Cultivating Magic

[SpiraSpira]

I stared up at the night sky and sighed. There wasn't another soul in miles, and for a heartbroken man like myself, it was perfect. However, I needed to consider beginning my hike back to civilisation, if not by tomorrow, then at least by the next day if I wanted to keep it leisurely. I didn't know if I was over my breakup, but being out here in the forest was exactly what the doctor ordered.

At least the breakup wasn't acrimonious; we had just drifted apart, and finally, she sat me down and told me that she was leaving. Personally, I would have been alright to continue things as they were just for the companionship, but it wouldn't have been fair on her, and I appreciated that she cut things off instead of continuing things while trying to get what she needed elsewhere.

I had taken several weeks of saved vacation time and travelled to Colorado. I saw the sights and went up Pike's Peak, but mostly, I had spent an entire week just hiking through the Grand Mesa National Forest. I didn't hike in the approved trails or campgrounds either. I didn't want to be around people, nor the edifices of people, and the campgrounds and hiking trails everyone took were just a bit too civilised. I had just wanted to be alone. Well, and truly alone.

It was actually fairly dangerous what I was doing, walking and sleeping out here alone, but I had a satellite phone in my pack. Such things were ruinously expensive to actually use, but as a piece of emergency equipment, they were alright. It wasn't like I was poor, either. I was only in my thirties but was close to being Senior Operator at the Palo Verde nuclear power station. I had gotten the job as soon as I left the Navy, about a decade ago.

Not surprisingly, the people trained and trusted enough to press buttons on a nuclear reactor's control panel were well compensated, and it wasn't like I spent much money on anything. I still drove the same compact Toyota truck I had bought used when I joined the Navy.

I initially intended to stay reasonably close to the edges, as I couldn't actually carry enough supplies to last as long as I had stayed out here, but I managed to stretch my food supplies with a little judicious poaching. I hadn't intended to take the animal out of season and with no tag for one, but it had been a perfect opportunity when I had seen the injured elk, and I had taken it. I didn't regret my felony, except that I left most of the kill to waste.

Well, actually, I'm sure it would be well appreciated by the animals of the forest. I wasn't used to taking an extra twenty to thirty pounds with me while walking, and if that was something I really liked to do, I would have joined the Marines when I was a kid instead of the Navy. Still, I managed it, and the meat meant I never had to return to civilisation for more supplies, even if I only had salt to season it with. Strictly speaking, open fires in this area of the National Forest at this time of the year were probably illegal, too, but I wasn't a poseur. I not only ensured that my campfires were safe, but I left nothing behind when I left, taking all of my trash with me.

As I started to get up to create a hang for my supplies between a couple of trees to protect them from hypothetical bears, I started to hear something unusual. The sound was fairly high-pitched, and I immediately rushed to my pack to grab my carbine. There were cougars in these forests, even if not many, and I was definitely more afraid of the large cats than the black bear, which was the only other really dangerous predator in the area.

However, I couldn't precisely put a direction on where I was hearing the sound, but it was getting a little louder and more intelligible as if it was both all around me and getting closer. Finally, I identified it as human speech, which was a surprise because I was almost certain I was the only human within fifteen kilometres, at least.

It was a woman or girl speaking, or perhaps chanting might be a better description. The language, once the phonemes could be differentiated, was unknown at first, but suddenly, I started hearing very accented English words, "Iä! Shub-Niggurath! Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young! Iä! Shub-Niggurath! Iä! Shub-Niggurath! I hunger and desire you, All-Mother!"

Immediately, I yanked back the charging handle on my rifle, depositing a six-point eight-millimetre cartridge into the chamber, and flicked off the safety, saying aloud in barely more than a whisper, "Nope, nope, nope."

There would be no summoning of Great Old Ones in these woods if I had something to say about it. I was a proper West Virginian hillbilly, even if I was somewhat more civilised and educated now. The important thing was that we didn't cotton to that sort of thing, of summoning eldritch abominations, 'round these parts.

I crouched low, still turning around, trying to localise the direction of the chanting. I caught movement in my peripheral vision and turned and saw... something. Something expansive, large, a cloud of darkness that was darker than the darkest night... It was like a void in the world, and inside was moving and squirming!

That was when I exploded.

---xxxxxx---

Okay, perhaps I didn't explode, except perhaps in agony. It only felt like I exploded. What does it feel like to have your soul ripped from your body? It turned out that it hurt a lot.

As a disembodied spirit, I had no mouth, but I needed to scream. I'm not sure how long this period of almost interminable suffering lasted, but it seemed like a very long time to me. Eventually, though, I learned how to see with no eyes and learned how to think with no brain, including thinking about the huge sum of memories that had been shoved into... well, I would have said brain, since before I exploded, I had been something of an atheist. Shoved into my soul, then.

I was floating, disembodied, in an obvious sacrificial ritual circle straight out of a horror movie or fantasy video game. A young woman with braided blonde hair, wearing a black robe, had a wicked-looking dagger shoved into the heart of some poor fool in the middle of the circle, with two adults on either side, presumably assisting her. She resembled the older woman assisting her so much that she was obviously her daughter. A little family-based ritual sacrifice, eh?

I would have certainly put being abducted by aliens at a higher likelihood than being yanked out of my body by what might or might not be a Great Old One out of a fictional mythos. Thinking about what I had seen, the dark cloud of...

I short-circuited, finally shaking my spiritual head. I didn't know how much time I had lost when I recalled that because everything around me was completely frozen in time. The sacrifice's face was frozen in a rictus of terror and pain, and even a globule of blood that had been splashed was frozen in the air.

Not only that, but I knew everyone here. I had in the back of my... soul, I suppose since I didn't have a head, the entire life's memories of the young woman who had expertly shoved a dagger into the man's heart, along with a knowing of what had happened and what I should expect.

The latter, I think I received from...

I short-circuited again. It was a mistake even thinking about...

I short-circuited again. This loop continued for an unknown period of time, but I didn't think it was very good for my continued sanity. Eventually, I managed to compartmentalise the memories enough not to bring them up as soon as I thought about them through sheer self-preservation. Instead, I mentally shifted to thinking about a small kid whenever I thought about it/her. Specifically, a small baby goat that I had raised on my grandpa's ranch when I was also a kid of a different kind.

What happened was that these three had sacrificed this guy to summon my pet goat to help them because they were desperate. They were desperate to get out of the predicament they were in, and my pet goat had answered their call—and my pet goat had helped them by ripping both my soul as well as the soul of the young woman, the daughter of the other two, and swapping them around.

It was, and I mentally sighed with deep distaste at the trope... an isekai. Not only that, but I wouldn't even be going in my own body. I also had no idea how putting me in the body of this young necromancer was supposed to help their situation at all. I had a narrow field of expertise—nuclear energy, engineering, the repair of the above, novels and video games. And that was it.

Time was frozen because I wasn't actually in that universe yet. I was in a kind of limbo to get used to the extra memories I had, and I could apparently stay here as long as I liked. I should move myself inside the young woman's body when I was ready, and Bob's your uncle. Time would resume—at least, from my perspective.

Instead, I floated disembodied and wanted to cry but couldn't. I had no body yet. I wanted to mourn all I had lost but found myself conflicted. To be honest, there weren't actually many ties of karma keeping me to my old life. I had been raised by my grandparents, and I hadn't spoken to any member of my family since I joined the Navy after both my grandpa and grandma passed. None of them were good people.

I went to work; I came home. I read books and played video games. My last tie was with my girlfriend, but she had dumped me. The only thing that I was really upset about was the possibility that the young woman who took my body would turn into a serial killer and, worse, get caught. This hadn't been the first person she had killed, after all. I could feel a connection to her, although I had the feeling that it would dim and fade to nothing over time with the wound in reality that we were both drawn to closed like a canker sore.

But, I felt from her the certainty that magic would work on Earth, so I was a little bit concerned that she would begin practising the major school of magic that she had been born, bred and educated in—necromancy. I could just see her doing it and getting caught if she wasn't careful. I could just see it, news reporters interviewing my neighbours, them saying, "He was such a quiet man, you would never have suspected he was The Organ Thief Killer."

She was also one of the reasons that this ritual had gone awry. She hadn't intended to screw her parents, but her subconscious was more interested in saving herself, and that coloured how my pet goat responded. Really, they were all lucky that my pet goat hadn't spirited them all away into some cenobite hell dimension, as that would have fulfilled the request of saving them from their present problems, and my pet goat was foreign enough to think such a thing was helpful. I wouldn't say that I was an expert on the entity, but I wouldn't say I wasn't, either. I knew it in a way that I wish I didn't.

And while it did want to be helpful, I suspected it would think an eternity of torment would have been helpful. They'd have tons of new problems, but they'd be safe from the people rushing to murder them, plus they'd live forever! Win-win!

I didn't yet see how I could help their problems, either, so I thought this was pointless. Well, they would also be my problems soon enough, too—unless I wanted to spend eternity frozen in time with only my own thoughts for company. While I liked very much to be alone sometimes, that was a bit much.

I floated around, careful not to get too close to the centre of the ritual. I didn't want to touch her body with my spirit self until I was good and ready. I needed time to really dive into her memories. I didn't know anything much more than the basics, as I was mentally holding the mass of memories away from me at spiritual arm's length by force of will.

I floated too close to the man at the edge of the ritual circle and accidentally floated inside his body, which gave me an up-close and personal view of his large intestine. I didn't know how I could smell anything at all, both because I didn't have a body and because scent required airflow and, therefore, time to function, but I could! I backed hastily away and shook my spirit body in disgust.

There was a tether, visible to me in whatever senses I was utilising, tying me to the centre of the ritual, but I suddenly decided I wanted to see how far away from it I could get in this limbo. We were underground, but I didn't presently need light to see. It would be weird if I did, as, like scent, it required time to pass so active photons could bounce off my retinas.

Still, I floated as fast as I could in one direction, floating down the corridor until I got lost in what appeared to be a fairly complex underground cave complex. It wasn't the largest cave system, but it did have a number of odd turns and chambers in it.

Some of them were naturally formed, while most near the ritual were either carved completely out of the ground or helped along. Finally, I glanced up and, gritting my proverbial teeth, just floated up through the dirt. I learned to turn off my sense of taste and smell about halfway through the ascent, and eventually, I came out to a nondescript desert biome.

It wasn't a desert like the Sahara, but more like New Mexico or Australia. Brush, rocks and what might be considered cactuses. And two moons above in the night sky, one of which was almost three times as large as what I remembered Luna ever being back on Earth. Fascinated, I flew up into the air. I didn't float much faster than I could have jogged in my past life, although I was slowly getting faster, but if there was one virtue that I had, it was that I was patient.

This moon looked a lot closer in orbit than I remembered, but was I patient enough to float for hundreds of "days" if it meant I could step my spiritual foot on the surface of a fucking moon?! HELL, YES, I WAS. I always wanted to be an astronaut.

Besides, I would need a lot of "time" to go through these memories. I finally stopped holding them at arm's length and allowed them to make contact with my spiritual body.

---xxxxxx---

I was Merildwen, the sole daughter of my mother, the elf Serinre and my father, her human husband Delgaroth. Privately, I felt that wasn't likely my father's real name, but if he had another, he never told me, so I just called him dad.

My parents were acolytes of a somewhat famous coven of necromancers and dark Wizards that had been eradicated in the last war before I was born. They had managed to escape, being assigned a mission at the time and felt fortunate to keep their lives. Necromancy wasn't entirely forbidden, but it wasn't really tolerated, either—especially the types that both my parents and later myself were trained in.

From when I could remember, we travelled from place to place, living on the periphery of society and fleeing whenever things got too serious. Fires and pitchforks were real dangers in the small villages, and the larger cities were scarcely any better. That said, there was always work for my parents. While necromancy was their focus, they were fully trained wizards, and my mother was an alchemist, too.

Ultimately, there were innumerable people and organisations that had little care for the fact that both my parents were wanted for execution simply by being living members of the Cavern of Lost Souls. I'd probably be hung, too, just on general principles. These people and groups provided the money we needed to live and thrive. A ward on someone's home here, a potion brewed there, a skeleton or two raised from the dead somewhere else—work was easy to come by, to the point where I was trained in the arcane arts as a child myself, just to help with the family business all the sooner.

There were numerous problems in such a life, but our current issues manifested when one of the newer organisations that provided work to us, specifically a guild of assassins, discovered the identity of my mother and father. We had done good work for them, and it was a really good match—it was quite surprising how well an interrogation could be conducted when the interviewee knew that even death wouldn't save their secrets. Even I could raise a dead man's shade and compel it to answer as many questions as I wanted, and I was only a novice in the arcane arts.

Still, they both discovered that my parents were former acolytes, as well as rumours that the Cavern of Lost Souls had special treasures in one of their abandoned and of course, haunted, ruined headquarters. We had just arrived in this city, so it was a different branch of the cult, but they were sure that my parents could get through the traps, ravenous spirits and other protections—so they had thrown us all, along with a man meant to be our minder, into the underground dungeon.

That poor bastard must have pulled the short straw. He was with us to "keep us honest" or, more likely, ensure we didn't somehow make off with any treasures. He had a magical device, a way to communicate with his several dozen friends waiting outside, too.

Still, localised telepathy was just a cantrip, so all three of us could communicate privately during the exploration of the ruined cave complex. We all agreed that there was just no way that this guild of assassins would leave us alive after we were finished being useful. You didn't enslave, however, temporarily, a group of necromancers and then expect them not to get even. Plus, our deaths would neatly solve the distribution of loot questions, too.

It was simple enough for my mom and dad to secretly bind some of the wraiths we found, but it wouldn't be enough to save our skins. Three or four wraiths would just slow down the proficient killers outside. We were desperate but not desperate enough to summon a devil strong enough to save us. He or she would demand our souls, at a minimum.

So, we did something even more stupid. My parents, you see, found this book in the branch leader's room. How it escaped the notice of the paladins who had destroyed the branch, I wasn't sure.

---

I returned to find myself not on the surface of the moon but roughly as high as I remembered airliners flying. The connection I had to the ritual was firm now and permitting me no further travel. Or perhaps I had run into the "invisible wall" of this limbo simulation. Depending on how far beneath the ground we had been, it seemed like the tether was a little more than ten kilometres—quite a lot when you thought about it.

It didn't feel like I had lived Merlidwen's life, but it wasn't too far from that, either, so I just hung in the air, trying not to be swallowed by the over two decades of memories.

After a long while, I started floating back down to the ground. It didn't seem to change the way I thought. I was still me. All of her memories were held at a bit of a distance compared to my own, yet at the same time, I could step into them if I wanted, as if I was wearing a mask or suit of clothes and become her. That was nice. Otherwise, my "parents" would discover my identity rapidly and probably treat me as some sort of disembodied possessor entity that had murdered their daughter. There were a variety of such creatures and spirits, after all.

Even death wouldn't save me from such a misapprehension.

It was strange how much you took for granted having a body until you wanted to sigh, shake your head or punch something, and you couldn't. I floated quite fast now, though, so I wondered how long I had struggled at my fetters while vicariously experiencing Merildwen's life. Probably quite a long time, I thought.

I was kind of lost, so I just followed the tether back to the ritual room. It hadn't been difficult for Meril's dad to render the man insensate with a spell and take the magical device he had been using to communicate with him. But they had prepared for this contingency and transmitted at set intervals. It was basic tradecraft, so I wasn't surprised a group of semi-secret assassins would utilise it.

It, like some magical devices, couldn't really be used by the dead, either, so it was a pretty good defence against, say, a necromancer raising your compatriot from the dead and forcing him to tell you everything was okay.

As it had taken a few hours to set up the ritual, even moving at reckless speed, it was likely that his compatriots knew of his capture or death by now. Really, they might have been following behind us the whole way. I decided to find out where they were, first things.

This wasn't a band of cops or paladins dealing righteous justice against us three necromancers. It was a cabal of assassins. I didn't feel bad at all saving my skin, even if it meant they lost theirs. I didn't even have skin right now! I was entitled to protect myself.

I used Merildwen's memories to retrace our steps through the cave complex, occasionally taking a wrong turn. However, it wasn't a maze or even a proper labyrinth—we wouldn't have been so lucky. I found a group of over twenty men frozen, about three caverns from the entrance. They looked mean, cautious and looked like sudden death from both hands. The weapons they carried looked magical, as did several devices, and they definitely appeared to be making their way through the tunnels.

Wizards were feared, but Meril's memories were telling me that this type of "rogue" archetype could murder them fairly well, especially if they had magical support in terms of their kit and equipment. Certainly, her parents hadn't thought it wise to fight it out when they had confronted them.

Perhaps these men wouldn't have succeeded in attacking Meril's parents' strong place, as a lot of undead and magic were waiting there. Wizards were all about preparation, after all. A lot of preparation went into those defences. Preparation that they didn't appear willing to give us a second time.

I returned back to the more finished walls of the coven's headquarters. It had been mostly looted, with most valuables taken or destroyed, and they hadn't found much of interest. But I would check every square centimetre myself.

Then, I would check every square centimetre of this entire cave system. There didn't appear to be a back way out of the caves, but that didn't matter. There might be! And, if one existed, I would find it. Even if I spent subjective months or years examining all... wait, how much volume is in a sphere with about a ten-kilometre radius?

I did some quick math: over four thousand cubed kilometres of volume that my tether allowed me. After all, if I had one virtue, it was that I was patient. Perhaps that was what my pet goat saw in me.

I got started.

 

[SpiraSpira]

I don't know if it took years, but it did feel like weeks or even, perhaps, months.

There was just no way to judge the passage of time, not even with the cycle of sleep like a prisoner in solitary confinement, as I didn't need to sleep at all. Not too surprising as a disembodied soul, I supposed.

Still, I did find treasure pretty quickly. There was a false wall in what appeared to be a simple pantry that led to the complex's main vault. Quite a lot of things were in there, including gold, magic devices and walls of books, but I didn't see anything that would immediately help us escape or deal with the assassins that were making their way to end what would soon be my "life."

I did find some other interesting in other parts of the complex. A number of explosive amulets had been overlooked in the armoury. When you raised corpses to do your bidding, the use of "suicide bombers" became an obvious strategy in warfare, and only certain magic devices required a soul or mind to function.

That gave me the kernel of an idea, but even that would only be a stalling tactic. I had been hoping that I wouldn't need to go down the "thorough" path, but in the end, I did. I examined every item in the treasury and eventually discovered that I could even read closed books if I was very precise about shoving myself into them. It took me quite a bit of time to learn to float so precisely and then immediately still myself so I could read a page, to say nothing of floating forward precisely enough to "turn the next page."

I probably looked ridiculous, especially when books were shelved upside down, and I had to hang in the middle of the air upside down, with part of my spirit body shoved into a book.

Even though, I read everything. Both to look for secrets, as well as my later edification. While some included more general arcane knowledge, most of the tomes dealt with necromancy, curses and ritual magic. Including many things that even Meril's parents weren't aware of. They hadn't been Elders in the coven after all, merely mid-tier members—the kind that got sent out on missions often, so some of it was things she had never been taught.

I was hoping to keep most of the memories. On Meril's last birthday, she summoned a devil and bargained for an improved memory and slightly improved intelligence. The former was delivered through a mental technique called a Mental Palace, and it was something I recognised even from my past life, although I had never heard of anyone that could actually use it.

In exchange for this help, as well as the use of an imp as a familiar, she owed the devil a quarter of her soul or, alternately, the souls of three other people. It was a debt arrangement, and the accounts would be settled when Merildwen died, or she paid off her debt, whichever came first. I hoped the devil didn't think I was obligated to pay her debt like some kind of usurious loan shark, too, but I had the feeling I would be on the hook.

The devil they dealt with was an Erinyes named Oriella, so it could be said that of all devils, they were the least likely to screw one over with a monkey paw deal, but the only way I could object to the debt would be in the Hells after I died. It would be simpler to just pay the debt with evildoers if I encountered some. It might be that I was a little insane now, but that idea didn't bother me as much as I thought it would.

Bargaining with a devil was something akin to a right of passage in Meril's parents' coven, and the entire coven utilised Oriella, so her parents had helped her make as good a bargain as could be expected. From my objective perspective, dealing with devils seemed kind of stupid, although the Memory Palace technique that had been shoved into Meril's mind was very useful.

I had already detected a lot of similarities in the world I would soon find myself in and a certain table-top roleplaying game that I used to love to play, to the point where many of the same spells and tropes existed, but it wasn't set on Faerûn or Eberron or anywhere else I recognised. None of the deity names were the same, and some mechanics were different enough that it caused a bit of cognitive dissonance when I noticed it.

Her deal with the devil was why Meril was wielding the knife, even. The ritual to summon the attention of my pet goat didn't require a soul, merely a murder. Honestly, I didn't think my pet goat really understood what a soul was. It thought so foreignly that I didn't think it understood the distinction between a living person or a dead one, or a human or a cabbage.

Since the ritual wasn't sacrificing a soul, she thought, why not two birds for one stone? The contract with the devil specifically stated she had to collect the souls herself, so she needed to be the one to shove the knife into his heart.

Taken together, it just meant that none of the people around, Meril or her parents, were good people. Still, even if they were evil necromancers, it was clear that Meril's parents did love her, and she loved them too. She hadn't intended to request her personal escape when she had performed the summoning ritual; it had just been a subconscious desire.

Her parents had wanted to help her pay part of her debt as soon as possible and had made the mistake of giving her the key position in the ritual when she wasn't quite ready for it. A more experienced Wizard would have been able to compartmentalise their mind enough that no subconscious should have leaked through.

Still, perhaps without that subconscious flavour, my pet goat would have sent everyone to the cenobite dimension, so there was no telling what would have been better. Not doing the ritual would have been better, probably, as using logic to predict the behaviour of that ... thing was madness. Madness. Madness. Madness. Madness. MADNESS.

I shook myself, or more likely, vibrated my spirit a little. It was best to think about something else... like how I had found a way to escape! I thought I had found everything to discover, but I was still thinking in only two dimensions. A few metres below the large ritual chamber I was tethered to was another similar room, except I had recognised the lines on the floor from a few of Meril's memories. It was a teleportation circle.

Every good supervillain lair had to have a secret escape tunnel, and I thought I found ours. The only problem was that it had already been used. A teleportation circle consumed a fair bit of silver, which had to be inlaid into the runic circuitry on the floor. There were several dozens of small ingots of silver in a cabinet in the room and even a small furnace to facilitate the rapid replacement of silver to bring the system back into function, but there was no way that they'd have time to repair it if we couldn't do anything about the attackers, first.

Nodding, I shifted my perception to the man with a knife in his heart. Perhaps I could be the one to save everyone after all. While I was patient, I also thought I was decisive when I needed to be. I reached out and grabbed Merildwen's hand.

The instant I touched it, I felt a vacuuming force and found myself inside. A second dump of memories hit me, although much smaller, and I instantly compartmentalised them. It seemed to be memories of Merildwen from her own version of "the frozen world." The frozen world of the Grand Mesa National Forest. She hadn't spent anywhere near as long as I had there, though.

The transition wasn't detectable, either. One moment, I was in the frozen world, and the next, I was moving again. My hand was still shoving the knife up, past the man's ribs, further into his heart, just as I had been taught.

I had already wrapped myself tightly with the "clothes" of Merildwen's memories, too. I had practised this many times during my search in the frozen world, and I already knew more or less what to expect.

"My" father blinked and said, "For a second, I thought... did it work?"

My mother nodded solemnly and asked, "Meril, are you okay?"

"Yes, but we don't have much time," I said wearily, trying to get used to using a body again, standing up from the still-twitching sacrifice. I turned to my parents and said, "But I have the knowledge of how to save us, I think. Plus..."

There had been a feeling at the back of my skull as soon as I got in this body, and I frowned. It felt like a new muscle, something I hadn't had before, but I sort of knew how it should work. I glanced down at the ritual dagger and yanked it out of the dead man's chest, with some effort, and looked at it, flexing the unseen muscle.

Suddenly, the dagger vanished, and I was aware that it was somewhere else, and I could call it back. My father's face brightened, and he said, "Oh! An extradimensional space? That's a pretty standard extraplanar boon. How big is it, Meril?"

Meril had been taught about these sorts of things. If a mortal travelled in person to some of the outer planes, there was a chance that the trip would change them. Sometimes for the better, other times not. Boons and banes.

Mostly, whether the changes were for good or ill was a matter of debate, except for a few that were undeniably beneficial. One of these "boons" was what I would consider a hammerspace. I frowned, thinking about it, "Maybe a little more than one and a half by one and a half by two mek." I was using this world's units of measure, and a mek was a little bit over a metre but less than a yard.

"Only a middling boon, then. Still, it is incredibly useful—a great bonus to our hopeful survival. Devils charge usurious rates for a trip to the outer planes, and even then, it isn't guaranteed what you'll get. Perhaps the entity took you to its home plane in an instant before returning you here? Do you remember seeing anything?" he asked.

I remembered. I remembered. I remembered. I remembered. I REMEMBERED.

Someone shook my shoulder, and I snapped back to myself with my mom looking at me worriedly, her hand on my shoulder. I had been rubbing my eyes hard enough to hurt. I shuddered, "Please don't ask me about that right now. I think that entity came a lot further than the outer planes, Dad. I don't want to talk about it."

He suddenly looked solemn and nodded, "For another time, then. What do we need to do?"

"Good news, there is a teleportation chamber directly below this room. The mechanism is over there..." I pointed to a spot outside the ritual circle, "...but the lock is magical. Bad news, the circle has already been used."

Mom frowned, creasing her forehead, saying in a worried tone, "I don't think we have enough time to refresh a teleportation circle. We might not have enough silver, anyway."

I nodded, "I need to buy us some time." It would take too long to explain this to them. I knew where to find everything I needed, but they would be fumbling in the dark. I needed something that would work as an extension of my own body, though.

I glanced down at the sacrifice victim, who was still twitching slightly and held out my hands. Animating the dead, like most magic, generally required knowledge, somatic, verbal and material components. However, if you murdered the victim yourself, then you didn't need any material components at all. Plus, it made the spell much easier to cast and more potent, even. It made necromancy a very cost-effective and potent form of magic if you didn't have any morals.

To be honest, though, the material components required to animate the dead were cheap, anyway. The real boon of ritually murdering the target of the spell was it increased your comprehension of the spell for that single casting.

Merildwen wasn't actually at the level of casting a third level Animate Dead as a standard casting. She could do it as a ritual if you gave her an hour, though. But now? I held my hands in the appropriate form and spoke the words, casting Animate Dead on the corpse.

It shambled to its feet but remained silent. Skeletons were a little smarter than zombies, but I wasn't strong or wise enough to animate an undead with any kind of intellect—I didn't want that right now, anyway. I mentally controlled the zombie, and it started walking off quickly. It wouldn't start to hobble and be slow until rigor mortis set in later.

I could control it like it was one of my own limbs and see through its eyes like they were my own for at least half a kilometre... or kilomek, which was way more than was necessary right now.

My dad was already inspecting the area where the stairs were hidden, but my mom was standing next to me. I nodded at her, "There are a handful of explosive amulets that weren't discovered in the armoury. I'm having the zombie grab them and take them to a specific part of the tunnels. There, he will explode them all. I am almost certain that will cause a localised cave-in. It will take them hours to move that much rock safely—if they even try. Plus, there are silver ingots in the room downstairs."

This caused her to brighten considerably, "I'll have the spectres check after we hear an explosion. But that does sound like a good idea, and we can definitely melt and recast the teleportation inlays in a couple of hours, even if there is no furnace and we all have to sit casting fire cantrips at it."

She frowned, turned to her husband and asked sweetly, "Dear, how much oxygen does an elvenoid consume per hour?"

"An adult?" he clarified absently and then paused as if to consider, "About 15 cubic lek per hour, sweetling."

She nodded, "And consciousness cannot be supported at less than one and a half part in ten oxygen." She bit her lip and shook her head, "I have potions of water-breathing but nothing for a truly oxygen-deficient atmosphere. I don't know the Air Bubble spell, either." She sighed and then shook her head, "Knowing this doesn't even help unless I knew how large this cave complex is anyway, but it is a bit difficult for me not to be a bit anxious when our plan involves entombing us here."

Meril's mom was a bit claustrophobic, which was kind of amusing since she had lived in secret hideouts like this for at least a decade before I, or rather Meril, was born. I did know how large the cave complex was. Approximately, at least, but while I wasn't an expert, I thought carbon dioxide buildup would kill us quicker than the lack of oxygen, so I didn't mention anything. Besides, we could survive for days, anyway. Far longer than we'd be in here.

Also, this world didn't have enough knowledge of biology and chemistry to understand that. The literal translation to this language's word for "oxygen" would be "vital air."

Many Wizards and other scholars knew there was something in the air that most life needed and even knew the relative percentage available in normal air. But they didn't precisely understand the mechanism and biology of respiration. I couldn't claim to entirely understand it either, but at the same time I thought that every submariner was concerned about what would happen if the air got stale, so I knew enough.

But the people here? Since it was the same thing that fires needed, they had mostly considered it some sort of fire animism. They'd explain that a living thing needed oxygen to fuel the fires of life, which was both close to correct but also an explanation that ruined further inquiry.

A couple of minutes later, my zombie arrived at the correct spot. He didn't need to trigger all of the amulets—they were explosive if they were damaged, so I just had him hold two of them and push the buttons as close as possible simultaneously. We could feel the rumble and hear the explosion from here.

"The tunnel is well and truly fucked, princess," Mom said so soon after that she had to have had her spectres following the zombie, but she used an Elvish word for the expletive instead of the Common we were speaking, "Forget hours; I think it might take days or a couple of determined dwarves. Certainly longer than I'd want to stay here." Then she reached into her pack and pulled out a mirror, speaking the words to a Clairvoyance spell.

After a moment, she nodded, "They're at the blockage. They're talking. And... they're leaving." She turned to her husband and said archly, "They're quite wroth with us, dear. How quickly they abandoned poor Jim." She glanced at the spot in the circle where Meril had stabbed him, "I don't think they liked him much. They're going to post guards outside the cave and an observer at our rented house. What a bother, there's quite a lot of things we're going to be leaving behind."

"Better our lives than our things, snookums! Besides, we have most of our valuables on us," my dad remarked brightly before saying, "I think I'll have this open in a jiffy."

"I will truly miss Hector the Spectre," my mom said wistfully. That had been a wraith that my mom had been nurturing for years, almost to the point where it was regaining some level of intellect. It was also incredibly dangerous, and hated all living things with a passion, including and especially us.

It also served as the lynchpin of a number of magical defences they set every time they moved to a new location. The magic of the wards relied upon him but also fed him so that he would persist almost indefinitely. I felt very, very bad for the landlord we had rented that house from or anyone he tried to rent it to next. They'd have to call in a wizard or a cleric from some god, and even then, they'd have to first deal with the wards and Hector themselves.

I smiled, "About that. The knowledge I gained was knowledge about everything in this cave system. That includes a secret vault in one of the food pantries. There's quite a lot of loot inside, including a whole bookshelf full of arcane texts and grimoires. Most cover advanced necromancy and ritual magic."

The secret area used purely a mechanical mechanism, probably to hide it. Detect Magic was almost required when looting a den of necromancers, but purely physical mechanisms combined with anti-divination wards might be missed. And I had spent long enough with my head in the wall examining every piece of it to know precisely how to trigger it without also triggering the deadly traps.

Both adults froze, with my dad turning to stare at me. As what might be described as a mid-level journeyman necromancer, you couldn't just go to the Institute of Higher Necromancy to get lessons because, of course, such places didn't exist. At least not in the country we were in. I had no doubt that many arcane academies secretly studied and kept all manners of tomes on the subject, but that was likely out of the question, too. Necromancy was one of the primary ways wizards had to extend their lives, after all, so I was sure it was studied carefully, if quietly.

So, the promise of advanced instruction, even if it was only from books, in the school of magic that they were both focusing on was literally more valuable than the book's weight in gold. And the books were heavy! Meril's mom started clapping and said, "Yay!" Then she did a little dance and flashed me a pair of finger guns.

I didn't even know why that hand gesture existed in this world since there were no guns at all, not even "handgonnes" that I would have expected in Eberron. Finger-crossbows, I suppose it must be called, but Meril had never really known. It was just a gesture that her mom liked to do like a goof, sometimes.

Advanced necromantic knowledge was especially important to Meril's mother. People studied necromancy for all sorts of reasons, but for Serinre, it was for one purpose alone. Extending the life of the man she had fallen in love with. An elf falling in love with a human was the basis of many tragic stories, but Meril's mom didn't intend for her husband to die. Ever. He was also of a similar mind. As such, she focused most of her time studying necromancy that affected souls, spirits and how necromantic energies affected the still living body.

There were numerous ways to extend someone's life, but most of the accessible ones involved some necromancy, even ones that didn't involve transformation into some sort of undead creature. The magic of death could be turned in on itself to push death away, if you were wise enough.

Of the books I had read detailed two. The first was easier to do but involved taking over someone else's body, turning yourself into a type of possessor entity. That kind of hit home for me, because that's exactly what I felt like, and made me a bit uncomfortable with the prospect.

The latter was much more challenging to do and expensive, but it involved creating a clone that your soul would transfer into in the event that your body died for any reason, including old age. I didn't really understand how to accomplish either, even if I had the texts of both books committed to memory, just like I didn't understand how to build a rocket in my past life despite reading books about it and knowing sort of how it worked.

"Wait, wait... I want to go with you. Let me get this hatch open first, though," the dad said. I glanced down at my hands, which were covered in blood and made a distasteful noise. My robes, which were stereotypically black as hell, were also covered in and around my breasts, which was also something a bit new to me and, more or less unwelcome.

Sighing, I wiped my bloody hands all over the pitch black robes I was wearing, cleaning my hands as much as possible. Then, I cast the cantrip that, in my last life, I would have called Prestidigitation. Here, it didn't have that name. It was just called the Apprentice's Cantrip because it was mostly used by those learning magic to practice control. Still, it cleaned off all of the blood from my robe instantly. My hands, however, I would still have to scrub manually later.

We didn't have to wait long. He got the hatch open, and we briefly stepped into the teleportation chamber. Meril's mom asked affably, "Princess, would you create some light?" While we all had Darkvision, Mom and I naturally, while Dad had a magical item, it wasn't great for seeing details.

Although I was in the body of their beloved daughter, I was still barely more than an Apprentice, and it was normal, both for an Apprentice in Magic and for a child, to get scut jobs. I nodded and walked along the edge of the wall slowly. As I made a circuit of the octagon-shaped room, I slapped the wall periodically, casting the Light cantrip multiple times.

This was also different from my expectations, as normally, the DM would say that recasting the Light cantrip would cause the first light to extinguish. Here, you could do it as long as your magical stamina lasted. The light would only last a couple of hours at most, but the room was brightly lit for that time.

"Oh, how interesting. How did you get the light to come out so brightly white?" asked Meril's dad, glancing at the pure white orbs hugging the side of the wall. I winced internally. Normally, this spell created a warm orange light, like a torch. However, I was thinking that the cantrip might create a brighter light if I didn't focus on a specific wavelength or colour, and sure enough, it came out as a pure white light.

I doubted that was a particularly innovative creation as playing with the colour of the spell was one of the first things someone would try when they were learning it. It was that I had done so with the idea of what the visual spectrum and light were, so I had a little better success. Even with that, I was sure people had done it before.

"Instead of thinking of a specific colour, I had the idea to think of all colours, and it came out as a white light," I said, tilting my head to the side as if I was curious too. The state-of-the-art knowledge about light in the world and of optics was on the level of Isaac Newton and his experiments with prisms, so it wasn't as though the concept was that shocking. Actually, I was pretty sure that most Illusion school masters knew a lot more than that, but that wasn't a school of magic that my dad studied. Merildwen did, though.

"Hmm..." was the reply, as he tapped the wall himself, creating a similar white light, if a bit dimmer, before nodding. Then he walked over to the cabinet where the silver ingots and forging supplies were located, "Give me a moment to get this furnace going. It's going to take most of this silver, so we'll only have one shot at this."

After he got everything going, I led them both to the pantry in question. I conjured a Mage Hand and had it perform the series of actions that I had carefully identified that would cause the secret door to open. I had spent a long time looking at the mechanism as a spirit, but even then, I was a bit leary to do it with my real hand as there were a number of traps, mostly involving darts that were obviously poisoned.

The vault itself was locked, but it only had a mechanical combination lock, which puzzled Meril's parents. I quickly dialled in the correct combination with the Mage Hand, and we stepped in.

A lot was missing, but a lot remained.

Possibly, more than we'd be able to carry out, even with a teleportation circle to help us. Both adults went straight to the wall of bookshelves in a corner and hummed, peering at titles. After a few minutes, Merildwen's mother asked worriedly, "You said you have all of the information in these books in your head? Are you okay? This tome will cause madness if you're not careful." Her eyes had the bright blue glow of someone performing divination magic.

I looked at the one she was pointing at. It was one of the books on ritual magic, and while some of the rituals in there were obscene and vile, it wasn't anything more to me than distasteful. I nodded and then thought about it. If that were truly the case, and the tome was slightly cursed, then I thought I must have developed something of a resistance to purely memetic-based info-hazards due to...

I managed to stop myself before I thought about it, which pleased me. Progress! Still, what I had seen made even the most vile description of ritual seem like an inventory of radishes in a storehouse. The very fact that I wasn't screaming my head off was impressive, although I suppose I had done enough of that while I was disembodied. "Yes, I'm fine, I think. That book has some really vile things in it, though. Like necessary reagents created from the tormented souls of infants level vile."

Mom scrunched up her face and shook her head, "Some manner of ghost foetus based sin ritual, I suppose. How disgusting. The Cavern of Lost Souls eradicated a small sect that specialised in things like that. A bit much for even us, you know? The Elders claimed they destroyed all of their research notes, but perhaps not." She shook her head before asking, "Is there anything in it that isn't just beyond the pale?"

I thought about it, but finally, I nodded reluctantly, "Yes, only a few of the rituals in there are really disgusting."

They were both very happy with all of the books, and we started looking at the general loot. There was some currency, but most of the valuables were items or weapons that were different or unique enough not to be stored in the main armoury.

"Oooh... a Netherjade Pearl amulet," Meril's mom said. I mentally paused. I was just going to stop referring to her in the third person. It wasn't doing me any favours and might get me in trouble if I stayed with them in the future.

My mom pulled an amulet from a shelf and held it out, smiling. Then she pulled off a somewhat similar-looking amulet from her own neck and held it out to me. I took it and peered at it. She said, "This is substantially worse than the Netherjade Pearl, but both amulets increase one's affinity and capacity for controlling and raising spirit-type undead, Princess. Here, you can have my old amulet."

I raised my eyebrows in surprise. Her amulet was one of the most expensive things we owned, and in addition to increasing affinity with ghosts, it also contained a small dimension that could store ghosts in. It could store either one wraith or eight shadows, and it was also the way we carried Hector with us from place to place.

I put it around my neck, feeling a slight chill suffuse into my being. It wasn't uncomfortable, though. My mom, like myself, specialised in ghost-type undead. My dad wasn't even, technically, a necromancer. His most accomplished school was Enchantment, followed by Necromancy.

I found a few other things to take that neither my parents wanted—some material components for my pouch, a dark short bow and arrows that my dad said was of Drow-make, and a wand that could cast the first level spell Flay twice a day.

The latter could be used as a weapon, but it was more useful to necromancers as a tool. While it would only perform a slashing-type attack on a living thing, if used on a corpse, all of the "meat" bits would be removed from the bones cleanly.

A lot of necromancers didn't like zombies for a lot of reasons. I agreed with them. They smelled! Skeletons were also smarter, so skeletons were generally preferred, and this was likely a tool used to help process corpses.

I also got another hand-me-down, this time a ring from my dad that could cast Ray of Enfeeblement once a day. It had already been used today on poor Jim in order to help Merildwen overpower the man during his ritual sacrifice, though.

My parents carried the money between them, but I grabbed a small sack of coins too and eyed them defiantly, which caused my dad to ruffle my hair. Then, I spent the next half hour running back and forth, using my hammerspace to transport all of the items out of the vault and into the ritual chamber.

After the silver inlays were repoured in the teleportation room and cooled, we transferred all of the loot downstairs. The heaviest items were the books, which numbered over thirty. I asked curiously, "Have you ever performed a teleportation ritual?"

"Well... no," he said, finally. "But I'm fairly confident. Still, we'll want to stand as close to the centre of the circle as possible."

We rearranged the loot to put the most valuable items closest to us, just in case. And both my parents grabbed the books they found the most interesting and placed them in their personal bags. My hammerspace was about half full, so I filled the rest of it with miscellaneous items that were on the periphery of the circle.

"Alright, the circle is activated," my dad said, glancing down at the slowly energising circle that he activated. Arcane light could be sensed flowing through the circuit over and over, building in strength with a repeated clicking noise. "Timing loop is working correctly, and capacitors are charging. I have a destination in mind. Be careful not to touch each other."

I held my hands stiffly at my side, and he grinned, "Here we go—wait, fuck..."

I widened my eyes and opened my mouth to say something. My mom looked upset, and I could feel her casting a temporary telepathic link. It was the simple Message cantrip. A person could send a short message, and the recipient could reply. They had used this spell to communicate while plotting to betray Jim. I felt the spell settle over my mind, and then, with a flash, I was gone.

Blinking, I found myself alone in the middle of a forest. It was kind of ironic, as that was how I started the day back in Colorado.

<We'll find you!>

The voice in my head only had time for a brief message after I arrived. Message had a very limited range. Using it right before a teleport when you thought you might be separated was something I would have expected out of a munchkin if this was a campaign, so I was pretty impressed. I sent back, <Be safe! In a forest!>.

I didn't have any sense of direction or distance before the link disappeared. I also felt the lingering connection between me and Merildwen snap like a rubber band. I had learned a little bit about her plans back in Colorado, and although it made me a bit uneasy, it wasn't as though I could blame her. I didn't have time to think about it right now, though.

I looked at my feet. There were a few items that came along with me, but nothing particularly interesting. Still, I would try to gather everything. When you were in a survival situation, you never knew what might prove invaluable.

For now, though, I just sat on a log and let the mental "clothes" of Merildwen's personality recede, becoming more myself, and let out a loud, "What the fuck!"

It had been a day.

 

[SpiraSpira]

I had a strong desire to just sit there on a log, like a log, and think—about what the hell happened to me, about where I was and whether I could get back, and lastly, about Merildwen's tentative plans to take over the planet Earth.

I wasn't sure I could blame her—due to my pet goat, we were both a lot more insane than we were yesterday, even if it wasn't entirely apparent from the outside, and I probably would be doing the same thing if I suddenly got the same powers as a Wizard when nobody else had them. I probably wouldn't have thought that yesterday, though, and my main issue was one of slight discomfort at someone doing such things in my body.

Before our connection snapped, I could tell Merildwen had similar concerns, and she was upset, thinking I had gotten the vastly better deal here when you compared a humanoid in their mid-thirties to an elvenoid in their mid-twenties. Half-elves didn't work like in the tabletop game I was so familiar with, either.

Merildwen was indistinguishable from a full-blooded elf. The only way that someone could tell she was a half-elf was the fact that she looked almost like a clone of her mother. The genetics of an elf were, apparently, so dominant that they override most of the human genome. Half-elves had the same lifespan as regular elves, and it kind of reminded me of the space babes Asari from Mass Effect.

As the connection between me and Merildwen snapped, she was already meditating and using the Mental Palace technique to commit all of the books I read into memory. That was a good idea since they formed a rather complete Necromantic education, at least up to level seven spells. Eight, if you included Clone.

Perhaps I should do that, too? The memories from when we were both disembodied souls seemed incredibly vivid, but I didn't know if they would start to fade after a while.

However, just before I closed my eyes to consider it, I noticed something... off about the forest I was in. The canopy above seemed thick at first glance, but Merildwen's vision was a lot better than mine. Darkvision noticed that what I thought, at first, was a thick forest canopy was actually webbing that bridged individual trees. A lot of webbing. Like from spiders. Giant spiders.

A part of my brain reminded me that Giant Spiders were only a challenge rating 1 monster and that I could be considered something close to a level four Wizard since I could almost cast level three spells. But the rest of my brain reminded me that a challenge rating was designed for a full party, Wizards were notoriously squishy and difficult to play solo, and most importantly, this wasn't a fucking game!

I quickly stood up and looked around.

"Holy fuuucck!" I yelled as I saw a spider the size of a calf descending slowly and silently down a strong silk line just behind the log I had been sitting on. Another minute or so sitting navel-gazing, and it would have been at pedipalp level of the back of my head. The fucker was quiet!

I thrust out my hand, twisted it into an odd shape, and yelled the verbal component to the Fire Bolt cantrip. Merildwen, and as an extension, me were not good at Evocation. It made me incredibly sad because while I was close to casting level three spells, the most complicated Evocation I could cast was Magic Missile. No fireballs for me any time soon. And what kind of Wizard didn't spam fireballs?!

That was another way that my "reality" was different from the tabletop. In the game, you could cast all spells from the entire Wizard spell list, so long as you met the level requirement. Here, you had to study each spell individually and more advanced spells in a school built on the lower-level spells. To cast Fireball, I would have to put a lot of study into other Evocations.

That was a total nerf, I thought. Normally, when I played Wizard, I was all about fireballs. Who wasn't?

The cantrip was completed, and a relatively small bolt of fire shot from my outstretched hands and accurately struck the descending arachnid. I chose Fire Bolt because spiders, and especially their webbing, were weak to fire and also because a giant fucking spider was coming to eat my head! Burn it with fire!

I was a little surprised that the Fire Bolt seemed to be kind of weak, though. Was this a function of me or the place I was in? From Meril's memories, it seemed as though the spell was harder to cast while delivering only two-thirds of the effects. Still, it struck the spider accurately, splashing across its exoskeleton with the creature screeching in pain. The fire spilt over the creature's rear, catching fire to its spinneret and setting the webbing it was descending to on fire, snapping the strong web line and causing the arachnid to fall a good eight metres to thump, hard, against the ground below.

I had already started backing up after making sure nobody else was behind me to put some additional space between us. When the spider hit the ground, I pulled out a bit of fleece from one of my pockets and cast my second spell, Phantasmal Force—a second-level spell from the Illusion school. Merildwen's primary school of magic was, obviously, Necromancy. The school she was next best at was Illusion.

This seemed like a terrible choice from my perspective, as I generally hated both schools when I played a Wizard. Necromancy was both weak and expensive in gold and resources, while Illusion was generally always up to the DM as to how well it performed, and DMs hated illusions, typically. Also, I hated people who played Necs because most of them took forever, rolling each individual skeleton's dice one at a time. It made their turn take the equivalent of everyone else's turn combined and was a drag on the game.

However, there wasn't really a DM here right now, as far as I knew. If that were true, maybe the Illusion school could be overpowered. Phantasmal Force was one of the most powerful second-level spells in the game if the DM lets you go wild with it. When the spell succeeded, you could create an illusion that the target believed so much that it could cause them damage, and their belief in the illusion was total. The standard example was that if you created the illusion of a bridge over a chasm, the target would walk over it, fall through, and then try to rationalise why it fell from a perfectly good bridge, thinking up something like a gust of wind blew it off or some similar explanation.

In this case, I created the illusion of a sphere of fire with the spider at the centre of it, although it wasn't in the fire. The fire was just the edge of the sphere. If it were an illusion of being inside fire, the illusion probably wouldn't work, or if it did, the spider would immediately leap out of it to try to save itself. However, if it moved very much in any direction, it would touch the fire. It was basically the illusion of a cage of fire.

This would cause real damage if it touched the walls—of the psychic type, as well as likely immobilise the creature in the centre, as most animals wouldn't willingly walk into fire. That was my main objective.

I saw the arachnid right itself shake itself off and then glance around. It cautiously extended a foreleg and then snapped it back when it touched the illusory fire. Phantasmal Force created a purely mental illusion in one creature, so if anyone else were here observing, they would be quite confused.

Nodding, I shoved the rest of the fleece back into one of the small pockets on my robe and shifted my fingers into a different shape before calling out the verbal component to Eldritch Blast. This was generally considered the best cantrip in the game, even if Merildwen wasn't a real Warlock. While she did have a pact with a devil and got the ability to cast this cantrip along with her Imp familiar, it was not on the level of a Multiclass. Basically, it was the same as if she had taken the Magic Initiate: Warlock feat at level four, I supposed, although I didn't think things worked precisely like that.

Realistically, it wasn't a feat that Wizards often took because, in the game, it would cause the spellcasting stat to use Charisma as on rolls still. Wizards needed all of the Intelligence they could get, so they generally treated Charisma as a dump stat, but I had the feeling that things in "reality" weren't as cut and dried as they were on the tabletop game.

She didn't have any of the Warlock invocations that made Eldritch Blast really deadly either, but that didn't stop it from being one of, if not the best, damage cantrip in the game. I just aimed in the centre of the illusory sphere, which I was keeping up through concentration. A single beam of force lanced out from my hand and struck the spider dead-on on its head, causing it to shriek in pain again.

Before it could psyche itself up to try to jump through the fire sphere, I shifted and cast Toll the Dead, a Necromancy cantrip and another one of the best damage cantrips available.

While the fact that you had to learn spells individually and couldn't just cast any spell at your level was a huge nerf, it was somewhat offset by the fact that I didn't have a limit to the number of spells I knew or could cast. If this were a game, I would only be allowed four cantrips, but instead, Merildwen knew basically all of them—including a lot that did not exist in the game at all.

This wasn't unusual, either. You had to learn all of the cantrips because you had to practice cantrips in a school before you could learn level one spells reliably, and then you had to practice level one spells in the school before you could cast level two spells, and so on. It made a Wizard's spellbook very expansive at lower levels but more specialised at higher ones.

To my surprise, Toll the Dead flew from my fingers as if it wanted to be cast and, with a sorrowful gong, smashed the spider to death. I didn't think it was generally that effective. In Merildwen's experience, I was expecting to have to cast it again to finish off the spider.

I didn't want to wait around to think about the differences in my cantrip's effectiveness, though. I glanced around to make sure there weren't more spiders coming and quickly attempted to summon Merildwen's familiar, an Imp named Tistix.

Instead, what appeared was a ghost of a Chinaman floating in the air... I shook my head, as that wasn't the preferred nomenclature, and I didn't want to offend. Rephrasing my thoughts, the ghost of the Chinese person, who happened to be a man, floated there, glancing around. He had an odd outfit, as one would expect from a kung-fu period film.

I hissed at him, suddenly wary, "Who the fuck are you, and where is Tistix?"

He replied in Chinese. Or at least, what sounded like Chinese. Of course. Merildwen knew Common, Elvish and even some Drow, and I knew English and Bad English. If you took our knowledge combined, I could be considered quite cosmopolitan in the languages I knew, but none of them were fucking Chinese!

I was also quite bad at casting Divinations, despite Merildwen's mother attempting to teach her often, but I could cast Comprehend Language. But... did I have enough time?

I glanced around and figured I maybe did. I wasn't presently being swarmed yet. I had intended to ask Tistix to fly up around the webbing in the canopy and tell me which direction to run that looked less spidery. That was important. I figured I was on the edge of whatever territory these spiders had, on account that I hadn't been swarmed by more of them, but it would be difficult to tell which direction led to more spiders here on the ground. Aerial recon was needed.

I fished through my pockets and found some salt, but I didn't have any soot with me. Growling, I picked up a small branch and burned it to ashes, somewhat painfully catching some soot with my hand before casting Comprehend Language.

Comprehend Language only worked one way. I could understand him, but it did nothing to let him understand me. However, intelligent ghosts were often like Devils and other extraplanar creatures and had something to the same effect on them continuously. I hoped he was the same.

"Can you understand me?" I hissed out in a whisper.

He nodded, "Of course!"

"Then, where the hell is Tistix and who are you?" I asked him again, forcefully. Theoretically, anything summoned by Find Familiar just cannot be hostile towards you, but did this ghost count as a familiar, or did it just take over the extradimensional space that Tistix waited in when I didn't have him summoned?

I didn't know, but I was quite cautious. Ghosts were dangerous opponents when you were alone, even to Necromancers. I didn't want to be possessed with nobody around to drive the spirit out, so I had a fistful of ghost dust ready as well as the level-two Necromancy spell Chain Spirit, although I wasn't entirely sure how effective it would be, as this ghost looked unusual. Normally, such a low-level spell wouldn't even work on an uninjured ghost, but through the familiar bond, I had the capability to cast spells directly at it, bypassing the ability to resist.

This would be considered breaking the familiar contract, so I would only do it if I felt that it was going to attack me first.

The ghost seemed somewhat sympathetic to my plight, which was already more than I would have expected from Tistix, before he replied, "I am Chen Lu, a lowly third assistant to a page to the Assistant Junior Yama King, Judge Wu. When you appeared in this plane, the uhh..." he paused, and tilted his head up, "...Erinyes Oriella sold your soul debt to Judge Wu. It would be difficult for her to collect here, obviously. The clause in your contract that specified assistance by this ... Tistix... can no longer be provided, but I am here due to the substitution subclause. I will provide all assistance that this Tistix could and would have provided for the contract term, subject to some limitations."

Sold Merildwen's soul debt?! The contract was really, really specific on when that was permissible. Oriella couldn't sell it to just anyone. She could only sell it to someone she knew would comply with the provisions. Practically, this only meant other devils. Perhaps Angels or other highly Lawful entities, but it wasn't like Angels were in the business of buying souls in the first place.

This meant that whoever this Assistant Yama King was... no, wait. Assistant Junior Yama King. Whoever this Judge Wu was, I could be pretty confident it was a very lawful entity. Assuming the ghost wasn't lying.

Sighing, I considered my options. I had the choice to dismiss the familiar or even sever the familiar bond if I didn't trust this ghost, but I kind of really did need the intelligence it could provide. It was a lot more intelligent than Tistix, but I didn't know if I could use that intelligence or not. It might just be explaining things now and would refuse to use a lot of its intelligence beyond what Tistix could have done. That's what I would expect if it were a Devil, to fulfil only the strict terms of the agreement and no more. I would have to test it if I decided I could trust him.

I decided I would use its help for now. I said, "Okay, let's table that for now. I need you to go up above the trees and find a direction to travel that looks the safest. Practically, that means not further into the nest of spiders in this forest. Use telepathy to tell me which direction to go."

I made sure to specify those last two items, as that was important information that Tistix would have needed to be told. Otherwise, it would have been possible that Tistix would lead me, with loud shouts and shrieks, directly into the spiders. Imps were just... not incredibly bright, and while an Imp familiar couldn't harm you directly, sometimes they could indirectly if you were stupid about it.

The ghost man paused and then nodded, floating directly up into the air. As he floated away, I grabbed the material component for one of my most useful spells and cast Invisibility. This wasn't as godly in a forest as one would think, as a lot of animals and monsters just as often used hearing and scent instead of vision, and this wouldn't stop me from crunching a twig underfoot or anything.

Still, it was one of the best spells I had for this situation. I glanced around, seeing a number of things on the ground where I had appeared in the forest. There were a number of things that might be useful. But nothing spectacular. A few unenchanted swords, a couple of the books I had already read, but not the most interesting ones. Those went straight into the packs of Meril's mom and dad. It was all generic loot that we intended to sell off.

Both my hammerspace and my backpack were filled with more valuable things and food. I put mainly the heavy spell components that we found in the vault in my hammerspace, like ghost dust, which I had the feeling must be made out of lead or uranium. I didn't have enough room to store those random items on the forest floor, nor did I want to try to haul them away, so I just left them. Perhaps I could come back and retrieve them, but I wasn't missing out on too much if I couldn't.

<This way, Miss> the mental voice of the ghost touched my mind, and I glanced up and saw him waving. I nodded, turned, and set off in that direction. I moved somewhat slowly, using mainly my own experience instead of Merildwen's to step lightly in a forest so I wasn't moving too fast. I wish I had my carbine. Magic was nice, incredible even. But thirty rounds of 6.8 Remington Special was a lot more deadly than most of the low-level spells I had access to.

The familiar link seemed to be working. We could communicate telepathically, and I could see through its "eyes" as well. That boded well for it to be telling the truth and not being a malevolent spirit that somehow managed to hijack the summoning. Sighing, I used a combination of my Darkvision and seeing through the eyes of the ghost to navigate my way through the forest. We passed a couple more spiders and a few other dangerous-looking creatures, like a surprisingly agile-looking giant snake, which snapped at the ghost but whose attack just passed through it.

At a point when my Invisibility was about to wear off, we found a relatively open area, and I called the ghost down. I asked him, "Do you know where we are?"

It frowned and looked sympathetic before saying, "A forest is all I can say." I felt that he obviously knew more than that, but decided not to make a scene right now. Sighing, I ordered him up into the air again, right up to the limit where I would no longer be able to see through his eyes or hear his telepathy, which was about forty metres. I told him to float there and tell me if anything approached me.

I sat my backpack down, pulled out some food from it and then pulled out my water canteen from my hammerspace. I first thought that the teleportation just sent me to a random location on Borea, the planet Merildwen grew up in. But things were looking worse than that. I caused one of the two silver ingots I grabbed from the teleportation room to appear in my hand and peered at it. It didn't look like anything but silver, but a regular teleportation circle should definitely not be able to send someone to a different Crystal Sphere, much less an entirely different Material Plane like the ghost seemed to be implying.

He had said that the Oriella wouldn't easily be able to collect me here, which meant that it was either cut off from the Hells or featured an entirely different cosmology, which would imply that it wasn't the same Prime Material Plane, but instead something like an alternate dimension. There were numerous planets that scholars knew about and could even travel to, but it was pretty well agreed that they were all on the same "material plane." They were just located a long way apart like Earth's solar system was located a long way from Alpha Centauri in my old life.

This meant that my... or rather Meril's parents may find it a lot more difficult to rescue me. Theoretically, they should be able to communicate with me soon with Sending, a third-level Evocation that can deliver a short message to anyone the caster knew, regardless of what plane they were in.

It did feel as though the short message I sent when Meril's mom cast Message did go through, too, so that was a good sign that Sending would work as well. However, I wasn't sure anyone had ever tried it through different prime materials. I had copies of the Sending spell, but I could barely cast Magic Missile reliably, much less a third-level evocation, so I would have to wait until they contacted me.

A lot of assumptions in Wizardry were based on the fact that there was only one prime material plane. For example, how was I casting spells if there was no Weave? One could argue that the study of magic was the study of the Weave itself, and there were many different opinions on what it was. The most popular was that it was a plane-wide continual conjuring by the Goddess of Magic herself, an almost physical thing that allowed one to cast spells. But unless she also existed in this area, I could pretty much debunk that idea.

I sighed. I might never see them again. I didn't know if that was good or bad. If they could somehow detect that I wasn't actually their daughter, then not seeing them again was definitely good. I didn't want Meril's mom to pull my soul out of my body and give it to a Devil to torture or turn into a Lemure, and she definitely could and probably would. Or do worse if she thought I was behind what happened.

If they couldn't detect I was something of an imposter, then it was pretty bad, as they were both strong and devoted to keeping me alive.

I glanced down at my hands, which were still stained with blood and paused before I actually pulled any of my food out. The area around was fairly open, with the trees fairly thin, and there was a small creek about half a klick further the way I was travelling. I put everything away, grabbed my backpack, hiked the rest of the way to the creek and sat everything down again.

First was to take stock of what I had to work with, and after that find ways to secure everything I needed to live. That amounted to oxygen, water, food, and shelter. Fortunately, the oxygen part was taken care of by the atmosphere of this planet, but the rest I would have to work for after my stocks were depleted.

However, I desired to be clean first. I thought that would help my frame of mind. I got some soap and a few small towels from my backpack and took off my clothes, setting them aside.

Looking down at my present body in the buff, I sighed. This wasn't a welcome sight.

I was never really one to want to know how the other half lived. Being male was better, in my opinion, and that was in a modern liberal democracy. I really doubted fantasy lands were as egalitarian as the tabletop games suggested, especially if this planet was modelled after Ancient fucking China. I suppose it could be worse, though. Viking planet or Arab planet would both probably be worse for my present sex.

Also, although Merildwen was in her mid-twenties, elves aged slow enough that it felt vaguely creepy to be looking at myself from the mental perspective of a man in his mid-thirties, too.

Theoretically, Merildwen was right. I got the better end of the bargain since she could be expected to live up to five hundred more years while my body back in Colorado probably only had a good forty years left. Maybe less, since Alzheimer's ran in my family.

That said, I found it difficult to care too much about hundreds of years when I might not live to next week, depending on where I was and what threats were around.

Shaking my head, I used the soap and water to clean off my hands and chest. The blood had soaked through my robes before I used Prestidigitation to clean them, after all. There was a surprising amount of blood spatter when you ritually sacrificed someone.

After drying myself, I cast Prestidigitation on each item of my clothes to clean them again before putting them back on, along with a final cast to change the colour of my robe from an edgy black to a brown-green that matched the forest pretty well. Prestidigitation couldn't do camouflage; it could only change solid colours, no shapes at all—so I just went with a colour that would blend in as much as possible.

I also slid in the amulet underneath my robe. It was a bit gaudy. It was also, with the possible exception of the ritual dagger, the most expensive thing I had managed to take with me. The ritual dagger was expensive because it incorporated a large soul jar in the form of a large red ruby in the pommel.

That was where the soul of Jim was currently resting, and it could store maybe another twenty average people as well. It kind of depended, as the size of someone's soul varied on a number of factors. A good rule of thumb was that the more powerful someone was in life, the larger their soul, though.

I was pleased to discover inside the amulet was one Shadow, though. Shadows were one of the most deadly monsters for their challenge rating, and as such, the game never let Necromancer players control them at all. It wasn't that they were strong, but Shadows had a strength drain attack that would temporarily drain the strength of an enemy, instead of dealing them physical damage.

However, if someone's strength was drained to zero, they died. Not only that, but four hours later, a new shadow popped up. Merildwen had studied how the process of turning a sentient creature into a shadow worked, and like with many undead, it didn't actually have much to do with the soul, merely the spirit. If a soul was a peach pit, the spirit was the peach. When you died, the spirit often remained behind for one reason or another, and that could form non-sapient undead like Shadows and Wraiths.

Shadows were also ridiculously lethal to someone like me who had low strength to begin with. They could two-shot many low-level Wizards, which I counted as. I'd like to bring the Shadow out because it could provide some protection, but I wasn't a hundred percent confident on my Chain Spirit spell. I'd like to cast it as a ritual, instead, as that increased its effectiveness by at least half again.

It was probably just me being paranoid, but since the Shadow could and would rapidly kill me if the casting failed, I felt it important to do it as a ritual the first time, where I could have a contingency if the casting failed. That would give me twenty-four hours of control over it, and I could recast it as I pleased so long as the Shadow was still under my command.

So long as I had one Shadow, I could fill up my amulet with seven more of them so long as I found seven people I didn't like and fed them to the Shadow. I didn't think a few days ago I would have considered feeding people to an intangible undead as something I would do under any circumstances, but today, I would throw ten Jims to them as a matter of course, so long as if they tried to kill me first or even if they were deeply repellent to me.

The rest of the things I had were somewhat to highly valuable, but only situationally. Ghost dust was quite valuable, but only to necromancers and a few types of clerics. The other spell components were similar. I had about a dozen healing potions, though. Those were always valuable, but I would prefer to keep them to myself—just like I would prefer to keep my two most valuable items, my amulet and ritual dagger. Those I would not sell for any price despite their value.

They both might be irreplaceable, depending on the state of magic in this world. Also, since I had to capture souls in order to settle my debt, losing the dagger might be a real problem.

For reasons specific to Devils and which were enumerated in Meril's contract, I couldn't just offer a soul inside a living mortal body to settle my debts. It had to be completely within my power in something akin to a soul jar, a magic jar, an anima jar, or a similar receptacle. A devil couldn't take the souls out of people's bodies non-willingly, after all. They could buy them like commodities, though.

The only exception was Erinyeses. They could come physically into the material plane since they weren't bound to the Hells the same way other Devil's were. If I were still dealing with Oriella, then I could have theoretically offered her physical bodies, and she could have just thrown them through a portal to the Hells.

Once a mortal dies in the Hells, they stay there and become a lemure, regardless of how they got there or if they consented to it, after all.

But the fact that an Erinyes could kidnap people and throw them bodily into the Hells was a very good reason to never, ever summon her or create a portal for her, as she could do the same thing to you as well. So Meril's contract specified that only disembodied, restrained souls were acceptable.

Creating a soul jar was a fifth or sixth-level necromantic ritual, depending on if it was just the temporary casting like Magic Jar or if it was something more permanent. Meril's mom could do it, and that was how she made the dagger, but it might take me a long time to reach her proficiency. I had to keep the knife, basically, was what I was saying.

So, in physical currency or the equivalent, I only had what amounted to a couple of hundred gold pieces, along with two ingots of maybe silver that each weighed approximately five pounds.

Ten pounds of silver sounded like a lot of money, but at least on Earth, the price of silver was so much lower that two hundred gold coins, even small ones, would be worth more. Who knew what the economy of this world was like, though? Maybe they didn't use precious metals at all, although Ancient China was all about gold and silver, so likely it would be useful if I ever found civilisation and didn't die in this forest.

Of the spell components that had immediate value were likely a number of gems, including one diamond. In total, they probably cost more than I had in gold coins, perhaps the small diamond itself costing more than two hundred gold.

Altogether, with straight physical currency, gems and the two bars of silver, I had what amounted to an equivalent bankroll of what eight or nine thousand dollars could buy me on Earth, assuming that the economy here was similar to the one on Borea. That was not a lot when you considered I might have to start a whole new life with it.

But it would be enough to get started, though.

After I got dressed and ate a sandwich, I spent about ten minutes recasting Comprehend Language as a ritual before the ghost above me sent me, telepathically, <I see a small village up ahead.>

I brightened. Maybe all of this talk about how much money I had was prescient. Maybe I wasn't so bad at Divination after all.

I ordered him to float back down and then asked him, "Are random villagers afraid of ghosts? Can you translate for me?"

He shrugged, "Probably. And, no."

I scowled. However, asking an Imp to translate for you was pretty stupid. So it wasn't surprising he wasn't willing to do it.

I sighed, and he said, "You only have about an hour left for me to be around, by the way."

I stopped and frowned, "What do you mean?!"

"I can only be summoned for two hours per day," he said primly.

I scowled, "Familiars can be out twenty-four-seven! That's why they are useful!"

"Sorry. Some limitations apply, as I said earlier. Everything is quite in line with the contract, though, I assure you!" he said, and I tapped my foot. We were already close enough to the village that I could probably proceed alone. Comprehend Language would allow some form of one-way communication, and it was very good for learning languages, too.

I didn't even know enough about Mandarin from Earth to know if this was the same language, but it sounded similar. I knew Mandarin was a tonal language like Elvish was, so maybe I'd be able to learn it rapidly since I already had some experience speaking this type of language.

I nodded and decisively dismissed him, causing him to vanish with a pop. I was going to assume that the two hours did not need to be contiguous. I could pop him in and out as I needed him, for now, and look at replacing him with a different familiar later. I liked the idea of a ghost familiar, but not one whose primary loyalty was to someone else, especially if that someone else had a hook into me.

I supposed it wasn't that dissimilar to having one of Oriella's Imps as a familiar, just shittier since I could only have him out for two hours, but there was no way I would have agreed to that back then, either. I would have preferred a crow, a fluffy black cat, or something. It would depend on how useful he was in the coming days.

I stopped before I set out, and frowned. My appearance... might be a problem, depending on how things on this planet were set up. I looked like a teenage Aryan elf, which may be an issue. Foreigners weren't often treated well by primitive cultures.

I might be overthinking things. It might be possible that foreign-looking young women were treated great here, but I didn't want to take the risk. I didn't want to waste a level one casting, either, so I sat down and spent about five to ten minutes to cast Disguise Self as a ritual.

I picked a human woman in her late twenties of Chinese descent. It'd be hard not to give them the idea that I was a foreigner when I couldn't speak the language, regardless of what I looked like, though. But a foreigner who looked like me was always treated better than someone who looked different and might be a different species.

I would have picked a male shape as that was what I was more comfortable in by far, but Disguise Self didn't change your voice. Also, I was "petite" now, not quite reaching Meril's mom's height yet, so I would have to pick a pretty short man, too.

To do all that, I'd have to use Major Image, which I was close to being able to cast as a ritual, but it would only last ten to twenty minutes. Not enough time at all. I was far and away from being able to cast permanent Major Images.

After I was suitably disguised as a local, I proceeded off. I had seen the village through the ghost's eyes, so I knew the direction where it was, but it was still quite difficult to see at night, even with Darkvision. Finally, I noticed it in the distance. The architecture was typical of what I'd imagine an Ancient Chinese village to look like.

Although, it wasn't as though I had any experience. I hadn't even been to Chinatown, much less China, in my past life. I did like kung-fu movies, though, so it was congruent with what I expected from films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero.

As I approached, I started to feel a chill in the air, though, and the edge of the village seemed to be coated in a fog, although it wasn't dense, and I could both see through it and over it.

As I got even closer, I paused and frowned. Something wasn't quite looking right. The village looked dilapidated and almost abandoned now that I was close to it. I summoned the ghost again. Wait, did surnames go first or last in China? Was he Mr Chen or Mr Lu? I frowned.

"Chen Lu, please take a look at the village up ahead. Something looks wrong. Look for any activity or anything you think is out of place and return to me," I ordered.

He nodded and flew towards the village as I resumed walking. I'd stop just before the village in case this was a Silent Hill situation. The fog was a little evocative in my mind.

I didn't have to wait too long, as he returned and said, "Miss, there doesn't appear to be anyone living in the village. There are bodies around. Sword and spear wounds on them suggest a violent end. Also, the level of yin qi in the air is incredibly high in this place."

What the fuck was yin? What the fuck was qi? Well, the latter I sort of knew about. It was like, uhh... the internal energy that kung-fu masters had, right? That allowed them to crush rocks with their fists. Merildwen's memories had more information, as there were Monk classes in her world that used Qi like that, but she didn't really know that much about it aside from that it made one's body strong.

And now that I thought about it, I knew about the Yin-Yang symbol, right? I just didn't know what yin was. Still, this was a lot more than I expected him to tell me.

"Can you tell me any more?" I asked, curious.

He shook his head, "No, sorry, Miss." Sighing, I nodded and said, "Stay above. Notify me if you see anything that might be a threat approaching me. Tell me before your time elapses, and you have to leave."

He nodded and floated up into the air a good fifteen metres above me. There was no way I wasn't going to investigate the village. I wanted, needed, someplace to rest and base out of. As long as I didn't see Pyramid Head around the village, then I didn't particularly mind if it was a deserted town. So long as there wasn't a gaggle of malevolent spirits here, it would be fine. Malevolent spirits ran the gamut. I didn't think I could take even one regular ghost, like my familiar, because they had ridiculously dangerous abilities like Possession and could hide in the ethereal plane. Ghost dust existed on both planes, and it would hurt any spirits, so it might allow me to deal with one ghost.

Ghosts were challenge-rating five monsters, though—actually really dangerous. Lesser incorporeal undead, like maybe a spectre or poltergeist, I thought I could handle.

As I stepped through the fog and into the village, I felt a slight sense of vertigo and a deep chill, but it passed immediately. The chill wasn't uncomfortable; in fact, I kind of liked it, and it felt refreshing. Brisk, even.

Ghosts could sense into the ethereal, as well as see magic as though they had the spell Detect Magic cast continuously, so he should be able to tell me if anything that goes bump in the night, other than him, appears near me. I hoped. I'd try to get my initial investigation done before he had to leave. This place felt strong to Necromantic magic, too, which would help me.

Wait... magic, huh? Perhaps that's what he meant by Qi? I frowned and opened myself up a little bit to magic in the local area. This wasn't like casting Detect Magic or anything structured like that. It was just an ability Wizards got after a while to notice the way the flow of the Weave shifted and moved.

Nodding. This place was fey, alright. The hint of necromancy was in the air, like static electricity on a cool, dry winter morning. The magic in the air had a feeling of coldness and etherealness. It felt quite good, actually, and I was pretty sure it was the reason I was feeling colder the closer I got to the village for the past hour.

That I liked the way it felt didn't mean I wasn't possibly in severe danger, though.

I came across one of the first bodies pretty quickly and peered down at it. Darkvision was good for seeing in the dark but not so great for seeing detail. It was kind of like forward-looking infrared; I could only see in shades of grey.

I looked around and grabbed a stick, casting the Light cantrip on it and using it as a torch, frowning as I held the light up to the body.

I wasn't a Crime Scene Investigator, nor was I an expert in the sword enough to say anything about the killer's swordsmanship technique based on the slash. But I was something of an expert on dead bodies these days thanks to Merildwen, and this one didn't look quite right. The blood was already congealed when they were slashed up as if someone hadn't slashed a living person but a dead body.

I sniffed delicately. To my calibrated nose, the body smelled of the undead—a bit like the natural type that rose on its own rather than rose through directed and controlled magic. How interesting.

I quickly moved through the village, finding a little more than three dozen similar bodies. They were all undead, as well. An entire village of the undead, risen naturally and then put to the sword? That didn't compute.

The ghost floated down to my head level and said, "I have to go now, Miss. I'll see you next time!" I nodded at him, still dissatisfied with his two-hour limitation. Still, we had looked through most of the village in the hour he had left, so I felt I had gotten some use out of him, at least. Maybe he could accept Jim's soul on behalf of this Judge fellow? I tried to remember to ask him next time.

I thought my ability to get out of this debt made in my name was a lot less likely in this plane compared to the one where Merildwen was born. There, the Hells kept detailed records and probably had one about the shape and composition of her soul. If those records hadn't been forwarded with the contract, then I might not be able to get out of the debt even if these ghost people were as lawful as Devils.

I decided to post up in the largest building in town. It consisted of a central courtyard surrounded by buildings on all four sides, made of made of wood, ceramic tiles and brick. I dragged two of the largest bodies into the courtyard and sat my things down.

It was a quirk of necromancy, but I wouldn't easily be able to reanimate a zombie that had already been killed. However, somewhat counterintuitively, I could reanimate them as a Skeleton if I got rid of all of their meaty bits. And you could reanimate Skeletons, so long as you repaired their bones if they got too broken. It was one reason why skellies were so much superior to zombies. You honestly didn't even need bones from the same person to animate a skeleton. You could mix and match.

Humming, I pulled out my new wand and cast Flay on both bodies. Ugh, that was grosser than I thought it would be.

On the floor, I then drew out a simple necromantic circle, usable for both Animate Dead as well as restraining and chaining spirits. I would need both, so it made sense for the ritual to be as flexible as possible, as I would be able to reuse it.

I was just on the border of being able to cast level three Necromantic spells, so I was limited to casting them as a ritual, and also, it took me over three times the normal time to do so. That was fine, though. I wasn't in a hurry right now, and every time I cast, I would get better at it.

According to Meril's mom, it was better to remember that slow is smooth and smooth is fast when dealing with animating the dead to unlife. Kind of like what my pa said about shooting when I was a boy. And second, all undead hate the living and generally hate necromancers more than most. This was especially true with spirit-type undead, like the shadow in my amulet. One should always proceed with prudent caution.

Thirty minutes later, my first skeleton came to life. Smiling, I mentally ordered it to guard the entrance to the courtyard. There were no weapons on any of the deceased villagers, but one of them had a large sledge hammer, which I had taken with me, and the skeleton picked it up.

My next skeleton took another thirty minutes, and I started to realise that Necromancy was possibly a lot stronger than it was in the tabletop game. In the game, you couldn't cast Animate Dead as a ritual. You had to use a third-level spell slot to do so.

This functioned as a game balance limit, as otherwise, a necromancer player character could, if they had a lot of time, amass a truly staggering amount of undead under their control. There was no reason a necromancer shouldn't be able to do this, and all antagonist necromancer NPCs always did because they could have hundreds of undead under their control. It was, strictly speaking, a way to limit player characters.

Then you also needed to recast Animate Dead every twenty-four hours per four undead in order to keep them from murdering you. That I still had to do, although I could do more than four undead at a time. I could do as many undead as would fit in the circle, so at least six with this small circle.

Instead of using an improvised weapon, I handed the second skeleton the Drow-made bow and arrows that I had taken from the vault.

Lastly, I carefully and cautiously cast Chain Spirit on the Shadow in my amulet, only at the last moment evicting it from the amulet when it was already trapped in the magic circle. The spell settled onto the intangible undead, and it finally stopped trying to escape, although now that it was somewhat connected to my mind, I could feel its hatred for everything, and me especially, only increase.

Although, I wasn't sure hatred was precisely the correct word. Animus might be better. It was just opposed, completely and utterly, to everything that lived. Hatred implied that it could think, and it really couldn't.

This was why Meril's mom said you should never really feel sympathy for malevolent spirits. They would always, always attempt to kill you if you gave them a chance, but this predictability also meant that dominating them as I had just done was safe, so long as you didn't let the spell duration elapse. They were more a computer program someone made than an entity.

Shadows were even stupider than Skeletons. Probably stupider than zombies, too. I could control any of the undead under me directly as though it were an extra limb. That was how I walked Zombie Jim with the explosive amulets in the cave. However, I could only do this one at a time. Otherwise, they'd need to be directed through words or simple directions.

I directed the Shadow to hide in my own shadow, and it darted into it, disappearing. Without some way to detect the undead, the only clue there was anything amiss was my shadow appeared extra dark. It was a very good tactic to ambush someone, and Meril's mom always had a couple of Shadows living in her shadow just in case someone got the drop on her.

There weren't a lot of wards that I could cast, but I could cast Alarm, so I went around the exterior of the courtyard and one of the buildings casting it, picking the building on the north side of the courtyard on a whim. Before I laid down to rest, I cast three instances of Unseen Servant and ordered them to clean the building, starting with the room I had chosen for my bedroom and working outwards. They wouldn't get finished before they vanished, but they'd make good headway, and I could repeat it tomorrow.

I didn't lay down to sleep right away, though. Now that I was somewhat guarded, I sat, meditated, and duplicated what Merildwen had been doing in the forest back on Earth. I used the Mental Palace technique to begin committing every book I read as a spirit into memory. My memory from then was still as sharp as ever, but it might not remain so, and I may never see any of those books again. Unless I reunited with Meril's parents, they might be my only hope to continue my path as a Wizard.

They didn't have spells from all schools, but there were quite a few of them up to what I would consider level seven, along with an entire book on Clone, which was a level eight. I wouldn't be able to understand either for years, I was sure, but I would seriously regret it if I wasn't able to study them later because I didn't make the effort now.

I spent a good three hours doing this, and I hadn't completed more than ten per cent of it, but I finally couldn't continue any longer. I was both getting tired and started to get a splitting headache from the mental exertion. I laid down on the surprisingly comfortable goose-down bed, and my last thought before I fell asleep was that I hoped nothing attempted to murder me in the middle of the night.

 

[SpiraSpira]

I dreamt of tentacles and of the woods that wend with a thousand young.

I snapped awake, drenched with sweat and hoarse from screaming and flailing my arms. Panting, I sat there in bed for a while before shaking my head. To call those dreams a nightmare was like calling World War One a small misunderstanding.

Still, there was something different about me now. That should have rendered me a complete wreck, but already I was feeling calm again. It didn't help me at all in the midst of the nightmare or if I was foolish enough to attempt to remember my pet goat, but I had a new and remarkable resilience to what might make another person gibbering mad. I didn't know what to think about it, nor did I know the origin of it, but I couldn't say it wasn't better to have than not.

But had it changed my personality? Perhaps, in fact, I thought it had, but so had ingesting the entire memory of a twenty-something elf woman.

Shrugging, I stood up and found my clothes. Cleaning them with magic, I went downstairs and pumped out some water from the well in the middle of the courtyard. I had to pump continuously for a good fifteen minutes before the water ran clean, but after that, I used it to clean off before getting dressed.

The chill was less now that the sun was out, and I didn't mean the temperature. The odd coldness of the magic was lessened during the day, and things were a little less odd around here. The fog was gone, as was the surreal feeling.

I sat down and cast Unseen Servant several times again and ordered them to clean the courtyard while I had a skeleton go out and drag back two more bodies. I didn't actually know the spell Flay, so I would continue to use my wand to demeat my future Skeletons. It was a lot easier and less messy than trying to do so on my own.

Perhaps, over time, I would deduce how Flay worked and recreate it, but for now, I wasn't particularly upset about my two-cast-a-day limit. All other things being equal, more skeletons were better than fewer skeletons, but I really didn't want to butcher and debone two dozen zombies. I didn't even think I had a sharp enough implement not to make a mess of it, honestly.

This time, one of the skeletons had a broken femur, so I carefully sat all the pieces together and used the Mending cantrip several times until it was all better. If that hadn't worked, then I could have used some first-level Necromancy spells that could "heal" the dead. They were mostly only useful for those practising Mortuary Science and needed a way to make someone presentable for an open-casket funeral. They were Mend Bone and Seal Wounds. They weren't very practical, otherwise, because they only worked on the dead and not the undead.

If I wanted a zombie that looked more or less like a living person, I could use them, though. Combined with the cantrip Death Aura to halt the decay process, you could almost get a zombie that didn't stink too much. You'd have to recast Death Aura quite often, though. Death Aura was a popular cantrip that even non-magical people liked learning for its utility.

Not only could it work on food, causing rations to last a lot longer as it killed all the bacteria, but it was strong enough to kill small flying insects like mosquitoes. You could keep it cast as long as you concentrated, and small flying insects would immediately die if they got close to you. Merildwen's memories suggested that it was almost a required cantrip for adventurers in some swampy areas.

From my perspective, if this skeleton's femur had been crushed to splinters, I could have used Mend Bone to fix it. However, since the fractures were just small, I could use the normal Mending cantrip on bones, which was quite nice.

Proper maintenance on your skeletons was important, after all.

It took an hour and a half to animate the two new members of my skellie gang, as well as to refresh the control spells of my two existing skeletons and my shadow. Timing was very important to a necromancer because if I forgot to refresh these spells, all of my minions would immediately try to murder me, so while they lasted a full twenty-four hours, I decided to recast them twice a day—once in the morning and once in the evening. I was already faster than yesterday, so it was good practice in any event.

I spent the rest of the day investigating the village I found myself in. I collected all the bodies and anything of value, including some tools and a lot of clothes. Some of which was what the zombies were wearing, but a fair amount was inside the dozen or so houses in the small village. Most were, of course, poor-quality weave and probably not valuable, but a few outfits in the large building I had co-opted were made of nice silks, but all of them were soiled, ripped and damaged. It was kind of a theme about this village.

Still, it was nothing a few casts of Mending couldn't solve, for the most part.

The next day, I continued exploring the village and started walking with my squad of six skeletons in the nearby forest.

Although Mr. Ghost had some unfortunate limitations, namely his time limit, he had other abilities that made him a lot more useful than a standard familiar. For one, he was a ghost. I didn't know if he followed the Monster Manual, but if he was close, then he was a Challenge Rating five monster, and that came with a lot of abilities. He refused to possess people for me, not that there were any people around to possess in the first place, but he could fly remarkably fast.

I needed to know more about where I was and what was nearby. I had a few weeks of food, but after that, I would need to either start hunting game in the forest or find civilisation. I wasn't really in that much of a hurry to find any civilisation. I didn't speak the language and could only even understand it at one-hour intervals.

"Today, go as high as you can and go straight north for your full duration. Make sure to pay good attention to everything you see. Tomorrow, you'll tell me anything interesting, and then you'll repeat the process going east," I told the ghost my plan, who seemed a little surprised at my idea.

I already had him expand outwards from the village in a spiral pattern, having him tell me everything he saw. I suppose he expected me to continue that, except it would take too long. It was fine enough that I knew what dangers were around the village that I might run into. Now, I needed to know some things to create some longer-term plans.

---

Hunting with a squad of a dozen or so skeletons was a bit difficult. I could move quietly, but they weren't up to it. So we basically could only take game that wasn't afraid of us. Large, poisonous snakes the size of giant anacondas had been the most common animal that I could easily take down and was still tasty enough to eat.

I felt good that for once, rather than the experience of studying magic for twenty-five years, what was more useful was my experience as a tween with a varmint rifle in the hills of West Virginia. Meril didn't know how to butcher a snake and eat it, but I sure did. Bigger snek was still snek.

There were quite a few giant spiders that wandered out of their territory and a few large cats. The latter were the most dangerous as they seemed to ignore the skellies and pounce at me with some stealth, especially from the high branches. Seeing one leaping at your throat in mid-air certainly got the juices flowing. Having it maul your arm before being put down was a bit traumatising, too. I had to use one of my limited supplies of about a dozen healing potions for that wound.

The cats and sneks tasted pretty good, especially with Prestidigitation to flavour the meat in something close to a nice BBQ rub. However, no amount of castings did anything to make the spider legs palatable. There were limits to magic, apparently, and I had found one.

I wasn't out hunting today, though. I was currently doing my best to backtrack to where I originated in this world. I had left a half dozen useful weapons on the ground because they wouldn't fit in my hammerspace, and they were too useful for me right now to ignore. My squad of skellies were armed with the most formidable weapon I had access to: long sticks. One had a hammer, and one had my bow. I was able to continually repair the arrows with Mending, being lucky enough that the shafts hadn't utterly splintered to bits yet, but that was it.

This was one of the classic limitations to low-level Necromancers whenever someone tried to play them, namely equipping all of your skeletons.

I had animated all of the village by now, and I had quickened the time it took me to cast the spell quite a lot. It took me about forty-five minutes each morning to go through the spell five times and the same in the evening when I went to sleep.

That was good progress. My nightmares, however, remained a serious problem. However, I no longer woke up screaming. But... I had a bit of a problem falling asleep, though, knowing what was waiting for me, so my eyes were a bit haggard, and I took small naps during the day. If I slept for only an hour or so, I wouldn't dream at all.

It got to the point where I was quite concerned I would get so sleep-deprived that I might sleep through recasting Animate Dead and Chain Spirit and have the skellies or shadow murder me in my sleep. The latter, especially, wanted to, and it was very close to me at all times. I suppose I could put it in the amulet at night and lock my door in the bedroom, but staying close to spirits was one way to increase my affinity to necromancy, and it was also a last line of defence if someone snuck into the village, bypassed my alarm wards and attacked me in my sleep. As such, I took different precautions.

I used the second-level Illusion spell Magic Mouth to create something akin to an alarm clock. That spell allowed you to record a message, but most importantly, it allowed you to set conditions about when the recording would play. It also lasted forever, until it was dispelled or until the object it was cast on was destroyed.

The conditions could be quite convoluted, to the point where I thought a smarter person might even be able to make an eight-bit computer utilising thousands and thousands of castings, like using Redstone in Minecraft. However, in my case, I just had it tell me loudly to wake up every twelve hours. I cast it on a small wooden disk that I had found, and I would immediately put it away in my hammerspace when I woke up.

I had already discovered that time didn't seem to pass inside there due to meals staying warm, so it amounted to a twelve-hour timer every time I took it out.

The nightmares were getting better, though. I wasn't sure if I could consider them less severe each day or if I was just getting used to it, but each day was a bit easier than the last. Still, it would be really nice to find something to help me with them.

I frowned, coming out of my reverie and immediately leapt and rolled to the side as a pair of giant spiders landed in the location I was previously in. They looked at least twice as big as the usual variety, which caused me to pause. I decided to cast Mirror Image immediately, and three illusory versions of myself stepped out of my body.

At the same time, the skellies turned and started to attack the spiders. One was restrained right away, while the other leapt at me like a pouncing cat, attempting to bowl me over and flew through one of my illusory copies, tumbling into the tall trunk of a tree with a loud thud, shaking some branches enough that a few leaves started to slowly float to the ground.

The force of that pounce was alarming; it likely would have broken some bones.

I held out my hand and cast Ray of Frost, striking it head-on. I had noticed that both my necromantic spells and, surprisingly, my ice evocations were extra effective in this world. I could cast Ray of Frost for half the effort, and it was twice as effective, while the opposite was true with Fire Bolt.

Other evocation cantrips like Shocking Grasp seemed to be slightly less effective than I would expect them to be, but nothing as bad as Fire Bolt. I didn't know why this happened, but I was pleased with it. It made casting all of my necromantic spells quicker and more effective, and that was my main strength.

Ray of Frost was becoming my favourite cantrip since it seemed excessively powerful when I cast it. It lashed out with a hissing noise, striking the spider directly on its carapace, freezing it to the tree!

Granted, not for long. The monster just had to exercise its Peter Parker strength to crunch the ice and get free, but in that time, my one skellie archer had put two arrows into him, and I followed up with Toll the Dead, killing it.

That was my main combo with these giant spiders, Ray of Frost and then Toll the Dead. The latter did a lot more damage, too, and it did even more if the enemy was already hurt a little. Those two would kill a regular giant spider, but this was the first time I had seen these extra-large versions. They appeared to be somewhat intelligent, or at least they had an animal's cunning. They knew to target me, rather than the smaller ones that just threw themselves at my skellies.

That didn't bode well. I knew from Mr. Ghost that we were barely on the perimeter of the spider territory, so I wondered if they got progressively stronger as you approached the centre, like a video game. Maybe with giant sapient Spider Queens at the end, who would suck all your juices? I didn't want to find out.

It took the better part of the morning to find the gear, and it was guarded by two more of those super spiders as well as three of the regular variety. I held back this time and let my skellies take the brunt of the fight. Only when the two giant spiders were more or less committed did I come in and start slinging spells.

My caution caused four of my skeletons to cross from being undead to being just dead, though, but I thought it was worth it. I could bring their bones back with me and re-animate them after we got back to my base. The entire purpose of my skeletons was to protect me, after all. Knowing when to throw them away was a vital part of being a Nec, I thought.

I dumped all of their bones into a large bag I had found in the village and had one of the other skeletons take it while the rest grabbed all the stuff I left behind. There were four swords and two spears. I would have loved a dozen spears, as, really, the skeletons weren't that great in terms of their technique, but it was hard to beat a ton of spears trying to poke you to death.

That said, I would take what I could get. The rest I took back were a half dozen books from the vault that I had already committed to memory. Not very useful, but not useless either. There was a level two transmutation spell that I couldn't quite cast that could totally blank an entire book, so I could practice it and get a book to write in or to sell.

If I was going to be a Necromancer experimenting with dark things beyond mortal ken and best left forgotten, then I had to have journals and lab notes! I just needed to find some pens and ink next!

Cackling quietly, I led my band of jolly skellies back to base.

---

Or, at least, I would have if something hadn't caused me to feel unease right as I saw the village. I paused, frowning, trying to identify what was wrong.

I stood there motionless for a moment before I could figure it out. There was movement in the village. I summoned Mr Ghost, "Please look around the village without being seen, and return to tell me what is going on."

He nodded and vanished, presumably into the ethereal plane or whatever this plane called it, and I waited patiently, half-hidden behind a tree. Casting Comprehend Language using one of my spell slots, I then waited for him to return. Ten minutes later or so, he returned, appearing right in front of me and tilted his head to the side, "It looks like a regular village, Miss. There are about twenty to thirty villagers going about their everyday business."

I frowned... had I gotten lost? No, I didn't think so. I recognised the large courtyard-style building I had been holding up in. I said, "How interesting..."

I didn't want to waste another first-level spell slot, so instead, I brought out everything I needed to cast Detect Magic and looked at the village again. It was absolutely covered in chilly necromantic blues and the tell-tale rainbow of illusory spells.

The colours looked a little different than I was used to. The necromantic blues were different, and the rainbow hues were darker, but I didn't think that this world used the same type of magic that I did, but it was definitely close enough that Detect Magic worked.

I tapped my fingers on the bark of the tree I was concealing myself behind and considered. I had found the corpses of twenty-five villagers when I arrived here. Twenty-five zombie villagers. That they had been undead was indisputable.

Mr. Ghost asked, "I'm pretty sure it's the same village, though. A lot of your things were still in the large courtyard. The place is also draped with strong yin qi and possible illusory formations. A mystery. Are you going to try to communicate with them?" He seemed curious.

"Fuck no," I murmured. I could guess how this would go. They would be welcoming despite the communications issues and invite me in. Perhaps serve me food. And then?

I had noticed that there was a cycle in this place. What Mr. Ghost called "yin qi" I considered pretty comfortable, so I noticed its ebbs and flows. It was strongest at night. And I noticed that the energy seemed to be a little stronger each night than the previous one. And as soon as the sun fell, I suspected these "villagers" would reveal themselves to be some type of zombie and tear me to pieces.

I gave Mr. Ghost my theory and asked him if anything like this happened naturally in this world. Monsters and undead could appear from almost nothing, but seeing an entire village spring up from nothing was weird. He tried to look sympathetic, but it came off fake and said, "I really can't say."

"That is bullshit. Tixit was capable of answering general questions about the prime material, and for things that he didn't know, he could give me some of the collected wisdom of all the devil's above his chain of command, all the way up to the fucking Archdevil in charge of his particular layer of Hell. I had significant credit for these types of questions banked, so you should be able to fucking answer my question. Now, you will answer me, or I will consider Judge Wu in breach of contract, at least for the familiar clause," I hissed out, finally so annoyed that I snapped, simultaneously causing a full handful of ghost dust to appear in my hand, secretly.

Honestly, I didn't know how to bring up legal action against a theoretic ghost in the netherworld, but I would fucking figure it out if this motherfucker didn't get with the program. He had been irritating me for days with his simpering refusal to provide much assistance at all. I was really close to changing him in for a crow. Now that I wasn't hanging as much on death's door as I had been the first day, I was just about done with this asshole.

Mr. Ghost's facial expression immediately shifted from inauthentic sympathy to shock, and he frowned, looking a little uneasy. Finally, he said, with a sigh, "Look, there is no need to get anyone else involved, Miss. Fine. That village is likely a semi-naturally occurring well of yin energy. They're considered anomalies, and it is pretty much exactly what you suspected."

"So nobody raised those villagers from the dead?" I asked, curious.

He shook his head, then paused and then said, "Well, I don't know. Maybe the first time. But it's also as likely that they turned that way due to exposure to the yin energy. That you survived even several hours in there is shocking, much less a week." I gripped my hand tightly, almost drawing blood with my long nails that had somehow survived without breaking yet. This motherfucker hadn't thought that was a good thing for me to know? Was he trying to get me killed?

He continued, "The fact that they reappear periodically has more to do with time being locally unstable. Really, that village is close to a small world that gets reset to a past point in time once the yin qi builds up to a certain level." He then narrowed his eyes at me and asked, "Is that sufficient, Miss?"

I wanted to just dismiss him, but asked, "Clarify. Small world. Do you mean a demi-plane?"

He frowned, considering it, before nodding, "Yes. You should notice as you pass the barrier. It's likely that you'd find it more difficult to leave that place now as its natural illusory formations are active again."

I nodded decisively, "Now that is sufficient. I never want to see you again." And with that, I dismissed him permanently. I saw his face wince as the familiar bond snapped like a rope under excessive tension.

I hissed and shook my head. I had a light headache, too, but it was quickly fading. Perhaps that had been short-sighted, but I honestly had started to get the opinion that he was trying to get me killed while acting within the limits of being a familiar.

The first few days, he had been helpful, but it had just gone downhill from there. I had attempted to interrogate him about the plane, but he had refused. I had let it go, not wanting to alienate the only sapient entity around, despite knowing I should be able to get some information, but I had snapped when he refused information that could be life and death to me.

I had been slowly coming to the conclusion that he thought I was an interesting distraction at first, but he felt I was going to die in the first few days and was getting increasingly annoyed that I clung to life or even thrived. Perhaps I was taking him away from all the ghost women, or his weekly canasta game, or something. I didn't know, but I had enough of it. The fact that he neglected to tell me that he thought I would die if I stayed in the village longer than a few hours was the final straw.

After I took care of these undead squatters in my base, I would find myself a good cat or crow. Maybe an owl, like Harry Potter!

I withdrew a good hundred metres back into the forest in case one of the "villagers" saw me. I didn't know how they worked. They might be aware that they were undead, or they might not. Either case, I didn't want them to see me.

For a moment, I just considered leaving. I sort of knew which direction to go to get to the nearest road that seemed well-travelled, but it was barely visible two hours of Mr. Ghost flying to the northwest. He did fly pretty fast, so I suspected it might take me days to reach there, then god knows how long to find civilisation from there.

No. I was comfortable here. The fact that all of the zombies had already been killed when I arrived tended to make me believe that this location was periodically culled. The fact that my stuff still existed in the courtyard and all twenty-five villagers meant that this wasn't as simple as going back in time—as I had at least twelve of their skeletons here.

I frowned. Could this be farmed like a dungeon, like in Danmachi? Where did the extra mass come from? How much "yin qi" equalled one gram of generated mass? Well, who knew? It might be conjured from any number of planes if it was like Merildwen's world, some of which were infinite. Expecting a fantasy world to follow the conservation of energy was stupid of me in the first place.

Could I use this place to ... farm skeletons? As well as whatever goodies that existed in this village before it was ransacked? Well, it was worth a try.

I dumped out the dead skeletons' bones from the sacks and sat about mending them before re-animating them again, getting back to full strength.

I wish I had brought my whole platoon, but I didn't think it was necessary. Now, they were probably dead or something. I couldn't feel any connection to them, but I wasn't quite in range to do so. But I wasn't optimistic. I felt it likely that they might have been considered part of the villagers' bodies and reintegrated or something, that or all of the villagers swarmed them.

I sat down on the soft soil of the forest and waited for the sun to set, studying some books in my Mental Palace while I waited.

I could tell not so much from the sun disappearing over the horizon, which wasn't visible in the forest, but from the feeling of the magic in the air. As if a switch was thrown, things got weirder. I had been used to the change for at least a week, but I hadn't quite put things together. I just thought the whole world was like this, as I tried not to be far from the village when the sunset.

That could have been a disaster if it did work that way, and my skellies just vanished when the villagers returned. If I had been in the village and I suddenly lost all of my skeletons?! I let out a breath of air, shaking my head and stood up and my squad and I set out.

Before I left, I cast Detect Magic one more time as a ritual but didn't bother recasting Comprehend Language. The time for talkin' was over, I felt. We approached the village from near the large courtyard building. I figured it was the mayor's house or whatever the local hegemon was called.

Surprisingly, we were able to get rather close before a zombie noticed us. I didn't know if he was a guard precisely, but he was armed with a sword and challenged us, or perhaps he was just shuffling towards us. I peered at him, testing his aura and sniffing.

No doubt that he was a zombie. I waved at him and casually shifted my wave into the somatic component for Ice Knife while quickly closing my hand around the drop of water I had dropped into my other palm earlier. I had been making progress with my evocations. I could now cast another first-level one besides Magic Missile. I think it helped a lot that it was ice-based, as I had a real talent for that type of magic, it seemed.

It was still just level one, but it seemed to have the firepower of a level two spell, so it was now my go-to artillery spell. Instantly, a "knife" the size of a claymore sword formed next to my outstretched hand and then shot out like a bullet, accurately striking the undead man in the chest with explosive force. He let out a keening scream before falling over, dead.

Nice. I had a few more of those in me, too. Now, I let my skeletons advance ahead of me, with two behind me to guard my back.

The "man" looked like he had been dead for some time. And now the keening could be heard all over the village. I thought, 'Ah, we aggroed them.'

Two more zombies shambled pretty quickly out of one of the buildings and rushed us. My two skeletons with spears held them off while I alternated between Ray of Frost and Eldritch Blast, and the other skeletons harried them. Toll the Dead didn't work too well on the undead, and neither did Ray of Frost, honestly, so I mostly used that to slow the enemies down while blasting force with the definitive Warlock cantrip.

We got over halfway through the village that way, not having lost more than one skeleton before everything went quiet, and I paused.

Then I heard a roar, and it seemed like the rest of the village, twelve zombies, rushed us, along with a hugely fat zombie that I didn't quite remember. I would have remembered Flaying this one for sure.

My skeletons closed ranks, and I cast three more Ice Knives at the horde, causing some area damage, killing three of the zombies and incapacitating two more with the explosions. The fat zombie roared and bashed a skeleton out of the way, causing it to fly a good ten metres into the air, tumbling end over in a ballistic parabola, its spear hitting the ground with a clank behind me, which made my eyes widen in shock.

What the fuck?! I backed up, casting a quick Ray of Frost at its legs to slow it down. This zom was way stronger than the others, at least from physical strength alone. I ordered my men to swarm him while I backed up.

Fortunately for me, he seemed to aggro on my skeletons, but two of the other zombies did not. I kept backing up and almost tripped over the spear that the flying skeleton had been holding when the fat zom bashed him into the air. I quickly reached down to grab it, using it to attempt to hold off the two zombies bearing down on me as I repeatedly cast Eldritch Blast.

The fat zom was going down, but every time he struck out, a skeleton was eradicated. He punched a skeleton in the head, and its fucking skull exploded into powder. Seeing it, I almost cast Invisibility and ran away in fright!

Instead, I saw an opportunity and thrust wildly with the spear instead of casting a spell, and I caught one of the two zombies harrying me in the eye. I tried putting my weight behind it, and the spear came out the other side of his head.

I winced as the second zombie swiped at me with fingers that were closer to claws, drawing blood from my arm and ripping my robe. Not stopping, he enveloped me with both hands, grabbing and lifting me into the air, looking like he wanted to take a bite out of my face.

I opened my eyes in shock. The Shadow that lived in my shadow darted out and wrapped itself around the zombie, but they had very limited utility against other undead. However, I had a sudden idea and held my free hand over the zombie's head and summoned the thick iron barrel of ghost dust from my hammerspace. The barrel only held maybe three litres of the stuff, but I really thought that this crap might be made of uranium because it was heavy! It only fell thirty centimetres, but it brained the zombie good, causing it to drop me. I shoved my hand towards the undead's face and, at the last moment, summoned my Flay wand, triggering it after I shoved the wand into the zombie's eye.

His head exploded grossly, and the zombie fell over dead, with my wand still sticking out of his orbital socket. I panted and looked around for any others but was relieved that I couldn't find any.

Only two of my skeletons were still operational, and one was missing an arm, but the super-zombie and all the rest were dead at their feet. I quickly counted all of the downed zombies and nodded. Theoretically, that should be all of them, but I needed to get my skeletons swiftly repaired just in case I was wrong.

"Okay, that was a lot more perilous than I thought," I said to myself as I held my injured arm. It wasn't bleeding a lot, and I'd rather not waste one of my precious and possibly irreplaceable healing potions on a small injury, but glancing at the wound, I winced. I triggered Death Aura, kept it running and hoped that it would kill all of whatever zombie germs on the wound before I caught a disease. I didn't have any potions or scrolls of Remove Disease at all, so that would be a real problem.

"Come back, Chad," I mumbled, and Chad the Shadow slinked around me and disappeared into my shadow again. I then walked over and peered at the super-zombie, frowning. I hadn't expected some kind of... boss fight. And how the fuck was that guy so strong? That one zombie took down half of the skeletons by itself.

Sighing, I walked around and moved dead zombies and piles of bones out of the way. I would need an open space for a new Animate Dead ritual circle. I was totally tapped as far as spells were concerned, with only one second-level spell left, which I kept for an emergency casting of Invisibility in case I was about to be killed. I only had cantrips left, which proved a lot less effective on the undead than on spiders and sneks.

An hour later, I had six skeletons repaired, armed to the teeth. Due to the super zom, some skeletons could not be repaired. I couldn't use Mend Bone to fix a skull if the skull was reduced to powder, and that happened three times. The rest might be able to come back with some repairs, but I was going with speed right now, putting a skull from a tiny woman on a giant man's body and more. I just needed a few guards.

I glanced down at the dead super zom and shook my head, holding out my Flay wand. I cast the spell and took two steps back as all of his meat just peeled off of his bones like a mandarin orange.

I carefully fished his bones out, and they did indeed look different. In fact, they felt a lot stronger than regular bones. I was wondering if this guy would make a better skeleton.

When I pulled his ribs out, I found something interesting. It was something like a stone sphere, ice cold to the touch. I didn't even need Detect Magic to realise it was full of an incredibly cold, necromantic energy.

I frowned. Were these in all of the zombies all along? Because this seemed useful, even if I didn't know a use for it right now. Things full of magic were rarely useless, but they could be dangerous, so I decided to isolate it in my hammerspace for now.

When I raised the super-zom's bones into a skeleton, he had a darker look to him and seemed a hair smarter and stronger even—a little better with the sword I gave him, which would be awesome!

The durability of his bones was the best thing, though. They were at least three times as strong as a normal person's bones.

I stared at the new skeleton and said, "Okay, you're Big Chungus." I'd take silence for assent; on that basis, it seemed to love its new name!

I popped my knuckles and grinned, "Time to search for loot!" Already, I knew this place looked a bit different than usual. For one, about half of the zombies had been... well, I wouldn't say armed. But they had weapons, even if they didn't use them. It kind of made me want to approach the village during the day to see if they were, as I suspected, sapient. It was possible to use a spirit as a type of artificial intelligence, but they didn't have much creativity and would generally not pass an in-depth Turing Test. If things were different here, it would be a very interesting thing to study.

I picked night because I didn't think they'd let me approach with a dozen skeletons, and the night around here felt better for me. It might be the same with the zombies. I wouldn't be surprised if they were stronger at night, either, but I thought it was still the correct choice. I could have done a better job at kiting the large mass of zombies during the last battle, though.

"Come, BC," I said, and we set off to thoroughly explore the village.

---

Surprisingly, there was a lot of loot. A lot of the weapons were broken, dull or both, but they were mostly clean breaks that I could use Mending to fix, and I knew at least enough how to sharpen a blade. One of the houses had been a blacksmith, or perhaps just the village handyman, and the house still had some of its tools this time.

I was assuming Big Chungus was the mayor, given that he was both fat and wearing silks and his house, which I had been squatting in, had a number of interesting things as well. Five books, which I was really glad to see. I used Comprehend Language immediately and looked through them. Three of them were erotica, which was a bit disappointing. One was a history, which would be useful. The last was a thick tome that had been written by a scribe and was titled "Five Phases Method."

I had to read the first few pages a few times because it was a little confusing even with my ability to understand any language, but it billed itself as a magic technique to allow a person to grasp Qi, the energy of heaven and earth, allowing them to strengthen their body, mind and even soul.

My first thought was to throw it away. It sounded like how one would Multiclass into a Monk, and the idea of a Wizard/Monk was ridiculous. However, I paused. I kept having to remind myself that this wasn't a game. There were no stat point limits. Just because I worked out to make myself stronger didn't mean I would make myself stupider, like the way a regular character sheet would work.

While it was true that I only had so many hours in the day, and anything I spent on this could also be used to learn spells I couldn't cast, I had already intended to work out a little more. Lift a few weights and run for cardio.

Also, something about what the text said kept having me re-read it. It was written in rather flowery language, but it basically claimed that if you could grow this Qi in your body, it would strengthen your mind to the extent that you wouldn't have unnatural fears or nightmares. It also said that it would make you significantly smarter, or at least you could think and react a lot faster.

That was very tempting. But how did this work? Comprehend Language only lasted an hour at a go; it would take me days and days to read this thing, especially if I had to keep re-reading areas.

---

The next week passed more or less how I expected it would, with me repeatedly casting Comprehend Language to read areas of the Five Phases Method. Reading it over and over, I realised that one didn't grow Qi but "cultivated" it. The nuance was a bit different, but I felt it was important.

Cultivating qi wasn't quite what I thought, either. I was the internal energy that Kung Fu masters were said to have, but this was allegedly on a level higher than that. Things moved a lot more quickly when I decided to just call it Chinese magic instead of something from Kung Fu or something that Monks in Merildwen's life did.

I mean, I could see the Qi with Detect Magic, and I could feel it with my magical senses, so it was magic. That made things a lot easier to understand, even if the explanations in the book were a lot more philosophic and esoteric.

It was said that it would take six months of meditation to get to the point where you could feel and perceive the "energy of heaven and earth." Especially gifted individuals could do it in three, but if you still couldn't do it within nine to twelve months, then you "had no fate as a cultivator."

However, if it was just magic, then I could already feel it. Learning to feel magic was also the hardest part of studying Wizardry at first, but I felt that budding Wizards had a lot better ways to do so. The Five Phase Method suggests that you should meditate on the energy of heaven and earth continually until you succeed.

That sounded pretty fucking hard to me! There was a certain amount of meditation in the early parts of wizardry, too. However, the standard way to get a new Apprentice aware of magic was to place him or her in a magic circle that isolated all outside energy so that it was completely calm and then use a magical device that did nothing but emit magical energy. Really high-quality ones could detect your heartbeat, and it would move and agitate the magical energy in time to your heartbeat.

It only took maybe a week. A month at most, and you didn't have to sit there navel-gazing while you did it. You could study. Eventually, you would feel it; it was basically guaranteed unless you were a total magical null. Once you could feel it, it wasn't hard to move to manipulate it. From that point, wizardry became much more of an intellectual discipline. Lots of reading books, trying spells and testing them out. Experimentation, like scientists.

If it was any harder than this, then magic would be a lot harder to do, and there would be no Arcane Tricksters or Spellblades.

However, wizards didn't purposefully accumulate, drawing magical energy in their bodies systematically; in fact, it was generally considered insane. It would have been like me trying to bulk up in my past life by sitting next to a hot nuclear fuel rod. Or swallowing gasoline because you want to run fast.

However, the Five Phase Method claimed to be a method by which such a thing was both possible and beneficial. It was also a prerequisite to casting any "spells." None of which were included.

Could I practice it, with already being a wizard? It was worth a try, I supposed.

---

One thing became quite clear early on, and it was something that caused me a lot of relief. I wouldn't be "surprised" when this village reset. As soon as I eliminated all of the zombies, I noticed a significant drop in the ambient magical energy level, and now that I was purposefully and systematically trying to absorb it in accordance with a weird Chinese magic manual, I realised that the baseline energy recovered a little bit every day.

It wasn't a steady amount every day, but on average, I thought it would take at least another week before it got to the same level I remembered just before the village reset.

That wouldn't surprise me, but I was still a little concerned other things would. The zombies had been dead when I arrived at the village the first time. Killed by swords and spears. And the village was looted. That means someone killed them. It occurred to me that this place might be periodically culled. I was pretty sure that the "yin" energy would continue to expand even after the village reset. Perhaps it would never stop. If so, wouldn't that be bad for the surrounding area? Beyond just using it to farm slightly useful things, it might be culled periodically to keep it from expanding.

Now that I wasn't worried about being surprised one way, I was worried about being surprised another. As such, I got myself a nice raven familiar that I had continually flying around. It had a little intelligence, enough to fly a way out and return and tell me if it saw people. That was as much as I could do now.

I also found the skeletons that I left behind in the village. They didn't vanish or reincorporate with the villagers, as I worried, but they had just looked like they dropped dead. It was as if something seriously interfered with the magic that kept them animated, so I was a bit concerned that if I was in the village when that happened, I would die a dog's death.

What was a Nec if all of her skeletons just dropped dead? Dead, that's what! Err, his. I still wasn't quite ready to totally adopt the identity of a woman. I was just being stubborn, though. I didn't expect to wake up someday and be back in my body in America.

Also, to be honest, ever since I was ripped out of my body and spent what seemed like a hundred years in the woods that wend before I found myself in "the frozen lands" with Meril's memories, I had an altered perspective on the subject.

So, it wasn't like I really cared that much anymore. I was just running on residual pride now.

Anyway, I had a pretty good way to detect when the village was about to reset. I even remembered a kind of vibration in the magic when I left the village that morning, so I was fairly confident I could decamp the village with my skeletons before I lost them.

Being snuck up by real people was something I was less confident about.

---

It turned out that I was short by a day. When I woke up, I felt the magic in the air vibrating as if it was trying to shake free of some shackles; I gathered up all of my skeletons and everything I couldn't bear to lose and decamped into the forest.

Big Chungus could one punch a large cat, so he formed the core of my personal protective detail, and I was looking forward to securing a Chungus the Second this morning as well. As far as other skeletons, well, I had already kind of hit the limit of what was comfortable for me to control.

I had reached the point where I could cast Animate Dead using a spell slot, so I supposed I could consider that I had levelled up to the equivalent of a level five Wizard, but that was the only spell I could thus cast. I was practising with Vampiric Touch, but the lack of living things around to practice was a bit of a roadblock. Since I had to cast it as a ritual while practising, I couldn't use it in combat, either.

Still, I could drain plants and also the odd large cat or other animal that I could have my skeletons knock out without instantly killing it, so I was pretty confident I would be able to work that into my spell list shortly.

"Cultivating" wasn't as intellectually stimulating as practising spells, at least at this level. I had captured my first whisp of Qi, though, but I was still months away from reaching what it called the first level of Qi Gathering. Until then, I wasn't even considered to be really cultivating, according to the book. I didn't really know what the fuck I was doing if it wasn't the thing I was trying to do, though, but I generally ignored the lofty and esoteric language in the manual—it was about a third of it.

With two dozen skeletons and Big Chungus, I felt very confident about quickly clearing this village.

In the aftermath of the battle, I was shocked to hear a mental *ting* that I immediately recognised as the alert built-in to a Sending spell. Words flowed into my head, and it was Meril's mom.

"Meril! Are you okay? It took us a day to get a Sending that would work. We're no longer in Borea. I think the teleportation circle was a bit off!"

You could only send about forty words using either Message or it's Big Brother Sending, so I wasn't expecting a large message. Honestly, I wasn't expecting anything. It had been over three weeks. I had concluded that they had passed away or that communication was a lot more difficult than I originally thought. However, their message implied it had only been a day from their perspective.

I didn't have much time to reply, so I just sent what came to my head, "Mom, it has been over three weeks here. Not same plane. Not same prime material. Oriella sold contract. My plane running faster temporally? I'll work on Evocations. Try to master Sending."

Surprisingly, about an hour later I got another message from her, "Fuck! Pay off that debt as soon as possible. Oriella known quantity. New one not. We have no idea how to travel to different primes. We don't know how to come to you, or go back to Borea."

I replied, "Don't worry. I had been intending to go off on my own; this is just a bit ahead of schedule. At least we can stay in touch. Focus on your safety. I'll get my debt paid."

I sat down in one of the mayor's comfortable chairs and frowned, not sure how to feel. I had done a number of experiments to examine my soul in the past days, and I was pretty sure that Meril's parents wouldn't be able to tell unless they ripped my soul out of my body. You see, I was still surrounded by Merildwen's spirit.

Normally, when you pull out a soul, you pull it out along with the spirit. But, of course, Great Old Ones had to be special. It was like it had cored me and Meril like an apple. It was no wonder it was so excruciatingly painful, and also why it was so easy to "think" as Merildwen when I wanted to. As such, there was a part of me that was trying not to cry.

I shook my head and pushed that feeling away.

---

It had been something like three months or the way I was calculating time, seven Chungi. I continued as I had been, but every week or so I would share a quick message with Meril's parents, and I was surprised at how much I looked forward to each message. Enough that I was systematically practising my evocations, even the difficult fire ones.

I often didn't even loot much anymore when the village reset, except for a few things. The books I took as I could blank them and use them for notebooks. A couple of the swords were a cut above the rest, so I took them.

There was also an unusual flower in the mayor's courtyard. It was a completely white lotus that gave off a chilly energy. It was a bit different than the necromantic energy around everywhere that I was used to, and from my study of the Five Phases Manual, I decided to call this a "natural yin" type of energy, with the energy of undeath being a subset of yin.

I wasn't sure if that was right, I was making shit up as I went along, but I still attempted to replant the lotus every reset. I killed it the first two times despite significant herbology training that Meril's mother gave her, but now I had five of them that I tended to as potted plants.

Big Chungus' ice stone, I also always took. And that was it, basically.

And I found these ice stones to be very useful. At first, I thought it could be an incredible necromantic catalyst, but I hadn't figured out how to use it that way. But I had figured out how to use it to create longer-lasting spells, specifically illusions.

I could cast Major Image as a ritual, and if I used an ice stone in a key position in the ritual, then the illusion could last... well, I didn't think forever. But it had been weeks, and I hadn't noticed the ice stone being substantially depleted yet.

I used this to hide what was already a secret entrance to the mayor's basement. In life, it was something like a huge sex dungeon, but I used it to store supplies, most of the skeletons I didn't have actively animated and as a secret retreat in case people came. The Major Image illusion caused the already concealed entrance to be virtually impossible to find unless you could see through illusions.

To be honest, I wasn't sure why I remained here except to accumulate more Chungi. I suppose I didn't have anywhere else to be, and I was still making progress in both my studies and my "cultivation." I was officially a cultivator now, being in the first level of the Qi Gathering stage. What that meant was that I was stronger, faster, and my mind thought a bit faster than I did before.

That was expected, but it also seemed to help in my wizardry, so I thought it was a win-win. I had been worried that the accumulation and circulation of magical energy in my body would stunt my spells or perhaps make me explode, but if anything, it made each casting a tiny bit easier, a tiny bit smoother.

Sitting amongst a slaughtered village, I had the feeling that this wasn't a peaceful world, so I wasn't really that much in a hurry to be thrust into it.

However, I just learned from my raven familiar, which I had named Crow, that people were coming. I had quickly ushered most of my Chungi into the secret room, except one. I had a suspicion that these people were here to pacify the town, so I was going to give them a town full of monsters and expected loot to pacify.

They might be skeletons and not zombies, but who really cared? If I didn't do this, then they'd definitely send someone to investigate, eventually. Probably somebody strong who would find me hidden in the basement.

Even though I suspected they were doing this to keep this place safe, I could just bet what I was doing was considered the equivalent of illegal poaching.

Governments never changed. Resources, even if they weren't worth that much, could be attained here, so they'd hassle me if I didn't have a permit and pay taxes or whatever the local equivalent was.

Sighing, I realised that while I was content to hide myself from the world for now, the world was knocking at my door.

 

[SpiraSpira]

I didn't have a long time before they arrived in the village, but from what my loyal raven's eyes could tell, they had paused at the edge of town and were consulting amongst themselves. I had two dozen well-armed skellies patrolling the town, and I was pretty sure that they had spotted them and were curious and cautious about this.

If this place was regularly culled, then they would know what to expect, and the fights didn't change here at all, at least not in the months I had been here. Seeing new enemies of a different type might cause them some hesitation, I was hoping. Twenty or so armed skeletons were a significantly higher threat than the zombie villagers, but only when acting together and with me to direct them.

Zombies were slower, but they were significantly tougher. If the skellies were on autopilot in drips and drabs, it should be an equivalent threat or even much lower.

The safest thing to do would be to hide in the basement until they were gone. Still, I didn't want to kill these people, so I wanted to observe their fight so I could cause the skellies to make a mistake in their favour if it looked like they were about to be murdered.

As such, I quickly cast Magic Aura on myself. This was an illusion spell that you normally cast on objects. It could either hide an object's magical nature or create a fake one on a mundane object. In this case, I was hiding my aura.

I had noticed that now that I had magic accumulating and circulating inside of me due to cultivation, small amounts tended to leak out a bit as if I were a magical creature like a fairy or unicorn. I would be noticeable, even if I was invisible if these people had some way to detect that—if they were "cultivators", that seemed highly possible.

The manual I had didn't really include any way to sense Qi except really close to your body, but I assumed that it was possible. It would be incredibly weird if it wasn't.

Another casting of Comprehend Language and Detect Magic followed by, finally, Invisibility when I saw that they were entering the village. Crow followed them and gave me a pretty good image. There were three men, two of them looked in their thirties and had the muscley thews of a Fighter class if I had any guess. They looked rugged and serious and weren't wearing kung-fu robes as I expected but outdoorsman-type clothing, including the conical hats I would expect from rice farmers.

The last was more of a young man, perhaps fifteen years of age. He was dressed more like what I expected and didn't look as rode hard and put away wet as the two older men. His eyes were pitch black, as was his hair, and he had a sword at his waist.

All of them had swords, actually, but the two older men had swords that were much larger and curved, almost like scimitar or falchion.

Seeing them with my eyes instead of my familiars, I noticed that the magic or Qi looked different in each of their bodies. The young man's magic looked similar to mine these days when I looked at myself with Detect Magic while cultivating. I took him for a cultivator, too, and the weight of his energy seemed a little bit stronger than mine, which would have made him pretty weak as I understood things.

The two older men didn't have a continually circulating pattern of energy. Instead, the energy seemed to wax and wane in time with their breathing, dissipating throughout their physical bodies. I didn't know what this was, but I could tell that they had a fair amount of energy accumulated in their muscles, bones and tendons.

I frowned. Would their bones be really strong, I wondered? I shook my head. Bad! I didn't need to know how strong these men's bones were because they were leaving with all of their bones!

At first, I thought the two men were guards for the young man, but they seemed to be working together. In fact, they were treating the younger man kind of like a junior. They had talked about their options and came to the conclusion that they would watch the skeleton's patrols and try to assault one alone to gauge its strength. They'd run if it was freakishly strong, as they already could tell they were faster than the undead.

Not a bad plan. I snuck around to watch in person, being careful not to make any noise.

---

Xiao Li had volunteered to test the first of these bone puppets, as he didn't want the two Martial Artists he was with to think he was weak. He had enough of that. He had been a cultivation prodigy of the Xiao family until inexplicably his cultivation dissipated slowly, like sand falling through his fingers.

When he dropped from the seventh back down to the first level of the Qi Gathering stage, he was no longer considered a genius. He was, instead, treash. And trash he had been for years.

He had all but been kicked out of the family and had been roaming the country, trying to study fleshy Martial Arts. He was shocked one day to discover an old lady's voice in his head one morning.

It turned out that the ring that his mother gave him as a keepsake contained the remnant soul of an incredibly powerful Nascent Soul powerhouse, and she had been, unconsciously, draining all of his Qi in order to reawaken. He had been incensed! Did this Old Grandma not know how much pain and suffering she caused?

In the end, he couldn't stay angry long, especially when she seemed genuinely upset about it and started helping him with his cultivation, sword skills, and alchemy. She had been a renowned alchemist when she was alive. If he was being honest, he was starved for the somewhat affectionate attention of an older person ever since his parents died, and he had already, in his heart, slid his new Master into almost a motherly role.

Instead of going back to the Xiao family right away, she told him that due to her draining so much of his Qi, he awakened a type of highly Yang physique that had been lying dormant in his body. This was both good and bad. It would let him get twice the results with only half the effort when he cultivated his Divine Solarfire Sutra that Grandma Mei gave him, but at the same time he might explode if he continued cultivating past the second level of Qi Gathering that he was at.

That was a real problem, but Grandma Mei had a number of solutions. It might be a real problem, but it wasn't a huge one, and she knew at least twelve types of pills that could solve it. That was the reason he had taken the job to clear this anomaly along with two Martial Artists he met at the Mercenary Guild. It was said that a Cool Yin Pseudo-Lotus bloomed in this place. A couple of petals pulled from the lotus would be enough for Grandma Mei to walk him through creating the pill, too!

You had to get there within a day or two of when the anomaly reset, so he wasn't that confident about it. If he was lucky, it would save a lot of time, but if not, then he'd just shift down the list while making some money at the same time.

This time, though, it seemed their luck was poor. Not only had they missed the reset, but there was a new type of monster here. Just skeletons with weapons. He supposed it wasn't that different than before, but it didn't pay to make assumptions.

Grandma Mei said inside his head, "Be especially careful. That raven is not a raven."

He glanced at an especially fat black bird sitting on the roof. He had noticed it sort of following them since they got within a few li of the village. He quirked his head and asked, "What is it, Master?"

"I think it is a tormented soul from one of the first few layers of Hell, shifted through some method into the illusion of a bird," she said confidently, "These skeletons don't seem very strong, but that isn't normal. You are definitely not ready to fight a ghost cultivator, living or dead. Leave at the first hint of something out of the ordinary."

Xiao Li paused, frowning. He wouldn't like to look forward to paying the penalty for abandoning this job, but he was smart enough not to place his head firmly in a lion's mouth. He asked, "Should I leave now?"

"I don't know. Surprisingly, I am not sensing any malice or killing intent directed towards you," Grandma said.

He nodded and pulled out his sword, saying aloud, "Well, let's see how one skeleton is, then."

He then leapt at a skeleton carrying a pretty standard saber as it turned the corner. The monster saw him and pulled its weapon into a low ready position and then, without preamble, chopped out.

He took the strike partially on his own weapon, intentionally testing the strength of the creature with a parry, frowning. It was both strong and weak. Its physical strength and speed were about the level of a Martial Warrior, the type of fighter that studied martial arts and "inner force" instead of cultivating immortality as he did.

Like his two new friends, but they were both already at the Martial Master stage. He had been proceeding down this path after becoming the trash of his family, but now that he could cultivate Qi again, he had stopped. All cultivators should study Martial Arts, but studying this type of inner force was a dead end if you had real cultivation methods—it would be like eating grass when you had perfectly good rice at home.

Something he also noticed was this skeleton's attainments in the Dao of the Saber were awful. He had seen a three-year-old conduct more elegant chops inside the kitchen versus a radish.

He twisted, beat the sabre back and riposted into a clean cut that took the skeleton's head clean off the next time it swung at him. Surprisingly, it still moved. Frowning, he chopped each limb off and only then did it stop moving.

Grandma Mei commented, "Sort of weak, but I think blunt force would work better here. I don't think it's actually dead even now. Try crushing its skull with your foot, or focus more qi into your sword next time. That might disrupt whatever is animating it."

As his two friends approached, chortling, he nodded and focused Qi into the sole of his foot and stomped down, crushing the skull into splinters. Old Gu slapped him across the back and said, "Seems at the same level as what we were expecting."

Xiao Li nodded, "Yes, let's just be careful. These can use weapons. The fat one at the level of a low-level demonic beast might be more dangerous, especially if it has some exotic weapon."

He had read the summary of what to expect in this place, and there was supposed to be a fat zombie at the same approximate level of strength he was at, but the truth was it was much less of a threat due to how stupid it was. While these skeletons weren't very bright, they did know that the pointy end of the sabre was supposed to go into the bad guy, and that was more than the zombies were supposed to know.

Old Gu nodded, "Don't worry. We'll take him together. Let's get going. We shouldn't stay here any longer than necessary." That was true. While his cultivation method and Grandma Mei both could protect him from the chilly yin aspected qi in this place, his two friends relied more on limiting their exposure to stay safe. They shouldn't tarry.

After that, they cleared the village just as they planned. The raven still watched them, but neither he nor Grandma Mei could detect any hugely dangerous cultivator waiting in the wings to refine their souls into a spirit tool. That was good.

Thankfully, the fat one... wait, how could a skeleton be fat? The stronger skeleton was easily identified. Its bones were as dark as cheap pig iron and almost as strong. They fought it in the courtyard of the village magistrate's house, and with the three of them together, it was no match. Realistically, he thought he could have taken it by himself.

Old Gu frowned down at the last finished skeleton, "Did he not have a core, then?" That would be a shame. The highly yin-charged monster core was one of the main reasons people took this job, along with salvaging the mostly useless and damaged weapons and tools for scrap iron.

Chen bisected the skeleton's skull with his sabre and grinned, "I thought so! I thought I heard something rattling around in there when it was moving." He reached down to pick it up. It was then that they all noticed that in the corner of the courtyard was a bright white lotus inside a pot, next to a few books—as if someone had just left them out for the three of them to find.

Chen asked, "Is that what I think it is?"

Old Gu said, "If you think it's the Cool Yin Lotus in a damn pot, then yes."

Xiao Li took a few steps forward, inspecting the items. It was incredibly difficult to salvage the entire plant of the Cool Yin Pseudo-Lotus without killing it. Although he had some hope with Grandma Mei to walk him through that he might be able to do it, he was just hoping to pull a few petals off before it died—that was what most people did and it was all the pill recipe required. The value of a live plant was at least ten, maybe twenty times as much.

He reached down to pick it up and heard Grandma Mei's voice yelling, "Kid! Watch out! Behind you!"

He had been so surprised that he didn't notice Old Gu approach him until the man he thought was a friend shoved his sabre into his heart and out the other side.

The last thing he remembered was the man saying, "Sorry, kid. We can't let you have any petals like we agreed. A live plant that we can move and won't die the instant we touch it? This is just too good to pass up. It's nothing personal."

---

I watched the two older men betray and murder the younger man with a complicated expression on my face. After thinking about it, I thought I perhaps had caused this falling out.

I had put all of the good loot out that one "run" of the village should provide, including dropping one of the cold stones in the skull of one of the Chungi, and setting one of the potted plants next to the cultivation manual in the courtyard.

I did know that the plant was difficult to harvest without killing it, but perhaps I had misjudged exactly how difficult? I succeeded on the third try, but I was a learned master of the mystic arts, not lumberjack swordsmen like those two old men.

I had taken kind of a liking to the young man when I watched him fight all of the skeletons. Not enough to try to stop his friends when they tried to murder him, though, and not enough for me to try to get revenge, either. These guys had to make it back; stronger people would come if it was a team wipe. That's how it worked, I felt, using my intuitive video game and novel logic.

Still, it wasn't like I couldn't do anything. The question was this worth my only diamond?

In the table-top game the third-level Necromancy spell Revivify was restricted to only clerics, paladins and for some unknown reason bards. The same was true with Raise Dead, Resurrection and True Resurrection. Wizards and arcane magic just couldn't raise people from the dead.

It was almost the same in Merildwen's reality. Wizards could get Revivify, but none of the other spells. A suitably trained Necromancer could bring someone back from the dead only in one situation—their soul still had to be available.

A soul left the body pretty quickly. Ten minutes was average, with the max being around an hour. A necromancer could either cast Revivify in that limit or restrain the soul from leaving through a number of ways, after which they could cast Revivify at their leisure while using the soul and the soul's original body, so long as it hadn't decomposed or wasn't too damaged.

It still cost a small diamond, though, and the spell consumed it. After I was sure the two scimitar guys were gone, I rushed out to the young man's body and fished out a couple of copper coins, placing them on his eyelids and quickly casting Gentle Repose. That would keep him from decomposing or rising from the dead in the heightened yin energy.

Following that, I pulled out my ritual dagger and ushered the young man's soul into the soul jar attached to the pommel, along with Jim. Soul jars were generally designed to keep souls in stasis so they wouldn't be aware of anything, much less each other.

They had looted him pretty thoroughly, but unusually, they had left a plain-looking ring that the boy wore on a necklace around his neck. Frowning, I reached out to grab it, and as soon as I touched it, I heard something in my mind.

"Poor Xiao Li. We shouldn't have come here... wait, who are you?"

I froze. My Detect Magic spell had already expired, so I hadn't thought to examine the item for magic, but as soon as I touched it, I realised what sort of object it was without even having to Identify it. In fact, it was quite similar to the object I had just stored the young man's soul in.

It was some type of soul jar, except that it was designed so that the occupant had some manner of freedom and could extend at least some energy outside of it. In that way, it started sounding closer to a phylactery to me, which scared me to death. Instead of answering, I immediately shifted the ring into my hammerspace. Time didn't pass there, and as far as I knew, nothing could affect me from there.

That lady's voice didn't sound like a lich. She seemed genuinely upset about this young man's passing. Some sort of ghost? Would the possibility of me being possessed never end?

I mean... I could just leave it in there forever. That would be the smart thing.

---

Over the next two days, I hadn't decided whether or not I was going to waste a limited resource like a diamond on the dead young man, although I carefully used Seal Wounds to heal all of the physical damage to his corpse, including the trauma to its heart before it lost too much blood.

The spell Revivify itself healed the corpse to the point where it wouldn't immediately die again, but not anywhere near what I would call hale and hearty.

As far as the old woman's voice in the ring, I had been studying ritual magic for the next two days, and I thought I had figured out a way to speak with her without giving it access to my body or soul. I was combining and modifying elements of Speak With the Dead and Magic Mouth to create a ritual that should allow two-way communication with the ring without touching it.

It was actually an amazing piece of spellcraft and would have been enough to see me considered a journeyman Wizard in my own right. Modifying and combining spellforms together was the sign of a truly educated person, not merely a dabbler. It was also the cause of most arcane explosions and untimely deaths of young wizards.

Beyond the potential for explosions, this was still not exactly smart because I didn't know if the soul inside could rush out and possess me. So, I took a few other precautions there as well, using multiple casts of Protection from Evil and Good targetted both undead and living souls to give myself protection against possession.

If it could just come out and squash me to death with magical power, I was a bit screwed, but I didn't think it would be taking my body. I was really a bit sensitive about that, I realised, looking down at my too-feminine chest.

My biggest issue, again, was that I still barely spoke the language. Sighing, I held my hand out in front of the centre of the ritual circle and caused the ring to plop down and clank on the ground before activating the magic, which had already been primed and buzzing, just awaiting my unleashing it.

"Can you hear me?" I asked in broken, maybe Chinese.

I heard audibly, "Yes, who are you, and why are you talking like a child?"

"It's complicated. I don't know the language too well, but I'm able to use a special technique to understand you despite that," I explained, or at least tried to. It probably came out like, "Me speak bad, but hear you in helmet."

"Uhh... just a moment. I'm very limited at what I can do in here, but I should have a form of soul divination that I can use to understand you in a similar way," the voice said, and I clenched my fist. She could cast magic from inside there. I should put her back in the hammerspace!

I decided to try speaking in English, then, "Can you understand me now?"

"Yes," she said, before asking, "Why do you still have little Li's body? I promise you, if you defile it by raising it as some manner of corpse puppet, I will find a way to make you pay for it."

I blinked. Did that mean she couldn't make me pay right now? Was she limited on what magic she could use in there after all? She seemed attached to the young man, at least.

I shook my head, although I would have been lying if I wasn't a little curious about what a cultivator zombie might be like. I said, "No. I restrained his soul from passing on and was considering bringing him back to life... uhh... regular life. But it would cost me something of value that I can't easily replace right now."

There was a pause, before the old lady's voice asked, seemingly hopeful, "Is that possible? He won't come back as some sort of yin-monster like a jiangshi?"

I had been waiting to see what her reaction to that offer was. If it turned out that Revivify was the equivalent of some sort of earth-shaking, amazing magic that would shatter the heavens or something, then I was going to immediately put that ring back in my hammerspace and not ever take it out again, unless I happened to be able to throw it into the sun someday.

Sorry, Grandma-sounding lady! I'd like to do the right thing, but my survival was, ultimately, more important. She had sounded a little surprised but not shocked by the offer. That was sufficient to allow me to proceed.

I nodded, wondering how she could see the young man's corpse from inside the ring, "He would be perfectly normal, as far as I know. He'd be weak for a few weeks to a month at the most." I also didn't even know what a jiangshi was.

"We would both be deeply in your debt, me especially. What would you need to compensate you for saving him?" she asked, with some emotion in her voice.

What I really needed was a language tutor and a temporary local guide. But I would settle for as much as they would give me. I grinned, "Well, let's talk about that..."

 

[SpiraSpira]

The Netherworld Kingdom was supposed to be dimly lit, but it was straight darkness that he found himself in. By reflex, he tried to shift Qi into his eyes to improve his vision and was surprised that it worked. That wasn't supposed to happen.

Not only did ghosts not cultivate in the same way that living people did, nor did they actually have bodies, but he was under the impression that people's shades would not be permitted to touch the Qi of the netherworld, which felt surprisingly normal. Otherwise, the courts of the dead would have sinners running all about trying to avoid being sentenced.

He almost shouted in shock when his improving vision caught a glimpse of an ashen young woman looming over him, inspecting him as if looking for a flaw. It was hard to tell in the dark, but she looked about his age, perhaps a year or two older.

Her skin was as pale as jade, paler even, and he caught the sight of a pair of exaggeratedly pointed ears poking out of her unusual golden hair. "G-ghost!" he screamed, at once realising how stupid that was. Wasn't he a ghost now, too? It was just that it was common knowledge that both spirits and demon beasts that could take a human shape often had subtle mistakes or tells as if they couldn't quite master the human form in its entirety.

The obvious was finding a tail on a transformed fox demon, but pointed ears and unusual beauty were featured in a series of stories he had read about a particular ravenous female spirit who drained men's yang energy. He flushed a little, remembering the popular stories in question.

An annoyed look came across the girl's face. At the same time, he heard a familiar voice in his head, "Li'er, are you okay?" Grandma? He was starting to come to the conclusion that he maybe didn't die after all and felt his ears heat up in embarrassment. But where was he, and why did this girl sit here, alone in the dark?

He felt around his body to make sure everything was still attached, and it seemed to be—except that he felt weak as a baby. In fact, he felt kind of terrible, but on the plus side, he didn't have a hole in his chest.

Those memories caused him to make a fist in anger on the bed he found himself in. He was angry at himself for not listening to Grandma Mei's warnings about those two when they had met. She hadn't liked the look of them, but he pushed ahead anyway.

Still, Xiao Li prided himself on being the type of man not to keep a grudge. His mother told him that it would stymie his cultivation and made him promise not to keep a grudge close to his heart.

He felt that was wise, and being a filial son, he, instead, wrote all of his grudges in a small notebook that he carried about his person at all times. Except they had even stolen his grudge notebook! The fact that he could rewrite it from memory was irrelevant.

He groaned and asked mentally while being very wary of the spirit girl in front of him, "Grandma Mei, what happened? Who is this spirit-girl? Is she a ghost cultivator?"

"You died, you stupid brat! That's what happened!" Grandma Mei scolded him, and he winced, "And she's not a spirit, but she probably is a ghost cultivator—still, she saved your life. But be wary of her. I think she is a foreigner, not of this world."

He raised his eyebrows in shock. It was common knowledge that the Myriad Heavens consisted of innumerable minor realms and ten thousand major ones, like the Winding Rivers Realm that they were living in right now.

Well, that was what Grandma said, anyway. He hadn't actually known that before she told him, but she claimed that it was common knowledge, so it probably was. But to see someone from a different world was as rare as a hen's teeth.

Travelling to different realms wasn't something even powerhouses like Grandma Mei could have done safely. She had repeatedly told him that, in the grand scheme of things, she was a nobody, but he always found it difficult to believe that. The Great Ancestor of the Xiao family, who stayed continuously in seclusion, was in the Nascent Soul realm as well, so it always seemed like she was just being humble.

At the same time, the girl, who he reminded himself definitely wasn't a ravenous yin-spirit, said something in a melodious windchime-like language he couldn't understand. He didn't understand a word, but he was a bit disappointed that she stopped. Everything she said sounded pretty nice somehow, and some of the phonemes she was using he wasn't sure he ever heard.

Just the idea of speaking a different language was a bit unusual. It wasn't that there were no other languages. Demon beasts had their own language once they got intelligent enough, and there were probably uncountable small tribes of mortals that spoke unintelligible dialects. But speaking a different language for a cultivator, which she clearly was if she had brought him back from the dead, was something he'd never heard of before.

"Pardon me, I can't understand you. But you sound very pretty, so feel free to continue speaking," he said cheekily but paused in dismay when he could detect total comprehension on her face. She looked interested at first but then narrowed her eyes, snorted, said a few more words and walked away, throwing her hair over her shoulder as she turned and left in the same way that his female cousins did when he pissed them off.

"Little Li, perhaps I should have mentioned that she can understand you. She just can't speak our language—yet," Grandma Mei told him, with an incredibly amused tone to her mental voice.

He winced, but at least he got to watch her leave. Before she left, she slapped the wall, which caused a bright light to pop into existence, allowing him to see a lot better. There was something that caught his eye as she left, and it wasn't just her butt. He asked Grandma Mei, "Her shadow looks a little bit odd."

"I'm glad that your brain has finally started working. That's one of the reasons I've asked you to be wary of her. She keeps a low-level malevolent spirit of shadow and hunger living in her shadow like a pet," Grandma Mei said, sending the feeling of shaking her head in exasperation, "It wants nothing more than to kill her, but despite all that, it is as chained as well as I have ever seen." Her voice turned amused again, "By the way, she asked you if you were feeling well. She took your response as a yes."

He let out a hiss, "So she is a ghost cultivator! A demonic cultivator, Grandma Mei! Are we going to be okay?"

"I haven't mentioned this before, but Little Li, whether it is the Righteous or the Demonic path... really, the most important thing is surviving," Grandma Mei said with emotion, "I don't sense a lot of sin on her, either. It's not necessary for someone who cultivates ghosts to be evil; it just turns out that way fairly often. But it would almost be a shame for this girl to be anything else. She's lived in this place for months, according to what she's told me. She almost certainly has some ghostly-yin type special constitution."

He felt his world and its assumptions rock, and he raised an eyebrow at the last guess. Demonic cultivation wasn't that bad? Lived here for months? Already, he felt kind of vaguely ill, which had nothing to do with his overall weakness.

He was circulating his Pure Yang aspected Qi, which helped to drive the feeling away. But the data he was given about this place was clear. A regular human, if they walked in, would be dead in an hour. Even Martial Masters like Old Gu, who had betrayed him, could only stay two or three hours at most.

It was why they tended to only take people who had experience with this place on the missions—so they could race through the place, killing all the zombies and taking what there was to take as quickly as possible.

He didn't know how long he could stay here, but it wasn't months.

"I think she is weaker than you, but she has incredible attainments in the Soul Dao for someone at her level. Bringing you back to life in the way she did would have taken a soul cultivator in the Golden Core realm, I think, to capture a soul before it ends up in the Netherworld Kingdom. Speaking of which, there were conditions for her to help you. I am going to need to ask you to swear an oath to the Heavenly Dao..." Grandma Mei then explained the oath that she had already sworn, and he frowned.

It basically amounted to an oath not to reveal the young woman's secrets or origins and also to help her learn the language and culture. Swearing an oath to the Heavenly Dao was serious. If you broke it... well, you might not die, necessarily, but it did happen sometimes, too. It kind of depended on both how severely you broke the oath and chance.

It would take a seriously strong person to completely protect someone from the backlash of knowingly breaking such an oath, but even if that occurred, it tended to cause your speed of cultivation to falter for a long time. It could even breed a type of inner demon in your mind. Nobody would swear such an oath with the intention of breaking it, he thought.

Well, he considered that and realised that some people might. Especially if they had no hope of further advancement and were offered a lot of compensation to do so, but it would still be a dangerous proposition.

Still, he owed the girl, literally, his life, so he wasn't upset that she had set conditions with Grandma Mei. The ties of karma were already there, after all, and it was best to balance the scales as soon as possible. In his opinion, this assistance wasn't near paying off his debt to her, either.

---

I was glad he was revived successfully. Merildwen had only used that spell once before, and only with her mom helping her out and using someone who had attacked them as practice subjects. The spell cost too much in material components to be practised often, but Merildwen considered it important. If the worst happened and both her parents died, but she survived, she wanted to be confident enough to have some chance of reviving one or both of them.

Fortunately, everything worked perfectly. He remained unconscious after his vital signs restarted for a few minutes, and I deposited the ring with his grandma in it around his neck. She said she needed to touch him to protect him from the yin qi in the area while he slept.

When he had woken up, I had decided to speak Elvish with the boy, as to me, it was the language that sounded the most like Chinese, even if it didn't sound at all like it. Perhaps if Chinese and Finnish had a baby, that would be what it sounded like.

His cheeky comments and being obvious about checking me out made me want to roll my eyes. It was unwanted, but I had been a boy his age before, so I realised that thinking with his little head was almost unstoppable for this stage of his life.

An hour or so later, he arrived from the bedroom that I had revivified him in. He coughed to get my attention and said, "Miss? Grandma Mei wants to speak with you. By the way, if you don't mind me asking, what is your name?"

I stood up from being seated on the floor and dusted my robes off before I considered how to answer that question. Finally, I decided to just continue stealing the identity of the woman whose body I was in, "Merildwen."

He scrunched up his face and said, "Mei Wen?"

I considered correcting him, as he lost a few phonemes there in the middle, but finally decided it sounded alright, so I nodded, acceding to the change in the moniker.

"She's got the same family name as you, Grandma!" he said, enthused, before taking the necklace that wasn't anything more than a loop of leather off his neck and handing it to me.

I had a good feeling about these two, but I didn't trust them completely, so I cast Protection from Good and Evil again. This caused the boy to squint at me and ask, "What was that? The Qi around you moved oddly, and now there is a bit of sheen to it... wait, I can't understand you." He chuckled and shook his head, "Never mind."

I closed my hand around the ring in the necklace and asked, "What do you need?"

"Well, I agreed to help you with language, culture and cultivation. I can mentally send you information, and I propose to send you information on language right now. It won't make you fluent, but you'll have all of the vocabulary and it will vastly shorten the time it takes for you to learn the language," the old woman said and continued, "I'll do the same for a better cultivation method, as well."

I frowned, "What's wrong with this Five Phase Method that I have been using?"

"It's crap. It's one of the most common methods around, and you don't have high compatibility with a five-element method anyway. You'll spend five times the amount of time for half the results. You have a ridiculously high compatibility for yin energy. It's the reason you can live in this place. You'll want a method that takes advantage of that. I have two options, but..." she seemed hesitant at the end.

Well, she sounded really sure and was the expert. I didn't know how fast or slow this was supposed to take. I was curious at her hesitance and asked, "But what?"

"The best one requires that you have maintained your primal yin energy all the way to the Foundation Establishment realm. But it is quite good and the manual I have goes all the way to the Celestial Immortal realm, which is incredibly rare. The other one is about as good, but the manual stops at the Nascent Soul stage," she tried to explain, but she seemed to be using words that Comprehend Language couldn't quite translate.

I asked, flummoxed, "What is primal yin energy? What is the Baby Soul realm?"

"Nascent. Nascent. And primal yin energy is what every female is born with... I'm asking if you're still a virgin," she said, finally becoming blunt about what she wanted to know.

I frowned. I've never had sex with Merildwen's body, obviously, but by any measure, I probably wouldn't qualify. I wasn't a virgin in my past life, nor was Merildwen, so I couldn't say either my soul or body was virginal.

Honestly, having the memories of her having a few sexual encounters, with men, were some of the things I had been trying to compartmentalise or forget, especially considering how much she had enjoyed herself.

Talk about body dysmorphia. I didn't really feel at home living in her body yet, but I suspected that even when I had, my sexual preferences wouldn't have changed, so the memories were a bit unwelcome.

It kind of reminded me of a few books by William Gibson, set in a cyberpunk future where you could experience the life and sex life of people vicariously through sensorium-broadcasting cybernetics. At least, I tried compartmentalising that way, although it was a bit difficult.

Finally, I said, "No, I'm not a virgin." That was the safest answer, and I didn't want to explode because I would like to say otherwise.

"Then it will be the Heavenly Dance of Moonlight Scripture, it's quite good but I only found half the book by fluke. If and when you get to Nascent Soul realm, you'll have to either find the rest, switch to another cultivation method, or deduce your own path to Immortality from there. You'll definitely have to dissipate your current entire cultivation base to start this method, though," she said, not seeming to judge my answer to her at all. From what I could tell from the one history I read, it was very much a culture where a young woman was expected to stay a maiden until marriage, but that had just been a mundane history.

It was possible that if you were a female cultivator, you were outside of most of the expectations of regular society. It was kind of like that in Merildwen's world, which was a great reason for young women to study magic.

But lose all my progress? I hissed, "Why? It took a long time to get this much!" I hated wasting time.

"Absolutely. It'd be like building a house on quicksand. If you didn't, you'd suffer Qi deviation and die before the year is out. Don't worry, you'll definitely save time overall. You're just barely started," she coaxed.

I sighed, "But if I manage to get to this Baby Soul stage, will I need to start over from scratch again? That seems bad."

"Nascent. And no. You'll be limited to methods which are similar to this, though. So only yin cultivation methods... well, perhaps single-element ones, if they are highly yin-aspected, like water to ice. And maybe a Yin-Yang method, or Taiji," she paused to consider and said something that made little sense, "After all, from zero comes one, from the infinite Wuji comes the supreme Taiji, and then from one comes two from the supreme Taiji comes the Duality of Yin and Yang, and then from two comes four and so on."

"Absolutely none of that made any sense," I admitted. I had only been really reading the practical directions in the Five Phase Manual. How it directed me to move energy around, basically, and I had been ignoring the philosophy.

If I proceeded down this "cultivation" path long enough, would I be required to actually comprehend what all of this philosophy and metaphysics meant? It would be hard. I was an engineer, and Merildwen was a wizard. Neither of them was really down to accept unverifiable axioms.

Still, I had gotten some information from her earlier about what some cultivators at the Baby Soul stage could do, and it was on the level of turning a mountain to gravel with a punch. That was stronger than some actual divinities in Merildwen's last world. And she said that she was a nobody. On the lower levels where I was at, I figured that Wizardry was a lot more flexible, though.

The possibility of combining the both was intriguing and even if it wasn't, this was even a crueller world than Borea. From what I've learned, if I didn't get stronger, my life would consist entirely of some strong person holding me upside down by the ankles and shaking my gold coins out of my pockets repeatedly, forever.

I also didn't want someone to take a fancy to my exotic looks and coerce me into a marriage, and that was before anyone found out how long elvenoids could live. I could see myself becoming an experimental subject or, possibly a broodmare, or both if I wasn't careful. That would be a sad end.

My ears were a bit hard to hide, though, unless I used magic, and when I did I could only do it for an hour at a time with Disguise Self. Although, who knew? I had gotten Major Image to run for several weeks straight by incorporating one of Big Chungus' ice stones, so I knew illusions longer than standard was possible.

While my ears weren't as long as anime elves or a Blood Elf from World of Warcraft, they were quite a bit longer than the traditional Tolkien-style elf, and they poked out of my hair even when I kept my hair styled to hide them.

They could also move a little bit, kind of like a cat to track sound. Although Merildwen thought that fact was deeply embarrassing for some reason and hated it when someone noticed she moved them. Personally, I thought it was cool.

She sighed, "You'll have options. So, are you willing?"

My conclusion was that I didn't really have a choice.

I nodded, "Fine." You'd think I'd be more accustomed to knowledge being dumped into my head, but really, it never gets any easier. I winced and, sat down on a chair and threw the ring back to the young man who was standing there during our entire mental conversation. I checked my mental dictionary for the word for "thank you" and said it after a couple of attempts, "Xiè, xie..."

He grinned and gave me two thumbs up.

---

A couple of days later, the young man, who was named Xiao Li, was feeling well enough to get out of bed and offered to teach me martial arts, specifically swordsmanship. I had told him he was free to take any of the swords the skeletons had to replace the one that those two guys stole from him, and he suggested he assist me in learning, partially in compensation for the "good sword" I had given him.

He had selected one of the swords I got teleported with, a thin, elvish longsword. It hadn't been made of mithril or anything, just normal high-grade elvish steel. He seemed slightly amused at the larger guard that this sword had compared to the swords I had taken and repaired in the city.

"Why do I need to learn swordsmanship or even any martial arts?" I asked curiously. Both he and his grandma were talking as though it was a given that I should. Although I didn't think this was a game, and I was sure that Multiclass mechanics didn't exist, at the same time, I didn't really want to shift my focus away from spells too much, "Certainly, there are cultivators who focus mainly on spells, right?"

While I wasn't anywhere near fluent in the language, part of Merildwen's wizardry training was speaking clearly any possible phoneme and remembering arbitrary ones. Saying the wrong verbal component when you cast a spell usually just caused the spell to fail, but people were known to explode occasionally if they were casting especially energetic spells. So the words came a bit easily, while the grammar was another story as I often reversed subject and verb order, butchered inflexion or forgot to say certain particles.

But I was at the stage where I could be understood, so that was Great Success.

I also had already dissipated all of the Qi in my body, which, while simple, was very uncomfortable. The action felt deeply unnatural, as my body and spiritual circulation system wanted desperately to hold onto it. If I had to describe it, it was like both relaxing and tensing your muscles at the same time and then farting. Honestly, that wasn't a very good way to describe it, now that I thought about it.

Still, the old lady was right. The progress I was making with the new cultivation method, the Heavenly Dance of Moonlight Scripture, was at least two orders of magnitude faster than before, even if I had to mentally re-read the first part of the book over and over and over. It was a lot more difficult to understand, and having it shoved into my brain didn't help that at all.

Xiao Li frowned, "Yes, there are. But... even they still at least practice martial arts, especially in the early stage. As for why..." He frowned and then brightened and nodded.

Then he seemingly vanished from across the room and appeared in front of me, pointing his sword directly at my head, before saying, "That's why, basically. You need to defend yourself from purely physical attacks while you attack with spells. There are defensive spells, but according to Grandma Mei, they aren't really that good until at least you establish your Violet Palace and enter the Foundation Establishment. Practising a Martial Art will improve your reaction speed and allow you to see and avoid attacks better at your same level." He lowered the sword and asked, hypothetically, "Also, if you can dodge or parry an attack, why bother wasting your precious Qi to defend against it? A lot of fights between cultivators devolve into who runs out of energy first, after all."

Ah. So, defensive techniques didn't scale very well at the entry-level of cultivation. Not only that, they used a lot of energy. But, I didn't particularly like being reminded that even weakened from being raised from the dead, this kid was significantly stronger to me, to the point where I barely saw him move.

Mrs Mei had found a way to speak audibly while Xiao Li carried her and agreed, "It's really a good idea, even if you have no fate as a sword cultivator like Li'er."

I nodded, having been convinced, and when he asked me to pick up a sword for practice, I selected one of the thin, slightly curved ones that somewhat reminded me of a slightly shorter Japanese katana. Xiao Li looked at me, his face unamused, "Wen, that's a sabre." The actual word he used was the same base word used for kitchen cutlery, actually, but I had since heard him use it in context and realised what he was saying.

"Well, I mean, it's still a sword, isn't it?" I asked, confused. I might as well have told him I kicked his puppy! He wasn't even angry; he was just confused and disappointed.

Mrs Mei interrupted with an interesting question, "Mei Wen, what do you think underpins the way the world works?"

I sighed. The older woman was a lot more down with the Socratic method when trying to teach me something; it reminded me of the way Merildwen's parents did. "According to the Heavenly Dance of Moonlight Scripture chapters I have read, the Heavenly Dao."

"Yes, but what is a Dao?" she pressed.

That was a better question, "I don't really know? A path. I know that there are many of them, though. Like the Dao of Water, the Dao of Fire, and so on."

"There are innumerable Daos, some of which are larger or more complete than others. But they all end at the same place. For example, it is rare for someone to immediately try to gain insight into the Dao of Water. Perhaps they approach it from the Dao of Raindrops first. This is a bit of an advanced topic since you don't really need to bother about this until you've created your Jindan or your Golden Core, but I think it is important that you need to know that the underpinnings of the entire world, how it functions, are concepts."

Okay, I hadn't really thought of it that way, but that made some sense. The concept of Water was somewhat different from the physics of water and liquids that I was thinking of from Earth or even the element of Water from Merildwen's world. Still, I didn't quite understand what she was saying.

She continued, "One Dao, obviously, is the Sword Dao. It is based, conceptually, on the fundamentals of what makes up a sword. Nobody is really sure if this concept existed as the world was created because nobody had invented a sword yet or if it is more malleable and was created the first time some distant ancestor created one. I tend to favour the latter possibility, but from your perspective, it doesn't matter. You're not trying to be a sword cultivator, but trying to practice swordsmanship with a sabre will produce less results because you're going against the collective, conceptual idea of what a sword is."

Xiao Li took that as a hint to hold out his own sword, "A sword. At its most basic, it has two sharp edges, a straight flat, a point, a hilt, and a guard. What's in your hand is a sabre, single-edged and curved. I'm also not very good at sabre techniques, so you'll have to pick up a sword."

I rolled back on the balls of my feet as if I'd been struck and tried to absorb what the old woman had said. She seemed to think that what I called and thought of something would drastically alter the way I was able to learn it. If I picked up a sword and called it a spear but practised it dilligently, I would get little or no good results from my practice.

I wanted to say this was deeply unscientific, but I wasn't exactly in a scientific world anymore. If anything, this world seemed even more magical than Merildwen's. Finally, I nodded and, sat the sabre down and picked up a simple sword that I had salvaged from one of the villagers. It was blunt, but Xiao Li said that wouldn't matter for now.

He nodded, letting out a sigh of relief, and said, "Before I show you some basic sword forms, I think it's important... especially with your misunderstanding before, for you to understand both what a sword is physically but also its purpose." He blinked and then got a smile on his face as if he thought of something clever, "The purpose of a sword is deeply linked to the concept of a sword."

I glanced down at the sword in my hand, hoping this wasn't a trick question. It was a weapon, so... This little brat seemed to enjoy playing the teacher, but I would go along with it for now. I replied questioningly, "A sword's purpose is to kill people?" I mean, it was a weapon

Xiao Li jumped up and down in excitement, waving his own sword, and grinned, "Yes! Yes! Excellent, Mei Wen! That's exactly right! Don't ever try to make it more complicated than that. My father told me this. You wouldn't believe how many people will say some nonsense about how a sword is supposed to protect people or something along those lines."

He shook his head, "A sword is a tool made for killing. That's it. Don't overcomplicate it." He then held out his own sword, "Always keep that in mind, as well as each part of the sword. How do you kill with the point?" He did a thrust into the air.

"How do you kill with the sharp edges?" which he followed with by a couple of cuts into the air, "How do you kill with the flat? How do you kill with the guard? How do you kill with the hilt?"

Wow, this boy was edgy as fuck! I had the complicated desire to both laugh and cry, as few people would get my puns or popular culture references anymore.

Still, if the world was driven by concepts instead of physics, then he had a good point. The ultimate purpose of a weapon was to kill. I had known that from a lifetime of handling them, so it wasn't a surprise to me. But it could have been something I would have not forgotten exactly but disregarded after I had accepted the concept. It sounded like keeping both the idea of what a particular weapon was as well as the purpose of the weapon well in mind while practising would produce better results here.

"I'll let the two of you practice. Xiao Li is really an incredible talent with the sword for his age," Mrs Mei said before returning to silence.

---

A few days later, I woke up and felt the tell-tale vibration in the air, and my eyes widened. I sat up and went to Xiao Li's room, knocking on the door, "Get up! We have to leave the village; it's going to reset in about eight hours."

His door opened, and he grinned, "Awesome! Hey, hey, Mei Wen..."

I tilted my head to the side and asked, "Yes?"

"Can I have the lotus that appears? I still kind of need it so I won't explode," he said, hesitantly.

I snorted, "You should have asked me earlier. I have five more flowers in pots downstairs. But sure. You have to fight Big Chungus yourself for it, though."

"It wouldn't really matter. I left all of my alchemy equipment back in a rented Immortal cave back in the city," he said, shrugging his shoulders, "So me and Grandma Mei can't refine the pill I need until we leave anyway." Then he paused and said, "Oooh... you have five of them? We'll help you sell them when we go back to the city."

Wait... I frowned, "Leave?" I was about to say, "but this is my home," but even I realised how weird that sounded. This was obviously not my home. Still, I was kind of attached to this place.

He stared at me as if I was a very special person, "Uhhh... you didn't expect that we'd stay here indefinitely, right? I'd die if I tried that. I'm not sure how I can explain how uncomfortable this place is for me. Besides... you can't learn the culture of this continent while hiding away from everything."

I mean... yeah, I suppose. I sighed. I kind of knew this was coming, anyway. The time it took to reset this place was growing a few days longer every reset. This time, it had been base plus five days. If I stayed here forever, would I eventually just "use up" all of the energy here? I didn't know.

"Also, I need to go and kill Old Gu and Chen," he said brightly, causing me to raise an eyebrow.

I asked, slightly amused, "Are you so invested in revenge?"

He paused and said, clenching his fist and making the mean face of a man who had obviously held a grudge, "Ahahaha... of course not! I don't hold grudges!"

"Mmmhmm..." I said.

He shrugged, "Besides, even if I hadn't, it would be necessary. I can't just come back to life... such a thing isn't impossible, but it is quite unusual. If we leave Old Gu and Chen alive to keep gabbing away, then more people might notice my remarkable recovery. Most people would assume that they're just incompetent, but who knows? Best to nip it in the bud."

I paused, "Is it really that miraculous?"

He tilted his head to the side, "Yes and no. My soul hadn't reached the Netherworld Kingdom yet, so it wasn't like reviving me was impossible. But soul cultivators are rare, and by the time they become more common... well... at that point, dying and even leaving your soul behind becomes the exception rather than the rule. So it's less miraculous and more unusual."

Grandma Mei had mentioned that. By the time Nascent Soul and possibly even Golden Soul cultivators fought, they could punch you and eradicate your soul. With a punch! Even One Punch Man couldn't do that, I didn't think.

So it was possible, but it took the equivalent of a lot higher cultivation realm than I had. And by the time it was possible, it wasn't often needed. So, his coming back to life might imply he had the backing of someone far above our level, which would produce interest. Since I intended to travel with him for the time being, that would be bad.

I nodded. That made sense, then, to silence those two guys. Well, I wouldn't be involved. I lived long enough as a man to understand this was something Xiao Li intended to do himself.

Xiao Li finished with a self-deprecating chuckle, "Uhh... besides, I have to go back to the city and get all of my belongings I left there. I really need to refine this pill soon."

Ah, yes. I supposed it was inevitable then. I sighed and looked wistfully at the dilapidated ruin of necromantic energy that had become my home for, perhaps, the last time.

 

[SpiraSpira]

Xiao Li didn't find fighting the regular zombies very interesting, so I had my squad of Chungi annihilate them. I was joking when I told him I was going to make him fight the zombie Big Chungus, but he was all fired up.

"Come here, Great Chun Gu Su!" he yelled and leapt at the fat zombie with his sword drawn.

I blinked and then cautioned, "Be careful; he's really strong. He can crush a regular skeleton's skull into powder." I never allowed BC to get anywhere near me when I cleared the village. But even as I said, I realised he was ultimately not a threat. He was just too slow. He was slow enough that I could have run away from him before I even started cultivating, at least for short distances.

About half of the time, Big Chungus stayed inside one of the buildings, though, so he would have been a significant threat if you walked in on him unawares. But out here in the open? Xiao Li had him decapitated in just a few moves, most of which were him testing out the zombie's strength.

"Mindless strength is useless, Wen. That's why this anomaly is allowed to be cleared by people from the pugilistic world and not actual cultivators, despite it being really quite dangerous. The danger is mainly in the environment. Yang-style anomalies are similar," Xiao Li said, sheathing his sword in one motion.

I perked up at that and made a note to ask him, but he shuddered, looking down at the corpse, "Say... how did you get the bones out? Surely not the hard way. I want the monster core, but almost not enough to go searching for it."

I chuckled and caused my wand to appear in my hand, pointed it at the corpse and said, "Avada Cadavera!" Okay, I was just channelling Harry Potter. Activating the wand didn't require any verbal components. Plus, I liked puns.

Xiao Li took a step back as the skin and meat of the corpse, thankfully including the decapitated head, almost liquefied and peeled itself. I carefully pulled each of his bones out of the mess, found the ice stone and tossed it at Xiao Li, who caught it with a grin. As for the bones? Instead of immediately animating them, I collected them all and stored them in my hammerspace. My space wasn't large enough to store all of my Chungi, actually. Even the one I just stored used a lot of space.

However, I somewhat doubted I would be able to take my squad into a civilised city, so I'd probably have to leave them outside.

There were things similar to Handy Haversacks and Bags of Holding in this world, but we were both too poor to own them. Small versions like the haversack could be occasionally found on especially wealthy late-stage Qi Gathering cultivators, but the nicer models with a lot more space were strictly the domain of at least Foundation Establishment people or perhaps incredibly rich scions. Xiao Li didn't count even when he was considered a genius of his clan, though.

Having one set of bones in my storage would allow me to animate a skeleton on short notice. Still, I thought I would have to focus more on incorporeal undead if I was going to be living in and around cities for the foreseeable future. I turned and asked him, "There are other anomalies besides just this yin-type? What's so dangerous about yang-type anomalies?"

"Yes, there are kinds for all five elements, as well as yin and yang, and possibly others as well," he remarked and stuffed the stone into his pocket before walking over to the Lotus that the fat man had been guarding. When he wasn't in a building, he often was guarding this flower. He hummed and said, "Yin and yang types can be the most dangerous at low levels. They usually have a danger outside their realm—mostly from the environment rather than monsters. This is an example of a dangerous yin-type environment, even though it ain't really that tough to kill the monsters."

He paused before reaching down and then asked, "Grandma Mei wants you to harvest it if you can. She thinks your yin-constitution is one of the reasons you were able to transplant them."

I hummed and nodded, pulling a pot out of my storage, "Sure." As I knelt down, I got started carefully. I found using tools killed it, so I had to use my hands to dig it out.

He finally answered my original question, "The environmental dangers in many Yang anomalies are often illnesses—contagious illnesses. Yang can be considered the energy of life, and rampant life can be as dangerous as its opposite. A yang anomaly of this level would be tended to by actual cultivators, not only because the treasures are generally better, but the risks of a contagion breaking out is a lot more dangerous than here. Here, if a zombie outbreak happened, it could be put down easily," he said as I worked, and then he nodded as I got the plant into the pot, "The Xiao family has one of our regional headquarters based around a Yang-type anomaly that we use for many types of spirit herbs, at least that's what my dad said."

I held out the plant and offered, "Want me to put it in my storage?"

"Yes, please. It would likely be at least sickly if we transported it in a bag," Grandma Mei piped up.

I nodded, causing it to disappear. I sighed and said, "Well, let me get anything more of value and then we can head out." With a lot of bags, all my Chungi could carry a lot. And they were quite fast, perhaps not as fast as this Xiao Li could run, but they were faster than me. They wouldn't slow us down.

Xiao's grandma was quite interested in the Major Illusion I had cast on the basement and asked me about it. I hummed, not really hiding anything, "Besides Necromancy, Illusion is the area of magic spells that I have the highest attainment."

"Do those include illusions where you bewitch the mind of a target?" Mrs Mei asked curiously.

I paused before nodding, "Yes, although those are much more likely to be included in a different school called Enchantment. My dad is an expert in Enchantment. But some Illusions only affect the mind. Most are kind of like this, though..."

I cast a Minor Illusion of a Big Chungus right in front of Xiao Li, who, rather than jumping in fright as I expected, immediately tried beheading it. He frowned and then put his hand through it before saying, "This is just a visual illusion."

"Precisely. The one over the secret door was an all-sense illusion, though. You could even have touched it," I said, nodding.

Mrs Mei had already asked me if I could teach Xiao Li anything, and I replied that it would be a bit difficult. He had the potential to learn, I felt, but Wizardry built on a lot of theoretical knowledge. It would be like trying to teach University-level physics and chemistry to someone who had never completed middle school. Maybe when I knew more about Qi, I could create similar cultivator spells based on Wizardry.

Besides, I liked being the only one to know this type of magic. But... I might be willing to consider teaching him an abbreviated course of what he would need to know to cast a few cantrips and one or two spells in the future. I was actually interested to see how both fire and lightning cantrips would work with him, as both were considered very yang-type energies here.

Cantrips were a big advantage for me, although I couldn't actually cast them continuously, forever, like in the game. Even before I started using Qi, they could cause magical exhaustion. That was one of the ways Merildwen's world was different from the tabletop. For example, I could cast the Light cantrip continuously, creating new lights each time, but eventually, it would cause me to exhaust myself.

Now, they used a little bit of true Qi, although from what I could tell, it was way less than equivalent low-level "Daoist spells." That didn't surprise me because it seemed like Wizards were a bit more efficient in utilising energy.

She accepted as much, for now, but asked, "If you don't mind, when we take rests, you should cast the bewitching spells on Little Li."

I blinked, "Huh?"

"Those types of spells are quite insidious, and it's difficult to really build up a resistance without being repeatedly exposed," she said, which caused Xiao Li to frown before nodding, seeing the logic.

I hummed and considered which spells would be appropriate. I had the Friends and Mind Sliver cantrips, Charm Person...

Charm Person would work, and it would give him a chance to fight the enchantment. I couldn't just keep casting Mind Sliver at him, though, or his brains would leak out of his ears after the tenth time. It dealt a small amount of psychic damage with each cast.

I chuckled when I realised two perfect ones: Sleep and Hideous Laughter. The latter would be the most amusing to me, I thought, so I would pick that.

I'd save most of my spell slots in case we found danger on our trip, but one first-level spell was worth it to see this. I grinned and asked, "I have one in mind. How about now?"

Xiao Li looked a little uneasy now, but Mrs Mei sounded enthusiastic.

I grinned and cast the spell.

While Xiao Li was incapacitated, it occurred to me that my low-level damage-dealing spells weren't that much to brag about, especially once we got a little higher levels of cultivation, but the utility and control spells had the capability to hit far above their weight class. If I was duelling a swordsman, and he ran at me—if I cast Sleep or Hideous Laughter like this, he'd be basically defenceless. The latter generally had a better chance to take effect, I thought.

The way Xiao Li squirmed on the ground, laughing uproariously while futilely trying to stop, made me laugh quite a bit as well. Laughter was contagious, after all.

---

As we travelled, Xiao Li told me a bit about where we were headed. The area we were in was kind of the equivalent to a rural nowheresville. There were some places in this realm where practically everybody cultivated, at least a little. This was on the other end of the spectrum, to the point where it would likely be more at home in a lower realm.

Cultivators, what few exist, were kind of hidden here, away from the secular world. Individual wandering "loose cultivators"—us, in other words—tried to mostly blend in. Those in the so-called "pugilistic world", like the two men Xiao Li intended to kill, lived with a kind of a foot in both worlds. They were strictly Martial Artists, although the strongest of them could sometimes rival cultivators towards the end of the Qi Gathering realm.

Despite being low-key, there would generally always be a number of businesses that catered to cultivators in cities the size we were headed to. Sometimes, they were owned by organised groups of cultivators, but often, they were owned and operated by single cultivators in the Qi Gathering realm who more or less gave up and were just living an excellent life with a family.

What Xiao Li had called an "immortal cave" was really just a rented villa with security features as well as a Qi gathering formation suitable to create an area for someone of his level to cultivate in. The term came from mountains with heightened levels of Qi, where a lot of cultivators actually lived in and rented out caves.

There was a lot less capex on a cave, I thought, so that sounded like a good scam if you controlled the spiritual mountain!

As we jogged through the forest, I asked, "So what's the plan after you get your revenge, refine your pill, and what have you?"

Xiao Li ran beside me, continually clapping his hands every couple of seconds. He said, "Well, I figure that we could kind of just tour the world for a period of time while cultivating. There's really no better way to immerse yourself in the culture so you don't seem weird." He hummed while clapping, "In twelve months, I intend to go to the Silver Serenity Sword School, which is about two countries to the east, as they are going to be accepting new disciples."

He rubbed the back of his neck, smiling good-naturedly, "I intend to try out. You're welcome to come with me if you like; either way, I propose we slowly head in that direction." He had already told me that he didn't intend to return to his family until he was at least in the middle of the Foundation Establishment realm so that he could wipe away the label of "trash" definitively.

He finally asked desperately, "Can I stop clapping now, Wen?"

I asked slyly, giving him a side eye, "I don't know... can you?" We had started a habit where before we set off in the morning, I spent ten minutes casting Suggestion on him as a ritual so I wouldn't waste the second-level spell slot in case of emergencies. Suggestion lasted up to eight hours, and you could give, while not quite a command, but a recommendation that the target had to follow so long as it wasn't entirely unreasonable. I suggested that he clap continuously today.

If the spell worked, they'd have to do the activity continuously for as long as concentration was maintained or eight hours. This was actually amazing practice for me, too, for keeping a spellform that required concentration going continuously while also running and dealing with other things which might tend to distract me all day.

By the "rules" of the spell, it was impossible to break out of. You just had the first saving throw, but it obviously didn't work that way. I could notice him getting better at resisting the "urge" to clap, and the time between each clap was getting longer, so both me and Mrs Mei thought it was good training. Honestly, I would like to do the same training myself, but I was still determining how I would be able to.

We had started running faster than my squad of Chungi. I had originally underestimated how fast I could run without tiring, so the skeletons became the bottleneck. We'd do this to build up a bit of distance between us and use that to pause and have lunch. The skeletons were capable enough of following me even if we were kilometres away, so eventually, they'd catch up. This way, we didn't waste any time eating during the day.

We had just started our "sprint leg", as I thought of it, but I frowned as I looked ahead of me. It looked like Xiao Li had already noticed it, too, as he sighed, saying, "Looks like bandits of some kind."

We slowed down so that we approached the potential enemies more leisurely and gave our skeletons a chance to catch up if they were needed.

As we got closer, I frowned. I really hoped we didn't have to kill these people. They looked like farmers, and most didn't even have proper weapons. The leader looked like he might have been a soldier once upon a time. Xiao Li had said that wars were incredibly common in the "mortal" nations, so much so that he didn't even know if one was going on at the moment in the current nation we were in. I suppose if there was a war, there would be deserters.

The man held out his hand as we approached and said, "Ho, there, rich-looking gentleman and beautiful young lady. I'm afraid there is a toll on this road, and it's one-third of your valuables."

I was kind of expecting the common bandit trope of lewd comments and thinly veiled rape threats. Perhaps this was a more gentlemanly sort of highwayman? It wasn't that uncommon for Meril and her parents to occasionally get stopped by highwaymen, too. Usually, they realised their mistake and let them by, but Meril's dad had a tendency to go murder-crazy if they made lewd comments about his daughter.

Xiao Li shook his head, frowned and pulled out his sword, continuing the clap every few seconds against the side of the hilt. I sighed. He was a bit single-minded. Was that how it was if you were a "sword cultivator"? Like you had a hammer, and every problem looked like a nail?

It was bad luck that we ran into these guys in the very short time we were travelling along a road. We had just been cutting through the wilderness for the most part. The lead bandit held out a hand and said, "Hey, hey, now... there's twenty of us, young man! You don't have to die here today! ... Also, why are you clapping?" He glanced left and right, almost as if he wanted to see where the hidden camera was.

"The one who will—" I tapped him on the shoulder and shook my head. He frowned and paused, and I quickly sent a Message, <Just stall. The skeletons are barely a minute behind us. These are a bunch of peasants. There is no way they will be up for a scrap when they see them.>

Comprehension lit his face, and he nodded, sending back, <Sorry. I'm used to being by myself. Usually, I have to beat up at least two or three of them.>

I snorted and said aloud, "I don't think you really want to fight us." I could have ended this encounter with Charm Person, and he'd consider us friends and happily let us pass, but this was more amusing.

"Why would you think... that..." he said, slowly trailing off as my squad of Chungi approached at a fast run.

"I didn't sign up to fight no skellingtons!" one of the peasants armed with only a farming implement yelled, backing up. That seemed to be the general consensus, with most of the bandits looking about ready to turn tail and run.

The bandit leader laughed forcedly and said, "Ahahah... of course, you already paid last time! I just didn't recognise you at first! Let them through, boys... BOYS, LET THEM THROUGH!" he hollered the last desperately.

Everyone got out of our way, and we glanced at each other before shrugging and running through their roadblock. I heard as I passed one peasant say in a hushed whisper, "Claps to keep dem tortured souls in dem bones, he does! It tricks dem bones into thinking they still have a heartbeat!"

I snorted, as I was pretty sure that was how necromancy worked in The Dresden Files. I didn't want to just kill people that I didn't have to, although it was a bit of a shame that I wouldn't be getting any souls to give the Yama King or new Shadows.

I hadn't contacted Judge Wu at all. I had decided to wait until I had all three souls just to limit the amount of times I needed to interact with the unknown factor. I still had a contract, and I was pretty sure my new familiar was a tormented soul that Judge Wu temporarily let out of Hell to serve in that capacity. Really, it seemed incredibly stoked to be a raven, just enjoying a bird life, and it looked like it might cry raven tears whenever I had to dismiss it for some reason.

That made me feel a little bit bad when I had to do so, but Mrs Mei told me that I shouldn't feel bad for it even if it went back to Hell when unsummoned. She said that only sinners went to hell and only temporarily at that. It wasn't eternal damnation, like the hell I grew up with, neither.

If you had a lot of sin, enough that you were sentenced to hell, you were released to reincarnate once the sin dissipated—suffering expiated sin here.

So long as I wasn't sending an unbaptised baby back to hell, I supposed, it was fine.

---

We stopped a few hours from the city in another wilderness area. There was one thing about this world, and that it was mostly wilderness. That was because the wilderness was usually dangerous enough that it wasn't profitable to tame, but also because many resources couldn't be cultivated by tame land.

My skeletons sat down all of the stuff they were hauling. We'd be able to carry it the last stretch, but it would be a pain in the butt. Xiao Li asked, "What are you going to do with these guys? You said they remain animated but will become murderous when your spell wears off. We can't just leave them to roam."

I nodded. I definitely agreed with that. If they roamed, not only would they probably kill people, but I wouldn't be able to find them again.

I had hopes that, eventually, I could figure out a way to cast a long-term Major Image, centred on each skeleton, to make them appear to be some sort of automaton or, alternatively, very quiet servants. It wouldn't fool any strong cultivator that had a spiritual sense, but it would make it less likely for people to run for the hills if I took them into the city as pack mules.

Perhaps I could carve runes into their bones? I had one set, and I could practice. If I could combine that with some way to make my control over undead last significantly longer, I could post long-term guards on a location without having to worry that they'll go rabid and murder every living thing that moved if I had an epiphany and spend several days in seclusion or something.

Both Xiao Li and Mrs Mei said that sudden bouts of enlightenment did happen for cultivators, although never as often as a cultivator wanted. That made the undead's inherent murderousness a real downside, let me tell you. I knew it was possible, even with straight wizardry, as that was what Meril's mom's wards accomplished with Hector the Spectre, but I was far away from such mastery.

I held a hand up, "Don't worry, I don't want that either."

I tested the ground, making sure it wasn't too rocky. I couldn't cast Shape Stone after all, but the cantrip Mold Earth? I could do that a lot before I got tired. It took about six castings per skeleton, but I entombed them and then created a distinctive X of stones marking the spot. As I was about to leave it at that, Xiao Li paused, "Uhh... this is pretty distinctive. Some people might tend to dig this area up just out of curiosity."

That... was a good point. I hummed and then grabbed one of the stones and cast Magic Mouth, speaking the message, "There are dangerous undead skeleton monsters buried here. They have the physical strength of a third-level Qi gathering disciple and will attack anything living. Dig up at your own peril."

The condition for playing the message was someone digging in the vicinity. There. Now, if someone continued after hearing that, it would be on their own head.

As we approached the guard post to enter the city proper, we didn't have to stay in line too long. Someone approached and let us aside, bypassing the line for the normal people, asking, "Welcome, Fellow Daoists. Do you have anything to declare?"

We did. Governments hadn't invented the income tax yet, and there likely was no reliable way to track a person's income in any event, so most taxes were still tariff and fee-based. We claimed we explored a set of ruins, which explained the rag-tag bags of loot that we had. Not even really a lie. Naturally, we absolutely agreed to abuse my storage space to hold the most valuable items in order to evade most of the tariffs.

Still, I had to pay ten per cent of the value of the items we had, and the fact that I didn't have any recognisable money was a problem. Only officially struck coinage was accepted, but the low-level cultivator who acted as a captain of the guards here was more than willing to act as an impromptu money changer, charging an usurious twenty-five per cent based on the weight of my coins.

My money situation was incredibly good if all I wanted was to start a new, mundane life. I had lowballed the buying power of both gold and silver here. It was worth a lot more. But, it was worth very little to other cultivators.

The basic unit of currency for cultivators was something called a spirit stone, which was crystallised Qi of varying grades and sizes. Spirit stones were finite in the sense that they only came from a limited number of places but had infinite regeneration potential. If you mined them, they came back. You could never completely deplete a spirit stone mine, although occasionally, they did move. The mines just had varying levels of purity and varying rates at which they refreshed themselves.

I had an epiphany when Mrs Mei and Xiao Li were telling me about this currency. Spirit stones could be used as energy sources in magic, even better than my ice stones, and basically, all cultivators used them. It was basically equivalent to a type of petrodollar economy, where the currency was also a unit of energy, without even the prospects of ever running out.

It explained why I thought the cultivator-based economy was so basic compared to even the mundane precious metal economy. They didn't need to be too sophisticated because people with spirit stone mines were the equivalent of Saudi Arabia without the need to ever worry about running the pumps dry.

We sold all of the miscellaneous junk first at the first blacksmith we saw, and Xiao Li said, "Alright, let me take you to my secret cave."

I snorted, "Please never tell a female that again." That caused him to flush, and I waved a hand, "Your targets won't see us if we head to your place first?"

He shook his head, "The pugilistic and cultivation worlds are different enough that I am sure they didn't really know where I stayed. I'm putting on a mask now, though, as the city streets are a different matter."

I nodded, "Alright... take me to your secret cave. I have a present for you." I said mysteriously.

He eyed me cautiously as if he expected my present would be a swift kick in the nads or something. I frowned, offended, but stayed silent.

The villa was kind of nice. Apparently, he rented for three months just for a few low-grade spirit stones, although it would have cost more if it had included servants along with it.

I sat down in one of the chairs and decided I would spend several hours repeatedly casting Unseen Servant as the place looked like it hadn't been dusted since Christopher Columbus was an ensign. I definitely considered myself too senior to pilot a swab myself these days, though, but I figured that's why they invented magic.

I held out my hands, and two rolled scrolls appeared, and I handed them to him. "I have been working on these for the past few days. Normally, you actually have to have some attainment in the mystic arts to activate magic scrolls, but I reworked these enough that you should be able to activate both of these by just inserting Qi into the scroll."

He blinked, "Ah, talismans. What do they do?"

"Talismans?" I asked curiously.

He said, "Talismans are a single-use spell embedded on and painted onto, usually, paper. They're made by talisman artists, which is a type of professional occupation cultivators can have, similar to alchemists, spiritual doctors, formation masters, and the like."

I blinked. Was there a systematic way to accomplish this? While both Merildwen's parents tried to teach her some of their professions, namely alchemy and magic device artificing, she had somewhat limited success. But she had pretty good success as a magical scroll scribe.

Speaking of alchemy... I made a mental note to talk Mrs Mei and Xiao Li through the basic alchemical recipe for a healing potion. I even had some of, but not all, of the ingredients with me.

It was common for at least mid-level rogues and assassins to have the ability to use magical devices, and that included scrolls, so she made really good gold, making a lot of copies of certain spells, usually Invisibility.

I made a note to find out how to learn talisman artistry and formations. Mrs Mei had already talked about formations a little bit, as she had thought that my continuous Major Image ritual was a formation. It seemed the closest thing to straight wizardry that I had heard about, so I had a definite interest.

I decided to answer him, "The first one is Disguise Self. Inject Qi into it while mentally imagining a person you want to look like. It can only be ten per cent taller or shorter than your body, but otherwise, you can go crazy. Even can be different species, so long as they are bipedal. The illusion lasts an hour."

He widened his eyes and said, "This will be very useful!"

I nodded, "The other one is Invisibility. You've seen me use it; it also lasts an hour."

I paused for a moment before asking, "These two guys are bad men, yeah?"

"Yes," replied Mrs Mei, without giving Xiao Li a chance to dispute her.

I nodded, "If you can, try to bring them back alive. But only if it is convenient. I owe one of the assistant judges in the Netherworld Kingdom three souls, and I figure waste not, want not, right?"

Xiao Li coughed, "How did you even meet one of the officials of the Netherworld Kingdom, much less owe him as much as the souls of three mortals? Why would they even want the souls of mortals? Aren't they surrounded by the souls of the dead at all times anyway?"

I sighed, "It's a long story; I'd rather not talk about it."

He considered that for a moment before he nodded, "Okay. No promises, but I'll see what I can do."

"If you can't, it's not a big deal. This world is definitely not short of terrible people who I don't care what happens to," I said as I held up my hands, "Don't take risks for it."

I only wanted to offer Judge Wu bad guys because I had no idea what he wanted these souls for. In fact, he might not want them at all and might have been obligated to accept the terms of the agreement between Meril and Oreilla. I just didn't know, but I didn't think there was an eternal Blood War here, so they couldn't be new recruits.

After he left, I began a chain ritual casting of Unseen Servant and telling them to clean.

By the time they started to make some pretty good progress, the door opened with a thunk and an invisible man walked into the room, closing the door. Just as I thought he was empty-handed, a man was dumped on the ground, unconscious. It was the man Xiao Li called Old Gu.

Xiao Li suddenly appeared out of nowhere and gave me a thumbs up, "Got 'em. Apparently, Old Gu didn't want to share with Chen either, so he's dead already."

I snorted and asked curiously, "That was quick. Well, is there anything else you want to say to him?" Did we have to wait until he woke up?

"Nah. Let it be a surprise," he said with a smirk.

I shrugged, and my shadow seemed to dart a tendril out, elongating almost the entire room like my surname was Nara. When it touched the unconscious man, the entire Shadow appeared to drain out of mine like a liquid, wrapping around Old Gu and squeezing the man's body as if it were an intangible anaconda. I had the urge to say, "Shadow Binding Jutsu... success." But I kept my mouth shut.

"Holy fuck," Xiao Li said and took a step back.

I made my dagger appear in my hand and said, "The shadow eats the person's spirit. That's basically the outside coating of your soul if you didn't know. It can't digest a soul, so it spits it out, and the soul usually comes out of the body with some velocity. I hope I can catch it."

I waited, but I didn't have to wait for long. I snaked my hand out in an arcane gesture, capturing the fleeing soul in the soul jar of my dagger, humming in satisfaction, "Well, one is better than none." I glanced down at the body and asked, "So, what should we do with him?"

"Uhh... how deep can you go with that spell you used with the skeletons? The dirt in the courtyard is pretty soft," he offered, rubbing the back of his neck.

"Deep enough, I suspect," I said with a nod. We'd have to wait a while before my new Shadow would pop out, though. I supposed I better start making sure it couldn't flee. Although they almost never did, that I was aware of, I wouldn't want to be surprised.

Letting a shadow get free in the middle of a densely packed city full of regular people would probably not do my karmic sin and merit balance any good now that I knew such a thing existed. They could reproduce exponentially in a packed city.

After the shadow was subdued and Old Gu was buried, Xiao Li said he had to go into seclusion for up to a week to both refine the pill he was counting on and then take it, "You can explore the city if you want, it's mostly pretty safe. If you want to sell the rest of your lotuses, then the best bet is probably The Frolics of the Lunar Bunny; it poses as a mortal business, but a pretty old sect is behind them. Grandma Mei said they were even still in business in her time a thousand years ago."

I blinked, as that name seemed a bit playful and evocative for most businesses, and asked, "What kind of business is it?" I wasn't an entirely ignorant hillbilly in my last life; if I remembered correctly, the Moon Rabbit was supposed to be the companion of a Chinese goddess, although I couldn't remember which one. It was also why the dark spot on the moon looked like a rabbit from the angle in Asia.

"Uhh... I think they sell alcohol, and you can pay for pretty entertainers to dance and sing for you," he said, blushing furiously. He coughed into his hand and continued, "They're the best bet for yin-type plants. Grandma Mei said they'll pay at least half and again the amount that you'll get in other places. They're also the least likely to try to take advantage of us low-level Qi-gathering cultivators. Grandma Mei says I should avoid going in for other reasons, but you'd probably be safe."

I grinned. That sounded like a brothel. The name made a lot more sense now. Yes, I'd definitely visit, if just to see the pretty ladies. The last point was very important, too. I had returned to the first level of Qi Gathering again, and I felt I was very close to the second, which was incredible progress.

That wasn't that unusual, though; you tended to recultivate pretty fast if you dissipated your cultivation base. Still, although I had the magic to hit above my weight class, I still had the aura of a weakling in this world. The flowers were also valuable but not earth-shattering. I supposed that an organisation that was backed by some power that could last thousands of years wasn't too interested in the small treasures of us paupers.

I handed him his potted plant and nodded. I was pretty sure I could survive an unusual city I'd never been to before. I'd done it in the Navy enough times, although port calls were a lot less frequent when I became a submariner. Then, it was just months under the sea at a stretch.

I hummed. We'd been running flat out these last few days, so I ought to secure from flank speed and launch the gig to make arrangements. Nodding, I summoned my raven, Crow, and he appeared with a happy caw. I told him, "Feel free to look around the neighbourhood. We'll be here for a week or two. Come find me if you find something of significant interest."

Crow flapped its wings at me before flying out the window.

My first stop before seeing some of the cultivator places, like the Moon Rabbit place, was a mundane bank. After they verified the purity of both my coins and silver bars, they handed local coinage back—which were actually square-shaped. This was unusual and interesting, kind of like if you bought bullion back on Earth.

As near as I could tell, a tael of silver or gold was close enough to a troy ounce that I couldn't really tell the difference with my calibrated hand, especially not since I had gotten stronger recently.

They had given me about ninety-two per cent of the value back, and I wasn't surprised. Anyone who minted coins was going to make money through seigniorage, especially if their coins had some official mandate as legal tender, which these did.

The unusual thing was that the bank wasn't a state enterprise, and it spanned multiple countries. That told me that it also was backed by someone with more power than the nation we were in because no King, Potentate or Emperor gave up the monopoly to strike coins easily.

I walked the streets towards my next destination. I slowed to admire the sights. It was quite clean and clearly had a functioning sewage system due to the lack of offensive odours that would have been common in primitive cities. The architecture reminded me of photographs of The Forbidden City and other Ming Dynasty-style buildings.

From my modern perspective, or even Merildwen's, it was exotic and beautiful. I suppose I had the eyes of a looky-loo lost in her own world, which might have been the reason I was accosted when I meandered into a less busy street.

I was actually surprised because the dirty man who attacked me didn't even demand anything; he merely tried to stab me. I reflexively cast the cantrip Silvery Barbs, which was a mental cantrip that distracted people. Especially people who were in the midst of attacking you. I saw him fumble with his knife and took the initiative to punch him in the throat.

He wheezed, gasped at his throat and fell like a sack of potatoes... no, a sack of rice. I hadn't seen any potatoes here yet, which was a real tragedy. I casually kicked the man's knife away, which clattered across the alley.

I glanced down at him and sighed. I seem to have punched him a bit too strongly. I hadn't intended to, but he actually surprised me while I was being a stupid tourist.

I glanced around, left and right, and casually produced my ritual dagger and held it above his body as he gurgled his last, snatching his soul while it was still somewhat firmly attached to his body with the soul jar's suction force. The expression on the mugger's face was a combination of unwillingness and exasperated anger—as if I had tricked him.

I couldn't say I felt bad. A thief who went straight to murder... there was no way he hadn't killed a lot of people before. Well, at least I had enough souls to pay the piper now, I supposed. They just walked into my arms!

I quickly stepped over his body and walked away with prudent haste before someone noticed the body, and the constabulary questioned me.

---

I arrived at the Frolics looking like a new woman. After the unfortunate mugging attempt, I switched to walking the main roads and found a nice clothing store. It was high-scale enough that I was initially denied entry. I made sure that my robes stayed in good repair, but they weren't actually that high class even in Merildwen's world.

Five taels of gold later, I had an entire wardrobe's worth of outfits bought and delivered to Xiao Li's house, and I wore one out of the store with me. They were gowns in silk, coloured in icy whites and blues, which I thought was nice.

The Frolics of the Lunar Bunny was a large building, too. Apparently, not only did they serve as a bar with optional entertainment, but the culture very much favoured private rooms or at least small cubbies. Only the uncouth would, apparently, drink their liquor amongst the rabble, I supposed. I had the opinion that the nature of some of the optional entertainment also probably necessitated privacy, as well.

A bouncy young woman in her early twenties acted as the hostess, and if she was surprised a young woman was visiting their establishment by herself, she didn't show it, "Young Miss, how can we at the Frolics service you today?"

My mouth twitched. Double entendres and innuendo seemed to be a little bit more difficult in this language, but that might also be because I hadn't grown up around it with all the cultural referents I should have. Still, the hostess managed to find a way to make it seem classy.

"I've come to sell a few Cool Yin Pseudo-Lotuses I have in my possession," I told her while struggling to keep my eyes on hers. While I didn't really have any plans to partake in their obvious entertainments whilst I was here this time, I did have eyes, okay?

The expression on her face shifted from pretty to pretty and surprised, but before she could say anything, another pretty girl arrived, moving like flowing water. This one was a cultivator, and she was two stages stronger than me.

She smiled at the hostess and said, "I'll take care of this client, Xue'er. Young Miss, finding someone who can assist you may take a while. For now... would you like a private booth? Our Liu Ruxue is about to begin playing the zither, and she's famous across three nations."

I blinked and then inclined my head. She led me to not so much as a private room but a booth overlooking the main stage. It was kind of like an opera house in this part of the building, and I could feel the faint organised Qi that might be a formation on the walls of the booth. I sniffed, trying to get a sense of what the magic did, and decided it was probably soundproofing. It was designed to still the air as it approached the exterior of the booth, but it was only in one direction, so you could still hear the performance.

Already on the stage, an incredibly beautiful woman was setting up an instrument. She appeared to be in her thirties and had a mature, cougar-like figure that I used to be quite fond of as a young petty officer.

Again, my mouth twitched a little bit as I wondered exactly what must go on in these booths sometimes for soundproofing to be necessary. Well, as long as they thoroughly clean them, I didn't mind.

The young woman asked, "Would you like something to eat or drink while you wait?"

That did sound kind of nice. I wasn't super hungry, but I was a bit peckish, so I nodded, "Perhaps some fruits, cheeses... Or whatever you have available for a small snack."

"Of course, of course," she said before leaving the booth.

The performance below started, and I blinked several times. The very sound carried Qi, but after a quick jolt, I came to the conclusion that it wasn't an attack. However, I thought it was designed to both relax, and calm and create a low-level happy-contended feeling.

I thought it was pretty obvious why they offered me a booth now. If you were going to negotiate a price for a salable good, it'd be useful if your counterparty was relaxed and chill. I suppose it was on the same level of offering free wine, so I wasn't that offended. People probably paid pretty good money to hear this performance.

Also, I grinned. I had found my first bard!

 

[SpiraSpira]

The zither-MILF's performance was very relaxing. After a few minutes, a different serving girl arrived with a platter of small fruits, two different types of cheese and little sausages, as well as a glass of what might be wine, and a carafe of water.

I watched the girl go and had the complicated feeling that this was pretty nice! Was this what it was like to get bottle service at some exclusive club? I was feeling complicated because it seemed as though I had wasted most of my money by saving and investing it in my past life! If I had been a bit more of a profligate lush, I would have ended up in this same place probably but with a more enriching experience base.

Sighing, I glanced at the food but paused. It occurred to me that a woman's natural weapon was poison. Detect Poison was a divine magic spell, so I couldn't use it. The general way to detect poison with arcane magic involved specialised magical devices, of which I had none. However, once one had at least a beginner's knowledge of transmutation, you could open your senses up to things, including food, and more or less detect if things were inside them that didn't belong.

It wasn't fool-proof by any metric, especially with some of these small fruits that I didn't recognise and had no experience with, but nothing was in the cheese, sausage or alcohol as far as I could tell. I took some nibbles.

Wait... if poison was a woman's natural weapon, should I go buy some poison then if I was a woman now? After a moment, I shook my head. No. I had no idea how to actually use it effectively, and Merildwen's experience with poison was the same as her experience with explosives—making it by accident when practising alchemy.

I took a sip of the alcohol, coughed, and sputtered. No need to go searching poison out; this was poison right here! It must be eighty-proof! Not exactly "wine" like I had been expecting.

I carefully set the glass aside. I wouldn't need any more of that. Merildwen didn't have super great alcohol tolerance anyway so that one sip was more than sufficient. I did make a meal out of the fruits, though, while listening to the performance.

After it was over, zither MILF left the stage, and other performers replaced her, and I realised that this was probably just a continual thing. This one wasn't a musical act, either. It seemed to be something close to a stand-up comedy act. While all the jokes were flying above my head, they were appreciated by those below.

Oh. I had just brought a bag with me, but none of the plants were actually in it. I stood up, walked over to another table in the booth and casually reached into the bag, causing a lotus to appear as if I had pulled it out of the bag.

This was a figleaf of a precaution in case someone was observing me. Realistically, I should have put them in the bags earlier, but these flowers were quite delicate.

A little precaution was in order, though. With brothels, you just never could tell. They usually fell into one of two camps: the vast majority were highly discreet, but the alternative was they were kompromat factories.

Not that I would know, of course! Ha ha ha! Coughing, I lined up the lotuses on the table, the air already starting to cool as the booth's temperature dropped a couple of degrees.

Just as I was getting bored with the comedy act, someone pushed open the curtains separating my booth from the hallway and stepped inside. My eyes couldn't help but stare a bit because it was zither MILF herself.

She looked like a black-haired Chinese Jessica Rabbit and moved like it, too. The clothes she was wearing seemed less designed for modesty and more prepared to accentuate and heighten interest in particular areas of her body, to the point where I thought her wearing such clothes might be more erotic than her being naked.

She noticed my stare and smirked ever so slightly before saying melodiously, "Greetings, Fellow Daoist. I haven't seen you before at the Frolics. Is this your first time?"

Did they all speak in innuendo? Before I could answer, she continued, "Ah, forgive me. I should introduce myself. I am called Liu Ruxue, the humble manager of this establishment." She paused and smiled, "As well as the Outer Sect Elder and deacon for my Hidden Flowers Fairylands here in city. I was told you have some things to sell, and so I see them. Might I have the pleasure of your name?"

"Uh.. y-yeah, of course," I sputtered for some reason, internally frowning. Was she using some technique on me? I had a resistance to madness-inducing effects—on account that I had already been rendered, at least temporarily, barking mad. I had hoped this might extend to mind-altering effects in general, but this didn't seem to be the case as it had already been demonstrated that she could, at least, relax me with her music.

Liu Ruxue was stronger than me to the point where I couldn't really estimate at what level she was. This, combined with her title of Elder, had me assume that she was probably in the Foundation Establishment realm, so I likely wouldn't be able to detect it if she had used a technique against me and wanted to be subtle about it.

Still, it was clear, like most bards, that most of her points went into charisma. After considering things for a moment, I decided that, no, I just stuttered all on my own when meeting her. I wasn't sure if that was better or worse than being enchanted, though.

I finished introducing myself, "I'm Mei Wen, just an itinerant cultivator at the start of her journey. I happened upon these flowers, and it was recommended that I sell them here. I'm also interested in buying some things, and possibly paying for specialised training."

"Hmmm... indeed, the Hidden Flowers Fairyland is a special place for precious flowers of all kinds," she murmured, half-lidded eyes staying on my face, and I had the feeling she wasn't talking about the lotuses.

Grandma Mei had given me a little bit of background information on this group. They were pretty famous because they only accepted female disciples. The only way a man could enter the sect was if they were the Dao companion of a disciple. I was pretty sure that "Dao companion" meant magic husband, basically, but I wasn't a hundred per cent on that.

They also ran businesses like this across many, many cities and interacted with so-called "mortals" much more than was common for a group of cultivators. Most so-called Sects of their size retreated from secular society into areas of the world with significantly more density of heaven and earth energy.

Privately, Mrs Mei told me that they were considered, strictly speaking, a Demonic-path sect, but they were so mild about it that nobody hassled them. They might cause a few deaths here and there, she said, but it was hard to really tell if they were behind them or not. And it wasn't like righteous sects might not cut random people down now and then, either, if they got too uppity.

Compared to Demon Sects that would put entire cities to the sword if they could and refine the souls of everyone inside into a spirit tool, they were hardly villains.

I hadn't realised precisely what she had meant until I noticed the auras of the men leaving the building earlier.

Ever since practising the Heavenly Dance of Moonlight scripture, I had become quite a bit more sensitive to both yin and yang type energies, to the point where I could almost see them now if I squinted just right. The happy-looking men leaving the building had a dearth of yang energies compared to what I was used to seeing in random men in the city—to the extent that I was sure that there were more things than the obvious being sucked dry here.

I wasn't a doctor, spiritual or otherwise, but I had the intuition based on my budding understanding of yin energies that such men would likely be fine, so long as they didn't get their yang devoured too frequently. But still, I bet now and again someone's heart did go out, or one of the budding disciples was a bit too vigorous and took too much. That was probably what Mrs Mei was talking about when she mentioned they didn't cause too many deaths, with the implication that they did cause some.

I absently wondered if I could modify Vampiric Touch to drain either Qi or yang energy instead of pure vitality. The nuance between yang energy and vitality was slightly different, after all. Simplified, it was the difference between your stamina points and your hit points. Even I, as full of yin energy as I was, had a smaller core of yang inside me, as did every thing that lived.

The idea had merit, but I wasn't sure if it would help me at all. It might even introduce impurities into my own Qi that I would have to eliminate, too. I made a mental note to research it. Vampiric Touch was my only current, reliable way to heal myself without using potions or healing pills that I could source in this world.

Liu Ruxue glided over and sat on a chair facing perpendicular to me, crossing her legs, smiling, "We will, of course, buy the flowers from you, dear. However, you have to have a very special constitution to even harvest such delicate plants. Would you consider joining our Hidden Flowers Fairyland? I could induct you as an outer sect disciple on my own authority, and you won't find people more knowledgable in yin techniques than us around."

Mrs Mei said they probably would offer to recruit me, and I thought it might have been her way of giving me an out if I didn't want to travel around with Xiao Li. I didn't think I had fate as a sword cultivator, so i wasn't too interested in visiting the Silver Serenity Sword School, but I figured I'd go there anyway.

I didn't have to join, and even if I did, I didn't have to be a sword lady to do so. Just because they focused on the sword didn't mean that they'd shun anyone who wasn't a sword fanatic. At least, I hoped.

It was nice of Grandma Mei to politely arrange options, and while the zither MILF was probably correct about their knowledge of yin techniques, I had enough of a foundation with just the cultivation method Mrs Mei gave me, for now.

On paper, it seemed like a good match. However, more importantly, their sect seemed to be focused on certain things that I was not in any sense interested in. I didn't really care how strong it would make me; I just wasn't interested in becoming a magical prostitute. Now, hiring magical prostitutes—that might be different.

I created some dimples with my smile and said, "Senior, for the moment, I am attached to my current path and independence, although I very much appreciate the offer."

I couldn't just tell her I didn't want to be a tart. Besides the fact that it would be needlessly rude of me, she was so significantly stronger than me that she could splatter me easily.

I had been given a crash course on cultivator culture, and those significantly stronger than you were considered Seniors and being intentionally disrespectful to a Senior was basically asking them to smack you down. In whatever way they desired. Not only would nobody help you, but most would consider it appropriate, and you a fool for bringing it on yourself.

She made a pretty moue of disappointment but shrugged, causing one of the straps of her gown to slip down her shoulder and expose her bare shoulder, the nape of her neck and even more décolletage. I had always been a nape enjoyer, and I wondered how she knew.

She said in a slightly disappointed tone, "We don't force anyone, little flower... but the offer will stand. Perhaps you'll change your mind when you discover how heartless this world is?" She sighed and somehow conveyed to me in that one sigh that she actually expected that I had a better probability of dying than realising my mistake and coming back.

How incredibly emotive. In one sigh, it was like she had said a sentence. I was impressed, and I felt it was likely that all of their disciples did hardcore theatre training, like budding actors, just to have this much control over their expressions and the chosen emotional affect they were displaying.

Which also meant that nothing I could see in her body language could be trusted. They were also likely experts at judging other people's body language, too, then, which caused me to squirm and the zither MILF to smile widely as if she could read my mind.

She hummed and said, "These six lotuses are in excellent, excellent condition. We don't often see this plant due to how delicate it is. That doesn't necessarily mean that rare means valuable, though. I suppose I could offer you a hundred low-grade spirit stones per plant."

Grandma Mei told me that this was about what I would receive if I went to one of the other two organised cultivators groups in the city but that the girls at the Frolics would be willing to pay more. I frowned and said, "I think I should get at least one hundred and fifty. I know how useful they are to you."

The zither MILF grinned widely as if she enjoyed haggling. And since she was a bard, I had no doubt that she did. I had the feeling that I was a little bit out of my depth when we went back and forth, but she seemed gentle enough, and in the end, we settled on a hundred and fifteen stones per flower.

I was now rich! Well, sort of. Xiao Li said he spent ten spirit stones to rent the villa he was in for three months, and that included the use of its basic Qi concentrating formation. There was no real exchange rate between spirit stones and gold, but people would say that one low-grade stone was worth about a thousand golden taels.

Realistically, though, nobody exchanged the currencies much except in small quantities when a cultivator wanted regular money, usually to pay servants and the like or for some other reason, so the real rate was negotiable only at the time of exchange. They wouldn't let a cultivator drop down a dozen high-grade spirit stones and abscond with all the gold in the city, as it would ruin the economy.

After we concluded the deal, the zither MILF reached over, gently placed her hand on my thigh and asked archly, staring at me with bedroom eyes, "You mentioned purchasing training? I think I would be willing to train you for free, little flower."

I sputtered, water almost going up my nose. She had timed that perfectly, waiting until I had taken a sip of water. This caused her to laugh and lean back, placing her hands down in her lap before smiling, "But, really, what do you want to buy, and what training or manuals do you seek? We're only willing to sell the most common manuals and skills if you're not a disciple, you understand."

"I'm interested in learning more about talisman artistry. I want beginner's information, manuals and possibly lessons with one of your talisman artists," I said and paused, "I'd also like a movement or footwork technique suitable for me to practice in the Qi Gathering realm."

Most of the techniques Grandma Mei had she was forbidden from sharing. It was almost a protagonist's luck that some of the better cultivation techniques she had found in her adventures by flukes suited Xiao Li and myself.

She did have movement techniques suitable for me, and even a couple she could teach me. However, they all had a minimum requirement of already establishing your Foundation, so I couldn't practice them until then. I needed a stop-gap technique for now.

Now that I thought about it, Xiao Li was really lucky. Before I could consider that anymore, zither MILF hummed, "I could sell you the Qi Gathering chapter of a footwork technique suitable for females of your stature for fifty spirit stones. A book detailing some very common low-level talismans will cost one hundred spirit stones, and a book on basic talisman techniques is another hundred. These are all manuals that almost everybody has, so the price is pretty standardised. Still, you would need to swear a Dao oath not to share the footwork technique until at least you form your Golden Core."

It sounded like that qualifier was just a way to make sure you didn't have a hanging oath over your head for your entire life and was likely a courtesy that they extended only on manuals that were already widely propagated. Grandma Mei was still bound by an oath not to reveal most of the things she knew, after all.

I nodded. That was a good portion of my earnings, but you had to spend money to make money. I would spend even more when I finished reading the book and had to buy the materials to actually make the talismans, too. I was about to say something, but she asked, "A lesson with one of our low-level talisman masters would likely be about ten stones per lesson... but... how is your attainment in calligraphy?"

I frowned. Merildwen was very accurate with transferring letters exactly as expected. You had to be to be a scribe, especially a magical one. But neither she nor I knew the first thing about calligraphy—especially here, where they used brushes.

I opened my mouth, closed it, paused and then said, "I don't know. People can understand the characters I write." At least, Xiao Li had when I had been practising writing the unfamiliar logograms. I had a base literacy now!

Faster than I could see, a traditional-looking folding fan depicting painted plum blossoms was deployed in front of the bottom half of the zither MILF's face, obscuring her mouth from me. I hadn't even seen her move, but I had the sudden idea that I might have made her smile genuinely, probably in amusement, and she decided to hide it from me.

From behind the fan, she said, "How precious. Let me make a recommendation, little flower. It would be much more affordable to, before getting lessons from a talisman artist, to get instructed by mortal masters of calligraphy. Even the lowest-level talisman artist needs to be considered a master in calligraphy. I know of seven Grandmasters in the city, four of which would be willing to give you lessons for a suitable donation of gold. I'll have my assistant include the names and locations with your other things."

That... that was really good advice. It was so good that I wasn't even offended that she probably thought I was a complete fool for not already having a background in calligraphy before wanting to study talismans.

Then, she stood up, and I did so as well. It seemed almost automatic. The fan was already gone, "You can pick up your things downstairs. Here, take this." She used one hand to take one of my hands into hers, then used the other to place a small, thin object into it and then closed my hand around it. It felt surprisingly more intimate than just handing me something.

"This is a token; if you find yourself in another of our establishments, you can produce it, and they'll know that you have a positive relationship with us," she said with a smile before departing.

I opened my hand and hummed curiously. It was a piece of jade in a small circle, almost like a gambling chip. From my time in the Navy, I recognised it as white "mutton fat" jade. It was supposedly quite valuable in my old world, but I didn't sense any Qi from it, so I expected it to be mostly mundane.

On one side, there was depicted a number, while the other had the characters for "paper fan." I didn't really know the significance, except that perhaps the number depicted this franchise of the Frolics while "paper fan" was her designation. The Paper Fan Elder? That didn't quite sound right, but I left it there, placing the token in my pocket.

I'd place it in my dimensional space later, just in case it could be tracked.

I picked up all the spirit stones I was owed, as well as the books I had purchased. They had a piece of paper with the oath I had to swear first, and it was what I expected.

When I left the premises, my last thought while watching a tired but satisfied-looking young master leave was that Mrs Mei was right. Xiao Li shouldn't come here. The zither MILF would gobble him up and not even have the decency to spit his bones out.

---

I waited a couple of more days before I decided to contact Judge Wu. I had found a regular library full of normal books, and I looked rich enough that they didn't even quibble about giving me a library pass for a nominal fee.

Rather than a public library, this place mostly served as both a depository for local and provincial records as well as books that any of the imperial officials might need to consult to do their business. However, that was such a broad and ambiguous possibility that they had a pretty comprehensive library, including fiction. If you were wealthy enough like me and didn't look like you'd set the works on fire, they'd give special dispensation to use it or even copy the books, scrolls and records if you wanted.

I spent two days researching the Netherworld Kingdom, at least what was known by mortals here which wasn't a whole lot. A lot seemed like mythology, but a "Yama King" was supposed to be a title for someone in charge of both judging and sentencing mortals after they died.

Depending on your actions while you were alive, you could be expected to be reincarnated in one of six places. Heaven as a Deva, as human, as an animal, as a type of ghost, or to be placed in hell.

A Deva was a type of entity that was born from the heaven and earth energies, having no mother or father, and it was born directly into the Xantian or pure lifeform state. Us regular human slebs could only be said to be "Xantian" after we reached the Foundation Establishment level, or if you were a Martial Artist, the Grandmaster stage.

The other huge advantage of being reborn as a Deva was that you regained the memories of your last life after a certain time, while all others allegedly had to drink the tea made by an old lady that wiped your memories. I was very curious if that was just an allegory or if there was really an old lady shoving tea down ghosts' throats continuously because it sounded funny.

In either event, it took a significantly strong soul to even have the chance to regain your memories after that, although some claim that every now and then, a former cultivator close to immortality would die without their soul dissipating and then reincarnate, gaining some of the memories of their previous life.

I couldn't find any reason why an assistant judge in the afterlife would want souls, nor what use he would have for them. I hoped not as a spice for his tea or something horrible like that.

After I learned enough, I set up the standard ritual to contact Oriella. I assumed that the "call" would now be forwarded to Judge Wu. After finishing, I checked it once, twice and thrice. Mistakes when you were summoning a devil were bad, even if it was only her incorporeal attention.

I assumed it was the same in the Netherworld Kingdom. I could see if you made a mistake, just hearing, "This junior dared to call me while disrespecting me by screwing up the ritual?!" Then splat.

I pulled out my dagger and held it ready, perpendicular across my lap, as I relaxed and used my palm to inject qi into the circle to start the connection.

The basic timing circuit and magical capacitor clicked twelve times a second until enough energy was concentrated, and then it stopped. This wasn't a visual call but something along the lines of long-distance extraplanar telepathy, and instantly, it felt as though the world around me froze. I couldn't move, and one of the leaves from a tree in the courtyard was frozen in the middle of the air.

I felt the presence of a mind much larger and vaster than my own, and a voice said, "Hello? Who is it?"

"Your Excellency, my name is Merildwen, also called Mei Wen in this world, and I have the three souls I owe you," I said respectfully. One of the things I had been looking in my research was the correct way to address a judge of the dead. I couldn't really find one, so I decided to just use the title for the highest mortal judge in the current Empire I was in.

"Hmmhmm... Merildwen, Merildwen... oh yes, the outsider girl. Mei Wen is a good name. Why was this call routed to me? Didn't I assign that Chun Wu kid to you as a liaison?" he asked, sounding slightly annoyed. I wasn't going to correct him, but I was pretty sure that wasn't the correct name for my former familiar. I felt pleased that his boss didn't even know his name—odd, I was pretty sure I hadn't been that catty when I was a man back on Earth.

I heard a sigh, but, then he said, "Well, whatever. Let's have them, then."

I let the three souls, spirits and all, slide out of the soul jar, and they instantly vanished. I could hear him hum, and then I literally heard him suck his teeth at me. He went, "Tsk. These are dregs, Mei Wen. Also, this last one is not acceptable at all. I'll take the two, though."

Dregs? Not acceptable? I was a bit confused because Devils didn't have very many quality concerns about souls. All would be grist for the Blood War. I frowned, a bit upset, "Your Excellency, do you mind elaborating? By what quality metric are you using to value them?"

"This is an answer that I would normally charge for, little girl, but I think it would be best if I gave it to you for free. I think you need a little background on my business here if we're to continue on," he rumbled. Business?

He continued, "It's the same thing I use to judge souls who appear before me in court. Sin! The more sin, the more valuable." he exclaimed.

Although I couldn't see sin or merit on a person, I was pretty sure they were all sinners, "Your Excellency, those three are all murderers, surely, at least."

"Ah. Yes. I can see you are confused. Yes. But it's small potatoes," he said, his voice still sounding as though it appeared from all around me. Wait, there are potatoes here, after all? Where? I wanted french fries desperately.

It was starting to give me a headache. He hummed noncomittally, "This one, James Durell, aka Jim, is unacceptable. Although he is a sinner, you must have brought him with you. The ties of karma have all been thoroughly severed or occluded. He'll definitely be punished, but there will be no karmic virtue awarded for punishing him."

"Why does that matter? Why would any of that matter? Wouldn't you or someone else see them in your court anyway, eventually, if I let them pass on?" I asked, completely confused as to his motives.

"Yes, but I receive only at most one-quarter of one per cent of the merit awarded for sentencing and punishment of a normal sinner if they arrive in my court, girl. The rest goes to the Netherworld Kingdom, the Hells and my bosses," he said reasonably as if he was explaining something to a child. "However, if I happen to receive souls in an unofficial way, I can punish them myself. Virtually all of the merits would come to me. Anybody can do this. Doing bad things to bad people is a good thing. That's advice, by the way."

I was slackjawed, "Your Excellency, are you suggesting that you operate a private, off-the-books secondary Hell?" Talk about the privatisation of prisons, I thought, completely gobsmacked.

"Precisely. You finally get it. Once I punish them enough so that they have neutral sin, I let them go, and then they'll appear in court with a neutral balance, and they'll be directly reincarnated. Most judges moonlight this way, providing things of value to mortals in exchange for the souls of sinners," he boomed, pleased with himself.

My head was really starting to hurt, but he continued, "It's forbidden for Yama Kings to advertise this service, of course. It usually takes someone at least three or four stages ahead of you or with deep attainments in the Daos of the Soul, Death, Karma or Samsara, to deduce a way to get in touch with one of us. Otherwise, people have to be introduced."

I wanted to rub my temples, but I was frozen. So, instead, I asked, "Your Excellency, why are you explaining this to me?" There had to be a reason. I didn't even know what cultivation realm this guy was at or if they even had one, but he was telling me a lot for no discernable reason.

"Well, you already have a way to contact me now. Might as well make use of it. I want better souls next time. Also, it isn't forbidden for you to advertise on my behalf. I offer significant benefits for those who contact me directly, which you qualify as. Specifically, you could earn up to five per cent of the net virtue generated by your downlines and up to one per cent of the virtue that their downlines generate, as well. Each person you sponsor has to buy in with a one-time payment of a soul or souls worth at least five thousand karmic sin units, though, but after that, they can start earning," he said pleasantly. He then paused and asked, "Do you want this fellow Jim back? I can get rid of him for you."

I was struggling to process what he had said just now. Finally, I said, "Surely he is worth something. He's a soul from a different cosmology. Surely, he'd be at least an interesting reagent, if nothing else."

"Well, that's true... but... no. You're right, but this soul would only be useful for a very limited number of things, all of which are incredibly evil. The margins for dealing with really evil people who would want to buy it are low, too. I have to budget in all the sin I am taking on by helping them, you see. Plus, I'd have to call in an expert in the Dao of Qiankun to certify this soul as a genuine outsider. That's an additional expense."

His next voice sounded final, "He might sit on my shelf for aeons. I'd be taking all the risk here; the most I could offer would be five hundred karmic sin units, and you'd still owe me another soul. It really isn't acceptable as the contract is written, I'm afraid," he said, and then I could feel a frown, "Hurry up. Your brains might start leaking out of your ears soon. Your soul is running on the Netherworld Kingdom's subjective time rate, while your body is not. I don't think I've ever taken a call from someone so weak." The last sounded incredibly amused.

That explained why I couldn't move and why that leaf was hung in mid-air. Maybe it also explained what I was thinking of a paradox of a limited number of Netherworld "employees" judging and sentencing so many, many more souls. This world was vastly larger than Earth, and there were trillions of minor realms in this cosmology, too.

If the Netherworld Kingdom, and presumably Hell, operated at an insanely ridiculous accelerated time factor, then they'd be able to keep up. How boring that must be, though. I thought being a lemure would be bad, but what if my fate was to be some low-level functionary in a vast ghostly bureaucracy? I could spend a million years toiling away to discover only a second or two had passed since my death in the "material planes"!

I wanted to get everything cleared out today, but I said, "Fine. That's fine."

"Okay. Your business is appreciated; call again," he replied, and the connection terminated.

Immediately, I groaned in pain and reached up to feel blood leaking out of my nose. I sat there with a piece of white silk held up to my nose, with my head tilted back.

My head was banging, and the only thing I could think was... didn't this sound a lot like Herbalife or one of those MLM schemes?

 

[SpiraSpira]

Xiao Li had gone past his expected week of seclusion, so I spent the next week and a half studying calligraphy, reading books on talisman artistry and practising my swordsmanship in private. The latter I was warming up to, just a little.

I had been thinking about it in multiclass terms, but realistically, wasn't the most OP wizard subclass the Bladesinger? Besides, studying swordsmanship or some other weapons skill was expected here, and I wanted to fit in a little better.

Only maybe one per cent of cultivators, or less, were considered "sword cultivators," yet at the same time, more than a third of cultivators used a sword. So there was a vast difference between being a sword cultivator and a cultivator that merely used a sword now and then, and I was just aiming for the latter.

My tutor in calligraphy had thought me, at first, a lost cause. I had never held a brush designed for writing before, and he exclaimed, furious, that I looked like I was about to put a layer of paint on the fences outside. He was an old man, and one of the little veins in his forehead was clearly visible.

I don't think any amount of specie could have convinced him to teach me after that point, but when he didn't immediately throw me out, I realised I had something that he might want. His grandson, a newly minted master of calligraphy himself, was also a Martial Artist, having stepped onto the Martial Warrior stage and unlocking his internal force.

Grandpa knew I was a cultivator; it was the only reason he invited me inside or let me pick up one of his brushes in the first place. He wanted more for his grandson, so he claimed he could fix my deficits in exchange for a cultivation manual for his grandson and setting him at least onto the path. Apparently, he had already been tested and had, allegedly, average aptitude for spiritual matters, and his body favoured the Wood element.

It had to be said that this was a ridiculous request—especially for a regular person to make of a cultivator. Or it would be if I didn't have a few copies of the first chapters of the Five Phase Method, wasting space. The value of the Five Phase Method wasn't high. It was only the chapters for the Qi Gathering realm, first of all, and it was a very middling method. Buying a copy could be as cheap as five to ten spirit stones.

This was already a ridiculous amount for a mortal artist to charge someone, but it didn't factor in that just having the method wouldn't be enough. If you could just read a book and be a cultivator, anyone could do it. The only reason that worked for me was that I already had the foundation of a wizard and could sense and manipulate Qi, or the energy of heaven and earth—what I called magical energy back then.

I asked around, and the old geezer really seemed to be the best in the city, not just in the pure attainments of calligraphy but in teaching it to disciples, too.

So I agreed, with the caveat that I would be leaving the city in a couple of months and that if his grandson hadn't awakened his mind to sense Qi in that time, then tough luck. Privately, I also wanted to use the guy as a bit of a guinea pig. Otherwise, I think I would have shifted to the second-best calligrapher in the city, who merely wanted several hundred taels of gold.

The prospective new cultivator was, even now, in one of the rooms of the villa, sitting criss-cross applesauce in the middle of one of my ritual circles. I wasn't quite good enough with Abjurations to create a field or shield that trapped Qi outside to create a true low Qi zone, but I was trying to cheat by using Magic Aura to hide the presence of all Qi in the room.

All the Qi in the room was hidden, except for any in a tiny secondary ritual circle which used a low-grade spirit stone to pulsate, slowly ejecting Qi every few seconds. He was supposed to focus his senses on this tiny circle, trying to sense the Qi being ejected. My experiment was... could you illusion someone into enlightenment? I thought you definitely could.

The ultimate attainment in the Dao of Illusion, I felt, would be creating reality itself! Haha, that felt profound just thinking about it.

My temporary calligraphy teacher had been surprised at how well I had improved in just a few lessons, and I had sniffed delicately and told him that I was just unfamiliar with brushes. That didn't make any sense to him, but he let it go.

In my last couple of lessons, he stopped praising me and said that while my mechanical skill was improving and even approaching good, the things I wrote lacked heart. That I was like a scribe, merely attempting to copy everything exactly.

That caused me to grind my teeth a bit because I was a scribe! That had been exactly how I was treating it. Still, he said that I might have the mechanical skills of a master of calligraphy in a couple of months before we left the city, but he would never be able to actually certify me as that unless I could make a work that wasn't, in his words, "dead."

I was alright with that since just skills were mainly what I was looking for, but I decided to try to surprise the old geezer if I could, doubling the time I spent closeted in a room with the four treasures of the study, namely brush, ink, paper and stones used to make traditional calligraphy.

I shifted my sleep schedule some, too, in order to cultivate in the middle of the night, either in the courtyard of the villa or even on the villa's roof. I got much better results when I cultivated in actual moonlight. It would be even better if I were naked and dancing like I was Eilistraee, but I wouldn't be willing to do that unless I had a large illusion formation or ritual hiding myself from prying eyes.

And like the swole bros in the gym, I had achieved gains, reaching the second level last night. I could now easily lift my own body weight with one hand, which was pretty impressive, even if my body didn't weigh that much.

I continued to repeat each move with the sword, moving as fluidly through the set of katas as I could. Xiao Li claimed that there were thirteen fundamental sword moves. That any of the hundreds of thousands or millions of sword moves in the world could be boiled down to a variant of one of these thirteen, and that was what I was practising over and over.

I wasn't sure he was right, although he had a very high confidence about him. To me, it seemed like an axiomatic claim. I thought if you could boil all ways to move a sword down to thirteen fundamental moves, you could also boil the thirteen fundamental moves down to a single "ultimate move", which encapsulated all possible sword moves, namely, hold the sword in your hand and move your arm.

Granted, that "ultimate" move wasn't very useful, so he might be correct. These thirteen were at least individually useful.

In mid-cut, Xiao Li ran into the courtyard, looking exuberant. Rather than stopping immediately, I finished that set of katas. Rather than look offended, he seemed approving. I finished the last move, exhaled and then sheathed the weapon before setting it aside.

I took a look at him and smiled, "Congratulations!" I offered, genuinely. I could detect his fourth-level cultivation from here. Also, his energies felt different. While before, he felt like a raging bonfire that might burn out of control, now it was a bit more nuanced, like the hot flames inside a jet engine's combustion can, constrained yet ready to be put to useful purpose.

I nodded, satisfied. It was a good change. He grinned and said, "Same to you!" I had been practising the same kata for over two hours, and while I might be a lady now, I still sweat—especially in the rays of the hot mid-day sun, which I didn't like as much as I used to. I decided I needed a shower.

"Who's the dude in the empty servant's quarters?" Xiao Li asked curiously but continued, "I want to talk about when we want to leave this city too."

I held my hand up, "He's the grandson of my calligraphy tutor. He's the best Grandmaster in calligraphy around; everyone agrees. I said I would try to help him open his senses to Qi in exchange for him helping my deficiencies in this art. I want to study talismans. However, let me go clean up and change clothes. Then we can talk."

He nodded, and I proceeded into my room. There was running water in the villa, but it came from a cistern on the roof. This would have been a perfect place to use the strong right humerus of skeleton-provided free labour, but instead, I found the man, a mortal, who managed the properties and paid him some gold to get strapping young men to fill it daily.

Still, the water was cold, as was the shower. However, I found it quite brisk and refreshing, which was also different from my past life, where you wouldn't be able to pay me to take a cold shower. It was just one more datum, along with many more that I had noticed, like the variable effects of some of my spells, that showed me ways this world and even myself were different.

I didn't think I would be uncomfortable outside in the snow, even if all I was wearing were these thin silk gowns—I really was the Icy Beauty now! I didn't know much about Chinese culture before I started living in this new universe, but I seemed to recall from anime and manga that I had read that I could pretend to be a Yuki-onna with fairly good results.

After finishing drying and rebraiding my hair, I found Xiao Li in one of the large rooms near the kitchen. He was scarfing down a rice dish like he hadn't eaten in days. Perhaps he hadn't.

He looked up at me and asked, grinning mischievously, "So, how was it?"

"How was ... what?" I replied, arching a single eyebrow in a gesture that I had practised in front of the mirror for a while. I had gotten deeply jealous at the zither MILF's ability to make practically any facial expression she wanted at will. I wasn't at her level, but now, at least, I could do the fundamental Spock expression.

He sat his chopsticks down and said, "The Frolics! Specifically, the girls at the Frolics!"

I tried to stop myself, but my mouth twitched into an amused smile before I could get it under control. I affected a fairly good glide over to the table and sat nearby as he continued, "I still don't see why I shouldn't go there."

Mrs Mei popped up, exasperated, "You're an exceptional talent with no backing; they'll turn you into a Furnace!"

He snorted, "The same could be said about Wen. Why is she safe and I am not?"

"Although she has made a lot of progress in changing the aspect of her qi to something that is pure and based on the Lunar star, she still has and always will have a strong well of ghostly yin qi in her essence. That's not compatible with life. At best, it would be a hindrance to anyone who wanted to make her a Furnace. At worst, it might kill them," Mrs Mei replied evenly with a tone that expressed that she would be rolling her eyes if she had any.

Xiao Li didn't have anything to say to that, merely, "Oh."

I chuckled and smirked, teasing him, "I'm not sure what you think I did there, but the women are everything you're thinking and more probably." I then considered what Mrs Mei had said and commented, "I suppose that means I have a pretty good chance to become an actual ghost cultivator if I die sometime." Also, the fact that the zither MILF couldn't drain me like a Capri Sun gave me ideas that I immediately suppressed.

I heard a snort, "Yes, you could say that. If you had stayed in that village permanently as you had planned, you'd just have woken up one day as a ghost. You wouldn't have even died so much as just transmuted when you passed the tipping point."

While that sounded cool as hell, actually, I kind of liked having a physical body and being considered both alive and a human. One of my ears twitched like a tiny radar dish, tracking a sound. Well... human-ish, I allowed.

"How much longer do you have on the lease for this place?" I asked, curiously.

He hummed, did some math on his fingers and then said, "About nine weeks, I suppose." He then frowned, "I doubt they'll give me a refund of the unused time, either."

I nodded, "Then I propose we stay here for the rest of the lease term. We don't have anywhere to be until a year from now, right?" That got his nod, "Unless you think it will take longer than ten months to travel to the Silver Serenity school?"

He shook his head, "It's about fifty thousand li away, but it shouldn't take more than four months. We'll have to travel to the capital and then pay for passage on an airship going further. They travel really fast, so it shouldn't take long."

Only fifty thousand li, which was close enough to an imperial mile that they used to call this unit of measurement "Chinese miles" back on Earth before China switched almost entirely to the metric system.

When I tried to ask how big this realm was, I couldn't get any answer. The most useful answer was Mrs Mei, who said that I could explore it for a million years and still not see half of it.

The idea of what had to be hypersonic airships appealed to me, and I said wistfully, "I want an airship."

Xiao Li nodded earnestly, saying wistfully, "Yes. Many people say the best thing about establishing your violet palace and entering the Foundation establishment is the ability to utilise flying treasures." I had been amazed at the speed we ran when I was only at the first level of Qi Gathering. We must have averaged fifty kilometres an hour for most of the day. Back then, I wasn't too shocked at my initial strength and speed increases at first until I started running with a purpose, and even then, the increase in my purely physical endurance was out of this world. Still, it was nowhere near hypersonic airship speed!

He then paused and nodded, "Sure. Let's stay here. One city is as good as another, I 'spose. I can work on my cultivation and sword arts, too."

I nodded, glad I could continue seeing the calligraphy geezer for now. I produced a sheet of paper and slid it over to him, saying, "I've considered trying to teach you a few of my spells." I didn't think he would ever have the temperament to study wizardry seriously, but learning a few cantrips was something even regular people often did.

I had been producing a syllabus for two cantrips I wanted to teach him. Fire Bolt and Lightning Lure. The latter was a combination of damage and control cantrip, causing a lash of lightning energy to ensnare someone within a couple of dozen feet of you, which will then yank them towards you like Scorpion from Mortal Kombat. It was a surprisingly good spell for someone who used a sword, as you could combo it by stabbing or chopping them in twain as they flew towards you.

They were also both evocations, which would make the syllabus smaller. Further, both fire and lightning were considered very yang-heavy energies, which definitely suited both him and his cultivation method.

However, at the last moment, I thought about how Mrs Mei told me that Xiao Li had an unusual talent with the sword, and I considered other cantrips that could utilise his monstrous sword talent. It would serve as an experiment, too. Would he learn these sword-based cantrips first? I thought he might. So, at the last minute, I added on Booming Blade, Sword Burst and Blade Ward. As a final whim, I also added True Strike.

On the list I had written Xiao Li, I had changed the name of two of the cantrips to Booming Sword and Sword Ward, too, just in case that would affect his comprehension of them.

In the actual tabletop game, True Strike was one of, if not the worst, cantrips in the game, and this was mainly because of the turn-based combat system. It allowed you to use your action to indicate a target, and then, on your next turn, you would get Advantage to attack them. There was no way that wasting one turn only for Advantage on the next was useful. Mathematically, just attacking twice, once each turn, let you roll the same number of attack dice and also gave you the chance to hit twice if you succeeded in each roll.

However, reality was different. In Merildwen's world, and also I suspected here, True Strike was very useful because if you were good, you could cast it so fast that you could use it as you were attacking. The mechanics of the way it worked were also different. We obviously didn't roll dice here. Unless the Heavenly Dao did it for me, I supposed.

When cast, for a short period of time, the spell gave you a one-second's glimpse into the future, but only the future of where your sword will be.

A second is not a lot, but when you're in the midst of an attack, a second is a lot. Not only that but knowing how your blade might be parried in a second is usually enough to twist out of it and score a hit. I had the feeling this cantrip would be OP enough that I had started practising with it more myself and included it in my sword katas.

"I'm going to try to teach you these six spells. I'm not sure you'll be able to learn all of them, but any that you do should be quite useful," I told him, "But there is a fair bit of things you need to learn first. So, we'll set aside some time for lessons. Also, I will combine my calligraphy practice with lectures. It will help me ignore distractions while practising my art."

There was also something that I knew that Merildwen hadn't quite grasped yet, and it was that there were few things that accelerated your learning about a subject, like attempting to teach it to another. This was one of the reasons these cantrips were mostly in schools that I struggled with, mostly Evocation and Divination for True Strike.

He read the list and details about each of the cantrips and looked stoked, saying wistfully, "True Strike and Booming Sword sound amazing." I nodded, figuring he'd be most impressed with the ones that directly affected his swordplay.

He was less enthused when I showed him the syllabus. He looked like a beat dog. I wasn't sure why. I didn't have any of these books, much less versions in a language he could read. I would have to read them from memory. All he had to do was listen, so this was a lot harder on me.

And woe to him if he wasted my time and didn't pay attention.

---

I looked at the second version of my final piece of calligraphy that I was going to give to my calligraphy tutor and nodded.

He had said that my works were dead, so the first version of what I was privately thinking as my graduation thesis work was a single character. Not only did I attempt to empty my mind of everything except the concept I was thinking of, but I cheated by infusing ghostly yin qi into the ink.

The single character? Death.

I intended this to be ironic. Since he called my art pieces "dead", right? However, after looking at it when I finished, I realised that this work would be harmful to the health of regular people if they were continually exposed to it—kind of like low-level radiation.

It wasn't intense, but it gave off a cool, deathly aura. I felt that if the old codger approved of it, then he should immediately burn it. He might really die in his sleep if he hung it up in his bedroom.

So, instead, I tried to make a different one. I still cheated, but this time, I was very careful to only use the pure yin qi that I cultivated, not the qi that welled up inside me naturally, and I thought strongly of snow on the winter equinox.

I decided on a simple couplet-style poem. I hadn't heard of this style of poetry before arriving in this universe, but I found it kind of interesting. They could be devilishly hard to come up with.

This one said, "In our chill heaven, this young maiden comes hither in wind and snow." It also subtly radiated an energy, but this one was a healthy chill. If anything, it could serve as a useful air conditioning unit in these hot summer days.

I asked his grandson about it, who had succeeded in becoming aware of Qi and even had grasped three whisps of it within himself. It was good progress, all things considered, so I considered that experiment a success.

He grinned and said to bring both of them, including the Death one. I was curious but complied. He followed me to his Grandpa's house. The old man didn't even turn to look at us as we entered his study, as he sat in the middle of the floor with a brush and a blank sheet of rice paper.

"Are you finally gonna stop bothering me, you little brat?" he asked in a way that truly old people only could, not caring that I was a cultivator or my station at all or probably if he lived or died. Still, I quietly shifted the sheets of rice paper so that "death" was on top again. If he was going to be a shit, as usual, then he could look at the death calligraphy first.

I nodded, "Yes, soon. I brought you these two works as going away presents." The man snorted but finally turned and motioned that I should hand them over, which I did.

Seeing the giant character for Death and how unearthly it felt, he cackled, "I ain't dying any time soon, little girl! Sorry! This almost gets a pass. I'll keep it, though. I know just the old bastard to send this to; I hope he puts it up in his bedroom." He mirrored some of my earlier thoughts exactly there, which made my mouth twitch.

He shifted it to the side, looked at the next one, and nodded once, "A poet, you ain't. But it's still heads and shoulders above the claptrap I see all these silkpants write. That's not a high bar, though, girl. The skill is good, and I can almost detect a hint of emotion in it, hidden underneath whatever magical claptrap you did to cheat." He exhaled loudly and was quiet for a moment before sighing, "Alright. A pass. I'll hang it in my parlour as an example of one my disciples' work."

I grinned and said slyly, "Disciple greets Master."

He brandished his brush at me, waving it like a cavalry sabre over his head, "Git! Git!" He half-chased me out and slammed the door in both of our faces.

His grandson grinned, "He's actually quite impressed. It took me five years to reach the same level you did in two months." The young man had been on cloud nine since he had managed to seize the first whisp of Qi and start circulating it around.

I chuckled, embarrassed. However, I had nothing but free time and had attainments in what might be described as a similar field, scrivening. The mechanical techniques had been pretty simple to learn. It was just trying to "put my heart into it", as the old man said, that took effort. I wasn't even sure I had done so, to be honest.

But I had reached the stage where the five lessons I took from one of the talisman artists at the Frolics were not wasted, and I was pretty sure I could start creating the lowest-level talismans reliably and without wasting materials on my own. My ultimate goal was to try to create talismans that duplicated the effect of magic scrolls.

I had already created two prototype magic scrolls that anyone with Qi could use, but they both took a lot of time and effort to accomplish. It was rather convoluted and wouldn't have had a very long shelf life. If Xiao Li hadn't used those scrolls, they would have become useless in a few weeks.

Talismans were designed from the ground up to be used by anyone, even if they didn't know the first thing about the effects generated, and would be kept on a shelf indefinitely.

The trick with creating a magic scroll was precision. If you made even a minor mistake, it wouldn't work. Talismans were kind of different, where the most important thing was understanding or comprehension, which you then impressed into the talisman. The names of the professions, scribes and artists could infer this. It wasn't that precision was something you could just throw away in talisman artistry, either, but it was much less important. Two talismans that did the same thing didn't need to look exactly the same as if they were an electrical circuit diagram.

They generally had to use the same characters, but how they were presented could be up to the individual talisman artist. That said, my book suggested that the publicly available talismans in its pages had already been refined over millions of years of experience and suggested that the way they were presented was the optimal presentation, all things being equal.

The effects of low-level talismans weren't as varied or useful as the spells I knew. There were talismans for attack, talismans for defence, and precious few for actual utility. Occasionally, there would be escape talismans, but at this low level, they were nothing to write home about.

Perhaps this changed when they got more complicated, as I hadn't really read about many talismans that were equivalent to Foundation establishment spells, but all of the ones I read about were either in my book or referenced in it, with a couple of exceptions, were just bigger attacks, or better defence.

While I was quite interested in the defensive talismans since I had the idea that they might be better than the arcane equivalent spells I had access to, I had the idea to master a number of utility talismans that I could construct using low-level materials that would have outsized effects or even some offensive ones where Weave spells might have a niche that was better than anything around.

Magic Missile, for example, never missed, and it did about as much damage as being shot with a crossbow. It's easy to look at it when you're playing a game with dice, but even just a first-level spell like that can make a disgusting ruin of a person, especially if it lands somewhere sensitive, like their head or throat. Indeed, it probably wouldn't hurt a cultivator too much, even in the middle of the Qi Gathering realm, but that was still quite useful.

Arriving back at Xiao Li's villa, I found that he had already packed up his mobile alchemy set. That reminded me that I would have to leave most of my wardrobe behind. I'd have to take at most one other outfit. We ran too fast to utilise the Big Chungus'. It hurt to leave them, but I was absolutely positive I could improve them in the future.

Necromancy was a deep well! It could always be improved. I hadn't even animated an actual cultivator's corpse yet, just the skeletons of zombies.

I found Xiao Li in the courtyard, and he was methodically going through the steps necessary to cast Booming Blade. He could actually do it now, but it took him about fifteen to twenty minutes, so it was entirely useless for the moment.

"Do you want to set off today, then?" he asked, curious, and looked outside, "It is a bit late in the afternoon already."

I shook my head, "No. The day after tomorrow. I have something to do all day tomorrow in the city."

He shrugged and said, "That's fine. We don't have to be out of here for four more days. What're you going to be busy with tomorrow?"

I narrowed my eyes, "Don't worry about that. I'll see you tomorrow night, probably, or maybe the next morning, and we can head out."

He looked rather curious but didn't inquire further. I left him there and moved purposefully to my next destination, walking past a group of rich-looking young men loitering in the antechamber. The hostess girl recognised me and asked curiously, "Another calligraphy lesson, Young Miss?" Here, in front of regular people, they wouldn't say talismans, obviously.

I shook my head and asked, "I was wondering if Liu Ruxue had the time to talk with me briefly."

The hostess squinted and handed me a small token, "I'll inquire if she is available. Here, go up to the same booth you visited the first time."

I nodded and retraced my way back upstairs into the opera house upper deck and found the private booth I had used a couple of months ago. They didn't offer me refreshments this time, so I assumed that the delay would be pretty short.

And I was right. Just a few minutes later, the zither MILF glided back into the booth with the same va-va-voom she had last time. A smile and half-lidded eyes regarded me, "Well, hello again, little flower. I hear you're leaving the city pretty soon."

I wasn't that surprised that she had really accurate intelligence assets in this city, especially focused on wandering cultivators. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the allegedly neutral housing Xiao Li bought was actually owned by her or one of the other two cultivation groups in the city.

I stopped digressing and fidgeting and nodded, deciding to just shoot my shot, "Yes... I was wondering, though... Is that offer for free... uhh.. training... still on the table?"

The zither MILF's laughter as she took my hand and guided me to her boudoir sounded like wind chimes.

 

[SpiraSpira]

I discovered that the nuance between training and being trained was completely, utterly and beautifully different. After an entirely pleasant day and two nights of the latter, I finally managed to leave the Frolics of the Lunar Bunny for, perhaps, the last time. At least, this local franchise, anyway.

I had to decline another offer to stay, this time as the zither MILF's pet, but I was nobody's pet—well, at least, not on a full-time basis! I had a lot more ambitions these days, and most of them couldn't be achieved if I wiled away my days hugging someone's thigh. That wasn't the way to master the mystic arts.

The weekly Sending from Meril's parents had arrived at a very inappropriate time last night, so all I could send back was that I couldn't talk right then. That said, I was happy to hear that they had finally discovered some signs of civilisation. They had discovered themselves in an arctic wilderness after the teleportation mishap, and from their perspective, it had only been six days, while it had been closer to five months for me.

Fortunately, they were well prepared to survive in almost any environment, no matter how harsh it appeared on the surface. Both of my parents could cast level six spells, so while they weren't quite capable of casting Magnificent Mansion just yet, to my mom's continual complaints, they were capable of casting the fifth level spell that was quite similar, if a little more subdued, called Humble Home.

As for me, I couldn't even cast Tiny Hut yet, although I was hopeful for the future with how I have been practising my evocations. Casting third-level evocations would be a good milestone because I wanted to be able to cast Sending back at them. I'm sure they wouldn't appreciate my bothering them twenty-plus times a day normally, but it would be much easier to tell them the story of my travels rather than having to count on the ability to reply to their Sendings.

I was really surprised such magic worked in alternate dimensions or wherever we were. I already knew, or at least suspected, that sending or receiving matter from my current world back to Borea was difficult. From my engineering background, I didn't understand why it would be easy to send information and hard to send matter, as I considered them fundamentally similar actions, but I had never been an expert on physics, aside from the practical applications of nuclear fission.

I knew I wasn't really their daughter, not really, but I was a bit attached to them anyway.

I got back to Li's villa, and he was already outside waiting for me. I smiled at him and waved, and he almost flinched and took a step back, frowning at me in deep thought. He asked, "What's wrong?"

"Nothing. Why? Let me go get my things, and then we can leave. I'll buy you some breakfast at the shop you like for the trip," I offered him, confused.

As I passed him, I heard him mutter, "...never just smiles. What happened? Why is she happy?"

It took some self-discipline, but I ignored those remarks, proceeding into the villa and getting the backpack I had already packed. I glanced around, frowning, and searched the villa for a couple of minutes before finding my familiar Crow. I had shifted his form into a black cat, and ever since then, he spent almost all of the day sleeping in sunspots.

A raven didn't fly fast enough to keep up with us even months ago, but I had built a little cat carrier onto the top of my backpack, and I shoved him inside. I could have unsummoned him, but I felt it likely that every time I did that, I likely got a new soul acting as my familiar when I summoned them again.

If they were sent back to Hell, then the time dilation was so extreme that it might be likely that they had finished their sentence and had been reincarnated by the time I called them back, especially if they were taken from the first few layers of the Hells here. Unlike in Merildwen's life, where each layer of the Hell had close to comparable, just different, quality of afterlife, the Hells here were more like Dante's Inferno, where the deeper you get, the shittier the experience.

I had taken Mrs Mei's advice to heart, so it wasn't as though I was pitying Crow; it was just that I already had a working relationship with him, so I felt like I didn't want to bother breaking in a new familiar.

After that, we left. I didn't lie; I bought an extravagant meal at one of the restaurants operated by the Zhang Immortal family. They were one of the three cultivation groups in the city. It cost a spirit stone for both of us but featured meat from demonic beasts and spirit rice, both ingredients that had a large amount of Qi.

Not only that, they didn't suffer from the fact that regular food tended to have impurities of various kinds, spiritual and mundane, that you had to spend a little time every day eliminating before you started cultivating.

Xiao Li was easy to please, and this meal would have him on cloud nine for the rest of the day. I even gave Crow a small bite of the stir-fried meat.

The way we travelled reminded me a lot of the way ninjas in Naruto travelled, except we didn't run with our arms held behind us. But we did run about as fast, much, much faster than I could have before, and fast enough to be barely visible if a regular person was watching.

Even the terrain was somewhat similar to what I would expect to be around the leaf village, with forests of various kinds being the norm. While before, we cut through the wilderness here, there was no real need to do so. Travelling between cities, especially when one of them was the Imperial capital, there would always be roads, and in this case rivers, too.

The Winding Rivers Realm wasn't named for nothing, after all, and it was common to see small boats and barges floating down the multiple rivers that they passed by, through and along.

My clothes weren't made of the silk of special spirit-worms, either, so they were only as strong as regular silk. Travelling through and near forests at high speed invariably caused damage, which I had to fix each time we stopped for the day with repeated castings of the Mending cantrip, to the point where Xiao Li saw me and eventually asked me to do the same, which I agreed to do as it didn't take me much time at all.

However, one evening, I suddenly frowned as I finished using Mending and Prestidigitation to not only fix but clean his spare set of clothes, realising that I was basically washing and mending his clothes for him, which pissed me off. I tossed the cleaned and repaired clothes at his head, which caught him off guard and almost caused him to trip into the small campfire we had created.

He seemed confused and asked, exasperatedly, "What did I do?!" I just gave him a snort and ordered that he make dinner this evening. I'd flavour it with Prestidigitation, especially if it was Xiao Li's cooking, but there was no way I was cooking, too!

---

We passed through two more cities on our way to the capital but only stayed in every two days a piece—one day to rest and the next to buy supplies and sell anything we'd picked up on the trip. Xiao Li seemed to be a magnet for odd demonic beasts to attack or stumble across strange herbs or even spiritual plants to the point where we would make a reasonably good profit just travelling from one place to another if the rate of encounters didn't ebb.

"This city was even worse than the last one," Xiao Li said as we departed its walled gates.

I hummed and nodded, seeing a long line of refugees waiting at the gates. I indicated the line and asked, "You mean the refugees we saw in the city?" The last city had a few, and it really was weird that the closer we got to the Imperial capital, the worse the quality of life was becoming, to the point where we were seeing refugees.

However, there was currently a Civil War being fought in this country, so it wasn't entirely unreasonable, I felt. I was pretty lucky in that the edge of the country where I teleported to was on the very opposite side of the nation to the provinces that were attempting to rebel, otherwise, I might have been caught up in it earlier.

Xiao Li shook his head, then paused and made a shrug, "Yes, no. It's more that it feels sick to me."

I raised an eyebrow and opened my senses to the area around us for a moment before I shrugged, "I can't feel anything myself."

We were far enough away that Mrs Mei popped up, slightly unsure, saying, "I think Little Li is feeling the Dragon Qi in the cities."

Dragon Qi? What the fuck was that? Were there dragons around here?! I queried the obvious question, and Mrs Mei replied, "Dragon Qi is the energy of a nation—a kind of metaphysical life's blood. He feels as though it is sick because the nation is in turmoil and its fate is up in the air. It's unusual that he can feel it, though. Usually, you have to become a leader of a lot of people or be born to a royal family before you can."

I grinned. This sounded like an obvious plot hook. If this were a novel and not real life, it would turn out that Xiao Li's mother, who married into the Xiao family, was secretly a princess of a large dynasty! We both asked a few more questions as we ran.

It turned out that if you had access to the Dragon Qi of a nation, you could be empowered to the point where it would be difficult to face you in the same cultivation realm. Xiao Li asked the obvious question, "Why don't all cultivators create some sort of country, then?"

"Because it takes a huge amount of time! It's seldom worth it! Why waste time managing a group of mortals when you can just continue cultivating and reach a higher realm with the time you would have wasted?" she asked exasperatedly.

I nodded slowly. That was true. It wasn't like everyone was good at leading people. In fact, most cultivators had very below-average leadership and management skills, from what I could tell. I doubted that you would get many benefits from the Dragon Qi if you were just notionally in charge or were a national mascot, either, but that was just my guess.

Xiao Li noticed it first, slowing for a moment before saying, "Something's a matter up ahead. I can smell a lot of blood. Let's go check it out."

I blinked, and then sniffed delicately, and admitted that I did sense the energy of death in the air. Xiao Li picked up his pace and I followed it was no time at all before we arrived at what could be characterised as the site of a massacre.

Most of the people, who appeared to be villagers and refugees, were already dead, and there were three men who radiated malevolence standing amidst the corpses, which had to number at least in the low hundreds.

One of them was older, looking middle-aged, with dark hair with specks of grey intermixed in it. He held a war cleaver-style sabre in his hand and everything about him screamed villain. The other two were younger, but they were all dressed in similar Daoist robes, coloured in bright crimson.

I clicked my mouth closed and prepared to cast Hypnotic Pattern. They were all cultivators, and I was unable to see through the strength of the older one. The other two were in the fourth and third level, respectively.

I knew Xiao Li liked the honourable thing and all, but they were bunched up enough that I intended to cast Hypnotic Pattern as soon as they turned to confront us. Certainly, Li would challenge them before the inevitable fight. I didn't think for a second that he would do the wise thing and back up and allow me to cast Invisibility on both of us so we could flee the area.

I felt that since the fight was inevitable, it would be best to catch them all with my strongest crowd-control ability right from the start; then we could focus fire each one one at a time, defeating them in detail.

However, I was mistaken about what Xiao Li intended. Instead of stopping to confront the murderers, who were even now absorbing tendrils of blood from their victims using some sort of magic spell, he screamed and leapt at them with his sword drawn, causing me to gape in surprise.

The three men were surprised too—enough to leap away to dodge Xiao Li, who caused a small crater when he landed. This made me feel a little bit better, as the old man couldn't have been in the Foundation Establishment if he hadn't noticed Xiao Li's approach. However, the fact that Xiao Li made them scatter and ruined my CC ambush made me suck my teeth with an audible "Tsk."

My crowd control spells hit way above their weight class, and I thought we could have instantly solved his battle if Xiao Li had kept them bunched up, but I neglected to send him a Message to tell him my plan, so it was partly my fault, too.

I kept most of my material components in my hammerspace so I could summon them at need, so I instantly caused a gilded skull to appear in my hand, held and hidden behind my back, as I shifted from crowd control to battle mode. I cast Summon Undead. Rather than animating an existing corpse, this one summoned an undead entity from the aether, and I could pick amongst a small group of them.

The only one that would be useful or quick enough to help me in this upcoming fight was the incorporeal one, though—the undead spirit. The rest were way too slow. I summoned it directly underneath me, hidden by two metres of dirt. Although I hid the summoning, the local Qi was still perturbed by my casting, which caused the older enemy to glance at me momentarily. I took the time to dump my backpack on the ground, getting a yowl from Crow in his carrier.

The three men glanced at each other and seemed more amused than anything at the interruption of Xiao Li. The older man said, "Another dog of the Imperial court. I'll take care of him. Junior Brothers, subdue his woman."

The two other cultivators nodded and laughed in a malicious way that promised that I, and probably any other female, really, really didn't want to be "subdued" by them.

I narrowed my eyes, sword already in my hand as well. However, if they were intent on subduing me and not killing me outright, then I could take them away from this strong guy, who might have some way to injure or kill me quickly. I wasn't his match, as he had to be at least in the upper levels of our realm.

I leapt away, using my recently learned but not entirely mastered Flutter Steps footwork ability and managed to move quite a bit away before I had to stop and face them. I had plans for how to fight them and hopefully win, although they weren't making it as easy as I liked. They didn't bunch up so that I could still utilise Hypnotic Pattern; instead, one approached me from each direction, obviously assuming I still intended to flee, cutting off my avenues of retreat as if I was frightened prey, slowly approaching me.

I was glad for this because not immediately attacking has allowed my summoned undead spirit to catch up with me, moving underneath the ground.

"Hey, hey now, little girl, you should just surrender, now, when—" I interrupted him, motioning at the approaching speaker, the third-level fighter with a sword that seemed to pulse malevolence in time to his heartbeat. It was an obvious spirit tool, even if probably a low-grade one, but it would make mince of my mundane sword if I tried to fight him.

As I pointed at him and gestured upwards, I lifted my hand in an obvious order. The undead spirit I summoned came up from underneath the ground, almost on top of him and attacked, getting a good swipe in before being fended off by the man's sword.

Both men took a step back, and the seemingly unarmed fourth-level cultivator that had been approaching me from the other direction hissed, "Ghost cultivator! Why the fuck are you here bothering us? We don't get involved with your business!" His voice was annoyed, like a cop who set up a sting operation only to arrest another cop who then tried to arrest him.

Instead of replying, I felt for a thin rod of metal in my hand and spoke the words to Hold Person, causing the man with the sword to freeze, paralysed. Then, both Shadows leapt out of my shadow and wrapped around him like snakes, beginning to drain his strength. I considered him a bigger threat, even if he was a stage weaker than the other man, as the other man was seemingly unarmed. That might have been a mistake, but I didn't have time to really think about it.

The unarmed man didn't give me a chance to try to kite him at all, leaping at me with a snap kick. I managed to cast True Strike in time to help me fend him off for a second, getting my sword in the way of his kick but ended up getting my sword kicked out of my hand with a crack and spike of pain that indicated a surely broken wrist.

I didn't even have time to cry out in pain as the man followed up with a palm strike to my solar plexus, my breath escaping in a hiss as I flew out several metres from the strike, slamming into the ground and rolling end over end for at least another metre.

The only reason I was saved from a follow-on combo while I was momentarily dazed was the incorporeal ghost attacked the man, and he had to spend a couple of seconds to destroy it with several quick punches that glowed with Qi. However, that gave me time enough to get to my feet and, shakily, cast Rime's Binding Ice, which exploded outwards from me in all directions, including the approaching enemy. The sharp shards of ice cut him in several places, and he winced, backing up a step.

That gave me enough space to follow on with another cast of Hold Person for the second time, and I was gratified that he was paralysed, too. I'd have been in a tight spot if he made the saving throw, probably reduced to kiting him with Web, combined with Ray of Frost or Toll The Dead. I spit out some blood, as I felt like I had several broken ribs and possibly damaged organs. Still, I had to move quickly—he wouldn't stay down long.

I walked out of the ice explosion, directly for the paralysed man, and grabbed him by the throat, casting Vampiric Touch. All of my ice spells had an outside impact and were easier to cast. It was how I was able to cast the last spell, even though I sucked at Evocation. The same was true, and even more so with necromantic spells.

Normally, this would have dealt some damage and healed me a little bit; however, this was the first time I had cast it on a human, and the effects on the fourth-level Qi-gathering cultivator were outsized, too. He wilted in real-time, dehydrating like a stop-motion video of a grape turning into a raisin. My own bones in my wrist snapped back into place and reformed with the distressing sound of Rice Krispies, although it wasn't painful.

Blinking, I felt in perfect health. Perhaps better than perfect health! I glanced over at the other enemy, who had fallen to the ground once my concentration shifted to the new casting of the enchantment, but he seemed so weak that he could barely crawl, trying to weakly fend off the two Shadows, which had already got his number. I kicked his sword out of his hand and let the Shadows finish him off.

One of the shadows seemed injured, so I drew it back into my amulet to recuperate while the other disappeared back home into my shadow to hide as normal.

I was a bit worried about Xiao Li, so I didn't have a lot of time, but I spared a couple of seconds to pull out my ritual dagger and snag the loosening souls of each downed man, before putting my understanding of Flutter Steps to the limit to return back from where I came.

---

Xiao Li winced as Mei Wen darted away with the two men chasing her. He wanted to help her, but he couldn't even take his eyes off this man. Otherwise, he might die right here, immediately. His enemy was four stages higher than him, in the eighth stage of the Qi gathering realm, and furthermore was an obvious demonic cultivator.

They generally had strength that was a little bit higher than their cultivation, not to mention weird and fey abilities. That said, almost universally, their talent was lower. Otherwise, why would you need to take a slantwise path? This guy looked fifty years old, for example.

"Don't worry about her; she can take care of herself," Grandma Mei said to him mentally.

Xiao Li nodded and said, "You really fucked me, stranger, by calling Mei Wen my woman. Don't expect any mercy." He wasn't intending to offer any in the first place, but he especially would not after the man had said that. Mei Wen was not likely to forget his words, and there was no way she would wash his clothes tonight with her magic.

The demonic cultivator snorted and took a step towards him with that large sabre raised.

Xiao Li brought his sword up into the ready position for his self-created sword style and struck first, attempting to get a measure on the man. His initial thrust was beat aside, but Xiao Li didn't leave an obvious opening for his enemy to take advantage of.

Xiao Li nodded, satisfied. This wasn't suicidal at all. The man's sabre techniques were nothing to write home about, and he didn't have that much mastery over them anyway. He might be stronger, but Xiao Li was better.

The fight then continued in earnest, with blows struck, parried, and occasionally hitting home. The enemy was just bullying Xiao Li with his larger cultivation base, strength and speed, and it was everything he could do to avoid dying in each exchange. Already, he had taken a couple of light wounds, but so had the demonic man. The recently masted True Strike spell was invaluable, helping not only in his attacks as was obvious, but also in defence, allowing him to make a strike with little avenue to counter-attack.

Xiao Li wanted to end the fight as quickly as possible, but he started to feel that his only hope was to drag it out and expose an unforced error on the less skilled man and then seize that opportunity. Every now and then, the old man held out a hand and cast a demonic spell that caused a whip of liquid blood to lash out, but Xiao Li saw it coming each time, leaping backwards and dodging the spell, lashing out with Fire Bolt at the same time.

He wasn't to the point of mastering that spell yet, as it took a couple of seconds to cast. Mei Wen said he should be able to cast it instantly, but the old man's blood whip was even more unwieldy. As such, every time he noticed the man casting it, which was distinctive, he had enough time to make some space and cast a Fire Bolt. It invariably caused the man to have to defend against the flame attack using the whip, dispersing the flame with a hiss of boiled blood. Both spells ended up being a wash, with neither doing any damage.

Xiao Li was perfectly willing to continue exchanging moves this way, as dragging things out favoured him, but the old demon growled and rushed at him, deciding to settle things with brute strength and speed, just what Xiao Li didn't want.

After several more moves, he was on the backfoot with another wound to his side that was weeping blood. However, he had finally noticed a flaw in the enemy's brutish sabre techniques, so he felt good about this next clash.

But, before the enemy lashed out again, he suddenly briefly glanced behind Xiao Li and frowned, leaping out of the way just as three glowing darts would have impacted him. Xiao Li grinned, having recognised that spell. It was Mei Wen's Magic Missile, and he knew, unlike the old demon, that it couldn't be dodged.

His enemy was surprised that the darts just shifted trajectories and started seeking him again. He lashed out with this sabre twice, destroying two darts and grunted as the third impacted his shoulder.

For Xiao Li, that was all he needed. He finished the spellform in his mind, throwing his non-dominant hand out as he cast Lightning Lure. A lash of electrical energy wrapped around his enemy and then yanked them rapidly towards him.

Xiao Li was ready. The Gentleman's Sword, first strike: Unhurried and unbothered.

The war cleaver fell from the dead hands of the old demon, impacting the ground shortly before the man's severed head.

Xiao Li went to one knee, panting, and pulled a small bottle of bright red liquid out of his backpack, thumbed the cork off with a popping sound and downed it in one go.

Mei Wen had shown him and Grandma Mei the alchemy that her mother practised, including recipes for these healing potions. It had to be said that Mei Wen was... really, really bad at it. However, reading the recipe was enough for both Grandma Mei and himself to guess at what local plants they could use for the missing ingredients.

Watching Mei Wen ruin a cauldron of ingredients with simple errors in an attempt to show them how her mother made potions also helped, as her errors were so obvious that they didn't impact the demonstration. This was their first attempt to replicate the potion, and it was effective. However, the ingredients were a bit too pricey, but it was just a prototype, a proof of concept.

He was sure he could adjust the recipe to produce the same potions with much cheaper ingredients, cheap enough that he might make a fortune selling them.

He relaxed for a moment and then glanced up and saw Mei Wen already standing near him with her hands firmly on her hips, looking perturbed. He waved his hands in supplication, "Look! Nobody thinks you're my woman! He was a brain-addled demon!"

She made a "tsk" sound but thankfully removed her hands from her hips. Xiao Li sighed with relief. He stood up and shook his head, sighing, "A shame. I didn't want you to see my Gentleman's Sword until I got more of the style finished."

Mei Wen's lips twitched and wriggled as if she was holding in laughter. She asked him, "You call your sword style your gentleman's sword?"

What? Was it so funny?!