The library was quieter than Chen Mu expected, and louder than he preferred.
Quiet, in that no one else was there. Loud, in that the building made no effort to hide its age. Wood expanded and contracted with soft complaints. Somewhere in the upper shelves, something—perhaps a mouse, perhaps just the idea of one—shifted and then stilled. Dust motes floated through slanted light like they had nowhere better to be.
Chen Mu stood just inside the entrance, hands folded inside his sleeves, and waited.
Nothing happened.
He exhaled and stepped fully inside.
The sect library was not large, but it was dense. Shelves climbed the walls in uneven tiers, packed with scrolls, stitched booklets, bamboo slips, and bound volumes of varying quality. Some were well-kept, wrapped in protective cloth and labeled with care. Others looked as though they had not been touched since someone decided they were no longer worth remembering.
The archivist was not present.
This did not surprise Chen Mu. From what little he knew, the man appeared and disappeared according to a schedule known only to himself, and possibly not even then. Chen Mu had been told to "assist," which in sect terms usually meant "do the work that does not merit acknowledgment."
He set down the wooden crate he had been given—inside were loose texts collected from various halls, returned late or not at all, now in need of sorting. On top lay a thin layer of dust already settling, as if the library itself were eager to reclaim them.
Chen Mu rolled up his sleeves and began.
The task was simple in theory: identify each text, check its condition, record its title and classification, and return it to the appropriate shelf. In practice, it was slow. Titles were often misleading. Classifications changed over decades. Some texts contradicted others, and some contradicted themselves.
Chen Mu worked steadily, without hurry.
He opened the first scroll. A treatise on sword intent, copied three generations ago. The writing was precise, the arguments familiar. He skimmed it, confirmed its identity, and set it aside.
The second was a commentary on the first, written by someone who clearly believed the original author had missed the point. Chen Mu snorted quietly and placed it in the same pile.
By the tenth text, a pattern emerged. The library did not lack knowledge. It lacked interest. Everything here had been read, argued over, judged, and then quietly abandoned in favor of whatever the sect currently deemed efficient.
Efficiency was valued. Depth was optional.
Chen Mu did not mind the monotony. In fact, he found it almost restful. There were no stances to hold, no breaths to count, no elders watching for signs of insight or deviation. He could read at his own pace, think his own thoughts, and no one corrected him.
Several hours passed like this.
At some point, the light shifted. Dust thickened. Chen Mu realized he had been working longer than intended, not because the task demanded it, but because there was no reason to stop.
He reached the bottom of the crate.
One text remained.
It was not a scroll, but a stitched booklet, its cover faded to a color that might once have been brown. There was no title on the front. The stitching was uneven, repaired at least twice with different thread. Someone had cared enough to fix it, but not enough to make it neat.
Chen Mu picked it up.
It felt heavier than it should have.
He turned it over. No seal. No author. No classification mark.
That was unusual, if not unheard of.
He opened it.
The first page was blank, save for a single line written smaller than the rest, as if the writer had not wanted it to be seen immediately.
"This is not a staff art for those who wish to be correct."
Chen Mu frowned.
He turned the page.
The writing that followed was fragmented—not incomplete, but intentionally broken. Sentences ended where they should have continued. Paragraphs drifted into metaphors without warning, then snapped back to instruction without explanation.
"The staff is not sharp because it does not wish to be.
Do not ask it to cut. Ask it where it is going."
Chen Mu stared at the line longer than necessary.
He read on.
"If you grip as you would a sword, you will fail.
If you release as you would empty hands, you will also fail.
The staff is held the way one holds a disagreement."
That earned a quiet huff of air from his nose.
The next page was worse.
"Length is not advantage.
Reach is not dominance.
The staff teaches distance only by refusing to respect it."
Chen Mu flipped forward, expecting diagrams, stances, something concrete. Instead, he found more of the same—short passages, separated by empty space, as if daring the reader to fill in what was missing.
There were marginal notes.
At first, he thought they were part of the original text. Then he recognized the difference in ink, the change in hand.
Someone had written beside one passage:
"Overwrought nonsense. If the author cannot explain a principle plainly, it is because there is none."
Another note, harsher:
"Staff techniques are compensations for those who lack precision."
A third, written with particular care:
"Contradicts orthodox sword alignment. Likely abandoned for good reason."
Chen Mu paused.
He read the passage those comments referred to.
"The sword divides.
The staff connects.
Heaven prefers division because it is clean.
The world persists because connection is not."
Chen Mu felt a faint irritation rise in his chest.
Not anger. Not excitement.
Annoyance.
The text was… inconvenient. It refused to explain itself. It circled ideas instead of defining them. It used Taoist imagery in a way that felt deliberately unhelpful, as if clarity were something to be earned rather than given.
Sword manuals did not do this.
Sword manuals were direct. They named things. They measured angles. They defined correct and incorrect with confidence bordering on arrogance. Even when they used metaphor, it was ornamental, a flourish atop a structure that remained solid and precise.
This manuscript did not want to be understood easily.
Chen Mu continued reading, partly because of curiosity, partly because he wanted to confirm his growing suspicion that the thing was, in fact, nonsense.
"Orthodoxy says the blade reveals truth by cutting away falsehood.
The staff reveals truth by forcing falsehood to keep moving."
He stopped.
That was not heretical.
It was… contrary.
Sword orthodoxy held that the sword was an extension of intent, that its sharpness mirrored clarity of will. This manuscript did not deny that. It simply did not care.
It spoke of redirection instead of severance. Of persistence instead of decisiveness. Of occupying space rather than claiming it.
These were not forbidden ideas.
They were unfashionable.
Chen Mu flipped back through the pages, slower now. He noticed that where instructions did appear, they were almost aggressively unspecific.
"Step where the staff already is."
"Let the opponent finish their thought."
"When pressured, do not retreat. Widen."
Widen what? Space? Stance? Intention?
The manuscript did not say.
The marginal notes grew more dismissive as the pages went on.
"This has no battlefield application."
"I see no advantage over proper blade work."
"Waste of ink."
One note was longer, written in careful, elegant script.
"The author confuses adaptability with lack of commitment. A weapon that refuses to choose cannot triumph."
Chen Mu closed the booklet and sat back on his heels.
He did not feel inspired.
He felt irritated in a very specific way—the way one feels when encountering an argument that is poorly presented but not obviously wrong. The kind that lingers, not because it convinces you, but because you cannot dismiss it cleanly.
The staff manuscript did not claim superiority over the sword. It did not insult sword cultivation. It simply… ignored it.
That, Chen Mu realized, was likely its greatest sin.
He looked around the library. No one else was there. The shelves loomed, indifferent.
He opened the booklet again and read the first line once more.
"This is not a staff art for those who wish to be correct."
Chen Mu exhaled slowly.
He had spent years being correct.
Correct posture. Correct timing. Correct understanding. Correct progress, measured and approved at appropriate intervals.
And yet—
He shook his head, annoyed with himself.
This was exactly how distractions began. He was not dissatisfied because he lacked direction. He was dissatisfied because the direction he had been given no longer seemed to lead anywhere. That did not mean every poorly written manuscript deserved attention.
Still, he could not bring himself to put it back in the crate.
He checked the classification marks again. There were none. No seal to indicate prohibition. No elder's notation ordering its removal.
It had simply… fallen through the cracks.
Chen Mu weighed the booklet in his hands.
Reporting it would be easy. He could bring it to the archivist, who would likely skim a page, frown, and either shelve it in some forgotten corner or discard it entirely. The sect did not forbid staff arts. It simply did not invest in them.
Not reporting it would also be easy.
No one had asked him to inventory every scrap of text. His task was to organize what had already been acknowledged. This booklet had escaped acknowledgment for years, perhaps decades.
Chen Mu looked at the marginal notes again.
They were not fearful. They were dismissive.
That, more than anything else, decided him.
He slipped the booklet into his sleeve, feeling the slight, undeniable weight of it settle against his forearm.
He did not feel clever. He did not feel rebellious.
He felt mildly, stubbornly unwilling to let someone else decide—again—that something inconvenient should simply be ignored.
When he returned the empty crate to its place and swept the dust from the table, no one noticed anything amiss.
The library remained quiet.
And Chen Mu, for the first time in a long while, left a task unfinished on purpose.