The Rooster Who Would Be Immortal — Chapter 8: The Medicine That Was Only Sap

The beans had flowered gold, and Elder Mo would not go near them. So on the first morning he was free to go where he liked, Brass walked out of the gate, turned uphill, and started to climb a mountain that no disciple was allowed to set foot on.

Nobody stopped him. He was a registered spirit companion now. It said so in a ledger.

The path ended halfway up. After that it was rock. He hardened his spurs and went up the cliff the way a nail goes into wood, one foot at a time, for most of a day.

[SYSTEM] Iron Spur — one cliff, climbed · cost: he will not be able to feel his feet tomorrow

He did not reach the top. Above the cloud line the mountain's qi pressed down like a hand, and nothing at his realm could climb through it. But just below, where the cliff gave out, there was a ledge of bare stone, a pool of rainwater, and one root as thick as a house, come down through the cloud from a pine on the summit so old that it had grown through the rock like fingers through bread.

"You are late," said the tree, from somewhere far above. "And you are loud. Even with your beak shut."

Brass froze.

He had not made a sound. He had only thought, very hard, the way he always did: I am here, I climbed your mountain, I have a great many questions.

"Yes, yes. Questions." The root shifted, with no wind. The voice was slow and kind and puzzling, like the end of a yawn. "I am Grandmother Pine. I have been listening to you shout at the sunrise for a year. Sit down, little rooster."

Somebody could hear him.

Brass sat down rather suddenly.

He asked her everything at once. Why the beans were gold. What was growing in her soil. How a rooster broke through to the next realm. Whether there was a technique, a scroll, a pill.

"A pill," said Grandmother Pine. "Good. Yes." A bead of resin, amber and no bigger than a pea, rolled down the bark and stopped at his feet. "Take this to the old cook. For his back. Then come and tell me what it did."

Brass looked at it. That was all?

"That is all."

It was not all. It could not be all. He had climbed a cliff. So when he got home he did what any serious cultivator would do, and improved it.

He would not carry a lump of sap down a mountain and call it medicine. So he set it on the woodpile and crowed at it. A full Dawn Crow, at sunrise, with everything he had.

[SYSTEM] Dawn Crow — one sunrise crowed at a bead of sap · cost: the sunrise

The bead looked exactly the same.

He tried again the next morning. And the next. He scratched it. He stared at it. He sat on it, in case that was how it was done. Three sunrises, gone. The bead sat there, a lump of sap, and did nothing at all.

On the fourth day, exhausted and furious, he dropped it on the kitchen step and went to sulk on the woodpile.

Ling Yue found it.

She picked it up and looked at the rooster, and at the mud on his feet, and at the mountain. She was not a fool.

"Elder Mo," she said, and she held the bead in both hands, the way a disciple carries a relic. "This came down from the forbidden peak. He carried it himself. I think it is thousand-year resin. I think it is for your back."

"It is tree snot," said Elder Mo.

"From the forbidden peak," said Ling Yue.

Mo looked at the bead for a long time. Twenty years his back had hurt. Twenty years he had told nobody how much. He took it between two fingers, the way a man takes something he does not believe in and wants to.

"Tree snot," he said again, more quietly, and swallowed it with his tea.

The next morning he came out to the well, bent to lift the bucket, and stopped halfway.

He straightened. He bent again. He put a hand to his lower back, and his face did something Brass had never seen it do.

"It does not hurt so much," Mo said. "It does not..." He lifted the bucket slowly, with both hands and his knees, the way he had for twenty years, and stood there holding it, like a man who has found money in an old coat.

Brass stared.

It had worked. But he had carried that bead. He knew what was in it. Sap. Only sap. Three wasted sunrises had not changed it, and a girl's solemn face had.

And then the board came back. The chalk. A word he had once written for a room full of bored children.

A medicine with nothing in it can still change how a person feels, if they believe in it. Pain eases a little. Fear settles. Sleep comes. The body has not been mended. Only the feeling has changed, and usually only some of it. It is no cure, and no reason to skip a real one.

[SYSTEM] Brass learned: belief alone can change how people feel — the pain eased, with nothing in the bead · cost: it mends nothing, and it is no cure

Mo's back was not healed. The old injury was exactly where it had been, and he would have to go on lifting with care. But the pain had been part injury and part twenty years of expecting pain, and that second part had just been told, by a bead from a forbidden mountain, that it could ease.

Brass went back up the cliff that same day.

"Well?" said Grandmother Pine.

It was sap, he thought at her. It was only ever sap. I crowed at it for three sunrises and that did nothing. She put one sentence into it and his back hurt less.

"Mm."

So it is a trick.

"Is it?" Something creaked, far up in the cloud. "He stood up straighter. That happened. His back is as broken as it was, and sap will never change that. You are angry because the thing that helped was not the thing you did."

Brass had no answer to that.

"You came up here for a pill, little rooster. You think the wall between you and the next realm is made of something you have not got yet. A scroll. A secret. A better crow." The voice was very gentle. "Some of it is. The realm is real. Sap will not carry you through it. But some of that wall is twenty years of a cook expecting his back to hurt. Some of it is a rooster who has been told every day that animals cannot cultivate, and has started to crow like something that is trying to prove them wrong."

Brass thought about the way he crowed. Chest out. As loud as he could. Every morning, at the sun, like an argument.

"Tomorrow," said Grandmother Pine, "do not shout at it. It is only the sun. It was always going to come up."

He stayed the night on the ledge. At dawn he stood at the edge of the stone and did the hardest thing he had done yet, which was nothing.

He did not puff up. He did not argue. He opened his beak and let the morning in, and the crow that came out was not loud at all.

The sip of qi was the same size it had always been. But for the first time, he had not wasted any of himself on shouting for it.

He was still in the second realm. Nothing had broken through. He simply understood, for the first time, where the edge of it was.

"There," said Grandmother Pine. "Now you can ask your real question."

Why is the peak forbidden? Brass thought. What is in your soil?

"Ah." A root shifted, slowly, with the sound of stone remembering. "Look down, little rooster. You have been standing on the answer."

Brass looked down.

The ledge was worn smooth, as if something had sat on it for a very long time. And pressed into the rock at his feet, as deep as a seal in wax, were tracks. Three toes forward and one behind.

A bird's foot. Larger than his own. So old that moss grew in it.

"The elders call this the Founder's Seat," said Grandmother Pine. "They say the one who began Cloudpine Sect sat here and reached the Golden Core. That part is true." The root trembled, and it might have been laughter. "They do not say what she was. They forbade the peak three hundred years ago. Not because it is dangerous, little rooster. Because it is embarrassing."

Brass put his own foot into the track. It fit, with room to spare.

Animals cannot cultivate. Everyone knew it. It was the first rule he had ever been told.

"She left something for the next one," said the old pine, already drifting. "She was sure there would be a next one. I kept it safe. I am almost certain I kept it safe." A long, slow breath of wind. "Now where did I put it. I do forget centuries."

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