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In the Bamboo House, there is a room that is never used. Its door and window remain shut, never locked and its walls are pasted with talismans so that nothing within may be seen or heard from outside, and those who happen by never suspect anything amiss.
In the empty room of the Bamboo House, an infant screams.
The little thing is ugly, red, and wrinkly, truly as if it is newly born. Yet it sleeps much less than a newborn should, instead screaming from the empty room at all hours of the day, and even for the few odd hours of night that it shuts its eyes, it is nearly always screaming.
The infant is not screaming out of hunger, or lack of sleep, or excess of noise, or having soiled itself, or any of those customary reasons for which infants scream. Perhaps it is misleading to call it an infant, for it has lived on this earth for at least half a lifetime already. No one ever comes to feed it, yet it grows. No one ever comes to comfort it, yet, by degrees, it stops screaming, or, at the very least, it stops screaming quite so loud and quite so often.
It is not right to call the thing a child. It does not learn like a child—it knows many things that it will come to know long before it learns them; and that being so it knows language before it has ever heard conversation over the sound of its own screaming, it knows writing before it has ever seen a book, and it knows pain before it has ever suffered injury.
It calls itself Shen Yuan, perhaps in reference to those borders of its enclosure. He is not quite imprisoned, having the ability to open the door and walk out whenever he so wishes, but it knows, in a similar fashion to that in which it acquires all its knowledge, that it will not do so for many years yet.
When its body is developed enough for it to begin cultivating—its intellect is far ahead at this point—it does exactly that, and little but that. After all, there is little to do in the empty room but sleep, and pace, and think, and meditate, and of those, the first is limited for Shen Yuan by a body not his own, the second does little good, and the third remains confined to what may be conceived of from within these walls, with no view but what of the little garden is visible through the closed window, and that view never changes but for the seasons. Like Shen Yuan, it seems to persist even in isolation, showing the passage of time in some ways but not others. But then, it is only a surface resemblance, and the fact is that the gardeners are adept at remaining unobtrusive and unmemorable, but Shen Yuan really is alone in its room.
There is only one other person in Cang Qiong Mountain Sect, and indeed one other person in the world, who knows of its existence. Shen Jiu, who does not answer to that name, knows, if he does not acknowledge, that there was once an infant who screamed from within the Bamboo House, and he does not pay any thought to the fact that it has stopped. Shen Qingqiu does not have any use for the spare room, and the door remains closed.
Shen Yuan is able to improve its cultivation quickly through meditation—quicker and less painfully than Shen Jiu was ever able to do it, with the advantage of an undamaged body and the experience of having done this once already. When it is not meditating or asleep, it can sometimes hear snippets of conversation, with Shen Qingqiu's voice on one side, a stranger's on the other. The most frequent interlocutor is Yue Qingyuan, who comes to bother Shen Qingqiu about things that Shen Yuan, in his usual way, knows but doesn't quite understand; and by virtue of being often there, only on the opposite side of a wall that cannot be regarded as thick, Yue Qingyuan becomes familiar, and over some time Shen Yuan stops considering him a stranger—for that is the way these things usually go. In this way, then, it might be said that, through these overheard conversations, the relationship between Shen Qingqiu and Yue Qingyuan is the first thing Shen Yuan must learn the way ordinary people do.
To be precise, the unused room of the Bamboo House is more bare than empty. Other than the talismans warding its walls, there is a bed, and there is a wardrobe. The bed is not notable in any way. It is overlarge, perhaps, for a child-sized Shen Yuan, but it will grow to fit it. The wardrobe contained—has contained—clothes in all the sizes that will ever fit Shen Yuan, from infancy to adulthood. There are no ornaments for its hair; it wears it loose over its shoulders, and it never tangles much, or becomes greasy, or grows longer than is manageable; but there is a single hair ribbon that lays next to the single pair of boots, adult-sized. Shen Yuan doesn't touch those yet.
Its clothes never become dirty or distressed as it wears them. It only replaces them in the wardrobe as he grows, and dons new ones. The clothing in the wardrobe is a clock of sorts, counting down to a culmination of all the things Shen Yuan knows without having learned them. He is confident in his untested abilities, and it trusts that he will have the knowledge required when the time comes.
Shen Yuan is still haunted by fearsome dreams, no matter what he does to leave them behind. The dreams come from Shen Jiu, of course—they are fears and memories of a life that Shen Yuan has not quite lived but remembers through a sort of osmosis. (Between the two of them, they suspect that Shen Yuan would not even dream, if it were not for Shen Jiu.) It has long ceased to wake up screaming, but now, with a body growing in jumps and leaps, he finds himself flailing and striking the wall or corners of the bed with limbs longer than he has ever been used to. It finds this deeply irritating. But the strange thing follows that once the dreams are irritating they are no longer quite so frightening, and he—Shen Yuan, at least, if Shen Jiu is no longer able to let go of the fear that has plagued him for longer than Shen Yuan has—sleeps more easily thenceforth.
(If Shen Yuan spoke in this time, he would hear all the evidence of new growth in his voice, but speech is still one of those things it knows without having learned, there being no one to speak to in its room and having no reason to speak to himself. In his thoughts, Shen Yuan has only ever spoken in his adult voice, the only one he thinks of as his own. It's strange to consider—no one will ever know what Shen Yuan sounded like as a child.)
In winter, when the glass of his window is cold to the touch and the bare branches of the topiary outside are dusted in snow, and it is nearly time for him to leave his room, Shen Yuan wonders whether the clothes in the wardrobe intend for him to grow old. There are many reasons for the timeline to stop at adulthood: when those robes fit him, his body might never change again; those robes, like all the others it has worn thus far, might never wear or dirty; or they will, but by the time it matters he will have left to never return—and, furthermore, he knows which of these reasons is most relevant. But there is a border there, a cutoff to his knowledge at the walls of this room; while it is not that he knows nothing of the world beyond them, it is as if his knowledge is not his own (his knowledge has never been his own, but he has, in the past, had some sense of it belonging to him in a way it does not now). It is as if he has been given a map but has yet to reach the first landmark, needing to choose a direction of travel and begin his journey before he is able to orient himself.
There is a familiar, and beyond that there is an unfamiliar. It does not fear the unfamiliar, but it faces the future beyond that border with some apprehension. Accustomed to perfect knowledge, he cannot help but anticipate the lack of it.
Shen Yuan may well be immortal. This is a claim any person could make, but he has more reason to consider it seriously—clearly not beholden to ordinary laws of human nature, he cannot say with surety that he will die.
Shen Yuan does not know when he was born, but in the year he turns twenty, Shen Qingqiu has a qi deviation. The Peak Lord Shen falls apart very quietly, more like the snow of an avalanche than a tree in a storm. Shen Yuan knows this because he steps, for the first time, out of his room to watch, and quite honestly he is not even paying his full attention to the one dying in front of him. He is considering whether to cut his hair very short, for while the boots on his feet fit him perfectly, as all his clothes have in the past, he has already struggled with his hair and the ribbon for some time today, and he has not much patience left—he did believe himself capable of such a simple task, but this seems to be one of those things he will have to learn for himself, something he has not yet grown used to. One's ancestors must be respected, but Shen Yuan has no ancestors to speak of, and his sole progenitor's bond to him is not even as strong as Nüwa's to any one of those first flimsy, mud-splattered humans—his sole progenitor has never even touched the door of the room in which he grew up and is dying on the ground in front of him.
… Is dead on the ground in front of him.
Momentarily he considers taking the sword, Xiu Ya, but he decides against it—it would be more weight to carry, and never having cultivated with a sword before, he does not know if he can wield it.
With its other self dead, Shen Yuan leaves the Bamboo House and descends the steps of Qing Jing Peak. By the time he reaches the foot of the mountain, his boots are covered in dust.