Her Fiancé Dumped Her for Crippled Roots, So She Climbed the Mountain on Ash novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Root Stone
On testing day the Root Stone declares Lian crippled and her fiancé breaks their engagement in front of the sect; sent to haul ash, she drinks it, and at dawn the Steward finds a bucket short.
The green light climbed a hand's width up the Root Stone and died there.
Meng Lian kept both palms flat on the white jade and waited for it to climb again.
Three years ago this same stone had lit to the top for her, the best reading in the outer sect in forty years.
Today the whole Jade Spring Sect had come to the Stone Yard to watch it happen twice.
The light leaked out at the bottom of the pillar.
Behind her, the next girl in line stopped drying her palms on her robe.
The testing elder bent close to the stone, then closer.
He was old and kind, and he looked sorry before he spoke.
"Cracked roots," he said. "Crippled."
Spirit roots were the channels inside a body that qi, the mountain's living breath, grew from.
One disciple in fifty cracked them at this test, when they had grown faster than the body could hold.
Lian's had grown faster than anyone's.
Three hundred people in white and blue went quiet at once.
At the rope line, her little sister lowered the wooden sword she'd been waving over her head all morning.
Meng Xiu was sixteen and had cut her own hair with a kitchen knife.
By sect law, an outer disciple with cracked roots became a carrier for life.
Carriers lived on the Ash Terraces, on the mountain's shaded west face.
Every night they scraped the ash from the bottom of the spirit pool and hauled it down nine hundred steps to the Ash Well.
Ash was the heavy gray qi that sank to the bottom of the pool, the part the disciples' bodies threw away.
On the elders' dais, Guan Shuo stood up.
Today was the day inner disciples announced their weddings, and he had been waiting to announce theirs.
He came down the steps with his white sleeves falling to his knuckles, the way they always did.
He was twenty-one, the youngest Core in a hundred years, and the Sect Master's grandson.
He stopped in front of her and took a jade token out of his sleeve.
It was the betrothal token she had given him at sixteen.
"Lian," he said, gently enough. "The first disciple of Jade Spring can't marry a carrier."
He held it out.
"I release you from the engagement here, in front of everyone, so nobody can say I hid it."
His right hand was wrapped around his left wrist.
Lian took the token.
"You could have let me take my hands off the stone first," she said.
Someone near the front laughed and turned it into a cough.
Guan Shuo's face didn't change. He went back up the steps to his grandmother's side.
Sect Master Nie Hanyue had not moved from her chair.
She was a hundred and forty-three and looked fifty, with silver hair in a plain knot and white silk gloves she never took off.
Every carrier on the terraces knew her story.
She had been a carrier girl herself, until a second test at twenty lit the stone to the top.
She had never touched the Root Stone since.
"The law gives her the terraces," the Sect Master said, in a soft, reasonable voice. "I will give her a kinder choice."
She lifted one gloved finger.
"Ten silver taels and the road down the mountain today. A ferryman's daughter can go home."
Xiu ducked under the rope.
"Then I'm going too," she said. "I'm not staying here without her."
The yard murmured.
An outer disciple who walked out never walked back in.
Xiu had wanted a real sword since she was five years old.
Lian looked at her sister's wooden one, worn pale where her hand went.
"I'll take the terraces," Lian said.
Xiu grabbed her sleeve.
"Lian, no. That's for life."
"You're staying," Lian told her. "You're getting your sword."
The Sect Master looked at her a moment longer than she had to.
"As you like," she said.
The head carrier met Lian at the top of the west stair that night with a pair of buckets and no welcome.
She was sixty-one, and her hands were scarred pink and gray from forty years of handles.
"Fill them at the pool, chalk the line, carry them down," she said. "Your palms will blister tonight."
They did.
The buckets were wooden and steaming, and the ash inside them moved.
It smelled like a fire someone had thrown water on.
Forty women went down the nine hundred steps in a line.
"Don't breathe over it," the head carrier said without turning around.
"Every few years some fool drinks it, because it's power and it's right there."
"It goes into the flesh, not the roots, so the roots don't matter."
"She burns every waking hour after that, and the gray climbs her arms."
"Clean qi won't take in her ever again."
"And when the Discipline Hall sees the gray, she goes down the well with the ash."
"Eleven in sixty years," said one of the twins behind Lian.
"Twelve if you keep staring at it," said the other.
At the foot of the stair, the Ash Well was a stone shaft as wide as a room, with an iron grate over the top.
The carriers set their buckets in a row beside it for the Steward to check at dawn.
Lian set hers down last.
She tried to draw a breath of qi.
It came in and ran straight out of her.
She thought about Xiu alone in the outer dormitory with a wooden sword and nobody to pay for her.
She thought about the Sect Master offering the road down because a crippled girl on the road was nothing.
Lian dipped her ladle into the bucket and drank.
It went down.
She bit her sleeve to keep from screaming and folded over her knees on the cold stones.
Gray lines rose from her wrists to her elbows.
The burn didn't fade.
But the qi stayed.
For the first time since the Root Stone, it sat inside her, heavy and hot, and none of it ran out.
At dawn the Steward came down the stair with his chalk and his cane.
He walked the row of buckets, checking each chalk line against the ash.
He stopped at the last one.
"This bucket's short a ladle," he said.
He turned to the forty carriers on the steps.
"Sleeves up. All of you."
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