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Reach Heaven Via Feng Shui Engineering, Drug Trade And Tax Evasion

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Chapter 40: Drown In Blood, Shed On Sightless Blades
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    • Author Note: If you'd like to read five chapters ahead, or read other works I write, you can find me on patreon.
    I also have a discord server, where you can discuss my fics, read some things about how classic xianxia tropes are re-interpreted in FSE, or get recommendations for other fics I read.
    Thanks for keeping up with the so far! I was really excited for the glassy fields crossing - I hope you liked it :)​
    Even in the freezing rain, a drop of sweat dripped down Qian Shanyi's hot forehead. She controlled her breathing, taking stock of her situation.

    Cultivators faced death calmly, and slaughtered the reaper as it came for them.

    The first thing she did was pull out her divination bottle, and check that her luck still held, and the vow in her mind was still whole. Only then did she breathe a sigh of relief. This was not some bizarre hitherto unknown form of the heavenly tribulation, but a perfectly ordinary weather event.

    It would still kill her, of course, unless she came up with a plan - but at least the Heavens didn't have their finger on the scales.

    Really, it could have been much worse. After the initial wave, the water was rising slowly - at a guess, she had some twenty minutes to think before it started to lap at her toes. Furthermore, the shrinking island of glass around her was at almost the exact center - and thus the lowest point - of the valley. If she managed to cross over this one stream, her road should go uphill from there, and away from the water.

    She sent her sword over the roaring stream separating her from Glaze Ridge, and with some horror, saw that the transparent glass was only barely visible beneath the clear rain waters. The stretch of water ahead of her was easily fifty meters wide, and slowly widening as the water rose - suicidal to try to swim over blindly. The one behind her was wider still.

    Wang Yonghao could have simply walked on air over all this, the lucky fuck.

    Her sour thoughts briefly turned back to Junming sending her out into the valley, but they must have simply not known this could happen. They said they were only here for a couple months, and had not seen any local rain before. Their postmaster could have no doubt warned them, but who would decide to head into the valley in the rain at night? Ordinary people would hardly do so except when working, while most cultivators would have been warned off by their sects. Loose cultivators, on the other hand, were sure to wait for daylight, or stick to the edges of the valley. The question of those in her exact circumstances might have simply fallen through.

    If only her flying sword technique was strong enough to carry herself - but no. It could perhaps lift a cat, not a full-grown woman.

    "Enough self-pity," she hissed at herself, "How do I get out of here?"

    As she saw it, she had two options.

    She could stay on the island and hope that someone came to her rescue. Cultivators did not leave other cultivators to die: if someone with a flying sword technique saw her - the local sect elders, at least - they were sure to help. The only problem was being seen.

    She doubted her little sword lantern could be noticed through the thick downpour, but she could circulate the Crushing Glance of the Netherworld Eyes and cover the entire island in glowing powder. Even if the water would wash it away, the sheer size of the area should let some light through, and perhaps someone could see her.

    There was only one problem: time. Eyeballing it, she had perhaps twenty minutes until water would cover the top of her little island. In these twenty minutes, someone had to notice the glow, find a cultivator with a flying sword technique, and convince them there was a person in danger.

    The chances of her rescue coming along before she was swept away were… not ideal. Of course, the rise of the waters might slow as time went on - but there was no way to predict this.

    The other option was to try to get across herself.

    When she decided to set off across the field of glass, she felt safe, knowing that she could protect herself from any falls with her spiritual shield. But a swim was not the same as a fall at all: when falling, she only needed to protect her body for a split second, before getting back on her feet. But if she went into the water, she would need to burn her spiritual shield at full power for the entire duration, lest a wave throw her into a sharp glass spike when she least expected it.

    Spiritual shield techniques have been known since ancient times, the basics so simple they have been independently rediscovered by dozens of sects. They covered a cultivator's body and clothing with a porous, protective membrane, capable of withstanding even the hardest blows, but this protection came at the cost of rapid spiritual energy consumption. The stronger the membrane, the harsher the cost; so much so that until the last hundred years the technique was dismissed as useless in combat - after all, if you had spent spiritual energy on shielding, then all your opponent had to do was stall you out until you ran out of reserves.

    Later improvements allowed cultivators to vary the amount of spiritual energy flowing through their spiritual shield on the fly, and strengthen different parts of the membrane independently from each other - so much so that nowadays, most cultivators tended to keep their shield active in a weak form all day long, instantly strengthening it if the need called for it - yet the fundamental limitation of spiritual energy drain had remained. In a fight, she could choose to strengthen exclusively the parts of her spiritual shield that were about to be hit by an attack, for only as long as the enemy's blade would stay in contact - but keeping it active at full power for the entire minute it would take her to swim across was well and truly beyond her.

    But she had to keep it active. She couldn't see the glass under the water, nor sense it in any other way, and so couldn't predict when she would need her shield - and if a wave tossed her directly into a glass spike with no protection, then she could die in an instant.

    She paced alongside the edge of the waters, thinking things over. She couldn't safely go into the stream, but she also couldn't stay: death lay in wait around every corner.

    The biggest problem, really, was the depth of the water. If it was shallow enough to walk across, then she could have leaned into the stream, dug her heels into the glass, and kept her balance. Even if it was at merely chest height, she could have at least made sure to always keep her legs under her, keeping her relatively safe as she could not be tossed into the river bed by an errant wave. But with an unknown depth, and unforeseeable terrain lower down the stream, this was hardly possible. The roiling waters would spin her around, and she could be thrown onto a glass outcropping at any moment. She would be rolling the dice with no control over the outcome, and praying they came out right.

    Control…

    She reached out around her waist, and drew out her Silvered Devil Moth Silk rope she always kept with her.

    Hmm.
    Qian Shanyi checked herself over one last time. Her time was running out, but when dancing on a razor edge above an abyss, rushing would only make you slip.

    Her idea was simple: she would hook a rope on the glass shards at the bottom of the stream, and anchor herself in place, safe from being swept away. That way, she would have plenty of time to check exactly where the glass was under the waters, and by keeping her legs under her, could make sure her sandals were always the first thing to come in contact with the glass.

    Of course a single rope would not be enough: after all, she needed to move, not simply stay in place. She tied the center of her rope around her shoulders, and made a loop at each of the free ends. Her hope was that by changing which of the two loops took her weight and which was free to move, she could slowly shimmy across, one step at a time.

    She tested it on the comparatively dry ground of her island, and the idea worked - if barely. The glass cracked, and the loops would occasionally slip around, some shards shattering while others took her weight - but that was fine. She didn't need to stay completely still: as long as she avoided an uncontrollable spiral at the speed of the water currents, she should be fine.

    She could use her rope control technique to move the loops around, but after her experience with fishing lines, she knew that doing so underwater would be ten times as difficult. The technique relied on mirroring the shape and orientation of a piece of string she held in her hands onto the larger rope she wanted to move, and in the rapid water currents, this small piece of string would surely slip out of her hands. Instead, she tightly wound a long piece of thread all around her fingers: by mirroring the orientation of one of its segments onto the larger rope, she could control it quite easily. Her precision suffered, but at least there was no danger of slipping.

    Over the thread, she layered pieces of tough fabric, cut off the hem of her cultivator robes, and tied down securely with strips of leather. She doubted her makeshift gloves could withstand glass sharpened to a knifepoint by spiritual energy, but perhaps it could help lessen the damage - cultivator robes were made for that express purpose, after all - and she suspected she would have to grab onto the glass to scamper up the opposite shore.

    Longer strips of leather tied her sleeves in place, and the hem of her robes was cut in half, each piece wrapped around one of her legs, formed into a pair of pants. Mostly, she just wanted to lessen the drag - if she didn't cut it up, it would have billowed in the water.

    She glanced behind herself, where she drew a long line of glowing powder all across the island before she started working. Nobody came to her rescue, and by now, the glow looked dim, most of it washed away by the rain.

    She was on her own.

    She looked out over the stream, still doubting herself. If she screwed this up, she would be shredded by the glass - she could hardly imagine a worse death for anyone, short of being turned into a cauldron by a demonic cultivator.

    But there was no better way out, and stalling would only make the river wider.

    She hooked her first loop on the ground of her island, tested it once again - it was secure - and sent her flying sword deep into the water, the second loop trailing behind it. Her rope control technique, by itself, wasn't strong enough to resist the force of the stream - but her flying sword very much was.

    It took her a couple tries, but eventually, she got the second loop hooked on the bottom of the stream. She tested it by yanking on it. It was secure as well.

    She breathed in one final time, and glared up at the clouds, rain streaming down her face.

    "Somehow, this is all your fault." She scowled at the Heavens, and stepped into the freezing, rushing waters.
    Halfway across the river, Qian Shanyi was no longer sure being cut into ribbons on razor sharp glass was the worst thing in the world.

    The glass in the valley grew over any dirt the winds might have brought in, and so the waters around her were clear as ice - and felt almost as cold. Her entire body was growing numb, shivering uncontrollably, and even the frostbite pill she swallowed well in advance was only doing so much to help.

    Through all of it, she had to keep careful control of four separate techniques - two to control each of her rope loops, her sword control technique, and the unnamed technique Hui Yin taught her for keeping rain and wind out of her eyes. Thankfully, the last one was so easy as to be merely an afterthought. The sword control technique alone pushed up against her limits, and with the others added on top, her focus kept slipping, parts of techniques unraveling and making her lose spiritual energy that she really couldn't spare.

    And on top of it, simply getting the loop to catch was a matter of chance, especially with her numb fingers, and working completely blind.

    Hook a loop - again - again - secure. Slowly, carefully, unhook the previous one. Swim as far as she could - only a couple meters, with how fast the stream was - then call the free loop back to her. Thread her sword through it, and send it upstream, through the water, so that she could hook the loop on the ground. Call her sword back.

    Again.

    Again.

    Again.

    The petulant rope refused to obey her clumsy fingers. The glass at the bottom of the stream shifted, cracked, and made her rope slip - only for her to hook it back in. The roaring waves around her dunked her in and out of the water, and though she could stay above the surface, with her focus split five different ways, she couldn't help but swallow some of it.

    Once, she descended into a coughing fit when it went down her lungs, and thought that would be her end.

    Hook. Again. Secure. Unhook. Swim.

    She kept her head down, not looking towards the shore. Her world narrowed down to the flow of water, threatening to make her slip and send her careening towards her death, and her slow, inexorable movement across it.

    Again.

    Again.

    Four separate techniques were not only a drain on her mind, but also her spiritual energy, and even the spiritual stone she held safely under her tongue was doing little to make up for it. It would take a good ten minutes for it to fully dissolve, an agonizingly slow rate of recovery - and with how feeble her hold was on the stream's bottom, she couldn't risk taking a rest right in the middle.

    She had calculated it all neatly over on the island, and this rate of use should have still been much less than needing to maintain her spiritual shield at full power - yet she didn't account for needing to recirculate the techniques when her control slipped, and now there was no space left in her mind to recalculate, or even to doubt her decision.

    Besides, what was she to do? Swim back over to the island? It must have sunk underwater by now.

    Finally, she couldn't take it anymore. She secured both of her ropes on the river bed below her, and paused to take stock of her situation. When she glanced over to the shore, she saw it was now perhaps only fifteen, twenty meters away. She briefly considered saying fuck it and just swimming the rest of the way, but her exhaustion - mental much more than physical - did not change the math, and even though a treacherous voice in the back of her mind whispered at her to hold still, to rest more, she knew she had to keep going.

    Hook. Secure - no, the glass sheared, her loop is floating free. Retract the loop, attach to the sword, send it out, hook. Is it secure? Yank to make sure. Okay. Unhook -

    Ten meters from shore, with only a quarter of her spiritual energy left, the glass under her only secure loop cracked, and the current threw her downstream. She scrambled in the water, trying to push the loop down, re-secure herself, but it was far too late.

    All in.

    She grit her teeth, and motioned for her sword to fly towards the shore on its own, and followed after it, swimming as if her life depended on it - because it did. She pushed spiritual energy through her limbs to move faster, the rush of power dilating her blood vessels and bringing feeling back into her limbs through painful tingling. She just had to guess where the shore would begin and activate her spiritual shield in time -

    She smashed her knee directly into the glass, and knew she guessed wrong. The pain of it made her blank out for a split second, and when she came back to it, she felt the current already drawing her further away from the shore.

    No! I was so close!

    Thinking quickly, she pulled back one of her loops, and tossed it above the waters, onto the ground. It slipped, but she had already pushed spiritual energy into it, making the rope dig into any tiny crevice it could find, and it caught.

    The rope went taught, and slowly brought her closer and closer to the shore, and she did her best to bring her legs under herself.

    The spot she ended up at was a poor one - a turn of the river, where the rushing water tossed and turned in a fierce vortex right next to the shore, but she couldn't risk letting go and trying to find a better spot. As soon as she felt her sandals touch down on the glass beneath, she pushed the last of her free spiritual energy into her shield - if she failed here, she was dead anyways.

    The waves smashed her into the glass ground once, twice, beating the air out of her lungs, her spiritual shield holding on until she was smashed the third time. Her shield shattered, but by then she had managed to grab onto the ground with both her hands and feet, the water beneath only knee deep. She felt the glass cutting into her fingers, but she didn't care, because finally she was secure, past this hellish stream of slicing death.

    She grinned, slowly rising to her feet, on hand on the rope holding her stable. Just a couple more steps -

    The entire sheet of glass underneath her feet sheared, and she slipped, plunging head first into the shallow waters, smashing her face into the glass beneath. She felt a hundred stinging lines open up across her skin, but this was nothing, and she stood up again, and drove her sandal deep into the ground to fucking secure it. Her lips - cut open in two places - were split into a feral scowl, blood dripping down all over her skin and obscuring her vision, making her wipe it away with her free hand just to see where she was going.

    Thank her luck that at least the water in the way had slowed her fall.

    One step.

    Another step.

    And then finally, she stepped out on solid ground, and she was free. Her legs shook from the stress as much as the cold while she hobbled away, reeling her rope back in, and climbed up the hills of glass, high enough to feel safe. She slowly took her knife chest off her back, placed it on the ground, and carefully sat down on top of it to rest. Her hands - still numb and shaking from terror, adrenaline and pain that slowly started to spread through her body - rested on her knees, blood dripping quietly onto the glass below.

    "Fuck you." She scowled up at the clouds above. "Whatever godling brought this weather along, I will rip your tongue out through your bowels."

    The spiritual energy in the air was fairly dense, so once the spirit stone in her mouth completely dissolved, she didn't go for a second one. Instead, she closed her eyes and concentrated on the flow of spiritual energy through her body, analyzing the damage.

    Luckily enough, most of it seemed to be superficial. Her knee took the brunt of the abuse, but even there, the cuts didn't go deep into the bone. Tendons in her hands were still whole, and while her skin bled a lot, it should also heal quickly. The healing pill she took earlier in the day was already doing the work - by the time the sun rose, most of it should already be scarred over, and in another couple days, even the scars would be gone.

    She opened up her eyes, breathing deeply, and started to use her spiritual energy to slowly push the shards of glass out of her skin. Perhaps showing up to Yonghao with her face in a mess of cuts was not the best impression, but on the other hand, perhaps it would also help to convey her message.

    As she worked slowly, giving her body all the time it needed to recover, her thoughts turned back to spiritual shields. Ironically enough, if she had been wearing armor, like cultivators in ancient times, then this river crossing would have been much less of a problem.

    The dominant paradigm at the time was that energy spent on defense was entirely wasted unless it actually prevented an attack: even if you managed to guess when you would be attacked, if you had underestimated the strength of the attack, then your shield would shatter and you would still die. On the other hand, you would also waste energy if you had overestimated the attack's strength, and committed too much energy to the defense. And of course, at the end of the day, your opponent could simply stall you out, wait until you ran out of reserves, and kill you like a defenseless dog.

    The same was not true for offense. A sword slash that wasted some energy would still cut off your enemy's head, and nobody cared how much energy the victor was left with. Even a weak slash would force a parry or a dodge, giving you an opening - and if they tried to resist it with their shield, then you were at least trading your spiritual energy against theirs. Of course, your enemy might have allies - but faced with strict numerical superiority, defensive techniques would fare no better.

    Attack with your whole heart and die with no regrets - or cower, and be slaughtered like the pig you are.

    Because of this, cultivators either relied on enchanted armor to resist attacks, their speed to avoid them, or their skill with the sword to parry them. The use for shields was extremely niche, mostly having to do with resisting environmental dangers or training aggressive demon beasts.

    Despite this prevailing philosophy, some sects continued to develop the spiritual shield technique, refining it, reducing the cost and maximizing the effects. The first breakthrough allowed the strength of the membrane - and thus the energy drain - to be varied on the fly. The second made it possible to strengthen individual segments of the shield independently from each other. Simultaneously, development of training methods for spiritual energy senses had allowed cultivators to judge the strength of oncoming attacks with unprecedented precision. It finally became possible to break the cruel asymmetry of spiritual energy use, spending much less energy on the defense than on the offense.

    Yet the perception that spiritual shields were useless stuck around, until a little-known sect that focused on their development had capitalized on an incidental civil war and managed to place their patriarch on the imperial throne. By relying on their spiritual shields, they could forgo armor entirely, wearing comfortable - and more importantly, light - robes into combat, their maneuverability on top of a flying sword impossible to compete with. This was the first brick on the path to the era of reformation, some fifty years later, and the establishment of the modern empire.

    Nowadays, this "basic" spiritual shield technique was made available to all cultivators in any imperial library. Most sects - her own included - did not consider their inner disciples fully taught until they had mastered it, and could keep a spiritual shield active at the lowest level of spiritual energy consumption throughout their entire day.

    "I wonder what they were thinking, when they put it in libraries -" she laughed softly, the shock and fear of the river crossing now safely behind her "- that the lives of us cultivators would be safer if we learned it? From the demon beasts, perhaps. But in the end, danger doesn't find us - we push ourselves into it."

    This entire incident was more than a little bit her own fault. If she had thought more about her environment, she could have predicted the flash flood, and waited for the morning - or sought assistance in crossing from a sect elder in Reflection Ridge.

    She sighed, and slowly got up off her knife chest. Her robes - ones gifted to her by Wu Lanhua - were thoroughly ruined, torn into shreds on the glass, and she stripped down, taking out her second, far more expensive and durable set. The same ones she couldn't wear in front of Liu Fakuang, lest he recognise her description as Qian Shanyi.

    The same scarlet robes she wore when she first left the forest with Wang Yonghao. It was only appropriate for their reunion, she mused, as she dressed herself again, and put the ruined robes in her pack - there was no sense in throwing away the fabric.
    It took her twenty minutes to find her sword, simply lying on the glassy ground of the valley, light from the bottle lantern she tied to its guard easily visible once she crested over another hill. She was worried she had lost it entirely - there was no time to catch it back into her sheath in the river, so she had sent it flying blind towards the shore. If it fell into the water, she doubted she could have ever found it again. A sentimentality, perhaps, but it was hard won.

    Her knife chest and scroll case survived the ordeal surprisingly well, even managing to keep their contents dry - though she supposed her face took the brunt of the hits. Her normal bag was likewise somewhat torn, though she thought she could repair the green dress Lanhua had gifted her.

    Having checked her things, she spent several hours simply resting on top of her knife chest, letting her body heal and recovering her spiritual energy from the air in the valley. The rain around her even started to feel somewhat pleasant - she couldn't get any more wet after the river, and the enhancements of the robes had quickly warmed her body up, if not so much that she felt dry.

    Once she felt ready, she got up, and headed towards Glaze Ridge, surprised to notice the dawn beginning to break through the clouds ahead as a sun rose above the town. Had she really rested that long?

    The rain did not let up as she approached the town. This side of the valley sloped gently, compared to the abrupt drop of Reflection Ridge, and so she didn't even need to find a particular path. Once the buildings rose up over the top of the hill in front of her, in the distance, she heard screams, clash of blades, and a surprisingly loud honk of a goose.

    "Then again," she mused, a light smile playing on her lips. "Perhaps the danger does seek out some of us."

    She headed for the screams, and soon came across a small square. An enormous creature of glass, with thin limbs but lumpy body, like a cross between a spider and a ball of clay, was laying down on the ground, cut cleanly in half. When it stood tall, she had no doubt it could have reached up to the third story.

    In front of the corpse, she saw Wang Yonghao, his hands raised up deferentially, arguing with another cultivator she dimly recognised. He was dressed strangely - narrow sleeves, pants, and some sort of thick leather jacket over his chest, glistening with jewelry, that called back something from her memory. It took her a moment to realize she had seen it on actors in plays - this was armor, or an imitation of it. On his back was a sword with a wide guard, wavy blade almost as long as he was tall. A practical belt of pouches and talismans was strapped across his chest, and by the flow of spiritual energy around him, she would have guessed him to be in the peak refinement stage.

    Wang Yonghao had his back turned towards her, and she sneaked up on him quietly.

    "What was I supposed to do?" Wang Yonghao pleaded, "It was going to burst into the houses! I couldn't just let it kill people!"

    "My formation would have caught it, you imbecile!" The other man roared. "Can you not even see your own stupidity with both eyes open? Then pluck them out, they are of no use to you!"

    As she came closer, she finally recognised him from the portraits. It was, of course, none other than Jian Shizhe, the man of a thousand duels.

    "Now, now, fellow cultivators, there's no need to fight," she grinned, catching Wang Yonghao's neck in the crook of her elbow and pulling him closer, "we wouldn't want to duel over a dead demon beast."

    "Qian Shanyi?!" Wang Yonghao tried to jerk away from her, but she held him securely, grinning at him. His face went through an entire pallet of emotions, shock, fear, joy, guilt, before he finally settled down on sheer bafflement. "How - how did you find me?"

    "I followed the scent of Heaven-defying arrogance," she snorted, "now come, we have a lot to talk about."
     
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    • Chapter 41: Hide Your Cries Amid The Shards Unseen
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    • Author Note: If you'd like to read four chapters ahead, or read other works I write, you can find me on patreon.
    I also have a discord server, where you can discuss my fics, read some things about how classic xianxia tropes are re-interpreted in FSE, or look at fanart and memes. Thanks for reading! :)​
    Jian Shizhe's gaze flickered between Qian Shanyi and Wang Yonghao, his eyes narrowing down in suspicion.

    "Who is this jade beauty, Yonghao?" he asked, his temper receding for a moment.

    "It's - a friend, alright?" Wang Yonghao said, turning his gaze back to Jian Shizhe. "She's right, we have to leave -"

    "Leave?!" Jian Shizhe scowled. "You dare speak to me like that? Answer for what you did here!"

    "What I did?" Wang Yonghao scowled right back, "I saved people is what I did! What do I have to answer for?"

    "You pathetic worm, do you even know who I am?! You've ruined months, years of my work - "

    "Oh, little Shizhe, did you find some new friends?" A shout from behind Qian Shanyi interrupted him, and Jian Shizhe stiffened, his lips curving downwards.

    As she glanced behind her, she saw an unfamiliar cultivator, covered in gems, gold and silver. His hair was sculpted into a pair of long wings, golden wire keeping the structure in place, framing a young male face. His ears carried a pair of chandelier earrings, each a good foot long, and his robes were covered in an assortment of chains and ribbons, half a dozen rings shining brightly on his hands. It was a small miracle that none of it had ended up tangled together - which meant that either the jewelry was enchanted, or the man had practiced a special art for this sole purpose.

    He was barely past twenty, if she were to guess, though already in the high refinement stage. Sigils around the sleeves and the front of his robes revealed him as belonging to the Flowing Scarlet River sect, though she didn't recall his face from the almanac - a new arrival in town then, most likely. He had a sword on his back, just as long as the one carried by Jian Shizhe, its tip dripping fresh black blood onto the ground. Shards of glass were spinning around him in a small whirlwind.

    "Aw, did we let this one fall through?" he said, passing the corpse of the felled glass shambler, and kicking it in disappointment. "So what were you discussing?"

    "Nothing that concerns you, Rui Bao," Jian Shizhe said through clenched teeth, his eyes glued to the young man.

    "You are always so rude to me, little Shizhe." Rui Bao pouted. That expression didn't last, as he smiled at Qian Shanyi while passing her by, giving her a small bow. "Yonghao, is that your wife? Why didn't you tell us she was coming?"

    "My - my wife?!" Wang Yonghao stuttered, his face growing white. Qian Shanyi raised an eyebrow.

    "Well yeah," Rui Bao said, coming over to Jian Shizhe and throwing a hand over his shoulder to mirror Qian Shanyi's pose. Jian Shizhe stiffened further, and his scowl grew deeper. "Look at how closely you two are standing! I can recognise a man's woman when I see her."

    "Yonghao said her name was Qian Shanyi," Jian Shizhe said stiffly, pulling Rui Bao's hand off his shoulder, "Wang and Qian - they can't be married."

    Qian Shanyi's eyes flickered between the two cultivators. Based on Jian Shizhe's demeanor, he was only a hair's breadth away from challenging Wang Yonghao to a duel. She didn't know who this Rui Bao was, but if Jian Shizhe was allowing him this much leeway, then her best bet to extricate them from this sticky situation was to play them against each other.

    Pretending she was anyone's woman was really not the mask she preferred, but in the end, it was better to work with the preconceptions of others than against them - and they wouldn't be staying in this town long enough for it to matter.

    "Indeed, fellow cultivators, we aren't married - but marriage is ever a question of timing, is it not?" She smiled, ignoring Wang Yonghao's nails digging into her shoulder. "Could we be excused? Whatever happened, this demon beast is already dead - and I had a very long night."

    "Yeah, I could tell!" Rui Bao laughed, gesturing at the thin scar lines on her face. "Slipped on the glass fields? Happened to me many times, back in the day."

    "Something like that. Perhaps we could meet in a couple days, once I have acclimated to the town? I would be glad to share my cooking, if you would allow me."

    "Oh Heavens!" Wang Yonghao awkwardly gasped, thankfully finally realizing what she was doing and trying to play along. His acting left much to be desired. "I had some medicine with me - please, can you let me attend to my…friend? This hunt is already over."

    "Oh but of course!" Rui Bao laughed again, nodding and making all his jewelry tinkle slightly, turning his head towards Jian Shizhe. "Jian Shizhe could show you around then - he is the expert on this town, and every time I come here, I learn something new from him! Isn't that right?"

    Jian Shizhe glared at the three of them, his scowl deepening, before he turned all his wrath on Wang Yonghao.

    "You cowardly, pathetic, sniveling worm, unworthy of even being a footrag for a true cultivator," he said, his eyes flickering with newfound fury, "this is just an excuse for you to run away from the mess you made, isn't it? Honorless wretch, you expect me to simply forget this?!"

    Wang Yonghao tried to step forwards, ready to respond, but she tightened her arm around his neck to keep him back.

    "Just take the insult," she whispered in Yonghao's ear, keeping her eyes on Jian Shizhe with a slight smile. "Trust me."

    She felt Yonghao stiffen, and then relax.

    "Sorry about the spider," Wang Yonghao said, bowing slightly, as far as her arm would allow, "hope you will find another one!"

    "Oh they practically grow on trees here," Rui Bao said, trying - and failing - to pull Jian Shizhe away from them.

    Wang Yonghao turned around and she let go of his neck, following after.

    "Hey! You think you can simply walk away from this?" Jian Shizhe shouted after them. "Even if you climbed up into the Heavens, you wouldn't escape me!"

    Qian Shanyi sighed, and stopped, turning around. Jian Shizhe didn't seem willing to throw a challenge down right next to this Rui Bao, but it was best to let him walk away on a positive note.

    "Honorable cultivator Jian." She bowed deeply. She needed a compliment, and an open request, to give some control back to him, yet non-committal. With how he dressed - perhaps something old-fashioned? "The beauty of your town is only eclipsed by that of your own, much like the prosperity of your family eclipses the stars. I haven't seen my fiance in ages -"

    Behind her, she heard Wang Yonghao stumble.

    "- and every second we could spend together, strolling these streets, would be a balm upon my soul. I hope you could find it in your heart to grant this humble cultivator this gift?"

    She batted her eyelashes at Jian Shizhe to sell the performance. He scoffed at her, but the corner of his mouth twitched upwards, and he finally waved them off. She turned around, and caught up with Wang Yonghao, putting a hand on his shoulder.

    "So, my 'dear fiance'," - she chuckled grimly - "I hope you know of a tavern in this town, where we could conduct our…spousal affairs?"

    "Please don't joke like that." Wang Yonghao shuddered. "I still remember what you looked like with your arms buried in that bear's midsection, or when you were digging through the brain of that fish."

    "Fine, fine." She snorted. "You think I like it myself? As if the only reason I could even exist is as an accessory to you. It was just more convenient to play along, and not give Jian Shizhe an opening."

    "You know this guy?" Wang Yonghao looked at her strangely. "I've only gotten here two days ago. How long have you been here?"

    "I've only just arrived, Yonghao," she said. "Do you truly think I would have simply skulked around in the shadows for days, observing you, without even coming around to say hi?"

    "Yes?"

    "Fine, I might have, but I didn't." She rolled her eyes. "I know of him from the cultivator almanac. He challenges others to duels over any little insult - you dodged a flying sword there, thanks to me. I wouldn't worry much about his insults - everyone already knows how hot-headed he is, so they carry little weight."

    Wang Yonghao rubbed his forehead.

    "What in the netherworld's name is a cultivator almanac?"

    "Hm," she hummed, "I suppose you not knowing about it would explain a fair bit. Not much to it - I have only learned of it myself quite recently. I'll show you later - but first, an inn? Let's not talk out in the open."

    Wang Yonghao sighed, and led her down the streets of glass, rain still falling all around them.
    The tavern they settled on, not pressed for space like the one in Xiaohongshan, was a single-story building in the shape of a square, encircling a bountiful garden. The garden itself had a dozen delicate domes of glass stretching above it - like an enormous frozen flower, panels keeping rain away from the paths, matte glass giving shade to small pavilions here and there, yet still leaving plenty of gaps for rain to water the plants and for fresh air to circulate. In any other town, only a lord or a large sect could afford something of this scale - but here in Glaze Ridge, she supposed both the glass and the cultivators who could shape it were in abundance.

    Every room in the tavern was more of an apartment, wide and inviting, with a fireplace large enough to fit a cooking pot, and even a small attached washroom - though the baths were still communal. The cost, appropriately enough, was high - a whole yuan per day - but after working for Wu Lanhua, she was no longer quite as strapped for money as before. They paid for a week - enough time to not seem suspicious, and for them to get their bearings, with the possibility of extending their stay. There were cheaper options, but she had plans for after her tribulation, and felt that the extra space would more than pay for itself.

    And if she died to the tribulation… Well, then it wouldn't be her problem.

    She had Wang Yonghao pay with her money, not wanting to leave her name on the documents, but in the end, the innkeeper didn't even ask for their seals. He was even kind enough to sell her some rice and vegetables.

    Once they were left alone in their room, she placed her bags on the floor, stretched out her tired hands, and closed her eyes. After that hellish river crossing, simply being able to put her things down felt rapturous, even if she was still drenched head to toe from the rain.

    "So um," Wang Yonghao said quietly, and from the shuffling of wool and groaning of wood, she knew he sat down on the edge of the bed. His voice was tense. "Did you find my message?"

    "I did," she responded, opening her eyes to give him a flat look. He was staring at his feet, and didn't meet her eyes. "Getting it was… very exciting. But let's set up some formations first. My luck has been rotten as of late - you will forgive me for being paranoid."

    She went over to her knife chest, flipped open the lid, took out two leather talisman pouches, and handed them to Wang Yonghao.

    "Here," she said, "and start a fire, if you wouldn't mind? I would like to cook something."

    Perhaps she was simply stalling. The heavenly vow in her mind quieted down now that she found him, but she had, at best, a couple days before it would force her hand - if the man himself didn't do so earlier. She wanted to spend these days preparing for her inevitable tribulation, but she couldn't really explain how she found him without mentioning the damn vow, for he would rightly want to know.

    But what was she supposed to do? She wasn't ready. Even in a good town like this one, even if Wang Yonghao would help her - she didn't envy her chances of survival.

    While Wang Yonghao was setting up the talismans, she took out her sewing set, and walked over to the window. It was a single panel of glass in a solid frame of wood, opening out into the gardens, and shutters that could be locked from the inside. She wanted to add a tripwire.

    She closed the shutters, and then took out the thinnest needle she had, tore off a single hair from her head, and threaded it through. Very carefully, she made a couple miniscule holes on the underside of the shutters, and passed the hair through them, tying it into a knot - if the window opened from the outside, the hair would tear in half, and then at least she would know someone had been snooping through the room. She did much the same with the inner window itself.

    By the time she was done, a fire was roaring happily within the fireplace, and Wang Yonghao had finished setting up both of her formations in two concentric circles. She glanced over his work and nodded approvingly.

    The first was a standard set of talismans for gathering spiritual energy. When put in correct positions, they would form a whirlpool, sucking it from the environment, and marginally raising the concentration of the energy within the circle. The relative increase was not very large, but every little bit counted for a loose cultivator, and so these formations were fairly common.

    Of course, with access to Wang Yonghao's energy-dense inner world, this formation was now entirely useless. Instead, she was after its side effect: this whirlpool of spiritual energy disrupted spiritual energy senses of cultivators. She could already feel it starting to pull on the cilia of her spirit, an uncomfortable tug that made them shrink back instinctively. If someone wanted to, they could of course force their cilia across the boundary and sense what was happening inside; but doing so would be a grave invasion of privacy, and not something anyone would dare to do casually. Merely putting up the formation would tell all cultivators to turn their senses away - and that meant they could open up the entrance to Wang Yonghao's inner world with no fear of discovery.

    The second formation was one that muffled sound crossing its boundary. The drain on it was fairly small, but she still wasn't sure if there would be enough ambient spiritual energy to power it for the whole day, even with the gathering formation helping out. Mostly, she purchased it as an excuse, to have something to point to if anyone asked why they have been so quiet within their room.

    "There we go," she said, coming into the middle of the circles, "now, even if there is a cultivator in the next room over, they shouldn't sense anything amiss. You can open up the entrance."

    "And the fire?" Wang Yonghao nodded at it, shifting around awkwardly. "If you wanted to cook, it'd be easier to do it inside."

    "It would be suspicious if we stayed in the room but never even lit a fire," she said, "the innkeeper saw how drenched I was in the rain, and I bought rice and vegetables from him - this way, he would see smoke coming out of our fireplace, and make all the wrong assumptions."

    She pulled out her silk rope, and offered one end to Wang Yonghao.

    "Let's go," she smiled, "I am getting hungry."
    As they descended down into the inner world - Wang Yonghao, walking on air, and she, holding onto a rope securely tied to his belt - Qian Shanyi felt tension lift off her mind. The same place that tried to kill her so many times now felt safe, comfortable, like returning back home from a long trip. Ever-present sunlight warmed her skin, the dense spiritual energy in the air rushed into her meridians, and she knew that at least here, she didn't need to hide.

    From the air, the world fragment looked like a perfectly round plate of grass. As she looked over it, she quickly noted the changes from her last visit. Wang Yonghao had dragged the lathe table off to one side, and the center of the world fragment was now occupied by a dozen chopped off tree trunks - supply of wood, she guessed. The drying cabinet on the chiclotron looked complete, and something of a kitchen had been set up above the fire node right next to the bath - all the cutlery arranged close together, with a stone foundation built above the node hatch, for easy access to the fire. The bath itself was surrounded by a fence as tall as a person - nothing more than thick, long wooden stakes hammered down into the ground, blocking the bath from sight down on the ground.

    "You walled off the bath?" she chuckled, as they landed and headed towards the kitchen.

    "Yeah. It felt awkward to bathe in the open." he shrugged.

    "In the open? You live alone." She raised an eyebrow, looking back at Wang Yonghao.

    "It was still awkward," he grumbled, "all this open space? Even if nobody can see me, it still feels like I am exposed."

    She hummed. It would certainly make it easier to cohabitate - she remembered how painfully awkward the man was around nudity, back in the forest.

    She quickly changed out of her drenched robes and into a fresh set - these ones brilliant white with silver thread, and a thin leather belt - hiding behind the bath out of courtesy to Wang Yonghao, and squeezed as much rainwater out of her long black hair as she could.

    Taking a long, hot bath after the chaos of the night seemed like just what she needed before sleep, but first, she needed to fill her stomach. She checked the pots - all of them perfectly clean, and free of rust - picked up a small one, pouring out two portions of rice to wash and cook.

    They quickly descended into silence only interrupted by the sound of rice swirling in water. Wang Yonghao broke it first.

    "You said you got my letter?" he asked, biting his lips. "Did anything…happen there?"

    She collected her thoughts before responding. Back in Xiaohongshan, she was furious when she read his message, but her anger had abated in time.

    "When I left you, I visited the postal office, and then went on to sell one of our swords," she finally said casually, "the merchant seemed interested, and offered a good price, but then I made a mistake, and he sent spirit hunters after me."

    Wang Yonghao made a whining noise, and she waved him off.

    "It's fine. I handled it," she said, straining out the rice from starchy water with the edge of her knife, before refilling the pot and putting it on the fire, and adding some salt. She wiped her hands, and turned back to glare at Wang Yonghao. "But I did have to sneak back into our room in the middle of the night like some cheap robber, just so that I wouldn't be spotted. I spent the entire night huddled inside of a fireplace, coughing up soot. That was not fine. If you wanted to cut me off, why didn't you just tell it to my face?"

    "I didn't want to cut you off!" he said, wringing his hands, "It's just…"

    "Just what?"

    "It's dangerous!" He shrugged. "I… I wrote about my friend, didn't I?"

    "You did," she said, her glare softening a fraction, "But by then, I've already realized that something like that must have happened in the past. It changed little. It also has nothing to do with refusing to speak to me directly."

    "Well what was I supposed to say?"

    "The truth," she snorted, "That you were afraid, that I'd be in danger, which I already knew. I would have, of course, told you to shove your concerns because the path of cultivation is always full of dangers - but if you didn't want anything to do with me, then I'd have grudgingly conceded, no matter how stupid that decision would have been. I told you as much in the forest."

    Wang Yonghao looked away.

    "I was hoping you'd just go back to your sect," he sighed, "it's your home, you have family there. Why should you throw your life away?"

    "Yonghao, I can't go back," she sighed, unpacking her knife chest, and preparing to dice up the vegetables she got from the innkeeper. Sadly, she didn't have any meat to work with.

    "What?" he said slowly, "but you… You do have family in Golden Rabbit Bay, right?"

    "Last I checked," she said, pushing down her spike of worry, "though I can no longer be sure, not after those demonic cultivator attacks on the day you left the city. But that isn't the problem. I wrote a… rather scathing message to my sect, saying I would not be returning. They would not welcome me back with open arms."

    "What?" he said faintly, taking his head in his hands, "No, when would you have had the time -"

    "You saw me write it, Yonghao." She glared back at him. "I meant every word in that letter, but the fact remains - I cannot go back, not as I am now. I can't even write to find out if my parents are still alive - the sect would track the return address, I am sure. And yes, perhaps I should have told you what kind of letter I was writing, but it was my own business. I am sorry I kept quiet, but you would have found out anyways if you simply asked me, or even just mentioned wanting to split, instead of making assumptions."

    Wang Yonghao sat down on the grass, looking faint.

    "So… What now?" he asked.

    "What is in the past is in the past," she sighed, "please do not pull something like that again - if you still do not want to travel with me, then let us figure something out calmly, so that I could split off without being left with the law at my heels."

    There wasn't enough space near the first fire node to place a pan of diced up vegetables. Something to busy herself with later - she could build a proper stove with multiple burners, perhaps - but for now, she simply headed off to another fire node. Running between them would be a chore, but she'd manage.

    "Besides, don't you think we work well together?" she asked, carefully positioning the shield that served as their pan on top of a pair of wooden logs, just high enough above the fire node to fry the vegetables, but not so high that all the heat would dissipate. "Without my advice, you'd be dueling Jian Shizhe right about now."

    As she stirred the pan with a carved, wooden spatula, she felt that something was missing. The innkeeper sold her some carrots and onions, but with only salt and pepper on hand, that would taste a bit too flat.

    "I wish I had thought to bring more spices," she sighed, "Wu Lanhua had such a good collection, and she wouldn't have missed me taking some samples…"

    "I have some," Wang Yonghao said, and she raised an eyebrow at him in surprise. He motioned for her to follow, and led her to the drying cabinet on the chiclotron.

    When she showed him her plans for the redesign, the drying cabinet was already included. It was merely a tall chimney above a fire node that passed through a large box, warming it and giving it plenty of airflow, fit to dry food or clothes after a wash. They hadn't had the time to finish building it before Wang Yonghao ran away, but it seemed that he had finished it on his own.

    She rapped her knuckles on the smooth planks, enjoying the solid, dull sound. Good construction. There was a door on the side, locked up with a latch, and when she popped it open, she saw neat shelves, full of ingredients. The smell of dry herbs hit her in the face, and she breathed deeply, savoring it.

    "Good job building this," she said, running her hand along the inside wall. "Great job on maintaining the entire world fragment, really - finishing up frying the chiclotron, adding a kitchen, and the walls to the bath. You put yourself down so much I was worried you would let it all fall apart."

    "I thought you said the walls were a waste?" he asked, uncertainly, but his mood did seem to improve somewhat.

    "I didn't say that," she shook her head, "it just seemed strange to me, is all. But if you feel more comfortable that way, then it is good. At the end of the day, a house should be built to serve its inhabitants."

    She turned her gaze to the contents of the cabinet, quickly adding them to her mental catalog of what was available.

    "Good selection," She said, impressed, going through the shelves. "Garlic, slothenleaf, even some sparkberries… Not stolen, I hope?"

    "No," he said, shifting awkwardly, "you left a couple spirit stones behind. Money doesn't stick around me, so I figured… I should buy something useful, right? Sorry for using it up."

    "I am not here to give you grief over a couple spirit stones, Yonghao." She snorted. "I want a long term, productive relationship. Besides, we'll both be eating this. It was a good purchase, though we'll have to take some of them out of the cabinet before it ruins the taste entirely. Some of these ingredients prefer the cold, others need more air moisture... But you couldn't have known, and it's not a big deal."

    "I can't store them outside, so that leaves the chiclotron," he sighed, "the rosevines eat everything I leave out. Maybe I'll make a second box."

    "Those are still a problem?" She raised an eyebrow.

    "Yeah, they hide underground, but they can't get into the box, not with the latch," he said, "I have to sleep inside of that hunting shack we dug into the ground. They tried to strangle me when I didn't."

    "I am glad it ended up being handy eventually," she smiled, and went back to the ingredients. At the bottom of the cabinet, one shelf caught her eye - it held a large cut of mushroom sponge, faintly suffused with wood-type spiritual energy.

    "Is this from that mushroom spirit you fought off?" She asked, curiously.

    "You know about that?" Wang Yonghao asked, surprised.

    "I know many things, Yonghao." She snorted. "Good job defending the ordinary people."

    "Well… yeah," he said, and even despite her compliment, she could tell that his mood had dropped like a stone. "I thought maybe I could cook it - but it was too tough to eat, no matter how much I fried it, so I just left it here. But if you know about it… Were you following me? How did you manage that?"

    "I have my ways." She laughed, deflecting the question. "Don't worry, I think I know how to cook this mushroom. It would be a good compliment to the rice."

    "No, really, this doesn't make sense," he said, suddenly scowling, "Shanyi, I know what I am doing. When I don't want to be found, people almost never find me. My luck is cursed, but it grants me this much - I get into new problems, but out of old ones. And I was trying to run away from you - so how did you manage to find me?"

    She stared at him, and considered deflecting again. There were ways to do it… but he deserved to know, especially if she was going to count on his help with the tribulation.

    "I made a heavenly vow," she said quietly, "the Heavens were kind enough to help me find you in turn - I suspect you are their favored son, for whatever reason."

    "You?" Wang Yonghao raised an eyebrow, "You made a heavenly vow?"

    "I was all out of options," she scowled, blushing in shame, "you think I liked kissing the hands of butchers?"

    "Uh huh," he said, his eyes narrowing in suspicion, "and what kind of vow was that?"

    She opened her mouth to respond, to say that they should discuss this after dinner - in case mere discussion broke it - but stopped herself. Something didn't feel right.

    It took her a moment to realize what she felt - or rather, did not feel - and her eyes widened in shock. The heavenly vow in her mind had gone completely silent.

    She could still feel it in her mind, inert though it may be, but it had ceased to poke at her thoughts, as if it had fallen into deep torpor. In all her time with it, this has not happened even once.

    Back at Wu Lanhua's estate, mere minutes after she made it, it was already active, pushing her along - and casting her mind back, it still was when she met Wang Yonghao, though it had calmed down significantly. Even while they were setting up the formations in their room, she could still feel it pressing down on her awareness.

    So why would it go to sleep now?

    No. Not now. She realized that she hadn't felt it move ever since they entered Wang Yonghao's Inner World.

    She glanced upwards, to the very top of the spherical world, where the entrance to it had closed.

    Could the Heavens simply…not see what was going on here? After all, the vow reflected their opinion of her - if it had gone silent, then had Heaven's watchful eye been closed?

    That seemed like the only sensible explanation - the only concrete thing that could have changed between then and now - and yet it made no sense at all. If her theory was correct - and everything so far had pointed in that direction - then Wang Yonghao was the favored child of the Heavens, and his luck related to them in some way. But why would the Heavens give him a way to hide from their sight?

    Was their sight limited within all world fragments, or only this one? She didn't know, and her research so far was too rudimentary to say for sure, but if any such limitations existed, then at least she hadn't heard of them.

    Was this a trap? No, that made no sense - if the Heavens wanted to kill her, they could have broken off the vow at any time. If they did so while she was crossing the glassy fields, she would have died for sure.

    That meant it couldn't be a trap… Or at least, not a trap for her.

    "It was…a calculated vow," she said carefully, testing the waters.

    Nothing. The vow stayed dormant.

    "One that I would never have made, before I met you," she said, her lips slowly stretching out into a grin.

    Not even a blip.

    "One that, in fact, I would have said I should go back on," she said, starting to laugh. Wang Yonghao looked at her suspiciously.

    "And in fact… It is a vow I never intended to fulfill in the first place!" She laughed in full, turning her eyes to the skies. Wang Yonghao went white as death, but the vow in her mind stayed silent, unmoving, and no tribulation lightning struck her down. "A vow of a liar, worthy of those it was given to!"

    "Why are you laughing?!" he asked, his hands shaking a bit, "if you made a vow, you should know how dangerous it is to break it off! It's a miracle they didn't do so just now, after what you said!"

    "Oh, Younghao, but why shouldn't I laugh?" She laughed louder, "I have just discovered that the Heavens, sanctimonious bastards that they are, have made a mistake."

    She let her malice fill her grin, like old wine filling a crystal glass.

    "And mistakes are made to be punished."
     
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    • Chapter 42: Rage At Luck, Thee Heavenborne
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    • Author Note: If you'd like to read three chapters ahead, or read other works I write, you can find me on patreon.
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    Wang Yonghao continued to freak out while she checked up on the rice, and took the vegetables off the burner.

    "Are you suicidal?!" He shouted at her, "Why would you ever make a heavenly vow you intended to break?!"

    "Oh relax." She snorted at him, bringing the large cut of mushroom to a cutting board to dice it up. "I wasn't just being a bit reckless."

    "A bit reckless?" He scowled at her. "You are in the middle of the refinement stage! Tribulation would have the strength of the peak of the refinement stage - it will murder you!"

    "Bah." She scowled back. "That isn't how strength works, and you should know this better than anyone. You cannot put a number to it, and say that since I have a strength of 500 points, and the tribulation has a strength of 1000 points, it would kill me every time. Circumstances, environment, allies, techniques, treasures and pills… all of it can swing the odds massively, and in either direction."

    "Circumstances? What circumstances?"

    "Well, for one, I have you." She nodded at him. "I hope you would help me fight?"

    "I mean - of course, but what if you didn't find me?" he said, "Or if I refused? I ran away from you! How could you be so reckless as to rely on my help?"

    "If I didn't find you, then I would have simply died." She shrugged. "That was a risk I was taking - but it was a calculated one. I asked for enough luck to find you, and the Heavens, for all their faults, always uphold the letter of their deals. If they didn't think I could do it, they wouldn't have granted me the vow in the first place."

    "Shanyi - I am in the high refinement stage, not the peak! I can't stand up to a heavenly tribulation either!"

    "You frankly could, but I don't need you for your strength." She snorted. "You could simply stand right next to me, keep your sword sheathed, and my odds would already improve drastically."

    "What?" he asked, confusion plain on his face. She hummed in response, gathering the diced up mushroom into a bowl, and headed towards one of the metal nodes of the chiclotron.

    "Do you know why you couldn't properly cook this mushroom?" she said, popping the hatch open, and carefully lowering the bowl in. "It comes from a spirit - you can still feel the spiritual energy within it, right? That makes it a spiritual ingredient, and you need to weaken it first."

    Three Obediences Four Virtues had several sections on the various techniques one could use to do just that, but with the chiclotron at hand, the choice was obvious.

    "It is a wood-type ingredient," she said, getting up off her knees and dusting herself off, "putting it in a metal-type environment will create inauspicious feng shui within this node. Inauspicious feng shui, among other things, weakens and damages many spiritual materials - which is exactly what we want, in this circumstance. Ordinarily, you would leave it alone for months - but with how much spiritual energy circulates through our chiclotron, I think it should be ready in about an hour."

    "And what does this have to do with the tribulation?" he said, frowning.

    "Nothing. It has to do with your luck," she said, going over to her bags, and starting to unpack what few personal possessions she had. "Many people think that auspicious feng shui is always good, and inauspicious feng shui is always bad - but that is not so. It's true that humans have vastly more uses for auspicious feng shui than the opposite, but that is not the same as one being 'good' and the other 'bad'. Some valuable plants require inauspicious feng shui to grow, and sometimes, you need it to brew a pill. It's much the same with your luck."

    She gestured to him with one of her pill bottles to illustrate her point. He had his arms crossed on his chest, but listened patiently. "You must think your luck is always bad, don't you?" she said, "You say it's cursed. I imagine you think it kills people. But that is a dangerous simplification, and it's much more productive to think of what your luck actually does, and what motivates those who granted it to you."

    "And those would be?..."

    "The Heavens, I suspect."

    "Wait, no." Wang Yonghao frowned. "In the forest, you said we couldn't even begin to guess why I am lucky. And now you say it's the Heavens for sure? This makes no sense."

    "You are correct." She smiled. "I don't have proof - this is still only conjecture... But it's solid enough to gamble with. I am betting my life on it, after all."

    "Because of one heavenly vow going your way?"

    "No." She shook her head. "All the signs point the same way. First of all, I am not a karmist, I do not follow the Heavenly laws, and I have been vocal about my disgust for them all my life - yet still, the Heavens have granted me my vow. It's not unprecedented - but it is certainly unusual. On the other hand, if we assume your luck is caused by the Heavens, then it would make perfect sense - for I have vowed to make you cultivate as hard as you can for an entire month."

    Wang Yonghao scowled at her, and she waved him off.

    "I already said I have every intention of going back on my vow. Which brings me to my second point -" she said, knocking on the side of her head. "- inside your Inner World, the damnable vow is silent. It is yet another link between you and the Heavens."

    Wang Yonghao froze for a moment.

    "That's why you openly admitted that you were going to break off your vow?" he asked, faintly.

    "I didn't know it would be safe for sure, but sometimes, you have to take a risk to confirm your theory." She shrugged. "If you are unwilling to take it, then it will tie your hands in chains of uncertainty. But now I am sure."

    "That's…" He paused. "It's something, but it's not proof."

    "It isn't." She nodded. "Which brings me to the question of means. I have no doubt that the Heavens could manipulate someone's luck enough to bring challenges to their feet, for their tricks are many and vicious, but could we expect the same of some natural quirk of your constitution? I do not think so. There are natural limits to what a constitution could achieve, just how there are limits to the weight of a newborn. Your luck, on the other hand, is so extreme, it is as if you were born as large as a fully grown man."

    "Shanyi, no," Wang Yonghao started, then sighed, "this explains nothing. If my luck really were down to my constitution, then it could have simply made the Heavens accept your vow. And as for my inner world… I don't know. How do you know that all inner worlds don't work this way?"

    "Ah, but there is a way to prove this theory, fellow cultivator Wang," she said, waggling her finger at him with a smile, "tell me, in all your travels, have you ever been faced with a Heavenly tribulation? You have not mentioned any back in the forest."

    "I am still in the refinement stage, and I don't make vows," he said, "why would I face any in the first place?"

    She shrugged easily. "Sometimes the Heavens send down a tribulation in response to some treasure being unveiled," she said, "Some techniques - ones that rely on the Heavens, for example - risk calling down the tribulation as well. And of course, sometimes the tribulation descends without any known reason. it's very rare, but with your luck, shouldn't it have happened a dozen times by now?"

    Wang Yonghao froze again, his brow creasing in deep thought, and started pacing. She waited patiently, gathering up the healing pills she dumped into her knife chest back on the glassy fields back into their bottle.

    "Twice, I think," he finally said, turning back to her, "I… wasn't the main target though, it was other people nearby."

    "And did the tribulation attack you?" she pressed, "Harm you in some way?"

    "I… don't remember," he said, ruffling his hair, "It was a long time ago… I think… Maybe not? At least, mostly? What does this mean?"

    "Well, consider what we know, and what we do not," she said, "we don't know why your luck acts the way it does, but whatever it's true goal, it seems to attract various challenges to you. Let's say that it is caused by some factor X. If we assume X is the Heavens, then it's clear why you have never faced a tribulation - the Heavens have no reason to waste their own precious energy when they can already attract all sorts of other threats to you. But if it was caused by something else, then it wouldn't make much sense. Why should some non-Heavenly factor X throw demonic cultivators, ravenous spirits and ancient ancestors at you, but not a tribulation?"

    "You are right," he said, pacing around, "why haven't I seen this before? It's obvious in retrospect. It's not just the tribulation, I almost never have any problems with karmists…"

    "It's easy to miss the forest for the trees when you are living in it." She shrugged. "But that brings me back to my oncoming tribulation. Whatever goals the Heavens have for you, they clearly want you challenged, but not dead - and so by simply standing right next to me, you would tie their hands. Out of two hundred odd known forms of the Heavenly tribulation of the refinement stage, a good two thirds are far too indiscriminate, and your mere presence should eliminate all of them. The fewer options I have to prepare for, the easier it will be - now do you see what I mean by your luck not being all bad?"

    He looked at her skeptically. She smiled.

    "Your luck is just a tool," she said, "a dangerous one, perhaps, but a tool nonetheless. It can hurt people - or it can keep them safe. It all depends on what you do with it."

    She paused, to let him take it in. The man had a real problem with being stuck in a funk, and they needed to resolve his issues before he had another panic attack and left her in the lurch.

    At first, she thought his mood started to improve - but then he stopped in his tracks, and spun around to face her.

    "Oh no…" Wang Yonghao groaned, his breathing speeding up, eyes widening. He clutched his head in his hands. "Oh Heavens, what did you do?!"

    "What?" She frowned. What did she say?

    "Shanyi, if you are right, then the Heavens will murder you!" He bit his lips, breathing faster. "You said you'd help me get rid of my luck! Out loud, in the forest - they couldn't let you live. They will squash you with all their might!"

    "I know," she said, her frown deepening, "what of it?"

    "No, you don't understand," he whined, "your tribulation won't be something ordinary - it will be one of the worst ones."

    "Yes, I know, Yonghao," she pursed her lips in annoyance, "I am counting on it."

    "You are what?!" he said, pulling on his hair.

    "The same principle as with your luck," she continued calmly, "it narrows their options, makes it that much easier for me to prepare - playing the best move every time is a poor strategy in many gambles for this exact reason. Of course, if I were in the Heavens' place, I would have picked a tribulation that was less predictable, even if it was also somewhat less deadly - but the Heavens are known for their wrath, not their cunning."

    He stared at her in shock, before his legs gave in, and he fell down on his knees.

    "No, no, no…" he said, covering his face in his hands, "You can't do this."

    "I can do whatever I want, Yonghao," she said, raising her eyebrows in surprise, "that's what it means to be a cultivator."

    "No, that's… You can't just kill yourself on my behalf!" He moved his hands away, and grimaced sadly. "Because that's what this would be, you realize?"

    "To cultivate is to rebel against the Heavens, Yonghao, and no rebellion is free from danger," she said, "Heavens already tried to murder me when they sent that fish after us in the forest, I suspect - and it did not change my mind on the righteousness of my promise in the slightest."

    "You are in the middle of the refinement stage! Going up against the best the Heaven has to offer is not rebellion, it's suicide!"

    She pursed her lips. "First of all, I am on the cusp of entering the high refinement stage - six out of seven of my dantians are already unlocked. With another month of training in your Inner World, I might get there - in terms of my raw spiritual energy capacity, there is not much more to go."

    Dantians were the areas where spiritual energy was stored within a cultivator's body. If meridians could be compared to rivers - constantly flowing, but narrow - then dantians would be lakes, deep and expansive. From birth, all dantians in a human body were "locked", storing only a small fraction of their true capacity due to the same impurities that blocked the flow of spiritual energy through the meridians. Through cultivation, they could be purified, and greatly expand the power of a cultivator - which is why how many dantians one had unlocked was one of the primary measures of advancement through the refinement stage.

    Traditionally, the refinement stage was split into four substages: low, middle, high and peak. A nascent cultivator was considered to have entered the low refinement stage once they have unlocked at least one of their dantians, and created at least a single contiguous pathway for spiritual energy - finally allowing them to practice spiritual energy circulation techniques. Once they have cleared all twelve of their primary meridians of impurities - not completely, but enough for the spiritual energy to flow freely - and unlocked three dantians, they were considered to be in the middle refinement stage. Once all of their dantians were unlocked, they would enter the high refinement stage.

    Peak of the refinement stage stood separately from the other three: once all dantians were unlocked, there was little else one could do to expand their raw spiritual energy capacity. Instead, the true measure of entering the peak refinement stage was whether you were ready to reforge your flesh, challenge the heavenly tribulation, and ascend into the building foundation stage - and to do that safely, you had to have purged your meridians of all impurities. The difference between the strength of the peak and the height of the refinement stage was thus relatively small.

    "Shanyi, you are grasping at straws," Wang Yonghao said, not convinced by her deflection, "Six dantians? You need all seven! That's almost a twenty percent difference in your spiritual energy capacity - going without it is like tying one of your hands behind your back."

    "It's a weakness, but not an insurmountable one," she continued, shaking her head slightly, "on top of that, I had purchased very good pills and talismans. This town has plenty of cultivators - and you are here too, of course, as well as your protective luck. I have memorized all the most dangerous forms of the heavenly tribulation, as well as the advice on overcoming them. I am as prepared as I could be."

    "Oh yeah? You think you are prepared?" He glared at her. "You are a gambler, right? So what are your odds?"

    She bit her lip. It was a damn good question. She could dodge it, but…

    The truth was, she already knew the answer, and it scared her.

    "Twenty percent," she finally said, "there's a lot of uncertainty, obviously, but… Twenty percent I come out the other end unscathed. I expected to only have a couple days to prepare, before, so perhaps it's higher now - but not by much."

    Wang Yonghao closed his eyes.

    "You can't even say it's better than a coinflip," he said faintly.

    "I am not in the habit of lying for no reason."

    They stood together in silence.

    "What was the vow, again?" Wang Yonghao finally broke it, "To make me train as hard as I could for a month? Fine, I'll do it."

    "No."

    "What do you mean, no?" His eyes flew open and he stared at her in shock.

    "It means no, I won't let you do this." She crossed her arms. "This is a problem mostly of my own creation. If you want to help - help, but I won't push it off on you."

    "Shanyi, you will die!"

    "Even odds I'll end up crippled instead," she said, "but there is no other way."

    "What do you mean there is no other way?" he said, leaping up onto his feet again. "I could just train! I hate it, but I'll do it -"

    "No, there is no other way." Her lip twitched in annoyance, and she let out an exasperated sigh. Did she really have to explain this? "Look, you said it yourself - if the Heavens are behind your luck, then they will want to kill me for helping you get rid of it. This one, singular tribulation is not the problem - it's all the shit that will come after it. This isn't just about me not wanting to make you cultivate - though of course forcing cultivation on you is just a hair short of turning you into a cauldron. This isn't even about sticking it to the Heavens - though fuck every single celestial individually for making either of us go through this. This is about their fucking vows. I need to beat it into their thick angelic skulls that I will never go along with their bullshit, that any vow they put in front of me I will break, even if it might kill me - because otherwise, they will scheme, and they will cheat, and they will contrive things to force me into one vow after another, until I am nothing more than their hand on your throat."

    She ran a hand through her hair to calm herself. "I knew things would come to this when I made my promise - I just didn't expect it to be this fast."

    "Forcing cultivation on me?" he said, completely ignoring most of what she said, "Isn't that exactly what you are doing by telling me I can't help you?"

    "You don't want to cultivate - we both know this. I am not forcing you into anything."

    "Well what if I do?" He scowled at her. "What if I am fine cultivating to save a friend's life?"

    "This is sophistry." She narrowed her eyes at him. "you don't want to do it. That you also apparently want to save my life changes nothing about you not wanting to cultivate."

    "Oh so what?" His scowl grew deeper. "Are you going to stop me?"

    "I won't stop you - I'll just tear up the vow in my mind the second you try, and risk transcending the tribulation on the spot," she said calmly, "It won't matter one bit how much you cultivate after that - the Heavens are strict in their dealings. If the vow in my mind is gone by the time I leave your world fragment, the deal is off, and lightning comes out."

    He crossed glares with her, but she held steady, and he looked away with another groan. He walked off towards the edge of the world fragment to sulk, and she took the opportunity to check up on the rice again, deciding it was best to give him some space.

    When he returned, his face was even more ashen than before.

    "I never should have come to the Golden Rabbit Bay," he said, his voice hollow, "this is all my fault. I should have known better - my luck warps everything, and now even you, the one person who wanted to help me, are trying to put your neck in the path of a flying sword. And you won't even let me do it instead. It's bad enough that I have to go through this, but why does it have to turn people around me into maniacs?"

    "Yonghao," she said, giving him a flat stare, "what are you even talking about? I've wanted to fight the Heavens since I was five, sitting on my mother's lap, listening to stories about cultivators. My decision has nothing to do with you in particular - you just made it a lot easier for me to do so."

    "Of course it has to do with me!" He waved his arms around erratically, "How else do you explain this path you are dead set on?"

    "Not everything that happens around you is due to your luck."

    "Oh come on." He scowled at her. "Really? This is what you tell me? After all that happened to you, you still say it's not down to luck?"

    "Yes, Yonghao, this is what I'll tell you," she said, her lips twitching in annoyance again, "that's not how luck works, Heavenly or otherwise - and if you insist on ascribing everything to luck, you are just flat out wrong."

    "Since when are you an expert on luck?"

    "This doesn't require expertise." She sneered. He was really starting to get on her nerves. "This is the basics."

    "Yeah, I think I know a bit more about luck than your "basics"."

    "Do you know why my birthplace is called the Golden Rabbit Bay?" She spun to face him, and poked him in the chest with one finger. "Used to be, the bay was covered in a dense forest all the way down to the shore, full of demon beasts. Among them there was a certain species of rabbit, its fur as bright as gold, and legs as quick as lightning - a most vicious predator. See, it had this luck - it would always come at you from the one direction you weren't watching, at exactly the worst moment. And if you tried to chase after it, you'd always miss it, always take the wrong turn among the trees. Impossible to hunt, and far too dangerous to leave alone - and so no human lived anywhere within a hundred miles of that forest, and only a rare few used the river flowing into the bay for trade."

    She pushed herself closer still, baring her teeth, and poking him in the chest again.

    "Do you know why I say 'used to be'?" she said, lowering her voice dangerously, "because there are no more Golden Rabbits. Because eighty years ago, when cultivators had enough, we surrounded that damn forest, and burned it all to the ground! And the thing is - once there were no trees to hide behind, once all cultivators were looking in the same direction, once the clouds of rain were chased off, once there wasn't even a single hole in the walls of fire and death sweeping through the landscape, nothing for the little rabbits to slip through, then their luck didn't amount to shit. They simply died. Because luck needs something to work with. And so now, we have a beautiful city, with gardens that are the envy of all the empire - for plants only grow stronger among the ashes."

    Wang Yonghao pushed her away, and she didn't resist.

    "Luck can push you towards a better path - but if there is no path, then it's not going to make one for you," she continued, "It can't manifest things out of the aether. It can't make your strikes stronger or faster. All it does is shift things, rearrange pieces, but it's just that - a rearrangement. Do you know why you found me in that restaurant? I suspect the Heavens wanted someone to motivate you to cultivate harder, and I fit well enough to their blind eyes. I cultivate hard, after all. I taught outer disciples in my sect. Would it not make sense that I would force you to cultivate hard as well? To a celestial, blind to the nuances of human motivations, it must make enough sense - and there simply are very few options for women who could keep up with the sort of bullshit your life is made out of. And so luck rearranged things, and we met - but that was a fuckup on their part, because I am not who they imagined me to be."

    "Oh, so you admit our meeting was due to my luck, huh?" He scowled at her.

    "Of course I admit it." She snorted, and pulled out the jade slate for the Three Obediences Four Virtues, waving it in front of his face. "See this manual? I found it in that sect ruin you stumbled into after kidnapping me. It's perfectly suited to my constitution. This cannot be a pure coincidence - this had to have been a little gift from the Heavens to sweet talk me into sticking around with you - and no doubt yet another reason why they chose me, for how many undiscovered manuals were in easy reach of the Golden Rabbit Bay? But I never said that nothing is down to your luck - just that not everything is."

    "And how could you possibly know that?" He swept his arms wide, "look at this! An entire Inner World, full of treasures! All of this, luck! Who are you to know its limits?"

    "You decided to pick the treasures up." She scoffed. "Luck only brought you to them - which is nothing unusual."

    "And I decided where to run, didn't I? But you still said the manual you found was down to luck, even though it served you perfectly!"

    "Not much luck needed to lead a drunk fool where he needs to go."

    "So what, it can affect my decisions, but not yours?" Wang Yonghao laughed, and his face split into a fake, arrogant grin, "that is stupid. How do you know your decision to battle the tribulation isn't just down to my luck trying to fuck me up again by seeing someone die right in front of me?"

    She clenched her teeth, rage settling into her heart. It flooded her all at once, and she didn't even know where it came from.

    "What?" she said, her tone cold enough to liquify air.

    "Luck can affect the decisions of other people, right?" he said, "That's how it draws people to me. So how do you know it didn't affect you?"

    "It was my decision, Yonghao," she said, barely managing to keep her tone level, "even if I was drunk or high on pills, it would still be my decision. Luck does not mindrape people, its influence is always subtle."

    "Subtle?" He looked around the world fragment again, "You call this subtle?" He turned back to her, and snapped his fingers at her face. "Fine - tell me this. You said you got those scars by slipping on the glassy fields? How did that happen?"

    She narrowed her eyes at him, and paused, giving herself a moment to let her burning rage abate. It did not help in the slightest.

    "I arrived in Reflection Ridge, and needed to cross to get to you," she finally said, "rain started, and I got caught up in a flash flood, and was almost swept away downstream. A couple scars is nothing - they will heal by morning. What are you leading to?"

    'Oh, 'rain started'?" He laughed again, the annoying sound raking at her ears, "Well, tell you what - when they pulled me into their hunt, Jian Shizhe said he was preparing to hunt shamblers, and just waiting for the first rain of the season to do so. It flushes them out of their hiding spots, you see - and then I arrive in town, and of course it's time for the rain to start. Won't you say this is down to my luck?"

    "What of it? I already know your luck could be dangerous to those around you."

    "But it's not just dangerous! My luck tried to kill you, again!"

    "Yonghao, the vow in my mind was still whole - still is," she said. "The Heavens would have had no motive to kill me. You are grasping at strings."

    "So what if they have no motive?" He snorted. "My luck is not just the Heavens, it can't be. My luck still works right here, in my inner world - where you say the Heavens are blind. It still lets me run away from problems that the Heavens bring to my plate. Whatever is going on with it, it's at least somewhat independent - and since I was trying to run away from you, wouldn't my luck try to kill you?"

    She took a step back. That…was a good point.

    "Still my decision," she said, her voice wavering for a moment, "nobody forced me into the hurricane."

    "Was it though?"

    "Yes it was!" she scowled, her mind flashing back to her talk with Junming. If she spent less time talking to them, she would have gotten ahead of the waters. "Of course it was, you asshole! I could have asked for help, I could have waited until morning - I simply assumed that crossing was safe because the one person I asked did not say it was dangerous!"

    "Was it though?" His grin grew wilder. "You told me a lot about assumptions, and how you shouldn't make them - and you are saying you 'just' made a mistake? 'Just' assumed wrongly?"

    "Yes I did! I make mistakes too!"

    "Fine. Let's take what happened in Xiaohongshan. Spirit hunters came after you right when I left - clearly luck, no?"

    "Stop being ridiculous." Her scowl grew wider, and she clutched her hands into fists. "You've just said you shouldn't assume things - in Xiaohongshan, your luck was not at fault. The empire requires all sword sales to be checked. The exact same thing would have happened if I tried to sell the swords halfway across the world, knowing what I did at the time. This was simply a natural consequence of bureaucracy."

    "A check?" He quirked his eyebrow. "Well why did you try to sell the swords in the first place then?"

    "I did it because I didn't know about the damn check," she said, "and because I didn't listen when you told me about it. See, I - stupidly - assumed that all your problems were down to luck, and not actual fuckups on your part."

    "Yeah, but you could have decided to sell all sorts of things - demon cores, for example." Wang Yonghao laughed. There was a mad, masochistic twinkle in his eyes. "Why not sell those? What, more stupidity? You should really get your head checked."

    "Because the first thing any merchant with half a brain would ask me is 'what kind of beast did it come from', you imbecile." She bared her teeth in full. "Which I couldn't fucking answer, could I, because you don't remember anything about your own treasures! And they would check my answer - there are techniques for this, though not ones I am familiar with. And then what would they assume? That I somehow slaughtered and butchered a demon beast without even remembering its form? No, that I stole the damn core! They don't simply get left to lie around in sect ruins or inheritance shrines, cores go bad and sometimes explode if stored improperly, and most spirits would happily eat any they come across. It is plausible that a loose cultivator could stumble on a small, unexplored ruin, and find a sword in a good condition. Hell, it's even somewhat plausible they could stumble on one out in the wilderness - demon beasts savor the flesh of their kills, but leave the weapons alone. But what is not plausible is that they somehow stumbled on a loose demon beast core."

    "And what about that core from the fish?" He laughed at her again, the sound breaking through the blood pounding in her ears. "Could have sold that."

    "Because I forgot we had it, you piece of shit," she hissed, raising her hands up between them. She wasn't sure if she wanted to pull at her hair or strangle the man. "I made the plan to sell the swords before we fought the fish, did not re-evaluate, and so didn't bring it with me."

    "Doing a lot of forgetting around me, aren't you? Awfully unlucky."

    "My plan," she hissed, "my execution, and my fuckup. Where the fuck does your luck even enter the picture?!"

    "Well, if not for my luck, you wouldn't have made such a shitty plan -"

    She punched him in his arrogant fucking mouth.
     
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    • Chapter 43: Throw Your Hands To Strike With Reason
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    Her punch slammed into his mouth, and he rocked back, arrogance shifting to shock in a flash.

    "Oh I am sorry, my fist must have slipped," she noted idly, taking a step closer, and kicking at his knee. "how unlucky of me."

    In his stumbling, he managed to step off just to the side of her strike. The rage in her heart was gone, crystallized down into cold certainty in an instant.

    "Why did you do that?!" He stared at her with wide eyes, wiping blood off his mouth with one hand. She felt his spiritual energy shield spike in intensity, and strengthened hers to match.

    "Me?" She put a hand on her chest, feigning innocence. "What are you talking about? It's not my fault if your luck moves my hand to dislodge some impurities inside your own head, is it?"

    She felt a brief spike of disappointment that her hit hadn't broken off one of his teeth. Well, there was always the next one.

    "Luck - you punched me!"

    "Did I?" She raised her eyebrow, pantomiming thinking with one hand. Her other hand flicked back to a series of strings tied to her waist, and she let her long rope fall down on the ground, filling it with spiritual energy, sneaking it over to his feet. She pounced on him again. "I didn't notice."

    Instead of a response, she felt spiritual energy burst out of his feet, and he retreated into the air just before her punch connected, standing on two clouds of fiery dragonflies. She raised her head to keep a watch on him, resting her hands on her hips.

    The fingers of her left hand kept moving her rope around. Could she make it leap up at him? No, he was too high.

    "Get down here and punch me like a man," she taunted.

    "Why would you punch me?" He shouted at her, "I didn't do anything to you!"

    "To hear you say it, you are responsible for every single problem in my life." She scowled. "So I figure, you want to treat me like a brainless jade beauty, helplessly pulled around by the strings of your luck? Incapable of my own plans, decisions, even mistakes? Well, hey, I guess I am fine with that - means I can do whatever I want, and not care in the slightest, since it's all your fault anyways."

    "What - that's not what I said!"

    "It's what you meant," she said, her breathing stabilizing, "now get down here and debate Dao with me like a true cultivator, or I'll have to force you down."

    "Force me - you can't even fly!"

    Instead of responding, she picked up the free end of her rope from the ground, unclipped her sword sheath from her belt, and tied the rope to the handle of her sword. Stretching out her hand, she started pouring her spiritual energy into the blade.

    "Hey- " Wang Yonghao said, worry bleeding into his voice, and backed up a bit more, "hey, what are you doing?"

    "To cultivate is to rebel against the Heavens," she intoned, letting a grim smile break out on her face, "I wouldn't be much of a cultivator if I couldn't drag even the stars down to the ground, would I?"

    The spiritual energy flowed through the sheath and the sword, spinning up, stabilizing, and in mere moments, the sword started to hum.

    "Let us see if we could follow in Gu Lingtian's footsteps." She sneered, and with a clap of air, her sword rocketed up into the air, invisible wings holding it aloft and heading straight for Wang Yonghao. The silken rope whipped behind it, like the string of a kite.

    He dodged it, because of course he did, and she brought the sword back for another pass, trying to at least catch him with the rope. The sword was moving too slowly to break through his spiritual shield, in any case.

    "Since when do you have a flying sword technique?!" He shouted at her, bouncing around in mid air. Somehow, the random flaps of turbulence managed to always pull the rope just far enough away from his limbs to avoid catching on.

    Because of course they did.

    "You can thank your luck for giving me one."

    "Stop this, Shanyi!"

    "Then get down to the ground and fight me."

    "Please! I didn't even do anything to you!" he cried.

    "What?" She scowled up at him. "You asshole, you kidnapped and beat me half to death! Or did you already forget? And now you have the sheer fucking gall to say all my decisions and everything you did was actually just down to your luck? As if it was your luck that swung your fists!"

    "It's - I apologized! You said we were square!"

    "I don't care about apologies, I care about actions and understanding," she said, "understanding that you clearly lack if even now you make excuses for yourself."

    Wang Yonghao was too fast, dodging her sword every time, and with his luck, he didn't even have to look at it half the time. She needed it to go faster, but there wasn't enough space for it to accelerate.

    Instead of making another pass at him, she pulled the sword over to the edge of the world fragment, and slammed it into the side. Her sword slid along the almost frictionless surface, circling around the entire thirty meter spherical border, gaining speed with every second as she poured more and more energy into it.

    "Funny thing about luck, Yonghao," she started with a wide smile, malice in her eyes, "there needs to be a path for it to find. So what happens when my sword flies faster than you could dodge? Should we conduct this experiment, little rabbit?"

    "Why are you trying to kill me?!" he cried, pulling at his hair.

    "You said you tried to kill me today, with the flash flood."

    "That's not me - that's my luck!"

    "By your own words, the fastest way for me to get rid of it would be to get rid of you! After all, who knows! Perhaps your luck would force us to meet time and time again. Besides," - she scoffed - "Kill you? Please. As if your luck would let you die - I would sooner believe you would spontaneously develop a resurrection technique. No, I don't think I can kill you. But I can make it hurt."

    She held his stare for a moment, and saw him gulp, before the fireflies below his feet winked out and he dropped down to the ground. She motioned for her sword to turn downwards, and out of the corner of her eye, saw a cloud of earth burst into the air where it safely buried itself in the dirt.

    "What do you even want from me?" he said, holding up his hands as she stalked over to him.

    "I want a bare modicum of fucking respect," she growled, raising her hands in the only defensive stance she knew, dancing lightly on her feet as she circled around him. Seeing her do so, he unclipped his own sword sheath, and tossed it aside. She waited for him to raise his hands, and then pounced on him.

    "I do respect you!" he said, blocking her strikes. "You are an asshole, but you've helped me a lot!"

    "Bullshit you do," she scowled, "you respect nothing - not even yourself."

    Pugilism was not a core part of either the Seven Flowers Bloom or the Three Obediences Four Virtues, the two fighting styles she had studied so far, but the basics - footwork, keeping your distance, guarding yourself - were shared between every martial art. She had never been attracted to the practice herself, and her Elders would have blown out their heart dantians if they ever heard of her practicing something this unrefined, but she had to admit that there was a very visceral satisfaction in slamming her fist into something and feeling it give.

    Unfortunately for her, Wang Yonghao seemed to have actual training. He realized this quickly, and relaxed, mostly going on the defense. The arrogant prick still refused to punch her in the face.

    "What are you even trying to do, Shanyi?" he said a minute later, catching her arm and tossing her over his head. She spun around in the air, landing on her feet, and sprung back into the fight. "I beat you last time! I am stronger - especially without a sword! You can't win this."

    "That is your philosophy, huh?" She sneered. "Only fight the sure fight? No wonder you run away so much."

    "Well… Yes!" he said, easily hopping over a wide leg sweep she made. She spun on the ground, turning her momentum into an upwards kick, aiming for his groin while he was airborne, but he caught her leg, and kicked her in the chest, sending her skidding off down the grass. "Of course I run - I can't beat my luck! Anyone would do the same thing!"

    "Luck this, luck that," she said, picking herself up, and sprinting back to him, "if things go well, luck made them good. If things went badly, luck made them bad. If you've fucked up, luck made you fuck up. If you hurt someone, luck made you hurt them. Is that what you call respect? Complete abdication of any responsibility for your actions?"

    "Of course luck did that!" He scowled at her, and closed the distance first this time, managing to trip her up. He didn't capitalize on the opportunity, and she sprung back to her feet a moment later. "You even said you found me because of the vow - because of my luck! How can I not say it?"

    "I didn't find you because of luck," she sneered. She needed a plan, this really was going nowhere. "I found you by being resourceful - your luck was just one more piece on the board. Should I thank the suns in the skies for giving me light to see? The winds, for bringing me air to breathe while I stalked you? The river waters, for letting me travel at speed? If you didn't have luck, I would have found another way."

    "That is not the same thing," he said, falling for her feint at his kidneys and dodging right into a kick at his neck - but his hand came up just in time, leading her leg millimeters away from his skin. "My luck kills people!"

    "It also saves people."

    "From me! It sometimes saves them from the misfortune I bring! Even your tribulation - you are only in it because of your vow, which you only made to find me!"

    "That's not how luck works, you idiot." She sneered again, frustration welling up in her. "It rearranges things. That mushroom spirit you fought? It had to already be in the forest, hadn't it? It would have come into conflict with the human towns eventually - your presence just expedited the inevitable."

    All she learned from the Seven Flowers Bloom was completely useless at this, she might as well have asked him out for a dance - and while Three Obediences Four Virtues had a great deal of useful advice, it was all of the disemboweling variety, and required a knife besides.

    "You do not know that," he said, but she could see she put him off balance, if even a bit. Her kick landed just a fraction closer to his skull. "It could have lived peacefully, and my luck enraged it. Made it attack when it otherwise wouldn't have."

    "Then why are you not a hermit?" She laughed. "Even if you really think it's all down to your luck, then it's still your decision to travel around people. Your fucking agency. So which is it?"

    He stumbled again, and this time, she managed to plant a solid punch in his face. His spiritual shield crackled, but held.

    The trouble was, she had started out with less spiritual energy than he did, and then wasted still more on her flying sword technique. She was running out faster than he was - she needed a way to change things around. Her rope was too far away from her, at the very edge of the world fragment, and Wang Yonghao's luck wouldn't allow her to lead him away from the center. She needed something else.

    While he was distracted, she reached behind herself, and tore off one of the many tassels she made to control her rope technique, hiding it in her fist. Carefully, she spun the technique around the belt of her robes, keeping it at its lowest power - she would have to time this very carefully. Her spiritual energy shield should hide it from his senses, at least.

    "It's - it's not so simple," Wang Yonghao said, getting his stride again, "I am no saint! I don't want to become a hermit because my luck might hurt people."

    "Or save people."

    "Save them from me!"

    "Say it's a good thing you saved those people," she snarled, "just fucking say it. A murderous spirit is dead, and nobody even got hurt. That's a good thing. Say it's a good thing."

    "It's not - "

    "Say. It."

    "Say what?" he snarled back at her, "That I am a selfish bastard for putting them in danger in the first place? Yeah, I know that!"

    "No. Say that it's a good thing for cultivators to save people."

    "Of course it's good for cultivators to do that -"

    "You are a cultivator. Say it's a good thing you did what cultivators do."

    "Fine!" he snarled again, "It's good that I killed it! At least sometimes I can kill something that deserves it! Are you happy now?"

    "Overflowing with joy," she deadpanned, dancing away from a punch he threw back at her, "without you, that moron Jian Shizhe would have fucked up, brought that demon beast too close to town, and it would have killed people. If not today, then weeks from now. Now say it's a good thing you stopped it."

    "It's good I am a butcher - is this what you want to hear?"

    "All cultivators are butchers, you are not special." She sneered. "Say it's good mothers and fathers won't have to dig graves today!"

    "And then what?" he shouted, and his eyes snapped to her face and away from her hands. Foolish mistake. "It's good that I kidnapped you, because you got a good technique from it in the end? It's good that I almost killed you, because I didn't? I just don't want people to die! Why can't you understand this?!"

    Using his distraction, she caught his left arm in her right hand, and powered up her rope control technique. With trained flicks of the fingers on her left hand, she made her belt untie itself, unravel, and slither across her body and onto Wang Yonghao. Her robes, now unsecured, opened up, and his eyes widened, before he turned away instinctively, blushing profusely.

    Second distraction. Her leg swept under him, throwing his back into the grass, and her belt tied into a noose around his throat, starting to squeeze. His spiritual energy shield crackled under it, keeping it at bay - but now that he had to burn energy every second simply to resist the pressure, they should be more evenly matched.

    Falling down on him, she slammed her knee into his stomach with all her weight, and started to punch him in the face.

    "You don't get to decide how I die," she snarled, straddling him, "that's between me, my sword, and the fucking Heavens!"

    He brought one of his hands to block, the other reaching up to his neck to tear her belt off. That wouldn't do. She caught that hand, and pulled it away from him, pushing the other one down with her leg.

    "You think being around you puts me in danger? So fucking what?" She continued, struggling for leverage, "By the time you arrived, I was already growing stir crazy in my sect. If not for you, I would have found some other way to reach for the skies - and if there was no way, I would have made one! You think you are doing me a fucking kindness by protecting me? Do not insult me - I need a sword that can slice apart the very Heavens! Danger? I put myself in danger! Because I am a cultivator, and that's what cultivators do!"

    Untrained as she was at grappling, she needed both hands to keep one of Wang Yonghao's hands away. His other hand was mostly free - she could push it away from his neck, but that was about it. She saw it scrambling down in the grass, and his hand closed around a handle.

    Because of course they happened to fall within reach of his sword.

    "Good," she said calmly, staring into his eyes, "now either stab me, or don't, but make a decision, and own it."

    "Fuck you," he said, let go of his sword, and punched her in the face with his free hand. Her spiritual energy shield held, and she responded by kicking him in the mouth, close distance not letting her put as much force in as she would have liked.

    They scrambled against each other, punches and kicks landing without any pattern or technique, until his spiritual energy shield broke and her foot slammed into his teeth, and then his punch broke hers and sent her flying off into the grass. She rose, and stumbled up to where Wang Yonghao was still laying, dismissing her rope control technique before it strangled her only way out of this world fragment.

    Her tongue felt around a hole in her mouth - that punch actually managed to knock out one of her teeth. She'd have to find it later - with healing pills, she should be able to put it right back where it belonged.

    Wang Yonghao still seemed out of it, and so she tied her belt back on, and went off to get some water to clean up, covered as she was in fresh grass, dirt and blood.

    One pot of water dumped over her head later, and she felt suitably refreshed, her thinking finally clear of rage. She got a second pot, brought it to the man himself, and dumped it over him too. He quickly woke up, blinking the water out of his eyes. His lips were split, and as he sat up, he spat out blood and a pair of teeth of his own.

    "You alive?" She smiled, offering him a hand. He took it with some reluctance, and she pulled him up to his feet, helping him dust off some grime and grass.

    "Sorry about punching you," she said lightly, "if you want to kick me out after this, I'd understand it completely. But no more of this bullshit about your luck deciding for me. I decided to punch you because I was furious. My agency is my own."

    It's not like she could work with him if he didn't change his mind on this.

    "Didn't you say you should kill me to get rid of my luck?" he asked, warily, hissing as he touched his face. "What happened to that?"

    "I don't actually believe that," she admitted, "I was just trying to get under your skin. Sorry about that too."

    "Why don't you believe it?" he said, "The threat is still there."

    "The Heavens trying to kill me is not your fault." She shrugged. "That they may or may not use your luck as a weapon is irrelevant. I already challenged them when I stepped on the path of cultivation, as every cultivator does, and I was aware of the risks."

    "But it's not just the Heavens." He winced. "What if my luck tries to kill you again on its own? It's all subconscious. In the back of my mind, I still had the idea of hiding from you - and so the flash flood happened just as you were crossing. Surely you agree it's not a coincidence."

    "I am already going to be helping you murder your luck," she said casually, "if your luck decides to try and murder me in return, then I welcome the challenge."

    Wang Yonghao looked at her strangely, and then started laughing. She arched an eyebrow at him.

    "What?"

    "Murder my luck?" He kept laughing. "That's how you put it? Heavens, you really talk like the old monsters sometimes."

    "Well, I've watched every play about them that was performed in Golden Rabbit Bay," she said bashfully, "I suppose I picked up some habits from it."

    "Some habits, yeah." He chuckled, bending over to pick up his own teeth. "You have healing pills, right?"

    "I said I was prepared."

    "At least one of us is, I guess." He sighed. "Look, I'm also sorry, alright? I know you don't care about that, but I am. I…didn't think how it would be, from your perspective, when I left you there. And…maybe I didn't need to push you about luck."

    "I was once told by a fellow cultivator that it's good to make a little trouble for less trouble later," she said casually, "no permanent harm done."

    She went back to check up on the rice. By a small miracle, she caught it just before it would have started to overcook completely, and pulled it off the fire. Now she just had to wait for the mushrooms to finish breaking up in the chiclotron, and then she could cook them together with the rice and other vegetables.

    She yawned. She was honestly feeling exhausted - the hectic flight on Curls, her fight for her life on the glassy fields, and then this fight with Wang Yonghao took a lot out of her, and on top of that, she had been up and about for close to thirty hours. But there was one more thing she absolutely had to resolve today.

    "So what will it be?" she asked Wang Yonghao.

    "What?"

    "Do you want to challenge the Heavens together, or do you want to kick me out?" she looked straight at him, "You can take the time to think it over, but I need a straight answer."

    "Oh. Yeah, but I… have a condition." He winced.

    She raised an eyebrow, letting him speak.

    "You being alright with risking your life… I guess I get it, kind of," he sighed, "but this tribulation… It's too much. I want to try something else - I am pretty good at pretending to work hard, but achieving very few results. If you make me cultivate hard, but ineffectually, it might still pass the vow, right?"

    "I…don't think that would work," she said uncertainly, "the Heavens aren't very big on technicalities when it is to their detriment."

    "But you wouldn't mind trying?"

    "As long as you aren't doing it just because of the threat from the Heavens, I don't care what you do." She shrugged. "It's your cultivation. Build it, break it, turn it on its head - it's your business. I just don't want them to think I would be their patsy, and I don't want you to think like you need to do this. You have choices."

    "Thank you," he sighed.

    "I should be the one thanking you," she grumbled, "this tribulation will be terrifying, and if this works, you'd be saving my life. I don't want to face it either - if I could avoid it without becoming their servant, I'd do it in a heartbeat. But that also wasn't what I was talking about."

    He looked at her in surprise.

    "What do you mean?"

    "Yonghao," - she gave him a flat stare - "you have an inner world that, best as we can tell, the Heavens can't see into - a perfect place to plan and scheme, a tool that could be sharpened into a weapon. And you have luck which is perhaps not entirely caused, but certainly heavily influenced by the Heavens. Forget the tribulation - if you want to get rid of your luck, there is only one place to head."

    She pointed one finger up towards the skies.

    "So what will it be?" she said. "Do you want to break into the Heavens and topple their thrones? That's my real question."

    He stared at her for a long while, before he closed his eyes.

    "I am just so tired," he said, "I can't keep living like this. If that's what it would take… Then yeah, sure. I am all in."

    "Good choice, fellow cultivator Yonghao." She grinned. "Now let's plan how to make celestials into corpses."
     
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    • Chapter 44: Paint Your Will With Softest Blades
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    • Author Note: If you'd like to read five chapters ahead, or read other works I write, you can find me on patreon.
    I also have a discord server, where I post memes I make about FSE, and occasionally discuss some plans and worldbuilding details. Thanks for reading! :)​
    Qian Shanyi hissed in pain as she pushed her knocked-out tooth back into its socket. It had taken them ten minutes to find the damn thing, and by then, the gum had already swelled with blood. She secured it in place with her spiritual energy, and then bit down on a small bit of cloth wrapped into a roll, applying more pressure.

    With any luck, it would heal back up by the time she finished making breakfast - or at least enough that it wouldn't fall out when she went to sleep.

    The mushrooms still had a good forty minutes left to go in the chiclotron, and so she headed to the baths. She dearly needed one.

    The baths - or rather, bath, for there was just one - was merely a circular basin in the ground, lined with the same stones as the chiclotron. The seams between them were sealed with clay, and she glanced over it approvingly - Yonghao had patched all the holes and cracks nicely.

    Air shimmered faintly above the stones, heated up by the fire tunnel of the chiclotron that passed right below the bath. A tall bucket was attached to the wooden walls just above head height, full of water from a Blue Tear Stone, and she marveled for a moment how Wang Yonghao managed to put it together without seams or nails, before pulling open a small shutter in the side and letting a stream of water pour out. As soon as it hit the stones, it hissed, turning to steam, and the bath slowly started to fill up.

    The bucket itself was nothing revolutionary, merely well-constructed: most water treasures that produced water had a certain, typically low, amount of pressure they could overcome, and so putting them into a bucket was the standard method of preventing overflow. The higher the level of water in the bucket, the higher the pressure on the treasure, until the two reached equilibrium; of course, if you were to empty the bucket, it would immediately begin to fill again.

    She was left waiting for the bath to fill with little else to do - trying to plan her approach to the tribulation on an exhausted mind was a lost cause. Ordinarily, she would have chatted up Wang Yonghao about what happened to him while they were split up - but neither of them could talk, forced to press the dislodged teeth back in place as their bodies slowly reconstructed the severed nerves and blood vessels.

    She came back out of the bath, and leaned against its wall - or perhaps a fence, depending on how one looked at it - sliding down to the grass. Wang Yonghao was sitting nearby, curiously looking through the knives in her open knife chest. Seeing her come back, he looked up, and gave her a thumbs up.

    What does that mean?

    She groaned, and raised her hand, going back to the same trick she used when they were stuck together on a tree - drawing characters on her hand.

    They wrote for a bit, and she told him about her adventures with Wu Lanhua in the broadest details. Interpreting the hand drawings was so much easier in the ever-bright daylight of the world fragment, yet it still took excruciatingly long to say anything of substance.

    <I don't suppose you can fingerspeak?> she signed, shaking her tired wrist. Wang Yonghao gave her a sympathetic look.

    <Oh yeah!> Wang Yonghao signed with a smile, and his hands blurred into the dimly familiar signs of the Imperial Sign Language. <Do you? You started signing in your weird way and so I figured...>

    <I don't.> she signed, accompanying it with a groan, <A thousand curses upon my sect.>

    Still, this was something to celebrate. If he could teach her, they could speak far quicker - she very much doubted this was the last time they would be forced to stay quiet.

    Yet this revelation still nagged at her. <Where did you learn it? I didn't figure you were a scholarly type, despite how you dress.>

    He froze for a moment, and she decided to encourage him. <Learning a language takes many years. It's a good achievement, something to be proud of.>

    With a sinking feeling in her heart, she saw Wang Yonghao's smile drop further.

    <Had a lucky encounter and got hit with a soul shard which fused to my soul,> he signed, looking away for a moment. <I think it was from the inventor of the language? Now I can speak it.>

    She closed her eyes and rubbed the bridge of her nose. Soul shards were nothing to mess with - she would have said he was lucky to have endured the event so well, if not for the irony.

    <You know, I really should have expected this,> she signed, opening her eyes again, <yet somehow, I am still surprised.>

    <Yeah, tell me about it.>

    She shifted around, laying down on the grass next to the wooden wall, and kicked off her sandals, staring up into the sky, trying to process what he said. Finding treasures or manuals was one thing, but to simply have an entire language grafted onto your mind… No wonder he was so touchy about his soul.

    <That must suck.>

    <Knowing fingerspeak?> he signed, raising his eyebrows. She had to angle her head to look at his hands, but didn't rise up from the grass. It felt too nice to simply lay down and relax.

    She shook her head. <Not being able to truly call skills your own.>

    <Yeah.> He looked away, and she waited for him to look back at her to continue speaking. When several minutes passed and he still didn't, she waved her arm in the air to grab his attention.

    She couldn't wait to go back to speaking with her damned mouth.

    <Would you mind teaching me?> she signed. Even besides her own interest, she doubted this was the last time they would be forced to speak quietly. <You may not have gotten it on your own, but if you could teach it, that would still be your own achievement, right? Something you could do without relying on luck?>

    That one phrase took her a good two minutes to sign out. He smiled at that, some mirth returning to his eyes.

    <Really? The great Qian Shanyi is truly asking for some pointers?> he signed, hopping up off the grass and making a mocking bow. <This here elder would graciously instruct you, junior.>

    She rolled her eyes at him.

    <Don't push it.>

    Over the next twenty minutes he taught her the very basics of the Imperial Sign, mixing it with her own method of signing to explain the meaning of individual gestures. The difference between the two was like comparing the sky and the earth: where drawing a glyph on the palm of the hand - especially in a way that could be understood - took at least several seconds, fingerspeaking was both faster and clearer, distinct gestures blending together smoothly and efficiently until "speech" was as fast as when saying words out loud. They've started with the basics of movement - go there, come back, left, right, grab that thing, and so on - figuring that would be the most immediately useful thing to communicate if they were pressed for time.

    Her tired mind was straining itself, trying to keep the unfamiliar gestures in mind. She wasn't sure how much of it she would remember tomorrow, but at least it passed the time.

    Once her bath was full, she secluded herself, stripped off her robes, and sunk into the hot waters, feeling her muscles relax and her skin tingle from the temperature. The slope of the bath was gentle enough that she could easily lie down completely, water coming up to her neck.

    When she went to the baths in Xiaohongshan, she did not know what to do with her life, the stress poisoning the experience. Now, even despite the threat of the tribulation hanging over her head, she felt none of it. The sheer contrast made her chuckle sadly.

    Perhaps she really was insane. Would a sane person truly prefer mortal danger to a quiet life as a waitress?

    As she laid there, her thoughts started to slow, despite her best efforts.

    I… I still have to cook… Should just quickly wash and go… Have plans to make…

    She hadn't noticed when her eyelids drooped closed.

    Just…just a minute…
    Sudden pain brought Qian Shanyi back out of her dreams, and she thrashed around in the bath in a flash of panic, coughing water out of her lungs. Her heart beat rapidly in her chest.

    She glanced around in momentary confusion at the wooden walls around her, until her memories floated back up to the surface. She was in Wang Yonghao's world fragment, taking a bath. Nobody was attacking her. The skies haven't fallen.

    I must have drifted off and my head slipped below the surface.

    Adrenaline coursing through her veins, she stood up and stretched. She couldn't help but chuckle at herself.

    Would have been awfully embarrassing to survive a flash flood and then drown myself by sheer accident.

    She tested her tooth with her tongue - the gauze had already fallen out of her mouth while she was coughing. It still shifted a bit, but wasn't at risk of falling out anymore. Her skin was all wrinkled - how long did she sleep for?

    The water was still just as warm as before, the chiclotron working to pump heat into it, though clouded by blood and grime.

    Picking up a piece of soap from a conveniently placed shelf, she quickly lathered up her long hair and body, and then washed herself off in the stream of fresh water from the bucket above her head. Opening up a wooden sluice at one end of the elongated bath, she let all the water drain down a channel and into a larger basin, situated above a neighboring water tunnel of the chiclotron. There, the dirty water would freeze, and be easy to toss out of the world fragment when they finally exited it, days later.

    She smiled. Yonghao made it, but it was her design, and it felt pleasant to see it working properly.

    She didn't have a towel, and so simply pulled a fresh set of robes over her wet skin - these ones too short for her, only reaching down to her knees, black and shimmering like onyx. She wasn't too bothered by it - in the end, cultivator robes and bathrobes shared quite a few similarities, and the ever-shining sunlight was pleasantly warm. It was a good thing Yonghao had so many robes - the set she came in was still wet from the rain, and covered in a fair bit of her blood besides, while the brilliant white ones she put on when she entered the world fragment were now lightly tinted green from the freshly torn grass.

    When she finally left the bath, she saw Wang Yonghao sitting in a lotus pose in the middle of the world fragment, eyes closed. All of his spiritual pores were shut tight, his face frowned in deep concentration, drops of sweat dripping down his forehead. She walked up to him, and stared at him in confusion for a while.

    He didn't seem to be doing anything - just sitting there, but by the look on his face, he might as well have been trying to lift a mountain.

    "What are you doing?" she finally asked, crossing her arms on her chest.

    "Cultivating," he said, opening one eye to look at her, "circulating my spiritual energy to clear my meridians. Can't you see how hard it is?"

    She glanced at him from top to bottom. "Usually people keep their spiritual pores open when they do that." she snorted, understanding finally dawning on her. "The point in circulating spiritual energy is to remove impurities from your body. If you keep your pores closed and only circulate what you have inside of you, you'd just be…moving them around, I guess, achieving nothing."

    "Really?" he said, a corner of his lips twitching upwards at the shared joke, "I had no idea, Elder. I'll make sure to try your way too… Perhaps next month."

    "That was impressive," she whistled, "I've never heard anyone say 'Elder' with that much dismissive disdain. I don't think I could manage that. I haven't even heard anyone call me 'whore' quite like that in ages."

    "I've had a lot of experience," he said, closing his eyes.

    She stretched her hands, yawning widely. "I bet," she said, "How long was I out?"

    "A couple hours, I think."

    She groaned. "You should have woken me up."

    "Seemed like you needed sleep."

    She grimaced, rubbing her face. "I did, but now the rice will be too sticky and the vegetables I fried will have gone soggy. So much for making an outstanding dish."

    "Shanyi, you know half the time I just have nothing to eat at all, right?" He arched an eyebrow in her direction, keeping his eyes closed. "I wouldn't know the first thing about the difference between an 'outstanding' dish and a normal one. I put the rice and vegetables in a water node, so it's not like they would have gone bad."

    "It's the principle of the thing," she grumbled, "Disappoints me more than it probably should - I wonder when I managed to develop pride as an immortal chef. Well, let's go figure something out."

    She bent down, grabbed him by the shoulder, and pulled him up on his feet. "What -" he said, finally opening his eyes and reluctantly following along, as she headed towards the node with the mushrooms. "but I can't -"

    "You can and you will," she said casually, "you'll teach me fingerspeak, and I'll teach you to cook. It'd be a nice, simple exchange of pointers between two cultivators, without any of this luck nonsense."

    His resistance went away almost immediately, and she smirked.

    "Also," she continued, "we both have to cultivate, and I don't want to bicker…much… about which one of us has a better plan to deal with the tribulation. This means we'll switch up which one of us cooks, so that neither wastes too much time. Your turn is first."

    Within moments, she had all the ingredients gathered up in their kitchen area, and started arranging them on the one table they had - mildly overcooked rice, fried vegetables, and uncooked mushrooms, now tinged with metal spiritual energy, but one that wasn't bound to the material itself. Wang Yonghao stood a distance away, looking at her curiously, as she gestured towards the table.

    "So, there's a lot I could teach you -" She yawned again, cowering her mouth with her hand. The nap in the bath helped, but she still felt exhausted. "- knife handling, how to prepare various types of ingredients, heat control, yadda yadda. All of it would be a waste of time, so I am not going to do that. You'll either pick it up yourself or read it from a manual I can give you - and if you screw up, just do it again and learn from your mistakes. Instead, I am going to teach you about the Dao at the heart of it all, one that applies to everything from making dumplings to sewing up your robes."

    "Dao for making dumplings?" He frowned, crossing his arms and looking at her uncertainly. "That sounds a little… Unserious."

    She gave him a flat look. "Are you insulting my mistress Tang Qunying?"

    "Maybe? I thought you hated your sect masters?"

    She shook her head. "She's not from my sect."

    "So how did you meet her then?"

    "Didn't." Qian Shani shrugged easily. "Her manual's very good though, so until she finds me and makes me stop, I'll call her my mistress - if she's even still alive to do so."

    "Must be quite the person, for you to declare someone your mistress without even meeting them," he grumbled, but came closer to the table, looking it over.

    "Yeah, if we had met face to face, I'd have tried to drag her into my bed to fuck her brains out," she said absently, focusing on making sure everything they needed was available, and heard Wang Yonghao sputter next to her. She turned back to him, and saw him blushing profusely. "What?"

    "How could you just say that?!" he said, blushing harder, and bringing a hand up to rub at his eyes.

    She rolled her eyes at him. "Yonghao, we've been over this. I can do and say whatever the fuck I want - that's what it means to be a cultivator."

    "That's not what I - gah! Don't you have any shame?"

    She laughed at that. "Is shame going to help me ascend to the Heavens like a phoenix? No? Then why would I keep it around?"

    "So you don't embarrass yourself or people around you with how graphic you are," he groaned, burying his face in his hands.

    "You realize this will just make me do it more, right?" She arched an eyebrow at him, not that he could see it. "I could be a lot more graphic if you'd like. Did you know that cultivator senses are enhanced all over their bodies?"

    "No! No, absolutely not!" He groaned again. "Fine, whatever, you mentioned a Dao of Dumplings? Can we move on from this?"

    She laughed again. This was fun, but he was right - and she didn't want to bully the poor prude too much.

    "Alright, alright," she conceded, "I'll spare you this time."

    His intimidating glare was ruined entirely by the furious blushing of his cheeks. Honestly, it was like he didn't know he could pinch blood vessels shut with spiritual energy. And he was going to tell her about embarrassment?

    "So what is it?" He sighed, trying to bring himself back into some semblance of order as he occupied his hands with adjusting his robes. "Some kind of cultivation technique?"

    "Better," she said, knocking on her head for emphasis, "doesn't even rely on spiritual energy. It's all in here."

    She gestured towards the ingredients.

    "Reading between the lines of what Tang Qunying wrote, the core question at the heart of all immortal cooking is this: what can you make with all this stuff?" she said, adopting her best lecturing tone.

    She let the question hang. Silence stretched. Wang Yonghao looked between her and the ingredients, waiting for her to say something, but she stayed quiet.

    Finally, he couldn't take it anymore. "So…what can we do?"

    "Why are you asking me like I know?" She gave him an exaggerated shrug. "I am looking at the same ingredients as you are."

    "Well, you are the chef here."

    "What does 'chef' mean?" She walked around the table and leaned on it from the other side, like a general might lean over a map of a battlefield. "I've learned some basic cooking from my mother when I was very young, and have been reading Tang Qunying's manual for several weeks now. I have about two weeks of experience cooking for customers. Does that make me a chef? Objectively, your skill is not far from mine. Does that make me an authority on cooking?"

    She grabbed one of her knives from her knife chest, and pointed at Wang Yonghao with the blade. She continued, "No. If you are the one holding the knife, then there is no authority above you in the kitchen."

    She tossed the knife to him, and he caught it easily. Not like he'd need it - everything had already been cut up - but the symbolism mattered.

    "You have the knife now," she said, her strict tone ruined entirely by an unwelcome yawn. "So what do you want to do?"

    He frowned, staring at her uncertainly, playing with the knife in his hands. "So what, I can't even ask you questions?"

    "You can ask." She inclined her head agreeably. "Just because you have the final say doesn't mean you can't receive information."

    "Can't you just tell me what to do?"

    "No, actually." She shook her head. "That is the point. I could teach you all sorts of skills, but if you keep looking over your shoulder for my approval or disapproval, you'll never get anywhere. The first step is deciding that your will is paramount, even if you will crash and burn a hundred times on your way to greatness."

    "Shanyi, we are talking about cooking rice, not overthrowing empires."

    "Indeed. You can half-ass the latter."

    He pursed his lips, leaning on the table to match her pose. "Look, this doesn't really make sense. I don't really know how to cook. What can I decide about the dish?"

    "Whatever you think of." She shrugged. "If I thought you couldn't do this, I wouldn't have bothered giving you one of my trophy knives. You are smart enough to manage, if you could only bring out some confidence."

    "First thing you said to me when you met me was to call me arrogant," he narrowed his eyes at her, "and you say I lack confidence?"

    She rolled her eyes at him. Sword duel, that he could win - but a fight of pure sophistry? No chance. "Arrogance is not the same thing as confidence - indeed, the two are often opposites. Arrogance is a perfect cover for insecurity, while confidence tends to grow into a quiet sense of self-assurance. For example," she tossed her long over her shoulder, "I have never been arrogant in my entire life."

    Judging by Wang Yonghao's expression, the humor was lost on him.

    "Oh yeah? And what am I supposed to be confident about?"

    "Your skills."

    "What skills?" He scoffed. "Ones granted to me by luck?"

    "If I meant your luck, I would have said luck. I meant your skills. You are a decent teacher - I've had plenty, and your instruction on fingerspeaking was better than most." She motioned to the bath. "You are a great woodworker. The Heavens have granted you neither skill…I hope… and knowing how to explain the language is entirely separate from knowing how to speak it."

    "It's nothing special," he muttered.

    "It's great work." She rolled her eyes, "Don't make me force you to admit it again. This is exactly what I mean by you not being confident. You put yourself down so much it blinds you to reality."

    "So what, am I supposed to just 'become confident' on the spot?"

    "Ideally, yes." She nodded readily, looking at him expectantly. "Could you?"

    He scowled at her this time. "No!"

    "A shame. In that case, simply focus on my opinion of you - and seeing as how my opinions are rarely wrong, it should be almost as good."

    He looked up to the sky with pleading eyes.

    Fool. Did he not listen to her when she said the Heavens were not listening to them here? He'd get no help dealing with her games from the skies.

    "Fine," he said, pulling the pot of rice closer to himself. "But I need something to start with. What were you going to make before our fight?"

    "I was thinking of making a stir fry."

    He shrugged. "Still sounds like a good option, so let's do that."

    "But is it really?" She inclined her head to the side.

    "Why wouldn't it be?"

    "I was planning to use rice more or less just as it came out of the pot." She made a casual gesture towards it. "Now, the rice is cold and sticky. A lot of moisture would have left it by now, too. This would not benefit the dish."

    He pursed his lips, and she could finally see him starting to think about what was on the table. "Are there ways to remove the stickiness? Wash the rice, or something?"

    "There are." She nodded. "The stickiness is due to a film of starch on the surface of rice grains - washing the rice would likely remove it, yes. But…It is best to lean into the strengths of ingredients, rather than fight them."

    "So what, you want to make… something that could benefit from the stickiness?"

    "I want nothing, I am but a humble, neutral observer." She made the same exaggerated shrug again. "Perhaps there is nothing at all you could do here - but it is worth at least considering. So what would such a dish be?"

    She was actually deliberately avoiding thinking about that obvious question - letting Wang Yonghao work through the problem on his own, without injecting her own perspective. It would be invaluable in the long term, even if this one dish went up in flames.

    "Not a stir fry, clearly," he grumbled.

    "Clearly. Is stir fry the only rice dish you know?"

    He easily named a dozen others. Some of them required ingredients they did not have, others would not have benefited from the stickiness in the slightest, but he was at least thinking, spinning the problem in his head. She kept poking him here and there, but once he was past the initial hurdles, he seemed to be doing just fine.

    "It's…I don't know," he said, walking back and forth in front of the table, "I keep coming back to this idea - if the rice is sticky, we could roll it into balls, right? And then… put the other ingredients on the inside, like a dumpling. But that's stupid."

    "How is it stupid?" She raised an eyebrow at him. "It is a coherent idea. Rice can be rolled into balls."

    "I mean, I've never seen it done."

    "I haven't seen it either," she shook her head. Honestly, as if what other people did even mattered - but she didn't want to say it and toss Yonghao back into his funk. They were making good progress, she thought. "But neither of us has been to every corner of the world, and that is not the same as stupid. I think it is worth trying."

    "But would this even work?" he asked uncertainly. "I mean - what if the rice balls we make fall apart, or the ingredients inside seep through?"

    She shrugged. "Only one way to find out, chef Wang Yonghao. Heat up the pan, and let's experiment."
    Qian Shanyi woke up feeling so full of energy she was ready to burst.

    She crawled out of the rosevine bunker, stretching her limbs. It was so cramped that she couldn't fully stretch out her legs while she slept, but Wang Yonghao's world fragment was so disgustingly auspicious after their work on the chiclotron that she still felt like she had just gotten out of a massage parlor.

    She was sure that this too would fade, and soon enough, her back would hurt again… But not today.

    Wang Yonghao was still up and about, "cultivating" as he did. They've agreed to sleep in shifts, since they only had the one bunker where they could doze off safely without being harassed by rosevines, and he wouldn't be going to bed for a good few hours. She briefly considered going over to talk to him - after her sleep a good plan for the tribulation started to slowly come together in her head, taking into account all the new information on the table - but no. She waited for long enough.

    It was time to cultivate.

    With a grin, she pulled out her sword, and started going through the movements of Three Obediences Four Virtues. High quality spiritual energy flowed into her body in rivers, not piddly streams like back on Wu Lanhua's yacht, circulating through all her meridians, spinning together into a beautiful tapestry only visible to her inner sight, before leaving her body through different pores, bringing the impurities alongside it. Even the sword felt lighter in her hands, making the air sing as it was sliced apart.

    Her breathing measured, she soon fell into a rhythm, and from the rhythm, into a meditation, her thoughts dissolving away into nothingness as all that was left in her world was the sword in her hands, the muscles dancing under her skin, and the grass trampled under her feet.

    This was what she was missing.

    This was true cultivation. Not counting out spirit stones and worrying wherever she had enough to last a month. Simply… freedom, freedom to build herself into who she wanted to be.

    Tribulation? Please. With her knives, she could slice the very fabric of the world apart. With her needle, she could sew it back together.

    Before, she was limited by her broken leg. But by now, it had healed completely.

    Before, she was limited by hunger. But she had been eating well these past few weeks.

    Before, she was only beginning to synchronize with her new spiritual energy recirculation law, pulled apart in two different directions. But by now, this process had concluded.

    She kept going for eight hours straight, until her meridians burned like magma, until even her bones ached and her muscles spasmed erratically.

    She only stopped when she collapsed down on the ground, her chest heaving with exertion, and yet her lips were split in the largest grin of her life. Oh how she missed this!

    Turning her senses inwards, she giggled, and soon her giggles turned into full blown laughter, cackling about the foolishness of the Heavens. The meridians in her body were so much clearer now. Once she had entered the middle refinement stage, it had taken her a bit over a year each to unlock her fourth and fifth dantians. In Wang Yonghao's world fragment, she had unlocked her sixth in less than a month. And she hadn't just unlocked it - it was already halfway to being cleared.

    She could practically taste how close she was to the seventh dantian unlocking too, ready to propel her into the high refinement stage.

    How long did it take even the best prodigies, with the support of the largest sects, to break out of the middle refinement stage? Two years at least, it must be.

    Of course, even if she cleared her dantians, it wouldn't mean that she would actually enter the high refinement stage - her body couldn't keep up. She already felt it lagging behind, muscles struggling to contain the power of spiritual energy.

    There was a reason why the aforementioned prodigies did not dump a small mountain of money into clearing their meridians faster - there wasn't much point. You need a strong body to advance into the building foundation stage, and so you might as well proceed at the pace dictated by your body.

    But for now, she could cackle. For once, she had the resources. She was the one advancing at twice the speed with half the effort. And even if she couldn't advance into the building foundation stage yet… Simply scaling the mountain of cultivation felt exhilarating.

    She laid there on the grass for a long while, simply enjoying the feeling of ever-burning sunlight on her skin, before, with great difficulty, she lifted herself up, and slowly stumbled over to the kitchen. Wang Yonghao was already asleep, so she'd be cooking on her own.

    After all, food was what every cultivator burned to cultivate - and she needed a lot of fuel to ascend into the Heavens like a vengeful phoenix.
     
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    • Chapter 45: Bare Your Teeth And Shatter Lightning
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    • Author Note: If you'd like to read five chapters ahead, or read other works I write, you can find me on patreon.
    I also have a discord server, where I post memes I make about FSE, and occasionally discuss some plans and worldbuilding details. Want to talk about the Heavenly tribulation? It's the best place to be!
    Thanks for reading! :)​
    When Wang Yonghao woke up, Qian Shanyi was drawing out cutting patterns on the fabric of the cultivator robes gifted to her by Wu Lanhua, the same ones ripped apart in the flash flood.

    Her experience taught her well - controlling her rope technique with loose bits of string was far too unreliable in a stressful situation. She needed a more robust solution, and that came in the form of gloves: she could anchor the technique to various threads in the fabric, and control the target rope by simply moving her fingers. She would be sacrificing some precision and versatility, but the tradeoff was more than worth it. Three Obediences Four Virtues even provided a convenient sewing pattern for the gloves - though it did not mention any relation between the two.

    She could almost hear Tang Qunying laughing over her shoulders.

    When Wang Yonghao crawled out of their sleeping bunker, she put her work on hold, waved him over, and pulled out several flowcharts she'd drawn while he slept.

    "You seem strangely cheerful," he said, coming over to their only work table and looking at her warily. "What's with that smile? It's unnerving."

    "Why shouldn't I smile, Yonghao?" She laughed. "I have a plan!"

    "That just makes me even more concerned."

    "What?" She squinted at him. "I make great plans."

    He moved his palm uncertainly, making a face. She scowled at him slightly.

    "Name one time my plan was bound to fail right from the start."

    "Remember how you almost killed both of us by experimenting with the chiclotron?"

    "Fine, name two times."

    He opened his mouth to respond, and she waved him off. "No matter," she said, "let's talk about the tribulation instead. I think I know how we could boost our chances. No time to waste - we only have nine days to prepare."

    Nine days within the world fragment - but only two in the outside world. She even planned out the exact hour they would come out.

    "Nine days?" He frowned, leaning forwards. "Why nine days? We aren't on a time limit."

    "No, we very much are." She shook her head. "The tribulation is not the only factor at stake here. We also have to keep quiet the existence of your inner world - as I am sure you are already aware."

    "What about it?"

    "Think about the innkeeper," she said, shuffling through her papers and pulling out a diagram she made of all the parties who knew about their existence in the town. "He saw us buy a room and head inside. First day we don't come out - fine, young cultivators, probably fucking like rabbits -"

    Wang Yonghao's face grew red and he scowled at her. She briefly wondered when it would stop amusing her so much.

    "- then second day, we still don't come out, and there is no smell of fire, no smoke out of the chimney. It starts to seem strange. Surely we would at least cook, or visit a restaurant? Once the third day rolls around, people will start to ask questions - and even with your luck or the Heavens running interference, I would rather not risk it."

    "I could just go up and light another fire," he said, "it would only take a minute."

    "No, you cannot." She shook her head again. "The moment you open the entrance, we risk the heavenly tribulation descending - they would see that your meridians are no more pure than when you first went in, and know that I have broken the vow on my end."

    "So? If they can't see into my inner world, they can't touch you."

    She grimaced. As if it would be that easy. "That's dubious logic - the risk is very significant, Yonghao," she said, "but more to the point, it would reveal our cards. Right now, the Heavens should still think that I am trying to train you hard - they have no motive to plot against me. If you pop your head out - even for just a moment - then they will start to set up traps. Imagine how badly my tribulation could go if a wave of demon beasts attacked the town at the exact same time, or an errant demonic cultivator were to interfere. We can't give them an opportunity to do so - and that means we only open the entrance once we are ready to go."

    "Fine, then let's move out of the town now," he said, "the Heavens couldn't complain about you taking a bit to start training me, could they?"

    "That is also risky." She knocked on the side of her head for emphasis. "It's possible that this damned vow remembers all I say - and as soon as I am out of the world fragment, the Heavens will get a report."

    He crossed his arms on his chest, ready to argue, and she smiled. It was always nice to see a cultivator ready to stand for his beliefs.

    He was still wrong, of course. It took her a good half hour to walk him through her reasoning, her plans and fallbacks, as well as a couple cards she had been keeping close to her chest, and explain why it would be a terrible idea to open up the world fragment now, even if she could get more training out of it.

    "This is still insane," he grumbled, rubbing his face in frustration, still mostly unconvinced, "nine days isn't even enough for you to open your seventh dantian, is it?"

    "Even odds, I'd say." She shrugged causally. "When I was heading to you, I thought I would be lucky to get a couple days of training, while I stalled you out about how I found you. Nine days is a small blessing."

    "How could it be even odds?" He opened his hands, looking at her with puzzlement in his eyes. Instead of answering, she pulled out her sketch of her training schedule, and handed it to him. He read through it, his eyebrows slowly climbing his forehead. She smirked.

    "Shanyi, you'll get qi deviation from taking this many pills at once," he said, glancing up at her, "even I know that much."

    "I'd only get it after two weeks." She rolled her eyes. "I've done the math on the interactions, Yonghao. I won't call nine days of this safe, but as long as it kills me slower than the tribulation, that's all that matters."

    He sighed, putting down her schedule, and stared straight at her. "Shanyi, please. Admit you made a mistake before it kills you. You should have gotten me out of the town, out of the tavern - then we could have trained for as long as was necessary."

    "Why would I get out of this town?" She stared at him in confusion. "The town is one of my best survival tools."

    "And how in the netherworld's name is that?"

    She stared at him in confusion, before it clicked in her mind. He'd never gone through a tribulation - and most likely fled from any sign of one. He wasn't educated.

    He straight up didn't know.

    "Yonghao, cultivators never challenge the Heavens alone," she said quietly, "you may not have seen this, but I did, every time someone broke through into the building foundation realm in the Golden Rabbit Bay. If the tribulation goes bad… Others will stand with us."
    The days passed quickly.

    She purified her meridians until her body couldn't go anymore, and then trained curse techniques until her voice gave out too. Then, she took healing pills, and waited to do it all over again.

    Most techniques were based on a simple, mathematically strict exchange of spiritual energy - the same amount went in to produce the same effect. The basis of curse techniques worked in much the same way - the only difference being that the spiritual energy had to be concentrated in her throat dantian, and shaped partly using her speech in order to produce compulsions or blasts of force. Yet there was also a deeper level to them - one described only in the broadest strokes in Three Obediences Four Virtues - where a cultivator could get more out of the technique than they put in, through imposing their will on the world around them, whatever that was supposed to mean.

    She was many months away from even beginning to probe at that level of mastery - for now, she couldn't even get the basic techniques to work without wrecking havoc on her vocal cords after half a dozen tries.

    At least she got a lot of practice at fingerspeaking from it.

    Before, she had deliberately avoided practicing curse techniques at all, as it made the Heavens more predictable - they would think she only had her flying sword, and play accordingly. Now, she focused on them instead: her old reluctance could be turned into a trap.

    When she could manage to lift her arms without wincing, she sparred with Wang Yonghao - it was always good practice, even if it couldn't compare to a real fight, neither of them willing to truly push themselves due to the risk of hurting the other. She trained her control with her flying sword, and her precision and speed at controlling the rope. She taught Wang Yonghao how to lie better, and when all she could manage to move was her eyes, she thought about her equipment - adapting bandolier designs, going over what talismans and pills she would take and in what order.

    Not a single minute wasted, always balancing just on the edge of what she could take without breaking entirely.

    In other words, exhilarating.

    Though really, she was well past balancing on the edge - it was more that she had jumped off, and was simply counting on a bungee cord pulling her back to the cliff face before she fell to her death. She got about three hours of sleep each night, running mostly on a careful regimen of stimulants and alertness powders, administered every four hours. The training she was doing was far too harsh as well - the only reason she could manage was her constant consumption of stimulants and healing pills. That would, in turn, cause her problems down the line from the slow accumulation of toxins in her body - there was a reason why no sane alchemist would sign off on the regime she made for herself.

    It was self destructive to the extreme, and could not last forever - but she didn't need forever. She just needed nine days.

    In nine days, she'd challenge the Heavenly tribulation, and then she could rest for as long as she damn well pleased.
    Qian Shanyi tied her spare rope around her waist and checked her equipment one last time.

    She was wearing the same scarlet robes she had worn when she arrived in Glaze Ridge, though she added a large seal of a dancing dragon and phoenix on the skirt, embroidered from black thread. She had always loved phoenixes, and a girl could let herself be a little vain when heading into mortal battle, couldn't she?

    Over the robes, she strapped a bandolier, with a bottle of medicines she would take at the last moment, and spares for others who might join her. Her old, trusty sword was strapped to her waist, with three of her cooking knives arranged on her back, in sheaths of wood and cloth Wang Yonghao had helped her make. Trusty fly whisk hung off her waist, same as before, right next to several defensive talismans of white jade, tied down with light tassels, ready to be activated at a moment's notice. Her hands were covered in her new gloves - it took her many tries to get the fit just right, but she had managed it.

    She brought a second sword alongside her - one that looked as plain as she could find among Wang Yonghao's hoard, which said little, for it still was fit for a sect elder. Its blade looked like it was forged with a bolt of lightning, with a delicately carved jade guard. It was simply hanging off her shoulder by a strap, ready to be dropped on the ground once it got in the way - but really, she did not expect to need it. Moving her flying sword still took a bit too much of her attention - if she was stuck trying to defend herself at the same time, it was best to simply recall it. Mostly, it was there as a fallback, in case the tribulation took her first sword.

    Equipment: check.

    Wang Yonghao shifted uneasily next to her. "You know, we could always delay - " he began.

    "Enough with this foolishness." She rolled her eyes at him. "We made the plan, we discussed all potential loopholes. We agreed it was logical. Have we learned anything new since then?"

    He grimaced. "You didn't unlock your seventh dantian."

    "That's not new." She shook her head. "We knew this was a possibility. The logic for the timing remains correct - backing out now would just be a decision made out of fear, and if you are too afraid to commit, you cannot gamble."

    She went over to their work table, where bottles of her slow-acting pills were arranged well in advance, and swallowed them one by one together with some rosevine tea. Broad healing pills, protective ones against burns or frostbite, antivenoms, pills to accelerate her recovery of blood… She was well prepared for anything that might happen.

    "Well, let's go," she said, handing a second rope over to Wang Yonghao, "I didn't sleep the luxurious eight full hours just before for nothing. I have a date with some flaming celestials, and the Heavens do not tolerate tardiness."

    He rolled his eyes at her. Through herculean effort over the past week, she had managed to get him to the point where he was merely annoyed at her crass statements instead of having a heart attack, which she for one called great progress.

    They rose into the air until they were at the very top of the world fragment, and Wang Yonghao opened the entrance. They stayed still for a moment, before she nodded at him, and he stepped through the opaque membrane covering the entrance portal. She stayed within the world fragment, hanging up in the air, the rope connecting them a bit longer than usual to accommodate for this.

    Since they had the opportunity, they decided to test the limitations of the Heavens' sight. They knew - or at least, heavily suspected - that they could not perceive what happened within Wang Yonghao's world fragment when it was closed. But could they see into it when the entrance was open? And would they be able to call down a tribulation on her when Wang Yonghao stepped out, but she stayed inside?

    It turned out they could not - no tribulation struck her down, and the vow in her mind stayed inert. She waited until a count of ten to make sure, and then tugged twice on the rope connecting her and Wang Yonghao. He came back, and they descended down to the ground.

    "This is great news," she said, smiling, "at least I won't have to burn all my notes any time we open the entrance, lest the Heavens spy some diagram or map that they should not. And if they truly cannot call down a tribulation here… that opens up all sorts of options."

    "Or my plan to placate them had worked," he said, crossing his arms.

    "True." She nodded. "Still, let's be pessimistic - head to the postal office."

    Over the past nine days, they'd discussed the plan in excruciating detail - he already knew exactly what to do.

    Wang Yonghao sighed, and rose up into the air, passing through the entrance to the world fragment. It closed behind him, and she settled down to wait.

    The safest place for her to transcend the tribulation was, of course, one of the imperial postal offices; but the closest one to them was in Reflection Ridge, all the way across the valley of glass - Glaze Ridge had merely a small transfer station. Their best guess for when - if at all - the Heavens would send down the tribulation was when she left the world fragment, and so their plan was for Wang Yonghao to head there on his own, find a hidden spot, and then release her.

    Hovering a foot above the ground, Wang Yonghao had nothing whatsoever to fear from the glass in the valley. At a sprint, it should take him perhaps ten minutes to get across - but for her, within the world fragment where the time flowed faster, it would be forty six minutes of waiting.

    To pass the time, she started working through the manuals left behind in his treasury.

    When she had first looked at them, back when she was cleaning up, she'd noticed that four of them - one of the books and three scrolls - were written in unfamiliar languages. She couldn't very well bring the manuals to a linguist - who knew what information was contained there? If one of the treatises happened to focus on creating human cauldrons, then that would surely bring attention of the spirit hunters - and even if she knew she was innocent, explaining where she got the book would be all but impossible.

    That left translating them on her own, and the first step was identifying the language. Her plan was to write down lists of individual characters, then narrow it down to the most common ones - and thus ones most likely to be generic verbs or nouns, as opposed to more specialized terms like "human cauldron". That should both make them much safer to research, even if she had to request help, and also more likely to be shared with closely related languages.

    She ran into a problem quite quickly. Whatever language the book used, it clearly did not rely on characters to convey meaning - over the first few pages, she only counted forty seven distinct shapes, and a few of those looked like merely larger copies of the other ones. Perhaps combinations of them were the key - they seemed to be grouped together, separated by gaps, and written in horizontal lines across the page, instead of the vertical ones she was used to.

    Even the shapes themselves seemed to be very generic - lines and circles, in various combinations. Perhaps a linguist could still recognise the overall set, but she didn't hold that much hope - this may well be a code invented by an individual sect.

    Encoding manuals used to be a much more common practice back in the day, meant as a protection against thieves and outsiders - but nowadays, it had fallen out of use. There was simply not much point - any code simple enough to be used on the fly could also be decoded by even a middling linguist, while any that was hard to translate would lead to disciples writing down notes, which a thief could steal much more easily than a manual properly protected within the sect's library.

    Somewhat more common was putting traps into the text of the manual - an altered spiritual energy circulation diagram that would turn you from the inside out if you practiced it, but could be corrected into its true form with relative ease. She had already experienced this with the Three Obediences Four Virtues - the diagram for the complex flying needle technique concealed a much simpler one within itself - even though Tang Qunying did not do so to kill the reader, the principle was the same. A direct disciple could be told where the traps were, while a thief would die in torturous agony. This was especially common when it came to alchemical manuals, as recipes required very precise quantities of ingredients - even a single false quantity could spell disaster.

    Yet even this practice was slowly dying out - a sect was more than simply a collection of its elders, and if one of them died without passing down this knowledge, the sect could be stuck with a useless piece of paper. The proper way to deal with manual thieves was much simpler: do not let the theft occur in the first place.

    After the book, she turned to the scrolls. One of them was written in cursive - it was hard to even tell where one character ended and another began, and so she laid it aside. She doubted she could get much farther with that one on her own. The other two, at least, seemed promising - plenty of unique characters she could try to look up in a library.

    By the time she had finished writing down notes for further research, close to an hour had passed.

    She got up, stretched, and started to pace nervously around the center of the world fragment. Wang Yonghao should have reached Reflection Ridge by now, and the entrance would crack open at any moment.

    Minutes ticked by, and yet it remained closed.

    She bit her lip. Why the delay? Did something happen?

    She shook her head to clear it. It was pointless to worry - actively harmful, in fact, for it would disturb her state of mind for the tribulation ahead. Instead, she picked up the other two books - ones that she could read, but not practice - the Seventeen Classifications of Essential Medical Herbs and the Jade Diamond Muscle Refining Law.

    Seventeen Classifications of Essential Medical Herbs was an advanced alchemical text - way beyond her skill, for now - but that didn't mean it couldn't be useful. Scattered here and there throughout the text were references to other alchemical treaties - she wrote them down, in the hopes that at least one of them would be easier to digest, and could let her build up to the main text itself. Likewise, there were plenty of names for the medical herbs - she wrote them down separately. She recognised several as having been mentioned in Three Obediences Four Virtues - after all, the line between alchemy and immortal cooking had always been somewhat blurry, not that alchemists liked to admit it. Finding information on the plants seemed like a promising lead.

    Jade Diamond Muscle Refining Law, on the other hand, was never going to be directly useful to her, as she had not followed the corresponding regime of drugs since childhood. However, her recent fight with Wang Yonghao had changed her perspective somewhat - even if becoming a body fundamentalist was not her path, the usefulness of strong fists in a pinch could not be denied. Scattered throughout the manual were generic pieces of advice about training your muscles and bones that did not depend on spiritual energy circulation - and those she could use. Likewise, there were some diagrams of pugilist stances - ones that certainly would have been ten times more effective when practiced with the law itself, but since her own knowledge of the topic amounted to a grand total of nothing at all, it was still an improvement.

    More time passed. When she looked at the clock again, two full hours had gone by since Wang Yonghao left - twenty six minutes on the outside, well over two and a half times what they had planned. He wasn't just delayed, he was late, and something had definitely happened.

    Hundreds of possibilities spun in her mind. This was sabotage from the Heavens - had to be, no two ways around it. They knew she had cheated them, and were trying to stack the deck in their favor - had done something to Wang Yonghao. The only question was - what?

    She felt something drip down her chin, and with a start, realized she'd bitten her lip hard enough to draw blood. She licked it away, and forced her breathing to stabilize. Panic would only play into their hands.

    She briefly debated calling the entire plan off, before deciding against it. They were all in now - if the heavens already knew she was playing against them, then waiting more would only give them more time to set up traps.

    By now, the effect of some of the pills she took in preparation had been running out. Fortunately, she had bought more than she expected to need, and so she made more rosevine tea and took a new dose.

    To keep herself calm, she settled down in a lotus pose in the exact middle of the world fragment, and started to very slowly circulate her spiritual energy. There was no practical point to this - the effectiveness of clearing your meridians dropped off a cliff the slower the speed of recirculation - but the meditation kept her mind calm without putting any stain on her body.

    She would need her muscles to be fresh later.

    A full half an hour after she started, the entrance of the world fragment finally opened, and Wang Yonghao poked his head through. His hair looked a bit haggard.

    "Ah, Yonghao! Good to know you are still alive," she noted sarcastically, looking up at him. Her meditation helped a lot: she felt calm again, ready for anything. "Would you like some refreshments? Some tea, perhaps a steam bun?"

    "No time for jokes," he snapped, tossing her a rope. It unfurled through the air, landing at her feet. "Get up here quick."

    She grabbed the rope as soon as it reached her face, and started to climb. Wang Yonghao's head vanished, and she felt the rope pull upwards, accelerating her up into the air.

    She grinned, her hair whipping behind her as she ascended. If the Heavens thought a little delay would stop her? They would soon learn the depths of their folly.
    As soon as her head breached the entrance to the world fragment, she felt a wave of unrelenting hatred slam into her mind. The vow went from being inert to a full blown fury in a blink, and she just barely managed to keep it from tearing itself apart.

    "Oh, you fucks are really not happy about me, huh?" she groaned, her mouth splitting open in a vicious grin of pain and challenge as she stumbled away from the entrance. She clutched her head, dimly aware of Wang Yonghao closing the world fragment behind her, and tried to get the vow back under control.

    She didn't manage to pacify it… But she adapted to the pressure on her mind quickly, and looked around. They were hidden behind a shed in a small enclosed garden, with nobody else around. Out of sight, just as planned.

    "Who are these 'fucks' you speak of?" Wang Yonghao asked haughtily, but in his eyes she could see understanding, fear and resignation. They've discussed this too - it was best to pretend Yonghao knew nothing about the vow, and would refuse to help her with her tribulation.

    "I'll explain in a moment. Where's the post office?" She groaned, still struggling against the vow, and soon they were sprinting away down the streets of Reflection Bay.

    No way out now.

    "Why were you late?" she asked, her breathing stable even as they ran fast enough for the wind to whip her hair behind her like the tail of a comet, heads turning to follow them.

    "Jian Shizhe found me, wanted a duel," Wang Yonghao said with a purse of his lips, "I had to throw him off my trail. He's still stalking around here somewhere."

    That couldn't possibly be a coincidence. She would have tried to puzzle through the implications, if the vow wasn't threatening to implode if she didn't pay utmost attention to keeping it stable.

    The postal office was the same as always - the squat hill of grass, blackened stone and reinforced earth, with the thirteen-leaved lotus flag fluttering over the roof on a tall mast. As they burst through the thick metal doors, her eyes skimmed over a dozen people inside - not one cultivator among them, come to send or receive mail. They got some angry shouts when she unceremoniously shoved through the queue, heading straight for the postmaster.

    The postmaster himself was an ordinary person, heading into his forties, his robes marking him out as a moon-rank civil servant - just a step behind Lan Yu. His hair was dyed bright red, and tied back in a long tail - she had seen the style in the Golden Rabbit Bay, though the name escaped her. He looked at her with barely repressed annoyance at the intrusion.

    "How may I help -" he began.

    "Qian Shanyi, righteous cultivator." She grinned, interrupting him, speaking clearly and precisely. "I'm about to go through a heavenly tribulation."

    She heard gasps of terror from the other people in the room, and a scramble to get away from her. The postmaster's eyes widened. "When?"

    "When do you think? Now," she said, "We'll need the goggles."

    "Fuck!" The postmaster snarled, ducked below the counter, and tossed her and Yonghao a pair of goggles of solid black glass. Moving quickly, he flipped a large lever on one of the walls, the groan of old mechanisms audible even through the thick stone as an alarm began to blare somewhere above, growing louder by the moment.

    "The postal office is closed!" She heard him telling the others in the room, but she wasn't listening, already sprinting outside. "The doors will be sealed - "

    She dashed out, and scrambled up the hill, only slowing down when she reached the flagstock.

    She had given her true name on impulse, but frankly… Help or not, preparation or not, there was a good chance she would die today - and if she did, she wanted to at least be buried under her own damn name.

    She had discussed the possibility with Wang Yonghao, and wrote up a pair of final letters to her parents, just in case. He promised to deliver them in person, alongside with her sword, the one she won in a competition so long ago - she didn't want it sold, or to gather dust among his treasures.

    She didn't know if he could manage it, with his luck as it was, but it made her feel better. And at least now they'd be able to find her grave.

    She leaned against the flag, and faced Yonghao, who had his arms folded on his chest.

    Location: check.

    "A tribulation, huh." Wang Yonghao scowled at her, reciting prepared lines. Her tutelage helped, but he was still a terrible actor, emphasizing words way too much - but then again, the Heavens were a terrible audience. "When were you going to tell me about this?"

    "Aw, relax!" She grinned. "What did you have to worry about? Me making a little vow to the Heavens to make you train like hell for a month? Couldn't even manage that, could you?"

    His scowl grew deeper, and he clutched his hands into fists. "A vow? A vow?! You made a vow to force me to train? My life, my cultivation - just toys for your amusement? How dare you?!"

    Wow, that was actually pretty good. She told him to channel the feelings from their fight, and that worked beautifully. Perhaps he still held some true resentment for her over what she did.

    "Eh, you'll get over it," she said, waving her arm easily, "now will you help or not?"

    "Help?! Fuck you," he said, "I hope I'll see you splattered across this hill today for what you did. In fact, I'll take a front row seat!"

    She forced her smile to falter a bit. Wang Yonghao marched away, settling down on the grass with an angry look in his eyes.

    Yonghao: check.

    She sighed, pretending to fix her hair, and then dropped her spare sword on the ground, and unclipped her main sword off her belt. She lifted her eyes to the skies, spreading her arms.

    The vow roiled angrily in her mind, threatening to slip out of her grasp at any moment. Only mere moments left now.

    "Well, Heavens," she hissed, "it seems fate has brought us together once again."

    With her free hand, she opened up a pouch on her bandolier, and pulled out a small pill bottle, filled with a glowing powder and a single pill, blood-red, with swirls on its surface. She flicked her spiritual energy through the bottle, tossing the pill into her mouth, and swallowed it. She felt it slip through her esophagus, and disintegrate almost immediately, heat pulsing through her entire body.

    "You sought to make me your patsy, to force me to do your dirty work?" She hissed, focusing on absorbing the pill properly. It was a specialized, powerful short-term healing pill, with a focus on tissue regeneration. Taking it in advance would reduce the effect, but if she got hit, she might not be able to swallow it. "You sanctimonious pieces of shit, you actually thought that would work? That I would ever bow my head to you, bloodthirsty celestial freaks?"

    She brought the rest of the bottle to her nostril and snorted the glowing powder inside. It hit her like a rampaging demon beast, all of her senses sharpening in an instant, and she stumbled from the momentary overload, the dose far higher than what she took to stave off sleep. As the stimulant took effect and her mind went into overdrive, she felt as if the time around her slowed down by a solid fraction. She grinned, feeling a whole cocktail of emotions swirling inside of her, and couldn't help but laugh.

    "I defy you, Heavens!" She shouted, turning her face back to the skies, and tore the vow into pieces within her mind, the pressure on her vanishing instantly. It was mere moments away from doing that on its own, but she'd be damned if she let the Heavens make the final decision. "I spit in your faces, I break your laws, I shatter your chains, and I swear on my life, I will climb up into the skies and tear out your throats until I will drink my fill of your blood!"

    As soon as the vow was gone, thunder sounded across the clear, sunny skies as they began to darken, light fading overhead. Even the suns began to dim. An entirely different pressure descended around her, like a cold wind before a thunderstorm.

    The hair on her head began to rise, spiritual energy in the air shifting, moving under forces askew to reality, and she hurriedly pulled the black goggles over her eyes.

    Thunder sounded again, and again, and then with a flash so bright it would have blinded her if not for her goggles a thunderbolt had smashed down from the skies. Aimed straight at her head, it bent through the air, twisting, curling, and yet was pulled towards the copper flagpole above the postal office, safely absorbed down into the ground.

    The thirteen-petal lotus flag fluttered in the wind above her, standing out against the eye-searing lightning.

    "You thought I only cared for myself?" she spoke quieter, aware that already, many cultivators would be gathering to watch her transcend the tribulation. The Heavens had good hearing - she shouted for her own satisfaction, not theirs. "That I would throw Wang Yonghao under the bridge to serve my own cultivation? You thought you could dictate how he lives, torture him with luck? Unacceptable! Unjustifiable! Even though the lazy fuck won't raise a single finger to save himself, I will still fight against you!"

    Her hair stood on end again, as the second bolt of lightning struck down, twice as bright as the first one. It lanced down, straighter than the one before, and yet was still pulled into the flagpole a couple meters above her head.

    She laughed, standing defiant as the skies tried and failed to murder her. The empire built their postal offices well - this flagpole could easily take a dozen lightning strikes in a row and remain standing.

    Third bolt - that one, would hit her. She knew this, felt it in the movement of spiritual energy around her.

    Behind her, she heard the postmaster climbing the hill as well, and glanced over at him. He was carrying a large book - Tribulation Index. She could almost read the golden lettering from where she stood.

    It was brave of him to stay, even if she had the book all but memorized at this point. Most cultivators could have used his help - as long as he did not interfere in the tribulation, the Heavens would not directly strike him down, and so he could stay relatively safe - and the Heavens did not consider giving advice, or organizing others to help to be interference.

    Junming was walking alongside him, carrying a strange, blue lantern on a long stick, almost half as tall as a person. His mask, alongside his thick outer robes was missing, revealing the gray skin beneath. At least they should keep the postmaster safe.

    All the way at the bottom of the hill and out on the street, she could see other cultivators begin to arrive, come to witness another of their ranks challenging the Heavens.

    She could give them a show.

    Her right hand held the sword she won through her own effort, back in Golden Rabbit Bay, not Yonghao's treasury. The same sword that served her so well all these years.

    Into heavens through sweat and blood, said an inscription on the side. Even though her other sword was of higher quality, she couldn't ask for a better weapon to transcend the tribulation.

    "You would have to try harder than that, you brigands and murderers," she sneered at the Heavens, pouring her spiritual energy into her sword, until the blade began to hum, "How arrogant can you be, to think you can dictate how to live our lives? This here cultivator is not scared of death! For freedom, I would have fought you alone! Even if all my limbs were broken, I would still fight you! Even if all I was left with was a single tooth, I would make sure to jam it into your jugular! But I am not alone - and hundreds would stand with me, because that's what cultivators do!"

    Third bolt struck down, yet brighter than the ones before. It bent across the sky, trying to twist away from the flagpole, and yet half of it was still caught. The other half had crashed down on her head with all the fury of the Heavens.

    She was ready for it, having felt its path in the prickling in her hair and the flow of spiritual energy around her. Her flying sword was already moving, flying out of its scabbard, invisible wings unfurling and jets of spiritual energy stabilizing its flight.

    It flashed through the air, and shattered the lightning.

    She laughed harder still, and pulled the black goggles down to her neck, spinning around gracefully, letting her robes twirl through the shower of sparks falling down all around her. She dreamed of doing this for all her life - she wanted to dance, to rip apart an angel with her bare teeth, to sing and to bathe in their blood, to kiss every person she ever met, to distill this moment into wine and gulp it out of the skull of a dragon.

    In the skies above her, a void had formed, a black circle in the fabric of the world - and in this void, she saw the glow of a hundred red eyes, and the chittering of rats.

    "So come, send down your butchers," she grinned up at the Heavens, the melody of her laughter echoing across the hill, "and let us relish in the slaughter!"

    End of Volume 2, "Tracing The Runaway Trails". Volume 3, "Enthalpy of Tribulation Lightning" starts next week.​
     
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    • Interlude: Every Thought An Arrogance, Every Breath Rebellion, Every Blink Audacity
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    • Author Note: My editor told me that "I suck at deciding where to break up volumes" and "it's immoral to edge your readers like this". Since they have clearly been influenced by the Heavens, I have elected to ignore them.​
    They both heard the alarm at the same time.

    Li Zhong put down his cup of tea, comically small in his enormous hands, and rose, appearing next to the window in a single stride. His cloak - in the style common among all body fundamentalists - billowed behind him, only held down by a single clasp around his neck, ready to be tossed aside at a moment's notice. Beneath it, the golden skin of his bare arms and legs, bulging with muscles, threw sun glares all across the room, only eclipsed by his shining, completely bald head. His torso was covered in a thin, tight fabric, leaving nothing to the imagination. The only other decoration on his body was an image of a happy bat, holding a golden coin in its mouth, embroidered on the back of his cloak in golden thread.

    Jian Wei, Elder Ever-Dancing Sunlight of the Northern Scarlet Stream sect and (some would argue) the second richest man in Glaze Ridge, remained seated, only inclining his head a fraction. This wasn't for them to deal with.

    "An alarm?" Li Zhong said, stating the obvious as usual, his voice loud enough to carry across a sect courtyard, let alone his small office, only large enough to fit a table full of paperwork and some futons. Jian Wei could hear the window glass rattle slightly every time he spoke.

    They had an argument about this habit of his many times, when they drank together. Jian Wei would say it made the larger man seem unprofessional, like a mercenary, not a banker, and didn't he leave that life behind? Li Zhong would reply that a banker was also a mercenary, just of a different sort, and besides, pitching his voice to speak quieter took effort he didn't care to expend.

    He did seem to do so when their juniors were in the room, though.

    "Must be in Reflection Ridge," Jian Wei said, not looking up from the financial plan for the telegraph network the two of them were supposed to be discussing, "Stage one. A forest spirit, you think?"

    "Forest should be quiet after the rainstorm," Li Zhong rumbled, still gazing out the window. Jian Wei knew for a fact that not even a single roof of Reflection Ridge could be seen from it, and he also knew what Li Zhong would say if he pointed it out.

    Finally, Li Zhong shook his head, and turned away from the window. "They should have it handled. That Shui Gui they have is pretty good."

    "It is polite to refer to fellow cultivators by their name, Zhong."

    Li Zhong scoffed, predictably. "Name? I don't even remember your name most days, Jin Mei. I don't care about the name, I care about the strength of their fists."

    "It's a wonder anyone trusts you with their gold." Jian Wei shook his head, smiling at the shared joke.

    "They trust me because I am the best at hiding their money, not because I remember every wee child of theirs," Li Zhong grumbled, sitting back down, finally ready to get back to work.

    A distant thunderclap made them both turn towards the window, eyes sharp and ready, waiting for confirmation.

    The second thunderclap came, and Li Zhong swore. Even from this far out, they could see the sky dimming slightly.

    Jian Wei pursed his lips. He agreed, but there was little need to state it out loud. "A tribulation…" he said instead, "Refinement stage, if they only called a stage one alarm. Someone from out of town, you think?"

    "Must be," Li Zhong grunted, picked up a small golden bell off the table, and rang it once. "I haven't heard of any formations being set up, at least. Loose cultivator, with nothing…"

    He shook his head.

    The poor soul.

    Exactly three heartbeats after the bell rang, the door opened, and a young disciple of Li Zhong bowed to them from the entrance, her hair tied in a conservative top knot. Unlike the man himself, she was wearing classic cultivator robes, though with sleeves cut above her elbows and the hem above her knees. Embroidering of a bat on the front of her robes mirrored that of her elder.

    "Send Zhao to the postal office, Lin Mei," Li Zhong said, "someone is going through a tribulation. He has the best eyes and ears of all of you - perhaps he could help."

    "Send word to my sect as well," Jian Wei said, "If they survive, we would be hosting a feast to celebrate, and they would need an invitation."

    Li Zhong raised an eyebrow at that. Lin Mei bowed, and left quickly.

    "Already looking to recruit?" Li Zhong said.

    "Just getting ahead of the others. We are a growing sect, and we need members." He smiled. "A loose cultivator who survives their tribulation must be a good talent, unlikely as that may be."

    "I figured your son would already be there, Wei," Li Zhong said.

    "I do not have a son." Jian Wei pursed his lips. Even after many years, this had not stopped rankling. "I have a nephew, as you well know. And while he will be there, I doubt he will consider what is best for our sect."

    "He might as well be your son, for how much you dote on him," Li Zhong grumbled, "you'll ruin him, you know? That young boy needs discipline."

    Jian Wei shot him a warning glare. Friends they may be, but there were limits.

    Li Zhong raised his hands defensively. "All I am saying is that people talk. When will you teach him how to run the sect?"

    "They can talk until their tongues fall out," Jian Wei said, "it is not their place to tell me how to deal with my disciple and my nephew."

    As if he didn't know people talked. He had been having the same argument in his own head for well over several years.

    "He is young. He will grow out of it," Jian Wei said quieter, more for his own sake than his friend's, "I have no plans of expiring until then, and the sect will still be here, when he will be ready to learn."

    They went back to their papers. There was work to be done - the poor soul would sink or swim on their own power.
    Jian Shizhe snarled as he stalked the streets of Reflection Ridge.

    He was going to find Wang Yonghao, and he was going to slaughter him.

    Three years of preparation and planning, finding the largest shambler in the alley, luring it towards the place he needed without scaring it off, buying and setting up the trap formations, waiting for the perfect night to subdue it…

    And then that imbecile, that pig in human form swung his sword, and all of it was obliterated in an instant.

    All because he couldn't open his eyes and see the damn formation.

    And then he had the gall to not even apologize properly for what he did? To simply walk away?

    But even after all that, he would have swallowed the humiliation. After what happened last year, Jian Wei all but ordered him to keep the peace while disciples from the Flowing Scarlet River were in town, and he did his best. He stomped down on his soul and let the bastard go.

    Two days later, just this morning, he happened to run into Wang Yonghao again, and - calmly - asked if they could settle the issue like true cultivators, trade some pointers about their sword technique and both walk away with their honor. In return for his grace, he got a single word tossed over the shoulder about being busy.

    Jian Wei ordered him to keep the peace. But Jian Wei did not understand, not since his brother - and Jian Shizhe's father - died and he laid down his sword like a coward, collaring them all to the Flowing Scarlet River sect.

    So rare, to have two cultivators in the same family, brothers in training. Rarer still, for one of them to have a child who could cultivate as well. So precious.

    And yet…

    The glass arts of their sect were made for those of a metal constitution, and the Heavens had cursed him with wood. He was never going to be able to inherit these sacred techniques, never going to perfect them further.

    His father's legacy? Not fit for his shoulders.

    An outcast from birth.

    So he threw himself into training with ten times the ferocity. If he could not learn the spiritual energy techniques, then he would perfect everything else. A strong spiritual shield and a lightning-fast sword was all that a proper cultivator should need - reliance on techniques was, in itself, a weakness.

    Other disciples laughed at him. A wood-constitution cultivator hoping to revitalize a sect of metal techniques? What a joke. Cultivators from the Flowing Scarlet River laughed at him - at their entire sect, as if being the main branch gave them a right to treat them all like trash.

    Those worthless worms understood nothing. They forgot what cultivation was for, debauched themselves from dawn to dusk all the while daring to insult him. And so he wore the clothing from the olden times, when cultivators knew the score. And then he made them understand. At this point, even building foundation cultivators had to admit his skill with the sword, whenever they had time to spar.

    Respect came from power. If he had power, he would have respect. The jokes didn't stop, of course, but by now, only a rare few dared to say them to his face.

    Rui Bao dared, but there was little he could do about that man. But Wang Yonghao… This trash, he could deal with.

    He needed that shambler - their sect had a minor manual on beast rearing, rarely practiced though it may be - and if he could not train in the techniques to control glass, then at least he could do that much, show the might of their sect to the rest of the world. But if he couldn't get the shambler… He'd be satisfied with some revenge.

    As he came around a corner, thoughts of rage and vengeance swirling in his mind, he heard the alarm, and saw the lightning strike down from the sky. The sight of it rooted him down to the ground.

    For a moment, he considered not going.

    He could turn away, claim he saw and heard nothing. Nobody would know. He could find Wang Yonghao, and get his vengeance, before the cowardly wretch fled the town entirely. Nobody would even say anything - coming to watch, let alone help, was not, could not be an expectation, for cultivators transcended the tribulation on their own power.

    Shame flooded his soul for even thinking this.

    Nobody would understand.

    Cultivators rose up and toppled the Heavens. What would he be, if he wasn't willing to help?

    He couldn't have his father's legacy. He couldn't make his uncle open his eyes to the humiliation the main sect imposed on them. Some days, he even doubted he could get anyone else to do so.

    But he was a cultivator, damn it, not a snarling beast of the forests. He knew what mattered.

    He sprinted towards the lightning.
    Hui Yin stumbled out of a tavern, polishing up his third spit of meat for the morning. His head still pounded after last night - another traveling immortal musician challenged him to a game of demonic music, and as usual it all devolved into drinking a couple hours in, with them both playing together, and even swapping instruments for a bit - though his memory was still hazy. His hurdy-gurdy, at least, seemed fine, if somewhat out of tune - getting it repaired all the way out here would have been a bitch and a half.

    At least the customers must have had plenty of fun, since the innkeeper didn't toss them out on the street until morning, and his gold pouch felt plenty full.

    He swallowed his breakfast and tossed the empty spits into the pile of firewood next to one of the houses he passed. He didn't much like returning to towns he had been in before, but he might have to make an exception for Reflection Ridge. All those solar lenses weren't just for show - he hadn't tasted meat this juicy in ages. He wiped his hands on a bit of cloth he carried - always good to have one, to wipe the chairs in the seediest taverns, if nothing else - and started working on his instrument, turning knobs to bring it back into tune.

    Sudden blare of an alarm cut into his ears like a knife, and he winced. Couldn't the demon beasts wait until the suns were high in the skies before trying to eat someone?

    He glanced up at the closest sun. Alright, so perhaps it already was mid-day, but this changed nothing. He briefly wondered if Curls might have gotten herself in trouble - that beautiful snake knew how to stay out of sight, but on occasion a cultivator would still come across her, and misunderstand things.

    A lightning strike from the skies tore through that line of thinking, and he whistled in surprise, blinking to get rid of the afterimage, and having just enough time to pluck his ears before the thunder clap. A tribulation! Now that was always a good show. Perhaps he'd even get some inspiration and write a new song. He headed towards it, though with no real hurry. The post office wasn't far enough to rush.

    When he saw a black void open up and heard the chittering of rats, it took him a moment to realize what he was seeing. An embarrassingly long one, since he knew no less than five songs about it.

    "A zodiac? Holy shit," he whispered, and sprinted off towards the edge of town, where Curls was hiding.

    He wasn't about to let an opportunity like this lie by the wayside.
    Trigger the alarm. Get the index. Lock the cabinets. Grab the tribulation bag.

    Chen Changjie let his body work through the motions, his mind elsewhere. He served as the postmaster of Reflection Ridge for thirty years - this wasn't his first tribulation, and he hoped it wouldn't be the last.

    He hoped that every time, and so far, every time he had been right.

    He had seen many tribulations. Most of them, cultivators trying to break into the building foundation stage, but there was their fair share of broken vows, heavenly techniques striking back at their users, and uncovered treasures the Heavens could not suffer to see. Once, he even saw a tribulation descend on a demon beast from the forest, though it died with little fanfare.

    He did his best to help every time.

    His wife told him he was crazy - he could have made the cultivator at his postal office do the job. He was a mortal, she said, and could die in an instant if things went wrong.

    He didn't argue, but how could he stay out of it? He saw the cultivators defend the town dozens of times, save his life and that of others. If he wasn't even brave enough to stay there and coordinate, provide information, then why did he even become a postmaster?

    Tribulations differed greatly. Some were fairly easy, nothing more than a challenge of skill and will. Others were… bad.

    He hated those that made the cultivator suffer before they died the most. A loose cultivator, with little preparation… For her sake, he hoped this would be an easy one.

    It took him less than a minute to lock everything up and make sure the other people within the room would stay safe. By the time he finished, Junming came up from the depths of the post office - no doubt woken up by the alarm - carrying that large lantern of theirs, and together they left through the doors, to face the lightning.

    He had seen many tribulations, and many cultivators. In the fables, cultivators always grinned in the face of death - but that was not how he saw it. Most were simply… focused, showing neither bravery or fear, mind working overtime to keep up with the Heavens. Some cried. Some seemed to welcome death, and disappointed when it did not come. Some laughed, consumed by a strike of hysteria.

    And some…well.

    When he came up on the hill, Junming following after, he saw this Qian Shanyi ranting into the storm, looking for all the world like an actress from one of the plays, though her sharp sword told a different story. In her eyes, madness flowed in rivers.

    "Would you help?" he asked Junming quietly, setting the tribulation bag down on the ground - full of basic first aid supplies, pills, some spare weapons, and a dozen other things. He tried not to wonder how many cultivators died before the empire mandated them in every post office, having technically passed through the tribulation yet succumbing to their wounds shortly thereafter, with nobody competent around to help.

    "Don't know," Junming warbled, their outer coverings left at the bottom of the hill. They put their lantern down on the ground, and were assembling the tripod for the Tribulation Index with practiced speed. "Don't know this tribulation."

    Chen Changjie looked up, and saw a dark void, something moving around and chittering. For all his experience, he didn't know it either, never having memorized the entire book. There was little point - two dozen most common tribulation forms were responsible for well over ninety-eight percent of tribulations.

    His heart sank. Unknown meant rare, and those were always the bad ones.

    He flipped the Tribulation Index open, and started going through it, checking descriptions, keeping his fingers from trembling with sheer force of will. Panic never helped things, even if his ignorance might kill someone today.

    "Page one hundred and fifty six, honorable postmaster," Qian Shanyi interrupted his thinking, pitching her voice to be heard across the hill, "but there is no need to search on my account."

    He glanced up at the mad woman. Her eyes didn't leave the void above for even a moment - she must have heard him flipping the pages. For all her ranting, she seemed composed, ready for what was to come.

    He flipped to the page she said, and his heart sank further as he realized she was correct.

    One of the worst ones, then.

    He breathed in, then out, and rose to his feet. If she knew this tribulation, then perhaps the odds were not quite as bad as the index suggested.

    He placed the Tribulation Index on the tripod Junming prepared - cultivators like them were the ones who would need the information inside, after all - and sprinted down the hill, where others were already gathering, those willing to assist standing closer. His job was to organize them together - make sure none would interfere if they were not qualified to handle the danger, and select those best suited to help.

    All the history books said that to cultivate was to rebel against the Heavens. They said that cultivators saved lives, and brought safety and happiness to millions.

    He could not cultivate. But if he could help the cultivators do so, then wasn't that just as good?
    Author Note: If you'd like to read four chapters ahead, or read other works I write, you can find me on patreon.
    I also have a discord server, where I post memes I make about FSE, and occasionally discuss some plans and worldbuilding details. Want to talk about the Heavenly tribulation? It's the best place to be!
    Thanks for reading! :)​
     
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    • Chapter 46: Slaughter Gods And Gorge On Their Blood
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    • ​
    The black void of death hung above her head, chittering and squeaking, rats growing in number second by second. Qian Shanyi paced below it, flicking her sword left and right to warm up her wrists. Seconds ticked by painfully slowly, stretched as they were by the adrenaline and stimulants in her blood.

    Too far away to attack. Not yet.

    They fell like water from an upturned bucket, a mass of flesh, tails and teeth, squeaking on the way down. Rats, the cleverest of the twelve heavenly beasts, tricksters and trapmakers, ready to drown her in a flood of flesh. Some of them would die from the fall, but most would survive - and then they would swarm her, biting and clawing until she couldn't hold out. With only her flying sword, she couldn't hope to compete - one needed a wide technique, something like Wang Yonghao's sweeping cuts and bursts of fire, but he said out loud he would not interfere. Other cultivators might have - but by the time she called on them, it would be too late.

    A perfect weapon, aimed straight at her throat… Or so the Heavens must have thought.

    Qian Shanyi grinned, opened her mouth, and Cursed.

    Air warped in front of her face, and then a wave of force sped off towards the swarm and smashed into it, pulverizing their little bodies, crushing bones and tearing flesh. The force of it split the swarm apart, revealing the rats further behind, and she Cursed again, shattering it into pieces.

    By the time the rats reached the ground, only a few were left breathing. Her sword danced above her head, batting aside the corpses falling down on her as the rain of blood and viscera drenched her robes. She grabbed one of the few still living ones out of the air with her free hand. It struggled futilely against her fingers.

    She bit the rat's head off and drank the sweet blood straight out of the neck stump, shuddering in bliss as the dense spiritual energy within flowed into her meridians, refilling them after the curses. Water-type: not ideal for her metal constitution, but not too harmful either. Dimly, in the back of her head, she heard cheers from other cultivators around the hill.

    "One down," she growled, tossing the empty corpse aside, and wiped most of the blood off her face with a careless gesture, "eleven to go."

    What few black bastards survived her attack huddled down on the ground, false life leaving their bodies almost at once. Spiritual energy circulated between the little corpses scattered all across the hill, and she closed her eyes, reaching out with her senses. Her left hand quickly tied her rope to the handle of her sword.

    The attack came from directly behind her, because the Heavens had no imagination. The world tilted, and she tossed her body to the side, rolling across the blood-soaked grass to get out of the way. An enormous ox, taller than her head and the color of ochre clay, burst out of one of the rat corpses, eviscerating it into dust in the process. It shook the ground as it landed, chuffing and mooing, loud as a trumpet. Its head was adorned with a pair of razor-sharp ivory horns, ready to gore any who would dare approach.

    Even a single hit from this beast would shatter her spiritual shield and smear her across the grass.

    Yet for all that the ox was strong, it was not agile. She turned her roll into a sprint, gaining distance while the dumb beast stomped around, slowly turning in her direction. Her sword sliced through the air, flying up and encircling the flagpole in the middle of the hill, tying her rope a dozen meters above the ground, before returning to her hand. She switched the rope to her left and gripped it tightly.

    The ox was soon after her, hooves thundering against the ground like an avalanche. She did not look back, sprinting away, careful of the length of the rope in her hand. When the beast was mere meters behind her, bright like a sun to her spiritual energy senses, she turned to the side, and used the rope and her momentum to fly upwards, carrying her above the ox. It passed so close to her that she could smell its sweat, and she swung her sword at its neck, slicing clean through the spine in one strike.

    The beast fell to the ground, dead, and she swung back to the ground, making her rope untie from the pole and pulling it back around her waist.

    Two down, and she wasn't even winded. Her spiritual energy reserves had dipped, but the rat's blood filling her stomach was quickly refilling them.

    Unfortunately, she knew that the others would be much, much worse… and the Heavens only needed one good hit to kill her.

    The emerald-green tiger's claw burst out of the oxes stomach, and it crawled out as if from a damp cave, drenched claw to fang in blood, yet eerily quiet. Wherever it stepped, a bamboo stalk appeared out of the ground, quickly growing to twice her height and as thick as her elbow. It circled around her, keeping its distance, fangs dripping with rage and blood.

    The temptation to send her flying sword at it was there, but that would be a mistake. This beast was deceptively quick, and her aim with the flying sword was still lackluster - she could not guarantee a kill. It would be nothing more than a waste of her spiritual energy, and leave her without a good weapon. Instead, she held her sword high with both hands, carefully stepping towards the center of the hill, where the ground was flatter, easier to move on.

    Through her sharp focus, she could dimly hear more and more people gathering - shouts and cheers, and a quiet murmur of speech. She pushed them out of her mind. The postmaster would know how to select the ones who could help - her job was to slay the tribulation, not worry what she would do if she failed.

    Suddenly, the tiger pounced at her, baring its fangs with a roar that pierced through the air.

    She didn't even blink, keeping her breathing even, her steps small and careful, ready to strike.

    Five meters away from her, the tiger pulled to the side, and retreated back. It circled her again, and then pounced again, roaring and snarling. Her eyes were glued to it, attention not wavering even for a second. It wanted to make her flinch, but this wasn't her first dance with death.

    For the third time it pounced, and for the third time she kept steady. The flagpole - and her second sword - was only five meters away now, and with it in hand, she could perhaps consider sending it out as a flying sword - even if she missed, it wouldn't be much of a loss. Her knives were too short and wide for the technique to take.

    The fourth time the tiger came at her, it did not stop. It moved so fast, she could have missed it with but a blink - but it committed, going for her throat. If she shied away, ran - its claws would have snapped her neck for sure.

    When the tiger was in mid-jump, she stepped twice towards it, and sliced down, aiming for the neck. For a moment, she saw surprise in the vertical slits of its eyes. It twisted its massive body, trying to avoid the attack, but up in the air with nothing to push against, there was little it could do. For all its efforts, her sword still went through its shoulder, cutting in deep.

    At the same time, the tiger's right paw slammed down on a shoulder of her own. Her spiritual shield held, but the impact still brought her down to her knees. The tiger flew past her, yowling in pain, and she heard it roll on the grass behind her.

    It still lived.

    She rolled to the side, but reeling as she still was from the first hit, she was too slow. Three hundred kilograms of tiger muscle slammed into her side, and sent her flying off down the grassy hill, breath driven out of her lungs. She skipped over the ground much like a stone over a lake, rolled, and finally brought herself to a stop, her arms and legs splayed awkwardly. Her side stung like hell, but thankfully her spiritual shield only broke after she bounced off the ground, and no bones were broken.

    The tiger was bouncing after her, but her hit got its mark too - it was a lot slower now, its left paw hanging limply at its side. She still had mere moments. As she rose to her feet, she pushed spiritual energy into her sword and sent the blade flying into the tiger, reconstituting her spiritual shield at the same time.

    The sword hit its mark, slicing into the tiger's stomach… but it would still live long enough to kill her. Just before the tiger slammed into her again, she reached behind herself and drew one of her knives, and then they barreled down into the grass in a tangle of limbs and claws.

    She came out on top, and heaved the tiger's heavy corpse off herself with a push of her legs. She had to burn one of her protective talismans to survive, but that was to be expected. Her knife was stuck deep in the tiger's neck, cleanly separating its spine, and she yanked it out alongside her sword, spinning them through the air to flick the blood away.

    Perhaps she should have felt terrified - but instead, the sound of her heart pushing blood through her veins was like music to her ears.

    Three down… Is this the best you Heavens have?
    "Annoying bastard." She spat on the ground, reeling from another strike to her stomach. "Stay still so that your grandmother can slaughter you properly!"

    The little brown rabbit did not have the strength of the ox, or the claws and ferocity of the tiger, but it more than made up for them with its speed. It rocketed between the stalks of bamboo left all over the hill by the tiger, accelerating with each bounce, and then slammed into her before she could bring her sword up. Each hit may have been individually weaker - though still strong enough to crack bone, should her spiritual shield fail again - but they added up.

    The first principle of gambling was to trust yourself, and not flinch in the face of danger. But the second principle was to always know when it was time to grab the money and sprint out the door.

    She could kill this rabbit, but it would take most of her spiritual energy to do it. It was time to change the game.

    Really, she had already pulled it a bit close with the tiger. But slaughtering it with her own hands felt so good…

    At the edge of her perception, she felt several cultivators moving around, keeping their distance as the fight shifted around the hill, never coming close enough to interfere. Wang Yonghao was there too, somewhere, though she had lost him in the confusion, and she needed all her focus just to keep pace with the damn rabbit.

    She whistled two short notes, calling for help, and felt one of the cultivators sprint towards her, sent over by the postmaster from among the volunteers. Coordinating was his job, after all.

    The rabbit bounced left, right, left, then left again. They've played this dance half a dozen times by now, and she still could not guess right, only scoring glancing hits. She held one of her knives in her left hand - putting more weapons in front of her seemed like a good idea, at least.

    The rabbit's hind leg slammed into her stomach, and she hissed, her spiritual shield flickering, but holding. She sliced off one of its ears for her trouble, but it bounced off -

    - and right into the path of a large, two-handed sword, the move perfectly placed and leaving it no choice but to be sliced in half.

    The rabbit spun around in mid air, and pushed off the blade, sacrificing one of its legs to bounce back at her with the other. She was ready this time, but for all that her perception was so sharp that the flow of time felt like dripping honey, her muscles, still only in the middle of the refinement stage, could not keep up. She missed the damnable beast by a hair's width, and it bounced off her chest with it's last leg and down to the ground, ready to flee -

    - and was met with the same sword, losing its head in a single strike.

    In the sky above them, she heard the sharp crack of thunder as a new bolt of lightning struck the flagstock at the top of the hill. The flash of it turned the grass white for a brief moment.

    Qian Shanyi breathed out, sheathed her knife, and raised her eyes to see a cultivator holding a two-handed sword with a wide cross guard, wearing a familiar cloth and leather breastplate.

    She arched her eyebrow in surprise. "Fellow cultivator Jian Shizhe?" she said, quickly pulling a bottle of pills out of her bandolier and tossing it to him. It was drenched in blood, much like the rest of her, but he didn't seem to care.

    He nodded at her curtly, and spun his sword through the air, flicking the blood off, pulling the cork out of the bottle with his teeth.

    She kept her eye on the rabbit, but it was not transforming. Perhaps the Heavens wanted to hit them from two directions at once.

    Together, they raced towards the middle of the hill, pulling on their black goggles as they went. The glass was so dark she could barely see anything through it, moving mostly by memory and the feel of dense spiritual energy in the blood soaking into the ground. "I am thankful for your help," she said, glancing up at the sky, and racking her brain for what she could recall of his almanac entry. It did not speak of cultivation directly, but she was fairly sure all his duels were with the sword, at the very least. "What techniques do you have?"

    He motioned with his enormous sword, held casually in one hand. "I have my sword," he said, swallowing the healing pill and quickly snorting the stimulant, clearly familiar with both. "It will be enough, or this here cultivator is not worthy of the name Jian!"

    "Of course." She nodded absently, as they reached the pole. "A flying sword, I presume? I have one as well, and curse techniques for medium range."

    "I can slice even the winds with my sword," he said, "but I have not practiced a flying sword technique. It will not be necessary - my sword skills should more than suffice."

    "I see. And… Besides that?" she asked slowly, confusion and worry leaking into her voice.

    He stayed silent, taking out a piece of strangely glittering cloth to polish up his blade. It shined even through the black glass.

    "You do not have a flying sword," she said, with dread in her heart. He didn't contradict her.

    What beasts were next?

    The dragon, the snake, and the horse.

    The dragon swam through the air, and the other two breathed fire.

    With a pure swordmaster at her side…

    "Nobody else volunteered," he said shortly, looking up into the sky. She could hear disappointment in his voice.

    Above them, a second lightning strike flashed, slamming down into the flagpost.

    She grit her teeth. Time for plan C. "Yonghao, get your ass over here!" she shouted, looking out over the hill, for all that she could barely see through the blackness. Where was he?

    "That honorless wretch least of all," Jian Shizhe scowled next to her, readying his sword to break the third lightning bolt. "No wonder you two are not married, if he leaves you to face a tribulation alone."

    Her head snapped to look back at him. "Honorable cultivator Jian," she said in a cold tone, "I would have expected someone like you to know better than to question how someone else faces a tribulation."

    She felt Yonghao approach through her spiritual energy senses, and turned to face him - for all that she spoke in his defense, for a moment she did worry that he fled entirely.

    "So it is now that you finally show," Jian Shizhe said. At least his voice sounded contrite, after her admonishment.

    Wang Yonghao ignored him. "You sure about this, Shanyi?" he asked, coming closer, "three at once, right away?"

    "No choice," she said, shaking her head, "Honorable cultivator Jian has no way to kill anything more than a couple paces away. I'll need you to handle the dragon while I deal with the rats."

    "I can deal with the rats," Jian Shizhe scowled at her, "I do not boast of my skill lightly."

    "Before or after they eat me alive, fellow cultivator?" she scowled right back. Pride she could take, but not stupidity. "I am aware of your skill. This is no ordinary tribulation - the Heavens seek to kill me, and so I expect them to focus their wrath on me, and away from you."

    "What?" he said. She did not bother to clarify.

    Another lightning struck down - still at the flagpole, not at Jian Shizhe. Not intended for him, then. Once Wang Yonghao came closer, he had already interfered - though unless her senses deceived her, his lightning seemed quite a bit weaker than theirs.

    She turned back to Yonghao. "Why didn't you tell the postmaster you were ready to help?"

    She heard the wince in his voice as he glanced over at Jian Shizhe. "The Heavens control the beasts, right? I thought if I kept my intentions quiet, they would play fairer. But then when you whistled, he ran over before I could react…"

    That…

    Okay, it wasn't a bad idea. They had no plan in place for every particular tribulation - with well over seventy possibilities, she had no hope Yonghao could memorize all the options - and as improvisation went, it was a good one.

    Well, perhaps it would end up killing them all, so in that sense it was bad, but there was logic to it.

    Another weak lightning strike fell down on the flagpost, thunder barely even shaking the ground. She could feel the heat coming off the pole from all the energy it had already absorbed.

    "Especially after your rant," Wang Yonghao sighed, covering his face with one hand. A careless move for an ordinary cultivator, when lightning could strike at any moment - but with his luck, she supposed there was no real chance of him missing it. Unlike him, Jian Shizhe kept his eyes on the sky, sword at the ready. "Did you really have to do that? You just made them a dozen times angrier!"

    "I am a cultivator, Yonghao," she snorted, "what kind of coward would I be, if I challenged the Heavens and didn't even tell them how I feel? One must face death with a clear heart!" She grinned. "I hope your hearts are clear, fellow cultivators?"

    Jian Shizhe growled, glancing at Wang Yonghao, but said nothing. She supposed it would have to do.

    Wang Yonghao just sighed, and unsheathed his sword, slicing above his head casually. With an echoing honk of a goose, a razor-sharp blade of light flew off his weapon and up into the sky.

    Two lightning bolts struck down at once. One, weak and feeble, was scattered by Wang Yonghao's careless sword strike before it even finished forming. The other one, as strong as any she had ever seen, slammed down on Jian Shizhe. He leaped towards it, his form perfect, and when his sword met lightning, the bolt came out lesser for it.

    She pulled her goggles down and raised her naked eyes to the sky, where two black voids were already starting to form, chittering once again echoing out over the hill. She hummed a tune, warming up her vocal cords. Cursing down two swarms at once would push her up to her limits, but she could handle it - it was the fight after that worried her.

    After all, any time a cultivator interfered in a tribulation of another, they would immediately face the exact same tribulation.

    Three cultivators, and three tribulations, all at the same time.

    She licked her lips, and giggled. Stimulants in her blood, beast blood in her stomach, fear and adrenaline in her veins… It all mixed together until even she couldn't tell what she was feeling.

    To face down three tribulations? Surely it was madness?

    Bah!

    Triple the danger, triple the fun!

    She spun her sword through the air, and prepared to spit in the face of Fate once more.
    The postal hill burned all around them.

    A scarlet heavenly horse, its mane of smoke and glowing ashes, galloped around them in a wide circle, its breath of flames setting fire to grass and bamboo all over the hill. Wang Yonghao dashed after it into the thick smoke, and she lost sight of them behind one of the corpses of an enormous oxen.

    She had her own beast to deal with.

    Qian Shanyi spun through the air, bouncing between the two oxen corpses lying close together on the grass. She dodged the snake leaping at her by less than a foot, liquid fire dripping off its scales and igniting the grass below. Its body was as thick as her thigh, half of the scales as black as smoke, the others glowing like hot coals.

    As she passed the snake in the air, her blade slid harmlessly across the scales. Her feet touched the ground, and she leaped after the beast, hoping to strike true this time, but the fires flared, and forced her back.

    Jian Shizhe's sword was humming in the air mere meters behind her, batting away the attacks of another rabbit. Alone, he couldn't force a killing blow so far - but she couldn't deny his skill at keeping it away from her.

    She clenched her teeth to stop them from clattering. The fires dripping off the snake's scales were bad enough, but it was the aura of fear that surrounded it that was the real danger. A voice in the back of her head, questioning her decisions, making her hesitate and miss her strikes. Her mind was already a mess, and this just made it worse.

    At least it also affected the other beasts - for of course, all three of them were going after her at once, just like she expected. They ignored Wang Yonghao almost entirely, and only engaged Jian Shizhe when he got in their way.

    The snake slithered in the charred grass, rearing up for another leap. She breathed out, steadying her nerves. It was neither fast nor hard to hit, she just had to ignore her limbic system telling her otherwise.

    She heard the squelch of split flesh behind her, and a moment later, Jian Shizhe's voice. "Rabbit down! Going for the dragon."

    The snake lept before she could respond, and she spun aside, slicing her sword horizontally, and this time she struck true. The blade caught the snake on the edge of the jaw, and she immediately turned her slice into a stab, sliding her sword directly into its brain. The pressure on her mind vanished at once, and she laughed, dancing away from the fires that briefly flared around the corpse. The acrid smoke in the air obscured her vision, but up close, it wasn't so bad.

    "Snake down!" she shouted, "Prepare for the second horse!"

    Behind her, she heard the flesh tear as the dragon emerged, and a clang of metal on ivory. The dragon roared in triumph, and out of the corner of her eye, she saw its long, bone-white, sinuous body slither up into the air. No kill. "Dragon's up." Jian Shizhe hissed behind her, "Wang, it's yours!"

    The sound of Wang Yonghao's curses, mixed with the whine and bellows of the first horse warmed her heart a bit. "What do you mean, it's mine?! You two think I have a second pair of arms?!" he shouted, but Jian Shizhe did not respond. He joined her next to the corpse of the snake, holding his two-handed sword high, while she took a low stance, pulling the fly whisk off her belt with her left hand.

    The best time to kill the beasts was just as they emerged, after all.

    The man's skill with the sword was honestly absurd. As soon as she scattered the twin rat swarms - her throat hurt, but she managed - he hobbled one of the oxen, cut open its belly, and without stopping for even a moment, decapitated the tiger before it could crawl out in full. By the time Wang Yonghao brought down the first dragon that emerged from her rabbit, they already had a second one ready for him to deal with.

    And now, a third.

    The world tilted around them, and a second horse emerged a meter away, snorting a great gout of flame towards the two of them. The Heavens wisened on to their tricks quickly enough.

    Jian Shizhe stepped in front of her, and spun his great sword in a wide circle, forming a shield for the both of them and batting the fire aside as if it was nothing. At the same time, she pushed her spiritual energy into the sword of her own, sending it flying just above the ground and towards the horse.

    The beast leaped to the side, and she scored merely a shallow gash across its flank. It galloped away into the dense smoke, off to join its partner. She sent a gust of wind from the fly whisk after it, blowing the smoke away and hoping to catch a glimpse of it and skewer it properly, but no such luck.

    She clicked her tongue in disappointment, recalling her sword back to her hand. It was no real surprise she missed - she only had a couple weeks of training with the technique, after all.

    "Dragon or horse?" Jian Shizhe asked, staying close, holding his sword in a guarding stance. They learned quickly that since the beasts sought to kill her first, the best place for him was at her side, keeping her safe.

    "Dragon," she said, leaping onto one of the oxen corpses to gain some ground above the smoke. Jian Shizhe leaped right after her. She would have climbed the flagpole instead, but one of the oxen broke it in its rampage. "Can't see shit through this smoke, won't find a horse until it comes for us."

    There was so much spiritual energy in the air, all mixing together, that she couldn't even rely on her spiritual energy senses anymore. Damnable heavenly beasts.

    A distance away, she saw Wang Yonghao, standing on air and pulling the fire and smoke apart into a cyclone to reveal the horse below, sending slashes of light down at it. His amazing fire-type cultivation law certainly came in handy - without him, they'd have been lost for sure.

    "Yonghao, where's the dragon?" she called after him.

    "I lost it," he grumbled, focusing on the horse.

    "Dragon approaching low, west of Qian!" She heard the postmaster shout from down the hill. He must have found some cultivator whose senses could pierce through the smoke. The Heavens, in their blindness, did not consider advice to be interference.

    Jian Shizhe spun around, swapping places with her as if in a dance, feet steady on the muscled side of the ox, and swung his sword. The dragon burst out of the smoke mere meters away from them, its jaws open wide, and breathed out a rain of bone shards, each as large and fast as an arrow. Jian Shizhe parried most of them, and she sidestepped the rest, sending her sword out to retaliate.

    "And then what, after the dragon?" Jian Shizhe asked as she kept her eyes on the dragon, its body of bone trying to dodge her flying sword. She handed him the fly whisk with her free hand, in case it would dive into the smoke again, still tied to her waist. Out of the two of them, he needed his spiritual energy less, but she needed the vision more. "They'll cook us alive if we stay on this hill. Run away, like cowards?"

    "Is it not cowardice to stick to your pride, even as it kills you?" she asked mildly. Her flying sword scored a hit, stabbing into the dragon's long tail, and she reversed the thrust, pulling it back out. Bright blue blood dripped on the ground below. "Retreating out of a bad position is nothing to be ashamed of."

    Out above the forest, her eyes spotted a long-awaited movement, and she grinned. Just in time. "Besides… My solution to our horse problem will be arriving soon."

    "And what would that be?"

    Her sword stabbed directly into the dragon's body this time, and it roared, twirling in the air and heading straight for them.

    "Yonghao, goose this dragon!" she shouted, and the dragon aborted its charge, forced to climb above an arc of sword light sharp enough to decapitate it, but her sword was already there, ramming through its eye and into the brain. It dropped down into the smoke, and she managed to recall her sword just before it vanished from sight.

    At the very edge of her hearing, a faint, distant whistle grew, accompanied by a strange, droning sound.

    "You'll see it now. Sky drop, west, safe, two seconds!" she shouted, bracing herself against the corpse she stood on.

    The faint sound turned into a shrill cry of air being torn apart, and then an explosion blew dirt a dozen meters up into the air at the edge of the hill as an enormous pale snake crashed down from the sky. The shake of the ground almost threw Jian Shizhe off the ox, and she had to grab him by the lapels to keep him steady.

    "Fellow cultivators, I hope you don't mind if I join?" Hui Yin shouted from his perch on top of Curls, as the great snake found its bearings, and quickly slithered into the smoke. It's head whipped down, and then came back up, tossing one of the horses high into the air. The horse whined, great gusts of flame blowing out of its nostrils, but the snake's jaws snapped shut, and Curls swallowed it in one gulp.

    "What took you so long, honorable cultivator Hui Yin?" Qian Shanyi laughed, waving to him from on top of the ox. She worried she misjudged his motivations, and he wouldn't come - or that he left town already - but in the end, it all fell exactly into place. "The party is halfway over!"

    He squinted at her, not stopping playing his strange instrument for even a moment. Above them, thunder cracked the skies once more. "That you, lady? Small world!"

    Suddenly, Curls curled up on herself, and stuck her long tail above Hui Yin's head. Qian Shanyi had just a moment to pull her black goggles back on.

    Lightning struck down, and Curls hissed, the sound as loud as a storm gale while sparks danced across her scales.

    Jian Shizhe pursed his lips, giving Curls an admiring look, though it was hard to tell through the black glass. "You knew a beastmaster of this strength would come? That is why you said we should target the dragon?"

    Curls turned its head over, keeping Hui Yin sheltered under her wide skull. "Beastmaster?" he called out to them, keeping himself anchored, standing upside-down. "I am an immortal musician, fellow cultivators!"

    "Didn't know he'd come," Qian Shanyi said, "only suspected. It was only natural that a snake of this size would pounce at an opportunity to eat its fill of the heavenly beasts. But I am surprised that you are taking this as calmly as you do, honorable cultivator Jian!"

    All of a sudden, she heard the beasts approach. This time, they decided to attack while they were blinded - either by the lightning, or by the goggles they wore to protect against it. She heard Wang Yonghao shout as he followed after.

    "And why is that?" Jian Shizhe said, his voice darkened, even as he spun his sword to block out the fire from the other, surviving horse. It was bright enough that she could see it clearly through the goggles.

    "To interfere in the tribulation of another, with no request or prior warning?" She laughed, stepping to the side to dodge the leap of a snake, trusting the spike in her sense of terror to tell her where it was. "Any one of us might die today! Is this not as if fellow cultivator Hui Yin had stabbed you in the stomach?"

    She couldn't see his reaction through the goggles, but his voice was clear enough. "Have your Elders taught you nothing?" He sneered. "To cultivate is to rebel against the heavens! If fellow cultivator Hui Yin dares to rebel, who am I to stand in his way?"

    "Well said!" she laughed again.

    "Can you two focus?" Wang Yonghao shouted at them, "the tribulation is still here!"

    "Is your wife always this reckless?" Jian Shizhe said.

    "It's pretty common for her," Wang Yonghao grumbled.

    "Oh shut it," she cut back, "what kind of cultivator doesn't have time to debate Dao in the middle of a tribulation? Have neither of you read any classics?"

    Thunder roared, and the beasts pounced on them once more, with claw and bloody tooth.
    Author Note: If you'd like to read five chapters ahead, or read other works I write, you can find me on patreon.
    I also have a discord server, where I post memes I make about FSE, and occasionally discuss some plans and worldbuilding details. Want to talk about the Heavenly tribulation? It's the best place to be!
    The art in this chapter is heavily based on this image, and is likewise distributed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
    Thanks for reading! :)​
     
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    • Chapter 47: Transcend Or Fall, Hope Not For Other Fate
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    • Author Note: Sorry for the chapter being late - I was traveling over the weekend, and mismanaged my time last week. Perhaps watching Dune 2 was a wrong move. I would say more, but it will surely happen again, so I won't.​
    The blood flowed, the swords flashed, and the slaughter filled the air.

    The trouble with the zodiac tribulation was that each of the twelve heavenly beasts fought differently, and there was no chance of any one cultivator being a great match against all of them. They were making a good show of it, and yet they were still being ground down, even with the four of them making up for each other's weaknesses. The beasts gave them no chance to rest, to recover.

    Would they crack first, or would the Heavens?

    Qian Shanyi was all out of talismans, and down to a fifth of her spiritual energy reserves. Jian Shizhe, for all his great skill, was down to two fifths, and if not for her pills, would have been doing a lot worse. The blood of the beasts helped, but not fast enough.

    Curls, in contrast, needed no help - a mount fitting for a beastmaster in the building foundation stage, let alone a refinement one. There was a reason Hui Yin felt confident in butting into their tribulation without announcing himself in advance. Yet even the great snake still struggled, held back by having to protect its rider, and further constrained in its movements by the much more fragile fellow cultivators fighting on the very same hill. It was used to making great leaps, falling on its prey from the height of a mountain and at the speed of the wind, and struggled to deal with the beasts coming at it on all sides, ready to take a bite out of its long tail. Chipped scales, cuts, and burns were adding up.

    A test of all their strengths.

    Except for Wang Yonghao, who could fly, the lucky fuck, and thus could approach all but the dragon and the rooster at his leisure, and even those with only the mildest concern.

    The goats were the most annoying of all, dripping in shadow and haze, their black fur blending in with the smoke still rising from the grass after the rampage of the horses. Even spiritual energy senses could not detect them. Silent killers, stalking the weak and going in for the kill - and so much worse for it than the rabbit, for at least it did not try to hide.

    With the pair of goats absent, they were faced with a horse and a tiger, Jian Shizhe doing his best to keep her safe from the gouts of flame, while Curls and Wang Yonghao tried to box them in for the kill. The beasts have learned from their mistakes, and ran circles around Curls, always staying just close enough to her to stop Wang Yonghao from striking out with the Honk of the Solar Goose, yet also moving erratically, throwing off the great snake's aim. She sent out her flying sword to help out, aiming for the horse -

    And things went wrong almost at once. The tiger pivoted, sprinting at her and Jian Shizhe, who stepped in the way -

    - only for one of the goats to leap out of the smoke, crashing into him from the side, tossing them both away from the tiger's path -

    - who charged at her, spit and rage flying, even as she tried to recall her sword back, knowing she would not be fast enough. Wang Yonghao rushed after it, already sending out blades of cutting light, but the tiger's claw slammed down on her chest just a moment before his strike cut its head off. Her spiritual shield crackled, but held -

    - and immediately shattered, twin black horns piercing her chest from the back, her ribs cracking to make way. The pain of it made her lose control over her flying sword technique entirely, and she saw it plunge down into the ground, a good five meters away.

    She grabbed one of the horns poking out of her chest to stop it from being pulled free, ripped a knife off her back with her other hand, and blindly rammed it into the throat of the goat behind her. She felt muscle and bone tear, and the beast stilled.

    Sneaky bastards.

    She fell to the ground, barely keeping enough presence of mind to push out with one hand and avoid dislodging the horns. There were now two massive holes in her lungs, and these damnable horns were the only thing plugging them up. Blood gushed into her lungs anyways, flowing around the wound, and her breathing seized, as she fought against her instinct to cough - for it would only damage her lungs more.

    No time to panic. Work the problem.

    She focused on her inner senses, hurriedly squeezing fat, skin and muscle against the horns to plug the gaps, seal the blood vessels, and manually pump blood out of her lungs and into her stomach with her spiritual energy. Her control over her own spiritual energy stated to slip, and a little and very annoying voice in the back of her mind started to tell her how well and truly fucked she was.

    Her lungs were damaged, and they were linked to the lungs meridian. Without functioning lungs, she could not properly circulate energy through it.

    The lungs meridian. Yin and metal, the most important one in her entire body. Her spiritual energy recirculation was already going awry, fucking up the delicate work of keeping herself from dying. If she slipped and let the blood gush out, she would bleed out and die. If she let it fill her lungs, she would drown and die. Yet the more she used her spiritual energy to force things into place, the higher the chances her spiritual energy recirculation would destabilize entirely, overload one of her dantians, and blow it clear out of her body.

    Her breaths were shallow, each one an agony as blood frothed out of her mouth. Dimly, she was aware of Jian Shizhe standing over her, fighting off a six-armed monkey, each hand holding a crude steel sword. It came to finish what the goat started, but she had no presence of mind to think of that. One problem at a time.

    With shaking hands, she tore open a pouch on her bandoleer, and drew out one of her spare bottles of healing pills. She pressed it to her lips, and inhaled the red, swirling pill within, fighting against her instincts begging for air.

    The healing pill dissolved as soon as it reached her stomach, flooding her chest with heat, and she felt the skin around the wounds pull closer together, regeneration accelerating further and the flood of blood slowing. There would be a reckoning, taking a double dose in short sequence, but fucking up her eyes sure beat dying.

    Alright. Now what?

    If she could survive until the tribulation ended, she'd get help… But she was barely holding on as she was. Without spiritual energy circulation, she had no spiritual energy shield, and could die to a sneeze by any one of the heavenly beasts.

    Almost half of the tribulation was still left. She couldn't rely on Jian Shizhe to guard her body through the rest of the chaos.

    With the horns stuck in her lungs, she couldn't properly recirculate spiritual energy - even the healing effect of the pills inside of her was severely weakened. That meant she had to pull them out. There was no other option.

    Unfortunately for her, they were also the only thing stopping the blood from flowing freely.

    She would have to pull them out slowly, giving the pill in her blood time to work. All the tissue - skin, muscle and bone - was still there, so perhaps if she pulled the punctures closed they could heal up enough for her to stand. Thankfully, her robes had somehow remained whole, and wrapped around the horns like a bandage, keeping the surface of the wounds relatively smooth. Masterful craftsmanship, truly.

    Qian Shanyi closed her eyes, and tried to keep her breathing deep and even. Despite her best efforts at pulling blood out of her lungs, she was starting to feel light-headed, and she'd need all the air she could get.

    Or perhaps it was the blood loss - her fingers did tingle slightly.

    Gritting her teeth, she reached behind herself, and grabbed the goat's head by the ears, preparing to do the one thing she was expressly told never to do, when she learned first aid back in her sect.

    She didn't get the chance. A strong hand seized her by the wrist, and she felt cold air all over her skin, pleasant after the heat of the fires and the acrid smoke. Raising her eyes, she saw Junming, kneeling on the grass right next to her, naked from the waist up. They were spinning spiritual energy in a complex pattern above their palm, before bringing that hand to her chest. She shuddered from the piercing cold as ice spread across her skin and through her lungs, blood freezing in place and sealing up the wound.

    In the skies above, thunder rumbled.

    She tried to speak, and instead coughed, spurting blood foam instead of words. Closing her mouth, she raised her hands, and signed. <Why come?>

    Junming glanced down at her face. Their face showed no emotion, but that was no surprise.

    "Don't like seeing cultivators die," they said. "Stay still. Hard to work."

    <I liked lungs.> She signed instead. Her body shook - though she couldn't tell if it was from stimulants, fear, pain, or bloodloss - but her fingers were steady. Mostly. <My best organ.>

    Junming pulled the horns a bit further out of her back, and her spine arched. Definitely pain, this time.

    "So chatty," Junming said, "Can fingerspeak now?"

    <Learn fast,> she signed. <Make me good grave, ok?>

    She had planned how to pretend to be worse at fingerspeaking than she was, to only use a limited set of words, not the couple hundred she actually knew. Somehow, it didn't feel that important in the moment.

    She felt the lightning about to strike, and shut her eyes, burying her face into the ground. With a thunderous clap, it struck, and yet she felt no shock. Cautiously, she raised her eyes, and saw Wang Yonghao, his sword raised where it split the lightning aimed for Junming's head.

    "Too young for grave," Junming said, not even looking up from their work, "keep still."

    She did as she was told, hiding her face in the ground from the lightning. Yonghao blasted the rat swarm apart with a great gout of fire, and Curls snapped the back of the ox in half with the strike of her enormous tail. Slowly, the goat horns left her body, and she pulled her tissues back in place, letting the cold seal up the gaps. Junming helped her, quickly bandaging up the wounds with a gauze they brought along.

    She rose up on her knees, her body still shaking from the shock. Junming's technique didn't heal her - merely stopped the damage, giving the healing pills in her blood time to work. Even now, she felt air whistle slightly out of the holes, and had to force it out of her chest cavity with spiritual energy, lest it collapse her lungs.

    But her spiritual energy recirculation had stabilized, so it would have to do.

    "Status?" she croaked, trying to keep her lungs from staining too much. They still bled, though not enough to worry her. The pills would replenish her blood. Junming helped her get up on her feet, and grabbed a large lantern, waving it through the air. A dozen shimmering swords of ice formed all around them, spinning in circles, giving them a moment's reprieve. A small pile of corpses surrounded them - the goat that almost killed her, one of the snakes, and many others. Not even a single spot of grass was free from the blood.

    Jian Shizhe's robes were torn up, his skin bleeding from multiple wounds. Even Wang Yonghao had a large gash across his face. Their spiritual energy was low - she could feel that easily. They kept her and Junming safe, but paid dearly for it - and the tribulation was far from over.

    "Rooster, Monkey, Monkey, Snake, Rabbit" Jian Shizhe said, his voice clear despite the wounds. He wiped off his face, taking a breather, and rested his enormous sword on the ground. "I am down to a fifth of my reserves. Wang is at half." She could see the monkeys stalking around the circle of ice blades, and heard the rooster battle with Hui Yin somewhere in the smoke, its deadly, confounding crowing neutralized by some musical technique.

    Wang Yonghao gave her a look. They discussed the possibility of sending her into his world fragment, hoping the tribulation couldn't follow, if things went badly enough. She shook her head. They couldn't just leave the others here to die. "Can you even fight?" he asked, pursing his lips.

    "Yeah, I am fine." She coughed up blood. Her lungs felt like a noodle strainer. "Never been better. In fact, I have a plan."

    Wang Yonghao cursed loudly.

    "Brat." She scowled at him. "Just for that, you have been elevated to be its key part."

    "And what do I have to do?"

    She reached for her hip, picked up the fly whisk, and tossed it to him. He grabbed it out of the air, looking at her curiously. "Bring me that snake -"

    "Sure," he said, raising his sword, and waving the fly whisk in a seemingly random direction. The smoke billowed outwards, and revealed the snake, about to pounce at them between the ice swords. Wang Yonghao raised his sword, and Junming stepped around to his side, covering the flank.

    "- alive," she finished, clapping Wang Yonghao on his ankle to stop his strike.

    He glared at her briefly. "What do you mean, alive?!"

    "I'll teach you all about the dao of life and death later, junior." She coughed up blood again. Her lungs have really seen better days, huh. Well, she'd just have to grow new ones. "We need something to balance the scales - I will tie it up and use its fear like a weapon."

    Jian Shizhe gave her a considering look, pursing his lips. In his eyes, she could see something approaching respect. Wang Yonghao scowled at her. "Tie it up? It's on fire!"

    She scowled right back at him, and grabbed the goat that almost killed her by the neck, its horns slick with her own blood. "Who is the seamstress here, me or you? Go, get me the damn snake! I'll worry about how to tie it up myself."

    She pulled her knife out of the goat's throat like a cork out of a bottle of spirit wine, and lifted it above her head, sucking the blood out. Earth spiritual energy, the best she could hope for, in her condition. Jian Shizhe stepped closer to her, readying his sword, and Junming waved their lantern, sending half of the ice swords into the smoke.

    Wang Yonghao sighed, and went after the living snake. On the way there, he pulled her sword out of the ground, and tossed it back to her.

    Tossing the empty goat aside, she knelt next to the corpse of the dead snake at her feet, readying her knife.

    "I will need a minute," she said, "honorable cultivators, I hope you can manage without me."

    Junming warbled something, waving their lantern again. More swords appeared, these ones spinning closer to them. Jian Shizhe gave her a dark look, but said nothing.

    With her knife, she sliced into the snake, carefully peeling the skin away from the flesh underneath, and cutting it into a long ribbon. It didn't have to be perfect, as long as it didn't tear. The scales of the snake resisted the fire, and her sword could not cut into them - the knife only managing with great difficulty, by cutting from the inside out. Three Obediences Four Virtues noted the skin of the heavenly snake as an excellent sewing material, tough yet elastic - and even though she had no way to properly treat it in the middle of a fight, she hoped it could serve its purpose raw.

    Less than a minute later, she held a long ribbon of snake skin, her rope control technique threading through it, bringing it into motion. Just in time, too, as Wang Yonghao tossed the living snake towards them. Terror rose in her mind, but at this point, it barely even registered. If anything, it felt invigorating.

    Junming blasted the snake with ice and cold, and it slowed, fires on its body dying out for just a moment, letting her get the impromptu rope around it, tying it into knots. The snake hissed, and flared more fire from its skin, but it was all for naught - where any rope would have been burned to cinders, the skin of its own kind survived. Caught, yet kept alive - and now the tribulation was five on four.

    "The Heavens want to kill me, fellow cultivators," she laughed, wheezing air out of her wounds. "So let the other beasts come. Let them make mistakes, terrified of their own Heavenly weapon. Unlike them, we are cultivators. What is a little terror to us?"

    She grinned, raising her sword defiantly in the air.

    "All we have to do is slaughter them like the cattle they truly are!"
    Her sword flew through the air, and ripped into the eye of the last fat, bloated pig, its snout dripping with drool and blood. It fell to the ground, dead, and Qian Shanyi called her weapon back to her, just barely managing to not fumble the catch. She breathed heavily, resting her hands on her knees. She felt more drained than she ever was in her entire life, and yet her soul sung in triumph.

    Next to her, Jian Shizhe was standing, his hands resting calmly on the pommel of his sword. For all that he was covered in cuts and bruises, and she knew for a fact that his left arm was broken, he looked as if he had expected their victory all along. His left foot was missing, bitten off by one of the pigs, though he had cut open its stomach right away to retrieve it - with any luck, healers should still be able to reattach it. She was the one to apply a tourniquet after the fact.

    Curls had curled up in a wide circle, sucking on the tip of her own tail. Here and there, her scales have been chipped and blackened - and Hui Yin was walking down her body, inspecting the damage. Out of them all, he was the most well put together.

    Wang Yonghao stood on her opposite side, looking around nervously, not knowing what to expect. Junming just seemed tired, but when she gave them a look, they smiled, very slightly and deliberately. All around the hill she could see expectant faces, the smoke having long ago cleared by now.

    Up above them, thunder sounded one last time, one crack after another, each louder than the one before it. Fifteen in total, for the fifteen bolts of lightning that had descended down upon them all.

    And with the last crack, the sky had brightened once more.

    All around the hill, cheers rang through the air. Cultivators, ordinary people, men and women, even children, all knew what it meant.

    They had transcended the tribulation. Today, the Heavens had lost, and cultivators won.

    The postmaster ascended the hill at a jog, followed by an unfamiliar cultivator and a pair of ordinary people - wearing the white robes of healers, carrying a large bag and a stretcher. She waited for them to come, not moving from her spot - after what she went through, they could be the ones to exert their legs.

    "You see, Yonghao?" she said quietly, inclining her head in his direction, "Is it not satisfying?"

    He looked at her strangely, but she could see he liked the adoration of the crowd too. "And now what?"

    "Now?" she said, stretching out her arms and back. "Now, I get to see a proper healer… And then, we celebrate. Get as drunk as you want - today, you deserved it."
    Author Note: Want to find out what the other heavenly beasts do? You can find a patreon-exclusive article about the tribulations written in one of the cultivator journals on my patreon, as well as four more chapters of the story.
    I also have a discord server, where I post memes I make about FSE, and occasionally discuss some plans and worldbuilding details. Want to talk about the Heavenly tribulation? It's the best place to be!
    Thanks for reading! :)​
     
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