The summer he was four, a cultivator came through Qinghe.
This was not unusual exactly — cultivators passed through river towns along this stretch of road with some regularity, moving between the larger cities, stopping for supplies or a night's sleep. What was unusual was the boat. It was not a trading boat or a fishing boat. It was narrow and lacquered black with a red insignia on the sail that Wei Liang did not know the meaning of, and it moved upstream against the current without oars, without poles, without any visible method of propulsion. It simply moved, steadily and without apparent effort, as if the river had been asked a favour and was grudgingly providing it.
Wei Liang saw it from the south dock where he had been permitted to sit while his father worked, on the condition that he stayed where he was and did not attempt to climb anything. He was four years old and had already demonstrated that "don't climb that" was a guideline he evaluated on a case-by-case basis, so the condition had been stated with some firmness.
He stayed where he was. He watched the boat.
The man on it was standing at the bow, hands clasped behind his back, wearing robes the colour of old bronze. He was looking at the far bank and not at the town. He did not appear to be doing anything — no gestures, no visible concentration — and yet the boat moved. Upstream. Against the Qinghe River, which had opinions about things moving against it.
Wei Liang watched the town's reaction to the boat.
It was the watching-the-town that taught him more than watching the boat would have. The vendors at Old Yan's row of stalls straightened, almost imperceptibly, as the boat passed. The two men arguing about net rights on the north dock stopped arguing. His father, without looking up from the rope he was coiling, shifted to the side of the dock — not retreating, exactly, just making space that had not needed to be made a moment before. The woman washing vegetables at the dock's edge gathered her basket and moved back.
Nobody said anything. The boat moved past. The town resumed.
Wei Liang looked at his father.
"What was that?" he asked.
"A cultivator," his father said. He went back to the rope.
"What's a cultivator?"
Wei Jian paused, which he rarely did in the middle of a task. He looked at his son, assessed the question, and decided it deserved an honest answer.
"Someone who trains their spirit," he said. "Their qi — the energy inside them. They learn to use it."
"Like how?"
"Like moving boats," his father said. "Among other things."
Wei Liang looked at the river. The lacquered boat had rounded the northern bend and gone. The wake it had left — unexpectedly large for such a narrow vessel — was still spreading outward, rocking all the fishing boats at their moorings in a slow sequence like something falling over in the distance.
"Could we do that?" Wei Liang asked. "Move boats with our — with qi?"
His father was quiet for a moment. He coiled the rope slowly.
"Some people are born for that path," he said. "Others aren't. We are fishermen." He said this without bitterness. He said it the way he talked about the eastern shallows being better in autumn — as a fact of the world he had made his peace with. "The river is ours. That's not nothing."
Wei Liang thought about this. He looked at the wake, still moving, still spreading, the last evidence of the cultivator's passing rocking his father's boat against its mooring rope.
That one man's passing, he thought, moved everyone's boats.
He didn't have a word for this. He was four. The word would come later, and it would be several words, and none of them would entirely fit. But the feeling of it — the shape of what he'd observed — settled into him the way river water settles into sand, quiet and permanent.
He sat on the south dock in the afternoon sun and watched the water until it went still again.