16: The Snake at the Fountain

I logged the Hu Liansheng sighting in the small dorm notebook that night at eleven-forty IRL, with my back against the headboard, with the cradle band off and coiled on the desk, with the helmet on the floor beside my bed where I had set it down still warm from a four-hour grind that had taken Crescent Moon Slash from one hundred mastery to one hundred and twelve and had earned me, secondarily, eight Aberrant Yellow-Tusk teeth that I was going to sell to the Jianghai herbalist NPC at dawn for a clean four silver each.

The notebook had been the To Save / To Bury notebook since launch morning. It had pages for both columns and not enough pages for either. I had been adding small marginalia to To Save in pencil and small primary entries to To Bury in pen, because the To Bury entries needed the visual permanence and the To Save entries — the dog, the sister's tuition, the mother's stress — were going to grow in unpredictable directions and would need to be erased and re-written.

Tonight I added a clean second page to To Bury. The second page was for the names that were not yet apex names but that were nodes in the apex tree. Hu Liansheng went on the second page. So did the names of the Tianxia recruitment cell from Manager Fang's café, none of which I had heard but whose physical descriptions I noted in fine pencil — the pale-grey-blazer woman, the two flat-faced men. So did Liu Sanpao. So did the unidentified pale-tunic swordsman who had said *beautiful form* on the path west of the gully. The pale-tunic swordsman was, by the third re-reading of my notes, almost certainly not on the To Bury list — the murmur had been too dryly delivered to be hostile — but I added him anyway with a small notation: *unknown affiliation, suspended.*

The page filled half-up before midnight. I closed it.

I lay back on the lumpy pillow.

The cracked-egg ceiling stain was directly above me. I had stopped consciously avoiding it on the third night. Looking at it had become its own small marker — proof that the ceiling was the ceiling and the morning had not, despite five years of practice, dissolved back into the cockpit at any of the recent plausible exit points.

The phone buzzed.

*Wanqing (text): Are you up.*

*Cangtian (text): Up.*

*Wanqing (text): I am turning my desk lamp on. Look out your window in three minutes if you want.*

I did not move for forty seconds. Then I got up and went to the window. I waited.

Across the courtyard, at her own window, the desk lamp clicked on. Wanqing was sitting at the desk with the white hoodie up around her shoulders and her hair loose and a textbook open in front of her and a pen between her teeth. She had pulled the curtain back. She raised one hand without looking up from the textbook. The hand stayed up for the small space of three breaths. Then the hand fell back to the page.

I lifted my own hand to my own window. The dorm was dark behind me. She did not see the hand because she was looking at the textbook, but the gesture was the gesture and the gesture counted whether it was seen or not. I lowered my hand.

The phone buzzed again.

*Wanqing (text): The grind tonight had a different rhythm. You were dialing something up. Tell me when you can. Sleep.*

I read the message twice.

I typed: *Tomorrow.*

I sent it.

I closed the curtain. I lay back down on the lumpy pillow. The cracked-egg stain was still there.

I slept for five and a half hours.

***

In the morning I sold the eight Aberrant Yellow-Tusk teeth to the Jianghai herbalist NPC at the eastern temple ward for four silver each — thirty-two silver, clean — and walked back across the city at the eight-AM in-game sun-cycle to meet Wanqing at the south gate.

She was waiting on the lower step. She had retuned the avatar a fourth time. The pale silver-grey tunic had a small additional clasp at the shoulder that I knew was a launch-week Lv-12 cosmetic option she had unlocked between last night's logout and this morning's login. The freckles were on. The collar was loose. The hair was up in the pinned ponytail again, a fresh in-game hairpin glinting at the back of her head.

She did not stand up as I came down the step.

"Cangtian."

"Mn."

"Sit."

I sat.

The south-gate plaza was busier than the central plaza had been last night — morning rush, players dispatching for the day's runs, three crier voices overlapping at the far side, the small NPC kid Mu Lan running her cherry-blossom side quest at her usual booth. The plaza floor was warm under the avatar's seat through the launch-week pass-through. Wanqing did not say anything for a moment. She pulled a small in-game mooncake out of her pack — one of the launch-week starter rations — and broke it in half. She offered me the half.

I took it.

She bit her half. She chewed.

"Question one," she said.

"Mn."

"Last night you went to the central plaza. I logged in at ten and you were not there. You came to the grasslands at ten-fifteen with a face. The face was your *I have just seen something that I am going to do something about* face. Cangtian, I have known that face since we were eleven years old when the boy three rows over tripped me on the playground. I am asking you what you saw. I am not asking what you are going to do about it. I am only asking what you saw."

"I saw a man put his hand on a woman's arm at the central fountain."

"I see."

"She stepped back. She handled it."

"You logged the man's name in your head."

"Yes."

"He is on the list."

"He is on the list."

"Mn."

She did not ask whose arm. She did not ask whether I knew the woman. She did not ask any of the four follow-up questions that were sitting in obvious order in the air between us. She finished her half of the mooncake.

"Question two," she said.

"Mn."

"You logged out of the grind early last night. You logged back into the auction at midnight. You sold three Crescent Moon mastery scrolls to a buyer in the Tianxia outer ledger. The buyer's ID was Hu — something. I cannot remember the second character. The sale price was twenty percent below market. You sold them at the discount because you wanted the buyer to take all three. You wanted the buyer to buy from you specifically. The buyer is the same name as the man at the fountain, isn't it."

I did not answer immediately.

I had sold the three scrolls to Hu Liansheng's outer ledger account at twelve-fifteen IRL last night. I had done it through a deliberately layered chain of three intermediate auction listings that the Tianyu engine routed through a buyer-anonymity protocol but that the payout source was, on the seller-side, recoverable. I had recovered the source. I had then re-listed the scrolls at the discount specifically so that Hu Liansheng's ledger would see them and snap them up. The discount had been bait. The scrolls were the kind of mastery item a Lv-14 outer verified Tianxia field operator would buy in bulk for distribution to his outer recruits. I had sold him three. He had taken all three. He had, by accepting them, opened a small one-way tradeable trust line between his ledger and mine that the Tianyu auction protocols required for repeat-buyer discounts.

Wanqing had read the entire thread off the public auction logs.

I had not realized, until just now, that Wanqing read the public auction logs as a habit.

"Yes," I said.

"Cangtian."

"Mn."

"You opened a trust line with him."

"I did."

"You are going to use it."

"I am going to use it."

"How."

"He is going to keep buying from me. He is going to keep buying from me at a discount. He is going to recommend me to his immediate superior as a reliable independent supplier. His immediate superior is going to send a buyer of higher rank to me. That buyer of higher rank is going to attempt, at some point, to negotiate an exclusive supply arrangement. The exclusive supply arrangement is going to be the conversation in which I will learn the names of two or three of his immediate superiors and their schedules and their preferred private instances and their auction-account weights. The exclusive supply arrangement, when I refuse it, is going to be the moment I am formally moved from *Refused — Provisional* to *Refused — Hostile* on the Tianxia internal ledger. Until then, every silver they pay me is a silver I can use to buy my father's medication."

She watched me.

"That is the plan."

"That is the plan."

"All right." She broke the second half of the mooncake into halves of its own and gave me a quarter back. "I have one more question."

"Mn."

"The woman at the fountain."

"Mn."

"You have a face for her too. The face is older than the *I have just seen something* face. The face is the *I have spent five years being cautious about this person* face. Which I have not seen on you before, because in my IRL knowledge of you there is no person you have spent five years being cautious about. So I am inferring, gently, that the woman is in the dream."

I did not answer.

She did not push.

She bit her quarter mooncake.

"Cangtian. You do not have to tell me her name. You do not have to tell me anything about her. I am only telling you that I noticed. I am also telling you that I am not going to be jealous of a woman in a dream you have not had with me. That is not how that works. The dream is the dream. I am here. I am eating your mooncake. I am sitting on the south-gate step at eight in the morning of a Sunday and I am about to do another Pioneer cycle with you. Please continue to manage the woman at the fountain at whatever distance you have decided to manage her at, and please continue to not be a person who lies to me about the things I notice."

"Wanqing."

"Mn."

"You are very precisely managing me."

"I am managing you precisely. You are easier to manage when the management is precise."

"Yes."

"Mn."

She stood up. She brushed nothing off her tunic. She slung the bow.

"Iron Hills. Cycle two. Wolves. Move."

I stood.

We moved.

***

The ridge climb at full morning was easier than the ridge climb at near-noon yesterday. The launch-week pass-through carried the small fresh after-rain smell along the rocks; the artists had pushed an overnight precipitation event into the launch-week atmosphere mod. Wanqing climbed with her hood down. The tunic clung along her back where the after-rain humidity had dampened it; the line of the spine was visible through the silver-grey weave for the small minute before the launch-week sun dried it. I let my eyes go where they were already going for one full breath. I held my eyes on the ridge.

She turned her head over her shoulder without breaking stride.

"You're staring at my spine."

"I am looking at the route."

"Cangtian. We are running at full daily-treat deficit. Yesterday you used both yesterday's and tomorrow's. You owe me an extra bow. You also owe me an extra apology and an extra mooncake by the end of the week."

"I will pay all three."

"Mn."

She turned back to the climb.

We crested the ridge, took the wolf clan, dropped the alpha clean. The cycle two tooth slid into the quest slot. The chain quest pinged the small +1 AGI permanent as the cycle reward.

> *Ding!* [Chain Quest Update: *The Severing Path* — Cycle 2/60 complete. Reward: +1 AGI permanent.]

Wanqing watched the system message scroll along the bottom edge of my UI from the bonded view. She did not say anything.

We descended the ridge by a different path — I had picked it, because the eastern descent was less exposed than the southern one and would not put us back inside Liu Sanpao's spyglass arc. Halfway down, on a small flat overlook above a sparse stand of pine, my chat scroll lit faintly with the small grey ping of a private message.

I opened it.

*MoonShadow: I have been told that the Pioneer of the Path title has only ever appeared three times in the Tianyu Tech beta history, twice on the Beijing internal server and once on a closed-test server in Shenzhen. None of those three players have surfaced on any production server. The title appears not to exist in the launch-week public datasets. I am writing to ask you, only, how you found it. — M.*

I read the message.

I read it again.

It was, by the casual standards of player-to-player private messages on the third day of launch, an extraordinarily well-researched message. Bai Yueran had spent her Saturday evening — between the fountain incident and my morning meat-skewer turn-in — pulling internal Tianyu Tech beta-test datasets that no public-facing freshman finance major in launch-week should have had access to.

She had access. She had access through her family's holdings in a Tianyu-adjacent equities portfolio that I had not, in old timeline, learned about until late in the second year of the game, and that her father's investment vehicle had quietly held since launch-day pre-IPO.

She was already pulling research on me.

I closed the message without replying.

Wanqing, half a step ahead of me on the descent, said without looking back, "Mn?"

"Nothing. Public chat. Auction notification."

"Liar."

"Wanqing."

"I am letting you lie. I am noting the lie. The notebook in your head is not the only notebook." She did not turn around. "Move. I want noodles before noon."

We moved.

At the foot of the ridge I opened the message a second time. I drafted a reply. I deleted it. I drafted a second. I deleted it.

I did not, in the end, reply.

I would reply tomorrow. Or the day after. The reply would be three sentences long, would tell her nothing she did not already know, and would be the second move in a long slow dance I had not played the first time around with the woman who had eventually put her hand in mine, in old timeline, in the hospital corridor outside her mother's cardiac surgery, the night before the engagement to Lu Yifan had been formally announced.

I closed the message.

I caught up with Wanqing at the mule.

She was eating an apple. She did not look at me.

"Cangtian."

"Mn."

"You drafted a reply."

"I did."

"You did not send it."

"I did not."

"Good." She offered me half the apple. I took it. "We will eat noodles. Then we will scout a tank candidate. Then I will make you do an essay about a person who has changed in a way I did not expect, and you will write it about yourself, and you will pick honest over brave. Move."

I almost broke step.

"Wanqing."

"Mn."

"Where did you hear that."

"What."

"*Pick honest over brave.*"

She turned her head. "Was it a thing."

"It was a thing I told my sister yesterday."

"Mn." She bit the apple. "Then your sister and I will get along very well. Move."

I moved.

The mule plodded south. The pre-noon sun was on my face. The chat scroll was quiet. The chain quest icon glowed quietly. The small unread MoonShadow message sat in the sidebar like a folded letter on a desk.

Wanqing's spine, against my chest, was warm.