Who's Calling It?

The elders say that everything in this world has something to say. When a furnace reaches the right heat, the iron speaks for itself. Ten thousand people may hear it, but only one understands. Chen Ji was that one. When iron is quenched in water, everyone else hears a single “hiss,” and that is all. He could still hear the half-sound trailing after it: the iron had a sentence left unfinished. When that half-sound faded, the whole batch was ruined. The craftsmen of Daxia made their living by following set formulas: how hot the fire should be, how many times to hammer, how many breaths to leave it in the water. The elders taught only one thing: memorize the formula, and never ask what the iron said. But in recent years, what the iron said no longer matched the teachings passed down by the elders. Things made by following the old methods looked the same, but refused to obey the hand in use. Chen Ji could not make himself memorize them. No one in Huangshui Town had ever seen the Chen family buy iron. The Chens ran a rice shop. Yet they had a furnace, one that only appeared after midnight. His father had secretly forged iron for half his life, but had never made a single thing right. Beneath the wall lay a broken saber wrapped in blue cloth. Ask about it three times, and on the third, there would be no answer. When he was eleven, he asked at the village school, “What did the iron say?” He was made to kneel. After that, he kept asking anyway. From the village to the town, from the village school to the Bureau of Machinery in the prefectural city, he asked his way onward.