Chapter 135

I stay looking at Lianhua with incredulity, because I did not expect that reply in any way whatsoever.

It takes me a few seconds to recompose myself, seconds in which my memory hurls itself, at full speed, toward the very long afternoons I spent rewriting that story from my previous life, fitting it into the logic of this world to turn it into something that made sense here.

And now Lianhua lets loose at me, with that so-infrequent half-smile of hers, that at the Imperial Theater a play titled The Adventures of the Monkey King is being performed.

“Lianhua”, I manage to say at last, slowly, measuring each word. “Are you pulling my leg, or are you really telling me that someone has put on a play based on my novel?”

Lianhua does not lose an ounce of her composure at the question. If anything, that half-smile is accentuated barely a bit, just enough to let me know she enjoys the moment as much as I would in her place.

“According to what Guifei Xiang has told me, that is exactly what it seems”, she replies to me without abandoning the smile.

And that reply turns my bewilderment all at once into something very much like enthusiasm, because one thing is for someone to tell you that there exists a play that bears the name of your protagonist, and quite another is for the person I trust most to confirm to you, with my mother’s word ahead of it, that the matter is completely serious.

“Then it is crystal clear”, I tell her, straightening up in the chair while a smile begins to tug at my corners. “We have to go see it. If only to check that they haven’t wrecked the story.”

Because, as absurd as it turns out, I feel curiously possessive about that novel. I know perfectly well that, strictly speaking, it isn’t even mine, that I stole it word for word from a book that in another world had been written for centuries. But the rewriting was indeed mine, every adaptation, every balance I had to seek so that the great scenes would keep working without footnotes, and that is enough for me to feel a very concrete pang of horror at the idea that someone might have managed to turn all that work into a succession of shouts and cheap somersaults on a stage.

“And at what time is it performed?” I ask her next, already imagining myself in the box.

“At nightfall, Zhāohuán Wen”, replies Lianhua.

Those two words crush my spirits, because I cast a sidelong glance toward the light coming in through the window and the conclusion is that it is barely midday, which means I have a whole scorching day left that I don’t have the slightest idea how I am going to fill.

I let out a long sigh and let myself fall back a bit against the backrest, resigning myself already to an afternoon of tedium.

And then, just when I begin to make peace with the idea of spending the next hours watching how the ice in my tea melts, an idea occurs to me so obvious that I have to contain myself so as not to slap my own forehead in front of Lianhua. An idea that I could have had months ago and that makes the mere confirmation of my own clumsiness draw from me a curse under my breath against myself.

I lift my gaze toward Lianhua, determined to put my idea into practice.

“Lianhua”, I tell her. “Is there any room in the Pavilion that is wide enough and that, besides, can be closed so that no one disturbs us while we are inside?”

Lianhua does not need even half a second to reply, because she knows this house better than the palm of her own hand.

“There is, Zhāohuán Wen”, she confirms to me with a nod. “I know one that fulfills both conditions.”

“Perfect”, I say, and from there my head sets in motion with the swiftness of one who already has the whole plan assembled and only needs to distribute the tasks.

“Tell Xia which room it is”, I tell Lianhua.

And then I turn my face toward the girl, who is still standing at my side, still resplendent from her morning of glory.

“And you, Xia, also have a task”, I tell her. “I need you to go fetch a few balls and to take them to the room Lianhua tells you.”

Xia blinks, and for an instant her expression is that of someone who expected many things from this morning except being charged with going to collect balls. She looks at me with her head slightly tilted, clearly bewildered, but, faithful to her nature, she does not waste time asking what for.

“I’ll do it right away”, she says simply, and turns toward Lianhua.

Lianhua indicates to her, in a few words, which room it is and how to get to it, and Xia, as soon as she has it clear, shoots out of the study with her usual overflowing energy, leaving behind her little more than the echo of her steps losing themselves down the corridor.

As soon as she disappears, I direct my gaze again toward Lianhua.

“And now, take me there”, I tell her. “We will wait in that room for Xia to arrive.”

“Yes, Zhāohuán Wen”, replies Lianhua, and without further preamble she positions herself behind the chair and begins to push it toward the door.

We leave the study and cross the corridors of the Pavilion, where the commotion of the handmaidens over the Fei Zhi’s return has already begun to calm and give way to the suffocating quiet of custom. The air is thick, dense with heat, and each stretch of hallway we leave behind reminds me how apt my little rebellion against the swelter on the basis of light outfits was.

Lianhua pushes the chair with that soft and unhesitating firmness she always has, and after a while we stop in front of a room I vaguely recognize as one of those multipurpose spaces the Pavilion keeps without a fixed use, large enough that half the court could fit inside and completely cleared save for some furniture pushed against the walls.

We don’t have to wait too long, since shortly after crossing the threshold Xia appears down the corridor at a run, out of breath and carrying a wicker basket from which stick out, lurching with each stride, several balls. She reaches us with her cheeks flushed from the run and leaves the basket on the floor with a muffled and satisfied thud.

“Good”, I say as soon as I see her inside, and I turn toward Lianhua. “Close the door with the bar.”

Lianhua obeys instantly. The leaf slides, and a second later I hear the dry and resounding sound of the bar fitting into its place, sealing the three of us inside the room. Only then, with the door barred and the certainty that no one is going to come in to interrupt us or to discover what they shouldn’t with what is about to happen in here, do I allow myself to explain my plan.

“Very well”, I begin, sweeping my gaze from Lianhua to Xia and back to Lianhua. “Since we have the whole day ahead and I do not intend to spend it melting from boredom, I have thought of taking advantage of it for a training session of the Myriad of Hands.”

Xia lights up immediately, because for her the word training is synonymous with fun, and Lianhua limits herself to inclining her head slightly, attentive, waiting for me to continue.

“And so that it isn’t the same boring training as always, we are going to do it in the form of a game”, I continue. “Lianhua and I will position ourselves each at one end of the room. And you, Xia, will dedicate yourself to throwing the balls in the most complicated and twisted ways that occur to you, toward wherever you want and however you want. Then, Lianhua and I will compete to see which of the two of us manages to catch each ball first.”

As I say it, I am already savoring the exercise in advance, because for me, tied as I am to this chair, there is no cleaner way to measure my reflexes than with a technique that does not depend at all on my legs responding. Here, inside this room, my Qi hands and Lianhua’s run exactly the same distances.

But then I look at Lianhua and, unable to prevent the smile from twisting with a touch of mischief, I add what truly turns the game into a game.

“Although if we did it the normal way, it is more than clear that you would win”, I tell her. “So it has occurred to me that you should have a small handicap. You will have to put yourself with your back turned and use the Vision of Horus to play.”

Lianhua arches an eyebrow, and for an instant her expression is that of someone sincerely surprised that such a refinement should have occurred to me. Because obliging her to turn her back on me means depriving her of her normal vision, with which she could probably catch my balls asleep, to force her, instead, to follow the flight of each one from the elevated and body-detached point of view the technique provides her, a perspective so different from the usual that tracking a small and fast object with it has to be, at the very least, a considerable challenge even for someone of her level.

The arched eyebrow holds a moment more, and then her face relaxes into an expression I know well and that in her is equivalent to a full-fledged compliment.

“It is a good exercise, Zhāohuán Wen”, she tells me, and in her voice there is an approval she does not bother to disguise.

Xia, who has followed the exchange bouncing on the tips of her toes, can’t hold out any longer.

“Come on, get into position already!” she urges the two of us, already waving a hand toward the basket despite the heat there is and which, by the look of it, couldn’t matter less to her. “Since I want to start throwing the balls now.”

Lianhua does not make herself be begged. She pushes my chair to one of the ends of the room and leaves it well oriented toward the center, and then crosses the room to the opposite side, where she stops, directs at me one last look over her shoulder and, immediately after, turns completely until she is facing the wall, turning her back on Xia and me.

“Whenever you want, Xia”, I tell her as soon as the two of us are in our places.

Xia does not need it repeated. She puts her hand into the basket, grabs the first ball and throws it with all her strength toward the center of the room, and although I know perfectly well what is going to happen, I cannot help a blink of surprise at seeing the speed it carries, with a force well above what any ten-year-old girl should be capable of imparting, the evident fruit of her cultivation.

What comes next is pure delicious chaos.

Xia takes it as the most important mission of her short life and begins to throw the balls in all the impossible ways her imagination is capable of inventing. She throws them high so that they bounce off the ceiling, she throws them low against the floor so that they shoot off at unpredictable angles, she makes them spin on themselves so that they describe treacherous curves in the air, and each time one of them shoots off, my Qi hands and Lianhua’s lunge for it like two invisible packs competing for the same prey.

At first I limit myself to enjoying the game. I catch a few balls, Lianhua catches just as many, and everything flows with the lightness of any pastime. But then I begin to notice something strange. From time to time, a ball ends up caught at once by the two of us, my bundle of Qi hands pulling from one side and hers from the other, and a kind of miniature tug-of-war begins between us over who keeps the piece, a silent contest that invariably ends with the ball falling on my side.

The first few times I attribute it to chance, to those flukes of the game in which two players reach the same point at the same instant. But when it happens for the fifth time, and not only that, but besides I again win the tug-of-war just as in the previous four, I realize and the truth becomes evident, that Lianhua is doing it on purpose. She is provoking those collisions deliberately, matching her speed to mine so that we arrive together, staging a tug-of-war for the gallery and letting herself be won afterward, like someone who lets a child take the last token to see them smile.

And there, I confess it, my pride rebels.

Because one thing is to know that Lianhua is infinitely above me in this, something I take completely for granted, and quite another is for her to gift me victories as if they were sweets. So I decide to change strategy, and when for the sixth time our Qi hands close at once over the same ball, I don’t follow her game of the tug-of-war.

Instead of that, I grab it first with the Myriad of Hands, which is the faster and more skilled of the two techniques and the one that guarantees me arriving in time, and right after, without giving it a breath, I also close over the ball the Dragon’s Grip, which doesn’t have by a long shot the subtlety of the other technique but does have all the brute force concentrated in a single fist, and with one dry tug I wrench it clean away before the tug-of-war she always initiates before letting me win has even been able to begin.

The ball crosses the room and lands cleanly in my lap.

For an instant the silence is total. And then, from the other end of the room, still with her back to me, Lianhua lets out a small laugh of genuine admiration.

“Very well thought, Zhāohuán Wen”, she congratulates me out loud, and the surprise of having found herself caught with her guard down tinges her voice with something close to the satisfaction of a teacher. “To combine the two techniques to make up for what one lacks with what the other has to spare. To take advantage of all the resources within one’s reach in order to win is always, without exception, the best of options.”

And I, who still have the ball in my lap and my pride mended, decide to take advantage of the moment to claim what I really want.

“Then stop letting me win once and for all”, I reply to her. “Don’t hold back with me. I want the real game, not the courtesy version.”

There is a brief pause on the other side of the room. And then, with that tranquility of hers that suddenly strikes me as vaguely threatening, Lianhua replies.

“If it is what you wish, Zhāohuán Wen, it is what I will do”, she tells me.

What happens from that instant on hardly deserves to be called competition.

It is, rather, an almost one-sided thrashing. Ball after ball, Lianhua’s Qi hands materialize over the prey a fraction of a second before mine, time after time, with a precision and an economy of movements that leave me literally behind gathering the dust. And the worst of all is that she is doing it with her back turned, guiding herself solely by that elevated and body-detached vision, and even so she sweeps me as if I moved in slow motion.

I feel, exactly, like any old basketball player, one of those who fill the benches of mediocre teams, who is suddenly seated on a court facing Michael Jordan in his prime. Each time I think I have a ball within reach, it is no longer there, because she has passed through there before and carried it off without batting an eye.

But, little by little, something begins to change.

Because, however much Lianhua may be an impassable wall, the chaos of Xia’s throws has a rhythm, and every rhythm, sooner or later, can be learned. I begin to anticipate, I begin to read the trajectory of the balls an instant before they come out, to have my Qi hands already deployed in the correct zone and to combine in an increasingly natural way the speed of the Myriad of Hands to arrive first with the strength of the Dragon’s Grip not to let go of what I catch.

And then, every so often, the impossible happens and I steal a ball from Lianhua. Not many, not by a long shot, but a few. And each of those balls I manage to wrest from her fills me with a disproportionate satisfaction, because now, at last, I have the absolute certainty that she is no longer gifting them to me and that those I have won myself.

The time, between one ball and another, slips away from me without my hardly noticing it. The cool room, free of the swelter thanks to its good insulation, helps so that neither of us feels the tiredness of the hours that go accumulating, and Xia, tireless, keeps throwing and commenting on each play as if she were the narrator of a tournament, cheering me on at the top of her lungs each time it seems I am about to take a ball from Lianhua and celebrating with a leap when I manage it.

But on one of the times I lift my gaze between throw and throw, I notice her and what I see snuffs out my enthusiasm all at once.

Xia keeps as lively as ever, that is true, but she has her bangs stuck to her forehead with sweat, her face much more flushed than the earlier run would justify and, although her enthusiasm sustains her, it is clear that the girl has spent hours on her feet throwing balls with all her strength and is beginning to be truly exhausted. And however much she would be the first to deny it if I asked her, the last thing I want is for my little amusement to end up costing her an upset on the very day she has reached such an important milestone.

So I decide that we have played enough.

“Very well, we’ll leave it here”, I announce, and I catch in flight the last ball Xia had half-thrown with a lazy gesture of the Myriad of Hands. “It’s about time we started finishing up, since we have to prepare to go to the theater and that takes its time. We have to bathe to get rid of all this sweat, eat something and dress properly, and if we dawdle we’ll arrive too late.”

Xia lets her shoulders drop with a mixture of relief and sorrow that the game has ended, and I turn toward her with the next instruction already prepared.

“Xia”, I tell her. “Go prepare yourself, and when you are ready, come find me so that we all go together to the theater.”

The girl, who had begun to lean toward the basket to gather up, stops dead and looks at me with her eyes very wide, as if I had just said something absolutely incredible.

“I’m going too?” she asks, and in her voice there is so much surprise that it almost makes me laugh.

“Of course you’re going”, I reply to her, unable to entirely contain the smile. “That is your reward for having finished the Tempering of the Bones. Or did you think that this time I wasn’t going to do something like in the previous ones?”

Xia takes a second to process it, and when she does, the smile that spreads across her face is one of those that light up an entire room.

“Thank you, Wen”, she tells me with a sincerity that reaches me full on, and then, suddenly remembering her manners, she straightens up and joins her hands with a formality that lasts her just barely. “Do I have your permission to withdraw and go prepare myself?”

While she asks me the question, I am already gathering up the disaster of balls that has been left scattered all over the room, making them float one after another back to the basket with the Qi hands of the Myriad, which for this kind of small task turns out infinitely more comfortable than the single fist of the Dragon’s Grip.

“You may go”, I grant her as the last ball falls inside the basket with a dry thud. “But take the basket with the balls with you too.”

Xia does not think twice. She grabs the basket by the handle with both hands, lifts it with a tug, goes to the door, draws back the bar and disappears down the corridor with the same haste with which she arrived, leaving Lianhua and me alone in the room again.

As soon as the girl’s steps lose themselves in the distance, I direct my gaze toward Lianhua, who remains serene in her place as if the last few hours had not meant for her the least effort.

“And as for us, it is better that we also spruce ourselves up, eat something and prepare ourselves”, I tell her with a smile that comes out entirely naturally. “Since tonight we have to go check with our own eyes to what extent The Adventures of the Monkey King is faithful to the original work.”

If you find any errors (non-standard content, ads redirect, broken links, etc..), Please let us know so we can fix it as soon as possible.