"Eh, you have any interesting work to talk about? Hearing about different occupations and crafts can offer inspiration sometimes."

"I am - I was, I suppose, a charcoal burner. Me and my father harvested the local woodland, and burned the wood into charcoal, and sold it. It's not easy work. You need to watch the burn for days at a time, lest the flame grow too strong or too weak and ruin the batch. You can't even really sleep - there were two of us so we could a bit, but otherwise ever nap was a terrible risk and having two people means twice as many burns. Makes it hard to socialise or attend festivals, except in the off season. But it's honest work and we could pay our taxes in cash." 

"I've seen people do pyres and kilns at the sect a few times. I think you could refine or transform qi-rich materials that way if you do it right. Qi-infused charcoal certainly sounds like it'd be useful for something. Tell me, what's too strong and too weak? What do you see and feel that tells you about it? Do you ever change the way you do a burn for different woods or the like?"

He could keep this conversation going for a good while, mostly gently steering the conversation away from himself.. Though not literally all day; Eventually he mentions that he needs to focus on the road and leaves Mei Cao to her own thoughts.

Mei Cao will talk with the blase enthusiasm of someone who doesn't get to talk about her work much and is happy someone is listening. She will go into great detail on every matter, but broadly speaking she will convey that the core idea of charcoal-burning is that there's one part that needs to burn to nothing and another part that needs to not burn at all, and your goal then is to keep the fire just barely in the state of burning without slowing down and leaving any of the first part, but without burning too hard and burning the second part as well, which is what usually happens in a hearth or the like (though sometimes it doesn't and you get bits of black ash in your white ash). The fire itself can't be seen during the burn, it's covered in a layer of dirt, so they monitor it by the flow of smoke and wind through the air-vents; if you do ever see even the slightest lick of flame it's burning much much too fast and you have a disaster on your hands. This is all very hard at night. They tend to prefer to always use the best wood for their burns, helping manage the woods so the right trees grow and then cutting them and seasoning them prior to the burn itself, and since there's always a lot of other firewood demands in a village they can afford to be a little fussy.

"That kind of - getting the perfect steady flow without necessarily being able to see it - cultivator crafting is sometimes like that. I was never a very good refiner, I just learned enough to make my own replenishing pills, but it still runs on steady just-right heat and intensity, and hidden details that are hard to see from the outside. Take that kind of perspective and try to fit it to new kinds of processes and you might have a head start. Commoner cultivators need every advantage they can get. Speaking of which, you need to learn to read."

"How urgently? ... How do you learn to read anyway." 

"Pretty urgently. Most of the stuff about how to be a cultivator is written down. They expect you to write notes. It's - being a dirty peasant, really bad, in terms of how people will treat you. You might not get that far in a month but it'll be better than not even having started.

-Well, usually you hire a tutor and do lots and lots of difficult practice. A mortal tutor from the sect village is probably fine to get you started and that's pretty cheap by my standards. I could set it up if you'll pay me back later, much later. Like next year when it'll be easy to. I mean, don't expect people to be generous but I figure as a fellow army candidate I'd pay forward the help I got."

She wonders if it will be easier or harder than splitting wood for twelve hours. 

"I would greatly appreciate any help you can give and will trust your estimation that I can pay it back." 

"Hey, don't take it too seriously. Or maybe you should, actually. Pushing through annoying, aggravating, difficult things will be good for your cultivation."

"It helps with most things." 

She is going to take it very seriously. 

"Hold on-"

He'll actually stop the carriage. It's fiiiine, they're back on the Cai roads again. Those are safe, at least for minutes at a time.

(He does obey the law by pulling off to the side, though.)

"May I enter, to give you something? Just some blank paper and a list of characters. Even if you don't know what they mean yet, one must make good use of their time. You can practice holding a brush and copying them. Sooner started, sooner finished!"

"I will happily learn anything you wish to teach." 

She holds a brush like someone who has only used whittling knives and chopsticks. 

...Well, he can grimace, and spend five minutes showing her the proper way now, and five minutes at each meal. Being fairly harsh about proper form and precision.

She is awful at it and needs to practice, he says, and practice some more, and then more. She should dream of writing and hand cramps. They will expect better than scribbles.

(He picked writing, not reading, because she can practice on her own. Don't worry about the ink and paper cost.)

(She can in fact memorize some of these characters over time, especially if she draws little pictures on the reference copy as notes.)

The trip takes five days. The landscape changes by the hour, through hill and valley and forest and cliff. He buys a chalk slate and a chalk pen, a clever little device for those learning to write that mostly feels like a regular pen, somewhere along the way, to reduce how much paper is used.

She tries hard. She stains her hands with ink and then runs through a box of chalk. She's worried she's injuring her hands how much they hurt, but her senior says they should hurt so she keeps going. Memorising the shapes comes easily to her, but controlled, repeatable finesse is a struggle. You don't need to eat every grain of rice in the same way. 

She sleeps lightly and dreams of smoke and flame. 

By the fourth day, her hand hurts so much she can't hold a pen; she keeps trying but her fingers rebel and spasm. 

Uh. That's not supposed to happen.

...Li Kang of some sixty years, who has not been a mortal in 45, and who is not known to be particularly foresightful, appears to have been mentally treating his escortee as a fellow sect member and forgetting just how fragile mortals are.

He tries not to let it show in his attitude. Too much. But he does tell her to stop. And pauses near one of the larger towns to solicit a doctor to look at her. The doctor does a bit of acupuncture and wraps her hand in a bandage that tingles slightly and is deferential but very much unhappy with Li Kang, and not afraid to show it, stresses a bit sarcastically that aren't escorts supposed to not injure their charges? No using that hand for anything for three days. But there's probably no permanent damage. Probably.

Well this fucking sucks. She continues to be polite and deferential to both her escort and the doctor. But also this experience warrants a certain amount of cursing, and the doctor has reminded her that in the grand scheme of things Li Kang is some guy and not the supreme vessel of the Duchess's will. 

... She's probably going to keep following his advice, having little else to go on. 

He's not exactly apologetic but also does not offer any more advice. And says that he'll set up that tutor, and they're a proper tutor, a schoolteacher even, no pay back or favor.

The last day of travel to the sect is quiet, even as the huge city of Tonghou passes out the window, and then the carriage begins a seemingly endless ascent up a high, wild, beautiful mountain.

Not spending all of her time trying to learn to use a pen has lead to her noticing how surreal this situation is. This mountain doesn't feel like a real place and her relationship with Li Kang feels nonsensical. The world contains a lot of cultivators so presumably at some point her life will stop feeling like a folktale but right now it does. Hopefully it's the good sort of folktale, about the virtuous young lady who treats people well and gets a happy ending. 

She supposes that learning to eat with her left hand counts as a form of manual dexterity training.  

They stop at the Sect Village, at the base of the mountain.

It looks like no village she's ever seen, though. The place is bright, prosperous, clean and square. Full of officials and manors and lovely three-story narrow homes, patrolled by guards in shining resplendent uniforms and armor, dotted with offices and signs. More ordinary looking people are present too, in nice clean clothing, cleaning the street, selling dumplings, shopping for candles or apples or paper or thread in tidy markets, tending gardens and going for strolls.

Li Kang pulls up to the gates and presents some papers to the guards, and is permitted to pass. He drives the carriage to a stable of sorts, where others like it are also stored, and bids Mei Cao to accompany him to the Ministry of Law office, which will assign her a temporary residence until the day of the sect acceptance.

Though... There appears to be some sort of... Clerk-related problem with this? Something about the paperwork Li Kang presents. The clerk has the aggrieved manner of someone who is just... Confused and annoyed by something stupid. It seems to be that her permission to enter the sect and registration for Army service hasn't arrived yet. And no, the papers that Li Kang is carrying on him don't count, apparently.

They end up going over all the rules and conditions of Army service again, exactly the same way as the other official did, and asking her to swear compliance again. But this time on Ministry of Law paperwork, instead of Ministry of Integrity paperwork.

The whole thing smells just a bit fishy, in her gut feelings. Like the results of a petty rivalry, perhaps. For all that the clerks are very professional about it, they're clearly low-key resentful of the Ministry of Integrity. Or at least trying to imply blame to them for the paperwork problem.

She does not, actually, find the idea of reiterating her oaths and conditions to a new official that weird; she's hazy on the mechanism whereby the fact that she already did that would be communicated to this office via paperwork in a way they'd trust and it's not like she's changed her mind. 

What *is* concerning to her is that Li Kang is acting like this is enemy action. Like it's something worth being angry about. And the clerks want her to think it's someone's fault. It feels like she's been punched from behind in a way where she's not even sure how to identify what, exactly, was the wound. 

The duchess was supposed to have put an end to corruption in the imperial ministries, though. So she must be mistaken. 

She's not going to say anything. She will stoically pretend to be immune to mysterious paperwork inconvenience. 

Then she can have one of the narrow tall houses! Here is her key. There is a servant assigned to the block of four small houses, who will see to any reasonable requests.

Li Kang sticks around just long enough to bring her into a building that turns out to be a schoolhouse of sorts, and introduce her to a tall, lithe, and sun-haired woman - "Cao Shan", a distant cousin of the baronial Cao family who is not really in line for anything and is at low Yellow cultivation. (This information is delivered as if it's an obvious and natural part of an introduction.)

She hits him on the arm - not very hard - and lectures him when the sore hand story comes out, and promises to treat Mei Cao much better than this oaf who can do little but fight.

Well, it's a house far nicer than any she's previously lived in, in that it has more than one room and furnishings made by someone who was reasonably competent at making furnishings. She doesn't know what things you're supposed to ask a servant to do so she's just not going to ask anything, unless she needs directions to the well or the privy and they're the only person around. 

Cao Shan is a strange and foreign person but any servant of the Duchess is a friend of hers in spirit. She will express polite subordinate gratefulness for her generosity of spirit.

She would like to figure out a polite way to ask - if Li Kang is only good at fighting, what is she good at? Mei Cao is still trying to learn what professions are common amongst cultivators. 

Cao Shan has mostly stopped cultivating, in favor of living out her life as a teacher; She does some petty maintenance of qi-infused clothing, and makes a few low-level talismans, which are magic writing infused with qi. Mostly, she teaches. She has a calm and patient manner, and is easy to listen to. Li Kang, before being rousted, has paid her in advance for lessons until her Sect entrance. Does three hours every morning and one after lunch sound good?

Mei Cao is happy to do as much studying as her teacher deems wise. She really wants to be good at things.