"Alright," I said looking at the remaining four of them, "I heard Dao Renqiu's story, now I want to hear yours."
What I got back was silence.
It was that same problem that always happened in situations like this where nobody wanted to be the first one to speak and everyone was waiting for someone else to go first and make it easier for the rest of them, Ru Jian looked at Wen Suli, Wen Suli looked at Qian, Qian looked at the jade beauty, and the jade beauty looked at nobody because she was above the process of looking at other people for permission to do anything.
Ru Jian broke first.
"But I already told you about myself," he frowned, "same as Elder Dao did, that should count, shouldn't it?"
"That was a dream," I said, "I want to know your life, who you are and where you came from."
Ru Jian opened his mouth and then closed it again, and turned to look at Dao Renqiu with an expression that suggested he found it unfair that the old man had gotten away with a story about childhood dreams while the rest of them were expected to produce something more substantial, Dao Renqiu did not look back at him because he was still watching the Genesis Seed.
Ru Jian turned back to me and then something shifted in his face and the mild grievance dissolved and was replaced by something that looked like excitement as he stood straighter and said, "in that case I'll go first."
"I'm not from noble blood," he started, "I don't have a clan name worth mentioning, my family worked in a wealthy household, my father managed accounts my mother cooked, and I was the child who was underfoot in the kitchens mixing things together that weren't supposed to be mixed." He paused, "the cook hated me, but she did admit that some of the things I came up with tasted interesting."
I noticed I was relaxing a little without having made any conscious decision to do so, there was something about the way Ru Jian talked about his history that made it easy to listen to because he wasn't performing it the way some people performed their own stories, he was talking, and I appreciated that more than I expected to.
He'd been recruited to the Fractured Sky Sect at thirteen because a passing elder had watched him stabilize a volatile compound that should have exploded but instead produced a clear liquid with an unexpectedly pleasant smell.
The elder had stared at him for a long moment before asking if he wanted to learn alchemy and Ru Jian had said yes before the elder even finished the sentence.
The Fractured Sky Sect's Alchemy Pavilion had been by his own account the best years of his life and he had excelled there in a way he hadn't excelled anywhere else before, advancing and building a reputation and taking on disciples of his own and spending multiple centuries doing productive work that he cared about.
"If you don't mind me asking," I said when he paused, "why do you look the way you look?"
I tried to phrase it in a way that didn't come out rude, but I don't think I succeeded at that.
Ru Jian didn't seem offended though, if anything he looked like he had been waiting for that question.
"Peak Stellar Realm cultivators can only live for around a thousand years," he said, "natural lifespan runs out somewhere in that range if you haven't managed to break through to the next level." He looked down at his small hands for a moment, "my cultivation method, the Returning Cycle Method, allows for age reversal, it extends life by running the clock backward. It costs cultivation resources and it costs time, but it keeps you alive past the point where you would otherwise stop."
I looked at him more carefully because that sounded overpowered.
There had to be some kind of restriction or limitation that came with it.
I was trying to work out what it was, but jade beauty answered it before I could figure out how to ask.
"The longer it runs," she said, "the more of a child he becomes."
Ru Jian looked over at her when she said that, but he didn't look hurt by it at all.
"Yes," he said simply.
I thought about what that meant in practice, a thousand years of knowledge and experience and peak Stellar Realm cultivation power all inside the mental and emotional architecture of what was currently a ten-year-old child and the word that kept coming back to me was dangerous.
Ru Jian seemed to pick up on something in my expression because he held up both his hands in a gesture that was small and earnest at the same time.
"I'm in control of whatever power I have left in my soul form," he said, "I promise, I'm not going to hurt anyone here, that's not something you need to worry about with me."
The strange thing was that I believed him and I wasn't sure why I believed him, but I did.
"Tell me about your cultivation method," I said.
His face lit up.
The method was built around what he called the Dao of Equivalent Exchange.
The core of it was that nothing could be created without something being given in return.
Every compound required components that balanced against whatever the product was going to be and every technique drew from something the cultivator possessed. The age reversal was the most obvious expression of that principle; you traded time forward for time backward.
The exchange had to balance or the technique failed.
Listening to him explain it made me think of something I had encountered once a long time ago and far from where I was now.
It was a story about two brothers and the principle that nothing came from nothing and that every gain had to be paid for in kind and that trying to cheat the fundamental equation of existence was the surest way to lose everything you had.
In that story, the principle had been treated as a hard wall you ran into when you tried to take more than you had earned, but in Ru Jian's hands the same idea sounded like something different, it sounded as a system for having a genuine negotiation with reality about what was possible.
I asked what the Masked One had used him for.
Ru Jian's expression didn't fall apart but it became more careful than it had been.
He had been used as a resource generation tool because the Dao of Equivalent Exchange applied at large enough scale could produce cultivation materials that were difficult to obtain through conventional means and the Masked One had understood this clearly and had treated Ru Jian accordingly which meant as an instrument and not as a person.
I sat with that for a moment before I said anything.
The reason I decided to let Ru Jian stay wasn't complicated when I thought it through.
He had told his story without trying to make me feel grateful for hearing it and without angling toward any outcome.
Not to mention, he was a thousand-year-old alchemist with a cultivation philosophy built around balanced exchange, so in practical terms, someone who understood how to balance transactions at a fundamental level was not the kind of person who would disrupt what I was building here.
They would look at the ecosystem of this inner world, the bees, the Dawn Ripple Fish, the Lithari with their mining operations, the Cathedral's thrones, and they would see a system that was in balance. They would want to understand it rather than take from it, and further down the road, a cultivator who understood alchemy at the level Ru Jian did would be valuable to have around as a partner.
"You can stay," I said.
The look that crossed his face was brief and real before he got it back under control.
"Do I have to stand here while the others go through this?" he asked, "because I've been watching those bees since we arrived and I have quite a few questions to ask them."
I smiled without meaning to because I hadn't been imagining it earlier, he had been watching the bees this entire time.
"Go," I said, "be careful."
"I promise," he said and he was moving toward where the colony had established itself on Ancient Oak before I had even finished speaking.
I watched him go and then turned back to the remaining three.
"Who's next?" I asked.
Wen Suli looked at the empty space where Ru Jian had been a moment before.
"I don't have an interesting background," she said, and when she gave her history, it was simple in a way that felt different from the others.
A family that farmed, a village that flooded, a childhood that was about managing scarcity rather than about anything else and she had discovered her cultivation talent at eighteen which was later than most people discovered it.
She had been recruited by the Ashen Meridian School as a secondary consideration, filling a quota rather than because anyone had looked at her and recognized something worth investing in.
She had been at the school for two years before her master took her in.
"Why did the Masked One add you to his collection?" I asked.
Wen Suli looked at me for a moment and then took a breath that wasn't steady and said, "because I can absorb heavenly calamities."
Beside her Qian went still, the jade beauty turned and gave Wen Suli a sharp look, Dao Renqiu didn't move at all because the old man was still watching the Genesis Seed and nothing was capable of breaking his attention away from it.
As for me, I was staring at her.
Absorbing heavenly calamities?
That was not something I had expected to hear come out of anyone's mouth today.