The Rooster Who Would Be Immortal — Chapter 3: The Jar That Should Have Exploded

Elder Mo's rice wine exploded at breakfast, which was not unusual. What was unusual was that, an hour later, a jar of it turned up under Ling Yue's sleeping mat, and the Hall of Duties came to expel her.

The explosion came first. Mo kept a row of rice wine jars on the high shelf, for cooking and, he said, for medicine, and for nothing else, and anybody who suggested otherwise could cook their own dinner. Every few days, one of them went off like a firecracker.

"Cursed jars," Mo growled, wiping foam from his eyebrows. "Twenty years I've made this wine. Twenty years they've tried to kill me."

Brass was not listening. Brass had been sulking for three days, because since his breakthrough, Elder Mo had made a new rule: no glowing in the yard. No crowing at the sun where anyone could see. The rumour Hua had started, that a beast who gathered qi was a curse, had reached the Hall of Duties, and the Hall of Duties did not forget rumours. It filed them.

So Brass was being careful. Brass hated being careful.

Which is why he was the first to see them coming up the path: Senior Brother Hua, looking pleased with himself, and beside him a thin, grey-robed woman with a ledger under her arm and the Hall's bronze badge on her sleeve.

"The Deacon of Duties," Mo muttered. "Wonderful. Look ordinary."

Brass tried to look ordinary. He was not sure what that meant for a rooster, so he pecked at the dirt.

"Elder Mo," said the Deacon. Her voice was quiet and very precise. "Two matters. First, a report that an animal in this yard has been cultivating. Second, a report of theft." She opened the ledger. "A disciple of the outer sect has been drinking wine stolen from this kitchen. Wine is forbidden to the outer sect. Theft from the kitchen is expulsion."

"Which disciple?" said Mo.

Hua smiled. "Ling Yue."

Brass stopped pecking.

"I found the jar myself this morning," Hua went on, "under her mat in the outer dormitory. Sealed with the kitchen's red clay. She's been drinking it for days, since the fever, I expect. Weak girls look for comfort." He glanced at Brass, and his smile widened. "Of course, it may not be entirely her fault. She spends every evening in this yard. With that bird. If the bird is what people say it is... well. Curses spread. Perhaps the beast led her astray."

And there it was. Brass understood the whole shape of it at once, the way you see the shape of a trap only after your foot is in it. Hua wanted Ling expelled, because she was the one who had said the rooster lifted the beam, out loud, in front of everyone. And he wanted the rooster gone. So he had tied them together with one jar. If Ling was guilty, the rooster was a curse. If the rooster was a curse, Ling was guilty. Either way, they both fell.

He was not a hero in this story. He was a pawn in Hua's.

[SYSTEM] Brass is being used: the charge against Ling Yue rests on the rumour about him

"Bring the girl," said the Deacon. "And the jar."

Ling Yue came up the slope between two inner disciples, pale and very straight. She did not look at Brass. She looked at the jar on the barrel as if it might bite her.

"I have never seen it before," she said. "I have never drunk wine in my life. I was on the Dawn Terrace this morning. I was on time. For once." Her voice cracked a little on the last two words. "The instructor saw me."

"The jar was found this morning," said Hua smoothly. "It says nothing about when it was put there. She's been sick in that dormitory for days, with braziers burning day and night to keep the patients warm. Plenty of time to drink in secret."

Warm. Days. Sealed.

Brass looked at the jar.

And the memory came, the way it always did, like a window flung open in an unfamiliar house. A classroom. A glass bottle with a balloon stretched over its mouth, slowly swelling on the teacher's desk while the children laughed. His own voice: Yeast is alive. Give it sugar and warmth, and it eats the sugar and makes two things: alcohol, and gas. The gas has to go somewhere. Seal the bottle, and the gas builds up, and up, and up.

Brass looked through the kitchen door at Mo's high shelf, where a burst jar was still dripping foam. Cursed jars. Twenty years they'd tried to kill him.

Not cursed. Alive.

[SYSTEM] Brass learned: yeast turns sugar into alcohol and gas — a sealed jar keeps time · cost: only while it's warm and still working

He knew what Mo did every morning, because Brass had watched him do it every morning of his life: at dawn, the old man climbed onto a stool and loosened the clay seal on each new jar, just for a moment, and let out a sigh of gas. He called it "letting the demons out." Any new jar he forgot, he lost.

The jar on the barrel was from the new batch. Brass could see Mo's thumbprint in its red clay seal.

A new jar, sealed tight, left for days beside a brazier, would have burst. It would have gone off in the night like the one on the shelf. Unless someone had let the gas out this morning, at dawn, when Mo let it out of every jar on his shelf.

Which meant the jar had been sitting on Mo's shelf at dawn.

Which meant it had reached Ling Yue's mat after dawn. While she was on the Dawn Terrace, on time for once, in front of the instructor and forty disciples.

Brass could not say any of this. He could only crow, and he had promised not to crow.

So he did the only thing a rooster can do. He flew up onto the barrel and pecked the clay seal on the jar, hard.

There was a tiny hiss. Barely a breath.

"Get down, you idiot bird," said Mo, and then stopped.

Brass shot through the kitchen door and flapped up onto the high shelf, knocking a ladle clattering, and landed beside the one jar in the back row that Mo had missed that morning, the one half hidden behind a sack of rice. Its clay seal had bulged into a dome. It was humming, very faintly.

He pecked that seal too.

The jar went off like a thunderclap. Foam hit the ceiling. Everyone who had crowded into the doorway behind him was spattered, the Deacon's ledger included. Hua leapt backwards into a bucket.

In the dripping silence that followed, Elder Mo began, very slowly, to laugh.

"I let the demons out of every new jar at dawn," he said. "I missed that one this morning. You see what one morning does to it." He pointed at the jar on the barrel. "That one barely hissed. I let it breathe at sunrise, on my shelf, in my kitchen. Then somebody carried it down the hill." He turned to the Deacon. "At sunrise, the girl was on the terrace. Ask the instructor. Ask forty disciples." He did not look at Hua. He did not need to. "Ask who was in my kitchen after dawn."

The Deacon wrote something in her spattered ledger. She was quiet for a long time.

"The charge of theft against Ling Yue," she said at last, "is dismissed. The Hall will ask its own questions about who carried the jar." She closed the ledger. Hua's face had gone the colour of the wine. "As for the second matter. The animal."

She looked at Brass. Brass looked at the dirt, and tried very hard to be ordinary.

"The rooster knocked over a jar," she said drily. "Roosters knock things over. I see no curse here." She paused. "But I will say this, Elder, since you are so fond of saying things. The girl spends her evenings in this yard. If this yard is ever found to be what the rumour says, she goes down with it. Rumours are patient. So is the Hall."

She left. Hua followed, stiff-backed, not looking at anyone. But at the gate he stopped and looked at Brass, and there was no laughter in his face at all anymore. Only something cold and patient.

"The Spring Tournament," he said softly. "Everyone watches the Spring Tournament."

That evening, Ling Yue came up the slope to the woodpile, the way she had every evening since the beam. She was smiling, really smiling, for the first time in days. She had a bowl of rice she was actually going to eat.

"You did it again," she said. "I don't even know how you did it, and you did it again. Now you really have to teach me. I'll come every night. I'll..."

Brass had heard the Deacon. If this yard is ever found to be what the rumour says, she goes down with it.

Every evening she spent on this woodpile was an evening someone could write in a ledger.

So Brass did the hardest thing he had ever done. Harder than the beam. Harder than the night of the fire.

He turned his back on her.

He hopped down off the woodpile, walked into the coop, and did not come out.

"Brass?" she said. "Brass, what did I do?"

He did not answer. He could not answer. And for the first time, he was glad he could not speak, because he did not trust what he would have said.

After a long time, he heard her go.

[SYSTEM] Ling Yue: kept in the sect · cost: her evenings in the yard

Mo found him in the coop that night, pressed into the corner.

"That was the right thing," the old man said gruffly. "And it was a stupid thing. And they are often the same thing." He was quiet for a moment. "She'll hate you for a while. Better hated than expelled."

He put something down in the straw beside Brass. It was a single page, torn carefully from the old oilcloth manual.

"The breathing forms for Qi Gathering," Mo said. "I can't teach you properly. I never finished learning myself. But I know where the rest of the book is." He looked up, through the coop's slats, at the black shape of the forbidden peak. "Someone up there has been waiting a long time for you, rooster. I think it's time you stopped being in a hurry."

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