I had heard of putting gum in a girl's hair or yanking her pigtails if you liked her, but this was a bit much. Had this entire rivalry been just for this?
When she kissed me suddenly in the tea room, I had to admit that I was surprised... but I wasn't against the idea. After all, she was exactly my type—beautiful, tall, strong, confident, and take chargey. Plus, I had been a bit tipsy from the party. Although I minimised it considerably, it was impossible not to drink at all when you were the hostess.
However, waking up now, I wondered if I had made a mistake. It didn't feel like it, though.
Stirring caused Dexin to stir as well. She stared down at me and said, "Good morning, kitten..."
I wasn't sure that I liked that particular diminutive since I was supposed to be an actual cat. I mean, I wasn't, but I was trying to pretend I was... so, would a cat object to being called that? After a moment, I decided that it was probably fine. It was basically the same as 'babe', so I didn't object.
Plus, she distracted me with more kisses, and she was very good at it, so that forgave a lot of sins all on its own.
A little over an hour and a half later, after wearing me out again, she finally revealed something useful, saying, "Well, I will clean out my office at the Disciple's Union sometime today or tomorrow."
From the bed, I looked at her oddly. That might have revealed something, but it wasn't obvious.
"The President of the Disciple's Union is an inherited position... did you not notice my cultivation?" she asked archly.
I blinked and opened my senses a little bit more. Her cultivation realm had always been high enough that I couldn't get an entirely accurate read on it. However, now I couldn't sense it at all. Ohhhh.
"Congratulations on breaking through," I told the Foundation Establishment cultivator. If you reached her level, you couldn't stay in the Outer Sect as a disciple. You entered the Inner Sect, or if you didn't qualify, then you left the school or became a "deacon" and helped run things. Now, though, that caused me to have all sorts of other questions, "Don't tell me that you held back your breakthrough...?"
She nodded, "Yes, I certainly did. For the past eight months. I didn't expect my second to beat me to the Inner Sect last year; although I don't begrudge her for it, I couldn't leave without a replacement."
"Uhh... why not? The President of the Disciple's Union is not really a big deal," I said, confused.
She frowned, narrowing her eyes, "That's just the title. The real position is the leader of the largest faction of female disciples in the Outer Sect, and I assure you it is important."
She stood up and walked gracefully around my bed, my eyes tracking her gorgeous body, almost as if it was an autonomic response, "This school does produce sword prodigies; that's its main purpose, and it does so well. It's an important task—but the cost can be high, and the Outer Sect system is ripe for abuse. If there is no one here to protect the most vulnerable, then things can get really bad. Not only that, but it's corruptive for the talents we're trying to produce if there are no guardrails at all. For the female disciples, this protector is the President of the Disciple's Union."
She flexed her Qi in an unusual way, and her body was instantly cleansed. I frowned. It didn't look like a spell, and I thought it might just be a result of the vastly increased affinity for and flexibility with one's own Qi that you received when you broke through to her level. It was the same effect that allowed you to control spirit tools farther away from your body—flying swords, for example. I was a bit jealous. She was clearly showing off here, considering she must have only broken through today.
Still, I wasn't about to be steamrolled into something I didn't want to do, so I said calmly, "I don't want to be the Disciple's Union President."
She glanced at me sideways and snorted, "It doesn't really matter. You could refuse, I guess, but you'll end up doing the same thing, anyway. As soon as I leave, most of the girls under me will gravitate to you one way or another. Are you suggesting that you'll ignore them all? I don't think so. Otherwise, I wouldn't be choosing you. So, since you're going to do it anyway, you might as well receive the benefits that come with the job, no?"
No, I probably wouldn't ignore them. Anyway, I had already made plans for the expansion of my group. "What benefits are there that I don't know about?"
She froze for a moment, then continued picking up her clothes, "I forgot that you've only been with the school a few months. That's another point in your favour. There are a number of things, like the seasonal meetings, most of which require minimal supervision after you get used to doing them. But the main benefit is that every President is immediately invited to join Jade Peak after they break through—even before you break through, you'll be welcome to come up as though you were already a disciple of the Peak."
I whistled. In some Sects, the disciples were separated three, sometimes four ways. There were Outer Sect disciples, Inner Sect disciples, Core disciples and then personal disciples of elders. Here, the equivalent of Core disciples were the ones that were invited to join one of the nine peaks. Jade Peak was the smallest of these groups, but it had a very outsized reputation.
For one, all of the disciples were women, and it was led by the old lady who interviewed me after I passed the school trials.
I had stayed in the Outer Sect at first on a misguided attempt to lay low, but that hadn't really lasted long—like, less than a day. I had already made plans to enter the next tournament and join the Inner Sect the next time we opened the recruiting window in seven or eight months. Although I was taking very good advantage of the Dao Repository here, in some ways, I was screwing myself over trying to be a fence sitter.
It was true that Inner Sect disciples were controlled a little bit more, which I had been trying to avoid, but I had discovered that this was mainly only at my present level of cultivation. They were highly protected until they reached the Foundation Establishment level.
After that, though? There were more Inner Sect disciples randomly adventuring in the world than there were here in the school. I had underestimated how much "tempering oneself" was a huge factor for sword cultivators and sword schools. Already, Xiao Li had asked me to go on an adventure or three with him when we both broke through to the Foundation Establishment realm.
By joining one of the nine peaks, I would be able to learn pretty much everything in the school and possibly have a more personal relationship with Core Formation or even the few Nascent Soul cultivators that the school possessed. It was rumoured that even nominal, throw-away disciples of a Peak Master or Mistress were given such discounts at the Dao Repository that things might as well be free. This gave me the idea that the only reason techniques cost points at all was to get low-level cultivators to be picky and focus their efforts on absolutely mastering a few abilities rather than being terrible at a lot of them.
If I had never joined the school, then I would be scrabbling for any bit of knowledge, techniques and spells out in the world, especially if most people assumed I wasn't a human cultivator. That had been a factor that I didn't really consider before joining the school.
I had figured that many cultivators had odd appearances, so I would be able to fit in, but now, if I was on my own, it would definitely necessitate heavily using illusions to hide my uniqueness. That had been something I did at first, but Disguise Self only lasted an hour, so it had always been a pain in the ass, and I stopped as soon as I saw a bunch of odd-looking cultivators around.
I had been pretty lucky that most of the interactions I had were with cultivators that either didn't have a prejudice or possibly even liked diremonsters—Liu Ruxue's offer for me to become her pet was definitely seen in a new light.
The life of a loose cultivator was really hard, even though it had a romantic freedom to it. However, just the memory of how the family that ran the airship wanted to charge me so many mid-grade spirit stones for just one book on formations when I got the same book for virtually nothing here in the school made me realistic about the lifestyle that would be.
Even Xiao Li wasn't down for living like that, and he had a thick protagonist's aura that would probably make it okay for him if he did.
Amongst the Outer Sect, the "Fairy Sisters of Jade Peak" had a reputation for being man-haters, but I didn't think I believed that. It reeked of the standard opinion that developed amongst a primarily male population for a group of highly competent women. Still... the way that I was "recruited" here was a bit evocative... could it really be some sort of Sapphic Peak? That was probably my imagination, but...
I coughed, "And I'm supposed to find a successor before I break through? Do I have to recruit her... uhh... the same way?"
I mean, I wasn't one hundred per cent against the idea, but...
She laughed, "You have to make sure she's strong enough that only the real freaks of the Outer Sect can beat her, that she has the organisational abilities to be effective and that she has the decorum expected of the Jade Peak." She sashayed over to me and gave me another kiss, "As for last night... and this morning, well, that was just because you are too cute."
So, she was behind all the challenges I had been subjected to. And the "honour" of being nominated to organise the quarterly meeting slash party was just a way to test my administrative abilities. I wasn't sure how she had tested my decorum, but it could be a number of ways.
Was I blushing? Why was she laughing at me again? Finally, I said with dignity, "I suppose I do not see any downsides in that case. However, I will not mindlessly allow all of your followers into my group." There were a few I didn't particularly like, after all. One, especially.
It was unrealistic to expect to stamp out all human-supremacist thought amongst cultivators, but I wouldn't accept anyone who couldn't keep a civil tongue in their head or who would be questioning my authority.
She waved a hand, "Not all of them will want to join you. Many of them will, though, and I think you'll find that they're fine girls. You don't need to lead all or even most of the female disciples, anyway. Just your presence will dissuade the most degenerate activities that could otherwise run rampant." She shook her head, making a 'Tsk' sound, "I've been told that before this system was established, the Jade Peak disciples would handle things after they got too out of hand, but this caused a lot of... breakage."
I guessed so.
As she got dressed again and looked like she was about to leave, I yelled, flexing my wrists which were restrained to the bed posts in silk ties, "Wait... are you just going to leave me tied up here?!"
She laughed and left.
I pouted. It wasn't like I was really restrained, though. It had just been for funsies. I wiggled my fingers, focusing some Qi on the tip of my index finger.
While I couldn't do story-like things, such as using my hand like a sword like Xiao Li probably could, Qi was the definition of malleable. It was basically pure potential. Giving a little bit the concept of "sharpness" wasn't hard.
"Ahhh...?" I asked questioningly while I frowned—the silks I was tied with weren't cut as I was expecting. Frowning, I opened my senses again and then made an indecorous "Pfft!" noise.
That bitch had infused a small amount of Qi into the silks, causing them to be unrealistically durable, if only temporarily. If I was able to make Sword Qi, this wouldn't matter, but all I could make was "sort of sharp" Qi, and this wasn't enough to cut them.
I could wait until it dissipated, but that didn't sound appealing at all! Instead, I closed my eyes and created a suction force with my hand, drawing the foreign Qi out of the silk ties and into my hand. Then, they cut like normal, and I freed myself.
Making a throwing-away motion, I tossed the foreign Qi away from me so it wouldn't contaminate my cultivation base and repeated the procedure to free my ankles.
I freed the cut silks from my bed, and I paused as I was about to throw them into the trash. Senior Sister Chen Dexin had brought them out of her spatial pouch, herself, after all.
Instead of throwing them out, I cast the Mending cantrip on each of them, folded them carefully and placed them inside the drawer on my nightstand, nodding.
I mean, there was no need to be wasteful, was there? Keeping them was an act of conservation, making me basically an environmentalist!
It had been about a week, and things worked pretty much as Chen Dexin had foreseen, which, for some reason, annoyed me. I suddenly became Sect-wide news! Not only did Chen Dexin breakthrough, but her successor was both a non-human cultivator and had only been with the school for less than half a year.
I wasn't the first "non-human" cultivator in this position, but it was pretty rare. One of the prerequisites was a fairly high aptitude for etiquette. It wasn't that this was impossible for diremonster disciples, but a lot of them only started to learn this skill when they came into human cities. Etiquette for diremonsters was a lot different than etiquette amongst humans—it was more primal and differed by which animal you were, so they were generally at a disadvantage in this respect.
The nine girls who followed me were ecstatic. They almost instantly became the first tier in the most prominent "gang" of female disciples in the sect.
I had to go into the Disciple's Union daily the past week, although Chen Dexin showed up about every other day this week to give me a rundown of both her duties and the duties expected of the Disciple's Union in general.
It really wasn't that much. The main everyday activity was that they handled the distribution of open spaces and buildings. Many of these were free for disciple use; you just had to schedule them, while others like my Fear classroom cost a small amount of points each lunar month.
They also managed the monthly market, where disciples could sell things amongst themselves. It worked almost exactly like a flea market, where the union just rented stalls to anyone who wanted to sell things.
I had become a landlord, basically. My grandpa would be incensed, as that was a class of people that he hated even more than straw bosses. Well, I was more like a property management company, I supposed. I couldn't keep all of the money I extracted out of my "tenants." I had to return most of it to the school after my own expenses, and Chen Dexin claimed that the money was immediately destroyed as soon as it was paid back to the school.
This was a closed economy, and the school used the destruction of money it received and balanced that with creating more currency out of thin air to maintain a sort of balance. It was a wonder that the relative purchasing power of the currency didn't vary widely month-to-month, but there wasn't really a true market. The party that issued the currency was also the one that sold the vast majority of "goods", so it worked as a standard command economy.
I had never once, in my entire life, thought that I would be thinking longingly back to Microsoft Excel, but I'd kill for a spreadsheet. Just a few formulas and most of my work would be automated.
Yaqi walked into my office after announcing herself with a brief knock. I had already told the girls not to bother wasting time and just walk in. Yaqi was one of the most enthusiastic of my girls. She had joined at just the right time to inherit a ton of seniority in the new organisation.
"Senior Sister, we've finished examining all of the buildings and rooms that are currently not being leased," she said and handed me several sheets of paper, and I nodded.
Chen Dexin did an alright job here, but I felt that there was a lot of ways to improve. I had no need to minimise my expenses, after all. The school didn't really care how much money they received, and Senior Sister mainly structured things to reduce her own labour, which I could understand.
But the Disciple's Union was an arm of the school, so I could just pay people in contribution points to do things like clean the unused buildings and venues on a periodic basis. I had to clean the room I rented thoroughly, and while I had Unseen Servants, nobody else did! It had been a pain in the ass and took a whole afternoon.
"Thank you, Yaqi," I told the girl, and reviewed each line item. Most of them would need to be cleaned, as would the units that the disciples vacated. I didn't have the authority to charge a security deposit like a traditional landlord would back on Earth, so I would just have to eat the costs of cleaning them after the tenant left.
Still, that was fine since I didn't care one whit about the profits. I could pay my own workers and followers to do this, but I didn't think many of them would be too keen on such menial activities, so I would probably end up paying any servant disciples who cared for the extra work.
They had surprisingly lenient work weeks, not being worked to the bone at all. They generally worked ten hours a day for three to four days a week and had three to four days off. So long as they saw to their primary duties, they were free to do whatever they wanted on their off-time, from cultivating to even performing any of the Missions at the Mission Hall that they would qualify for.
Nodding, I made a few scribbles. I'd offer these extra jobs for just under what I think most Outer Sect disciples would be willing to work for, which was pretty high. Most real disciples wouldn't be willing to clean things for any amount of remuneration. This would make them excellent paying for the servant disciple caste and make me popular with that group of people that kept the cogs of the school greased and running.
I then made a note to lower the price of the stalls at the monthly market. The last time I went, only five out of ten were being utilised. I could lower the price to the point where nine out of ten were being utilised, and this would increase the economic output of the Outer Sect. Disciples who might have wanted to sell some things they made but thought the price for a booth was too high might take the plunge.
I could even vary the prices until I found the point on the price-demand curve where I maximised the utilisation of the booths while at the same time not leaving people wanting a booth and not being able to get one. In this monopoly money economy, that was the only point of the prices I was charging to begin with.
A bigger monthly market made it seem like we had a more lively and interesting Outer Sect, after all, so I thought this was a great idea.
Perhaps I could make a rule that the sellers could pay the stall fees in spirit stones, too. You had to rent the stall with contribution points, but you could only sell things at the market for spirit stones. Most people were leery of converting points to stones that way, so I think I had a good argument for this one place being priced in spirit stones. I'd have to talk with the administration about that one, though.
I worked for another thirty minutes or so and as I was about to leave and head back home to continue my studies to master fourth-level spells, someone I didn't recognise came in.
She looked to be in her mid-twenties and was wearing a standard Inner Sect disciple's robes, although with a small pin signifying that she was a member of the Jade Peak. The density of her power was strong. I couldn't get a read off of her cultivation at all, but she gave me the feeling of threat that only a few cultivators at the Foundation Establishment did, so I guessed that she was mid to high up in that realm.
I stood politely and asked, "Senior Sister ...?"
"Junior Sister Mei Wen, be at ease. I am Han Meiying," she said, smiling.
I nodded and took my seat, "Would you care for some tea?"
I offered, as it was expected, but she shook her head, and said, "Thank you, but no. I'm here at the direction of the Jade Peak Mistress. I'm to offer you this. You're allowed to pick two items on this list, for now, and I'll deliver the manuals to you."
She handed me a jade slate, and I glanced at it, my eyes going a bit wide. It was a list of techniques and cultivation methods, but these obviously were not orthodox methods.
Some were methods to devour blood essence, like the one in my blood inheritance; some were methods to devour the spirit of the dead to gain insights into the experience they had in life; for example, I could become a pretty good carpenter if I used this on a number of carpenters.
It didn't destroy the soul, as that was a lot harder than you'd think, but everything told me that it was excruciatingly painful for the soul involved.
There were four listed methods for turning a lover into a Cultivation Furnace, and I snorted as I read them.
I flipped a few pages until I got to the more overtly necromantic parts. A method to refine a living human into a corpse puppet. While I was interested in what ways this was different from Animate Dead, I had already sort of focused on the incorporeal undead.
Nodding, I looked at one, and it looked like a two-fer. Both were methods for controlling ghosts as well as refining a living person into a wrathful spirit. It sounded like a two-fer, but really, how useless would the method for refining someone into a malevolent spirit be if you couldn't control them? I assumed the corpse puppet technique before also included a way to control them, too.
"I'd like these two, please," I said after I reviewed the whole jade slate. I'd picked the one to devour the experiences of a person as well as the one to refine and control spirits. The former one was interesting. It didn't transfer memories, exactly, just some sort of ambiguous "talent."
Han Meiying had a serene smile on her face, not seeming to judge me at all for my choices and nodded. She made a gesture with her hand, and two tomes, each as thick as an encyclopedia volume, appeared in her hands, and she handed them to me.
"Do you have every single one of those techniques on you, or did you make some kind of guess?" I asked, curious. I had assumed she would need to leave and bring me back my selections another time.
She giggled, but I could tell it was fake; it was just a way to not answer me. Finally, she said, "I hope you understand the rules about practising these techniques in the school, yes?"
I inclined my head. I couldn't very well use anyone as practice materials here. Not only wouldn't it be ethical, but they'd kill me, "About that... how would I go about getting uhh... materials... from which I could practice either of these techniques? I don't want to harm innocent people."
Her smile got wider, "I'd prefer you didn't, too. Although, I'm actually not so sure that the Mistress would care. She has a unique view about the world, feeling that it isn't her business if any of her disciples are good or evil, just that they are true to themselves."
Before I could digest that philosophy, she said, "I'll send you a letter of introduction. Cloudsoar City has more than a hundred million people inside of it. There are capital crimes committed every day. Do you have any objection to using condemned prisoners?"
Wow, what a left hook to my personal philosophy. Did I? It's not like I could stop capital punishment, even if I was against it. I frowned, "So long as the crime they're condemned for is an actual crime, and they're clearly guilty, no."
"An actual crime?" she asked, arching her eyebrows curiously.
I nodded, "An actual crime, with an actual victim who is or was a person. Not something like... he offended the dignity of the state, so off with his head."
"Ahhh," she said, enlightened, before shrugging, "You can review the prisoners and select as you wish. We have an agreement with the city to practice such techniques in controlled settings, as I am sure a number of other Sects do as well. We keep it discreet."
I nodded, "Thank you, Senior Sister."
She stood up, and I did so as well out of respect. She said, "Master both of these techniques to basic competence, and the Mistress said you will be able to borrow another. If you manage to get them both to small perfection, you'll be given two more. Don't lose those books or allow a disciple here to see them. Also, obviously, don't teach them to disciples. I'll need them back later."
I frowned but remained quiet as she left. I had found something unusual, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it until she left.
She did not have me swear any kind of oath not to transfer these techniques to anyone; she just told me not to teach them to disciples.
Interesting.
