Enshrined by a Bowl of Rice

Chapter 3: Just Got Lucky

The first thing Chen Xifan felt when he came to was the back of his skull pressing into something hard.

He opened his eyes. Warm yellow ceiling — no, a dome. A round stone dome, its walls lined floor to ceiling with shelves, and the shelves packed with ancient texts and scrolls that looked ready to collapse at any moment. The air was thick with the smell of old paper and dried ink, like a library that hadn’t been touched in three hundred years.

He was lying on a narrow stone bench. Something rolled up under his head — a scroll, by the feel of it. Someone had grabbed it off the nearest shelf without looking.

Three people stood around him.

Three old men, arranged around a six-sided stone table. The energy crystal at the table’s center cast their faces in warm yellow light, every wrinkle pulled deep and sharp, like riverbeds carved out over decades of weather.

The one closest to him — Chen Xifan recognized him. The old man who’d risen from the nobility stands. Gold embroidery. The one who’d knocked over a teacup. He was watching Chen Xifan now with the exact expression the owner of a pet shop in his neighborhood back in Taipei used when a rare-breed cat came in.

Not the way you looked at a person.

“You’re awake.” The old man’s voice was unhurried. “What’s your name?”

“Chen… Xifan.” He sat up and rubbed his temple. His head was buzzing, but his body felt fine.

“Xifan.” The old man turned the name over in his mouth, expression hard to read. “Interesting.”

The second elder stepped forward. Shorter than the other two, face blank, one hand wrapped around a black-wood abacus, his knuckles resting between the beads like he was ready to calculate something at any second. Chen Xifan clocked the embroidery at his cuffs — deep blue. Grain-bearer.

“Skip the pleasantries.” The abacus man’s voice was dry, clipped, stripped of anything unnecessary. “Have you consumed White Jade Soul Essence?”

Something clicked in Chen Xifan’s brain.

White Jade Soul Essence. The thing he’d seen at that stall — the stuff that looked exactly like white rice, the stuff where a small pinch cost an ordinary person a year’s wages.

He almost blurted out you mean white rice — but three years of convenience store self-preservation instinct moved faster than his mouth. His lips stayed shut. The word caught in his throat and he swallowed it back down.

”…No.” He let genuine confusion settle across his face — he’d been practicing that expression for three years, nine parts bewildered and one part innocent, just enough to make the other person feel like you couldn’t possibly be lying. “I’ve never even seen it. Isn’t White Jade Soul Essence incredibly expensive? How would I afford that?”

“Then how do you explain what happened during the ritual?” The gold-embroidered elder — Can Sui — pressed further, though his tone wasn’t accusatory. It was more like a field researcher checking his notes. He actually reached into his robe sleeve and produced a palm-sized notebook, flipped to a blank page, and waited.

Chen Xifan looked at him. Then at the abacus man. Then at the third elder in the corner — a thin old man with white-streaked temples and a frown knotted so tight it looked permanent — who still hadn’t said a word. Three sets of eyes, three entirely different expressions: Can Sui’s was pure excitement barely held in check, the kind that was nearly overflowing; the abacus man’s was a cold, surgical stare; the thin man in the corner was simply stunned, not quite finished being bewildered yet.

Chen Xifan let out a slow breath.

Exhaustion, pure and simple. Three months of being transported to another world, and every time something went wrong it went the same way — he didn’t know anything, but everyone assumed he should. So he’d end up sitting there, wearing his most innocent expression, answering questions he didn’t understand.

Here we go again.

“Elders,” he said, in his most earnest tone, “I genuinely don’t know why the crystal exploded. When I pressed my hands against it, what I was thinking was — please just give me Fire-kindler, nothing too low, enough to get me into the academy and get a meal. And then it blew up on its own.”

He paused, then added: “Is there any chance it was a manufacturing defect? How old was that crystal, exactly?”

“Three hundred years,” Can Sui said.

“Three hundred years?” Chen Xifan’s eyebrows went up — that part wasn’t an act. “Three hundred years and nobody replaced it? No annual inspection? No maintenance record? Do you have… any kind of regular upkeep system at all?”

Can Sui’s pen nib hovered above the page. When he spoke, his voice was slow: “The Guidance Stone is a relic of the ancient world. The concept of ‘maintenance’ doesn’t apply. Its continued existence is itself—”

“Three. Hundred. Years.” Chen Xifan cut him off, shaking his head with the expression of someone genuinely mourning on the stone’s behalf. “Three hundred years of continuous use, testing hundreds of people a year, no maintenance, no backup unit, no decommissioning threshold — back home, we’d call that an occupational safety hazard. When you run equipment to breaking point without ever replacing it, accidents aren’t just possible, they’re scheduled.”

Three seconds of silence.

The abacus man’s fingers flicked across a row of beads. One clean click.

Can Sui closed his notebook slowly. His expression was complicated — as the undisputed authority on ancient civilization research, he was perfectly aware the Guidance Stone could not have shattered from “wear and tear.” But the young man’s confusion looked real. Someone who genuinely possessed power beyond a Granary-keeper wouldn’t explain the destruction of a three-hundred-year ancient relic with annual inspection schedules.

Either he was lying, and the performance was convincing enough to fool even a Granary-keeper.

Or he truly had no idea what he’d just done.

Can Sui leaned toward the latter. Forty years of research had taught him that the most precious specimens almost never knew their own value.

“Based on available evidence,” Can Sui said, his voice settling back into scholarly restraint, “we cannot rule out the possibility of structural fatigue in the Guidance Stone itself.”

The abacus man’s gaze cut across Can Sui’s profile like a blade. Can Sui didn’t turn.

“The matter of enrollment.” Can Sui shifted to face the other two elders, his tone switching from field interview to department head running a meeting. “This student’s test results cannot be confirmed due to the Guidance Stone’s destruction. I recommend admitting him under the designation of ‘special observation candidate,’ with a provisional rank of Dew-gatherer.”

“Dew-gatherer?” The thin elder in the corner finally spoke, his voice full of skepticism. “He shattered a—”

“Precisely because it shattered, an accurate reading is impossible.” Can Sui’s cadence didn’t waver, his logic airtight. “Without confirmed data, any rank higher than his actual ability risks drawing unnecessary attention. Dew-gatherer is the most defensible middle ground — he enrolls normally, and we have sufficient time to observe.”

What he didn’t say aloud was: I don’t want any other faction noticing this young man. Not until I know what I’m looking at.

The abacus man said nothing. His fingers shifted two more beads, calculating something that clearly had nothing to do with enrollment paperwork.

“Agreed.” The thin elder nodded — mostly because Can Sui’s tone hadn’t left much room for objection.

Chen Xifan sat on his stone bench and listened to three old men decide his fate above his head. Inside, he was setting off fireworks.

Dew-gatherer. Mid-tier. Not too high, not too low.

Perfect.

Too high and people watched you. Too low and you got nothing. This was exactly that zone where nobody looked at you twice. He felt the tension across his shoulders drain away — the breath he’d been holding since he woke up finally, finally let go.

Can Sui had no idea he’d just been mentally adopted as a kindred spirit by a guy from another world. He was scribbling furiously in his notebook, his handwriting so wild it looked like a distant relative of ancient script.

---

The three elders filed out of the stone chamber. Can Sui led, his footsteps carrying a kind of controlled urgency — the gait of someone who needed to go check something in a book immediately. The thin elder followed, steps heavy.

The abacus man — Ledger — walked out last.

He stopped at the doorway.

The others had already rounded the far end of the corridor. Ledger turned back, crossed to the six-sided stone table, and ran his fingers across the abacus in a rapid, precise sequence. The energy crystal at the table’s center flickered — the recording function.

He drew from inside his robe sleeve a sheet of mica, barely larger than a thumbnail. Its surface was dense with numbers — the energy readings from the moment the Guidance Stone shattered. This was his gift: the precise quantification of any magical fluctuation, with a margin of error under one in a thousand.

The numbers had stopped at a magnitude he had never seen.

Ledger studied them for three seconds. Then, without expression, he slid the mica into the deepest inner pocket of his robe — not the one where he kept documents, but the one reserved for things no one should ever see.

He did not tell Can Sui.

The abacus beads returned to their resting position. Ledger stepped out of the stone chamber. His footsteps went in a different direction from the other two elders.

---

Sinking Grain Academy was larger than Chen Xifan had imagined.

After being released from the council tower, a blank-faced administrator had walked him through the full enrollment process — handprint, school uniform, registration. The whole operation ran like water, and the administrator never looked at him once, processing him with the energy of someone handling medium-priority paperwork.

Dew-gatherer. His registration tag was engraved with an amber water-droplet pattern — which, according to regulations, should match the mark on his wrist. Of course, what was actually engraved on his wrist remained hidden under the white robe’s long sleeve. He didn’t know either.

The academy had been built into the mountainside. Grey-white stone buildings rose in tiers, the architecture growing more imposing the higher you climbed — the magic crystals set into the doors and windows shifted from dull red to amber to deep blue as you ascended, a color-coded gradient of social rank carved into the architecture itself. Chen Xifan was led to Dew Dormitory, situated at the middle tier — a two-story standalone building, stone walls, wooden windows, with a cluster of small unidentified flowers growing along the windowsill.

His room was on the second floor. He pushed open the door. A stone bed, a writing desk, a window overlooking a courtyard, a basic magic heating unit running silently in the corner.

Habitable.

That was the feeling. Not good, not bad — just habitable. Infinitely better than the stone floor of an abandoned shed, and roughly on par with the three-tatami studio he’d rented back in Taiwan.

He was just reaching to swap his white robe for the school uniform when footsteps came from outside the door — not walking. Running. And whoever it was stumbled right at the threshold and slammed into the door with a solid thud.

“Fine! Didn’t hurt!” A boy’s voice rang out from the other side, full of energy. “Hey, anyone in there? You’re the new Dew-gatherer, right? I’m Zao Xin! From Fire Dormitory! I live below you — well, no, not below you, I live in the row down the hill! I came to say—”

The door opened.

Standing in the doorway was a boy who looked about sixteen. Not tall, but his eyes were bright enough to outshine a freshly charged energy crystal. He was wearing a school uniform washed so many times the color had surrendered — the dull-red embroidery at his cuffs barely registered as red anymore. A wooden rod was tucked at his waist — not a weapon, more like a branch he’d picked up off the ground somewhere, except someone had sanded it smooth and carved a few small characters into it.

“I’m Zao Xin!” he said again, like the first time hadn’t counted. “You just enrolled? Me too, this year! Fire-kindler! Lowest rank! But that’s fine! I work really hard!”

Chen Xifan looked at him. Three months in this world, he’d met all kinds of people — but someone who opened a door and immediately dumped their entire life résumé onto you was a first.

”…Hi. I’m Chen Xifan.”

“Xifan! Great name! Easy to remember!” Zao Xin was already walking into the room as he said it, not waiting for an invitation, and then: “Oh man, Dew Dormitory is so much better than ours. So much better. Fire Dormitory is half underground, and the windows are only like — this big —” he held up his hands to frame a gap the size of his palm, ”— and I can literally hear the person next to me snoring. You guys have windows? A desk? Heating? No way, that’s ridiculous.”

He did a full lap of the room, touching things, looking at things, like a squirrel that had wandered into new territory.

“Oh, oh, oh, and —” Zao Xin suddenly dropped his voice, though his version of a lowered voice was approximately the volume of a normal person talking, ”— you know White Jade Soul Essence, right?”

“Heard of it.”

“The academy has an annual quota of White Jade Soul Essence! Oh man, and — only three. Three! Whole academy, one year, three! And they all go to Granary-keeper level — well, the academy doesn’t have any Granary-keepers right now, so the top Grain-bearers are basically fighting over them. People like us?” He pointed to the dull-red embroidery on his own cuff and smiled. “Wouldn’t touch a single grain our whole lives.”

Three.

Chen Xifan’s expression didn’t change.

But the calculator in his head had switched itself on.

Three. One year, three. The academy’s top resource. Three per year.

He thought about the white powder at the stall outside the ritual plaza. Looks exactly like rice — that had been his thought at the time.

If that really was rice… twenty-five years, three meals a day, at minimum a few thousand grains per meal —

His brain started doing the multiplication. Somewhere in the middle it froze. Too many zeroes.

His fingers curled inward against his knee. He kept his expression polite and pleasant — face still, head full of nothing but zeroes.

Zao Xin was still talking. About how the academy dining hall divided by dormitory, and Fire Dormitory always ate last, and how assessment rankings determined resource allocation — he was like a survival manual that turned its own pages, packed with useful information, and needed absolutely no audience engagement to keep going.

Chen Xifan sat on the edge of the bed, half-listening, half-drifting.

His right hand reached, without deciding to, for the inner fold of his sash.

His fingertip touched familiar plastic. Thirty grams. Chishang brown rice. Sample pack.

Zao Xin had just said one grain of White Jade Soul Essence could push a Fire-kindler through a breakthrough.

This bag of brown rice he was carrying around… how many grains would that be?

He pulled his hand back. His expression didn’t move.

Zao Xin’s voice kept bouncing off the walls of the room. Outside, the academy’s bell tower struck once — low, slow, resonant.

“Oh, right!” Zao Xin smacked his own forehead. “Almost forgot — orientation ceremony tomorrow! All new students have to show up! And I heard the rich kids from Grain Hall are required to attend too, which — they never share a space with us normally. Heh. Tomorrow’s going to be interesting.”

He said it with a smile so genuine it made Chen Xifan pause. Like all the unfair parts of life had just been cheerfully absorbed into that one small sound.

“Come on, Zao Xin, you got this, Zao Xin.” The boy gave himself a brief, barely audible pep talk as he turned toward the door. “Good showing tomorrow. Good showing.”

Chen Xifan watched him.

“See you tomorrow,” he said.

Zao Xin bounced out. His footsteps clattered down the stone steps, and somewhere midway he stumbled again — “Fine!” — the sound gradually fading down the corridor.

The room went quiet.

Chen Xifan closed the door and sat on the edge of the bed for a long time. The heating unit in the corner threw a small patch of orange warmth across the wall, like the indicator light on a convenience store microwave at two in the morning.

He reached into his sash again.

Thirty grams of brown rice. Back in his world, hundreds of bags stacked on supermarket shelves, promotional price fifteen dollars, buy two get bonus points.

In this world, he had no idea what it was worth.

But that number — three, one year — had given him a very bad feeling.

He pulled his hand back, lay down on the stone bed, and stared at the ceiling.

“Just got lucky,” he told himself.

The ceiling didn’t answer.