The tea in the copper kettle was half-spent, reduced to a dark, bitter decoction that smelled of tannic acid and wet cedar bark.
Ji Mingchuan had not touched his cup for an hour. He sat rigid upon his ebony camp-stool, his hands clasped tightly over his knees, watching the orange embers in the white chalk-stone hearth slowly dim to a dull, violet ash. Outside the nook, the high tide had reached its peak. Thirty feet below their ledge, the dark water of Entry hall 101 was lapping against the lower steps of the roofed porch with a heavy, rhythmic murmur that sounded like the breathing of a sleeping giant beast.
“The ancient masters spoke of Wu Wei,” the Scholar began, his voice dropping into the formal, argumentative rhythm of an academic disputation. “The Dao of Non-Action. You believe you practice it, Caspian. You sit in your cellar, you scrape no stone without necessity, you alter no hall, you initiate no enterprise. You believe your passivity is virtue.”
Qiao Ming picked up his wooden ruler, turning the yellow wood between his calloused fingers.
“A land-mapper does not argue with texts, Scholar,” Qiao Ming replied. “I read the water level. I read the plumb.”
