Master Bao lived in a house at the northern end of Qinghe that was not so much small as compressed — a house that had once aspired to more rooms and had achieved its current state through a series of decisions that had each seemed reasonable at the time. The books had taken over. This was not metaphorical. The books had, over the course of decades, displaced all the furniture that was not load-bearing and most of the furniture that was, leaving the interior of the house as a landscape of stacked paper in which Master Bao moved with the confidence of someone who had learned the geography very well.
He was sixty-three years old, white-haired, and had the particular leanness of people who forget to eat when they are reading, which was most of the time. He had been in Qinghe for twelve years, which was long enough that most people had stopped wondering why he had come to a river town this small and simply accepted him as part of the existing furniture, the same way they accepted the south dock and Old Yan's stall.
He had been a scholar. This was known. The specifics were not known, or were known in the version that small towns produce — compressed, slightly mythologized, approximately true in feeling if not in fact.
Wei Liang was six when he found him.
Found is the right word. He had been exploring the northern end of the town with the methodical thoroughness he applied to all explorations, working his way down the lane with no particular destination, and he had stopped because there were books in the doorway. Not inside the doorway — the books had expanded to the threshold itself, and several were sitting in the open air with the unconcerned stability of things that had been there long enough to feel they belonged.
Wei Liang could not yet read most of them. But he recognized that they were books and that books were where words went to be kept, and he had a strong interest in words and where they went.
He was examining the topmost book in the nearest stack — running his finger along the spine, feeling the texture of the binding — when a voice said, from somewhere above and to the left:
"If you bend the spine I will know."
He looked up. Master Bao was in a chair that was mostly invisible behind stacks of paper, watching him with the alert patience of someone who had been watching him for longer than he'd known.
"I wasn't bending it," Wei Liang said.
"Good. What are you doing?"
"Looking at it."
"Can you read it?"
Wei Liang considered the question seriously. "Some of it," he said. "My brother taught me characters. Not enough for this."
Master Bao looked at him for a moment. He had been watched by this boy from his doorway four or five times now as the child made his circuits of the northern lane, and each time the child had stopped at the books and done the same thing — touched the spines carefully, looked at the characters, moved on. He had not taken anything. He had not been careless. He had been, for a child, remarkably precise.
"Come in," Master Bao said. "Don't touch anything on the right-hand side. The stacks on the right are organized."
"What about the left?"
"The left is also organized," Master Bao said. "But according to a system that I am still developing and which will not survive handling by anyone who doesn't understand it. So also don't touch those. Sit there." He indicated a low stool near his chair that was not covered in books, which was the only surface in the house of which this was true.
Wei Liang sat on the stool.
"What do you want to know?" Master Bao asked.
Wei Liang looked around the room. The books rose on all sides. The smell of old paper was very present. A window on the far wall showed a narrow strip of river.
"What's the most interesting thing you know?" he asked.
Master Bao looked at him over the rim of his cup. He had not been expecting this specific question, and he had been an examiner for twenty years and expected most questions. He drank. He thought about it.
"Sit down three afternoons a week," he said, "and I will work my way through the list."
Wei Liang sat down three afternoons a week for the next eight years.
He learned to read properly by the end of the first year, not because Master Bao taught it as a lesson but because Master Bao simply used words and expected them to be looked up and remembered and used in response, and Wei Liang met these expectations because meeting them was more interesting than not meeting them.
He learned history — the dynasties, the cultivation world's political geography, the wars that had been fought over resources and face and the specific pride of people who had power and were afraid of losing it. He learned geography. He learned, from Master Bao's asides and digressions and the dark editorializing that ran through everything the old man said, that the world was comprehensible and frequently absurd and that both of these were fine, because comprehensible meant you could navigate it and absurd meant you shouldn't take it too personally.
He sat on the low stool, and Master Bao refilled his cup, and the river ran south outside, and this was education.