The Rooster Who Would Be Immortal — Chapter 1: The Rooster Who Moved the Beam

On the morning the storm broke the storehouse, Senior Brother Hua announced that the kitchen rooster would be served in the soup. Brass, who was the kitchen rooster, took this personally.

It had rained all night on Cloudpine Mountain. The wind had torn at the kitchen yard until, just before dawn, the old roof beam over the storehouse door gave up and came down across it. Now the rice, the salt, the pickled radish and every bowl in the sect sat behind a wall of wet timber as thick as a man.

And the dawn meal was due in one hour.

"Carry it," said Senior Brother Hua. He stood at the edge of the yard in spotless blue robes, careful not to let the mud touch his hem. "You are the kitchen, Elder. Kitchens carry things."

Elder Mo did not look up from the beam. He had one hand pressed to his lower back, the place where, twenty years ago, a breakthrough had gone wrong and never quite healed.

"Four disciples could lift it," Mo said. "All four are on the Dawn Terrace, meditating. As you should be."

"I am inspecting." Hua smiled the way a cat smiles at a moth. "The Hall of Duties will want to know why five hundred disciples went hungry. I will tell them the kitchen failed. And since the kitchen has nothing to cook..." His eyes drifted to the woodpile. To the scrawny golden-red bird standing on top of it. "...I suppose the kitchen will cook what it has."

Brass puffed himself up to his full height, which was not much.

He could not speak human words. He understood every one of them, though, and he had a great deal to say. What came out was a furious, strangled "BRAWK."

"Exactly," said Hua. "One hour, Elder."

When he had gone, Mo lowered himself onto an upturned bucket and looked at the beam for a long time.

"Don't give me that face," he told Brass. "I'm not going to cook you. I'm going to be reassigned to scrubbing the latrines, and you'll be given to some cook who will." He sighed. "Go and crow. The sun's nearly up. At least one of us should enjoy the morning."

That was the other thing. Every dawn, when the first light touched the mountain, Brass crowed. And every dawn, for one breath, something came in with the air. A warmth. A sip of something bright. The disciples on the terrace spent years learning to catch that brightness. They called it qi. Brass had been catching a sip of it every morning for a month, and he had told no one, because no one listened to roosters.

It was the only thing he had that was his.

But the beam came first.

Brass hopped down, marched to the fallen timber, set his chest against it, dug in his claws and pushed.

Nothing happened.

He pushed harder. His claws slid in the mud. His crooked tail feather quivered with effort. The beam did not notice him at all.

He tried the other end. He tried the middle. He tried running at it, which ended with Brass lying on his back in a puddle, looking up at the grey sky and thinking about soup.

"Is he... wrestling the roof?"

The voice came from the gate. Ling Yue, the outer disciple who was late to the Dawn Terrace most mornings, stood there with a broom over one shoulder and her sleeves tied back. Her eyes were red from studying by candlelight again.

"He's lost his mind," said Mo. "Like the rest of us. Why aren't you at the lesson?"

"I'm late," she said miserably. "If I walk in now, the instructor will make me sweep the terrace for a week. I thought I would sweep something here instead, and then it wouldn't feel like a lie when I say I was working." She looked at the beam. "Oh. Oh, that's bad."

She stepped forward to look, and her foot came down on the flat end of a rake lying in the mud.

The handle leapt up and smacked her on the forehead.

"Ow!"

Brass stopped thinking about soup.

He stared at the rake. A small foot, pressing down at one end. A long handle, swinging up at the other. Something small moving something bigger, just because of where the pushing happened.

And a memory surfaced. It came the way these memories always came, sudden and bright, like a window opening in a house he did not remember living in. A room full of desks. Chalk dust. His own hand, a human hand, drawing a long line on a board with a little triangle underneath it.

A long stick and something to turn on, said a voice that had once been his. The longer your side, the less you have to push. A child can lift a teacher, if the child sits far enough out.

Brass let out a crow so loud that Ling Yue dropped her broom.

[SYSTEM] Brass learned: Lever — a long arm moves a heavy load · cost: you pay in distance

"What is he doing now?" Mo said.

Brass was dragging a bamboo pole out of the woodpile. It was three times the length of Elder Mo and he could barely move it, but he hauled it backwards through the mud one furious step at a time. He dropped it. He ran to the garden wall and began shoving at a round grey stone.

Ling Yue tilted her head. "I think... he wants the stone next to the beam?"

"He wants to be soup," said Mo.

But Ling Yue was already rolling the stone. Brass herded her with little pecks at her heels until it sat right up against the fallen timber. Then he pushed the tip of the bamboo pole under the beam, over the stone, so that almost all of the pole stuck out long and empty behind it.

He flapped up onto the far end of the pole, as far out as he could go.

The pole bent a little.

The beam did not move.

Brass sat there, bobbing gently, while the truth of it settled over him. The lever was real. It made his weight count ten times over. But ten times a scrawny rooster was still not a roof. The memory was right, and it still was not enough. The world did not bend because you were clever. It only let you trade. He needed more weight on the long end.

Weight. The yard. The coop.

The sun touched the top of the mountain. Gold spilled down over the terraces.

This was the moment. The only moment of the day. If he crowed now, facing the sun, the brightness would come in and he would be one breath closer to becoming something more than a rooster.

Or he could turn around.

Brass turned his back on the sunrise, faced the coop, and crowed his dawn crow with everything he had.

[SYSTEM] Dawn Crow — the whole yard wakes · cost: today's sip of qi, spent

The coop exploded.

Eleven hens, two ducks and a goose who did not live in the kitchen yard but had opinions about everything came pouring out in a panic of feathers, certain that a fox had come. They ran where roosters always told them to run: towards the rooster. Towards Brass, on his pole.

They piled onto the bamboo, flapping, squabbling, shoving for room. The pole groaned.

And the beam lifted.

Not far. The width of a hand. But Ling Yue was fast. She shoved a log of firewood into the gap, then another, then kicked a third in with her heel. The beam settled onto the logs, and between the timber and the mud there was a hole, just big enough.

"Elder!" she said.

Mo stared at the hole. He stared at the pole, and the heap of hens on it, and the scrawny rooster at the very end with his crooked feather standing straight up.

Then he got down on his bad back and crawled into the storehouse.

The dawn meal was served nine minutes late.

When Senior Brother Hua returned, the yard smelled of rice and ginger, and a line of hungry disciples ran out of the gate. He looked at the beam, now propped high on firewood. He looked at Elder Mo, stirring a pot with a face like a closed door.

"Who lifted it?"

"The rooster," said Ling Yue, before she could stop herself.

Hua laughed. It was a big, generous laugh, meant to be heard across the yard. "The rooster. Of course. Next the pigs will be teaching sword forms." He turned to Mo. "Luck, Elder. Luck and a clumsy girl. Don't expect it twice."

Brass watched him go. He did not crow. For once in his life, he did not need to. Everyone in the yard had seen the rooster at the end of the pole. Hua had laughed because the alternative was admitting it.

That evening, Ling Yue sat on the woodpile beside him with a bowl of rice she did not eat.

"You did it on purpose," she said quietly. "The stone. The pole. You knew. You gave up your sunrise for it, didn't you? I watch the sky every morning, I'm always late for it. You turned your back on it." She hugged her knees. "Where does a chicken learn a thing like that? Could you... could you teach me?"

Brass looked at her. He could not answer. But he did not look away, either.

From the kitchen doorway, Elder Mo watched the two of them for a long moment. Then he went inside and, for the first time in twenty years, took down the old cultivation manual he kept wrapped in oilcloth on the top shelf. He did not open it. He just held it.

Night came down over Cloudpine. The storm clouds had cleared, and the forbidden peak stood black and sharp against the stars.

Brass was almost asleep when he heard it. It was not in his ears. It was somewhere behind them. It was slow and deep, like wind moving through a very old tree.

The little one who counts, it said. You spent your dawn on your friends. That is rarer than a rooster who cultivates.

Brass's eyes flew open.

Come up the mountain, when you are not in such a hurry. I will still be here. I am always still here.

He did not sleep again that night. He sat on the woodpile, staring at the peak, and for the first time since he had hatched, Brass the rooster was quiet.