Page 119 of The Blood Orchid

“I’ve been trying to reach you ever since you left in search of Penglai Island,” he said, “but it’s a bit hard to break through.”

He waved his hand across my lap, and there were the loose sheets of his notes that I’d read over so many times as I’d tried to retrace his footsteps. He placed a new, cleaner sheet in my hands, and I knew from the writing at the top that I had never seen this one before.

“I had this one with me when I died,” he said.

I skimmed over the unfamiliar words, then placed the paper in the sand beside the others.

This was the missing page.

I’d thought it wasn’t that important, since I’d managed to find my way to Penglai Island without it, but I was wrong.

“I don’t understand,” I said at last, a coldness settling in my stomach despite the desert sun overhead.

He folded his hands in his lap, staring off into the pale horizon as if considering his next words.

“What did you see when you touched the source of alchemy?” he said at last.

Hesitantly, I told him about the typhoons, the war, the starving children in the fields. Once I started, I felt like I couldn’t stoptalking, needing to tell him about each and every instance of suffering, for keeping those moments secret inside me felt like a betrayal. Though it was only an illusion of alchemy, I knew these people had been real, their pain had been real.

When I finished, he nodded knowingly, staring toward the horizon as if seeing past it.

“Alchemists are born from suffering,” my father said at last. “Suffering helps alchemy to grow, and in turn, more people suffer.”

The Moon Alchemist had said as much when she was alive. Every rule of alchemy confirmed it, right down to its most central rule:You cannot create good without also creating evil.

Alchemy was China’s greatest good, and year after year, it had deepened our suffering. Greed had led to starvation and disease, then war, and now a city in ruins.

Maybe at first, China hadn’t suffered noticeably more than anywhere else in the world. But a century into our reliance on alchemy, the suffering was deepening, and the country was creaking apart like a house after a typhoon. The villages were torn apart by private armies, the capital in shambles, the royal family dead.

“It’s going to get worse, isn’t it?” I said.

“Yes,” my father whispered.

How much can one country suffer?I thought. At once, I imagined a kingdom ravaged by civil war with no one to claim the throne, armies fighting until there was nothing left but bones and blood, no people to rule over.

I thought of all the small and insignificant ways I’d used alchemy—to mend my clothes and freshen fruit and untangle knots in my hair—maybe, somewhere across the country, it had caused small suffering in equal measure. A child falling andskinning their knee, an old woman burning her tongue on hot soup, a mother looking for her last piece of fruit, only to find it swarming with fruit flies.

Carefully, I folded the paper into fourths, closing it in my fist.

“I need to think,” I said.

My father nodded. I stood up to leave, unsure what to say to him. I’d been curious about him for so long, but I remembered so little of my life before my first death that it felt like I was parting ways with a stranger.

“Just so you know,” I said over my shoulder, “Zilan is a terrible name for a child.”

He laughed. “But orchids are so beautiful.”

“That’s not the point. There are more important things than beauty.”

“Indeed,” he said. “In fact, do you know what Confucius said about orchids?”

I shook my head. Confucius had been Yufei and Wenshu’s area of expertise.

“Confucius admired the way orchids survived in harsh environments,” my father said. “In the mountains, where the terrain is rocky and roots cannot penetrate the earth, they grow in the trees.The orchid grows where others cannot, he wrote.”

He raised his gaze to meet mine, and something in his eyes was deeply sad despite the soft smile on his face.

“That is why I named you Zilan,” he said. “I have always thought orchids were beautiful, not because of their color, or shape, or patterns, but because they endure.”

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