“Is anyone familiar with the concept of the Dao?” The man stood at the front of the makeshift classroom, its high windows looking out on a grey afternoon somewhere in the city, transparent from within but opaque from the outside. His face was constantly pensive — distracted, almost — but he was clearly focusing on what he was saying. Anwen knew him only as Faine, and she had met him just that morning. He was one of those men with a vaguely academic air; dark eyes, and darker hair that was a little longer than average. He was the sort of person who could have been from almost any period in history. His clothes were dark too, and had an unremarkable and faded eccentricity. He looked every inch the teacher. Anwen watched him carefully as he glanced around the room at the mere half-dozen faces looking back at him. No-one had raised their hand. “That’s probably for the best,” Faine continued. “Suffice it to say that it’s something the ancient Chinese never quite succeeded in explaining.” He paused, but not for laughter. He looked down now, and seemed to be gathering his thoughts. Anwen wondered for at least the tenth time if she was meant to be taking notes, but the small wooden individual desks were bare; no writing implements or paper. “It’s a lot of things, really,” Faine said. “A cosmic force. The underlying pattern that governs the universe. The way that people should live their lives generally. Various specific methods of doing things. And always resistant to description, conveniently. One popular translation of the word, but by no means the only one, is The Way.” He nodded, warming to his subject. Anwen shifted in her seat, unsure where this was all going. “The Confucian view is that the Dao has always been around, and is self-regenerating, and is the basis — in a sense — of reality. The actual agent of its forming of reality is something they called qi.” Anwen had heard of this word, at least. Faine had pronounced it like chee, and she knew it was something to do with Eastern mysticism. Wasn’t it involved in acupuncture or something? She thought so. But Faine was talking again. “Qi is the substance of the universe, as opposed to its foundational basis. It’s a fluid, omnipresent energy form, and everything that exists condenses from it, to use one possible analogy. It is the sole and universal constituent of all physical matter and energy as we know those words, and it’s also the life force of all living beings. And it both facilitates and impedes behaviour and destiny. In a nutshell, then, the Dao allows for the cosmos to generate itself from a formless state, by means of qi being refined to produce everything in the universe.” Faine did glance around at everyone now, and then gave a small and almost bashful half-grin. “That’s what the ancient Chinese said, anyway. Which is just another lot of pseudo-philosophical-cum-spiritual nonsense, isn’t it?” Again, no-one laughed, and with good reason. Because suddenly the concept was very familiar indeed. Anwen sat up straighter in her chair. Faine raised his right hand, and made a curious motion by moving several fingers in the air. The movement had the air of precision that Anwen associated with sign language for the deaf, and she saw that his mouth also moved, silently wording a few syllables she couldn’t decipher. Immediately, there was a sound that was somehow a combination of a clap, and a pop, and a hiss of escaping gas, as if the air pressure had abruptly changed and then violently equalised itself. Two full suits of medieval armour snapped into existence, standing to either side of Faine. They were at least two and a half metres tall, shining steel edged in obsidian, and of a grotesque and exaggerated design Anwen had never seen before. They were effortlessly terrifying. The visors upon the helms were raised, showing the armour to be unoccupied, but it stood upright nonetheless. One suit held a broadsword, huge beyond all reason, and the other held a cruel-looking pike with a curved double blade. One of Anwen’s fellow students fell backwards in his chair, and when he hit the floor he rolled to the side and took up a crouching position instinctively. Faine’s grin widened, and then the armour to his right took a threatening step forward, towards the young man who crouched on the floor. It raised its weapon, eerily slowly and making surprisingly little noise, and then paused with its arm held aloft. Anwen tore her gaze from the monstrosity and looked at Faine in alarm. “Shēngsǐ,” Faine said. Both suits of armour dissolved into motes of flickering light, and were entirely gone within a second. “The thing is,” Faine said casually, turning away from his students and strolling over to the nearest window, “the Chinese got it largely right, quite a few centuries before the birth of Christ.” The unmistakable sound of an iPhone ringtone came from his coat pocket, and he fished out the device to glance at the screen briefly. He made a small noise of dissatisfaction and then pocketed it again, taking a calming breath before continuing. “I say largely right, because their concept of the Dao is a bit woolly. And of course, qi isn’t a distinct component from the Dao itself. The two ideas are in fact one, viewed from different perspectives.” He turned once more, and made his way to the front of the class again. “We can’t be sure what the Chinese philosophers — in all their various schools, in various eras, selectively quoted and misquoted, translated and mistranslated, and manipulated for political ends — actually knew. They inhabited a world where belief was more readily come by, certainly. Or perhaps it was all just a gigantic coincidence. It doesn’t matter.” He moved to sit down where he stood, and a chair snapped into existence beneath him. Once seated, he crossed one leg over the other, ankle to knee. Anwen thought the motion had a certain cavalier quality to it. Nearby, her classmate had got up from the floor, but made no move to pick up his own chair. Faine looked directly at her now. “They spoke of the Dao, and they spoke of qi. But what they were really talking about… was the Fabric.”