The stonemasons arrived on the third day of autumn.
Seven of them, from a Western Reaches contractor settlement two weeks west of Hekou, with two oxcarts of tools and enough dressed stone to begin three foundations. Their foreman was a compact woman named Ru who walked the training ground perimeter before speaking, pressed her heel into the soil at four points, and told me the northern flat was workable.
Gao Ren was already there. He had been waiting for the stonemasons the way he waited for ore shipments, standing at the northern edge of the flat with his arms folded.
He and Ru spent the first hour arguing about the cultivation hall's foundation depth, but by midday they were working off the same plan.
I left them to it and went to meet the Luan cousins.
They had been housed in the two buildings east of the Pei household since arriving in the days after Mother's burial.
Ten people total who had backgrounds as healers, farmers, and there was a carpenter named Luan Fen who had finished his assigned building in eleven days and was already asking what to do next. I had been managing the integration from a distance through.
They told me stories of Mother while I did their intake.
They knew the girl she had been in Chenjia, the apprentice who had been too serious for her age and then suddenly warm when she thought no one was watching, the one Sun Ai had called her best student while complaining that she asked too many questions. They had stories I had never heard. They produced them without being asked, over the rice and salted fish Tong Lian had sent over.
A woman named Luan Mei, the oldest of the cousins, told me that Mother had stolen a jar of preserved ginger from the kitchen as a girl and blamed it on the cat. I had not known there had been a cat. I had not known she had been the kind of child who stole things and blamed them on animals.
I found myself laughing at the thought it.
Luan Mei looked at me while I was still laughing and said, simply, "She wrote letters about you."
I asked what she said.
"That you were the difficult one," Luan Mei said. "Though she meant it as a compliment."
I believed that.
The integration work moved quickly. Luan Mei and a younger healer named Luan Shen took the clinic rotation alongside Liu Jun, which freed Suyin for the school preparation work she had been wanting to spend more time on. The three farming cousins joined the labor rotation immediately and one of them, a quiet man named Luan Guo, improved the eastern field drainage within a week by redirecting two irrigation lines.
Luan Fen the carpenter had already begun on the classroom building before the stonemasons arrived. I had given him the dimensions and the load requirements and he had looked at the plan for no more than five minutes before he memorized the layout.
With the influx of skilled workers, I was able to work more on the curriculum layout.
The cultivation hall on the northern flat was accessible from zone one, with capacity for thirty students in group sessions.
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The classroom at the gate end of the training ground, listed in the construction plan submitted to Administrator Wen's office as a supply manifest reading room for military practitioners, was what I had been looking forward to the most.
The spirit stone stayed under the floorboards. I was not ready to explain it yet and the construction timeline didn't require it.
Three weeks into the build, Hao found me at the river when the sun was setting by the river.
He sat next to me on the bank while I kept running the channel work I'd been doing, the slow circulation that traced the ambient signature, feeling the river's field the way you felt weather coming before you saw it. My mind was adrift attempting to categorize what my current strength level was. Would this be considered Qi Refining? It was hard for me to tell, especially since I had refined my Qi flow through my Mai, but I hadn’t pulled ambient Qi into my Dantian yet, if I even knew how to feel for it.
Hao waited until was done with my rumination before asking, "What are we going to call it?"
"The school?”
"It needs a name," He picked up a stone and turned it in his hand.
"We're not naming it after ourselves," I said to him pointedly.
"I wasn't going to suggest that." He threw the stone and it skipped four times.
I looked at the river. At the fork where the two currents met and moved together south. The geography that had given the village its name and given the village's people their best training ground as well.
"The River Fork Academy," I said finally.
Hao turned the name over in his mind, and then he smiled at me and nodded. “River Fork Academy, huh? I like it.”
"And what’s even better,” I began to say while I stretched my arms out, “Is that the stonemasons are ahead of schedule.”
I thought about Luan Fen, who had arrived with nothing but a cloth satchel and a family name and had immediately begun contributing to the school’s foundation. They truly wanted to be apart of somethin bigger than themselves.
"Mother wrote letters about us. Apparently she used to give them to any wandering merchants that were headed back that way.”
So that’s how she did it, I thought to myself.
"I know. Luan Mei told me as well."
He smiled. We sat with the river for a while, both of us probably thinking the same things, about how much we still missed our Mother, and how being around her clan only made that pain worse some days, while other days it made it far easier to bare.
"Come inside when you're done, Wei Suyin wants to see you," he said. He stood and walked back toward the village, and the dark closed behind him, and the river kept moving.
Suyin was still at the table when I came in.
She had the Luan family documentation spread in order, chronological from the left, margin annotations in compressed script, the pages weighted at the corners with two ink stones and a small knife she used for herb preparation.
She had been cross-referencing the cousin intake records against the Western Reaches administrative framework that Wen's office had supplied three years ago, building a formal record that would satisfy a review without exposing anyone.
I sat across from her and pulled the cultivation hall layout toward me. We worked without speaking, which had become the ordinary texture of evenings like this over the weeks.
I looked at the stack of records she had organized, the intake documents, and the family histories the cousins had provided.
"How long did this take you?" I asked her.
"Several evenings." She moved to the next page. "The Luan cousins helped. Luan Mei has a family ledger going back four generations. I wanted the clinic records to reflect that as well."
I looked at the notation she had drafted. She had understood what the records needed before I had. This was a pattern I was accustomed to and had stopped finding surprising.
In my previous life I had done this kind of work alone. Sat with borrowed lamps and old construction reports from three different administrative periods, trying to understand ancient systems without anyone to cross-reference my work with, and without anyone across the table to pass a completed page to.
"Hao and I decided to name the school ‘The River Fork Academy,’" I said.
She looked at me. "That's the name?"
I nodded.
She considered it. "It feels right," she said after some thought. She returned to the records. "What is the school going to be documented as?"
"A school of cultivation and martial arts serving the Western Reaches military and the surrounding civilian population."
She looked up at me and rightfully suspected that there was more to it than that. "And what is it actually?"
"A communal space for people to learn," I explained.
Suyin picked up her brush and wrote the school's name at the top of the intake record in her precise handwriting.
River Fork Academy. Established in the third year of the Western Reaches eastern contract, Hekou settlement.
She set the brush down and looked at it.
The River Fork Academy existed on paper now.