The Rooster Who Would Be Immortal · an original cultivation (xianxia) serial · Chapter 5 · A Quiet Chapter
Elder Mo's cabbages had been getting smaller for twenty years, and Elder Mo had decided it was his fault. Brass thought this was the saddest thing he had ever heard a man say to a vegetable.
It was an ordinary morning. Those were rare, and Brass meant to enjoy it.
He crowed at the sunrise and took his one sip of qi. It went down warm, like the first mouthful of soup.
[SYSTEM] Dawn Crow — one sip of morning qi · cost: one sunrise, and you only get the one
Then he went to work. Ling Yue came to the kitchen now, every day after the dawn lesson, to earn her thirteen silver. She scrubbed pots. She carried water. And in between, when nobody was looking, she knelt by the gravel path and Brass taught her with pebbles.
Today it was halves and quarters. She got it on the third try and grinned at him, and Brass felt taller than the woodpile.
Behind the coop lay the kitchen garden. It was one long bed of dark earth with a bamboo fence, and in it sat forty cabbages the size of a fist.
Elder Mo stood over them with a hoe and a look Brass knew well.
"Same bed," Mo muttered. "Same seed. Same water. My master grew cabbages here you could not carry with one arm." He nudged one with his toe. It rolled over. "Twenty years I have planted this ground, and every year it gives me less. A man starts to think it is not the ground."
Ling Yue looked up from her pebbles. "Elder?"
"Nothing." He leaned on the hoe. "Some people spoil what they touch, girl. I pushed a breakthrough before I was ready, and it broke me instead. Eleven years to reach Qi Gathering, and not one step since. I plant the same thing in the same place and I get less each time." He spat. "The cabbages are only being honest about it."
Brass did not like that at all. He hopped the fence.
He meant to scratch about and look sympathetic. Instead he stopped, because at the far end of the bed, in the corner by the fence post, three cabbages were enormous.
Not large. Enormous. Each one was bigger than his head, comb and all.
And all around them the soil was matted with the dead brown stems of last winter's weed, with a few green shoots of it climbing the fence: feathery leaves ending in a curling tendril, tiny purple flowers. Vetch. Wild bean. Mo had been pulling it out of the rest of the bed for twenty years. In the corner he had never bothered, and every winter it had grown, died back, and rotted into the ground.
Brass stared at the weed. Then at the giant cabbages. Then at the weed.
Something surfaced. A board, a piece of chalk, a drawing of a root with little round lumps on it like beads on a string.
A plant eats from the soil, and one kind of plant always eats the same things. Grow one crop in one place, year after year, and it empties the ground of exactly what it needs most. But beans are different. Beans, peas, clover and vetch keep tiny living things in lumps on their roots, and those take one food out of the air itself. When the plant dies and rots, that food stays in the ground. It is the very one that leafy cabbages are hungriest for. It is only the one. But it is the one this bed had run out of.
That was why farmers moved their crops around. It was not luck. It was not a curse. It was dinner.
[SYSTEM] Brass learned: rotating crops restores the soil — beans put back the food cabbages are hungriest for · cost: one food only, and it takes a season
It was not Mo. It had never been Mo. It was the same bed, the same seed, twenty years.
Brass opened his beak to say so, and remembered, as he had to remember every single day, that all he could say was BRAWK.
So he did it the other way.
He hardened his spurs and dug. Clay flew. He hauled a vetch plant out by the roots and dragged it across the garden, and dropped it on Ling Yue's foot.
[SYSTEM] Iron Spur — one weed dug up whole, roots and all · cost: a very dirty rooster
"That is a weed," said Ling Yue.
Brass pecked the roots. Peck. Peck. On the little round lumps.
She picked it up. "It has beads on it." She rolled one between her fingers. "Elder, has it always had these?"
"It is a weed," said Mo. "It has whatever it likes."
Brass ran to the corner and stood on one of the giant cabbages. Then he ran to the middle of the bed and stood on a tiny one. Then back. Then back again. He was out of breath and he had mud to the knees.
Ling Yue watched him go back and forth three times. Her face did the thing it did when the pebbles started to make sense.
"The big ones are where the weed grows," she said slowly. "Only there. Everywhere you pulled it out, the cabbages are small."
Mo opened his mouth to say something sour, and did not.
That was when the Herb Steward came for the kitchen scraps.
He came every tenth day with two junior disciples and a handcart, to carry peelings down to the compost pits of Spirit Herb Valley. He was a tall, tidy man named Fan, and he had opinions about soil.
"Still growing marbles, Elder Mo?" He looked over the fence and smiled. "I have told you. Dead ground. Dig it out and I will sell you a cartload of valley earth." He noticed the weed in Ling Yue's hand. "And you are letting vetch run in it. Peasant beans. In sect soil. No wonder."
The two juniors laughed. Four outer disciples waiting at the kitchen door for the midday rice turned to look.
Ling Yue went red. She glanced down at Brass. Brass looked at the corner as hard as he could.
"Steward Fan," she said. "Would you weigh two cabbages for us? You have the scale on your cart."
"I am a busy man."
"It will not take long. One from the middle. One from the corner, where the peasant beans are."
The Steward sighed the sigh of a man being generous. He pulled a cabbage from the middle of the bed, dropped it on his scale, and slid the weight along the bar. "Half a catty. As I said. Marbles."
Then he went to the corner, took hold of one of the big ones, and pulled.
It did not come.
He pulled with both hands. It came up with a sound like a boot leaving mud, and he had to carry it against his chest. When he set it on the scale, the bar swung up and hit the stop.
He slid the weight to the end. The bar stayed up.
"Three catties," said one of his juniors, in an awed voice. "More. Steward, that is as big as the ones in the valley."
Nobody at the kitchen door was laughing now. They were looking at the Steward.
"Same bed," said Ling Yue. Her voice shook only a little. "Same seed. Same water. The only thing different in that corner is the weed that rots there every spring. I think the weed feeds the ground, Steward. I think if Elder Mo grows beans in this bed for a season, and cabbages after, the whole bed will look like that."
Steward Fan stared at the cabbage for a long moment. Then at the vetch. Then, with great dignity, he bent down and pulled up a plant himself, and looked at the beads on its roots.
"Peasant beans," he said faintly.
"Marbles," said Elder Mo, and for the first time in a very long while, he was smiling.
The Steward left with his scraps and with one vetch plant wrapped carefully in a cloth.
That evening, Mo sat on the fence with a basket of dried beans in his lap. Brass sat beside him.
"A season of beans," Mo said. "Then cabbages. A whole year before I know if the girl is right." He turned a bean over in his fingers. "And she is not the one who is right, is she."
Brass said nothing. He was getting good at that.
"Twenty years I thought it was me." Mo's voice was rough. "The same thing, in the same place, harder every time. That is not only how I grew cabbages, bird. That is how I cultivated." He was quiet. "Maybe the ground just needed something else for a while."
Brass looked at the old man. He wanted, more than he had ever wanted anything, to say: it was never you.
He could not. A crow at dawn, a spur like steel, a head full of chalk and boards, and he could not say four small words to the one person who needed them.
So that was it, then. Not just to be taken seriously. To be heard.
He leaned against Mo's arm instead. Mo let him.
Down in the yard, a single pine needle drifted onto the woodpile. There was no wind. There was no pine tree within a mile of the kitchen.
And from very far up the mountain, slow and kind and puzzling, a voice came down like the end of a yawn.
"Beans," said the voice. "Good. Now come up, little rooster, before they flower. Something is growing in my soil too. And it is not patient."
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