The Rooster Who Would Be Immortal — Chapter 2: The Fever Nobody Could Blame

Three days after the storm, the outer disciples started falling down. By the fourth day, Senior Brother Hua had decided whose fault it was, and he was pointing at the rooster.

It began with one boy who fainted on the Dawn Terrace. Then six more, hot to the touch, clutching their stomachs. By the fourth morning, a third of the outer dormitory lay on their mats, and the instructors had cancelled the dawn lesson for the first time anyone could remember.

Ling Yue was one of them.

Brass found out because she did not come to the kitchen yard. She had come every evening since the beam, to sit on the woodpile and talk to him while she pretended to eat. On the fourth evening, the woodpile was empty, and Brass felt the emptiness like a stone in his crop.

"Stop pacing," said Elder Mo. "You're wearing a groove in my yard."

Brass did not stop pacing.

The next morning, Senior Brother Hua arrived with two inner disciples and a scroll.

"By order of the Hall of Duties," he read, "the kitchen is suspected of poisoning the outer sect." He lowered the scroll and smiled. "Your food, Elder. They all ate your food. And they all fell sick."

"Everyone eats my food," said Mo. "You eat my food. You look disgustingly healthy."

Hua's smile tightened. "There is another explanation, of course. There are rumours that an animal in this yard has been... gathering qi at dawn." He let the word hang. "Every child knows what the old scrolls say. A beast that steals heaven's breath brings sickness to the ones around it. A curse." He looked straight at Brass. "Either your cooking is poison, Elder, or your bird is. The Hall will decide by tomorrow's dawn. I'll be recommending both go in the pot."

When they had gone, Mo stood very still.

"A curse," he muttered. "Idiots. It's bad food. It's always bad food." But his hands were shaking as he checked the rice jars, sniffing each one, then the salt, then the pickled radish, then the bones for the soup. "It isn't the food," he said at last, and he sounded almost disappointed. "It isn't the food."

Brass did not believe in curses. But a cold little thought had crept in anyway. He had been catching qi every dawn. What if Hua was right? What if Ling Yue was sick because of him?

He had to see for himself.

The outer dormitory sat just below the kitchen yard, down a slope of rice terraces. Brass had never been inside. Roosters were chased out of places with floors. But nobody was chasing anything that afternoon. The healer was too tired, and the sick were too sick.

Ling Yue lay near the door, pale, a wet cloth on her forehead.

"Oh," she said weakly. "It's you. Are you... visiting me?" She almost laughed. "Hua says you cursed us. I told him that was the stupidest thing I'd ever heard. Then I was sick on his shoes. I think that proved my point."

Brass pressed his head against her hand for a moment. Then he began to look.

He looked the way the chalk-dust voice in his memory had once told children to look: not at what everyone was shouting about, but at what was the same, and what was different.

Who was sick? Outer disciples. Many of them. Not all.

Who was not sick? The instructors. The inner disciples. Hua. Elder Mo. Brass himself.

They had all eaten the same rice. So it wasn't the food. The sick and the well had all stood near the same rooster. So it wasn't a curse either, or at least it wasn't a very good one.

What else was different?

A girl on the next mat reached for a clay cup and drank. Brass followed the cup with his eyes. Beside the door stood a big water jar. And beside the jar lay a bucket on a rope, still dripping.

The well.

The outer dormitory had its own well, down at the bottom of the terraces. The inner disciples lived higher up and drank from the spring. And Elder Mo...

Brass remembered every morning of his life in that kitchen. Mo shouting at a young disciple who had tried to drink from the cold jar. Mo muttering, "Nobody drinks from my kitchen until it has boiled. I don't care if you're dying of thirst, you'll die politely and wait." Everyone had always thought it was just Mo being Mo. Bitter. Difficult. A man who liked rules because he had failed at everything else.

And the memory came. Sudden and bright, like a window opening.

A classroom. A drawing on a board of tiny creatures too small to see, crowded into a drop of water. His own voice, a human voice: Most of the things that make water sick are alive. Heat kills them. Bring water to a rolling boil and hold it there, and most of them die. It won't cure a person who's already sick. But it stops the next person from getting sick.

And then another piece: after a storm, rain washes the dirt of a whole hillside downhill. Into the rivers. Into the wells.

The storm. The same storm that had brought down the beam. It had poured the mud of the kitchen yard, the coops, the goose pond, all of it, down the terraces and into the outer dormitory's well.

It had never been a curse. It had never been the food. It had been the water, all along.

[SYSTEM] Brass learned: boiling water kills germs — clean water stops the fever spreading · cost: firewood, time, and it cures no one already sick

Brass ran.

He burst into the kitchen so fast he skidded across the floor and hit the rice jars. Mo turned, ladle raised.

"What now?"

Brass flew at the cold water jar in the corner and knocked it over. Water flooded across the floor.

"You featherbrained—!"

Brass ran to the big iron kettle on the stove and pecked it. Clang. Clang. Then he ran to the door and pointed his whole body down the slope, toward the dormitory. Then back to the kettle. Clang.

Mo stared at him. "You want tea? Now? The sect is dying and the bird wants tea?"

BRAWK. Clang. Down the slope. Clang.

Mo opened his mouth to shout. Then he closed it. Very slowly, he looked at the spilled cold water on the floor. At the kettle. At the slope.

"The ones who drink my tea," he said quietly, "aren't sick." He was silent for a long moment. "My old master used to say it. Boil it or bury them. I thought he was just a grumpy old man." He almost smiled. "Turns out it's a family tradition."

He grabbed the kettle. Then he grabbed the second kettle. Then the soup cauldron.

That night, the kitchen fire did not go out.

Mo boiled water until his bad back screamed. Brass guarded the fire. Every time the flames sank, he dragged sticks from the woodpile in his beak, one at a time, one at a time, until his beak bled and he kept dragging anyway. Mo carried the boiled water down the slope in covered pots and told the healer, in a voice that allowed no argument, that no one drank a drop from that well again until he said so.

The healer argued. Mo said something short and dry about the healer's own training, and the healer stopped arguing.

The sick were still sick. Boiling could not change that. They needed rest, and clean water, and time. But by midnight, the healer noticed something strange. No new disciples had fallen ill.

By the third hour, still none.

Ling Yue drank a whole cup of boiled water, cooled, and fell into a real sleep for the first time in two days.

Dawn came grey and then gold.

Senior Brother Hua climbed the path to the kitchen yard with the Hall's decision rolled under his arm. He found the healer waiting for him.

"No new cases since sunset," the healer said. "The well was fouled in the storm. The kitchen's boiled water stopped it. Your curse, Senior Brother, seems to have been mud."

Hua's face went very red.

Brass was not listening. The sun was rising, and he was so tired that his legs trembled on the woodpile. He had not slept. He had not eaten. There was ash in his feathers and blood on his beak.

He turned to the sunrise and crowed.

And this time, something was different.

The brightness came in, as it always did. A sip of warmth. But this time it did not stop at one sip. It kept coming. It poured into him like the boiled water had poured into the sick, filling up every hollow place. The night of work. The fear for Ling Yue. The fire he had not let die. It was all still there inside him, and the qi went into it and found somewhere to stay.

Something inside Brass, some small closed door, swung open.

[SYSTEM] Breakthrough: Qi Gathering — the dawn's qi now stays in him instead of fading · cost: his secret; someone saw

Light rose off his feathers. For one breath, the scrawny rooster on the woodpile glowed like a coal.

Then it faded. Brass wobbled, and sat down very suddenly.

Behind him, in the kitchen doorway, Elder Mo had seen everything.

He did not shout. He did not laugh. He stood there, with his hand on his bad back, and his face did something complicated.

Then he went inside, took the old manual down from the top shelf, unwrapped the oilcloth, and opened it for the first time in twenty years.

"Qi Gathering," he said, to nobody. "A kitchen rooster. At Qi Gathering." He turned a page. "I took eleven years."

Down the slope, a thin voice called out. Ling Yue was standing in the dormitory doorway, wrapped in a blanket, pale but upright. She waved at the woodpile.

"I saw that!" she called. "I saw that! You have to teach me now. You don't get a choice!"

And far above the clouds, on the forbidden peak, something very old stirred in its sleep, and smiled.

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