The examiner arrived on a grey morning in the ninth month, when the village was still wet from two days of rain and the road through the centre of Wuxi had turned soft underfoot.
Tianqi heard about it from the grain seller's son, who had heard it from someone at the well. A junior disciple from the Xuanming Sect, sent out to the villages on the eastern circuit to test children of age. He would set up at the community hall, run the tests through the afternoon, and be gone by evening. Anyone who cleared the threshold would be given a placement token and told when to report.
Chu was at the worktable when Tianqi came back inside.
"The sect examiner is here," Tianqi said.
Chu did not look up from the pill he was grinding. "I know."
Tianqi set his sack down by the door. "You knew this morning."
"I knew last week." Chu kept grinding. "Go. You are old enough and it is time you went."
That was the whole conversation.
The community hall was the largest building in Wuxi that was not a barn, which was not saying much. Someone had set up a table near the back wall with a pale green testing stone at the centre of it, about the size of a man's head, smooth and slightly luminous in the flat morning light coming through the high windows. Seven or eight children were already waiting in a loose cluster near the door when Tianqi arrived. He recognized most of them. A few had older siblings who had tested before. One girl, Shen Lihua, had been talking about this day for most of the past year.
The examiner was young, perhaps nineteen or twenty, with a Xuanming Sect outer disciple's robe and a manner that suggested he had done this circuit enough times to find it tedious. He was sitting behind the table looking at a ledger and did not look up when Tianqi walked in.
Tianqi stood at the back of the loose group and let his eyes settle on the testing stone.
[Xuanming Sect Spirit Root Testing Stone]
[Age] 34 years
[Grade] Mid
[Function] Spirit root detection — measures elemental affinity and root grade via qi resonance. Displays result as light column: colour indicates element, height and brightness indicate grade.
[Limitation] Detects primary root only. Compound, void, and sealed root types return null or trace readings. False negatives possible in 3–6% of tests.
He read the last line twice.
False negatives. Three to six percent.
He read the last line twice and looked at the examiner.
[Outer Disciple — Xuanming Sect]
[Name] Fang Deru
[Age] 22
[Realm] Qi Refinement — Stage 7
[Spirit Root] Wood Root — Mid Grade
[Current State] Bored
[Notable] Has conducted 340+ root examinations across 12 villages. Pass rate this circuit: 4 out of 67 tested.
Tianqi looked back at the testing stone and kept his expression neutral.
The tests went in order of arrival. Shen Lihua was third. She pressed both palms flat against the stone the way Fang Deru told her to, and a column of pale yellow light rose about two hand-widths before it steadied. Earth root, low-mid grade. Fang Deru made a mark in his ledger without enthusiasm. Lihua stepped back with her hands pressed together trying not to smile and mostly failing.
Two boys after her got nothing. The stone stayed dark. Fang Deru told them the results without any particular gentleness and moved on.
Tianqi went when his turn came. He stepped up to the table and pressed his palms to the stone the way he had watched the others do it. The stone was cool and slightly rough at the edges where it had been handled over the years. He felt his qi move toward it naturally, the same low hum the eyes produced, but quieter.
The stone showed nothing.
No column. No light. The surface stayed the same faint ambient green it had been since he walked in.
Fang Deru looked at him across the table, then at the stone, then back at him with the mild patience of a man who had seen this result more times than he could count.
"No affinity detected," Fang Deru said. "Mortal grade root, no attribute." He made a mark. "You can step back."
Tianqi stepped back.
He stood at the rear of the hall and watched the remaining children test while Fang Deru worked through the ledger. The stone found two more with usable roots. One fire, one wood. Both low grade but above threshold. They would get placement tokens. They would go to a sect. They would spend the next several years doing whatever outer disciples at Xuanming did, which from what Tianqi understood was mostly labor and basic technique drills, but it was still more than most children in a village like this ever got.
He watched Lihua receive her token. She looked at it for a long time before she tucked it into her inner pocket.
Fang Deru was already packing up the ledger.
Tianqi looked at the man once more before he left, letting the panel run one more time without really meaning to.
[Current State] Tired. Ready to leave.
He walked back out into the grey morning.
The road back to the shop was empty. Most of the village was either at the hall or keeping out of the damp. He walked without hurrying, hands in his sleeves, thinking about the three to six percent false negative rate and what it meant in practical terms. One in every sixteen to thirty-three children with a non-standard root walking away from every examination circuit believing they had nothing. Across twelve villages, over three hundred tests, Fang Deru had missed somewhere between ten and twenty of them and recorded them all as mortal grade. He had done it correctly by his training. The stone had told him what it was built to detect.
It just was not built to detect everything.
Tianqi pushed open the shop door and went to hang his outer robe on the hook.
Chu was still at the worktable. He had moved on to a different pill. He did not ask how it went.
Chu looked up briefly from the worktable. "Eat something. The peachwood bark needs sorting before evening."
Tianqi went to the back room and started sorting the bark.
He did not feel much about the result. He had known before he touched the stone what it would show, and he had known before he left for the hall that the morning would go exactly the way it did. What he had not expected was the three to six percent.
Somewhere in the twelve villages on Fang Deru's circuit, there were children who had walked away from that stone believing a lie.
He sorted the bark into piles and said nothing.