Chapter 265: The Pond is Done
.Chapter 265: Filling the Pond
By mid-afternoon, the pit had taken shape.
Tie Zhu and Mo Yu stood at the bottom of the excavation, sweat-soaked and grinning, surveying their work with the pride of men who had just carved a small lake out of solid earth by hand.
"Zoning's done," Tie Zhu called up, wiping his brow with a dirt-streaked sleeve. "Deep end's a good three meters at the center, tapering up to knee-height along the northern bank. Should be perfect for your turtles."
"And the shallows on the east side?" Jiang Chen asked, leaning over the edge with his hands on his knees.
"Wide enough for wading birds to steal your fish, if you're not careful," Mo Yu said, tossing his shovel up onto solid ground before hauling himself out. "You'll want netting, or a formation ward, unless you enjoy sharing."
"Noted." Jiang Chen made a mental tally. Netting was cheap. A formation ward was elegant, but elegant things had a way of costing him favors he didn't feel like spending yet.
Han Xin arrived at the pit's edge not long after, her earlier drunkenness burned off by an hour of brisk walking and, from the sour look on her face, sheer force of will. She peered down into the pit with the sharp, assessing gaze of someone who had spent years drawing formation lines across far less forgiving terrain.
"You want the Spirit Qi gathering array extended to cover the whole basin?" she asked.
"If it's not too much trouble."
"It's always trouble," she said, already crouching to sketch the first line in the exposed dirt with a thin bronze stylus. "But you fed me pigeon stew that tasted like it was cooked by a Immortal, so I suppose I owe you the trouble."
Jiang Chen chuckled and let her work.
Formation adjustment was, in Han Xin's hands, less a chore than a kind of quiet artistry. She moved along the perimeter of the pit in measured steps, murmuring under her breath, tracing invisible threads of Spirit Qi that only she and Jiang Chen — with his Spirit Sense — could perceive. Where her stylus touched the earth, faint silver lines bloomed and sank into the soil, weaving themselves into the existing lattice that already blanketed his five-acre farm.
"You've got a decent foundation array already running under this whole property," she remarked, not looking up. "Whoever laid the original grid knew what they were doing."
"That would be me."
She paused mid-stroke, glancing up at him with an eyebrow raised. "You laid a farm-wide Spirit Qi array. Yourself. As a loose cultivator."
"I had a lot of free time," Jiang Chen said mildly.
"You had no business having a lot of free time and this much talent," Han Xin muttered, shaking her head, and went back to work.
By the time she finished, the sun had begun its slow slide toward the western hills, painting the sky in long streaks of orange and violet. The pit — no longer a pit, but a proper basin now — sat waiting, its floor packed smooth, its walls sloped just enough to keep the banks from crumbling with the first heavy rain.
"Water next," Tie Zhu said, cracking his knuckles.
Jiang Chen considered the distance to the irrigation canal, then the size of the basin, then sighed. "This is going to take all night if we haul it by bucket."
"Who said anything about buckets?" Mo Yu smirked, jerking a thumb toward the canal. "Old Jiang, you're an Envoy now. Use your rank for something other than impressing archive clerks."
It wasn't a bad suggestion. Jiang Chen walked to the canal's edge, knelt, and pressed his palm against the water's surface. He drew on the Green Lotus Art, coaxing a channel of Wood Spirit Qi to bore a narrow trench between the canal and the basin — not brute force, but persuasion, the same way he coaxed roots to grow where he wanted them rather than where they wandered on their own.
The water responded almost eagerly, curling into the newly carved channel and beginning its slow crawl toward the empty basin.
"Neat trick," Han Xin admitted, watching the water level begin its patient rise.
"It'll take a few hours to fill properly," Jiang Chen said, standing and dusting off his knees. "No sense standing around watching a ditch fill up. Might as well eat again."
Tie Zhu's stomach answered before he could.
Dinner was simpler than lunch — leftover ribs reheated, a fresh pot of millet porridge, and the last of the stir-fried giblets, though Jiang Chen split open a jar of pickled radish to round things out. Nobody complained. After a full day of digging and formation work, even plain porridge tasted like a feast when eaten under Jiang Chen's roof.
They lingered at the table longer than usual, the conversation drifting from pond maintenance to gossip about the Earth Vein mines — Tie Zhu recounting, with visible relish now that his health had returned, exactly how insufferable Manager Yang had been in the days before Jiang Chen's timely arrival with the wine.
"He kept saying the sect 'takes care of its own,'" Tie Zhu grumbled around a mouthful of radish. "Meanwhile I was coughing up enough soot to build a second Earth Vein."
"To be fair," Mo Yu said, "the sect probably would have gotten around to it. Eventually. After the ice spring water arrived from the fortieth level. Assuming the runner didn't get lost. Or eaten."
"Comforting," Tie Zhu said flatly.
Han Xin snorted into her tea. "This is why loose cultivators live longer on average. No sect bureaucracy standing between you and not dying."
"I'm technically not loose anymore," Jiang Chen pointed out.
"You're an Envoy who still farms his own fields and cooks his own dinner," she said. "You're loose in spirit, if nothing else."
He couldn't really argue with that.
By the time the meal wound down and the dishes were cleared, dusk had settled fully over the farm, and the basin — when Jiang Chen walked out to check it — was nearly three-quarters full, moonlight already beginning to catch faint ripples across its surface.
"Looks good," Tie Zhu said, coming to stand beside him. "Give it another hour or two and you'll be able to stock it tonight if you wanted."
"I was planning to," Jiang Chen admitted.
Mo Yu perked up. "Stock it with what, exactly? You never said."
Jiang Chen allowed himself a small, satisfied smile — the kind he usually reserved for moments when a harvest exceeded even his own expectations. "A few things I've been saving. You'll see soon enough."
He didn't elaborate further, and none of them pressed — Tie Zhu was already yawning, still not fully recovered despite his bluster, and Mo Yu had started eyeing the road back toward town with the particular urgency of a man who didn't want to walk it in full darkness. Han Xin, for her part, seemed content simply to have eaten well and avoided further embarrassment after her earlier tumble out of the sky.
Farewells were quick and easy between people who trusted each other enough not to need long ones. Tie Zhu promised to return in a few days to check on the pond's water clarity. Mo Yu promised, with a completely straight face, to bring his fishing rod "just in case." Han Xin promised nothing, which — from her — was practically an oath of return.
Jiang Chen watched them go, three familiar silhouettes shrinking down the moonlit path toward the outer road, until even Han Xin's unsteady footsteps faded from earshot.
Then, finally, the farm was quiet.
He turned back toward the basin, its surface now smooth and dark, brimming nearly to the rim, the last trickle of water from the canal slowing to a lazy dribble. Da Huang trotted up beside him, sniffing curiously at the new body of water, tail wagging with the particular excitement of a dog who suspected, correctly, that something interesting was about to happen.
"Not yet," Jiang Chen told him, scratching behind the dog's ears. "Let it settle first. Let the Spirit Qi even out."
He glanced up. The moon was still climbing, not yet at its peak, the sky deepening from violet into true, star-scattered black.
There was time enough to wait.
And when the water finally stilled to glass, and the formation lines Han Xin had carved began to hum faintly beneath the surface, drawing the ambient Spirit Qi into a slow, contented spiral — that was when he would open the Jade Green Gourd, and let the pond meet its new residents.