The coldvein lotus steamed in its jade vessel, and Li Mei's hands were cold around the cup all the same.
She sat on the low bench in the treatment room with the cloth unwound from her fingers for once, and Wang Ben saw what the cloth usually hid, the skin gone white at the tips, the cold that had lived in her hands since before he was born. His father knelt at the brazier and drew the last of the medicinal power from the lotus into the solution, a lifetime of alchemy bent, for one afternoon, on his own wife.
"Are you certain now is the time for this?" Li Mei asked.
"The final session is still days away," Wang Tian said. "There is nothing to be done until the Prince moves. Let me see to your hands."
They had waited for a calm stretch, and this was the calmest they would get. Wang Ben had promised her that when the clan was steady again he would look at her meridians properly, with his father. But the promise came due early, in a room that smelled of cold flowers.
"Drink," his father said, and she drank.
Wang Tian set two fingers to her wrist and sent his qi in after the lotus, guiding it as he had said he would, down through the secondary channels and around, wearing at the block that had held her in the early stages of qi condensation for near thirty years. It was almost the same treatment that had opened his own ruined meridians, once. Wang Ben had never once watched it work from the inside.
He let his own perception ease into the flow beside his father's qi and read the meridians.
The medicinal formula made from the coldvein lotus went where his father sent it, cool and patient, and met the harm at the first of her bottlenecks, the junction where her qi should have thinned to cross into the next stage and instead ran into scarring, dense and set hard. The medicine pressed against it and could not move it. It held like iron.
Wang Ben went still.
[OBSERVATION: Scarring at the advancement junction. Regular. Set at even points around the channel, each the same as the last.]
[ANALYSIS: Pattern inconsistent with injury. Consistent with deliberate structure.]
Placed. Not broken. His father could never figure out what kind of injury her meridians had sustained to leave her cultivation stagnant, and for years he had called it an inborn flaw.
Wang Ben understood now why the idea had never sat right with his father.
The longer he looked the more of it came clear. The even points were not scarring but a figure, laid into her channel, the kind of work built to hold a thing in place and hide that it was held. Someone had put a sealing formation into his mother's body. Her cultivation had been suppressed, and kept suppressed.
He had felt the still, even flow in her meridians for months, and never been able to name it. It had a name now.
His first thought was to reach into it. He could see three places where one wrong turn would let her qi run clean.
[Prior observation, subject Li Mei: data now sufficient. Filed classification revised.]
[Sealing formation confirmed. Structure exceeds Host capability. Direct intervention not advised.]
The System's warning stopped him. One wrong turn would cost her more than her cultivation.
He withdrew his spiritual sense from her channels.
Wang Tian's fingers stilled on her wrist. "It is not working."
His mother had gone very quiet on the bench. She was watching his face the way she watched everything, missing nothing.
A sigh came from the doorway. The patriarch made his way into the treatment room, and none of them had heard him come. He looked at Li Mei a long moment.
"Come to my study," he said. "All three of you."
...
In the study Wang Tian told the patriarch that Li Mei's meridians had not reacted to the coldvein lotus at all.
Wang Tiexin listened with his hands folded on the table. When Wang Tian finished he closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them he took out a jade slip from his storage ring and set it in front of Li Mei.
"Your father entrusted this to me," he said. "If he did not come back, and if your cultivation ever began to trouble you, I was to put it into your hands and no one else's."
Li Mei looked at it and did not touch it. "What does it say?"
"I have never read it," Wang Tiexin said.
Wang Tian looked up. "How long has it been since he left it with you."
"Since the day he went into the Blackwood," Wang Tiexin said. "He asked me to keep it. He did not know how long he would be gone."
Li Mei took the jade slip and sent her spiritual sense into it. It warmed under her fingers, and a hollow image of her father appeared at the end of the table, looking at her with sadness in his eyes.
He looked just as he had the day he left. He was translucent as breath on cold glass, and the light of the room went through him and lay on the table where he was not.
"Mei," he said. "I am sorry I did not come back."
The slip shook once in her hand, and she stilled it.
The image went on looking at her as though it could see her, and perhaps the jade held a strand of spiritual sense of its own, so that it could.
After a few moments the image's expression turned solemn, his eyes narrowing.
"Mei, when you were born, I saw that you carried a very special constitution. You were lucky enough to be born with a one in a million physique, the Profound Yin Ice Physique. Given enough time, you would have become a great cultivator.
"Unfortunately, I also found something in your spiritual sea that I could not get rid of. Everything I have done until now has been to try and find a way to help you. For now you must not cultivate. That is why I sealed your meridians. Continued exposure to qi will rouse it from its slumber.
"Should the seals deteriorate, have Wang Tiexin do his best to mend them. And remember my words. A fate worse than death waits for you should you let the seals break and stay broken, for that will raise your cultivation, and with it the risk lying dormant in your spiritual sea."
Li Cheng's image swept his gaze over the room then, as though he were reading the people closest to Li Mei. He stopped on Wang Ben, and for a moment seemed to see through him, and everything in the study went quiet. Then the image looked away and went on.
"Your grandmother used to say the cold preserves. She said it to comfort herself. For you there is no comfort in it. The cold is a sign of the seals deteriorating in your meridians. Because of your physique, exposure to qi wears the sealing formation down, year after year. Mei. Hold on until I can come back. This jade slip carries the method to restore the seal to its full strength. That should keep your physique in check for another few decades."
He looked at his daughter a few moments longer.
And then he was not there, and the jade lay dark in her hand, and the room was only a room once again.
[Figure reclassified: containment. Contents: no match at current resolution.]
[Restructuring requires (unreadable). Access: restricted.]
Wang Ben read the two lines twice. All winter the System had corrected itself for him, named what he could not name, opened when he asked. It had never once refused him before.
His father was looking at his own hands. All afternoon those hands had sent the coldvein lotus against the block in her meridians, wearing at it, trying to bring it down. And Wang Ben had stood inside her channels the same afternoon, one thought away from reaching in. No one said it. There was no need.
The patriarch looked over at Li Mei.
"It seems what afflicts you is beyond us," he said. "But your father did not abandon you. With this slip we can restore the seal on your meridians, and hold it, until he returns."
"Is there no other way to help her?" Wang Tian said.
Wang Tiexin shook his head. "A formation of this nature is far beyond me. To fully comprehend it would take a grandmaster at the very least, perhaps even a great grandmaster. Li Cheng left it with us because he knew this was the only way to help her if he was not here. I believe Ben and I can mend the seals. Once Li Cheng is back, we can uproot the trouble she carries."
Wang Ben held out his hand, and his mother gave him the slip. He sent his spiritual sense into it, and when the System had gathered everything the jade held, he handed it to Wang Tiexin.
The patriarch read a long while, and his face grew darker the longer he read.
He set the slip down and looked at Wang Ben. "What do you think?"
Wang Ben was silent for a moment. While he thought, the System compared everything he had seen since the treatment room.
[ANALYSIS: Restoration by the recorded sequence is feasible.]
[ANALYSIS: The reconstruction cannot be interrupted once begun. The output required exceeds Host capacity. At core formation strength, estimated duration is one full night.]
One full night of effort, for a man at his grandfather's cultivation. For a qi condensation cultivator, not even a beginning.
"I can map the design onto a formation diagram," he said. "Every node, in its order, before you begin. The rebuilding itself I will have to leave to you. If a flaw shows as it takes shape, I believe I will see it, and I will say so." He believed in the patriarch's hands, and he said that too. What he did not say was how much of the seeing would not be his own.
Wang Tian's hands closed around his wife's cold fingers, and he said nothing.
Li Mei looked at the jade slip for a long time. Then she looked up at each of them in turn, and nodded. Her father had left the seal in her meridians, and left the way to mend it.
"Tomorrow night, then," the patriarch said.
He rose, and tipped his head for Wang Ben to follow, and the two of them left the study for the clan archives.
The night air was sharp after the warmth of the study. Somewhere in the house Wang Chen was crying, small and fretful and easily hushed, and Wang Ben listened to it as they crossed the yard, and did not let himself finish the thought that such things passed down through the blood.
...
A procession of carriages came in through the southern gate after nightfall, and at its head sat an old driver the guards had never seen before, a golden wolf fang hanging at his belt. The nearest guard gave the line one look out of habit, and then a second, because the carriage beds sat deep and the wheels ran heavy. The old driver handed over a paper whose seal matched the delegation's own, and the guard stood aside, not daring to ask what they carried.
The last of the carriages passed under the wall, slow and quiet, and the gate closed behind them.