The Price and the Choice

"Teacher! Teacher Shen!"

Li Wangye practically burst through the office door, a sheet of paper clutched in his hand, his face pale.

Shen Moxin looked up. Sunlight fell across her glasses at an angle, obscuring her eyes.

"The academy's decision is out." Li Wangye handed her the paper, his voice trembling. "It's the notice the supervision office posted."

Shen Moxin took it and unfolded it.

The office was quiet. The leaves of the pothos on the windowsill were wilted, rustling softly.

Li Wangye stared at her. But Shen Moxin only pushed up her glasses, read the last line, and gently laid the paper on the desk.

"I see," she said.

Her voice was flat.

"What kind of decision is this?!" Li Wangye could hold back no longer. "Suspending your qualifications as a lead instructor? Transferring you to manage the old archives? Nobody's been there in years!"

His chest heaved. "Isn't it just because Supervisor Sun attended that class? He reported it, and Director Ning and the others..."

"Li Wangye." Shen Moxin cut him off.

He fell silent.

"Have you measured Chen Shi's data today?"

Li Wangye was taken aback.

"Not yet."

"Go measure it," Shen Moxin said. "Three times. Record the time, environment, and condition clearly. The data can't have gaps."

Li Wangye opened his mouth, but in the end said nothing. He nodded hard, turned, and ran off.

His footsteps echoed down the empty corridor, growing fainter.

Shen Moxin picked up her pen again and wrote in her lesson plan. The nib scratched steadily against the paper.

After a few lines, she stopped.

The pen hovered above the page, ink gathering into a small black dot.

She let go of it. The pen rolled to the edge of the desk and fell to the floor with a tap.

Shen Moxin didn't pick it up. She took off her glasses and rubbed the bridge of her nose. The glasses lay on the desk, their lenses reflecting the light from outside in a blank expanse of white.

She sat there for about the time it took to drink a cup of tea.

Then she got up and gathered the lesson plans and notes scattered across the desk, stacking them one by one. Her movements were unhurried.

Finally, she folded the paper bearing the red stamp twice and tucked it into a pocket in the bottom notebook.

Lu Yuan didn't find out until the following evening.

He had just left Zhou Chun's laboratory and rounded the back wall of the abandoned training ground when he saw Li Wangye crouched in the corner, his head buried in his arms.

Lu Yuan walked over.

"Senior Li."

Li Wangye jerked his head up, his eyes a little red. He tugged at the corners of his mouth, producing a smile uglier than a cry.

"You heard?"

"I heard." Lu Yuan crouched beside him.

"How could they..." Li Wangye's voice caught. "Teacher Shen only wanted to teach something useful!"

Lu Yuan didn't answer. He picked up a piece of gravel by his foot and drew a line in the dirt.

"What about Chen Shi's data?"

"We're still measuring it." Li Wangye wiped his face. "It's risen by 0.3 since yesterday. It's slow, but it really is rising."

"That's good."

"What's good about it?!" Li Wangye suddenly grew agitated. "Teacher Shen's been transferred! Who'll dare teach this stuff now? Who'll dare try new methods?"

He caught his breath, and his voice dropped. "That day in class, Supervisor Sun was argued into silence... I thought, I thought it would be different."

Lu Yuan looked at the line in the dirt.

"She won the argument and lost her position," he said. "It happens all the time."

Li Wangye was silent for a long time.

"What will you do now?" he suddenly asked. "With Teacher Shen gone, Director Ning and the others will surely keep an even closer watch on you. Zhao Shi's held up two more of your material requests these past few days, hasn't he?"

"Yeah."

"What about the field mission? Teacher Sun is in charge of that, and it leaves next month."

Lu Yuan stood and dusted off his trouser legs.

"We'll see."

With that, he turned toward the dormitory. The setting sun stretched his shadow long.

Li Wangye watched him leave and opened his mouth, but in the end, he didn't call out.

Shen Moxin shut herself in her room for a whole day.

The door wasn't locked, but no one dared knock.

Early the next morning, the door opened.

Shen Moxin came out, her face paler than usual, but her eyes bright. She had changed into a plain gray cloth robe, her hair pinned up with meticulous care, and held the stack of lesson plans and notes in her arms.

She went first to the teaching supervision office and handed in her lead instructor's badge and course schedule.

The deacon who received her wore a subtle expression. Shen Moxin said little; once she had handed everything over, she turned and left.

Then she went to the old archives.

The building stood in the academy's far northwestern corner, next to the mountain behind it. The plaster on its walls was mottled, and withered vines covered them. The door creaked as she pushed it open, and dust sifted down.

The light inside was dim, and the air smelled of old paper and mold. Row upon row of bookshelves stood crammed full, the lettering on most of the spines blurred. Files and manuscripts that hadn't been shelved were piled on the floor, bound with hemp cord and covered in dust.

The librarian was an old man, curled up in a battered wicker chair and dozing. Hearing the noise, he opened his eyes, glanced at Shen Moxin, then closed them again. "The key's hanging on the door. Have a look yourself."

Shen Moxin took down the copper key. It was icy cold.

She walked to the nearest row of shelves and brushed her fingertips over the spines. The dust was thick.

She pulled out a book and opened it.

The pages had yellowed, their edges somewhat brittle. On them were records of Soul Power observations written in archaic characters, the ink so faded it was almost illegible.

Shen Moxin read a few pages, closed the book, and put it back.

She pulled out another.

And so she stood in the dim light for an hour, leafing through them one by one. Her movements were slow but steady.

At last, she walked to the window. An old desk stood there, one leg missing a corner and propped up with bricks.

Shen Moxin set the stack of lesson plans and notes from her arms on the desk.

She straightened and looked out the window. From here, she could see the dense woods on the mountain behind the academy, and farther away, the lofty spire of the Soul Master tower on the academy's main building.

After a while, she withdrew her gaze and put on her glasses.

She began tidying the desk.

Lu Yuan saw Shen Moxin on the third night.

They met on the second floor of the old archives. Shen Moxin had lit an oil lamp, its bean-sized flame illuminating the pile of old manuscripts in front of her, stacked half as high as a person. She was sorting them, opening them one by one, skimming a few pages, and putting them into categories.

When Lu Yuan knocked, she didn't even look up. "Come in."

"Teacher Shen."

Shen Moxin paused and raised her head. The oil lamp's light danced on her lenses.

"You're here," she said, as if she had known he would come.

Lu Yuan entered and closed the door behind him. The room was quiet, with only the rustle of turning pages.

"Sit."

Lu Yuan didn't sit. He went to the desk and looked at the manuscripts. Some were parchment, their edges curled; more were rough straw paper, the ink badly blurred.

"These are..."

"Research manuscripts judged 'useless,' 'radical,' or 'out of step with the times' over the more than one hundred years since the academy was founded." Shen Moxin picked up the top one and brushed off the dust. "Some are things written privately by instructors and students over the generations. They didn't dare make them public, and only after their deaths were they found among their belongings and piled here."

She flipped through a few pages and handed it to Lu Yuan.

Lu Yuan took it. The oil lamp was dim, so he narrowed his eyes and leaned closer. The pages bore intricate diagrams of Soul Power circulation, annotated with dense, tiny writing.

"Look here." Shen Moxin pointed to one spot. "This person believed that a Martial Soul's form wasn't fixed, and that fine adjustments to the frequency of Soul Power could trigger a brief structural change. He called it 'Instantaneous Dissimilation.'"

Lu Yuan read a few lines carefully.

"The idea is sound, but the model is too crude," he said. "It lacks constraints for energy homeostasis. If someone actually trained according to this, their Martial Soul could collapse."

"So he failed," Shen Moxin said. "The experiment records only go up to the seventeenth attempt. There's nothing after that. I suppose something went wrong, or the academy called a halt to it."

She gently placed the manuscript on the pile marked "for further research."

Lu Yuan was silent for a moment.

"Teacher Shen," he said, "will you be staying here from now on?"

Shen Moxin looked up and glanced at him.

"For now," she said. "As the archives librarian, I'm still nominally on the academy staff, but I have no teaching duties, no students, and no one attending my classes."

She paused, her voice growing quieter. "It's peaceful."

Lu Yuan said nothing.

Shen Moxin put down the manuscript in her hands and walked to the window. Night had deepened, and it was pitch-black outside.

"Lu Yuan." With her back to him, she suddenly said, "Your road at the academy may have reached its end."

Her words were blunt.

Lu Yuan showed no surprise. He walked to the desk, took something from inside his robe, and placed it beside the oil lamp.

It was a folded sheet of letter paper.

Shen Moxin turned around, her gaze falling on the paper. She didn't pick it up immediately, only looked at it.

"Teacher Zhou gave you that?"

"Yeah."

Shen Moxin came over, picked up the paper, and unfolded it. There was only one line, an address in Old Shipyard Alley in Vast Sea City. The handwriting was untidy.

She looked at it for a few seconds.

"Vast Sea City... dragons and fish mingle there." She raised her eyes to Lu Yuan. "But there really are people there researching 'things that can't be brought into the open.' Teacher Zhou means that perhaps someone there can understand what you're saying."

Lu Yuan nodded.

"However," Shen Moxin continued, changing tack, "once you leave the academy and lose its nominal protection, the Hundred Refinements Pavilion and those who can't stand you may act more directly."

She handed the paper back to him.

"The academy suppresses you, but at least it still has to follow the rules on the surface. Once you're outside, there are fewer rules."

Lu Yuan took the paper, folded it again, and tucked it inside his robe.

"I understand," he said.

His voice was calm.

He turned his gaze out the window, toward the distant outline of the Soul Master tower's spire.

"Here, I can't learn what I truly want to learn," Lu Yuan said. "Instead, I have to spend enormous effort dealing with these pointless struggles. Teacher Sun making things difficult for me, Zhao Shi holding things up, Director Ning watching me... every one of them is slowing me down."

He paused.

"It's time."

Shen Moxin looked at him. The oil lamp cast deep shadows across the side of his face.

"You've made up your mind?"

"Yeah."

Shen Moxin was silent for a while. She went back to the desk and drew a thin, hard-covered notebook from the bottom stack.

"This is for you." She held it out. "Some basic Soul Power models I've compiled over the years, and analyses of common Martial Soul structures. It's not particularly advanced, but it's systematic. You can read it on the road."

Lu Yuan took it and opened it to the first page. Shen Moxin's neat handwriting filled it.

"Thank you, Teacher Shen."

Shen Moxin shook her head.

Lu Yuan looked at her and suddenly asked, "What about you? You're staying here..."

A faint, bitter smile appeared on Shen Moxin's face.

"I still have to stay here for now," she said. "The archives... may yet contain what I'm looking for. There may be real gold hidden in these buried manuscripts. It just takes time to go through them and sort them out."

She walked to the window and rested a hand on the frame.

"And as long as I'm still at the academy," she said softly, "even in this corner, perhaps... I can still shield those who come after me from a little of the wind."

She didn't finish the thought, but her meaning was clear.

Lu Yuan looked at her back. Her gray cloth robe almost blended into the background in the dim light.

He stepped back, folded his hands together, and bowed deeply toward Shen Moxin's back.

He bent low and held the bow for three breaths.

Then he straightened and turned toward the door.

As he put his hand on the handle, Shen Moxin's voice came softly from behind him.

"Take care."

Lu Yuan paused.

"You too."

He pulled the door open, went out, and closed it behind him.

There was a soft click.

Only Shen Moxin remained in the room, along with the oil lamp and its bean-sized flame. The flame flickered, casting her shadow across the walls covered with old books and manuscripts.

She stood there for a long time before returning to the desk and picking up another manuscript.

She opened it and lowered her head to read.

The pages rustled.

By the time Lu Yuan left the old archives, it was deep into the night. There was no moon in the sky, only a few stars hanging there coldly.

He followed the path along the mountain behind the academy toward the dormitory, his steps unhurried.

Inside his robe, the hard cover of the notebook Shen Moxin had given him pressed against his chest, a little cool. On the other side, the sheet bearing the Vast Sea City address was thin, its weight almost imperceptible.

He looked up at the sky.

The starry sky hung low, vast and boundless.

His departure was settled.