Morning practiced the light before letting it loose.
First Peak accepted it with the patience of old wood.
The mark beneath Yinlei's collarbone held its quiet warmth.
Stay, it said, and meant: do not hurry what already belongs to you.
Lin Yunyao set two cups on the root of the Seventh Pine and unwrapped a small cloth. Three breads again, browned where the pan had argued and then agreed. She left space for a third cup.
"Chairs in the corridor," she said.
"Chairs in the corridor," he answered.
Elder Shi Tianjing climbed the last steps with weather in his knees and good humor in his breath. He greeted the cups before the people.
"Today you will be asked to turn a meeting into a room," Shi said. "Keep the door honest."
"And if the Speaker tries to move the door?" Yunyao asked.
"Lift while you turn," Shi said, as if carpentry had always been a political science.
They went to the kitchens first. Warmth breathed from clay pots. The cook shoved a basket of scallions against Yinlei's chest and pointed at a board that had known sharper knives and kinder hands.
Li Wei waited by the window with a plain fan and bread wrapped in a clean square. His bow was less embarrassed now; it had learned to be grateful without apology.
"Ask the air to consider your wrist," Yunyao said. "Not to obey. To consider."
He tried. The fan quivered, then steadied when he let his breath go first.
"Better," she said, and turned to swat a junior's ladle before enthusiasm boiled dignity out of the pot. "Eat like you plan to stand," she reminded a cluster of outer disciples who counted pride in speed.
The first bowls went out. Steam wrote brief characters over the yard, then wiped itself clean before anyone could pretend breakfast needed witness.
By the inner path, Elder Wu waited with a ledger under one arm and a set of stools under the other—three-legged things from the repair shed, honest enough to be ugly.
"We begin in an hour," Wu said. "The Speaker has accepted the chair."
"He accepted it yesterday by not refusing it," Yunyao said. "Today we will learn whether he knows what chairs are for."
They carried the stools to the council corridor. Servants unrolled a narrow rug without courage; Yunyao sent it back with a look and showed them where plain stone outranks decoration. The chairs were placed not as thrones, but as places—two along the wall for elders whose knees knew what years meant, one beside the wide sill to face the door, a fourth turned deliberately toward the kitchen hatch.
"Leave one empty," Yinlei said.
"Which?" a servant asked.
"All of them, for a breath," Yunyao said. "Then this one," she tapped the stool by the door with her fan. "For the guest who chooses to be a person."
Shi inspected the line the chairs made and moved one a palm to the left. "Walls are conversations," he said. "Give them a listener."
The ward thread over the eastern terrace plucked once, testing. The pressure that followed was the polite kind—the sort that turns welcome into etiquette and etiquette into trembling.
"Walk slower," Yunyao told the hallway. "If you arrive late, the house will still be here."
The pressure thinned like smoke when rain decides to earn its keep.
When the hour arrived, the corridor remembered it was a room. Elders came without pageantry. Elder Meng muttered about chairs blocking traffic and then sat on one with a sigh that thanked the wood without admitting it. Servants set two pots—soup and tea—on the sill beside bowls, chopsticks, and a small dish of salt.
The Speaker arrived without escort. Grey robe. Gold eyes. The bell in his hand looked like a memory that had agreed to dress formal.
He paused at the threshold, as if expecting the house to kneel.
It didn't.
He inclined his head to Elder Wu, to Shi, to the corridor itself as if it were a host. His gaze settled on the empty stool by the door.
"For me?" he said.
"For the guest who chooses to be a person," Wu replied.
The Speaker lifted the bell a fraction. He did not ring it. The corridor's breath tightened anyway, as if old rules had looked in and asked to be remembered.
Yinlei took one step forward and set his palm on the stool's seat. He moved it a hand's breadth—not away, not closer, only so that the door and the stool agreed on where the room began.
The Speaker watched his hand, not his face.
"Lift while you turn," Yinlei said, as if to a stubborn hinge.
"I know hinges," the Speaker said.
"I believe you," Yinlei replied, and left the stool empty.
Li Wei hovered at the edge, fan down. He watched Yunyao's wrist for time, not authority.
Elder Wu gestured slightly. "Sit, if you choose."
The Speaker did not. He raised the bell the way a man lifts a question and allowed the corridor to decide whether it wanted to excuse itself.
A junior messenger chose that moment to run through the far arch with a folded slip in his hand and terror on his face. He saw the assembly, the grey robe, the bell that didn't ring, and forgot how to be a body in a room.
He tilted.
Not a dramatic fall—just a surrender of balance to an old script.
"Give him the room," Yunyao said.
Yinlei reached him in two steps, turned him with a grin he had not planned to wear, and let the boy sit on the empty stool.
"For the guest who chooses to be a person," he said.
The corridor learned a new trick; it laughed—not at the boy, but with the relief of a witness. The pressure missed its cue. The Speaker's mouth changed very slightly, the way a tide shifts when rock refuses to be impressed.
"Your house has teeth," he said.
"It has chairs," Elder Shi answered. "Teeth are optional."
The boy clutched his slip and stared at Yinlei with the panic of someone who has brought the wrong sentence to the right room.
"Breathe," Yinlei said, and took the slip. He did not read it aloud. He skimmed and nodded.
"From the northern sluice," he told Wu. "A hairline in the ward chalk. Not widening."
"Good," Wu said. "Thank the chalk for being cheap."
Yinlei passed the slip back to the boy. "Next time, walk slower," he said. "If you arrive late—"
"The house will still be here," the boy whispered, testing a proverb against his lungs.
"Good," Yunyao said, and tapped her fan's spine lightly against her palm. One beat. The room took it up.
The Speaker lifted the bell again. "We came for an answer," he said. "When the ear opens, will your house stay neutral?"
"We do not worship an ear," Wu said evenly. "We host a house."
"Then answer as a house," the Speaker said. "Do you kneel to anyone's argument of emergency?"
Elder Meng stirred, ready to remind the world that emergencies feed themselves on hesitation. Elder Shi looked at Yinlei, not to give permission but to confirm the room knew who could place the chairs.
Yinlei stepped half a pace to where the corridor's light met the shadow from the kitchen hatch. 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 gently at the floor's center, then spoke, not to the bell, not to the man, but to the house.
"We will bow when we mean it," he said. "We will stand when we mean it more. We will sit to listen. We will leave a seat. We will name gently."
He looked at the Speaker. "And we will keep our names inside the room."
The bell pressed—not a strike, but a weight. The room felt its knees consider the floor, then reconsider.
Li Wei lifted his fan and matched Yunyao's beat, imperfect and brave. The corridor's breath found their meter. The bell found less air than it had hoped.
"Eat," Elder Wu said abruptly, startling himself with the right order. He gestured toward the sill. "Or watch us do it."
A servant ladled soup. The Speaker remained standing. He did not ring. He looked at the empty stool—occupied now by a junior who had remembered his hands—and looked back at Yinlei.
"You keep a chair for me," he said. "And give it away."
"We keep a chair for anyone," Yinlei said. "We give it to the first person who needs to sit."
"What if I declare emergency?" the Speaker asked.
"Then we will ask why you prefer a room on its knees," Yunyao said, eyes on her bowl, voice clean as a blade you use only to cut food.
Silence followed, the kind that learns something.
The Speaker lowered the bell a fraction, as if weight had found its own balance without him. "Very well," he said. "Let us sit."
He did not take the junior's stool. He took the one turned toward the kitchen and set the bell on his knee as if it were only metal. He accepted a bowl, tasted, and did not pretend to admire. He ate like a person.
Elder Meng made the face of a man who has lost a fight he is grateful not to have won. Elder Shi breathed the breath of a winter that promises a spring no one has to deserve.
They ate.
They argued, but only the way families argue in a house they have decided to keep. They made a shape of policy and left space in it for bread. They left a seat empty and did not let the room forget it.
When the bowls were empty and the bell still had not rung, the Speaker stood and inclined his head to the corridor and then to Yinlei.
"Your method offends spectacle," he said.
"It feeds rooms," Yinlei said.
He lifted the bell and did not move it. "I will visit again," he said. "Do not be surprised if I arrive at a wrong time."
"We have a door," Elder Wu said. "We use it at right times and wrong ones."
The Speaker left without drama. The corridor exhaled as if it had passed an exam it had written for itself.
"Boundary," Wu said. "Before the day thinks it accomplished enough."
They took one loaf of bread, the small dish of salt, and nothing else. On the way, they passed the storeroom; Yinlei turned the key—lift while you turn—and checked the shelf where nothing special slept. He took the tiny kettle Yunyao had smuggled once to a ledge and a cup with a chip that knew where lips belonged.
At the arch, the stone said nothing. The house had learned to hear without prompting. Yinlei placed his left palm on the cold and his right over the mark and did not speak a question with his mouth.
What do you want?
Down, the ear answered, out of habit and because rooms grow better in layers.
They descended. The room beneath had spent another day becoming itself. The trough held water to purpose. The three-legged stool waited, turned toward the crystal. The black box sat on the lip, unopened, unashamed.
Qingxue stood.
She did not practice standing; she had trained the day to support it.
Her eyes moved from the stool to the kettle to the chipped cup, then to the bread and the salt.
"You brought breakfast to a room without a roof," she said.
"Rooms learn roofs last," Yinlei said.
He set the bread on the stone, pinched salt, let the kettle breathe steam into the air, and poured a little water into the chipped cup so the room could see what cups are for.
He did not call it offering.
He called it method.
"Ask," Qingxue said.
"What do you want?" he asked the ear.
Up, it said, softly. Then—unexpectedly—together.
The word did not mean a chorus.
It meant two hands on a single hinge.
Yunyao set the drum on her thigh. She did not tap. She looked at Yinlei. He looked at the black box.
"I didn't plan to tell you this," he said to Qingxue, and surprised himself by having kept something honest in reserve. "There was a spring when I thought I could love you better if no one could see me doing it. I moved your name in conversations so mine would look clean."
The truth landed without performance. The room did not applaud. The water did not shiver. The stool did not scrape.
Qingxue's flame thinned at the edges—not pain; accuracy finding a place to sit. "And now?" she asked.
"Now I will keep your name where it belongs," he said. "In rooms that feed people. Not as a weapon, not as a justify, not as a debt."
The ear listened without blinking. It answered with direction.
Up, again. Then it added a small, ordinary word it had borrowed from kitchens.
Serve.
Yinlei breathed once, unexpectedly lighter. He touched the box and left it shut.
He lifted the stool a palm and turned it a quarter, so that the crystal and the trough and the chipped cup made a triangle no one would trip over. He placed half the bread on the stool's seat—an insult in palaces, a courtesy in houses—and pressed the other half briefly to the crystal. The heat warmed it without theft.
"Next time," Qingxue said, "bring the box to the corridor and let it sit where the house listens hardest. Do not open it. Do not explain it. Let people pass by it the way they pass by a door that will be there tomorrow."
"I will," he said.
"And bring someone else's name," she added. "Not to display. To keep."
Yunyao tapped the drum once.
The room remembered its beat.
They climbed while the ear hummed a word it had learned and wanted to practice.
Together.
At the arch, Elder Shi leaned in the shade, eyes amused, eyelids pretending to rest. "Someone else is standing," he said for the third time in three days, and this time looked at the corridor, not the crystal.
"We'll teach them to sit," Yunyao said.
"Teach them to serve," Shi corrected gently. "Beginning with chairs."
They returned to the corridor. Servants had already begun to tidy. Elder Wu stood with his ledger and an expression that wanted to be stern and settled for satisfied.
"Tomorrow," he said, "we bring a box into the meeting and pretend we do not know what it holds."
"We do not," Yinlei said.
"Good," Wu said. "Then we will be honest."
Li Wei approached with his fan and a question correctly carried by the handle, not the blade. "May I set chairs in the practice ring?" he asked. "To teach people to sit before they bow."
"Yes," Yunyao said. "And bring bread."
He looked terrified in a useful way and ran toward the kitchen with the posture of a person who plans to return.
Evening chose its color and kept it. The Seventh Pine threw a shadow that had learned where to live. Yinlei set the slate between the cups and wrote two lines.
Sit together.
Serve first.
The mark beneath his collarbone warmed like a lamp whose job is not to impress but to let people see each other's faces. The mountain exhaled. The house held.
Far away, inside the crystal, Mu Qingxue pressed her palm to the wall and did not ask it to become a door. She said three names in one breath, then a fourth, and then—very softly, as if trying the word on—guest.
On the ridge beyond courtesy, the Speaker stood with the bell in his hand and watched a corridor learn to sit down without asking him if he approved. He adjusted his breath to the beat the house kept for itself and frowned like a man who remembers building a thing and longs to know whether it still needs him.
Night cooled the bread on the pine root. The Seventh Seal did not crack. It learned a workable verb and shared it with the room.
Serve.