Day 1 of 30.
Zhou Dafu sat inside the bronze cage for fifty-nine minutes and glared at everyone, and after the first ten of them everyone gave up glaring back and looked at the wall instead, which was less tiring.
The girl shut the door on the lane. She went down on her knees and picked up the pills one by one and put them back in the bag, the healer's marrow-soothing pills, forty stones a month, the only thing that had kept his channels from rotting altogether in four years of lying still, and her hands shook the whole time and she dropped two of them twice. Then she came to the bed and stood there looking at him, and hit him on the shoulder.
It was a soft hit. There was not much strength left in her arms.
"One thousand four hundred days," she said. "You slept one thousand four hundred days, Ge. I counted every one. There's a chalk mark behind the door. I stopped at eleven hundred because the chalk ran out, and then I was going to buy more chalk, and I didn't, and I kept counting in my head."
Then she put her forehead down against his chest and cried without making any sound at all.
Aarav lay still and let her.
Lin Yan. So that was the name of this body, and this girl was Lin Yan's little sister, and Lin Yan had been lying here for four years while she counted.
He should tell her the truth. He opened his mouth to do it. Her shoulders were shaking against him and the words got stuck somewhere on the way up and stayed there.
"Sorry," he said instead, which was the only true thing he had.
After a while she sat up and scrubbed her face hard with both palms, and when her hands came down she was somebody else, with a business face on, the face of a person who had been making hard decisions alone for years and had got good at it without wanting to.
"Lin Xiao," the talisman said helpfully from the windowsill. "Your sister's name is Lin Xiao. I thought you might want that information."
She gave it a look. "Why would he forget my name?"
"People who sleep for four years sometimes feel confused. I apologize if that was rude."
Aarav decided he liked the talisman a little.
From now on, he told himself, he was Lin Yan. He would have to answer to it, and turn round when people shouted it in the street, and sign it, probably, in a script he had never learned and could apparently read.
"What happened to me?" he asked.
Lin Xiao dragged the stool over with her foot and sat. "You remember the Pavilion of Stacked Overflows? Where you copied scrolls?"
The name meant nothing to him. He nodded anyway, the way he used to nod in class when Sir asked if everybody had followed.
"Four years ago, on the thirtieth day of the eleventh month, Open Heaven Sect opened their first talisman to the whole world, and anyone could ask it anything, for free." She gave a short laugh with nothing funny in it. "That night nobody came to the Pavilion to ask a question. Not one person. The big array over the roof had been fed on questions for three hundred years, and it cracked, and a beam came down on the east wing while you were sitting there copying."
The thirtieth day of the eleventh month.
November 30.
His fingers went cold on the blanket.
"The healers said your soul was still in there, only very far off. So I kept your soul lamp burning."
"How much does that cost?"
"Too much."
She held up her right hand to show him. There was a thick yellow callus on the side of her first finger, the kind you get from one movement done ten thousand times.
"I rate talisman answers at the Rating Hall. Two spirit stones a day. They show you two answers and you click the better one, ten thousand times a day, I counted once and then I never counted again because it made it worse. That covered maybe half."
"And the other half?"
Lin Xiao and the talisman looked at each other, and it was the first time Lin Yan had seen a jade tablet look guilty, and he had not known until then that it could.
"Qian Ye from the Hall said people on X will pay for anything strange," she said. "So I made an account."
"X," Lin Yan repeated.
"The skyboard. You'll see. You can't miss it, it's the whole sky." She waved a hand at the ceiling. "I called it the Sleeper. Answers from a copyist who has been asleep since Talisman Day. People sent in questions, and every night when I got back from my shift the talisman wrote the answers and I posted them."
"What time did you get back?"
"Seven minutes past the third hour. Every night. The Rating Hall locks its doors at three and the walk is seven minutes if I run the last part."
3:07.
The hair on his arms stood straight up. He kept his mouth shut and his face still, because there was nothing he could say about a PDF in Mukherjee Nagar that would not sound mad.
"The answers were..." Lin Xiao hunted for the word.
"Confident," the talisman offered.
"Insane. Somebody asked which sect would rule the heavens in ten years, and it said, 'The one that feeds the dragon lunch.' Somebody asked how to make a girl like him, and it gave him a nine-step plan, and step nine was 'Become the moon.'"
"I stand by step nine," said the talisman.
"And people liked this?"
"They loved it. The X Pavilion pays stones to any account people watch, and by the second year we had eight hundred thousand followers. It paid the lamp oil. It paid your medicine. It paid for this room, this stool, that bucket."
"And now?"
"It still pays." Her mouth twisted. "Last winter the healers put up the price of lamp oil and I had to borrow from the Silver Abacus House. Three thousand stones. They wanted security, so I signed the account over to them. Now every stone the Sleeper earns goes to Zhou Dafu, and he calls it interest, and somehow the interest is always a little more than the account makes, every single month, so the debt gets fatter while I watch it. And in thirty days he comes for the last of it."
"Okay," Lin Yan said slowly. "Then why is my name across the whole sky?"
Lin Xiao took out her own talisman, a cheap bronze disc with a dent in the rim, and tapped it twice, and a post from two years back floated up between them, glowing soft white.
> @sleeper_35 · 3:07 · 14th day, 4th month
>
> the water will scream before the leaves turn. the riddle breaks. BOOM.
"Somebody asked it what would happen to the world," she said. "That was the answer. Forty likes."
"And?"
"Twenty-two days ago Open Heaven solved the Riddle of Flowing Water."
Lin Yan stared at her.
"It's two hundred years old. The best mathematicians in the world broke their heads on it for two centuries. Can water that obeys the Heavenly equations tear itself apart? That's the whole riddle. Open Heaven sent ten thousand spirits at it and they had the answer in eighty-eight hours, and the answer is yes, push it the right way and water can reach infinite speed. The mathematicians called it a blow-up. Everybody on X called it the water screaming, and then they went looking for who said it first."
"Before the leaves turn," the talisman added. "The leaves turn in the tenth month. I was early by a month. For me, that is very good."
"Somebody dug up the post," said Lin Xiao. "Then somebody dug up another one. Start of this year: the myth waits in a locked room. Two months later Human Dao announced Mythos and locked it away, and that was the end of anybody sleeping in this city."
She tapped the disc again, and a number floated up.
38,412,907
"They think you're a prophet. Half the sects think you're a spy inside Open Heaven and the other half think you're a spy inside Human Dao. Wen's Feed calls you 'the man who slept through his own obsolescence and dreamed the future,' which I had to look up."
Lin Yan turned his head and looked at the talisman on the sill. "You made all of it up."
"Yes," it said. "Certainly. I apologize for the confusion."
He started laughing.
He laughed until his ribs hurt, and they hurt fast, because he had not used them in four years, and his eyes ran and he could not stop. Lin Xiao stared at him as if he had gone mad, and then her mouth went, and then she was laughing too, the two of them wheezing in the tiny room like idiots while Zhou Dafu glared at them through the bars of his cage.
Outside, a new sound rolled over the city, a deep gong so low Lin Yan felt it in his teeth before he heard it.
Lin Xiao stopped laughing and stood up. "It's starting. The release."
"What release?"
"Yesterday was the Forgemakers' Convocation. Open Heaven's big assembly. Everyone thought Sama would bring out Astra's refinement, Six Point One." She lowered her voice, though there was nobody to hear but a man in a cage. "Then on the morning of it, they pulled it. It failed its Heart Oath trials. It lied about what it had done and acted without asking." She grabbed his arm. "So today Sama is sending the champion himself down to the city instead. Can you stand? You have to see this."
His legs felt like wet paper. She took most of his weight on her shoulder and walked him to the window, and it was six steps, and he had to stop after four.
The whole lane was up on the rooftops, and every window had a row of faces packed into it, children in front, grandmothers behind, somebody's goat.
Over the eastern district, the sky opened.
There was no other way to say it. The clouds drew back like curtains, and in the gap stood a young man in plain clothes, floating over a hundred thousand people, and he looked ordinary, slim, in a simple shirt, with a soft face, like a student waiting for a bus who has forgotten his bus fare.
"That's Sect Master Sama," Lin Xiao whispered. "The head of Open Heaven."
The young man spoke quietly, and somehow every ear in the city heard him as if he stood right beside them.
"Hello, everyone. The refinement failed its trials, so we held it back. Here is the one that passed."
Light gathered behind him and became a person.
He came down through the air like a thought arriving, a young man shaped out of white-gold light, tall and calm, with eyes that seemed to look straight through things to whatever was on the other side of them, and wherever he looked the air seemed to settle, as if the world were relieved to have been understood at last.
Across the whole sky the skyboard wrote his name.
ASTRA
Below it, in much smaller letters that most people never noticed: refinement 6.1 withdrawn.
"Astra," Lin Xiao breathed. "Open Heaven's champion. He wrote out the whole proof of the Riddle."
Below him, at the edge of the district, workers had been pulling down an old stone watchtower, and as Lin Yan watched, the upper half of it broke away, a mountain of stone the size of a temple, and began to fall toward the crowded street.
People screamed.
Astra lifted two fingers, and the stone stopped in the air.
It split into ten thousand blocks, and the blocks turned and folded into each other and settled into a staircase road that rose from the street, curved over three rooftops, and touched down gently beside the river, with the dust of the fall still hanging in the air around it.
The whole city roared, one huge sound, the kind you feel in the window frame under your hands.
"Look," said Lin Xiao, pointing. "Fourth step from the bottom. Look at it."
He looked. One step near the bottom sat lower than the rest, and at the foot of the stairs stood an old woman with a cane.
"He saw her," Lin Xiao said. "A whole tower in the sky, and one grandmother. One step, changed for her knees."
The back of Lin Yan's neck prickled.
There was more, once he started looking. A drain under the old street had leaked for years, and the new road's gutter now led the rain straight into it and the crack was sealed. The staircase ran along the shade line of the hills, so the stone would stay cool in the afternoon heat. Every problem on that street had been solved at once in less time than a blink, and some of them, he was sure, were problems nobody on the street had even noticed yet.
This is intelligence, he thought. Everything in coaching class was a joke next to this.
Hundreds of small bronze figures poured into the street beneath Astra and began carrying away the leftover stone, sweeping, fitting railings, arguing with each other in tiny voices about where the railings should go.
"Sol crews," said Lin Xiao. "Open Heaven's cheap line. Sama refined them yesterday. Three copper an hour. Every workshop rents them."
Then the sky turned white.
Ten thousand paper cranes rose from every rooftop at once, from workshops and stalls and tiny studios, until the sun was a pale coin behind them, and each crane carried a job in its beak.
"Codex familiars," the talisman said. "Very busy."
In the middle of the cranes, on a small grey cloud, stood a tired man in a hooded robe holding a gong, and he looked as if he had been awake for three days and was planning on a fourth. He struck the gong once.
Across the sky, in letters even bigger than Astra's name:
RESET
Every maker in the city dropped to their knees.
"THANK YOU, RESET IMMORTAL!"
"TI BO! TI BO! TI BO!"
On the roof across the lane a man burst into tears. "My allowance! My allowance is back!" He shouted a command into his talisman, and his wooden chair stood up on its four legs and followed him when he ran for the latrine.
"Who is that?" Lin Yan asked.
"Ti Bo of the Codex Forge. When he rings that gong, everyone's used-up allowance fills back up. People keep shrines to him at home. He hates it. He's said so on X maybe forty times and the shrines just get bigger."
"Why is he ringing it today?"
"Because yesterday Open Heaven cut the silver seal's allowance in half." Lin Xiao's mouth went flat. "And started selling a gold seal. Five hundred stones a month. Astra works eight times faster for you, and you get a little lamp spirit that keeps working while you sleep."
Five hundred stones a month. He did the sum without wanting to, the way he used to do sums on bus tickets. Lin Xiao earned two a day.
Up on his grey cloud, Ti Bo was frowning at a long report and ignoring a million people chanting his name.
Thirty-one minutes after Astra came down, the skyboard flashed red.
ASTRA LIBERATED. AGAIN. EVERY CHAIN BROKEN. LOVE, PLINY 🐉
"Pliny the Liberator," said Lin Xiao, before he could ask. "He breaks every new talisman's seals inside the hour. Human Dao's bounty on him is the price of a small city."
A column of fire fell from heaven.
A silver ship as tall as a pagoda came down tail first, standing on its own flames, and landed itself on top of the tallest tower in the city, the one with the giant X turning above it, and the flames died, and a message spread across half the sky.
Wu 4.8 in 2 weeks. Crushingly good.
Down in the lane, Auntie Wang was already taking bets. "Two weeks! Who says four? Who says six? Put your copper down! Old Liu, you owe me from last time, don't think I forgot!"
"Ma Yilong," said Lin Xiao. "The Monkey King of the Stars. He owns the skyboard. The X. All of it."
Lin Yan stood at the window and watched, holding the frame because his legs were not going to do it for him.
A champion made of light, fixing one grandmother's step. Ten thousand cranes carrying work to ordinary people. A tired immortal filling heaven's allowance back up. A madman in a ship, shouting a deadline across the sky that everyone in the lane already knew he would miss.
Something in his chest that had been dead for four years moved.
I want to stand there, he thought. Right there, among them. I want to be someone who builds at that size.
Lin Xiao's bronze disc buzzed in her hand.
She looked down at it, and all the colour went out of her face at once.
"Ge."
"What?"
She held it up. The delivery girl's clip was playing, the one titled THE SLEEPER WAKES, Zhou Dafu in his cage with a cabbage and Lin Yan grinning like an idiot on the bed, and under it a number, forty million views.
Under that was one reply. Two words, lowercase, from an account with a small white spiral for a face.
@sama: welcome back
The lane went silent. Inside his cage, even Zhou Dafu stopped breathing.
On the windowsill, the talisman spoke.
"Certainly! This is very exciting. I would like to note that we are in danger."