by Warement
Five spirit roots. Every one of them the lowest grade there is. At Qingshi Sect — a stonecutters' mountain too poor to matter, sitting in the shadow of a rival that built higher and looks down on it every single day — Lin Yuan is the servant nobody bothers mocking anymore, because mocking him stopped being interesting years ago. Six years on a cold rock above the waste heap, at an hour and three-quarters a day, going nowhere. Meridians so narrow that qi crawls into him at half the speed it should. And a sister with one arm, because an elder at a desk once worked out what a servant boy's word was worth and said no. He has kept exactly one rule since: he will not become cruel to survive a world that was cruel to him first. Then, carrying a dying child thirty li through beast-haunted dark for a reward he never thought to ask for, something opens its eyes for the first time in his life. **The Ledger.** A cosmic account only he can see — silent, incorruptible, ancient — that has been quietly pricing every good thing he's ever done. It calls the total *Merit*, and Merit buys what six years on a cold rock floor never could. He asks it for the two names he has never been able to say out loud. [UNPURCHASABLE] Some debts were never currency to begin with.
