The month that came after the day of the Summer Solstice Festival was one of the busiest months of the year for the sect. The gates were crowded with people once again, early in the morning of the second day, clamouring to get themselves registered so they could submit their help requests. Gyuvin could hear the sounds of faraway chatter as he emerged from his sleeping quarters to head to the Eclipse. On second thought, he turned back and headed in the direction of the guest quarters. He wondered if the others were awake yet. Considering the sun was already beginning to rise, he supposed they should be. Meteor Court had never imposed strict sleeping hours on its cultivators, but he knew some of the other sects did.
As he turned the corridor that opened out into the guests quarters of the grounds, he missed crashing head-on into Ricky by a hair’s breadth, stumbling back just in time to catch himself before he fell.
“Oh, you’re awake. Good morning.”
“I’ve been awake for two hours,” Ricky said neutrally, straightening out the front of his white robes. “Your sect is so laid back.”
“Hey, there’s no point waking up before the sun rises. It’s so dark outside that you might as well just do your morning activities the night before.” Gyuvin turned and started walking back in the direction of the Eclipse, expecting Ricky to be following. “Wait. You brought a change of clothes with you? Weren’t your inner robes soaked with lake water last night?”
“No, I didn’t,” Ricky answered. “And yes, they were. You have a confusing habit of asking many questions at the same time.”
“So, you’re wearing lake clothes?”
“No, I’m not wearing them.”
“You’re not wearing your inner robes?” Gyuvin stared at him, slack-jawed for a long moment. “You don’t know how to wash clothes?”
He was unsurprised to find out Ricky didn’t know how to wash clothes either. Seriously, it seemed like all Moonrise Palace was good for was raising a bunch of princesses.
“There you go asking more than one question again,” Ricky said, pretending to sigh. “No, and no. What about it?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Gyuvin answered. “Come on. Bring your lake clothes with you.”
He dragged a bewildered Ricky over to the disciples’ quarters and left him standing in the middle his bedroom as he rummaged in his chest for a set of clean uniform. “Here you go, put this on. We’re the same height, so it should fit you alright.”
Ricky looked like he wanted to argue. “I only need the inner robes,” he said. “I can still wear my outer robes from yesterday.”
“You put those down on the grass last night,” Gyuvin pointed out. “White fabric stains easily. You should wash them.”
Before Ricky could continue arguing, Gyuvin threw the set of uniform at him and closed the door behind him. “I’ll wait for you outside!” he called through the door. “Give me your dirty clothes when you’re done and I’ll help you send them for washing.”
Moonrise Palace’s official sect uniform was a set of faint, milky-blue robes with an iridescent, sheer outer covering that shimmered with the embroidery of the moon phases in silver thread. There was something about the color that had always made Ricky’s habitually cold resting expression even colder than it already was; sometimes when Ricky looked up and didn’t smile, Gyuvin felt like he was struck by a bolt of ice, for just a passing moment.
But as Ricky re-emerged from his bedroom in Meteor Court’s signature spun gold, for a second Gyuvin imagined he was watching the first buds of tulips bloom in the spring. Their sect’s uniforms were made of a very fine silk spun only by silkworms fed with spiritually-rich herbs and leaves, designed to be adaptable to temperatures because, unlike the snowy mountains places like Moonrise Palace were built on, Sunshower City saw all four seasons every year. The resultant fabric was comfortable and lightweight, more the color of summer sunshine than true gold; something about it brought out a hint of natural color in Ricky’s face. Gyuvin had never noticed the dusting of pink over the tops of Ricky’s cheekbones until now, as he stepped into the morning light.
“You should really get into a discussion with your sect about changing your uniform colors,” Gyuvin started, bundling Ricky’s dirty clothes under his arm. “White makes you look even scarier than you already do, and if you camouflage too well into the snow, the heavenly realm can’t see you, so how are you going to cultivate to ascension when they don’t even know you exist? Now gold, on the other hand…”
Ricky, sensibly, didn’t bother dignifying Gyuvin with a response to that. Hanbin, Zhanghao and the others were ahead of them in the breakfast line, and by the time Gyuvin and Ricky arrived at the table with their trays of food, everyone was already seated. Ricky set his tray down without a word, fixing his eyes on his food and pointedly ignoring the stares of the other seven people at the table.
“What’s with the switch up?” Zhanghao asked, in as neutral a tone as possible, trying not to laugh. “Did the betrothal plans go well? Yujin and I will still come and visit you every once in a while, I promise.”
Hanbin and Gunwook slapped their hands over their mouths in comical unison and Gyuvin, from the other end at the table, sending a puzzled look their way. “Ricky’s getting betrothed?” he asked. “To who? Why am I the last one to hear the news?”
“I have no idea,” Ricky said evenly, picking up a piece of fried egg with a chopstick. “I haven’t heard the news either.”
Gyuvin gave up on the entire topic, after a few more minutes of confusion. The seven guests would be helping out with the sect’s tasks for the rest of the two days of their stay; all training and lessons were reduced to a minimum for at least the first two weeks in the month so the older cultivators could focus on attending to the commoners’ help requests, so it wasn’t like they had better things to be doing.
Meteor Court had had a good system set up for years now. Everyone lining up at the gates would receive a blank piece of scroll where they could write their name, their address, and the issue they needed assistance with. The scrolls were to be dropped into a large box, which would then be brought from the gates back to the Celestial Hall at the start of every hour. There they’d be sorted through by someone and color-coded by the type of request and the urgency, then pinned onto a massive board at the centre of the Hall. Cultivators could come by anytime during the day to look through the requests and choose one that best suited their abilities, and upon completion they would return and have the scroll marked ‘completed’ and set aside. This way the cultivators could take on issues that they were more confident in knowing how to solve, and it made things more efficient than forcefully delegating and monitoring everybody’s activities throughout the day. The system had worked for decades now, though it was Gyuvin’s first year actually participating in it since no one below sixteen was considered well-enough trained to take external requests.
Hanbin explained the system to the others as they crossed the breezeway connecting the Eclipse to the Celestial Hall. The view from the higher levels of the Court grounds was majestic on days where the weather was good; the training fields were mostly empty today instead of being full of younger disciples practicing, and from their vantage point the lush grass and ornate-topped blue-panelled walls seemed to stretch out for unending miles.
The request board was truly massive. Gyuvin had remembered seeing it as a child and thinking it was a ten times his height, but now that he’d grown up and was taller than most of the other cultivators his age, he still felt like the board was ten times his height, or maybe more. He couldn’t even see the scrolls on the top row, but that didn’t matter. The way they were arranged was such that the most urgent and important ones were at eye level, and as those were completed and removed from the board the less urgent and important ones would move down to take their places, ensuring no issue went overlooked no matter how trivial.
He picked out a scroll marked brown for high urgency, moderate difficulty. “Please send a cultivator over to the house on xxxx street,” he read out loud. “My family home has been plagued by suffocatingly strong evil energy. We only moved back into the house a month ago and since then all the crops we have planted have died inexplicably, our family dog has died and our youngest daughter has fallen ill. I cannot imagine there is a cause for this other than some evil or demonic presence in the vicinity. Please help.”
Hanbin gave a concerned look. “I feel like that’s something that should have been raised to us earlier…”
Gyuvin shrugged. “Who knows? Anyway, since I took it off the board, I guess I’ll go handle it.”
“Alone?” Hanbin asked. “I would go with you, but Zhanghao needs help with this one-“
“It’s alright,” Gyuvin interjected. “Ricky will come with me. Right?”
They both glanced over at Ricky, browsing through the eye-level scrolls on the display board, and he nodded, coming to stand next to Gyuvin. “Let’s go, then.”
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