Zhou Man did not yet know what had happened outside her door.
She tucked the copper coin and thumb ring away and turned to look at Zhao Nishang, who had just stepped inside.
The room was still slightly disordered from her earlier fight with Jin Buhuan. Zhao Nishang noticed, said nothing, drew a quiet breath, and came forward to bow.
"The servants of Qiluo Hall mentioned Senior Sister came by this morning. I was away at the time. I apologize for missing you."
"It doesn't matter," Zhou Man said. "I wasn't there for you then."
She stood, crossed to the writing desk, and picked up the pages she had spent the morning on. Then she glanced back and saw that Zhao Nishang was holding a small porcelain jar, expression cautious, as though working up the nerve to speak.
"Is that for me?"
Zhao Nishang exhaled. "I had some free time these past two days. I went up the mountain and picked a little snow-bud tea, just finished roasting it. I thought of bringing some for Senior Sister when I came."
Zhou Man accepted it and looked inside. It was a neat little tea jar, the kind you bring to a friend in passing -- light enough not to impose, full enough to mean something.
"Thoughtful," she said simply, and set it on the desk.
Then she straightened the pages she was holding, checked the order and the writing once more, and held them out to Zhao Nishang with an unusual gravity.
"This is the cultivation method I chose for you."
Zhao Nishang took it with both hands. She read the first page aloud, slowly: "Nichang... Yuyi Qu?"
Zhou Man's handwriting was not elegant. Her right small finger was incomplete, and that finger was what kept a brush balanced in the hand. The damage showed -- her characters were blunt, unrefined, a little ungainly. But the brushwork had force behind it, a dense, striking weight that lodged itself in the eye.
The first two pages were not cultivation instructions. They were sheet music.
The page after that described how to make the Rainbow Feathered Robe itself.
"This method is called the Rainbow Clothes and Feathered Song," Zhou Man said. "Of everything I know, it may suit you best."
It was one of the twelve Daoist teachings recorded in Emperor Wu's Golden Tablets. The memories of those twelve scrolls, from her previous life, surfaced quietly behind her eyes. She let none of it show.
"You may not have studied much," she said, "but you have been at Jianmen Academy long enough to have heard the stories. Three hundred years ago, Emperor Wu withdrew from the world and entered meditation at Daiyue Mountain. She became the most powerful cultivator of her age. She established her dojo at the Jade Emperor's Peak with three great attendants: one for dance, one for music, one for clothing. The Dance Attendant was Miaosong, goddess of Wushan. The Music Attendant was Wang Xiang, the renowned Qin slave. The Clothing Attendant was the Heavenly Granddaughter, whose fingers were said to weave cloud and dusk into cloth."
Zhao Nishang had been listening quietly, but at those last words, she looked up. She could not help it.
Zhou Man continued. "The technique I am giving you was created by the Heavenly Granddaughter herself. In the beginning it was only music -- a composition Wang Xiang made for Emperor Wu. Miaosong later choreographed a dance to accompany it. From that dance, the Heavenly Granddaughter conceived the legendary robe, and in making the robe, she found her own Dao."
She paused, then added plainly: "I do not know this method in full. What I have given you are fragments. The early portions of the cultivation text are my own reconstruction -- reasoned out from Daoist principles and filled in where the original was lost. I cannot promise those sections carry the power of the original work."
In her previous life, Zhou Man had never thought to memorize all twelve golden tablets. For a cultivator, absorbing too much Dao at once was a hazard. What you could not yet understand, you would forget. What you understood too well, you would remember in excess -- and that excess could erode the Dao-mind. Even Emperor Wu had simply written the techniques down rather than holding them all within herself.
Zhou Man did not remember the Rainbow Clothes and Feathered Song in its entirety. But her attainment in Taoism during her previous life had been equal to the Heavenly Granddaughter's. Reasoning from fragments was not difficult for her. What she had reconstructed might not be inferior to the original.
She would not say this to Zhao Nishang. Better to underpromise.
"If you take the score apart line by line," she said, "the music becomes method. I've written the cultivation steps in the following pages. The three weapons that pair best with this technique are..."
Zhao Nishang turned to the next page. Her lips parted.
A needle. Thread. A shuttle.
Zhou Man nodded. "Used well, all three are formidable. It depends entirely on how you train with them."
The Heavenly Granddaughter was the patron of weavers and seamstresses. A statue of her stood in the main hall of Qiluo Hall. Zhao Nishang knew this -- and she knew something else: her father had chosen her name precisely because of the rumor that the Heavenly Granddaughter had woven the most beautiful Rainbow Feathered Robe of all, with fingers that moved like they were threading cloud.
She had expected nothing like this. She had come hoping for basic instruction, something ordinary, something suited to a person who had never trained. Instead Zhou Man had placed into her hands a technique traced back to a goddess who had shaped one of the three great attendants of Emperor Wu herself.
Zhao Nishang thought she must be dreaming.
She clutched the thin pages and looked up, her voice going unsteady: "Is this... truly for me?"
Zhou Man raised an eyebrow. "You made a robe for me. Of course it is."
Zhao Nishang stood still a moment. Then, to her own surprise, she laughed -- quiet and self-deprecating. "Don't compare my work with yours."
"I'm not comparing," Zhou Man said. "I'm telling you how it is."
She leaned back against the edge of the desk, unhurried. Her voice stayed light, but her eyes had more in them than her expression showed.
"Ordinary people aren't assessed for talent until they're sixteen. If the results are poor, they stop training. But those born into powerful families have their aptitudes measured from birth, supplemented with spirit medicines, trained by senior cultivators. By the time they're sixteen, their 'natural talent' looks extraordinary. And if they show no gift for the sword, the family places all of the three thousand great paths in front of them -- alchemy, music, painting, calligraphy, talisman-making -- one by one, until something fits. They always find something. They are always better than others at it."
Zhao Nishang had been watching Zhou Man's right hand -- even wrapped in black cloth, the shortened finger was visible.
"But Senior Sister," she said. "In the Sword Hall, you--"
The words stopped in her throat.
Zhou Man glanced at her own hand. For a moment something shifted in her face, something old and quiet, and she was silent.
Zhao Nishang went cold. The cold spread outward.
Then Zhou Man looked up again, and her voice was level and direct: "If you don't understand why those gaps exist, then comparing yourself to people who started with ten times what you had will only convince you that you are talentless. Zhao Nishang -- if a person does not believe she can succeed, even if Emperor Wu herself descended to teach her, she would accomplish nothing."
These words fell on Zhao Nishang strangely. She had expected -- she wasn't certain what she had expected. Not this. The words tangled in her chest and would not settle.
Then something shifted in her, and she went to her knees. She pressed her forehead to the floor.
"Thank you, Senior Sister. I was confused. I nearly lost my footing."
"Get up," Zhou Man said.
When Zhao Nishang rose, she was steadier. She met Zhou Man's eyes. "I was only afraid that if my cultivation was too slow, I would fail this sect. Fail your effort."
Zhou Man shook her head. "Their talent is not necessarily greater than yours. They only had more luck, and more chances."
She straightened, and her voice became matter-of-fact again: "It is not fair that you came from where you came from. There is nothing I can tell you to make it fair. The only thing in front of you is more work than others to close the distance -- that's all. But if you can learn to rely on your own work and not spend your energy measuring yourself against people whose starting line was somewhere entirely different, you may discover that the distance is not as great as you believed."
Zhao Nishang's expression settled into something resolved, something that had not been there before.
"Nishang will keep Senior Sister's teaching in mind," she said. "Since she has been given this method, she will give everything to it. And if she can follow even a fraction of Senior Sister's path -- that will be enough."