"The great sects," Master Bao said, "were founded approximately eight hundred years ago in the aftermath of what the official histories call the Consolidation and what the unofficial histories call the time when the people with the most power decided to make sure everyone else understood who had the most power. The names differ. The events are the same."
He drank.
"They say," he continued, "that the sects exist to protect the common people from demonic incursion, unstable qi phenomena, rogue cultivators, and other hazards of the spiritual world. This is true in the way that it is true that a fisherman protects fish — entirely, right up until it's more profitable not to. The sects provide protection because protection is a commodity. It can be withheld as easily as provided."
He paused. Wei Liang's brush was moving across the paper. Master Bao had given up telling him not to take notes. The notes were of a quality that suggested keeping them was reasonable.
"The heavenly order," Master Bao said, "is the general agreement among the high cultivation powers about how things are organized. Who controls which territories. Who has authority over which spirit veins. Who may recruit from which regions. It is called heavenly because calling it a treaty made among powerful people who would benefit from everyone believing the arrangement was natural and permanent would have been less persuasive."
"Did people believe it?" Wei Liang asked.
"Most people believe most things that are presented consistently over a long enough period," Master Bao said. "This is not stupidity. It is efficiency. If you questioned everything presented to you as settled truth, you would have time for nothing else."
"What's a spirit vein?"
"A current of spiritual energy running through the earth. The sects build on top of them and draw on them for cultivation resources. There are maps, which the sects do not share."
"Where does qi come from?"
"The world," Master Bao said. "The original breath, the old texts say. The universe exhales and what comes out is qi, and living things take it in and some living things can refine it. Cultivators refine it and use it to extend their lives and increase their power and, occasionally, do genuinely useful things." He said the last part with the tone of someone granting a point they find minor.
Wei Liang looked up from his notes. "Is it fair?" he asked. "The way it's arranged. The sects having everything and everyone else just — existing around them."
Master Bao looked at him over his cup. He had been waiting for this question. He had been waiting, in fact, since the afternoon three years ago when a six-year-old had walked into his house and asked what the most interesting thing he knew was.
"No," he said. "It is not fair. It has never been fair. The distribution of spiritual roots follows no principle of merit or character or effort. A child born to a fisherman with a brilliant fire root will be recruited at twelve and given opportunities that no amount of hard work can purchase for the child born next door with an ordinary root. The system perpetuates itself because the people who benefit from it are the people with the power to change it." He paused. "This is not the same as saying it will always be this way."
"What could change it?"
"Time changes everything," Master Bao said. "The sects that exist now are not the sects that existed four hundred years ago. The ones that exist four hundred years from now will be different again. Systems that concentrate power tend to become brittle. The brittleness takes a long time to matter, and then it matters very quickly." He drank. "This is not comfort. It is perspective."
Wei Liang wrote: fair is not the same as permanent. He looked at what he had written. He wrote underneath it: systems that concentrate power become brittle. He thought about this.
"What if you have a formless root?" he asked.
Master Bao set down his cup.
He set it down slowly, with the care of someone buying time to arrange his face, which was not something Master Bao usually needed to do.
"What do you know about formless roots?" he said.
"I asked you about the different kinds of roots last month and you listed them," Wei Liang said. "But the books use different categories from the ones you listed. The oldest book — the one with the water-damaged cover — mentions formless roots differently. Like they're a category the sect examination doesn't account for."
Master Bao was quiet. He looked at his cup. He looked at the window and the strip of river visible through it.
"Formless roots are mentioned in very old texts," he said carefully, "as something that manifests in rare individuals. Roots that do not align to a single element. The standard jade examination orb reads them as absent because it is calibrated to the elemental spectrum. It would register a formless root as — grey. Or colourless. Or some variation that would be interpreted as nothing."
"Interpreted as nothing," Wei Liang said.
"Yes."
"But not nothing."
Master Bao looked at him. "No," he said. "Not nothing." He picked up his cup. He held it. He said: "Practice what you are learning, Wei Liang. Whatever form it takes. Practice every day."
He did not explain why he said it in that particular way, with that particular weight.
Wei Liang wrote it down anyway.