Morning arrived as if the mountain had practiced it all night.
The mark beneath Yinlei's collarbone held its steady warmth.
Stay, it said, and that was enough.
Lin Yunyao set two cups on the root of the Seventh Pine and unwrapped a cloth bundle. Three small breads waited, browned where the pan had argued and then agreed. She left space for a third cup.
"The box?" she asked.
"In the storeroom," Yinlei said. "We'll bring it when the house is ready to listen."
Elder Shi Tianjing climbed the last steps with weather in his knees. He greeted the cups before the people, as always.
"You will be asked for something foolish at the wrong time," he said mildly. "Say yes if the house is watching. Say no if the audience is."
"Which will it be today?" Yunyao asked.
"Yes," Shi said, and almost smiled.
They walked to the kitchens. Warmth breathed from clay pots. The cook shoved a basket of scallions into Yinlei's hands and pointed at a board that had seen better knives.
Li Wei waited by the window with a plain fan and bread wrapped in a square of clean cloth. He bowed to Yunyao, embarrassed to still be a student and relieved to be one.
"Ask the air to consider your wrist," Yunyao said. "Not to obey you. To consider."
He tried. The fan quivered like an idea that had not learned its name yet.
"Slower," she said. "You are not a storm."
The first bowls went out. Steam wrote brief characters over the yard, then wiped itself clean before anyone could decide they meant more than breakfast. In the corner, a junior stirred too quickly and splashed congee on his sleeve; he laughed at himself before anyone else could, which is a good habit in a house.
Yinlei salted once and stopped before the pot believed it was a river.
On the inner path, Elder Wu stood with a ledger under his arm, as if reminding the sun that lists are a kind of weather. He did not greet.
"Council at midmorning," he said. "The Speaker has requested a… demonstration."
"Whose?" Yunyao asked.
"Ours," Wu said. "He brings an oath bell and wishes to see whether a house like ours remembers how to kneel."
Elder Shi's mouth wanted to argue and chose patience instead. "We will not forget how to stand while remembering how to bow," he said.
They did not have to wait long. The ward thread plucked over the eastern terrace. The pressure that followed did not erase names today; it thinned faces. Eyes slid off eyes. People forgot how to meet each other without apology.
"Walk slower," Yunyao said to the air and the disciples inside it. "If you arrive late, the house will still be here."
Yinlei carried a pot to the practice yard and set it on a low stool in the sun. He ladled three bowls and left one space for the fourth. He did not call lightning. He called breakfast.
The pressure thinned the way smoke thins when rain decides to be useful.
Li Wei stood at the edge, fan steadying. He breathed the way Yunyao breathed. The house kept watching.
By midmorning the council corridor had remembered that it could be a room. Elders took their places. Servants set a table to one side as if policy and soup had agreed to sit near each other without quarreling.
The Speaker came without escort. Grey robe. Gold eyes. The bell in his hand looked like silence pretending to be metal.
"Feng Yinlei," he said.
"Speaker," Yinlei replied.
"I have brought a bell," the man said, and lifted it an inch. He did not ring it. "I have also brought a question. Will your house bind itself to stay neutral when the ear you worship decides to open?"
"We do not worship an ear," Elder Wu said dryly. "We feed a house."
"Then let the house answer," the Speaker said calmly. "Let it answer while standing."
He moved the bell a fraction. The corridor felt its bones reconsider. Knees wanted to practice remembering the floor.
Someone else would be standing, he had warned.
Elder Wu's weight shifted. Not to kneel. To surrender balance.
Yinlei did not ask permission. He stepped forward and put a hand under Wu's elbow the way one corrects a friend's coat without making a speech. He looked past him to the servants.
"Bring the stool," he said. "The three-legged one."
They brought it. Yinlei set it behind Wu—not to make him sit, but to give the room a back. He nodded at Yunyao.
She opened the fan and matched her wrist to breath—hers, not the bell's—and tapped the fan's spine once against her palm. A beat. Not a command. A memory.
"Bow if you mean it," Elder Shi said into the corridor. "Stand if you mean it more."
The Speaker's bell pressed. It wanted an oath that looked like a posture.
Yinlei knelt.
It was not submission. It was furniture. He slid the stool half a palm to the left, where a back would feel like a wall instead of an edge. He stood again. He did not hurry.
He lifted his right hand and shaped the smallest seal of agreement he knew—the one that asks air to be a room. He set it down between the bell and the stool like a mat.
He turned his head. "Kitchen," he said to a passing junior. "Two bowls. Bread if it's there. Salt if the cook looks at you kindly."
The junior ran and returned with the impossible. He set the bowls on the corridor's wide sill and left a space for the third.
"Eat like you plan to stand," Yunyao told the two disciples nearest the door. They were suddenly very busy doing exactly that.
The pressure pushed. It wanted magnificence. It found soup.
The Speaker watched without blinking. "You will not ring another day," he said to Yinlei, voice polite as a knife put down on purpose. "Do you intend to build every room slower than I can empty it?"
"No," Yinlei said. "We intend to keep a chair empty for you and let you decide whether you want to sit like a person."
Something very small changed in the Speaker's posture, the way a shore changes when a wave chooses not to perform.
He moved the bell a fraction more.
Elder Wu's knees tried to argue with the floor again.
Yinlei set his palm on Wu's back, right where a door would be if people had doors. "Lift while you turn," he said to him softly, and Wu—annoyed to learn that bodies obey carpenters—shifted his weight as if opening a stubborn latch. His balance found itself without having to kneel to do it.
Li Wei stepped forward at the edge of the crowd and matched Yunyao's beat with his fan, imperfect but honest. The corridor's breath learned the new meter. The bell had no room left to be impressive in.
The Speaker let the bell fall still. "Your house has learned to be loud," he said. "I will ask to be a guest in it."
"We will leave a chair," Elder Shi said, and his smile was winter and decent. "We will not leave our names outside."
The Speaker inclined his head as a person does when polite things have run out and something else should begin. He left without pretending to vanish.
The corridor remembered its job. A servant spilled soy on the stone and swore softly, and the world went on.
"Boundary," Elder Wu said after a breath, as if surprising himself. "Now. Take what does not need applause."
They stopped by the storeroom. Yinlei lifted while he turned the key. The door remembered how to be reasonable. He took the small black box. He did not test the hairline crack. He took nothing else.
At the arch, the stone had written words and changed its mind. It rested from telling people what they already knew. Yinlei touched the cold with his left palm and set his right over the mark.
Ask first.
"What do you want?" he asked the ear, the way hands ask grain whether the river is stubborn today.
Down, it said.
They descended. The room beneath had spent another day becoming what it was. The trough held water to purpose. The floor waited without hurry.
Yinlei set the box on the lip of the trough. He wrote with chalk on the slate and propped it against the stone.
Leave a seat.
He did not open the box.
He did not explain the box.
He placed a small three-legged stool—borrowed from the kitchen on their way out, carried because houses deserve continuity—beside the trough. Its legs splayed the way honest things do when they expect to be used.
Qingxue stood within the crystal above. She did not need to speak for the room to hear her approval. Her eyes settled on the stool, then on the box, then on Yinlei's hands.
"Surprise," she said, and managed to make the word kind.
The bell arrived, not as metal but as rule. The boundary pressed the water, tested the chalk, asked the box to justify itself.
Yunyao set the drum on her thigh and tapped once. She did not try to drown anything. She showed the room where time was.
Yinlei put his hand on the stool's seat and moved it a palm to the right. The bell found a posture instead of an argument.
It thinned.
It left without the drama of being defeated.
The ear listened.
Up, it said. And—quietly now, like a person trying a word they aren't sure will be welcomed—sit.
Yinlei did not sit.
He turned the stool toward the crystal and left it empty on purpose.
"For the guest who will choose to be a person," he said.
Qingxue's mouth changed the way a smile begins in a room that has not made a habit of them. "You will bring bread again," she said.
"And salt," he answered.
"And something you didn't plan to tell me," she added.
"I will," he said, and surprised himself by knowing exactly what. He did not say it.
He reached into his sleeve and took out a small paper folded twice—the letter Shi had given him in the morning. He had read his own yesterday; this was different. He opened it. Not to read aloud. To see the single line Elder Shi had written in a hand that had built student after student.
Do not confuse privacy with secrecy.
He put it back. The room accepted that too.
They climbed to the arch. Elder Shi waited where shadow turns to hallway. "Someone else was standing," he said without asking who. "Good."
Elder Wu stood with his ledger and no bell inside his bones. He looked like a man who had rediscovered a disobedient door and forgiven it.
"What did the ear say?" he asked.
"Sit," Yinlei said.
Wu grunted, almost a laugh. "Then tomorrow we will teach the council how."
"Put chairs in the corridor," Yunyao said. "Leave one empty."
"It will irritate the right people," Wu said.
They returned to the pine at the hour when color chooses what kind of evening it wants to be. The breads were still on the root. They tore them and salted them and ate without correcting the recipe.
Li Wei approached with his fan and a question that he carried correctly—by the handle, not the blade.
"May I sit?" he asked.
"Yes," Yinlei said, and shifted one of the cups to make space that did not pretend to be spare.
They sat—three bodies and an empty chair the house could hear. Crickets tried on their assignments and decided to keep them.
"Tomorrow?" Yunyao asked.
"House in the morning," Yinlei said. "Boundary after breakfast."
"And at dusk?"
"Chairs in the corridor," Elder Wu said from the path, not hiding his presence and not insisting on it. "A meeting that begins with people remembering how to sit belongs to better arguments."
"Bring bread," Yunyao said. "I am still tired of miracles."
Yinlei wrote on the slate and set it between the cups.
Leave a seat.
Name gently.
The mark beneath his collarbone warmed like a lamp in a room that had finally learned where to live. The day did not ask for applause. The mountain exhaled.
Far away, inside the crystal, Mu Qingxue lifted one palm to the wall and chose not to ask it to become a door. She said three names in one breath, then said a fourth, quiet and unexpected:
Guest.
On the ridge beyond courtesy, the Speaker stood with the bell in his hand and watched a corridor fill with stools that had not yet been sat on. He did not ring. He adjusted his breath to the tiny beat the house now kept on its own.
Night came the way bread cools—honest, ordinary, enough. The Seventh Seal learned another word and kept it without ceremony.
Welcome.