Morning arrived the way steam remembers a kettle.
The mark beneath Yinlei's collarbone kept its small, steady warmth.
Stay, it said, the way tables say eat before anyone decides to argue.
Lin Yunyao set two cups on the root of the Seventh Pine and unwrapped a square of cloth. Three flat breads waited, browned where the pan had disagreed and then made peace. She left space for a third cup and did not fill it. Some habits are doors; you keep them open to remember you live in a house.
"Together?" she asked.
"Together," Yinlei said.
Elder Shi Tianjing climbed the last steps with weather in his knees and patience in his breath. He greeted the cups before the people.
"Rooms grow downward," he said, as if continuing a conversation the mountain had started in his sleep. "Bring what knows your hands. Leave what wants applause."
"The box stays," Yinlei said.
"In the corridor," Shi agreed. "Doors are conversations. Don't make the boundary do all the talking."
They went to the kitchens first. Warmth breathed from clay pots. The cook shoved a basket of scallions at Yinlei and jabbed a finger toward a board that had known sharper knives and forgiven them. He sliced into thin coins and salted once and stopped before the pot decided it was a river.
By the window, Li Wei stood with a plain fan and a loaf wrapped in clean cloth. He bowed without apology, then set the bread on the sill like a student introducing a friend.
"Ask the air to consider your wrist," Yunyao said. "Not admire. Consider."
He tried. The fan trembled, then learned.
"Slower," she added, tapping the spine with a knuckle. "Breath first, hand after."
The first bowls went out. Steam wrote brief characters over the yard and erased them before anyone could pretend breakfast needed witnesses.
On the inner path, Elder Wu waited with a ledger under one arm and no bundle of stools today—confidence, perhaps, that chairs had learned to arrive when summoned.
"Corridor runs itself this morning," he said, gruff and satisfied. "Go where the ear has been eavesdropping. If the Speaker arrives, we will lend him a bowl and a bucket."
"Keep a chair," Yunyao said.
"Empty on purpose," Wu replied, and surprised himself by liking the sentence.
They passed the corridor on their way. The small black box lay in the table's center like a plain star a room had chosen to orbit. Hands rested on it in passing. No one asked what lived in it. The question had begun to sound like poor manners.
A chipped cup waited on the sill. Someone had placed a sprig of mint beside it, not to decorate, but because kitchens like to be right twice.
At the arch, the stone had written nothing. It had learned to rest from telling people what they already knew.
Yinlei set his left palm on the cool and his right over the mark. He did not ask with his mouth.
What do you want?
Down, the ear answered. And—softer now, as if testing whether the room would welcome it—together.
He looked at Yunyao. He looked at Li Wei.
"You sure?" Li Wei asked, which is an honest way to say yes.
"Walk slower," Yunyao told him. "If you arrive late, the house will still be here."
They stepped through.
The world inside had changed the way patience changes a field—incrementally, precisely. The moss sprawled like something that had won an argument and decided not to boast. Light fell from nowhere and everywhere and did not apologize for choosing a color. The orbs of water hung lower, as if gossip had gathered them.
The obelisk stood in the middle of enough. The crystal held Mu Qingxue standing the way water holds reflections it intends to keep.
Her eyes moved to Li Wei immediately. She had never met him in a room that admitted it was a room. She did not ask a question. She watched whether he remembered how to breathe under attention.
He did. Not beautifully. Correctly.
Yinlei bowed, then didn't insist on being answered.
"We brought bread," he said. "And the chipped cup."
"And a drum," Yunyao added, settling the small instrument against her thigh without touching it yet.
"And a fan," Li Wei offered, because honesty is a kind of introduction.
Qingxue's flame thinned at the edges, not as pain, but as accuracy finding a place to sit. "Ask first," she said.
Yinlei did.
What do you want?
Down again. Then, at the base of the obelisk, stone remembered stairs. The room beneath waited without impatience. The pale trough held water to purpose. The three-legged stool faced the crystal. The air had learned the beat of a drum it was not hearing yet.
They descended.
Yinlei set the bread on the stone, pinched salt, 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.
"Carry with us," he said to the walls. "Together, if you know how."
The ear listened. It answered in direction and then in a word small enough to fit in work.
Serve.
Yunyao tapped the rim of the drum with her fingers, once, correct. Not louder. The room's breath took the beat.
Li Wei stood by the trough as if remembering to be a door. He did not reach for the bread. He waited to be asked. Waiting is a skill houses wish more visitors had.
"Name gently," Yinlei said, and surprised himself by knowing what needed naming first.
He did not say Mu Qingxue. He did not say Lin Yunyao. He said, "Li Wei," into the room, not as introduction, not as display—quiet as a promise that had decided what kind of work to be.
The trough's surface answered with a small concentric ring, approving of grammar.
Yunyao looked at the crystal and did not lower her gaze through habit. "Mu Qingxue," she said, equally as quiet. "Not as weapon. Not as debt. As a person the house has decided to keep."
Qingxue's mouth changed the way a smile begins when no one would benefit from its triumph. "Feng Yinlei," she said, matching the vow with the same refusal of theater. "To be kept, not used."
The ear hummed, pleased the way kitchens are when recipes stop pretending to be music.
"Someone else," Qingxue added, attention slipping to Li Wei with a professional kindness. "Choose a name that is not famous enough to break."
Li Wei swallowed. He did not choose Elder Wu. He did not choose the Speaker. He said the name of the junior who had panicked two days ago and sat in the guest's chair because gravity forgot him for a breath.
He said it like you put an extra blanket on a sleeping child and do not take credit for warmth.
The room took the sound and filed it where plain things go when they intend to outlast applause.
The bell arrived then—not from ridge or metal, but as rule. You could feel the pressure in the bones of the trough, in the skin of the drum, in the glass's attempt not to be glass anymore. It did not ring. It pressed. Its trick today was small and mean: it tried to pry apart together by finding the seam of the newest member.
Li Wei's breath stuttered. He forgot the fan. He forgot his hands. He remembered embarrassment and almost bowed to it.
Yunyao tapped the drum once. "Walk slower," she said, precise as a blade you use only to cut food. "If you arrive late, the house will still be here."
Yinlei 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 at Li Wei's shoulder like you'd set a mat under wet feet.
"Lift while you turn," he said, absurd in a spiritual crisis and entirely applicable. "Twist your breath at the hinge."
Li Wei did. His next inhale found purchase where fear had tried to smudge the grain.
"Say it," Qingxue said, not unkindly.
Li Wei looked at the crystal instead of his failure. "I am Li Wei," he said, which is the sentence that makes a room true if you are brave enough to say it without trying to win anything by saying it.
The pressure slid off that like oil off a seasoned pan. Old rules dislike correct sentences.
It went for the bread next. It always does. You can tell what your enemy fears by what it tries to vandalize.
Yinlei tore one loaf into three and put a piece in each person's hand—his, Yunyao's, Li Wei's—and then pressed the last corner briefly to the crystal. The heat warmed it without theft. He did not hand it to Qingxue. He put it on the stool.
"For the guest who chooses to be a person," he said.
The bell thinned, embarrassed again.
"Water," Yunyao said, and tipped a little from the chipped cup into her palm, washed her hands as a person does when about to touch a baby or a truth. Li Wei followed. Then Yinlei. They were not afraid to look ordinary in a room that could have asked for a storm.
"Speak the thing you didn't plan to," Qingxue said, the same test in a different room, broadening now to include more than one heart.
Yunyao spoke first. She is surgical that way. "I loved you as leverage for a while," she said to Yinlei without moving her chin. "To lever you out of the corner you chose so I wouldn't have to drag you."
The room did not applaud. The water did not shiver. The drum did not perform pity. Accuracy found a chair and sat.
"I made you into a tool for atoning," Yinlei answered, surprised at how quickly the sentence had waited for him. "I stopped when you made me choose bread over brilliance."
Li Wei said his piece too, small and exact. "I wanted your approval more than breath," he told Yunyao and then Yinlei in a voice that had learned about shame yesterday. "I will want it again. I want to want it less."
The ear hummed as if pleased to be spoken to without theater. It answered with direction.
Up.
And with a word a house can use without ceremony.
Keep.
"Someone else is standing," Elder Shi had said on other days. It was true here in a different way: three people, none kneeling to a rule, none rising with triumph—just standing in a room they had agreed to keep.
The pressure made one last try, petty as a critic at a wedding. It pushed the stool. The stool scraped a finger-width. Yunyao set her palm on the seat and moved it back a hand's breadth so the crystal and the trough and the cup made a triangle nobody would trip over.
"Lift while you turn," she said, to the furniture, to the day, to the part of her heart that had tried leverage and was retiring from engineering.
The bell left with the dignity of a man who knows he has been asked to eat and is not hungry enough to refuse properly.
Qingxue raised her hand in the crystal, not to shield, to keep time. "Bring the corridor here," she said.
"We did," Yinlei said, gesturing to the chipped cup, the bread, the stool, the beat.
"Bring it louder," she said. "Not with sound. With habits."
Yinlei nodded. He had brought the chair into the council. He would bring sitting into the boundary. He could feel the sentence forming on the slate already.
Teach people to sit before they bow.
"Tomorrow," Qingxue added, "leave the box where it is. But bring me the mint by the cup, because I wish to smell a thing that knows how to be small and true."
"That we can do," Yunyao said, and her mouth's corner did the neat thing a laugh does when it has better work.
They climbed while the ear hummed keep, and together, and serve, like a stove cooling after soup. At the arch, shadow became hallway. Elder Shi stood where doors like to consult grandfathers.
"How many?" he asked, which is how he asks who.
"Three," Yunyao said.
"Enough," Shi replied, which is how he says good.
They crossed the courtyard. The corridor had behaved like a room without supervision. The box sat where honest gravity had left it. People touched it and did not require it to explain itself. The empty chair by the hatch waited for wrong times with a patience that knew it would be needed.
The Speaker had not come. His bell, if he held it, had chosen not to interrupt soup. The house noticed the effort and did not gossip.
Elder Wu met them under the pine with his ledger and an expression that wanted to be stern and settled for relieved. "Report?" he asked, out of habit more than need.
"Bread stayed bread," Yinlei said. "Water did its job. A name became furniture."
"Which one?" Wu asked, wary of poetry sneaking into policy.
"A junior's," Yunyao said. "The right size for a chair."
"Good," Wu said. "Policy prefers names it can feed."
They sat at the root. The breads were cool and better for it. They tore and salted and ate without correcting the recipe.
Li Wei stood to go, then didn't. "May I write the slate today?" he asked—by the handle, not the blade.
"Write," Yunyao said.
He wrote in the tight careful script of someone who has been scolded by calligraphy and is trying to make peace.
Keep each other's names.
Sit before you bow.
Serve first.
Yinlei added a line beneath, small and plain.
Walk slower. The house will still be here.
Evening chose a color and kept it. The lantern line took their assignments without sulking. The mark beneath Yinlei's collarbone warmed like a lamp in a room that had decided to survive by being ordinary well.
Far away, inside the crystal, Mu Qingxue laid her palm on the wall and did not ask it to become a door. She repeated four names in one breath and added a fifth—quiet, the junior's—and left the order to luck. The water in the trough listened, pleased to be borrowed by work.
On the ridge beyond courtesy, the Speaker stood with a bell he did not lift and watched a corridor that kept a chair for him without surrendering its name. He practiced breathing to the beat a house kept for itself and frowned like a man who recognizes a song he taught and cannot own.
Night cooled the root of the pine. Crickets practiced until they believed themselves. The Seventh Seal did not crack. It learned a new sentence and filed it with the other small laws of a house.
Keep names.
Teach sitting.
Serve first.
And—filed back where only ears can read it—
Together.