The cloth curtain in front of the room stirred slightly, and then two small heads poked through one after the other.
Munetaka came first, his sideburns still damp with sweat. Though he had changed the hems of his trousers, his feet were still speckled with dirt. Ieharu clung close behind him, eyes wide as he looked around the moment he crossed the doorway, as if afraid he might miss something interesting.
“Father, can we see the baby?”
Munetaka tried to lower his voice, but there was no hiding the excitement on his face.
Nobumasa, seated beside the bed, immediately raised a finger to his lips. Shizuru had only recently woken, and her face was still pale. The two newborns lay beside her. Fumino slept peacefully, while Takehisa only stirred faintly from time to time.
“You can look, but don’t make any noise.”
The two brothers immediately nodded.
Munetaka seemed to understand how fragile newborns were, so he only stood beside the bed and watched. Ieharu was different. He was only three, and after staring at Fumino’s rosy face for a while, he curiously raised a finger, intending to touch his sister’s cheek.
Nobumasa caught his wrist before that dusty hand could reach her.
“Don’t pinch her.”
Ieharu looked up. “I was only going to touch her a little.”
“Your sister is still very young.”
“Much younger than me?”
“Much younger.”
Ieharu thought about that for a moment. Perhaps he found the explanation reasonable enough, because he obediently pulled his hand back. But three-year-olds could not hold their attention for long. He looked at the baby for only a few minutes before turning around and tugging on his father’s robe, his voice utterly earnest. “Father, I’m hungry.”
Hearing that, Munetaka immediately remembered his own stomach. He stood beside his little brother without saying anything, but the look he gave Nobumasa clearly conveyed the exact same message.
Only then did Nobumasa realize that night had fallen.
Since Shizuru had gone into labor that afternoon, the entire household had been swept up in the birth. Someone had fetched hot water, someone had run for medicine, someone had watched the children, and someone had cleaned the room. Nobumasa himself had spent hours pacing back and forth. Only now did he remember that he had barely eaten since noon.
He turned to Sakuma Tome, who was putting away the supplies.
“Tome, please stop by the kitchen. Cook two chickens today. Stew one until it’s very tender for Shizuru, and divide the rest among the children and everyone else. Takehisa is still weak, so his mother needs plenty of nourishment in her meals for the next few days.”
The instant the words “two chickens” reached Ieharu’s ears, his eyes lit up.
“There’s meat?”
Munetaka could no longer maintain his older-brother composure. “We’re really eating both chickens today?”
Tome laughed. “The two of you aren’t eating both chickens yourselves. Go wash your hands. You’re covered in dirt, and you’re already asking to grab chicken legs.”
The two children immediately ran off. Nobumasa watched them go and smiled despite himself, but the smile lasted only a moment before gradually fading.
The Kurose clan had farmland, a granary, servants, and a residence large enough to make ordinary families in Kawase Town look at them and think they lived in comfort. But to say their life was truly prosperous would be far from the truth.
Most of the land the Kurose clan held consisted of rice paddies and millet fields running along the old irrigation channels around the valley. Every year at harvest, the grain had to be divided into several portions: the fixed quota sent upward, the share set aside for repairing irrigation channels and transport roads, seed for the next season, wages converted into grain for tenant households, and reserve food stored in the granary. After all those deductions, what the Kurose clan could actually use at its own discretion was far less than the hundreds of fields suggested.
Their ancestors had earned merit in the past, allowing the clan to retain some of the privileges attached to its old landholdings. Thanks to that, their burdens were lighter than those of households of comparable size, but “lighter” was only a relative term.
In a year of favorable weather, the Kurose clan could live more comfortably.
If floods, drought, or pests struck, every calculation had to be redone.
That was why a meal with meat was not exactly rare, but it was not something the children could demand every day, either.
Nobumasa was far too familiar with weighing every expense that way.
Sometimes he even found it amusing. He carried the memories of another world and had once thought that if he were reincarnated into a world with immortals, his life should at least include a few fortunate encounters. Instead, most of the past twenty-two years had been spent calculating how many people a harvest could feed, how much lumber a damaged granary roof needed, and what day a chicken ought to be slaughtered.
Yet those very things were what had kept the Kurose clan alive to this day.
Dinner was served later than usual.
Shizuru did not come to the dining room. She was still too weak, so Tome carried tender stewed chicken and thin rice porridge into the room. Nobumasa personally carried over the first bowl and waited until she had managed a few sips before returning to the main house.
Kurose Chiyo was already seated there.
She came from the Miyake clan in Kawase Town, a family with a long-standing reputation in the region. The Miyake clan was not exceptionally wealthy, but it had broad connections, and someone in the family had once worked for the local government. Chiyo had grown up in comfortable circumstances. She had not been taught as much classical history and literature as Shizuru, but she was straightforward by nature and decisive in managing the household.
Tonight, she did not look pleased.
As soon as Nobumasa sat down, Chiyo glanced at the empty bowl in his hand.
“She managed to drink?”
“A few sips.”
“Tome and the servants are there. She doesn’t lack for people to care for her.”
Chiyo’s tone sounded like a casual question, but Nobumasa had lived with her for many years. How could he fail to recognize what lay beneath it?
He did not call her out directly.
“Shizuru gave birth to two children in succession and lost far too much strength. I should keep a closer eye on her during the first few days.”
Chiyo separated a piece of fish in her bowl with her chopsticks without looking at him. “Did I say otherwise?”
Nobumasa was silent for a moment, then placed the softest piece of chicken thigh into her bowl.
“You had to handle the household all day, too. Eat.”
Chiyo looked at the meat in her bowl, then back at him. There was still some displeasure on her face, but at least she said nothing more about Shizuru.
Unfortunately, that peace lasted only a few more moments.
Munetaka was eating beside her, his mouth slick with grease. Afraid that if he slowed down, Ieharu would take the remaining meat, he secretly glanced at the serving plate in the middle of the table between bites. Chiyo noticed that the boy’s hair was still slightly tousled and remembered the brothers playing in the water that afternoon. Her already foul mood immediately found an outlet.
“Munetaka, sit up straight.”
The boy immediately straightened his back.
Chiyo frowned at the grease around his mouth. “Slow down. Is anyone in this household fighting you for your share? You were punished by your father for playing in the mud this afternoon, and now you’re eating like you just ran in from the fields.”
Munetaka instinctively wiped his mouth, only making it dirtier.
Seeing his brother, Ieharu wisely lowered his head and began eating much more slowly.
Nobumasa looked at the woman and two children before him and could only put more food into Munetaka’s bowl. He knew Chiyo was angrier with him than with the boy, but saying so now would only make the meal harder to swallow.
Chiyo knew he understood.
They exchanged a brief look, then both looked away.
Dinner was not exactly cold, but neither did it retain the cheerful atmosphere it had started with. After eating, Chiyo had someone lead the two children away to wash their faces and go to bed. She herself stood up to check on a few household matters before returning to her room.
Nobumasa did not stop her.
He could not rest yet, either.
After stopping by to look in on Shizuru and the two children once more, Nobumasa went straight to the study.
The oil lamp was lit.
Golden light spread across the wooden desk, illuminating several open ledgers, a map of the farmland, and wooden tags marked with the projected labor requirements for the approaching harvest.
Late summer was nearly over.
In just over a month, the Amasuzu pear orchard on the western hillside of Kawase Town would enter its harvest season.
That was the true source of income keeping the Kurose clan breathing.
Rice and millet fed people, but most of their value was locked away in taxes, reserve stores, and obligations tied to the land. Amasuzu was different. These pears had crisp flesh, plenty of juice, a clean sweetness, and thin, pale-yellow skin. Wealthy families in the larger towns around Mizuhara Domain prized them, and merchants often placed orders before the fruit ripened.
The Kurose clan was not the first hereditary house to grow that variety of pear.
But in recent years, their orchard had consistently produced noticeably more than the orchards around the region.
The reason was Nobumasa.
In his previous life, he had not been an agricultural expert, but his general knowledge of composting, pruning, drainage, planting distances, and pest control had been enough to make a difference in a place where most growers still relied on knowledge passed down by word of mouth.
At first, no one believed him.
The longtime gardeners had even objected when he ordered them to cut off branches that still looked healthy. They believed that more branches meant more fruit, and cutting them was no different from ruining the harvest with their own hands.
Nobumasa did not argue much.
He chose a small section to test first.
Two years later, no one objected anymore.
Trees pruned at the right time received more sunlight, producing fewer but larger, more uniform fruit. Well-rotted compost helped the soil retain its fertility longer. Drainage ditches reduced root rot after prolonged rains. Their pest-control methods also significantly reduced the amount of spoiled fruit.
Those small changes, combined, had turned the Amasuzu orchard into Kurose’s most valuable asset.
Nobumasa opened last year’s ledger, his finger pausing over each column of figures.
The weather had been fairly stable this year.
If no major storm struck in the coming month, production could surpass last year’s. But a large harvest did not mean money would simply flow into the granary. They had to hire more pickers, prepare bamboo baskets, inspect the carts, repair the road down the hill, contact merchants early, calculate how much fruit could be held back for later sales, and how much had to be shipped out immediately.
Pears were not like grain.
Waiting a few extra days could completely change their price.
Losses on the road were money, too.
If a cart overturned into a ravine, the work of several families for an entire season could disappear.
Nobumasa wrote and calculated at the same time.
The two newborns meant two more mouths to feed. Shizuru would need nourishing medicine for a long time. Takehisa was physically weak, and in the future he might require more than the care given to an ordinary child.
Those were only the immediate expenses.
And what about the Thousand-Leaf Family Hall?
If he truly could step onto the immortal path, the future would certainly bring expenses he did not even have names for yet.
Spirit medicines.
Cultivation arts.
Arcane artifacts.
A place to cultivate.
None of those things would simply fall from the sky.
Nobumasa set down his brush.
The Thousand-Leaf Genealogy Wall surfaced in his mind.
Leaves bearing the names of Kurose family members rested silently on luminous branches.
Only yesterday, he had thought the Amasuzu orchard was the foundation that would help the clan survive for a few more decades. Looking back today, its meaning seemed to have changed.
Money from the pears could hire people.
It could buy medicine.
It could repair roads.
In the future, perhaps it could even be exchanged for his first cultivation resources.
If he wanted to build a clan capable of lasting through many generations, in the end he still had to begin with things as ordinary as these.
Nobumasa closed the ledger.
He sat quietly in the lamplight for a while, but his calm lasted only that long.
Ever since the Thousand-Leaf Family Hall awakened, one matter had remained buried deepest in his mind.
His spirit root.
The clan’s affairs could be calculated tomorrow.
The pear season was still more than a month away.
But the opportunity he had waited sixteen years for was right before him.
Nobumasa had once tried another path after the bone assessment when he was five or six years old.
If the immortal path would not accept him, he thought martial cultivation could at least make him stronger than an ordinary person.
He had once studied boxing and kicking under a martial arts instructor in the region for nearly half a year. At first he had been diligent, rising before dawn to practice stances. At night, his legs hurt so badly that even climbing stairs was difficult.
The results were not encouraging.
His physique was not especially weak, but his bone constitution was merely average. Other people began to sense their strength flowing along the proper paths after a month of training. Even after twice that long, he had learned only the outer shell of it.
The martial arts instructor did not mock him.
He only told Nobumasa frankly that he could train to strengthen his body, but making a living through martial cultivation would be too difficult.
After that, Nobumasa stopped forcing himself.
The two paths he had once been able to see had both closed.
Until today.
Nobumasa stared at the lamp before him and finally raised a hand to cover the flame.
The room sank into darkness.
The courtyard was already very quiet. Nearly all the servants had gone to rest. Only the insects chirping from the grass behind the granary and the distant footsteps of the night watchman broke the silence.
Nobumasa returned to the main house.
Chiyo had lain down already.
She had her back to the door, the blanket pulled up to her shoulders. Her breathing was even, but Nobumasa only had to look at that rigid posture to know she was not asleep.
He changed out of his outer clothes and lay down beside her.
The two of them were silent for a while.
Finally, Nobumasa placed a hand on her shoulder.
Chiyo did not turn around.
“You’re not going over there again?”
Her voice was quiet, but the bitterness remained intact.
Nobumasa exhaled. “Shizuru is asleep. Tome is with her.”
“So you finally remembered this room?”
Nobumasa did not answer immediately. He understood Chiyo’s temperament. She was not someone who would stop being angry after a few reasonable explanations, and she disliked it even more when he acted as though nothing had happened.
“I know you were upset today.”
Chiyo shifted her shoulder slightly. “What do I have to be upset about?”
“If you weren’t upset, Munetaka wouldn’t have been scolded so badly that he didn’t dare raise his head tonight.”
Chiyo immediately turned to look at him. Her face was indistinct in the darkness, but Nobumasa could still feel her gaze.
“Are you saying I took my anger out on a child for no reason?”
“I didn’t say it was for no reason.”
“So you meant exactly that.”
Nobumasa knew that continuing the argument would only make things worse. He reached out and pulled her closer. This time Chiyo resisted lightly, but she did not truly push him away.
“Something almost happened to Shizuru today. I looked in on her a few extra times because she had just given birth. It wasn’t because she’s the only one in my eyes.”
Chiyo fell silent.
Nobumasa continued, “You’ve managed this household for years. I’ve entrusted every major and minor matter to you. If even that isn’t enough for you to know your place in my heart, then explaining further won’t help.”
After a long while, Chiyo’s shoulders finally relaxed.
“I don’t like the way you are when you’re beside her.”
She spoke very softly.
“I know.”
“You know, and you still act that way.”
“Today was an exception.”
Chiyo did not answer again.
But when Nobumasa took her hand, she did not pull it away.
The night deepened.
After the words lingering in their hearts had been released, the distance between them slowly disappeared as well. Nobumasa remembered the Harmonized Life-Nourishing Root Method, but he did not immediately follow it like someone merely waiting for the chance to test a cultivation art. Chiyo was the person who had weathered the clan’s hardest years alongside him. What happened between them was, first and foremost, a matter between husband and wife.
Only after their breathing gradually fell into the same rhythm did Nobumasa calm his mind and recall the incantations the Thousand-Leaf Family Hall had transmitted into his sea of consciousness.
He did not recite them aloud.
He simply guided his thoughts along the method in silence.
At first, nothing changed.
A while later, Nobumasa sensed a faint warmth appearing within his body. It was not the warmth of flesh and skin, but something like a stream of vital energy born directly from a deeper place, slowly spreading into his meridians.
Chiyo furrowed her brows slightly.
“Nobumasa.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know.”
She placed a hand on her abdomen, her voice carrying a hint of confusion. “I feel strangely warm.”
Nobumasa did not explain.
He did not yet know how to explain it.
The stream of vital energy within his body was becoming clearer. It traveled along paths Nobumasa had never sensed before, sometimes warm and sometimes cool, finally gathering into a closed cycle.
At the same time, the Thousand-Leaf Family Hall appeared in his consciousness.
The lines of light on the Thousand-Leaf Genealogy Wall trembled faintly.
A thin, mistlike amount of Clan Meridian Vital Qi was drawn into the hall, then dispersed toward the Spirit-Nurturing Field and the Still-Life Pond.
But that was still not the most important change.
Deep within Nobumasa’s body, a place that had been silent for twenty-two years suddenly emitted a tingling sensation.
It was very faint at first.
Then it spread rapidly through all four limbs.
Almost instinctively, Nobumasa held his breath, focusing his entire mind inward.
A point of light appeared.
Red as a coal just fanned into flame.
Immediately afterward came a second point, green, carrying the sensation of young branches growing after rain.
The final point was pale blue, cool and gentle like spring water.
Three streams of light coexisted within his body.
Fire.
Wood.
Water.
Nobumasa needed no one to explain.
He knew what they were.
Spirit roots.
A three-element spirit root.
In that instant, all the sounds around him seemed to recede into the distance.
Sixteen years ago, a six-year-old child had placed his hand on a spirit-testing stone and waited in vain.
Sixteen years later, three streams of spiritual light had finally illuminated themselves within his body.
Nobumasa closed his eyes.
If he had not been afraid of waking Chiyo, he might have laughed aloud.
A three-element spirit root.
According to the rumors he had heard, those with a three-element spirit root no longer belonged to the lowest tier of aptitude. If they entered an immortal sect, they at least would not be the kind dismissed at a glance.
He did not know that understanding was still missing many details.
The three streams of spiritual light in his body were clear, but all of them were fairly short, and their radiance was not strong. If a true cultivator skilled in assessing constitutions had been standing there, they would quickly have realized that the activity within them was merely average.
Even among those with three-element spirit roots, the gap could be enormous.
A person with a four-element spirit root but stronger spiritual qualities might not even cultivate more slowly than him.
But Nobumasa did not know that yet.
And even if he had known, it would not necessarily have diminished his joy by much.
The distance from nothing to something was the greatest distance of all.
Ordinary aptitude was still aptitude.
A difficult road was still a road.
As long as he could set foot on it, he had overcome the wall that had blocked him for sixteen years.
Chiyo fell asleep quickly that night.
Nobumasa, however, was not sleepy at all.
He lay still beside her, sensing the three streams of light that had appeared within him over and over again. The more he examined them, the more he wanted to know the true limits of the Harmonized Life-Nourishing Root Method.
The Thousand-Leaf Family Hall’s privilege stated that the first time would inevitably give rise to a spirit root.
What about the next time?
Could it continue nourishing and enlarging the spirit root?
Could it turn a three-element spirit root into a two-element spirit root?
Or at the very least, strengthen the three branches he currently possessed?
The thought was impossible for Nobumasa to ignore.
After enough time had passed, once Chiyo had awakened and the two of them had been intimate again, he tried circulating the method one more time.
Clan Meridian Vital Qi still appeared.
It slowly returned to the Thousand-Leaf Family Hall. The thin mist over the Spirit-Nurturing Field seemed to thicken slightly, while a faint ripple appeared across the surface of the Still-Life Pond.
But the three streams of spiritual light within his body did not change.
They did not grow longer.
They did not grow brighter.
Nor did a fourth element appear, or any of the existing elements disappear.
Nobumasa observed for a long time before finally accepting the result.
The first time had been breaking through the door.
The later attempts no longer changed his constitution.
At least, that was how things appeared with the information he currently possessed.
It left him a little disappointed, but only a little.
If simply repeating the method could infinitely improve a spirit root, the Thousand-Leaf Family Hall would be so powerful that almost no rules would remain worth mentioning.
This was more reasonable instead.
It gave him an opportunity.
It did not give him the final result.
Nobumasa lay in the darkness, staring at the ceiling whose shape he could no longer make out.
When dawn came tomorrow, he would still have to review the number of bamboo baskets needed for the Amasuzu orchard. In a few days, he would have to inspect the cart road on the hillside. Shizuru needed time to recover, Takehisa needed more careful attention, and Munetaka and Ieharu still needed to be taught and disciplined.
Not one of those matters would disappear simply because he had gained a spirit root.
But beginning tonight, all of them carried a different meaning.
The money from the orchard was not only for keeping one family alive from year to year.
The farmland was not only for paying taxes.
His children were not only people who would continue bearing the Kurose name.
If the Thousand-Leaf Family Hall could truly pass this path down through every generation, then every coin he managed to save, every plot of land he preserved, and every bit of knowledge he left behind could become the foundation for a future the Kurose clan had never before been entitled to imagine.
Nobumasa raised his hand before his face.
In the darkness, he could see nothing.
But in his inner vision, the red, green, and pale-blue points of spiritual light continued to exist in silence.
They were not brilliant.
Nor were they powerful.
They were only enough to prove one thing.
The door had opened.
As for how long the road beyond it stretched, he would walk it himself and find out.