The Unknown Arts 2: Early Years (II) (Patreon)

Father was true to his word.

A week later he brought the other four volumes of the Principles of Alchemy. By the time he returned, she’d long since finished them. He picked up a volume, flipped to a random page, and quizzed her on it—on Demon cores and their uses. She recited the page verbatim.

She had seen that soft happy glow adults got when they drank wine. As she saw his grudging approval, she imagined this was what it felt like.

A day later, Father moved her back to the mansion. A guest room on the first floor, a floor underneath her old room, a floor underneath her brother’s. Yet she was so happy she burst out in tears, but not in front of him. In front of him she kept her face carefully indifferent. Alone, in her closet muffled by pillows, she let go.

At home, Father opened her family library to her, since she’d earned it. When she finished their family’s meager collection of alchemical texts, Father procured new ones for her through the librarian, an old man Xiaoshan with much eyebrow and little eye. At first Xiaoshan seemed unsettled by her. He had taken to staring at her as she read, as though afraid she might steal something. His eyebrows would steadily travel up his forehead as she began the day with a fresh stack of books on one side of her reading table, and finish with them fully read on the other.

“Are you truly reading, girl?” he’d asked her once. She said yes. She knew what he meant—to him, she was turning the pages too fast. But by now she had learned she was not the same as other folk. In a way, she’d always known it.

From the tomes in her family library she learned of artificing—the making of weapons and the inscribing of runes upon them. She devoured economics, and politics, and of the history of the Song Dynasty, and of the Grand Xia continent on which she lived, and the millennia-old war between humans and Demons which divided it in two.

But most of all she learned the secrets of Alchemy.

An Alchemist had no need for a magical core. They borrowed power from their ingredients. They would use a cauldron to mix the ingredients. A stirring rod to channel their mental energies, to break the ingredients down and fit them together again. And a fire to fuel it all—the better the wood, the better the flame, the better the brew.

As she read she could hardly keep her hands from trembling.

The most powerful elixirs could bring a man at the brink of death to perfect health. They could regrow shattered bones, add feet to one’s height… perhaps even grow a missing core.

***

As she traipsed back from the library one day, head swimming with formulae, she saw a flash in the courtyard. It was Jin, his fist white with qi. Beside him an older man nodded thoughtfully.

Later at the dinner table she asked, “Who was that?”

“Tutor Xin!” said Jin, so excited it was annoying. “He knows so much about flame qi. He’s teaching me the Fire Fist—”

She turned to her father. “I want tutors too.”

Father took a breath to finish his soup before responding. “Your brother is tutored because he is capable. Do not ask for things you don’t deserve. It is pathetic for a man to reach beyond his capabilities.”

“I’m not a man,” she ground out.

Father paused. “True.”

“And I’m just as deserving as Jin is!” she said. “Let me show you.”

“Rue?” said Jin, looking worried. “This isn’t a competition.”

“It is,” she hissed, with so much force he seemed surprised. With so much force she surprised herself.

Father, meanwhile, pursed his lips. “Jin is tutored in literature. Politics. Martial Arts. Philosophy. And the manly arts—calligraphy, music, strategy.”

“I want to learn them all,” she said. “And alchemy.”

“Alchemy?” Her father’s eyes were flintlike. “You have hardly seven summers. Starting so young is unheard of. Most apprentices will not gather the mental strength to control a simple brew until they near adulthood.”

“I can do it.”

“You cannot,” snapped Father. “Cease this foolishness.”

They glared at one another and she saw her reflection in his dark eyes. She looked so small, so frail, so pitifully angry.

“Haven’t I earned the right to try?”

Father’s face grew so calm she flinched. She wished she knew what moved underneath that iron mask. He held her there, letting her suffer under the weight of the uncertainty for a full breath, before he spoke.

“You are correct in one thing. You are a child,” he mused. “Not a man. You are wrong, but perhaps it is best to let you make these mistakes. Very well—you shall have your tutors. You have shown aptitude, so I shall indulge you this once. Should this aptitude… waver… I shall tolerate you no longer. Do you understand?”

“I know,” she breathed. “I won’t disappoint you. I promise.”

***

Later, Jin pulled her aside. “Are you alright?”

She slapped his hand away. “Leave me be.”

He looked like a kicked puppy. “What’s gotten into you?”

She blinked.

Jin wasn’t like Father. Jin was different. She knew when he said something, he meant it. She knew he really cared. He was like her; she could be honest.

But how could she answer him? Did she even know how to? He must’ve seen her stricken face, since he put a hand on her shoulder and smiled gently, as though to a frightened animal.

“Do you want to go play chess with me?” he asked.

“Yea,” she sniffed.

***

She’d see Ling around the mansion. The few times they interacted Ling spoke stiffly and didn’t meet her eyes, a total stranger. It left her cold and suited her just fine. When she walked past, she kept her eyes trained forward. She didn’t acknowledge Ling either.

***

When she met with her politics, and economics, and philosophy, and calligraphy tutors—all of them, really, save one—things went well. They came out of it with the same faintly dazed expression.

Then came the Alchemy tutor.

She took one look at him and immediately decided she disliked him. His hair was greasy and he smelled like oysters gone bad and he wore sandals, which he propped up on her favorite library table. He had this pompous air to him she often saw in experts who visited the mansion, like he was so important the rules didn’t apply to him. Too important even to use soap.

“I thought I was tutoring your brother,” he said, which was the worst possible way he could’ve begun.

“Well, you aren’t,” she said stiffly.

He frowned at her, then blinked, as though seeing her for the first time. At least he sat up straight now. “Aren’t you a pretty little thing,” he muttered. “My name is Xin, Master Alchemist.”

He said it like she was supposed to be impressed, but it was all just noise to her.

“When can I start brewing?”

“Brewing!” he giggled. “Brewing. Ah, me. Sit down, dear.” He patted a seat to his side. She stayed standing, arms folded. He sighed. “If you want my opinion on the matter, Alchemy is not meant for the weaker sex. You must have a certain…” He paused, like he was trying to find some delicate way to phrase it. “Mental fortitude. You ought to know that it takes a great deal of Mind Power to wrangle an elixir. Most females, I find, simply lack the capacity…you are a fine looking girl, very fine. You shall grow up to be a fine looking woman. There is no need for you to dirty your hands with Alchemy. Marry well, bear children, tend to your husband, and you shall live an easy life. Doesn’t that sound so much better?”

“When can I start brewing?”

He blinked. “Did you not hear anything I just—bah. Very well. If you insist, perhaps we can spend the next… oh… decade or so on theory. If you prove adequate, after your body and mind mature, perhaps we may begin—where do you think you’re going?”

She went to Father.

“Get rid of him. I want another Alchemy tutor. And this time, I want to interview them.”

***

Surprisingly, Father obliged her. He must’ve seen something in her expression.

He brought a lineup of experts, each of which had attained the rank of Master. She asked then just one question. “Will you let me brew?”

She went through six candidates before she came upon the seventh. An old lady with an eye patch. Bald, with a liver-spotted pate. She looked like a beggar, not an alchemist. She also looked bored—like she was performing some tedious errand for someone else.

When she asked the question, the old lady yawned.

“If you are ready for it.”

“If I show you I’m ready now?”

“Then we shall begin today.”

Which was how Old Gao became her Alchemy tutor.

***

The first thing Old Gao did was put Ruyi’s hand on an instrument. It had a crystal at the bottom and a gauge from one through ten over it, like a thermometer. Gao said it measured Mind Power. It was a trait one could not train; it would grow until adulthood, and however much you had was it.

When Ruyi put her hands on the crystal, nothing happened.

Then a brilliant white beam shot up, filling the gauge totally.

Ruyi was not trained to read a Mind Power gauge, but she had an inkling this was good news. Old Gao stared it at for a while with an unreadable expression. At last she grunted.

“Huh.”

Next she took out another gauge, this one to test Qi Sensitivity. When she put her hands on the thing a beam shot up so fast it sparked out.

“Huh,” said Old Gao again. A pause.

“Your father mentioned you’ve got no core. This will complicate some brews, but spirit stones should work as a substitute, in a pinch…”

She stuffed it into a dingy sack of hers and pulled out a box. Inside were what seemed like puzzle pieces, but they were grotesque shapes and of a single color. And they all shifted about, their edges ebbing and flowing—some faster, some slower. Some were vibrating.

“What’s this?” said Ruyi.

“Ingredients, girl. Ingredients.” Gao held something up. “Red ginseng.” It looked like a shard of bloody ice. “Not the ingredient precisely, mind you, but its energies. When the ingredients are in the pot, this is what you shall see in your mind’s eye. With this ginseng I will make a healing potion.”

“But none of the eight recipes in the Encyclopaedia Alchemica use Red Ginseng.”

If she’d imagined Gao would be impressed by her recall, she was mistaken. If anything Gao looked contemptuous.

“Blegh! Forget the textbook. Memorizing is the death of Alchemy! Alchemy is not about running… calculations…” Gao spat it like a dirty word. “Alchemy is an art. An art of ten thousand combinations. Observe.”

She drew up another shape, this one blue and spiky, angled it just so, and in one smooth motion flicked it into the first. The two snapped into place; the seams between them vanished; they became a flat purple mass, as if by magic.

“Healing potion,” Gao intoned. “I did not create this potion by following a formula. I understood the ingredients, and their shapes, and I saw in my mind’s eye the ways their energies complete and destroy one another. It is a matter of feel, of instinct. What is a healing elixir? An elixir that achieves the effect of healing—and one can do this ten thousand ways with ten thousand ingredients. Like art, it ought to be individual to the alchemist.”

Her sneer grew more pronounced. “Those who follow mere formulae are doomed to produce mediocrities full of impurities. For they follow the lifeless shapes on the page, rather than the living shapes in their minds.”

“Oh,” said Ruyi.

“Now you try,” said Gao. She broke the two pieces apart and handed them to Ruyi.

Ruyi did. She tried to imagine the ice’s shards aligning with the spiky piece’s; they blossomed in full color in her mind. She could see it! Her heart skipped a beat; she jammed them together—

“Agh!”

A shock rippled up her arms. She dropped them, hands twitching.

“Fail a reaction, and the puzzle pieces shock you. It’s only appropriate. If you fail a reaction in life, you’ll be lucky to leave with only a shock.”

With that, Old Gao stood. “I leave you these puzzle pieces. I want you to make a healing elixir in six different ways—none of which are covered in your precious textbook. I’ll return in one month. Manage that, and we can talk about brewing.”

***

Ruyi failed again. And again. And again.

It became an obsession. Sort of like reading had been, when she first started. Sometimes she forgot to eat. Sometimes she forgot to sleep. Over, and over, and over…

One painful week passed. Then another.

Jin brought her tea, tried to call her off many a time. She waved him away. Father caught sight of her struggling with it and gave the littlest nod. She couldn’t bring herself to care about that either.

It was like walking forwards and seeing your body move backwards. Things that should fit did not. In the space of minds and energies the rules of her physical reality, things she’d depended on all her life, tripped her up time after time.

It was driving her mad. Until then everything had come so easy. But this—this—

Three weeks later, she had made no progress.

In those three weeks, she slept no longer than five hours a night. She tried until her eyes were red and dark-rimmed and her fingers trembled incessantly. She grew pale and sickly. Sheer desperation kept her up.

What a silly creature she’d been. Marching up to father, to those Master Alchemists, demanding they let her brew. When she could hardly master something so maddeningly simple. She had a good long cry about it.

Three days before she was scheduled to meet Old Gao again, she resolved not to sleep until she managed it.

On the end of the second straight day, wielding the jolts of her failures to fight off sleep, she entered a trance. A place between waking and sleeping, a land of dreaming where she was freed from the considerations of the physical. There, in a stumbling haze, the shapes appeared to her, fluid bolts of energy. And she married them, one by one.

She woke to a boot tapping in her face.

It was Gao.

“And here I’d expected you were practicing,” she snorted. “I do hope you’ve not been sleeping all this time.”

She scrambled up, wiping drool from her red cheeks. “I have it! I have it!”

“Really, now.”

And she did. She had taken the patterns from that dream-state to waking; they were with her as she sought that flat purple space, the space of healing. There were so many ways to make purple. How many colors were there on a spectrum? It was such a simple color, and the shape, flat as it was, took barely any nudging. How could she have messed it up, all this time?

She demonstrated six variants.

At the end, Gao grunted, “Huh.”

“So?” she said, her head dangerously light. She swayed on her feet.

“You were not supposed to be able to do that.” Gao studied her with this blank frown. “That should have taken you at least six months. Most adults take a year.”

“Huh?”

“I set you up to fail, girl,” said Gao. “You wish to brew at the age of seven? I’ve never seen an ego so big on a child so small. You really think you can do anything, don’t you?”

Ruyi was so shocked, and so relieved, and so tired, she had no mental space to be angry. She just said, “Huh?” Her eyelids felt so heavy…

Gao rolled her eyes. “Humility is as important a trait in an Alchemist as any. Knowing your limits, so that you do not overstep them and blow yourself up. This exercise was meant to teach you an Alchemist’s instincts—but it was also meant to humble you. Though in that regard it seems to have failed spectacularly… my. You truly are something else.”

This last bit Ruyi didn’t hear. She was unconscious before she hit the floor.