The examiner arrived on a grey morning in the ninth month, when the village was still wet from two days of rain and the road through the centre of Wuxi had turned soft underfoot.
Tianqi heard about it from the grain seller's son, who had heard it from someone at the well. A junior disciple from the Xuanming Sect, sent out to the villages on the eastern circuit to test children of age. He would set up at the community hall, run tests through the afternoon, and be gone by evening. Anyone who cleared the threshold would receive a placement token and be told when to report.
Chu was at the worktable when Tianqi came back inside.
"The sect examiner is here," Tianqi said.
Chu did not look up from the pill he was grinding. "I know."
"You knew this morning."
"I knew last week." Chu kept grinding. "Go. You are old enough and it is time you went."
That was the whole conversation.
The community hall was the largest building in Wuxi that was not a barn, which was not saying much. Someone had set up a plain table near the back wall with a pale green testing stone at the centre, about the size of a man's head, smooth and faintly luminous in the flat grey light coming through the high windows. Eight children were already waiting near the door when Tianqi arrived, most of them ones he recognised from the village lanes or from Chu's shop. A few had older siblings who had gone through this before and came in with the particular confidence of people who had been told what to expect. One girl, Shen Lihua, had been talking about this day for the better part of a year.
The examiner was young, perhaps twenty-two, with a Xuanming outer disciple's robe and the manner of someone who had done this circuit enough times to find it tedious. He sat behind the table with a ledger open in front of him and did not look up when Tianqi walked in.
Tianqi took a position at the back of the group and let his eyes settle on the stone.
[Xuanming Sect Spirit Root Testing Stone]
[Age] Thirty-four years
[Grade] Mid
[Function] Spirit root detection via qi resonance. Colour indicates element, height and brightness indicate grade
[Limitation] Detects primary root only. Compound, void, and sealed root types return null or trace. False negatives possible in 3 to 6% of tests.
He read the last line once and moved to the examiner.
[Name] Fang Deru
[Age] Twenty-two
[Realm] Qi Refinement — Stage 7
[Spirit Root] Wood Root — Mid Grade
[Body Constitution] Mortal Flesh
[Talent] Good
[Comprehension] Average
[Current State] Bored. Counting villages remaining on the circuit.
[Affiliation] Xuanming Sect — Outer Disciple
[Fate Thread] The road is long and all the stones look the same.
Tianqi looked back at the testing stone.
Three to six percent. One in every sixteen to thirty-three children with a non-standard root walking away from an examination believing they had nothing. He did the numbers quietly while the first child stepped up to the table. Across Fang Deru's twelve-village circuit, over three hundred tests conducted, that was somewhere between ten and twenty missed roots recorded as mortal grade. Done correctly by his training. The stone had told him what it was built to detect.
It just was not built to detect everything.
The tests went in order of arrival. Shen Lihua was third. She pressed both palms flat against the stone the way Fang Deru instructed, and a column of pale yellow light rose two hand-widths before it steadied. Earth root, low-mid grade. Fang Deru made a mark in his ledger without enthusiasm. Lihua stepped back with her hands pressed together trying not to smile and mostly failing.
The two boys after her got nothing. The stone stayed dark. Fang Deru delivered the results with the mild patience of someone reporting weather and moved on.
A heavyset boy with a shaved head went next and produced a thin column of red that wavered before stabilising. Fire root, low grade. Barely above threshold. Fang Deru made his mark. The boy looked at the ceiling and let out a breath that he had probably been holding since morning.
One more after that. A girl Tianqi did not recognise, older than the others, who must have walked in from one of the outlying farms. Her stone reading came up pale blue, water root, and she received her token with both hands and held it carefully like it might crack.
Then it was his turn.
Tianqi stepped up to the table and pressed his palms to the stone the way he had watched the others do it. The surface was cool and slightly rough at the edges where years of handling had worn it down. He felt his qi move toward it naturally, the same low hum the eyes produced, and waited.
The stone showed nothing.
No column. No light. The ambient green of the surface sat unchanged.
Fang Deru looked at him across the table, then at the stone, then back at him.
"No affinity detected," he said. "Mortal grade root, no attribute." He made a mark. "You can step back."
Tianqi stepped back.
He stood at the rear of the hall while Fang Deru worked through the remaining children. Two more usable roots, both wood, both low grade but above threshold. They would receive tokens. They would go to Xuanming and spend their first years doing labor and basic technique drills, which from what Tianqi understood was most of what outer disciples did, but it was still more than most children in a village like Wuxi ever saw.
He watched Lihua receive her token. She looked at it for a long time before tucking it into her inner pocket. She caught his eye across the hall and her expression shifted, just briefly, the particular discomfort of someone who did not know what to do with good news in front of someone who had none. He gave her a short nod. She looked away.
Fang Deru was already closing the ledger.
Tianqi left without waiting for the hall to clear.
The road back was empty. Most of the village was either still at the hall or keeping out of the damp. He walked without hurrying, hands in his sleeves. He thought about the three to six percent and what it meant spread across every circuit examiner in every region running the same stone with the same limitations, year after year, village after village. Somewhere in Fang Deru's twelve villages there were children who had touched that stone this season and walked away from it believing something untrue about themselves. The stone had done its job. So had the examiner. The gap between what the test was built to find and what actually existed was nobody's particular fault.
That did not make it a small gap.
He pushed open the shop door. Chu was still at the worktable, a different pill now, the afternoon light catching the edge of the pressing tool as he worked.
"The peachwood bark needs sorting before evening," Chu said, without looking up.
Tianqi went to the back room and started on the bark.
He had known before he left what the stone would show. He had known before he touched it. What he had not expected was the three to six percent, and he found he could not stop turning it over. Not because of what it meant for him. Because of what it meant for everyone else.
He sorted the bark into piles and said nothing.