The next morning, Daniel arrived at Li Qinghua's with his notebook.

  Chinatown was already awake around him. The produce vendors had set up their displays on the sidewalk, crates of gai lan, choy sum, and napa cabbage stacked high. An old man sat on a plastic stool outside a bakery, newspaper spread across his knees, glasses pushed up on his forehead. The smell of pork buns drifted from somewhere nearby.

  The shop looked the same as it always did. Cabinets stood in every corner, dried herbs in bundles hanging from the ceiling, their stems bound with red thread gone brown at the edges. Four pillars made of oak held the shop together, and the scent of incense had settled into the walls.

  A lucky cat, the one for good money, was on the counter swaying with one paw out front, up and down. Somewhere in the back, a kettle was heating. He could hear the faint whistle of steam, hissing as the water started to boil.

  Li Qinghua was already in the courtyard, practicing in another stance. Her hands turned at the wrist as if winding an invisible thread around a spool. Her shoulders stayed perfectly level and her feet barely lifted from the stone tiles, sliding to the side.

  It looked like an animal, a bird maybe, gracefully turning as it would have done in the morning dew, looking down at a pond, pecking fish that happened to get too close. A heron, ready to strike, but simply looking around as if there was something to eat.

  The form ended with her palms settling at her sides and a single bead of sweat traced down her temple. She didn't wipe it away.

  "You're early," she said without turning.

  "I learned something. Wanted to test it."

  "Let me see."

  They moved to a chair and low table, and she poured tea without asking, oolong tea, dark and slightly bitter. Steam rose between them as Daniel spread his notes across the wood.

  "Someone showed me how to use pressure points." He pointed to the diagram in his notes. "And I was hoping to get some practice to see if I can figure out how to do it more reliably."

  Li Qinghua set down her tea and picked up the diagram. Held it at arm's length, squinting slightly. The light from the courtyard fell across the paper, illuminating his annotations and corrections.

  "Someone."

  "Yes," he said.

  She traced the lines with one finger, following his annotations from point to point. Her nail was short, practical, a thin ridge of white against the red ink.

  "Hmm." She tapped the point he'd marked. Twice. Three times, each tap landing slightly to the left of the last. "This is Chize on the Lung Meridian. Though you've drawn it too far from where it should be. It sits between the tendons, not beside them."

  Daniel made a note. The pen scratched against paper, loud in the quiet room.

  "That's what I wanted to test. She said the location varies by person, and this is where I think mine is. She said you can't just memorize a chart."

  "This is true." Li Qinghua set the diagram down, looking at his arm. "If this is yours it's pretty accurate. Just move it up a few inches."

  "But it got me thinking." Daniel flipped to a fresh page.

  "If you can use your own qi to stop someone from moving can you also stimulate someone else's qi directly?" Daniel looked up. "Awaken dormant meridians instead of shutting down active ones?"

  Daniel wrote more.

  "The theory is there," Daniel continued, leaning forward. His knee bumped the table leg. The tea rippled in its cup. "I had the idea before when I went to the Asian Art Museum the first time and feeling it again. I think it's possible. I could stimulate the flow directly, push my qi into someone, and then help them breakthrough and use qi themselves."

  He paused, swallowing.

  "What do you think?"

  Li Qinghua was quiet for a long moment.

  Something shifted behind her eyes, like she was reaching back through years of memory. Outside, a cart rattled past on the street. The sunlight shifted as a cloud crossed overhead, dimming the courtyard, drawing shadows across the table and the notebook between them.

  "Qigong and Neijin methods," she said finally. Her hand still hadn't moved from the paper. "They were supposedly used for students who couldn't feel qi naturally but at least had the potential to do so."

  "So, it works?"

  "I don't know." She lifted her hand. Flexed her fingers once, twice, as if working out a cramp. "I've never tried it. Most stories end up with someone dead."

  Daniel held up his hands, palms out. "If they end up dead, I guess it would probably be too dangerous. I guess this is a dead end too."

  He crossed out the marks he made on his notebook.

  Li Qinghua then considered. Her eyes moved across his face, reading something there.

  "Then again, there is probably little risk. I'm old and there isn't much harm that can be done to me anyway. In the stories, it's only dangerous for people in the peak of their vitality when the body is said to surge with strange and inexplicable force."

  She extended her arm across the table with her palm up.

  "Come try."

  The gesture simple, almost like if she was at the doctors. She pulled her sleeve back past her wrist, revealing the hollow between the tendons, the slight concavity that marked where the pulse could be taken.

  Daniel took her wrist. Her skin was cool beneath his fingers. Dry. He turned her arm slightly, orienting himself. He searched for the depression between the tendons, pressing gently along the inner forearm, working his way up from her wrist.

  "Higher," Li Qinghua said. "And more medial. Toward the center."

  He adjusted and moved his fingers a fraction of an inch. Pressed again.

  He felt skin and muscle and the ridge of bone beneath. Nothing else.

  "Feel for the gap. The point sits at the deepest part."

  Daniel closed his eyes.

  He let himself feel. The darkness hollowed out around him, and then, just like the first time, a bright light seemed to emit from his dantian, lighting up all his meridians at once. He could feel the yang meridian, extending up from his chest and to his fingers.

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  Her arm beneath his fingers. Thin. Lighter than he expected, as if the bones were hollow. The faint pulse of blood through the radial artery, steady and slow. The touch of her skin, barely warmer than the air. And beneath that, deeper, something else. A quality that didn't come from circulation or anything physical.

  He pressed into the valley between the tendons.

  There.

  It wasn't a pool of energy like Li Mei had shown him on his own arm. This was something else entirely. The memory of a pond. The shape of where energy should gather, carved deep into the tissue by the years.

  An ancient canyon where a river used to run.

  Dry stone now, cracked and pale. The walls of the canyon still stood, still held their shape. But nothing had passed through it in a long time. Maybe nothing ever had.

  "I feel it," he said. His voice came out strange. Hushed, like he was in a temple. Like speaking too loudly might disturb something.

  "It's like a very deep canyon or gorge."

  A pause.

  "But empty. There's nothing flowing through it."

  Li Qinghua's mouth caught, just slightly. A hitch in her breath.

  If he hadn't been touching her arm, if his fingers hadn't been pressed to that exact point, feeling the subtle tremor that ran through her muscles, he might not have noticed.

  But he noticed.

  "Now what?" he asked.

  "Now you try to stimulate it." Her voice was steady again. "Gently. As if you were trying to coax a fire from an ember."

  Daniel took a breath. Steadied himself. He thought about the exercises he'd been practicing, the way qi moved through his own meridians when he focused.

  He focused on the point beneath his finger and gathered the qi into his body. He let a thread of it extend through his fingertip, a whisper of energy, nothing more. Reaching toward her dried meridian like a hand extended across a great distance.

  The qi left him.

  He felt it go. Departing his finger, crossing into her. For a moment, the briefest moment, he felt it touch something. The edge of that canyon, the lip of that empty vessel.

  Then it was gone.

  The emptiness absorbed it, swallowed it whole. Like water poured onto sand that hadn't seen rain in decades. His qi sank into her and vanished without a trace, and where it went, he couldn't follow. The emptiness drank it down and asked for more.

  The emptiness had a shape to it. A tangible depth he hadn't expected. It went down and down and down, and his small thread of qi had vanished into it like a single drop of water falling into an ocean so deep you never heard the splash.

  Li Qinghua's hand twitched. Her fingers curled involuntarily, joints flexing in a wave from pinky to thumb. Then they relaxed. One finger at a time.

  Daniel pulled back. It felt like he'd reached into a darkness and touched something vast. Something that had been waiting there for a very long time.

  "Did it work?" he asked.

  Li Qinghua didn't answer.

  She was looking at her own hand. Too many things moving behind her eyes, layered over each other, impossible to separate.

  "No," she said finally. The word came out quiet. A murmur meant for herself as much as for him. "It didn't work."

  She pulled her arm back slowly with the care of someone handling something fragile. She held it against her chest, both hands wrapped around her own forearm, fingers interlaced over the spot where he'd touched her.

  The lines around her eyes had deepened, but her expression was something unreadable.

  "I'm not feeling too well. You should go home."

  "Did I hurt you?"

  "No." She still wasn't looking at him. Her eyes were fixed on her own hands. On the arm she held against her chest. "I'm not hurt. I just need to get some rest."

  "Okay," said Daniel, nodding. He wanted to say more, to ask what she'd felt, to understand what had happened. But something in her posture told him now wasn't the time.

  The papers rustled too loud in the silence. She sat motionless, arm pressed close, eyes on nothing.

  He said goodbye at the door.

  The brass bell chimed as he left.

  The street outside smelled of rain coming, though the sky was still pale and dry. That heaviness before a storm. The light had gone flat, washing the color out of the storefronts.

  Daniel was halfway home when he realized he'd left his pen.

  The good one. The red one with the fine tip that he'd bought at the stationery store on Grant Avenue. He'd set it down during their discussion and never picked it back up.

  Stupid. He could use another pen. He had other pens.

  But that one had been with him since the beginning. Since the first night he'd started taking notes, trying to make sense of forum posts and old texts. Superstition, maybe. But he turned around anyway.

  The walk back felt different. The weather had thickened, but it was more than that. He kept thinking about the way she'd held her arm.

  Back at the shop, it looked different. The sign in the window had been turned to closed, and the lights in the front room were dark. But the door was unlocked when he tried it. She always left it unlocked for him.

  "Hey! I forgot my pen," said Daniel, knocking on the door. "Li Qinghua?"

  He slipped inside, trying to find the light switch. He failed and figured he'd head for the courtyard in the dark. Shadows pooled thick between the shelves, as he side-stepped most of the medicinal jars and floorboards.

  His pen would be in the courtyard. On the table, probably.

  He stepped into the courtyard, then heard her voice.

  It came from further back, beyond the courtyard, through a door he'd seen but never entered. He should call out. Announce himself.

  But her voice was different. Softer. Speaking Mandarin instead of Cantonese. The dialect of somewhere else, a version of herself he'd never heard. The words flowed differently, as if it were a more traditional version of Mandarin.

  He moved closer.

  The door was cracked open. Just a few inches. Candlelight flickered through the gap, painting a thin stripe of gold across the dark floor. Incense smoke curled through the opening, carrying a scent he didn't recognize.

  Through the crack, he could see part of the room.

  A small altar against the far wall. Red cloth draped over what looked like an old chest, the fabric worn soft with age, its color faded to rust in places. Candles in brass holders, their flames barely moving in the still air.

  An incense burner shaped like a lotus, smoke rising from its center in a thread that didn't waver. And photographs. Several of them in dark wood frames, crowded around a central photograph.

  Li Qinghua knelt before the altar. Her back to him. Her posture formal. Hands resting on her thighs, palms down. Spine straight. The gray hair had come loose from its usual knot.

  She was talking to someone who wasn't there.

  "Do you remember how we would climb to the upper pavilion and watch the clouds gather over the mountains?"

  Her voice caught. A wet sound. She steadied it.

  "I don't know how it's possible. But it's coming back."

  She reached out. Touched one of the photographs. Her fingers lingered on the frame, tracing its edge.

  "You would have liked him, I think. He reminds me of you. The way you questioned everything. The way sifu would get so frustrated because you wouldn't just accept what they told you. You always had to understand why."

  A soft laugh. Ragged at the edges.

  "Remember the stories we used to listen about? Lu Dongbin crossing the Yellow River on his sword, so drunk on celestial wine that the demons couldn't touch him because he'd forgotten how to be afraid. He Xiangu eating the mother-of-pearl mushroom and feeling her body become lighter than silk, ascending on the back of a phoenix while her village watched from below. Zhang Guolao folding his paper mule into his pocket and walking into the sunset, a thousand miles in a single afternoon."

  Her hand moved to another photograph, smaller and older than the others.

  "Everything we've dreamed about is coming true, and yet I won't be able to see the beginning of the new era… Why did it come so late… if only it was sooner..."

  Her voice dropped. Almost a whisper.

  "To witness everything coming back but not being able to participate, this is truly…."

  Her hand resting on the photograph, still.

  "Silly, isn't it."

  "Jianghu. In the end, it was just a dream."

  She pressed her palms together.

  The candles flickered once. Outside, thunder rolled across the city, distant but getting closer. She bowed to each of the photographs, and then she began to stand.

  Daniel stepped back, quietly. It didn't feel right to go in now, not with what he had just seen.

  He didn't get his pen.

  He moved back through the shop. Through the front door, the bell chiming once, but far enough that it probably wouldn't have been heard from the courtyard, and out into the street where the first drops of rain were beginning to fall.

  He stood under the awning of the shop next door for a moment, watching the rain spot the pavement. His hands were shaking. He wasn't sure why.

  The realization started to hit him as he walked back to his apartment.

  "The temples are tourist spots now, I know that much. But the real stuff? The actual masters?"

  He walked home in the rain.

  It started slow, fat drops hitting the pavement one by one, then faster until the rain was coming down in sheets.

  "Could be anywhere. Could be gone. Who knows."

  Daniel walked through it. Let it soak through his hoodie, his shirt, drenching his hair to his forehead. The people on the street hurried past with umbrellas and newspapers held over their heads. A bus hissed by, tires throwing up spray. Daniel barely noticed any of it.

  By the time he reached his apartment, he was shivering.

  He stood in the doorway for a long moment, dripping onto the worn carpet. The water stain on the ceiling stared down at him. The futon with its tangled blankets waited in the corner.

  He fell back onto it, still in his wet clothes. He lay there a long time, staring at the ceiling, listening to the rain. Putting the pieces together like he always did.

  Where are the old masters?

  The answer was simple.

  All the old masters are already dead.

  And the ones that are left can't access qi at all.