The first thing I had noticed was that the garrison grounds occupied the entire western quarter of the inner wall.
I had seen the outer edge of it the previous day from the corridor of campaign maps, but walking through it was different. The training fields alone were larger than Hekou's entire fenced perimeter.There were four separate yards with different surface conditions ranging from packed earth to sand, as well as stone flags, and a raised platform of hardwood that flexed slightly underfoot. Impact structures along the eastern wall built from a stone composite I didn't recognize, harder than what Gao Ren's forge produced and shaped that implied either a mold-casting process I hadn't seen before.
"What's the binding agent used for the impact walls?"
Xu walked beside me with her arms folded as she nodded as the passing soldiers and administrators who acknowledged her. " It is river clay fired with ground iron slag. It absorbs impact better than stone and it doesn't fracture the way packed earth does in the winter."
I looked at the surface closely. The texture was consistent throughout with no visible seams and the color was a uniform grey-brown. "How thick is it?"
"Forty li at the base, tapering to twenty at the top. The weight distribution keeps them from shifting in heavy rain."
I noted all of it. The construction list I'd been building in my head since before I left Hekou was growing more specific by the hour. Zone three's impact walls at Hekou were packed stone and they worked, but this composite would work better, and if Gao Ren could source the slag in sufficient quantity from the ridge cave operations then the binding process would be replicable.
We moved through the supply depot next, and I took notice of how every category of material had a location, a rotation schedule, and a designated party whose name was on a placard at the station. The documentation was current to within two days, which meant that no food or resource would be out of date or expired.
"Your quartermaster chain," I began to say, "How far does it extend before the information degrades?"
Commander Xu pondered my question. "To about the third outpost which are all approximately twenty li apart. Beyond that, reports tend to arrive late." She moved past a row of weapon racks she knew without looking at them. "The eastern territory is the weak link as the distances are longer and the roads are newer."
"Hekou is on the eastern road," I realized.
She nodded.
I looked at a stack of supply manifests on a desk near the depot's main entrance. Three years ago Wang Su had supplied me with enough paper to run my village's administrative records. This depot must have consumed more paper in a week.
"I want to see the map room," I said.
The map room was off the campaign corridor I'd walked through the previous evening. Xu unlocked it herself, which told me something about who had access, and we went in alone.
The room was adorned with territorial maps, campaign maps, supply route maps, population density charts, and seasonal weather patterns for the eastern and western regions. The Opal Continent was rendered in detail with more projections than I had known existed.
I found the eastern territory first which housed the river fork where Hekou sat. I traced the road west through the settlements I'd ridden past on the journey and then wider, taking in the full shape of the Western Reaches' territory and its borders.
Hekou sat close to the eastern edge. I had known this abstractly, but seeing it rendered at scale made it concrete in my mind. The Western Reaches extended far to the west and south, a relatively tame territory with established infrastructure and population centers.
To the east, the border was thinner and the settlements smaller and the garrison outposts were visible on the map due to the fact that the territory depended on them.
Meishan sat at the boundary between the Western Reaches and Qinghe territories, exactly as Administrator Wen had described. A prefecture-sized territory controlling the passage between east and west, marked with a different notation than the surrounding settlements.
The lands to the south were mainly unmarked, which to me meant that it was mostly unexplored territory. Shan Pei's tribe was from the south, as most hill tribes in our region were, but he never spoke much about the surrounding territories. The hill tribes lived a more nomadic lifestyle, so perhaps Shan was tired of it and wanted to settle down for once.
I looked for Chenjia village but found that the scale was too broad. The small farming villages that had made up the world were below the map's resolution. They existed somewhere in the eastern territory's notation but individually they were invisible, swallowed into the aggregate.
"Your position concerns you," Xu said from beside me. She saw that my finger had still lingered on Hekou and that I had been tracing the surrounding lands.
"Hekou is close to Meishan," I noted aloud.
"That it is," she replied.
I looked at the passage between the two territories. The road that connected them ran through a river valley that was defensible in some areas but exposed in others. It proved to be a natural separator between Qinghe and the Western Reaches. If Meishan were to fall, then it could be used as a launching pad for another campaign.
"What does your Lord want after he takes Meishan?" I turned to ask Xu as my curiosity got the best of me.
"Why do you ask?"
"Because Meishan is a crossing, not a destination." I turned my eyes back to the map and traced it with my finger. "If he takes it, then he controls the passage between east and west. That also means that he can either hold the line or push through it."
Commander Xu's lips curled into a grin as she seemed rather amused by my question, perhaps because it was one that she had asked herself.
"Lord Shen Yue is his father's son," she said. "His father, Shen Bowen, unified the Jade River territories, which ran from Lanyu to Meishan and beyond to Qinghe. His eldest son Shen Yuan took Qinghe to the east and his second eldest son Shen Yue took the Western Reaches, meanwhile Shen Yang took Meishan to act as a buffer."
She moved a few steps along the wall. "Lord Shen Yue is ambitious, but what he will do beyond reclaiming his father's lands, I do not know for certain."
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I looked at the map.
Hekou sat on the eastern approach to Meishan. If Shen Yue's ambition ran east after he took the crossing, the eastern territory wasn't a border region anymore. It was a staging ground. And a village that produced cultivators and had a defensible position on the main road was not, in that context, a school.
It was a forward asset.
I thought about Zhao Ping on the night of the vote, saying "Better terms on paper doesn't mean better terms in practice." I had believed then that the Western Reaches contract came with better terms. I naturally, even at that time, understood that Zhao Ping's skepticism hadn't been wrong either.
Whatever came next, we would handle it the way we had handled everything: Together. Though I preferred if we operated ahead of any crisis than beside it.
I now understood that the question was no longer whether the war would reach us, but whether we would be ready to do when it did.
"I'll need the stonemason team as soon as you're able," I said.
"You'll have them." She turned from the map and headed towards the door. "I'll have the seal and the authorization documents prepared before you leave tomorrow."
I gave her a gracious bow, "Thank you, Commander Xu."
She nodded back at me as I turned to look back at the map one last time.
The river fork.
The eastern road.
The passage at Meishan, a crossing where two brothers would inevitably meet and swallow up innocent lives over their familial dispute. I couldn't ever imagine Hao and I doing such a thing, especially when one considers that the territories themselves paled in comparison to what surrounded them. This continent was so large yet my limited view of it was so small, it gave me a perspective on what I wanted to accomplish and made me wonder who else in this world was building something similar...
"You coming?" Commander Xu asked as she opened the door.
I nodded and followed her out.
Xu handed me a small map on the morning of my departure.
I unfolded one corner and saw that it was rendered in great detail and regard to Hekou, the river fork and ridge caves to the east, as well as the road north to Tongshan.
There was also Chenjia village on the map, the place where Mother's people had come from and where she had also apprenticed under Sun Ai. Father's settlement must have been somewhere on this map as well, I just didn't know the name of it yet.
I refolded the oilskin.
"I had my best cartographers prepare it," Xu said. She stood in the commander's posture, straight and composed, the personal register from the river and the map room folded back into the professional one. "You seemed quite interested in what surrounded your village, so, I expect you to put it to good use."
I bowed deeply to her. She had done me a kindness in a way that she could not have possibly known. "I will."
She looked at me. The early morning light was flat and grey and made the inner wall behind her look even heavier than it was.
"Ride safe," she said. "The eastern road narrows past the second checkpoint."
I tucked the map into my bag beside the seal case and mounted. Administrator Wen was already ahead with the soldiers, waiting at the outer gate. I looked back once at the inner wall, at the woman standing in front of it in the grey morning, and then I turned east and rode.
One interesting point of interest I noticed was that going west made the world feel larger, but going back home to the east made the world feel as if it had been narrowing back down again.
The third-ring settlements gave way to the second-ring outposts. The outposts gave way to the contracted villages. The contracted villages grew smaller and further apart, and the garrison checkpoints became less frequent.
Wen rode ahead and didn't speak, which was the same as it had been traveling west.
I used the days to work.
The school's layout had been forming in pieces since before I'd left Hekou, but seeing Lanyu's garrison grounds had given me a template.
There would be three buildings to start.
The cultivation hall running north-south along the river side of the training ground, long and single-storey, oriented to catch the ambient field from the water. The clinical wing would be adjacent to it and smaller and connected by a covered walkway. The administrative hall at the gate end, where Wen's quarterly reports would go and where students could study literacy off the record of course.
Zone one on the northern flat, as it was. Zone two along the riverbank, formalized with proper boundary markers and the covered rest area Gao Ren's crew had built about a year ago. Zone three would remain against the hillside, with impact walls rebuilt in the Lanyu composite if I could source the slag and replicate the binding ratio.
Gao Ren would have opinions about the composite and I was definitely looking forward to that conversation.
The construction sequence mattered as well. Foundation stone first, which was what the stonemason team would bring. Timber from the ridge was already stockpiled and the ironwork was straightforward as well. The clay composite for the impact walls was the variable that I couldn't account for since that was outside of my area of expertise. Everything else however, I felt like I could have it done.
Three months to get the foundation buildings functional.
Six months to the first full intake of Xu's practitioners.
Winter for the campaign mobilization, and if I had to guess, Spring would be when the fighting began.
I thought about the heartbeat practice and what I could do with it now that I knew the mechanism. The ambient field was the medium, permeability was the method, and permeability required practice with another person present. Bolin was the most technically precise student I had. If I explained the framework and the goal, he would work it until he had it, and then he could teach it to the others while I continued developing the range. A skill that had taken Xu years of unintentional practice to develop could be potentially taught in weeks.
That tracked with Principle five: Any principle that worked for one person should work for any person with the aptitude.
I thought about Xu saying "It requires someone willing to be still with you" and thought about Suyin and what our connection could bear fruit to, well, beyond the obvious factor of children, but more so in a cultivation sense.
On the ninth day, passing through a village that had been under Qinghe's prefecture two years ago, it made me think about what it would mean when the Western Reaches's territory had expanded and Hekou was no longer on the border where the outposts had delays.
I needed to have an answer for that, but for now, I had to school to build, and whatever came of that would be the groundwork for the eventuality of a Sect.
Hekou appeared on the seventeenth afternoon.
The double palisade wall appeared first, and it was taller than it had been when I'd left. Gao Ren must have decided in my absence that the eastern facing fence needed reinforcement.
The gate was open as I strolled through the front, but I immediately noticed that something was off.
The village was too quiet. People were present, moving through the ordinary afternoon, but their heads hung low as I passed by them. A cluster of people near the well stopped moving when I came through the gate.
An older woman I didn't recognize pressed her palms together and bowed her head as I passed, and then a man beside her did the same.
The Wei brothers were near the training ground entrance. Both of them turned when they heard the horse, and Duan met my eyes and looked away. Ma and Tao took a step forward and bowed deeply.
"Sorry, Pei Liang," he said. "We are sorry."
I was dismounted from my horse faster than the speed of thought.
The Pei house had a crowd around it. Fifteen, no, twenty people had gathered around the house with more than half of the faces being unfamiliar to me.
Hao appeared in the doorway.
He came toward me as I ran and he met me a few steps away from the house.
"What's going on? Who are all of these people?" I asked in between breaths, my heart was beating fast and even I hadn't known why.
"They're Mother's family." He kept his voice even, but it was cracking at the seams. "They are her cousins who migrated from Chenjia when they heard the news."
My heart sank and my lips turned dry, but I pressed on. "What news?"
He sighed and put his hand on my shoulder.
"Hao." My voice came out harder than I meant it to. "Just say it."
He looked me in the eyes.
"What I'm going to tell you is hard," he continued, but his eyes remained hard in spite of the tremor of his hand.
"Hao, I told you to just say it."
He looked down. When he looked up his jaw was set and his eyes were clear. I had never seen him look like this.
I heard a whimper beside the house and saw that Suyin was sitting against the wall with her knees drawn up.
"Mother has accepted her fate," Hao said. "She wishes to pass on."
Color faded from my vision, it was as if I was going blind all of a sudden, like I was walking through a tunnel.
My chest tightened and my throat closed up, I heard myself say it before I understood I was speaking...
"Wh — what did you say?"
Hao's fist balled tighter. He looked down at the ground between us, at the packed earth of the village he had built with our father's name and our mother's knowledge and everything the three of us had carried here.
"Mother has been holding on to see you," he said. "But she wishes to die in peace surrounded by family."