether she'd teach him. She looked at him a long moment before agreeing, and the first month taught him almost nothing about music at all — only how to sit still long enough that his breath stopped fighting the silence around it, how to let a single string's fading note finish completely before his mind reached for the next thought waiting in line behind it.
If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
"Rhythm isn't in the notes," she told him once, guiding his hand back to the correct position for the third time in as many minutes. "It's in the space between them. Anyone can strike a string. Very few people can wait the right length of time before striking the next one." She played a short phrase, slow and unhurried, each note allowed to die fully before the next one rose to replace it. "That waiting is the whole art. Everything else is just fingers."
He never grew skilled enough to call himself a musician by the time the snow finally cleared from the mountain paths, but something in him had settled the way it had settled after the calligrapher's stall, a stillness carried now in his breathing that hadn't quite been there before. He noticed it most clearly in his sword forms that spring, the pause between one motion and the next holding a fraction longer than it used to, deliberate rather than merely habitual.
He left the monastery once the roads had dried, and the months that followed blurred the way months on the road always eventually blurred, one city's history folding into the next kingdom's customs folding into a fourth country's particular style of raising a roof against heavy snow. He read what each place offered and asked what each place was willing to teach, farming techniques in one province and the rudiments of metalwork in another, a week spent watching a shipwright's crew fit planks together along a river town's busy dock, simply because the geometry of it had caught his eye and he'd never once let curiosity like that go unanswered when the road gave him the time to indulge it.
It was crossing a wide, slow-moving river on a ferry crowded with merchants and their goods that he finally sat down with Wei Baishan's map properly, tracing the whole distance he'd covered since leaving the capital rather than only the next stretch ahead, and understood, counting the seasons marked in his own memory with the same perfect clarity every memory now carried, that three years had passed since he'd walked out through Hundred Herbs Hall's gate.
Three years, and he'd crossed perhaps a third of the distance the map suggested still separated him from the Myriad Craft Sect's mountains. He sat with that fact a long while, the ferry rocking gently beneath him, and let it settle into something other than discouragement.
On Blue Star, a journey this long would have carried him across oceans, circled the edges of more than one nation before it ever ran out of new ground to cross. Here, it had barely carried him past a string of kingdoms clustered along one edge of a single continent — a continent so vast, he suspected, that the entire surface of Blue Star could have been laid across it a hundred times over and still left empty land beyond the horizon. He'd read enough geography in enough languages by now to trust the shape of that thought even without a precise number to hang on it.
The scale of it should have felt like defeat. It didn't. It felt instead like the plainest confirmation yet of something he'd already decided a long time ago, sitting beneath a bare plum tree with a promise he still meant to keep — that the road home was long enough to measure in years rather than seasons, and that the only sensible response to a road that long was to keep walking it, one patient mile at a time, exactly the way he'd walked every other impossible distance this world had put in front of him so far.
He folded the map, watched the far riverbank drawing slowly closer, and waited for the ferry to carry him the rest of the way across.
Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!
Use arrow keys (or A / D) to PREV/NEXT chapter