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

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Chapter 48: Drink And Feast To Victory You Wrought
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    • 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 three 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!​
    "Unstable heartbeat. All meridians overstressed, to the point of spasming in the left leg, heart, liver, and both wrists." The healer glared at her, scribbling down notes in a small notebook. His spiritual energy swirled around her, burning here and there as it gently touched her body and soul to check for damage. "Microfractures in most of the bones. Lymph full of residuals. All this on top of the main injury to the chest." He slammed the notebook closed. "What did you do to yourself, girl?"

    Qian Shanyi glanced up at the strict man standing next to the bench. His disciple - a boy, not even a cultivator himself - was busy bandaging her chest. The treatment room was small, and she was glad for the sound muffling formation inscribed on the walls.

    "I had a -" She winced, as the disciple pushed a bit too much on her ribs. His bandaging skills left much to be desired. "I had a premonition, and acted to prepare for the worst," she finished.

    Healer's eyes bore into her. "What pills did you take?"

    "Ivory of the rampaging divine ape, about fifty milligrams every four hours for nine days, to stave off sleep," she began. She had the whole list memorized. "Then another gram when the tribulation started. Big Mo's healing tablets, one every eight hours, for overall recovery, supplemented by pills from local alchemists, equivalent to ox-seven, dragon-two, goat-twelve and rooster-six from Huang Wen's tables. Rosevine tea - ah!" She winced again, and glared at the disciple. At this rate she could have done it faster herself.

    He mumbled an apology, and she sighed. He was almost done, anyways. "Like I said, rosevine tea, hard brew, for spiritual energy recirculation and water intake. Then the standard pre-tribulation set, and finally, the ministration of the dying serpent, for major injuries, one right when the tribulation started, and another one when I got perforated."

    "You were days away from a qi deviation if you didn't stop."

    "Like I said, I had a premonition. Besides, I knew when to stop."

    "How?"

    She shrugged slightly, doing her best to not further interrupt the work of the disciple bandaging her up. "I checked the interaction tables."

    "Interaction tables?" The healer sneered at her. "You took enough pills to kill a horse. No table is written for this many variables."

    The disciple tied off the bandage around her chest, and bowed, retreating to a corner of the room. "Desperate times, desperate measures," she said, slowly standing up, and stretching out her arms to check how well she could move. She shouldn't have disparaged the boy so much - for all his slowness, the bandaging was done competently, and did not restrict her beyond reason. "I had four or five days of safety margin, if my math was off."

    The real safety margin was the dense spiritual energy and highly auspicious feng shui in Wang Yonghao's world fragment, but she wasn't going to mention that, healer confidentiality or no.

    The healer sighed, unimpressed by her logic. "Any other symptoms I should know about?"

    "Is your skin supposed to look orange?"

    "No."

    "In that case, my eyes." She frowned, looking around. "I think I stopped seeing blue, sometime around when we reached the clinic."

    "That would be from the overdose on the ministration of the dying serpent."

    She grimaced. "I figured. Is the damage permanent?"

    He gave her a long hard look while she dressed back up. "It will be permanent if you do not stop. But no, despite your best efforts, you should recover. Even your lung meridian should heal well on its own."

    "Excellent." She smiled, clipping her sword back to her belt. "Any other advice?"

    "My advice is to rest and let your body fully recover," he said, walking over to a small desk. He picked up a small sheet of paper, and started writing his instructions on it. "Absolutely no pills of any type for at least two weeks. No cultivation either. Refrain from forcefully circulating spiritual energy at all if you can help it - though who am I kidding, I can already see you will ignore this."

    She bowed. "I will make sure to limit myself to the basics."

    "Ample and varied diet, prepared by an immortal chef if you can afford one," he said, handing the note over to her. "You are mildly malnutritioned on top of everything else. I added instructions on dealing with qi deviation, in case you still slide into it - I do not want to see you in my clinic until the month is done, at the very least."

    "Thank you," she said, looking over his notes. Curt, but comprehensive. "I happen to be an immortal chef myself, so that should not be a problem. I solemnly swear that I will follow your advice to the letter, unless the Heavens force my hand through devious treachery."

    The healer's glare warmed her heart as she left the room.

    Some medicines were for the body, while others for the soul.
    Wang Yonghao was waiting for her in the lobby, small as it was, pacing around anxiously. There was no sign of Jian Shizhe - he had been brought in together with them, and treated first, once the healer made sure she was in no immediate danger. She hoped dealing with his foot would go well - he looked pretty bad when she last saw him, despite his attempts at stoicism, and hers to keep up the good humor.

    When she approached him, Wang Yonghao pulled out an unsealed letter and handed it over to her. She took it with a raised eyebrow. The paper felt thick and smooth in her fingers.

    "While you were out, a messenger came from the Northern Scarlet Stream sect, and gave me this," he said as a means of explanation. He looked around the room anxiously. "They also paid for our bills."

    Her eyebrows climbed further, and she opened the letter. It was short and to the point.

    Every day, the suns fall below the earth, and yet every sunset is still as beautiful as the last. Every tribulation transcended is a cause for celebration - fellow cultivators, Northern Scarlet Stream sect extends a heartfelt invitation to a feast, an hour after sunset at our compound.

    Wang Yonghao looked just about ready to bolt. "So, what do we do?"

    "What do you mean?" She looked back at him. "We don't have to do anything, simply attend."

    They walked out of the clinic, and headed towards the post office. There was a matter of the remaining materials to deal with.

    "No, I mean - " Wang Yonghao looked around as they walked, but the street was mostly empty. "Should we flee? What does this mean?"

    She rolled her eyes. Honestly. "Please, relax. Nobody will bite your head off - nobody will dare even slap your face, not right after a tribulation. It's just a feast."

    "Shanyi." He glared at her. "It's never just a feast!"

    She started to laugh, then winced. Okay, no laughing until her lungs healed more. "Fine, it's not just a feast. They clearly want something, if they even paid for my healer. But that doesn't mean it's anything nefarious. Everyone celebrates a successful Tribulation - for a sect we have not dealt with before to invite us is unusual, but not unprecedented."

    "What makes you so sure it's not nefarious?" he grumbled.

    "That their darling child Jian Shizhe fought alongside us?" In lieu of laughing, she rolled her eyes instead. "Even if you ignore our status as having transcended the tribulation, that alone would shield us from reprisals. You cannot see danger in every bush, Yonghao."

    When they reached the post office, she saw the hill busy with activity - the corpses of the Heavenly beasts being butchered for parts, weighed on scales, and stored away in boxes and barrels as half a dozen cultivators and another dozen ordinary people made quick work of it. Junming stood nearby, watching over the process, back to wearing their woolen robes. A clipboard was strapped to their left arm, and a pencil held in their right, attached by a short lanyard.

    "Jun-!" she tried to call out, and descended into more coughs instead. Damnable lungs. They turned to face her, perhaps because of how loud she was. "Junming," she continued quieter, "a cultivator is supposed to relax after transcending a tribulation, not go back to work."

    They let go of the pencil, and signed to her, the pencil bouncing around from the motion of their hands. <You>, they made a sign she didn't recognise, two fingers held out on both hands, moving away from their nose in a slight upward curve, <cultivator> <me>, another one, fingers of both hands wagging at chest level as they moved the hands backwards, <see> <alive> <and>, yet another one, palms spread, moving away from the chest.

    I am guessing that last one was for "breathing". First one, perhaps either fellow or honorable? From context, expressing concern or happiness? "I am happy to see my fellow cultivator is alive and breathing"?

    "I am afraid I only got about a third of that," she said honestly, "but I am glad to see you alive as well. I take it you are processing the materials?"

    Junming put their hands down, bouncing on their feet slightly. Annoyed or anxious? Could well be either. "Yes," they warbled, reaching for the clipboard and flipping over to one of the sheets, before handing it over to her. "Your part."

    She briefly wondered why they added <honorable cultivator> at all. It felt a bit too formal, though it was just a guess on her part - she had no idea about the norms of politeness in sign. Perhaps they were concerned how it would seem to Yonghao, or others further up the hill.

    She accepted the clipboard with a smile. It was filled with neat, clean writing. "What did Hui Yin do with his part?" she said, scanning through the tables.

    "Ate it."

    She heard Wang Yonghao choke behind her. "Exactly as I expected," she said, nodding. Curls must have eaten it - a beast of that size would surely appreciate a meal so dense in spiritual energy - but it would amuse her to keep Yonghao in the dark. "I expect we need to pay for the work and the storage?"

    He named a price, and she frowned slightly. It sounded too high to her, by a factor of two or three, but perhaps she estimated falsely while she was waiting on the healer.

    Then again, when you're ahead...

    "Tell you what," she said casually, picking up the pencil attached to the clipboard, and leaving small marks on one row after another. "There are two hundred odd cultivators in these two towns, are there not? We will be donating half of our share - take the payment out of it, and then split the rest equally. Loose cultivators get double share, and those helping here now get triple - could you do that?"

    Some gasps and cheers rose up around the hill, where other cultivators could hear their conversation. She smiled. That was a lot of money she was tossing out, and this was about the effect she was hoping for. Junming froze for a moment, but then nodded, and accepted the clipboard back.

    She also marked out one of the oxen to be sent directly to the Northern Scarlet Stream sect, with compliments to their kitchen. It wouldn't do to have them expect they were simply some paupers they could lure in by paying for their healer, and perhaps she could get a good meal out of it too.

    They took some small cuts of the meat together with them - rooster, ox and horse - and headed back to the tavern. Wang Yonghao still kept quiet, all the way across the glassy fields. He only spoke up again when they entered the sound-dampening formation in their room. "So you still want to go to the feast? That's why you sent them a whole ox?"

    "Partly." She nodded. "I want to celebrate transcending the tribulation properly, and besides, my healer expressly told me to have a varied diet prepared by an immortal chef - who would I be to defy him? But no, I donated them because there is little else we could do - it's not like we can bring them with us. People see us slaughter several tons of beasts, and then we walk out of town with two dainty backpacks - what do you think they will think?"

    "That we have an inner world?"

    "Don't be ridiculous," she scowled mockingly, "everyone knows that inner worlds don't exist. No, they will think we have a cosmos ring - and those have to be registered. Now open up your inner world, will you? We could get a whole day of rest inside before the night falls here, and I want to give my lungs as much time to heal as they could get."

    Wang Yonghao rolled his eyes at her joke, but opened the entrance.

    "I feel like you still aren't taking this seriously, even after the Heavens almost killed you," he said as they slowly descended inside.

    "We talked about this, Yonghao - not everything is due to your luck," she said, "we transcend the tribulation - it is only natural for us to be invited to a feast. This doesn't have to be a scheme of the Heavens."

    "But it could be. You know they will keep trying to kill you."

    She raised an eyebrow, looking up at him from where she hung on a rope tied to his waist. "Obviously. But we've established there are other reasons for this feast to occur. We've also established that your luck has limits, and can be defeated. We are in a very good position right now. So why the suspicion?"

    "It's…I don't know. Can't I just worry about you getting killed?"

    She nodded. "You can, of course. It's good to think ahead - I simply think you are going a bit overboard. How do you imagine them doing that, aside from using your luck?"

    "What if they send a celestial to cut off your head directly?"

    Her eyebrow lifted a hair more. "Hm. Have you heard about the Lion kingdom, Yonghao?"

    He frowned at her, as they touched down on the ground. "No. What is it?"

    "No matter." She waved him off, heading towards one of the icy trenches of the chiclotron. "There is a reason why the Empire now slaughters celestials on sight. If the Heavens tried to send a messenger, they wouldn't be fighting us, they would be fighting the whole province."

    She reached the trench, Yonghao following close behind, and quickly put the newly harvested meat inside, only taking a small cut of the rooster.

    "Look, I do see your concerns," she sighed, heading to the kitchen, "that is another reason why I donated half of the materials we got. Selling them would take a while, and I am no longer quite so willing to try my luck at it. Donation gives us goodwill immediately, which has other uses. So if you simply do not want to go, I won't drag you to the feast - but I am getting my Heavens-damned celebration, Yonghao."

    She tossed the rooster meat on the table, slipping out of her bandoliers and knife sheaths. They'd need cleaning, still covered in blood as they were.

    "And in the meantime - let's see about cooking this Heavenly chicken," she said, stretching out her fingers. "I want soup."

    They lazed about for the rest of the ever-shining day, in games and conversation, and once she went to bed, she slept like a kitten.
    Spirit wine flowed, torches and lanterns shone brightly, and music filled the air.

    One of the main courtyards of the Northern Scarlet Stream sect had been completely transformed, from a place of training, to one of glittering silks and celebration, or cheering and laughter, of conversation and games. Great tables have been brought out, filled with drinks and food, and a hundred people - cultivators and mortals both - all reveled together, drinking and dancing and playing as outer disciples ran to and fro, bringing more wine or tea. The light of lanterns reflected off the great, arching glass ceiling, arrays of lenses turning it into rainbows that overlaid the black, starry sky above.

    Alongside one of the courtyard walls, there stood a portable kitchen, where Qian Shanyi was making a certain oxen stew, assisted by Wang Yonghao and a half dozen outer disciples. A small pack of cultivators gathered around, watching her perform.

    "Honorable cultivator Qian, what made the heavenly tribulation so furious towards you?" asked one of the young men from the Northern Scarlet Stream sec, and the others around him quieted down, watching for her response. One named Chen, she was fairly sure.

    "Isn't it obvious?" Qian Shanyi said, gesturing to her body with her knife. After a full day in the world fragment, her hands have almost stopped shaking. "I broke into Heaven and slept with the mother of the Heavenly Emperor. He has been out for my blood ever since."

    Other cultivators watching her slice up the ox meat laughed, and Probably Chen blushed slightly. Wang Yonghao, conscripted to help her prepare the meat, stepped on her foot under the table. She ignored him.

    "But how could that be?" Chen said, shaking his head, and trying to recover his position. "Everyone knows that the Heavens know nothing about filial piety."

    She nodded easily. Casual stance would hit the strongest here. "Who could deny this?" she said, not looking up from her work. "But you see, after three days and three nights with me, his mother adamantly refused to sleep with him anymore. He simply…doesn't suffice. Is it any wonder jealousy would flood his mind?"

    The laughter grew riotous, and Chen bowed, tapping out. She smirked. Too easy.

    A simple game of rhetoric, known by a hundred different names, played often whenever someone transcended a tribulation. Others threw questions at her - traditionally about the tribulation - and she had to respond in a way that made fun of the Heavens. Neither side could contradict what the other had already established - even if it was a blatant lie - only build on top of it. The first one to stumble lost - but of course, where the tribulation transcender was usually alone, there were many challengers. It was expected for them to lose, again and again - the question was merely how long they held out, and which of the challengers could make them fall.

    She rarely lost, though this was her first time on the other side of the field. This fool didn't know who he was dealing with. Her donation had only heated up the rumors that started up after their rare tribulation, and this game gave her a perfect excuse to tell all comers to fuck off with their questions. Let them make their own conclusions - being seen as rich and mysterious was one of the goals, after all.

    After much gnashing of teeth and wringing of hands, Wang Yonghao finally agreed to try coming to the feast alongside her, and she roped him into helping her cook. Partly, it was so that he wouldn't get cornered all on his own - working together, she could catch questions aimed at him - and partly because for all that she healed greatly after a day in his inner world, lifting things still hurt quite a bit.

    She finished cutting the ox cheeks, and slid the cuts over to him, to be arranged on a baking tray and put in an oven. An outer disciple on her other side had just finished doing the same with the ribs, and she nodded at him, admiring how quickly and efficiently the man moved. It was nice to work with well-trained people.

    The main sect cook really appreciated her donation, and easily agreed to give her access to one of the portable kitchens. She recently happened across an amazing ox stew recipe, you see, and couldn't wait to try it out.

    She even shared the recipe with him. It's not like she cared - even if she wanted to specialize as an immortal chef, there was no real chance of her needing to hoard recipes to make ends meet, not with Yonghao around. Besides, Wang Niu was a prick: if she could take the uniqueness of his dish away from him, she'd consider that an added victory. In return, the cook agreed to provide all the heavenly materials and earthly treasures they would need to adapt the recipe to work with a Heavenly ox, as opposed to a regular one.

    Her hands freed from knifework, she looked across the courtyard, searching for her fellows in tribulation. Hui Yin was playing a game of his own, all the way across, spinning songs from what the audience threw at him. Junming seemed to have left - the crowds did not seem to be to their liking, so she expected as much. As for Jian Shizhe…

    She spotted him hobbling into the courtyard, Rui Bao at his side, and clapped Wang Yonghao on the shoulder. They headed over, leaving the challengers behind. She'd be back for their blood soon enough.

    Jian Shizhe looked composed, for all that he had a short peg tied to his leg in place of his missing foot, yet there was challenge in his eyes. He met the eyes of many as he entered, and all looked away, too scared to even congratulate him on transcending the tribulation. She wasn't sure if she would have dared to do so either, in other circumstances: who knew how the man might react? Even honest praise might be taken as an insult.

    Fortunately, they had transcended the tribulation at his side, and so she was immune to his wroth. When Jian Shizhe's eyes turned on her and Yonghao, she saw the challenge in them soften and fade. "Fellow cultivator Jian!" She grinned, opening her arms wide, as if for a hug - though there was no chance he would ever allow that. "Finally you come to celebrate! I was starting to worry that the Heavens got to you in the end."

    "My life was in no danger - unlike yours, fellow cultivator Qian," he said, giving her a curt nod - the most she could ever imagine from him, really. He stopped at one of the refreshment tables, seemingly consumed by the choice of what to drink, and people nearby suddenly found they had somewhere else to be entirely. That the table was one of the closest to the entrance did not escape her notice.

    "Oh, please." She waved him off. "That goat couldn't kill a child, let alone me."

    "Again you tempt fate, Shanyi." Wang Yonghao sighed, a step behind her.

    "Amateurs 'tempt' fate." She grinned. "To cultivate is to bend fate over your knee, no temptation required."

    The slightest of grins flickered over Jian Shizhe's lips, contrasting with his gloomy appearance.

    "I heard it was quite the battle indeed," Rui Bao said right next to him, his hand already cradling a glass of spirit wine with the same casual grip as she had seen him hold a sword. "The hill is still red from the top down."

    "I haven't seen you among the crowds, Rui Bao." She snorted. "A busy morning?"

    He grimaced as if he bit into a lemon. "It is a crime to rise before noon without a cause," he said, "next time, could you ask the Heavens to schedule the tribulation more conveniently?"

    "I will make sure to send them a letter." She laughed softly.

    Jian Shizhe turned away from the table, his hands still empty of food or drink, and towards Wang Yonghao. He inclined his body slightly, exactly enough for a respectful nod.

    "Fellow cultivator Wang," Jian Shizhe said quietly, "I must apologize, for I have treated you unfairly. I thought you were an honorless dog, but you fought the tribulation - and few things bring more honor to a cultivator. It has been an honor to fight alongside you."

    "It's… alright?" Wang Yonghao chuckled awkwardly, looking at her for guidance. She shrugged. She told him this might happen - it's his own fault he didn't believe.

    "It is not," Jian Shizhe said, shaking his head. "But I no longer have any quarrel with you, and I wanted this known. And now - my uncle, Jian Wei, asks to meet you. I have come to show you the way to his office."

    "Only Yonghao?" Qian Shanyi raised an eyebrow before Wang Yonghao could respond.

    "Both of you," - Jian Wei glanced at her - "one after the other."

    "Hm. In that case, I will go first," she said, stepping in front of Wang Yonghao, and putting a hand over his shoulder with an easy smile. "I planned to meet Elder Ever-Dancing Sunlight on my own, and I must say that my partner can be quite clueless in the things honorable Elder no doubt wants to discuss."

    She saw Jian Wei pause, clearly unused to a disruption of his flow. Wang Yonghao grabbed her by the hand, and pulled her away from the table. "Fellow cultivators, if I may have a word with my… partner?"

    She snorted, and let him lead her aside, towards one of the courtyard walls. "What are you doing?!" he whispered, growing more agitated. "Going to meet an elder - this is what always happens for me!"

    She rolled her eyes. "No, it isn't," she whispered back, "we got invited to the feast - who do you think sent us the letter? A lowly outer disciple? Elder Ever-Dancing Sunlight is the head of the Northern Scarlet Stream sect, and the uncle of Jian Shizhe. He was one of the obvious candidates, and there is no reason to expect malice from him - especially towards me. What do you think he will do, shout at you?"

    "And what if he just kills you on the spot?"

    "Kill me?" She boggled her eyes at him, and looked around. Thankfully nobody was close enough to overhear them. "Are you insane? No wonder you have problems so often, if you just casually suggest such a thing. No building foundation cultivator - let alone an elder - would dare violate the fourth edict."

    He just stared at her. "What the hell is the fourth edict?"

    "We don't have time for a history lesson," she said, brushing his hand aside, "I'll see what he wants, then tell you if it's safe. Keep watch over the stew, will you? And if you need any help, ask the local chef."

    The local disciples should have it well in hand, really, and most of what remained was the waiting while individual ingredients cooked - but she wanted to give him something to do instead of worrying over nothing. When she returned to Jian Shizhe, he looked back at Wang Yonghao staying behind, clearly suspecting something, but finally nodded, and set off through the twisted corridors of the sect compound together with Qian Shanyi and Rui Bao.

    As they walked, she lowered her voice, glancing down at Jian Shizhe's missing foot.

    "The healers could not save your leg?"

    Rui Bao froze as soon as she opened her mouth, and sent her a warning glare. Rage flashed in Jian Shizhe's eyes, but then he looked back up at her, and it slowly faded. He breathed out slowly, through clenched teeth.

    "No."

    Cultivation and pills could do a lot, and reattaching a lost limb was not out of the question - but if it was damaged enough, then only the rarest masters could help, and even those only if they arrived quickly enough.

    She nodded simply, even as Rui Bao gesticulated furiously at her with his eyebrows, telling her to shut up. "I am sorry that happened," she said, winking at Rui Bao when Jian Shizhe looked away. Someone had to, and all the others around Jian Shizhe were clearly cowards.

    That it let her tweak Rui Bao's nose was simply a bonus.

    "There is nothing to apologize over," Jian Shizhe said, not looking at her. "It is the duty of every cultivator to stand against the Heavens. A foot is a measly price to pay to rip the lives of fellow cultivators out of their jaws."

    She could tell he said it for his own sake as much as hers.

    "Besides, I will have a prosthesis soon enough," he said, "what kind of trash would I be if I put down my sword over a mere loss of a limb?"

    She raised an eyebrow. "You sound like you speak from experience."

    "You will see it soon enough," Jian Shizhe grit his teeth. "We are almost at my uncle's office."
     
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    • Chapter 49: Speak Of Dao, Built On Hundred Slaughters
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    • Jian Wei's office was surprisingly plain for his status. In the back of the room there was a single clean desk below a window of frosted glass, looking out into the sect courtyard where the celebration was taking place, letting in the only light in the room from the lanterns outside. Four landscape paintings adorned the plain walls, and some futons surrounded a small table with a steaming tea set, the smell of fruit filling the room. There were two doors - one they walked through, and one at the side - but not even a single shelf filled with documents or idle trinkets, accumulated over a long life, of the sort she was used to seeing among the elders of her sect.

    Rui Bao chose to stay outside. When Qian Shanyi and Jian Shizhe entered, Jian Wei was standing next to the open window, his hands folded behind his back, wearing the dark blue and purple robes of the Northern Scarlet Stream sect. His long black hair, grown to his waist, was left to flow freely behind his back.

    Spiritual energy in the air flowed gently into his body, vanishing beneath the skin. Building foundation, befitting of an Elder. He surely had heard them approach long before they entered.

    The flow of the spiritual energy felt odd to her, and it took her a moment to place it. It was the asymmetry, more flowing in from the right than the left - and as she focused on it more, she realized with a start that the Elder's left arm, and a good chunk of his left side must have been nothing more than a prosthetic, inert material lacking any true meridians - though excellently made. In the dim light, she couldn't tell the difference between whatever material covered his false fingers and human skin.

    Jian Shizhe stopped in the middle of the room, bowing to Jian Wei - almost casually, barely enough to be considered respectful. She stood a few steps behind, bowing as well, though deeper.

    "I have done as you said, uncle," Jian Shizhe said, "this here is fellow daoist Qian Shanyi. She is the one who transcended a tribulation just this morning."

    Jian Wei turned back from the window, nodding to the two of them.

    "Thank you, Shizhe," Jian Wei said quietly, gliding out from behind the table. "You may stay in one of the nearby rooms. I'll call for you when we are done."

    Jian Shizhe nodded silently, and left the room at once. Qian Shanyi kept her face neutral, hands clasped politely in front of her.

    Interesting.

    She read about Jian Wei in the cultivator almanac, but the dry text left a lot of the nuances out, and she forgot much of it in the interim. She knew Jian Shizhe was his disciple, of course - a cousin, in fact - but that he let himself be addressed simply as "uncle" spoke volumes. Was he truly the one who sent the invitation? It seemed more and more likely.

    She supposed she could have researched the man more before coming here - but after being perforated by a goat, figuring out the details of sect relationships was the furthest thing from her mind, and she trusted herself to improvise if necessary.

    Jian Wei gestured to the futons, and she quietly kneeled down next to the small table. He took the seat opposite her. "I apologize for tearing you away from the well-deserved celebrations, but I won't take up too much of your time."

    She reached forwards to pour tea for them both, but Jian Wei raised a hand to stop her, and did it himself.

    Very interesting.

    By etiquette, the younger - or less cultivated, as the case may be - person was supposed to do that.

    She took a second to think it over, and then raised her eyebrows in surprise. She was feeling a little tipsy from the spirit wine, but she worked in worse circumstances before. "I am afraid you have me at a disadvantage, Elder. The invitation to this feast, this personal talk - to what do I owe the honor?"

    "I try to meet every notable loose cultivator who passes through my town," he said, picking up his tea cup, "to speak to them about their Dao and their cultivation. It helps to avoid…accidents, and it's that much easier to find the ways to benefit each other."

    So it was him.

    Gears spun lazily through her mind. She felt no threat, but nobody went through this sort of effort for nothing - and it was only polite to try to disentangle the schemes of a fellow cultivator.

    What did she know about this man?

    Her mouth opened on its own, spinning nonsense to give her time to think. "This humble daoist would not dare to call herself notable."

    "I have heard about your donation. Few loose cultivators would part with such wealth."

    "Wealth acquired through gambling on luck vanishes as easily as it comes, does it not?"

    "And yet, you have still transcended one of the rarest forms of the heavenly tribulation, and survived," Jian Wei said, raising his eyebrows at her. "It cannot be done with merely luck. False modesty does you no favors."

    She quirked an eyebrow in return, shooting a quick glance around the practically bare walls of the office. Talk about false modesty. Reaching forwards, she picked up her tea cup, cradling it in her fingers.

    Back when she read the cultivator almanac a week and a half ago, she frankly did not focus on the sect elders, considering them of tertiary importance to cultivators of her realm. Jian Wei was… around seventy years old, she thought, though if he was an ordinary person he would have passed for thirty. One of the three elders of the Northern Scarlet Stream sect, which had been around for about half that time, though under a different name. Did he establish it himself? She couldn't recall.

    "Only because of the selfless help my fellow cultivators offered me, and even then only just." She continued honestly, pulling the edge of her robe aside just enough to let her bandages show.

    "Not even Gu Lingtian rebelled against the Heavens alone," he said, "as for your injuries - are they permanent?"

    There was no way he didn't know this, if he paid for the treatment. Healer's confidentiality only went so far. "The healer said I should make a full recovery."

    To understand an Elder, one must look at their sect. From what she could recall of the cultivator almanac, many of the cultivators who joined the Northern Scarlet Stream sect did so closer to the recent years, which would have meant that the sect was actively expanding. Oh how she wished she could have made a graph to be sure - she even had an entire day to muck around with it after the tribulation ended, if only she had thought to pay for a copy of the cultivator almanac and brought it with her into the inner world. Something to remember for the future.

    Jian Wei shrugged, taking a sip of his tea. "In that case, my point stands," he said, letting the statement hang - as if inviting her to contradict him. He showed little on his face, but if he truly wanted to know how she saw the world, then perhaps he enjoyed conversation for its own sake. She took the opportunity to stall more, by taking a long sip of her tea to mirror the Elder. It tasted sweet, of berries and peaches.

    Growing sect, growing ambitions. Didn't Wu Lanhua mention something about their main branch sourcing lenses from this town? So likely not only growing, but also getting involved in some new, innovative projects. Add the fact of their invitation on top - and it painted the picture of a cunning, resourceful individual, most likely angling to recruit a pair of talented loose cultivators who have just transcended a tribulation.

    Speculation, of course, but one that was relatively easy to confirm.

    "Surely even a kitten could ascend into Heavens through every tribulation, if carried in the hands of a mighty cultivator?" She said lazily, taking another sip.

    "Few cultivators would dare take on two tribulations at once, merely to help a kitten."

    She shrugged. "Cultivation is ever a path of extremes. Who is to say what is common and what is rare?"

    "Careless words, fellow cultivator Qian," Jian Wei said, smiling slightly, "there are those from the ministry of statistics at this very feast."

    That smile. Did he realize what she was doing? Well, it mattered not - if he was who she thought she was, he should take it in good nature.

    "Yet not in this room, are they not?" She shrugged again. "How could we say what my fellows in tribulation would and wouldn't do? Surely more credit should go to fellow cultivator Jian - he lost his foot in the fight, after all."

    Jian Wei tapped his cheek in contemplation. For all that she was talking about his cousin coming to harm, he seemed entirely copacetic. "He was the first to come to your aid, from what I heard. My disciple is not so reckless as to put his life in danger on a mere whim - that means you must have impressed him, at the very least."

    Qian Shanyi shook her head slightly. Jian Shizhe, not reckless? He all but challenged Wang Yonghao to a duel, not knowing what he was capable of in the slightest. But she did not want to contradict the Elder directly. "Perhaps. Yet one cannot paint with but one brush, could they?"

    "Out of the five of you, one is my disciple, and the other works in my town," Jian Wei said, picking up on her implication. He was frowning slightly - perhaps her stalling started to grate on his nerves, and it was time to change tracks. "The third is a nomad, who I suspect will have little to say to me. I intended to speak to this Wang Yonghao as well - yet you came here first."

    She inclined her head, staying quiet and letting the Elder drive the conversation. This all but confirmed her guess - a nomad would never join a sect, of course, and the way Jian Wei pushed the conversation back towards her skills implied that was his true interest. That explained the invitation - and while she had no intention of accepting, she could still find a use for the relationship. But to do that, she needed to have a better grasp on the Elder's personality.

    "But there is another way to view this, fellow cultivator Qian," Jian Wei continued, "that the Heavens chose to strike you down is notable in itself. Tell me, why did that happen?"

    She had little to go on in regards to Jian Wei, but his image was reflected in Jian Shizhe, warped though it may be. The latter was disrespectful - though perhaps not openly - and that meant a conflict in their beliefs. But what kind?

    Jian Shizhe mentioned putting down his sword, and the sect was founded some thirty five years ago - or just about around the time of the last imperial succession. Perhaps the answer was staring her in the face all along.

    "To cultivate is to rebel against the heavens," she began neutrally. If she was right, she had a good angle to take. "How could there not be great animosity between me and the bastards up top?"

    Jian Wei inclined his head in agreement. "But this animosity takes different forms for all of us, and these days, most cultivators live their entire lives in peace. To bring down a tribulation - that must be a great deal of hatred indeed. What was its cause?"

    She shifted around on her pillow, folding her hands on her lap. "I am afraid I cannot say," she said, keeping her neutral tone.

    "You do not know?"

    "I do. But I cannot say." She looked off to the side. "Elder, you have said that you seek to learn the beliefs of other cultivators, and that is exactly why I cannot say. Is information not ten times more valuable and a hundred times deadlier than any weapon? This is especially so for someone who knows how to use it. If I were to simply speak it aloud, would that not be as if I willingly handed you my sword?"

    Jian Wei leaned back, considering her silently. She picked up her cup again and took a sip of her tea, keeping her eyes down. It really was very good.

    "An interesting position to take," Jian Wei said. A fair few of the elders of her sect would have been furious if she said something like that, but he was still calm. Another piece of the puzzle. "Especially when talking to one of the pillars of this town. It is my interest - and my duty - to make sure no cultivator brings in a weapon beyond our power."

    She shrugged slightly. It was a careful dance to not slip into outright disrespect, but she was confident she could manage it. "I only have the one sword, and the one position. To change it would break my spirit."

    "And if I compelled you to speak?" Jian Wei said, danger implied, yet not stated.

    She put her empty cup down on the table, and shrugged, spreading both hands to her sides, "Like I have said, to cultivate is to rebel against the Heavens."

    She was rewarded with a slight twinkle in Jian Wei's eyes. "You speak of philosophy," he said, slowly. "A rare affectation, after the reformation, especially among the refinement stage cultivators."

    "Most cultivators are blinder than newborn kittens," she said dismissively, "That they do not understand the meaning of their own actions is on their shoulders. They agree with me in spirit, and that is enough."

    "Do they now," Jian Wei said, refilling both of their cups. There was interest in his eyes now. "Very well, then let us speak of philosophy. Back when I was at the beginning of the refinement stage, my Elders used to ask - we are cultivators, yet what do we cultivate? What would you say to that?"

    A test, not a real question - for there was no one true answer. This wasn't her first time hearing it - though her elders back in the Luminous Lotus Pavilion never deigned to ask her.

    "The obvious, and wrong, answer would be that we cultivate strength," she said, examining the steam coming off her tea. There was a very slight swirl of spiritual energy in the kettle - talisman to keep the water hot, no doubt. "After all, every stage of cultivation revolves around strengthening our bodies and souls, and the more we cultivate, the stronger we get."

    "Yet you say this answer is wrong?" Jian Wei asked her with fake curiosity. "Many cultivators would disagree with you. Do we not cultivate in order to resist the demon beasts? Do we not forge flying swords in order to slice apart the Heavens? Is it not by strength that Gu Lingtian brought them low?"

    She nodded in acknowledgement. She was sure Jian Shizhe, for one, would say that, if her measure of the man was correct.

    There were as many answers to that question as there were suns in the skies. Some would say they cultivated to reach immortality, others to find their Dao, yet others that they cultivated truth. But none of those were her answer.

    "No," she said, gesturing with her cup. "We cultivate freedom."

    "Freedom?"

    "To cultivate is to rebel against the Heavens," she said, "the question is not what we do to cultivate - but why we cultivate. It is not enough to say that the Heavens prohibits the practice - one must also answer why every cultivator chooses to spit in their face and reach higher than their station. They do so for their freedom, and that of their fellow people, wherever they know it or not. And once this is understood, why should they stand an imposition from any other source?"

    "You speak of nomadism, and yet say other cultivators agree with you in spirit?"

    "This is not about nomadism." She shook her head. "It is about agency. Did every emperor not rebel against the previous one? The slaughter of the kitsune lords, the year of three emperors, the fall of the cultivator clans - too many are the events to count. Cultivators rebel against the Heavens, for the Heavens tie down their hands, and the empire grows stronger in the process. This is the meaning behind all cultivation."

    Jian Wei tapped a finger on his cheek. His gaze seemed distant, almost wistful. "It's consistent enough, I suppose. I haven't heard talk like that in… oh, thirty odd years," he said. "It is rare, in our peaceful times."

    "Not all rebellion begins with a sword." She inclined her head. "I am a daughter of merchants - there is great power in coin."

    "Is that so?" he said, that same glitter coming back to his eyes. "You have said information is as valuable as a weapon - but even the sharpest sword has a price."

    She smiled. "That it does."

    "And what is your price?"

    "Information for a favor," she said lightly, "I have a business proposition, one that I hope would benefit us both. But let us speak of it after I recover fully." She gestured to her torso for emphasis. "All I ask is to be heard out, on fair terms."

    Jian Wei raised his eyebrows. Understandable - for a loose cultivator to offer something of that nature to a sect elder must be rare indeed.

    She knew why he was asking, of course. If he really intended to recruit them, he needed to know what caused the tribulation, in case it brought one down on top of his whole sect. And most importantly, he needed to know who she was.

    Why would a tribulation befell a cultivator who wore a sign of no sect? Why would this cultivator donate so many materials they rightfully earned? Out of foolishness, or because to them such wealth was a pittance, for they were merely traveling incognito?

    He needed to know to make his own offer - and that meant he could not deny her this small favor.

    She had no actual wealth - in fact, all the liquid money she had amounted to five spirit stones and change, all carried on her person - but so what? A perception of wealth was often as good as the real thing. It all hinged on painting a picture, one brush stroke after another.

    "Very well," he said, "Tomorrow, I will be leaving Glaze Ridge for five days to attend to sect business. You will receive a letter from me - present it at the gates of our sect after I return, whenever you are ready, and you would be given an hour of my time. And now, for your part of the bargain?"

    "I have tricked the Heavens into making a Heavenly vow with me," Qian Shanyi admitted easily, "and then I broke it. It was… a unique set of circumstances. I do not anticipate it repeating again."

    She could see he didn't believe her. "It sounds like something out of a play," he said slowly.

    "I swear on my honor, and I have a witness of me making the vow," she said, "they could confirm my words, if necessary."

    "No… No, I do not think it is," he said, and she saw him finally make a decision. "How could I question the honor of a cultivator who transcended the tribulation? In fact… My sect is always looking for talented cultivators. Perhaps we could speak of that, after your business proposition."

    She shook her head. Now that she had set up the groundwork, denying the request was simple. "I am afraid I have prior commitments," she said, "and as for what kind, this piece of information is, as of right now, not for sale."

    Suspicion in Jian Wei's eyes grew another notch - she was sure that most loose cultivators in her apparent circumstances would have jumped at the chance. Another brushstroke. "And your partner?"

    "You may make the offer," she inclined her head, "I do not anticipate him accepting, but if he will, then I suppose I will as well. I will tell him your offer in full honesty, if that is alright?"

    Jian Wei nodded, and rose, gesturing for her to do so as well. She bowed, and left through the doors.
    Qian Shanyi's pleasant talk with Jian Wei took longer than she expected - by the time she returned, the ox stew was already finished, immortal chef of the Northern Scarlet Stream sect helping assemble the dish and putting finishing touches on it. He was a younger man, and quite enjoyable to work with.

    She only promised to help cook the first batch, in order to show him how it was done - after all, she was here to celebrate, not to work - and so she grabbed a plate, and was about to head over to where Wang Yonghao was sitting, when she realized he was missing entirely.

    After asking the chef, it turned out that he was hiding away in a food cellar. She hummed a little tune as she headed down into it, her steps echoing on the bare stone floor before being muffled by sacks of rice and grain, and walls full of bottles and clay pots. She found him hidden among two shelves of wine, so full of anxiety he was just about ready to crawl up the walls. Even when he saw her approach, only a small part of the tension had left his body.

    She brought a second plate with her, and offered it to him, sitting down next to one of the walls to enjoy her stew.

    "Just as I suspected, the Elder wants us to join the sect," she said, getting straight to the point.

    "What?" Wang Yonghao scowled. "Absolutely not!"

    "Yeah, about what I expected," she nodded, "I told him as much. He still wants to talk to you. For what it's worth, he seemed incredibly reasonable to me - if you can manage to avoid insulting him to his face, there should be no danger."

    She looked around the storeroom. It was pretty dark, only lit by a lamp she brought with her. Wang Yonghao had a lamp of his own, but he powered it down. "What were you doing in here, anyways?"

    He sighed, covering his face with his hands. "When you left, those other cultivators have all but dragged me into some kind of tournament. I had to flee and hide in here."

    She tapped her spoon against her teeth. "Hm. Yes, I should have expected that. Sorry for leaving you alone."

    "It's fine." He waved her off, and breathed out deeply, picking up his bowl of stew, and his face lit up with pleasure. She gave him a quiet minute to contemplate things, and sure enough, he started talking again. "At least nobody tried to fight me…yet…"

    She wagged a finger at him. "Putting yourself down again? What did we talk about, Yonghao?"

    He gave her a guilty look. "Sorry," he said, closing his eyes for a moment to collect himself. "Okay, honestly, this wasn't too bad. This stew is delicious. The music was nice. Hui Yin even was starting to put some kind of impromptu theater together, and I was looking forward to it, before that damned tournament -"

    "You like theater?" she interrupted him, before he could sink deeper into the funk. "You even said you wanted to visit the one in Golden Rabbit Bay before, I think?"

    "I guess. Doesn't everyone?"

    "No, I wouldn't say so," she said, tapping her cheek. "Perhaps we could swing through there again, once we have a more stable handle on things."

    She could also check on her family. Good idea all around - she just needed a way to avoid her sect.

    "Maybe you weren't wrong when you said I should come."

    "I didn't say that." She raised an eyebrow at him. "I said it was fine for you to stay in the tavern. You are the one who decided to come."

    He sighed again. "I guess that is true. Sorry, I am doing my thing again."

    "Just keep working on it. So, will you go and talk to the Elder?"

    He grimaced at her. "He really was fine with you just rejecting his offer?"

    She shrugged. "I said I had a business offer for him, which I do. I suppose that it mollified things a bit. Just keep things vague and you should be fine."

    "Then I guess I will go, yeah. And what will you do in the meantime?"

    "Me?" she said. "Going to find someone to warm my bed tonight, is what I will do."

    Wang Yonghao scowled at her, predictably. "Why do you always have to turn everything into a joke?"

    "Who is joking?" She raised her eyebrows. At least the annoyance seemed to drown out his anxiety. "Sex is best after a victory, and this was a damn close - and glorious - victory, even by my standards. It even got us a potential business partner. I worked very hard to make it happen and almost died - and so I intend to relax equally explosively."

    "You have holes through your lungs!"

    "I will be very careful, I assure you. They do not bleed anymore, which is all that matters."

    "And how do you intend to find someone? There's no brothel in this town."

    "Brothel?" She snorted. "Why would I need a brothel?"

    "To… hire a prostitute?" Wang Yonghao said slowly, beginning to blush. It seems that what he was saying had finally caught up with him. "To do, you know, the deed? It's not like you could marry an honorable cultivator on the spot…"

    "Please, Yonghao." She laughed. "Mariage? Show me ten honorable cultivators who swear by marriage and I will show you seven hypocrites. Or would you like to bet I couldn't bed even one before the sun rises?"

    "I am definitely not going to gamble with you."

    "Ah, so he can learn." She smirked, running a hair through her long hair. "Good. You know, there is a saying that in every bet there is one fool and one trickster?"

    "What, you've already slept with someone?"

    "Yonghao!" She gasped in mock shock, clasping a hand over her mouth. "How could you say something like that?!"

    He just squinted at her in suspicion, not reacting.

    Bah, no fun.

    She leaned forwards, whispering conspiratorially. "I couldn't possibly fuck someone this quickly - you need to savour these things. It's best to go for hours."

    He groaned, and got up, covering his face in his hands, his stew forgotten. With how slowly he was eating, he only managed to finish about half.

    "We are not talking about this!" he said, heading for the doors. "I am going to go talk to that Elder and then I am going back to the tavern!"

    "You should find someone as well!" She called after him. "You've just transcended the tribulation - man or woman, all the local cultivators should be all over you!"

    He groaned again, louder this time, and left the room, her cackling echoing after him.
    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 three 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!​
     
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    • Chapter 50: Palm The Trees Before Their Eyes
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    • Author Note: Want to read ahead? You can find some patreon-exclusive posts, as well as three more chapters, over on my patreon, for a low price of 3$.
    I also have a discord server, where I post memes I make about FSE, and occasionally discuss some plans and worldbuilding details.​
    When Qian Shanyi returned to the tavern, hair unkept and yawning from sleep cut short, it was already noon. The sun rays burst through the rainy clouds, bringing spots of color down on the quiet town. The scant rain had kept most people indoors, and the town seemed quiet, almost as if it was just as tired as she was after this long but very enjoyable night.

    Her judgment for finding a partner for a night was still spot on: Rui Bao turned out to be a decent lay, though the inner disciple he dragged in with them - some girl of barely twenty, whose name she didn't care to ask - was far too timid for her tastes. She supposed she shouldn't complain much - she couldn't truly go wild, not with her injuries. Her lungs bled a bit still, though easily manageable.

    When she unlocked their room with her key and stepped inside, she found Wang Yonghao asleep in the bed, dug in like a rabbit into a burrow, with only the head sticking out. She nudged the edge of the blob with her foot, and he woke up with a start, limbs scrambling beneath the covers.

    She snorted. "Bad dreams?"

    His eyes finally focused on her, and he breathed out, slumping back into bed and pulling the blanket up to his chin. "Not today. You just startled me."

    She looked around the room curiously. "I take it the honorable fairy had left already?"

    He blinked at her, and then groaned, covering his head with the blanket entirely.

    "What?" She laughed. "Shouldn't I be concerned about the happiness of my…partner?"

    Wang Yonghao's voice came out muffled by the silks and down. "Why did I ever wake up?"

    "No time to sleep, Yonghao." She snorted, poking the blanket with her foot again. "Open up the entrance - I want to change my bandages and take a bath, and the one next to our room is too small to relax properly."

    "Are you going to be this annoyingly cheerful every morning?"

    "Why shouldn't I be cheerful?" she asked, resting her foot on the edge of the bed, leaning forwards and pitching her voice lower, "I've had the most entertaining night. Quite…acrobatic, too."

    Wang Yonghao pulled the blanket down to just below his eyes, glaring at her. "I still can't believe how casually you talk about luring some man into your bed."

    She raised an eyebrow, her grin spreading a touch wider. "Who said it was a man?"

    She saw the tops of his cheeks blush beneath the blanket. "So-" he stuttered, "you, ah, another woman?"

    "Who said it was a woman?"

    "You are messing with me again," he accused her, annoyance straightening out his speech in an instant, as he pulled the blanket down to his neck. "Aren't you even a bit worried about getting pregnant?"

    "Why would I -," she stopped, blinking in confusion, and stood up straight, rubbing her nose in dismay. Talk about ruining the joke. "Yonghao, cultivators don't get pregnant by accident."

    "Why not?" he said, frowning sincerely. He sat up against the head of the bed, keeping himself covered. "I know that much about how things work, don't try to fool me."

    She sighed. Well, at least he woke up. "For once I can't blame your lack of education," she said. "Men in my sect weren't taught this either - though I would have expected you to run into the issue already, with how much you have traveled."

    She lifted her hand, and circulated the Crushing Glance of the Netherworld Eyes, making a crude diagram of light in the air. The technique wasn't terribly precise, but neither was what she was drawing.

    "There's a minor spiritual energy circulation technique, meant for the woman's root dantian," she said, "once you adapt to it, no more pregnancy, until you take a couple weeks to reverse the adaptation."

    It also stopped her monthlies. Seven years of miserable experience before she stepped on the path of cultivation and cleared her root dantian made her more than glad about that particular side effect.

    Wang Yonghao studied the spiritual energy circulation diagram with surprising interest. "Some kind of body transformation technique?"

    She waved her other arm vaguely in the air, shaking her head slightly. "It's too simple for that. It's something about stabilizing life energies, but the scholarship on the topic is so abysmal you would think that the reformation never happened. Most healers still can't be bothered with the topic," she said, dismissing the diagram and lowering her hand. "Teaching those new to our sect was one of my unofficial duties. Now get up and open the entrance, I really do need to bathe and brush my magnificent hair."

    She poked him with her foot again for emphasis. He glared at her. "Can you at least turn around and let me dress first?"

    She rolled her eyes at him, but did so, leaning against one of the walls. "And while you do that," she said, "You still haven't answered my question."

    She heard the rustle of silk as he got out of bed, and picked up his robes. "What question?"

    "Whether there was a girl after all," she said casually, checking her nails. There was a bit of blood stuck beneath them - was that still from the tribulation, cooking the ox last night, or from the excitement after? She honestly wasn't sure. "Though I suppose your confusion from before might explain some of your hesitation?"

    "What makes you think it wasn't a man?" he called out, a challenge in his voice. The fool. He was a thousand years too young to play this game.

    "You don't seem like the type, and I have seen how you look at both men and women," she said, pulling out her sword, and using the tip to clean beneath her nails. "But perhaps I am wrong after all? There is something to your tension with Jian Shizhe - an honorable cultivator and a drifter, the hate all mixed up with respect, your 'swords' clashing with the fury of the sun and sending out showers of sparks... You know, I could arrange a date for you two, somewhere hidden - all you have to do is ask?"

    She heard him choke, and cackled loudly.

    "Why do you even care?" he said, once he got himself back under control.

    She turned her head ever so slightly in his direction. "Why shouldn't I care? Well-being of my allies is also my concern, is it not? Besides, I am curious."

    "You know what the problem is," he grumbled behind her, "I'll run into the fiance of some young master, or they'd be a demonic cultivator in disguise, or they'd straight up die in my arms. I can't have a relationship with anyone."

    "Hm. But I didn't ask about any of that. I asked about sex."

    "For everyone except you, those go together."

    She laughed at that, and sheathed her sword. This would go so much easier in the bath. "One person may play a melody, but shatranj takes two. I assure you, I am far from unique."

    She heard steps behind her, and turned around to find Wang Yonghao fully dressed, glaring at her. "Careful," she said, smiling cheerfully at him in return, "keep holding that expression and it might stick."

    He only glared at her harder. Honestly, some people just couldn't appreciate free advice. "Well what was I supposed to do?" he said.

    She raised an eyebrow curiously, leaning against the wall. "I am not saying you were supposed to do anything. I am just curious why you didn't. You've approached me in the Golden Rabbit Bay, have you not? So what changed?"

    He looked away guiltily. "I was drunk. Besides, didn't you shout at me for it? And now you want me to do it to other people?"

    She angled her head, looking down at the idiot that kept avoiding the question. "I did not merely 'shout' at you, and I did it because you beat me up," she said, "your approach itself, while far too blunt, boring, awkward, and overall mildly unpleasant, wasn't the actual issue - and with the status of having transcended the tribulation, I suspect a fair few fairies would have looked past your glaring lack of conversational skills. But once again - what I want is irrelevant, I am merely curious why you didn't in fact do it."

    He stayed silent, crossing his arms, and not meeting her gaze. His lips twitched downwards.

    Hm.

    "Do you imagine I would judge you for it?" she said gently, "Surely you know better than that."

    He sighed. "It's - I don't know how to explain it. It's silly."

    "Many worthwhile things have been called that."

    He paced around a bit. "I don't know. Of course I'd like someone to talk to about life, to share things with - and you know," he said, blushing slightly, "it would be nice if they were a cute fairy. But it's not about sex, it's about, you know, having someone who cares for you, keeps their home warm for you. But I can't have that, can I? So it's silly to think about. Besides, I can already talk to you, so how could I ask for more?"

    "Hm. Would you like a hug?" she said neutrally. Wang Yonghao glanced at her hands, folded as they were right below her bandaged chest, and shuddered. She chuckled. "Fair enough."

    She pushed herself off the wall, and stretched out her arms, humming in thought. "Thank you for sharing - it was quite interesting. But let's take it one step at a time. First we topple the Heavens, and then we'll find you someone to love."
    While she waited for the bath to fill, she changed her bandages, and used a bit of cloth to wipe off dried sweat and blood off her chest. The wounds have been healing decently enough, even though with the bandages off, she could still feel the air whistling through the slowly closing holes. She had to keep them clean in the meantime - and that meant she couldn't submerge herself, but she could still wash her hair and legs without too much difficulty.

    After she cleaned herself, she leaned against the walls of the bath, using a wooden comb Wang Yonghao made to brush her long hair while it was still wet. The man himself was lounging on the grass nearby. "Now that we are away from the hateful gaze of Heaven," she began, "I think it's time we talked strategy."

    "Shouldn't we have waited to talk about, you know, what we talked about upstairs, until we were down here too?" He said, sighting. "Sorry. I forgot we agreed to do this."

    She raised her eyebrows. Upstairs, really? "I am struggling to imagine what advantage the Heavens would derive from knowing a bit more about your love life." she said slowly, "even if they weren't already aware, which seems doubtful."

    "Maybe they could seduce me somehow."

    "All the better for you, in that case?"

    Wang Yonghao closed his eyes, breathing out calmly. She chuckled. "But enough about the past," she said, "let's talk about where we are headed."

    "Well, you already know where I was headed."

    They have discussed it a bit in the previous days - but frankly, neither she nor Yonghao had the energy to focus on the long-term before the tribulation. He said he was heading towards an ancient sect compound up on top of a mountain peak he had visited before, where he saw a lot of stone cuttings of celestials, in the hope that a careful search might turn up something useful.

    He also said he only stopped in Glaze Ridge because there was free food for those who helped Jian Shizhe with his hunts, which she found hilarious.

    She nodded. "I think your idea still makes as much sense as anything else, as a starting point. If we pass through a larger city on the way, it will be even better - the libraries there might tell us a lot. But I am reluctant to abandon this town before we have exhausted all it has to give us."

    She saw his mouth open, and raised a hand to forestall him. "I know what you will say," she said, "it's dangerous to stay in one place for too long. But I still think your judgment of how your luck works is flawed. Its power - whatever source it comes from - is not infinite. You thought I would fall to the tribulation, and yet I still stand."

    He grimaced. "Barely."

    "There is no barely, you either transcend or you do not."

    "Shanyi, you got perforated."

    She shrugged easily. "Victory is all that counts."

    His grimace grew. "And why do you want to stay here?"

    "Consider our situation," she said, listing out factors on her fingers, "We have an excellent reputation, and the ear of the young master of the Northern Scarlet Stream sect. We have the heavenly materials and earthly treasures in storage - ones we could, potentially, sell or use, but only as long as we remain. I have already made small moves in that direction. We know the terrain, and have a safe place to hide your inner world. And of course, I am still injured. If there is any place at all where we could rest, prepare, and build up your inner world, this would be it."

    Wang Yonghao rubbed his face with both hands. "Fine."

    "Really?" she said, raising an eyebrow. "I would have expected you to put up more of a fight."

    "Well," he said, "This could be a test, right? For wherever you are right about my luck? Even if you are wrong, we'd learn something."

    She smiled. That he was starting to think in proactive terms was very good to hear.

    "So how do you want us to prepare?" Wang Yonghao said.

    "It's a question of limitations and forced moves," she said, sweeping her arm across the world fragment. "For example, think back to how we prepared for the tribulation. Even if we decided to spend more than the nine days training, we would have ran out of food by the two weeks mark - forcing us out of here. It is a weakness, one the Heavens can surely take advantage of."

    She pointed at the bunker they used to hide from the rosevines, and started counting out points on her fingers. "First of all, I want a proper house," she said, "one that does not smell of damp earth and mold, and with enough room we could sleep in parallel. Having to schedule sleep is incredibly inconvenient, the more so the more time we have to spend here. Secondly, I want a source of food - a farm - and storage that could last us several months. Third, a proper way of dealing with waste - I am thoroughly fed up with needing to dig a hole any time I have to poop. Fourth, a way of proactively dealing with dead air, if that problem ever reoccurs. Sleep, food, waste, air - with these problems solved, we could stay here indefinitely, if the need presented itself. I think we could get it all done in a week or two, if we try."

    Wang Yonghao sighed, rubbing his face. "You mean, I could get it done."

    She blinked at him in confusion. "Since when are you so addicted to work you hog it all to yourself? Of course we would do it together."

    "No you won't." Wang Yonghao said, getting up off the grass, dusting off his robes. "The healer said you should rest for two weeks, so you are resting."

    She squinted at him. Where did this come from? "Don't be ridiculous. I am not a child to be coddled, just because I had a bit of a scratch."

    "This isn't about-" Wang Yonghao stopped, and shook his head. "Shanyi, you are being stupid. You got perforated, your wounds would reopen if you start lugging tree trunks around. You are resting until you are fully healed."

    "So what, you propose we do nothing at all for two whole weeks?" she asked sardonically. "You really think we can risk waiting that much?"

    "No, I propose you rest, as your healer instructed. Like a sensible person."

    So annoying.

    The worst part was that she had no real counterargument.

    "Fine." She said, rolling her eyes. "This here jade beauty will refrain from lifting even a single one of her long, slender fingers. But in exchange… We are going to do a couple heists."
    Lin Fang saw the smoke when she and Ye Yun were returning from their circle around the town.

    Patrols during the rain season were always the worst, though at least the new cloaks they got this year kept all the water out. The quiet murmur of rain lulled you to sleep, and made it that much harder to see or smell anything beyond what was right in front of your face. But spirits had to be kept track of, and that was their job.

    "Do you see that?" she asked, pointing towards the smoke. It was faint, obscured by one of the tall hills that dotted the landscape more and more as one headed towards the mountains.

    Her partner stopped, squinting in the same direction. "See what?"

    "The smoke."

    He angled his head to the side, grimacing uncertainly. "I suppose. What of it?"

    It was hard to see, especially due to the rain. Ye Yun argued many times that there was little point in patrolling when it rained, because they could walk right on top of a spirit and not even notice it - but she knew he just wanted to stay inside.

    "We should investigate," she said, checking the sword at her hip and the short ax slung over her back. "It might be a problem."

    "Oh come on," he groaned, looking back at Reflection Ridge, the outermost buildings visible here and there between the trees. "It's got to be a good hour away."

    "It's our job."

    "Our job isn't to look into every little thing that could maybe, possibly, be happening somewhere. It's probably just a cultivator practicing flame techniques."

    "And if they start a forest fire?"

    Ye Yun raised an eyebrow at her, and mutely pointed up at the rain clouds. She crossed her arms. "The rain could stop at any moment, and the ground dries quickly. But it could also be a spirit, or a demon beast. One that it is our job to track."

    "What demon beast? We don't have any fire beasts nearby."

    "Azonian shriks can develop fire breathing."

    His forehead creased in an uncertain frown. "First time I am hearing of it, which means it barely ever happens."

    "Rare is not never. It could also be a migrant."

    "You are really stretching this. A migrating spirit, this time of year?"

    "You should read the reports more," she said, pursing her lips in annoyance, "one was delivered three days ago from Lake of Peace. They had an encounter with a powerful mushroom spirit, and their best guess is that it was a migrant from a good four hundred miles away. Lake of Peace is on the other side of this forest - we could easily be getting knock-on migrations."

    He grimaced, still clearly unconvinced. "Okay, so say it's a spirit or demon beast. Then what? By the time we get there, it will be gone already. Come on, our patrol is almost over - let's go eat something warm? You can look for this spirit tomorrow too."

    "There won't be any tracks left tomorrow."

    "Well if it sticks around, we'll see more of it, and if it moves on, it's not our problem either way?"

    "If it moves on, we should warn other offices," she said, glaring at Ye Yun. "If you aren't going, I will go alone."

    He sighed, and turned away, walking towards the farms at the edge of the town. "Don't get eaten!" he called out, giving her a last glance.

    Lazy bum.

    She turned around and sprinted off into the forest, quickly bouncing up into the tree crowns, and keeping her pace even as she swung from tree to tree above the dense undergrowth below, bouncing off the trunks where the branches were too sparse. Her cloak, all dark greens and browns, blended in with the forest, and for once she was thankful for the rain - it should obscure her scent.

    They were supposed to patrol in pairs for a reason.

    Ye Yun was right on the money, and she came out into a clearing about an hour later, crouching down on a branch high off the ground. It had been recently cleared out, still littered with leaves and branches. In the middle was an enormous pyre, a massive pile of wood arranged into a pyramid, flame and smoke rising up into the sky. It was surrounded by a dozen smaller ones - some still going, others already put out.

    There were two cultivators in the clearing, wearing long, black leather cloaks, crouched in front of one of the smaller fires. They were cooking meat, and speaking quietly enough that she could not hear them. One was a man, looking bored, and the other a woman, wearing scarlet robes underneath her cloak.

    Poachers?

    Something about the picture tugged at her mind, but she couldn't quite figure out what. She sniffed the air. No fresh blood, and the meat was from an ox - they must have brought it from the town. If they were poachers, they were careful enough not to leave obvious tracks. But then why start a fire she could see all the way from the town?

    As she observed them, the woman raised her head, scanning the treeline, and spotted Lin Fang, smiling and waving at her. The man looked in the same direction, suddenly growing alert.

    "I told you someone would come if we didn't warn them," the woman said, louder than before - clearly for Lin Fang's benefit - before calling out to her directly. "Would you like some meat, honorable cultivator? We have plenty to spare."

    After a moment of indecision, Lin Fang nodded, and dropped down to the ground. "I apologize for the intrusion, honorable cultivators," she said, "I only wanted to make sure this wasn't a forest fire."

    "It's alright," the man said, "we expected that a spirit hunter might show up, like Shanyi said."

    Lin Fang's eye twitched as she came closer. The woman - Shanyi - snorted, shaking her head.

    "I apologize for my partner, he was raised under a bridge," Shanyi said, and Lin Fang shared a look of understanding with her.

    "Hey!"

    "Perhaps you are right. A bridge would have been far too luxurious for you," Shanyi continued, shaking her head. "Those aren't spirit hunter robes, Yonghao."

    Lin Fang stopped a respectable distance away, and bowed. "I am Lin Fang, office of spiritual conservation," she said.

    "Qian Shanyi, and Wang Yonghao," Qian Shanyi said, bowing as well, and gesturing to her partner. "I hope we haven't made too much trouble?"

    "Not at all," Lin Fang said, and something finally clicked in her mind, and she relaxed. These two had no reason at all to poach. "You are the ones who went through the tribulation yesterday? And then donated half of the materials to the town?"

    She still wasn't sure what to do with her part of the donation.

    "Indeed," Qian Shanyi nodded, gesturing towards the smaller fire. Lin Fang approached it, and Wang Yonghao handed her a small log to use as a seat. She took it, stretching out her legs. With the central pyre burning bright, it was actually quite comfortable. The three of them got to talking, sharing small things about themselves. After her run through the forest, the cooked ox tasted heavenly, true to its nature.

    "I am an immortal chef," Qian Shanyi said, when the question of the clearing came up again. "I wanted to practice cooking with wood fires - see how their shape influences the heat and smoke, how quickly they burn through wood, and so on - but you can't burn a dozen different fires at once in a tavern. So we decided to do it here."

    Must also make it easier to practice secret sect techniques, Lin Fang thought, idly wondering what sort of techniques were practiced by magnates so rich they simply donated several tons of Heavenly Materials and Earthly Treasures on a whim.

    "And this?" she asked instead, pointing to the central fire.

    "We wanted to scare demon beasts away, if any were nearby," Qian Shanyi said. "Two cultivators, the smell of cooking meat… It seemed safer, even if it's a bit of a waste of good wood. I hope we haven't violated some prohibition? We checked the trees for talismans or markings, and I looked at the maps in the library to make sure this forest was open, but perhaps we missed something?"

    Lin Fang shook her head, and the conversation moved on.

    "I still don't understand," Wang Yonghao asked after a while. "You say you patrol the forest, keep track of demon beasts and spirits… Isn't this what spirit hunters do?"

    "Spirit hunters hunt spirits, Yonghao," Qian Shanyi said before Lin Fang could respond. "The office of conservation does the opposite, if anything." She glanced at Lin Fang. "I understand that the difference in philosophy leads to some tensions."

    "I wouldn't say tensions." Lin Fang shook her head. "Our work rarely intersects with each other."

    "Then disagreements, perhaps?"

    Lin Fang inclined her head in agreement. "Sometimes. Our approach to protecting people tends to be different."

    Wang Yonghao raised his eyebrows. "How is not killing a demon beast going to protect anyone?"

    Lin Fang pursed her lips, thinking how to explain it. A common enough attitude, but still misguided.

    Qian Shanyi shook her head. "Indeed," she mused, "when there is something threatening your life, you should simply kill it, shouldn't you, Yonghao?"

    He seemed to pull back after that. There was some history there, though not one Lin Fang had any business prying into.

    "Spirit hunters come from an earlier, more brutal time," she said, throwing a thankful glance at Qian Shanyi for her support, even if she couldn't exactly understand why it was given. "We know more about the world now, and many of the threats that could put whole towns on the brink of extinction have already been dealt with. To simply slaughter - it is misguided."

    "A flower plucked is a field that will not grow," Qian Shanyi said, quoting straight from the books. "A demon beast slaughtered is a dozen beastlings that will never be."

    "Oh," Wang Yonghao blinked, some realization plain on his face. "Is that why so many ancient manuals and techniques can't be made to work now?"

    "It's not really my field," Lin Fang shrugged. She was glad he understood, at least. "But yes, many ingredients have been driven to extinction. Many more simply never get the chance to ripen to their proper age. Out on the frontiers it's different, but here on the interior of the Empire, we have to be careful."

    "I imagine it's more than just the patrols," Qian Shanyi said, scratching her chin. "But also catching poachers when they try to sell the materials?"

    "That as well, yes," Lin Fang nodded, "though it comes up rarely enough - most cultivators never even notice us doing our jobs in the background. Those who want to make money hunting leave for the frontiers, and all we have to deal with are the occasional mistakes."

    Qian Shanyi nodded with great interest, and they spent another half an hour talking about her job, before she thanked the pair, and left for Reflection Ridge, her spirits lifted greatly. It was always good to meet some cultivators who understood the big problem, and had nothing to hide.
    "Excellent work fooling Lin Fang," Qian Shanyi said, clapping Wang Yonghao on the shoulder once they made their way back to the tavern, and descended down into his world fragment to check their haul. After a day's work, they made out with a solid fifty tree trunks, and she never even came close to suspecting they had some kind of spatial storage. This wasn't the frontier: if they wanted to stock up on wood for their projects, they had to cover up their trails.

    And now they had a witness, and a ready-made excuse for any other clearings appearing in the forest.

    A perfect heist.
     
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    • Chapter 51: Count The Beans To Bless Your Ass
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    • Author Note: Want to read ahead? You can find some patreon-exclusive posts, as well as three more chapters, over on my patreon, for a low price of 3$.
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    "What are you doing?"

    Qian Shanyi glanced up at Wang Yonghao, who was bent over her, leering curiously. She was sprawled on the grass, her back to one of the mounds where the chiclotron trench rose above the ground, a book in her lap and a cup of rosewine tea in her hand. At her side, she had a crude scratchpad - a wide plank of wood with a piece of paper pinned to it with several needles, with columns of notes written out in her quick-flowing shorthand. A small writing brush laid on top of a small inkwell, resting securely in a depression in the grass, with the jade slate for the Three Obediences Four Virtues right next to it.

    "What does it look like I am doing?" she said, lowering her eyes and marking down another dozen symbols on her scratchpad. "You told me to relax until I am fully healed, so I am relaxing."

    "You are doing math, I can see it. You aren't relaxing, you are working."

    "And math cannot be relaxing?"

    Wang Yonghao paused, as if thinking it over. "No."

    "Quite prejudiced of you, Yonghao," she said lightly, "Perhaps I should challenge you to a duel over it."

    He sighed. "I have never seen you do math to relax."

    She grinned up at him, tilting her head backwards to look him in the eyes. He looked funny upside down. "You've never seen me fuck either. Perhaps I have simply never felt like it before."

    Wang Yonghao groaned, covering up his face.

    "Fine, fine," she chuckled, "I was thinking about growing food."

    She picked up her scratchpad, before thinking better of it. It would take her longer to explain her shorthand than any benefit it might provide.

    "Ideally, an adult person should eat two to three thousand calories per day," she said instead, "For a cultivator, closer to four or five thousand, even more for body fundamentalists. The hard minimum is somewhere around one or two thousand - any less and you are just burning your own body for energy. So between the two of us, we need to grow between four and ten thousand calories of food per day in order to be remotely sustainable. That's the basis we have to start working from."

    "I knew this was just going to be about math," Yonghao complained, sitting down next to her with a grimace. "So what, you want us to plant rice?"

    "You say it like staving off hunger is an imposition," she said idly, frowning at her notes. Where did she write this down? She flipped to the next sheet of paper.

    Wang Yonghao sighed next to her. "No, no, it's nothing," he grumbled.

    She glanced back at him, and then turned to face him fully. His lips were pursed, as if she kicked his favorite puppy, and then blamed him for it. "It's not 'nothing'," she said, her eyes piercing him. "This affects both our lives - so what about my plan makes you so annoyed?"

    He didn't respond, rubbing his eyes with the backs of his hands. She reached out and flicked him on the forehead. "Tell me what the problem is, Yonghao."

    He moved his hands away and grimaced. "It just… sounds like a lot of work."

    She glanced at where a hut was slowly coming together. The fool insisted on doing it on his own, and had spent the last day expanding the hole leading down to the granite base of his inner world, and pulling out stone blocks to use as a foundation. By now, all that he had to show for it was a single square frame, resting on six stone posts - though she had to admit that that was probably the hardest part.

    Bringing her attention back to him, she snorted. "I am not looking forward to it either. Would you prefer starving?"

    "Maybe?"

    She rolled her eyes. Drama queen. "No you wouldn't, you are just tired. Tired from stubbornly deciding to do this work alone, mind. And it's not like we have to start planting right away - I just want us to have a plan for the future."

    He laid there for a moment, before his face relaxed. "Okay, fine. I am sorry I was dismissive."

    She nodded. "That's better. Now, do you have a better idea?"

    "Why do we have to plant anything?" he said, lifting himself up on one elbow. "Can't we just buy a whole bunch of rice and store it here? I could build us a larder, I think. It'd be way easier."

    She nodded. This was a valid point, though one she had already thought of. "It's all because of dependencies," she said, "currently, we depend on outside sources of food to not starve. If we stored a lot of food at once, our dependence on the outside would go down - but only until we ran out again. Heavens would, of course, know how much food we have, because they'd see us bring it in - and if they forced us into a situation where we had no external food sources for months, we'd be fucked. Too risky for my tastes."

    "Couldn't they just as easily… Sneak some kind of parasite into our world fragment that could eat this farm of yours?"

    She nodded again. "They could, yes - which is why we will still need the larder. But it's a question of sequential failures. With a larder, Heavens only need to put enough pressure on us to exhaust it - but if we also have a farm, they need to disable the farm, and put enough pressure on us to get through our stores, and make sure we couldn't re-plant the farm before we run out, or get back to civilisation. It makes us a lot more robust."

    "Fair enough."

    She finally found the sheet she was looking for, and pinned it to the top of the stack with a pair of needles, showing it to Wang Yonghao. It was a simple diagram with three nodes. "I see three broad strategies for how we could produce food," she continued, "first would be to plant berry bushes or fruit trees - something that would produce fruit all year round, since your inner world doesn't have winter. The problem is that they take a long time to grow - years, potentially - and even with the time moving faster here, I would prefer not to wait. But maybe keep your eyes out for small apple trees that could fit through the entrance - we might be able to dig them up and replant here wholesale."

    He gave her a baffled look. "What, you really think we'd just run into an unclaimed, healthy apple tree?"

    "I think that with your luck this is entirely possible, yes."

    He closed his eyes and sighed. "I hate that you are right."

    "I always am," she said casually, "But enough about the trees. The second option is animals - chickens or rabbits, for example - that we could raise for meat, but this runs into our as of yet unsolved rosevine problem. As long as we are around and awake, keeping them safe shouldn't be too big of a deal - but we cannot do so if we are on the outside. We would need to build some kind of safehouse, one that could be safely left locked up for weeks at a time - and that is an engineering challenge in its own right. I think it would be too difficult to start with - which brings us to grains and vegetables."

    Yonghao told her that he tried to freeze the rosevines out by radically dropping the temperature in the world fragment and leaving it alone for a day, but it didn't seem to kill them. His other idea was to burn them out - but he didn't try it, since he didn't want to burn himself. She had concerns that it could also break whatever property of the world fragment allowed the dead air to diffuse - until they knew exactly what caused it, any large-scale modifications seemed too dangerous to attempt.

    Wang Yonghao watched her explanation with interest, and nodded. "So, rice?"

    She shook her head. "No, rice would be a very bad choice. It takes too much work to plant and harvest." She gave him a meaningful look. "Do you want to spend your days bent over a rice paddy?"

    "No."

    "Neither do I. This means that rice is right out. No, here is what I was thinking."

    She put her scratchpad down, and picked up her jade slate, handing it over to him. It was already opened to a page with a picture. He took it from her hands, looking at it curiously.

    "Beans?" he asked eloquently.

    "Yes, beans," she said, flipping to a different sheet of her notes. "Ten thousand calories per day equates to three kilos of dried beans, or about a ton of beans per year. Conveniently enough, a square meter of planted beans produces about a kilo, which means we need about a thousand square meters of plants per annum."

    Three Obediences Four Virtues had figures on the caloric density of beans, but not on how much space they needed to grow. This is where her other book helped - after returning from the forest, they went straight to the postal office, and checked out some common books from the library about all sorts of farming topics. An immortal chef wanting to learn how plants are grown shouldn't be too suspicious.

    Wang Yonghao raised his eyes from the manual. For all his hatred of math, she saw him easily do the numbers in his head. "That's more than a third of the world fragment," he winced, "we'd never be done planting."

    "On paper, if this was a regular farm, yes," she nodded, "but it isn't. For one, your inner world doesn't have winter - this means we should be able to get several harvests done every year. Depending on the variety, beans take from sixty to a hundred and twenty days to grow to harvest - which means we could do three to six harvests per year. For another, we would be the first farm to raise beans in an environment with this much spiritual energy - nobody else would be insane enough to waste it on beans. I wouldn't be surprised if that doubled the productivity at the very least. We might be able to get away with just a hundred or so square meters, which should be very manageable."

    She shrugged, closing the book and getting up off the grass to stretch her back. "Of course, that's just a theory," she said, "I've never planted anything in my life, so I am sure I am missing something. For all that my sect specialized in alchemical plants, tending to the greenhouses was done by outer disciples, not cultivators."

    "Now come on," she said, heading towards the center of the world fragment. "I am bored with math, and you are tired from building a house. Let's go steal something."
    Two figures glided silently through the night, black cloaks of leather all but invisible against the night sky. They leaped over the fence, grabbed the goods, and vanished, leaving behind not even a single whisper.

    Or at least, that was the plan.

    "You shouldn't have come," Wang Yonghao grumbled quietly, disturbing the ambiance of the dark forest as they circled around Glaze Ridge, beyond even the outermost farms, slowly creeping up on the facility built a good distance away from the town, lower down the hill. They were walking at a leisurely pace, and the dim moonlight that pierced the tree crowns was more than enough to light their way.

    "Please," Qian Shanyi snorted. They were still several kilometers away, and speaking barely above a whisper, voices sure to be swallowed completely by the forest. "Without me, how will you know what to grab?"

    "You don't know either!" Wang Yonghao said, so scandalized that he was barely managing to keep himself quiet. "You said you only read about this ages ago!"

    "I make better guesses."

    "Guess what your healer would say about you running around the forest at night?"

    "That this is just a restful walk through the woods. It's good for my health."

    "It's good for your ego."

    "Are the body and soul not two halves of a whole? What is good for one is good for the other."

    He sighed in exasperation. "You know I am right."

    "I most certainly do not." She smirked, and stepped in front of Wang Yonghao, walking backwards so she could stare him in the face. The forest floor was flat and clean, with few roots, and she had memorized the next fifty meters of their path. "Besides, what will you do about the workers?"

    He glared at her, and her smirk only grew. "We don't even know if there will be any!"

    She rolled her eyes at him. And this man called her stubborn? "Please."

    "Fine," he said, sighing. "Nothing. I'd go back and we'd try it tomorrow."

    She wagged a finger at him. "You know we can't give the Heavens time to prepare," she said, "Tomorrow something will happen, and there will be more defenses. We do it in one sweep."

    "All the more reason for us to have waited until you were healthy."

    "No reason at all," she slashed her hand through the air, and turned around so that she could see where they were going. "The plan does not rely on my fitness."

    They walked in silence for a while, the midnight forest silent around them but for the slight movement of the trees in the wind. Even the earliest rising birds weren't due to wake up for another couple hours.

    Navigating through an unfamiliar forest was difficult, but not too much. Glaze Ridge was built on a hill, above even the level of the forest around it, and they could see the lights of the town shining through the tree crowns, as well as the moonlight reflected off the glass in the valley to their right. Somewhere to their left, beyond their range of vision, was a road: even if their direction wavered, they couldn't deviate too far.

    Soon enough, they saw lantern light shine through the forest ahead of them, and tasted the foul smell wafting from their target, and slowly came to a stop. "This should be close enough," she said quietly, closing her spiritual pores as she looked around, and pointed towards one of the pines. "Now help me up this tree."

    The branches were quite high up off the ground. A bit over a day had passed since their tribulation, though for the two of them, it was closer to three, and her lungs and ribs were starting to heal quite well… but not well enough to start leaping around like a mountain goat.

    "Didn't you say the plan doesn't rely on your fitness?"

    "Still doesn't," she grinned at her own blatant contradiction, daring him to argue more. "It relies on you helping me climb this tree."

    Wang Yonghao sighed. He would have flown up, but they were trying to stay hidden, and his technique created a pair of clouds of fiery fireflies as bright as a campfire. Instead, he put his back to the tree and laced his fingers together. She stepped onto his hands, and he lifted her up to the lowest branch, leaping up soon after.

    Climbing without straining her ribs was difficult, but manageable: she simply had to imagine the tree as a staircase, and rely more on her legs and her sense of balance than on pulling herself up by her hands. In a couple minutes, they ascended to the top of the tree, and stared at their target out over the forest.

    There were a dozen pools dug out of the earth, roughly circular and arranged in two rows, each a good thirty meters in diameter, and paved in stone, with high edges. Half of the pools were full, liquid glistening in the moonlight, and the other was empty, revealing the greasy stone walls. Channels ran between them, connecting them to each other, and terminating in a pair of buildings on each end of the facility.

    In the center of each of the pools was a small circular "island", with a thick "walkway" arch connecting the island to the edge. The walkway had a channel running over the top of it, filled with water even in the empty pools, heading towards a much smaller pool off to the side, with large, conical piles of something black rising out of the water.

    The whole structure was surrounded by clean pathways, lined with lanterns on poles. A fence, a good five meters tall, encircled the whole facility, with trees cleared out all around it.

    "Those must be the hives," she said, pointing to the smaller pools as she balanced on top of a branch, hugging the tree trunk. They both wore their dark leather cloaks to better blend in with the night. "Queens should be inside them."

    "Are you sure you want to do it?" He sighed. "We could still turn around."

    She raised an eyebrow at him. They've already discussed this before setting off. "Yonghao, we need a permanent solution to the waste problem. I don't want to keep having to dig a new hole any time I need to take a shit."

    And if we are going to start a farm, we'd need a way to compost dead plant matter.

    She kept those thoughts private. There was no way to conceal the purpose of this raid from the Heavens, but the farm plan should still be secret.

    "I know, I know," he sighed. "It's just… I am not used to this."

    "You'll be fine."

    He stayed silent for a while. "How do you think they feed them?"

    She shrugged with one shoulder. "The sludge, I think. They eat it, and clean the water at the same time. Should be easy enough for us to reproduce."

    She wished she could have simply looked this up in the library. She didn't find any obvious tomes on the subject in the library in Reflection Ridge - and she did not want to attract attention by asking about it. Perhaps there were none to be found - treatment of sewage was a fairly specialized topic.

    Wang Yonghao stared at the facility quietly for a while. "I don't think it could be that simple," he finally whispered. "Beast trainers have ways to keep the beasts from escaping, right? Perhaps there is a technique they use on the worms - something that could alert them to the theft. I've seen that happen several times. We can't just walk in like this."

    She hummed in agreement. "Mhm. More to the point," - she pointed towards one corner of the facility, where an older cultivator was slowly patrolling around one of the outer pathways. He wore a mask, wrapped tightly around his mouth and nose, and practical robes of leather. "I told you there would be people. Someone has to be on guard to chase any errant animals out."

    "Yeah, yeah, rub it in," Yonghao sighed again. "So how do you want to do this?"
     
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    • Chapter 52: Speak Of Troubles Above The Fertile Pools
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    • Author Note: Want to read ahead? You can find some patreon-exclusive posts, as well as FOUR more chapters, over on my patreon, for a low price of 3$. That's right, despite being busy with a move all last week, I finally started to get back to the backlog.
    I also have a discord server, where I post memes I make about FSE, and occasionally discuss some plans and worldbuilding details.​
    The forest was quiet as Wang Yonghao approached the fence around the facility, the cilia of his soul fully extended as he reached out with his spiritual energy senses. His mind spun through a hundred ways in which this could all go horribly wrong. It wasn't his first time trying to break into a place - not by far - but this was different. The fact that he was choosing to proactively do this… the anxiety of it all made him want to flee and never return.

    Just follow the plan.

    As soon as he felt the cultivator on the other side - middle refinement stage, and not even that high up - he headed straight for them. Through his spiritual energy senses, he felt them stop in their tracks just a few moments later, and retreat away from the fence.

    He squished a spot of panic in his soul. It was going to be fine.

    With a single leap, he grabbed the top and pulled himself over with one hand, coming face to face with his target standing some thirty meters away from the fence. Back when they observed the facility from up in the tree crowns, it was hard to tell his age, but this close, he could see that the man would have passed for forty, wearing practical, expendable robes of leather and linen, with few decorations. The lower half of his face was covered by a thick cloth mask, and his hand rested warily on the handle of his sword.

    "Fellow cultivator, please help!" Wang Yonghao said, putting some urgency into his voice. Shanyi said focusing on a memory helped, and he did his best to recall that sharp spike of despair when she fell down into the caldera of a waterfall. "My partner, she - she is sick, and now she has fainted - I don't know what to do."

    "Your partner? Where is she?" the other cultivator said, looking around. Some of the initial tension left his body, and he stepped a bit closer. "And who are you?"

    "I am Wang Yonghao, loose cultivator," Wang Yonghao said, gesturing to himself with his free hand. Shanyi said that he was a terrible actor, and true enough, it was really hard for him to hold this entire fictional life in his head all the while thinking of things to say - but she also said that people went with their first impression, and as long as he didn't mess up too much, he should be fine. "My partner is Qian Shanyi. She is here, in the forest - I only left her to see if I could find some help."

    The other cultivator relaxed completely, and jogged over to the fence. "No wonder your face looked familiar," the other cultivator said as he approached, "This here cultivator is Zhao Anquan. I've been helping with the butchering when you came and donated so many Heavenly Materials and Earthly Treasures. You have my thanks."

    Quietly, Wang Yonghao breathed out. Okay. This didn't go disastrously.

    Zhao Anquan leaped over the fence, and Wang Yonghao dropped down, shaking his head. "That was Shanyi's idea."

    "Then I suppose I better thank her in person," Zhao Anquan said. "Lead the way."
    Zhao Anquan knew the surrounding woods well, and even under the dim light of the moons, following Wang Yonghao was child's play. He did wonder what a pair of cultivators was doing in this part of the woods this late at night - but there were more mysteries on the path of cultivation than stars in the sky, and it wasn't for him to question. Perhaps they had a dual cultivation law that had to be practiced beneath the stars.

    As they followed the path back, he scanned the treeline, noting things to do later - a tree that grew too close to the fence line here, a series of tracks to report there. It would save him a patrol later.

    They found the poor woman slumped against one of the trees, wafting air into her face with one hand. Her face was deathly pale, bright enough to shine even through the darkness of the forest, eyelids half closed. Her breathing was labored, quick, shallow breaths just on the edge of wheezing.

    Zhao Anquan felt a pang of pity in his heart. For someone who transcended a tribulation, she looked so small. Would they have to carry her? Or was that bad, when someone was injured? He honestly couldn't remember.

    As they approached, she turned her face slightly in their direction, but did not open her eyes. "Yonghao," Qian Shanyi said quietly, "you brought someone?"

    "I did," Wang Yonghao said, gesturing towards him. "This here is Zhao Anquan."

    Zhao Anquan stepped forwards, and bowed. Qian Shanyi's face turned a bit more in his direction. "A healer?" she said.

    "No," he said, thankful the two weren't from a sect. He always fumbled the formal addresses. "Just a fellow cultivator. What happened?"

    Wang Yonghao approached Qian Shanyi and kneeled next to her, putting a hand on her shoulder. The color of it really stood out in contrast with her skin. "She was hit pretty badly during her tribulation."

    Qian Shanyi slowly pushed Wang Yonghao's hand aside. "I am fine. Just a bit light-headed."

    "We could help -"

    Qian Shanyi grimaced, and pushed herself upwards, back scraping across the tree bark. "I do not -" she grunted, slowly raising to her feet. "- require help."

    She stopped, keeping herself stable with one hand on the side of the tree, and waited for a couple seconds before stepping forwards. Standing up, she was actually a hair taller than the both of them. "See?" she said, opening her eyes and smiling slightly. "I am completely fine -"

    The wind changed, bringing with it a hint of the noxious fumes from the pools, and Qian Shanyi gagged, folding in on herself in a fit of coughing and almost losing her balance, if not for Wang Yonghao holding her up by the waist. Zhao Anquan hurried to support her from the other side.

    "You are not fine," Wang Yonghao grumbled, "stop being stubborn and let us help."

    "Damnable smell," she grimaced, slowly getting her breathing under control, and wiping some blood off her mouth with the back of her hand. "We were heading back to town when it hit us before. By the time it passed, I had all but coughed up a part of my lung, and my wounds reopened. What is it that you are making here? Poisons for the next imperial succession?"

    Zhao Anquan frowned. It was easy to forget how those unaccustomed fared in this environment. "It's a paleworm farm," he said, untying the thick mask from around his nose, and carefully offering it to Qian Shanyi. Jingxin stuffed it with flower petals for him every morning, to make the work more pleasant. "This should help with the smell."

    She accepted the offering with a grateful nod. "I should have realized." She sighed. "Of course a town of this size would have one. Should have studied the map better before we decided to take our walk. I humbly apologize for taking you away from your duties."

    "There isn't much to do most nights," he said, "even during the day, we only harvest the hives twice a week. I am just here in case an errant demon beast is attracted by the smell." He gestured towards the northern side of the farm, though it remained hidden by the trees. "If you'd like, you could rest in our quarters until your wounds will let you reach the town safely. It's calm, safe and with clean air."

    The other two cultivators shared an incomprehensible look, then nodded, and they set off slowly, supporting Qian Shanyi lest she fall over again.

    Zhao Anquan was mostly glad they didn't have to carry her.
    The entrance to the offices passed through a long greenhouse, the curved ceiling of pure glass letting starlight through. Thankfully the smell of the greenery around them easily overpowered the draft that came from beyond the doors, and they could finally breathe freely.

    Zhao Anquan picked up a lantern near the doors, and Wang Yonghao looked around in wonder at the little circle of color surrounding the three of them, as they walked past wooden troughs, full of exotic flowers and herbs, filling the air with a dozen different scents. It wasn't the most colorful or unusual sight he had seen in his life - not by far - but at least nobody was trying to kill him, and -

    I like these flowers, he thought, focusing back on the moment. They are pretty. They smell nice.

    That was Qian Shanyi's advice, to try and focus on sensations and the positives, and it surprised him how well it worked - at least compared to what he used to do before. She was walking right next to him, looking around with a small frown on her face, no doubt brewing up some new devious scheme. So far everything was going just about how they planned it - down to her pretending to be more injured than she was, and refusing help at first.

    She said that it was best to stick close to your own personality, to minimize the chance of something slipping through, which is why that particular element was necessary - but he felt it was more down to her enjoying fooling other people.

    They soon reached the opposite end of the greenhouse, and passed through another door into a small and cozy kitchen, illuminated only by the dim light of a smoldering fireplace. There was a large window, looking out towards the pools, with a table right next to it, and so many plants all over the place, in pots and troughs, some sort of vines climbing up small railings and up to the ceiling, that for a moment he thought they were still in the greenhouse. Two doors, on opposite sides of the room, led further into the building.

    Zhao Anquan pressed his hand to a talisman on one of the walls, and gentle light slowly spread throughout the room. One of the other walls turned out to have a large glass tank, filled with water and more plants, and small golden fish swimming between the roots. Wang Yonghao walked over to it to take a look: they seemed content with their small lives, occasionally splashing up to the surface.

    While Zhao Anquan was busy with lights, Qian Shanyi lowered herself into one of the chairs with a grateful sigh. Her face was still deathly pale - only partly makeup, he knew - and as she took the mask off her face, he felt her spiritual energy stir ever so gently, reapplying it where it might have rubbed off. If he wasn't looking for it, he was sure he would have missed it.

    "Are you back already?" a male voice came from one of the doors, and Wang Yonghao turned around to see another man enter the room, dressed in a fluffy bathrobe. A mortal - or "ordinary person", as Shanyi kept insisting - and closer to fifty. About the same age as Zhao Anquan, really, once you accounted for the latter being a cultivator. He squinted up at the bright lights, and when his eyes focused on Wang Yonghao and Qian Shanyi, he stopped and raised an eyebrow. "We have guests?"

    "A fellow cultivator had been injured," Zhao Anquan said, turning towards the new man with a smile, and gesturing towards Qian Shanyi. "This is Qian Shanyi - she is the one who made that donation. I offered to let her stay until she recovers her strength."

    The other man paused, looking between Qian Shanyi and Wang Yonghao. His lips were pursed ever so slightly. "And she just happened to be injured here? In the middle of the forest?"

    Zhao Anquan sighed. "Jingxin…"

    "Very well," the other man bowed deeply after a pause. "I am Zhao Jingxin. Should we send for a healer?"

    "It is not necessary," Qian Shanyi waved her hand, "I have it under control. I just need a bit of rest, and conversation to distract myself. But I am forever grateful for your kindness."

    "I should be the grateful one," Zhao Anquan said, sitting down opposite her at the same table. Zhao Jingxin went over to the fireplace, and stoked the fire with new wood, before hanging a kettle over it. "Your donation is worth much more than a place to rest and some tea."

    Wang Yonghao turned away from the room and back towards the fishes, concealing his emotions. Qian Shanyi said she could handle the conversation, but he was still worried. What if they made something slip and were discovered?

    "Have they distributed it already?" Qian Shanyi said with a smile in her voice. "The empire works fast."

    "I was there at the hill, helping with processing."

    "Truly? Post office is quite some distance from here."

    He heard fabric shift. A shrug. "It's good pay. And with your donation, it's exemplary - easily six times what I earn here in a month. We'll be able to buy so much for our garden now."

    Wang Yonghao breathed deeply, and then turned around. Zhao Anquan was chatting amicably with Qian Shanyi, Zhao Jingxin standing just a bit behind him with a hand on his shoulder. Nothing seemed to be going wrong.

    It was probably fine.

    He walked over to the table and sat down next to Qian Shanyi.
    Their plan - modified once they saw that the facility was manned - had two stages. First, they would try to find out as much as they could about the worms, and verify exactly how many people were on the farm. Then, if they could manage it, Qian Shanyi would distract them, while Wang Yonghao went off to steal the queens. If that didn't work… Well, nothing they could do - the information alone would already be quite useful, and she had a legend prepared for if they were caught.

    Once the tea was ready, Zhao Jingxin sat down on the same table, right next to Zhao Anquan. Qian Shanyi studied his appearance in the reflection of the window, pretending to look at the pools of the farm. There was something off about him - how he looked at her and the tone of his voice, a certain air of suspicion and mistrust - but it was hard to place. It definitely wasn't the usual awe many ordinary people had for cultivators, and it wasn't fear either, but rather something else entirely. In theory, it shouldn't be a problem… but it was still an uncontrolled factor, a ball tossed up into the air and out of sight. With Wang Yonghao's luck muddying the picture, she couldn't simply dismiss it.

    "Would you mind if we closed the curtains?" she asked, turning back to the others. Just because she needed more information, it was no reason not to set up for the second stage of their plan. "I wouldn't want to impose, but the sight of these pools brings back the memory of that horrific smell…"

    "Oh it's nothing," Zhao Anquan said easily, and stood up to do as she asked. Zhao Jingxin, on the other hand, did not react to her sudden request at all, not even a twitch of an eyebrow out of place.

    So he isn't suspicious of what I am planning? Only the circumstance?

    She hummed in thanks, keeping her outward attention on Zhao Anquan. "I take it you are the beastmaster of the farm?"

    Zhao Anquan nodded as he sat back down. "One of the two," he said. Zhao Jingxin put an arm around his shoulders, and he didn't resist. "We switch who is on duty every other week. The other one would usually still be here, in case I needed to step away for something - but he went off to celebrate the very same donation you made. Said he'd be back tomorrow, so now it's just me and Jingxin."

    Qian Shanyi did her best to project a feeling of smugness at Wang Yonghao without changing her expression or posture. Even though she knew no telepathic techniques, he still shifted slightly right next to her, which she considered a success.

    "I see," she continued smoothly, "Well, send him my regards when he returns. This is not a job many cultivators would be willing to take, I imagine."

    Zhao Anquan shrugged. "It's a job," he said, "it pays well enough, and we like it here, out in the forest. Not many people to bother. Most days, me and Jingxin do some maintenance, and then work on our garden."

    And what a garden it was.

    "Still, I would have thought a beast could only be bound to one person?" she said, letting her true curiosity seep into her tone, "I've never been on a paleworm farm before, though I have read about them in books - how does it work with two beastmasters?"

    "We don't bind them," Zhao Anquan said, shaking his head. "It would be far too much effort, especially since they breed all the time."

    "Really? But then how do you prevent escapes?"

    "They have been made to depend on the Rose Sand of Shah," Zhao Anquan said with a shrug. There was a hint of surprise on his face, probably because very few cultivators aside from her would be interested in what happened to their poop. "Without it, they die. But mostly, they don't really try to escape."

    "Fascinating," Qian Shanyi said, leaning forward in excitement. "Tell me more."

    They talked more about the farm - how the worms were grown and cared for, and the flow of water. Apparently there was a river passing not too far from the valley of glass, and kept from spilling into the valley through careful civil engineering - half a dozen dams and artificial channels. Water was drawn from the river somewhere upstream, passed through the town, and then ended up here before being returned back into the river.

    It was all quite interesting, though she could tell that she was the only one among the four of them truly curious about the subject, and Zhao Anquan was just humoring her as a polite host. After a while, Wang Yonghao picked up on the situation, and started to talk with Zhao Jingxin about the greenhouse, and gave her an excellent opportunity to study his reactions.

    There was still that tension there - less than for her, but noticeable if you knew where to look. Not quite suspicion - but definitely a certain wariness. He stayed close to Zhao Anquan, their hands touching - in an almost protective gesture.

    One question kept nagging at her mind. Why here? This was not a particularly prestigious or well paid job, and neither of them seemed like much of a recluse. Zhao Anquan was in the middle of the refinement stage - he should have had plenty of options, so why pick a job so far away from the eyes of anyone else?

    Hm. They were quite old, weren't they?

    A hypothesis appeared in her mind, one that would fit everything quite neatly, and give her the opportunity she needed. And even if she was wrong - she could improvise. She only needed five minutes, at most.

    Qian Shanyi glanced at Wang Yonghao. Yeah, she wasn't testing it with this prude at her side. Instead, she grimaced, rubbing her chest. "My lungs are still more sore than I would like. Yonghao, would you mind running to our room and bringing me my medicine?"

    He nodded, and headed for the doors. They've discussed this signal well in advance - he knew what to do.

    Only a short minute after he left, Zhao Jingxin yawned, and rose up from his chair. "Honorable cultivator Qian, I must retire for the night," he said tersely, bowing to her, "my sleep was interrupted, and there is plenty of work to do tomorrow."

    "Before you go," she said immediately, "there was one thing that made me curious."

    By her mental count, Wang Yonghao should be sneaking back into the brightly lit yard of the facility right around now. If she let Zhao Jingxin leave, he'd surely glance out the window in another room and notice him.

    "You two have the same family name," she noted with a smile, "What's the story there?"
    After he left the others, Wang Yonghao sped off in the direction of Glaze Ridge, before making a wide hook through the forest and circling around to the other side of the farm. He glanced at the windows from up in the trees to check that the curtains were still closed - they were - before quietly hopping over the fence and heading towards one of the hives.

    His task was simple: steal one or two queens, make it seem like a fox got in instead of a person, and then run to Glaze Ridge and back - not so much so that someone could see him, as to make sure he was gone for a right amount of time. Taking longer than expected was plausible - returning too quickly was not.

    It was a simple task. There was just one problem.

    Wang Yonghao stared at the waxy, brown-black surface of the hive, hundreds of disgusting pale worms wriggling in and out of it, and traveling down a channel to reach a pool of raw sewage. Up close, the smell was so bad he opted to block up his nose with a pair of wooden plugs he prepared in advance.

    The queens were, of course, in the very middle of the hive. He felt them keenly, like warm spots to his spiritual energy senses, streams of much dimmer worker-worms heading to them and back out of the hive.

    "Damn you Shanyi," he grumbled, glancing up at the building with the closed curtains.

    Surely there had to be a better way.
    The tension in the air ramped up a notch as Zhao Jingxin narrowed his eyes at Qian Shanyi. She met his gaze with a polite smile, saluting him with her cup of tea.

    "Why shouldn't we have the same name?" He challenged her. "We are family."

    "Brothers?" she asked, raising an eyebrow. They looked nothing alike - but stranger things have happened.

    He put his hands on his hips, and nodded at her challengingly. "What is it to you?"

    Clearly not brothers, then, but nonetheless quite close. There was no fear in his eyes - he had to know for sure that Zhao Anquan would back him up against a cultivator.

    Zhao Anquan breathed in sharply, aghast. "Jingxin! That is no way to speak to our guest!"

    Our guest, huh.

    "A guest that shows up in the middle of the night?" Zhao Jingxin said, looking back at Zhao Anquan. "In the middle of the forest?"

    She inclined her head. "Your tone tingles with accusations. Have I harmed your family in some way?"

    Ultimately, she just had to keep him occupied and away from any windows that looked out onto the pools. That he 'decided' to go to sleep just about when Wang Yonghao would have circled back to the facility certainly had a stink of the Heavens.

    "Of course not!" Zhao Anquan said, turning to her, eyes full of concern. Zhao Jingxin, thankfully, stayed quiet, though he kept his glare on her. "Fellow cultivator Qian, please don't take this to heart. He is my adoptive father."

    She shook her head. Father? They were practically the same age. As if she'd let them off this easily - she had no interest in what was technically in their papers. Besides, she couldn't just let such an excellent opportunity lie. "Should I not take this to heart?" she said, "I have felt the suspicion in the air ever since I walked in - but I had little interest in ruffling feathers, and so I stayed quiet. But now, you have all but slapped me across the face."

    Zhao Anquan's eyes widened a fraction, and he turned back to Zhao Jingxin. "Jingxin, apologize to our guest," he said, tension in his voice.

    Zhao Anquan's reaction seemed to put him on the back foot, but not entirely. "What for?"

    A dangerous ignorance, if he was claiming to be a father of a cultivator. "I am a loose cultivator, honorable Zhao Jingxin," she said, shaking her head. "We are not like ordinary people. My honor and my sword is all that I have. If people go around making insinuations about why I came to their house, I could hardly stand that, could I? If people thought I was some kind of robber, who would deal with me at all? It's said that to insult a cultivator is to court death, and there is a reason for that."

    Zhao Anquan stood up at once, stepping over to Zhao Jingxin and putting himself between them, a grave look on his face. He wisely kept his eyes on her sword - she was younger and of a higher realm than him, and likely better trained too. Wounds or not, if they crossed swords, she would put money on herself three times out of four.

    Zhao Jingxin's face only showed confusion. Less bravery and more foolishness, then.

    She waved both of them off, leaning back in her chair to show just how not prepared for a fight she was. "Please. We are alone in here, and nobody else heard us," she said, "I have no reason to seek satisfaction. But my point stands. The least you can do is explain what it is that I did that put you on edge."

    He should be thankful she wasn't Jian Shizhe, or there would have been blood already. Honestly, why was she the one to teach him this? The man was twenty five years her senior. Perhaps they lived so far from the other people that he never had a chance to learn.

    Zhao Anquan breathed out, his body relaxing. Zhao Jingxin warily looked over his shoulder at her, clearly unnerved. It took him a moment to come up with the words. "Why did you donate your winnings?" he said slowly, "people do not simply do that."

    "And if I said it was out of the kindness of my heart?" she asked, and chuckled at the frown Zhao Jingxin gave her. "Very well."

    Suspicions did not arise for no reason. Every suspicion was borne out of someone failing to put you into their picture of the world - and if you helped them do so, it could easily resolve, or even turn them into your closest friend, depending on how you did it.

    "There are certain… expectations that are put on a young woman such as myself," she began slowly, pouring herself a new cup of tea, "ones I do not welcome. To marry, to have children, to obey my husband. I refuse to live up to them. But to do so - it is like trying to turn back a river. It is much easier to at least pretend to conform."

    All true enough for many people, though her view was that a true cultivator should simply force the river to flow uphill. To do anything less was cowardice - but truth would not help here.

    "So I have a partner who is not my partner," she continued, bending the truth with practiced ease, "We rent the same room at a tavern, even though we don't sleep together. I donate money - for people tend to look through closed eyelids at anyone who gave them a gift. And sometimes I sneak off into the forest at night, all so I can do what I want in peace."

    "And what might that be?"

    She gave them her best flat, unamused stare. "I would have thought the two of you, of all people, would have guessed already."

    The silence between the three of them grew palpable, until Zhao Anquan spoke a single syllable. "Ah."

    "Oh," echoed Zhao Jingxin, "So you know."

    "Honestly," she said, crinkling her nose at them slightly, "Who do you think I am? A refiner?"

    At least they had the decency to blush.
    "Ew, ew, ew, ew, ew," Wang Yonghao muttered, as he sprinted away from the paleworm farm, shuddering in disgust. He quickly found a quiet corner of the forest, before dipping into his inner world to unload his cargo - a pair of paleworm queens, and a few kilos of this Rose Sand, that was simply poured into the middle of their hives though a big funnel.

    Then he headed straight for the bath to wash himself thoroughly. He'd say thanks to Shanyi for coming up with the idea of building a bath here, but he was short on thanks for her at the moment.

    Half an hour of thorough scrubbing later - and only seven minutes on the outside - he was back on track, heading towards Reflection Ridge. The bath really helped him center himself, and as he ran, he thought that actually, this heist went off surprisingly well - being disgusted was probably a small price to pay for having a proper latrine. Stealing the queens was simplicity itself, after he overcame himself, and by the time the morning rose, the other worms would repair the rest of the hive, erasing all evidence. Maybe Shanyi was right that he could relax more about these things.
    Zhao Jingxin did not end up going to sleep. Instead, they got out a mahjong set, and started a game for three people.

    With their secrets out in the open, and her own idiosyncrasies more or less accounted for, the tension was gone from their conversation, and she slowly turned it towards their garden. She kept track of what Wang Yonghao had talked about, of course, but his interest was in the flowers, while hers was on the food. Even though she only recognised about half of the plants in the greenhouse, their density was much higher than she expected - and she was wondering if she could adapt the same principles to the farm in the world fragment.

    It turned out that she could not. Their farm was some fiendishly complex arrangement of pipes and troughs, water flowing through different varieties of herbs, grasses, shrubs and flowers and being filtered by their roots, with half a dozen species of fish feeding on the parasites and providing nutrients through their excrement. While it was undeniably impressive, it also required constant attention, as two dozen different factors had to be manually adjusted all the time, and the system for circulating the water was finicky at best.

    This simply wouldn't do. She needed a farm that she could leave alone for weeks, if not months at a time, and be sure that it would still be there when she returned, and one that wouldn't take up even more of her precious time.

    Well, no matter. She didn't come here for the garden - she came here for the paleworms, and she managed to not only conceal Wang Yonghao's movements, but even somewhat turn the pair of Zhaos to their side - she doubted that they would talk about this meeting.

    And yet, despite the fact that everything was going her way, her mood only seemed to worsen - not that it showed on her face.

    For lack of a better word… the plan was going too damn well.

    It was suspicious. She understood opposition and sabotage, but if the Heavens were staying quiet, that meant they were plotting something - and she didn't know what.

    It only got worse when Wang Yonghao returned with her bottle of pills. She easily palmed one, pretending to swallow it, and then they quickly left, heading back to town. Once they were far enough away from the farm, he told her that he had no problems whatsoever. His unbridled optimism made her scowl.

    "Did your part go that badly?" he asked, misunderstanding her mood.

    "My part went fucking perfectly." she said, "Better than I could have hoped for. Now come on, let's get out from under the moonlight. There is trickery afoot, and I won't rest until we have a plan to deal with it."
     
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    • Chapter 53: Part The Mists Of Doubt Along Your Trail
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    • Author Note: Want to read ahead? You can find some patreon-exclusive posts, as well as FOUR more chapters, over on my patreon, for a low price of 3$. That's right, despite being busy with a move all last week, I finally started to get back to the backlog.
    I also have a discord server, where I post memes I make about FSE, and occasionally discuss some plans and worldbuilding details.​
    "So what is it that worries you?" Wang Yonghao asked when they finally got back to the tavern, and started to descend into his inner world.

    She sighed. How to explain this…

    "You said you didn't have any problems?"

    He nodded. "Yeah. I mean, it was disgusting, but aside from that..."

    "And that's what worries me."

    He actually stopped in midair, still a good ten meters above the ground. "You are worried because the plan went too well?"

    "Yes."

    "Shanyi, this is insane. Even I feel better now that it's done."

    She glared up at him, gesturing to the open air below her feet. "Just get down to the ground, will you?"

    He resumed his descent, but didn't shut up. "We set off on this heist, and I am worried sick. You, on the other hand, entirely blase," he said, "Now we are done, and you've changed your mind? This makes no sense."

    "It makes perfect sense," she said, touching down on the grass and stepping out of her rope harness. "I expected opposition we could deal with, yet we found none. This means the Heavens are plotting something else, and the plot I do not see is a hundred times deadlier than the one I can."

    "Didn't you say Zhao Jingxin could have spotted me?"

    She waved him off. "It was barely anything. Now where did you put these worms? Perhaps they are sick, and our heist will be for naught."

    He motioned towards the metal node of the chiclotron, right next to the baths. "Into the chiclotron, like we talked about, safe from the rosevines."

    "Strange," she frowned, heading there together with him. "I can't feel their - "

    Realization reached her mind at the same time as her own words reached her ears, and she dashed towards the stone cap on the node, wincing at her ribs as she tried to pull it aside. Wang Yonghao reached her just a moment after, and together, they opened the node.

    Inside, she saw several bricks of stone arranged into a sort of cage, with only small gaps left for air, and a stone plate placed on top. When Wang Yonghao lifted it up, they saw that the cage was entirely empty.

    "I left them still in their bag," Wang Yonghao said, confusion plain on his face as he looked into the empty trap. "They were still asleep, I think."

    "They must have eaten the bag and climbed out, looking for more food," she cursed, casting out with her spiritual energy senses, and sighed in relief when she felt the two worms in the next water node over, evidently still alive. "I guess without any bones these hungry girls can squeeze through pretty much any hole."

    A moment later, she got the worms out of the chiclotron. They seemed to have spent quite some time there, pushed further in by their ravenous hunger, and then pulled back by the uncomfortable drop in air temperature. Holding each one in one hand, so that they wouldn't wiggle out, she started to inspect them for damage.

    Her worries turned to once again be unfounded. The two worm queens - as long as her elbow, bulbous, and as pale as their name implied - were a bit cold, but otherwise in decent health. There were no cuts or other wounds, no sites of discoloration, and the soft fur that covered their bodies was even and in good condition. Hopefully that should mean they would live long enough to produce the next set of queens.

    Wang Yonghao stared at her studying the worms with a grimace. She raised an eyebrow at him, momentarily looking away from her work. "What?"

    "How could you just," he made a vague gesture, "touch them so easily?"

    Her eyebrow climbed further. "Why wouldn't I?" she said, lifting the queens to her eye level. One of them was trying to gnaw her fingers off with its hard black teeth. They were more than sharp enough to bite through bone, but it was just scratching uselessly against her spiritual shield. The other one curled up and seemed to have fallen asleep, it's fur - or was it whiskers? - rising and falling in slight waves along its length. She supposed it looked kind of cute, in a worm-like sort of way. "Are you afraid of insects, Yonghao?"

    He sighed, covering his face with his hands. "Because they are covered in poop?"

    "What?" She spread her hands slightly, framing Wang Yonghao in between the two worms. "No they aren't."

    "They literally make their hives out of poop."

    She rolled her eyes at him. Wasn't he listening when Zhao Anquan explained this? "No they don't. They consume sewage, but they consume pretty much everything they can bite through. That's why they also dump rotting vegetable matter into the mixture, so the worms would have more nutrients. And the queens don't even touch the sewage - that's for the worker worms."

    "Which they eat to make worm poop. And then they build their hives out of it."

    "The term is humus, Yonghao. It's not so different from what fallen leaves turn into in a forest. And it is not pooped, it is secreted."

    "As if there's a difference?"

    She gave him a flat stare. "Truly?" She gestured at his clothing with one of the queens. "Your robes are made of silk. Where do you think that comes from?"

    His eyes shifted to his clothing and then back to her. Like a rabbit caught in a snare. "From…silkworms?"

    "Which side of a silkworm, Yonghao?"

    "It's - look, it's different."

    "Or what of the bees - shall I call honey bee vomit?"

    He groaned, burying his face in his hands. "Why would you say that?! Now I won't stop thinking of it!"

    She shrugged. "You are the one who asked."

    He'd get over it.

    Probably.

    Best not to let him dwell on it, just in case. "Let's build a house for these little babies," she said, getting up off the grass. "I can't hold them all night, and they'd happily chew through everything in here if we left them alone."
    The temporary nest for the paleworms was quick to build. It consisted of a hole in the ground, only a couple feet deep, lined with flat stone plates and clay to keep rosevines from digging in or the paleworms digging out. At the top, they angled the stones inwards, to make it harder for the worms to climb out, and covered it all with a stone plate.

    Well. Wang Yonghao did it, still refusing to let her help with physical labor until her ribs healed entirely, while she kept the paleworm queens from wriggling away to carelessly chomp on a demon beast core and blow themselves up. She also talked to him about the design, and helped measure and draw out the cuts on the stone plates to make them slot into each other, making the whole structure more stable.

    ​

    They would have to build a much larger version based on the same principles when they added a latrine to the system, but for the time being, it would do. Building solid sleeping quarters took priority, and with the paleworms safely deposited in their new dwelling, with plenty of freshly cut grass to chew on, they should have gone right to it.

    Emphasis on the should have.

    "You've tricked me!" Wang Yonghao accused her, sitting on the foundation of their new house - a wide wooden frame, on top of stone plinths. His arms were crossed on his chest.

    Qian Shanyi stood opposite him, her arms on her hips. "How, precisely?"

    "By distracting me with all this talk about the worms," he said, "we were going to talk about how it makes no sense for you to be worried now."

    "Were we?"

    "Yes."

    She sighed, and laid down on the grass to stretch her legs. "Oh fine," she said, waving her arm around casually. "What is it that confuses you?"

    "Usually, when something goes right, people relax."

    "According to who? No law mandates this."

    Wang Yonghao pursed his lips, repositioning himself on the frame a bit closer to her. "According to me. Because it makes sense."

    She sighed in exasperation. Why was this so hard for him to get? "Suppose you go to dinner with your extended family," she said, "You expect one of your aunts to twist things into an argument against you, as she always does, yet she is quiet and cheerful. Would you not grow anxious, not knowing what she is planning this time?"

    "I don't have any aunts, so I wouldn't know. And you are still avoiding the question."

    "You call an answer an avoidance?"

    "I call an avoidance an avoidance. All this stuff about aunts - it's all very clever, but also has nothing to do with why you were worried."

    "Have I not answered already?" She said, raising an eyebrow. "I do not know what the Heavens are doing, so I am worried."

    "But you didn't know that before, either."

    She opened her mouth to respond, and then closed it as the meaning of the words caught up with her. "Hm."

    That was… True, annoyingly enough. Just because the Heavens were doing something obvious, it didn't mean that they weren't also planning something sneaky. So why was she worried now?

    She shifted around, steepling her fingers together under her chest, drumming them against each other as she considered this. "Fine," she grudgingly admitted after a minute of thinking. "Perhaps I just needed the contrast of a job gone well to realize I was being a bit too careless."

    "A bit?"

    She shoed him off like an errant pigeon. "Not in the way you think - it's about thinking ahead, considering the possibilities," she said, pausing to think some more. "So what, do you think I am being too paranoid?"

    "About my luck?"

    "Yes."

    "Probably not," he said slowly, "I just think you should relax."

    She turned her head to look directly at him. For a moment she was sure she misheard. "You are telling me to relax?"

    "Yes," he said, with a smug look on his face. "Panic never helps."

    She was worried, not panicking. But more importantly…

    "Junior, do not seek to use the techniques I taught you against me."

    "If a master forgets a technique, they deserve a reminder."

    She shook her head. When did he get this introspective? At this rate he'd start to behave like a scholar, instead of simply looking like one.

    "The world gone mad, ducklings teaching fish to swim," she said, "And how do you suppose I do that?"

    "Ideally, you'd just become relaxed on the spot. Could you do that?"

    "No."

    His smug grin grew wider. "A shame. In that case, simply focus on my opinion - it should be almost as good."

    She narrowed her eyes at the cheeky bastard. "You know, Yonghao, it's said that debating Dao with a fellow cultivator is the best balm for the soul out there."

    "Would that help?" he asked, leaning forwards with a bad imitation of interest.

    She scowled at him in return. "Feh. It's not entertaining if you are going to be all reasonable," she said, and then breathed out. Alright, enough sulking. "I'll feel better when I have something to work on. So if you want to help, let's talk about your luck."

    "Alright."

    "Give me a bit to collect my thoughts," she said, gesturing vaguely. "You can work on the house in the meantime - we do need to finish it eventually."

    Wang Yonghao nodded, and went over to where they piled up the pine tree trunks, while she closed her eyes to think. He did have a bit of a point, even if he was wildly off in scope - simply worrying would achieve little.

    Five minutes later, she opened her eyes, and folded her hands behind her head. "So," she began, "I think I have narrowed down the possibilities for the factor X behind your luck to about ninety six primary theories."

    Wang Yonghao snorted, lining up another trunk to be cut to shape by the Honk of the Solar Goose. "Well, this mystery is practically solved then."

    She grimaced. "Yeah. Hold your insults until I finish, it's actually much worse than this."

    With four precise swings of his sword, the trunk was turned into a long, rectangular beam. She had to time her speech to be heard over the call of the goose, echoing around the world fragment. "I didn't mean to insult you."

    "Fine, I'll hold my own insults at this travesty of a theory," she groaned. "If it could even be called that. The way I see it, there are four primary questions. One: what is the mechanism? Two: why you? Three: what is Heaven's motive? Four: why no communication?"

    She turned over on her side, supporting her head with one hand. "Let's start with the first one. I don't mean the precise spiritual mechanics of your luck - that would be pure speculation. What I mean is this: does your luck cause unusual events, or does it attract you to them?"

    Wang Yonghao kicked the separated bark to the side and picked up the beam, stacking it up alongside the others. "It could do both."

    She nodded, not that he was looking at her. "It certainly does do both - any luck should. The question is about what dominates. If it merely attracts you to sites of conflict - then the world is no worse for your luck, but it is also no better. If it causes it - then we could think about where creating a bit of chaos could benefit everyone."

    He glanced at her with worry in his eyes, and she raised one hand to forestall his objection. "If you don't want to think of it in those terms, that's fine. But let's move on. The second question is - why are you the one affected? I see four possibilities."

    She raised her hand, counting them out on her fingers. "First possibility is random chance," she continued, "You just stumbled into some factor X when you were young - be it a quirk of your constitution, or an encounter with some treasure or artifact - and this initial event changed your luck, leading to everything else that had happened to you afterwards. Could have happened to anyone, you are just 'lucky' enough to win the initial draw. Second possibility is ancestry."

    Wang Yonghao turned around, raising an eyebrow. "Ancestry? I am a nobody."

    "Have you ever met your parents?"

    "No," he said, frowning. "I am an orphan, remember?

    She shrugged with one shoulder. "In that case for all we know you might be the Emperor's own son. If we don't know exactly where you came from, we can't dismiss the possibility."

    Wang Yonghao's eyes widened in shock as he contemplated the possibility of his august heritage. She hurried to continue before he had a chance to object. "Ancestry could mean that you inherited your constitution, or that your mother slapped your ass with some ancient divine artifact just after you were born, or something else," she said, then frowned. "Actually, about a hundred other things, but the point is: it is due to something incredibly specific to your past. Maybe 'ancestry' is a poor term."

    Wang Yonghao rubbed his face, then looked back at the pile of wood right next to him. "I don't know," he sighed. "I don't think this is it. I can't remember exactly, but I don't think I had any insane luck until I became a cultivator."

    "And when was that?"

    "When I was about nine years old, I think."

    Of course he did.

    Cultivators generally unlocked their spirit root between the ages of ten and eighteen, and ten was supposed to be almost unheard of. She had unlocked hers at fifteen.

    "This doesn't necessarily mean anything," she said, not feeling even a little bit bitter. "If you have a special constitution, perhaps it was simply dormant until then. In fact… You've said you've fallen into a barrel of Asure Heart Cleansing Dew which unlocked your first dantian. This means you had to already be not that far from such a mysterious barrel when your spirit root unlocked, correct? At least in a town close by - and I doubt that there are many such ruins across the empire. One could certainly argue that your luck was setting things up for you in advance."

    He grimaced, acknowledging the possibility, and then went back to the tree trunks.

    "Third possibility is that you were chosen deliberately," she continued, "Either through some act of your own, or because you have a fitting personality, or something of that nature. The choice was not random, and it was not done because of who you are, but because of what you might be expected to do."

    "Personality? The heavens are bad at reading people."

    "They don't necessarily have to be good at it," she said, prepared for the question. "Take a house: I could not begin to guess what makes one stand and another one topple over. But if I saw a well-known architect making measurements…"

    She let her words hang, and Wang Yonghao finished her thoughts. "You could rely on their opinion."

    "Right."

    He turned back to look at her. "So you think, what?" he said with a frown on his face, "There is someone going around figuring out who would be a good target for divine luck?"

    She shook her head. "Not necessarily so direct, but it's not impossible either. It is something to consider, in either case. And the final possibility is…"

    She paused. Should she even mention it? This was really speculative, and she didn't know how Yonghao might react…

    Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him still looking in her direction. "What?" he said, bringing her back to reality.

    She sighed. Well, it was going to come out eventually. "That you weren't always an orphan," she said quietly. "It is said that when Gu Lingtian broke into the Heavens, he tried to paint a bridge out of his familial love. In retaliation, the Heavens erased his family, and made it so that he was an orphan all along."

    This time Wang Yonghao actually stepped back in shock. "What?!"

    "Yeah, tell me about it," she muttered, before gathering her thoughts together. "His rebellion comes from before modern history," she said, hoping to lessen the blow. "What is known of it freely blends fable with fact. If the Heavens have such a power, then as far as I know, they haven't exercised it since, even when it would have served them well."

    As far as I know. As if such words meant much. It seemed to help Yonghao, at least.

    "Which brings us to the next question," she continued, "what is Heaven's motive? We know they are somehow related to you. If we assume that they have done something truly drastic, then they must be getting something out of it. Again, several possibilities: opportunism, crippling, grooming, bystanders."

    "Bystanders?"

    She grimaced. "We don't actually know for sure that the Heavens are involved with your luck. All that we know is that they've granted me a vow I used to find you, that your inner world blocks whatever method they use to spy on the vows, and they were ready to retaliate in force when I broke it. This may or may not mean something, but it's all circumstantial. It could still be that the Heavens are merely paying attention to you in some way, but otherwise staying out."

    Wang Yonghao gave her a considering look. "I didn't expect you to say that."

    She rolled her eyes. Please. "I am not blind, Yonghao. I still think the evidence leans in their direction - but that is not enough for me to dismiss the possibility entirely. The bastards up top are not the only ones with bizarre horrors in their vaults, after all."

    She wasn't sure what would be better - to know for sure it was the Heavens, or to know that it wasn't. The other candidates were no less malicious, and certainly less studied - if also, generally, less powerful. She spent a minute thinking over the possibilities in silence.

    Wang Yonghao went back to the beams. Having cut and cleaned a few of them, he started measuring out lengths, using his sword as a ruler, and cutting two wide notches into each beam, where they would lock into each other. She quietly watched him work, holding herself back from offering advice.

    Finally, she sighed. "Where was I?" she said, "Right, opportunism. This would mean that the Heavens didn't plan on your luck, but are still using it for their benefit. Taking out talented cultivators opposed to them, saving karmists, stealing artifacts that are too dangerous to their eyes, but would gather dust in your inner world - that sort of thing."

    Wang Yonghao straightened up, flicking sweat off his forehead. "I don't collect those kinds of artifacts."

    She raised an eyebrow at him. "Those kinds?"

    "Yes, you know," He waved his arm vaguely. "There are swords and then there are Swords. Whenever I find one that has a blade made of wind and sings poems into my mind, I just turn around and walk away. Most of the time that's enough."

    "Interesting," she said mildly. "That you find them at all could be evidence, or it could be nothing."

    There was determination in his eyes. A good sign, she supposed. "Yeah. You said there are four possibilities? What's next?"

    She nodded. "Next is that they could have tried to cripple you. Your luck does not behave like normal luck should - what if this is not a coincidence? Imagine how much you could do if your monstrous luck obeyed your whims."

    "Like what?"

    "If I had it, I'd be an empress in fifteen years and lead a new war on the Heavens in thirty."

    "I really do not want to lead any kind of war."

    She nodded readily. "Of course - but you have grown up with your current luck causing you anguish all your life. If it obeyed your whims, you would have a different mindset - and this is exactly my point."

    He paced around, a thinking look on his face, the construction forgotten. "You may be right. And the last one?"

    "The final possibility is in some sense the reverse - that they sought to build your mindset to their benefit from the ground up. To either make you obsessed with cultivation, or hateful towards other cultivators, or… something. Failing that, simply to make you strong, to serve whatever strange plan they may have at a later point."

    He gave her a baffled look, and she chuckled. "I didn't say they had to be good at it. Which brings me to the final question. Why did the Heavens never try to talk to you? Remember: we have, more or less, established that they are involved somehow - at least indirectly, at least as bystanders. So why not communicate with you? They have many ways to do so - that they do not talk to most people is immaterial. They could send a messenger, twist your luck into meeting a karmist with the right ideas, or get your hands on one of the vanishingly rare artifacts that were made for that purpose. Instead, you get deafening silence. Why?

    He stopped in his tracks, staring off into space. "That's… a good question."

    "When it comes to cheating at cards -" she began, and Wang Yonghao's face whipped in her direction.

    "Of course you'd know how to cheat," he said, scowling at her slightly.

    She blinked in surprise. They've never played cards together, on account of it being a luck game. "You don't?"

    "No. Because I play fair."

    "Bah," she said, rolling her eyes at the hypocrite. "'Fair' he says, when his luck eclipses the sun. Cheating - and spotting cheating - is as much a part of the game as any other. But no matter - I was leading up to a point."

    "Which is?"

    "It is said that there are three types of invisibility," she continued, "can't see, don't see, and won't see. First - your mark has no physical ability to see the trick, because you do it behind their back. Second - they could see it, but they do not notice it. Third - they do notice it, but they say nothing, because you've threatened to break their legs."

    "And you think it's the same with the Heavens?" he said, frowning in concentration. "They either can't talk to me, for whatever reason, or they try but I don't notice, or they don't even want to?"

    She nodded. "Exactly. Two, four, four and three possibilities for the answers - and any combination of them is potentially plausible. Multiply them together, and that's your ninety-six primary theories for your luck, and I can't outright dismiss any of them. But actually it's much worse - all of this is pure speculation. I might be missing key possibilities entirely, or one of these questions may be completely irrelevant. We just don't have enough information."

    Wang Yonghao sighed, ruffling his hair. "This is a lot to take in."

    She hummed in agreement. "That it is."

    "Do you at least feel better now?"

    She blinked, considering her own thoughts. "Yes," she finally stated with certainty, "Thank you for your help. But I could feel even better."

    She got up off the grass, and went off to fetch her writing set and a solid wooden board, settling down next to the house that was slowly coming together.

    "I need data," she said with determination, pushing the grass down with the board and pinning a sheet of paper to it. "Tell me about your adventures."

    "What do you want to know this time?"

    She grinned. "All of it. Start from today and go backwards - I want to know everything. Towns, names, directions, battles fought, ruins visited, enemies made… Everything. And then, I am going to search for gaps amid the patterns."

    Wang Yonghao grimaced at that. "You realize that would take forever, right? I don't even remember most of it."

    Her grin grew wider. "Got somewhere else to be? I am a gambler, Yonghao, but this game is played in a pitch black room with a cloth tied around our eyes. You can't win like this."

    She tapped the sheet of paper in front of her with the back of her writing brush.

    "So let's light a lantern, and hope we see something in the shadows."
     
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    • Chapter 54: Scrape Away The Sap Of Mysteries
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    • Author Note: Want to read ahead? You can find some patreon-exclusive posts, as well as FOUR more chapters, over on my patreon, for a low price of 3$. That's right, despite being busy with a move all last week, I finally started to get back to the backlog.
    I also have a discord server, where I post memes I make about FSE, and occasionally discuss some plans and worldbuilding details.​
    Qian Shanyi stared grimly as Wang Yonghao put the last couple beams on top of their new hut, her hands crossed on her chest. Her idea of collecting stories while he worked ended up distracting him too much from the construction work, and she decided to just let him finish.

    The hut itself looked like a brick of wood - all lines and right angles, made easy with the Honk of the Solar Goose. The individual beams weren't actually attached to each other, but rather laid freely, interlocking at the corners with notches cut almost halfway through each beam. The roof was much the same - just another layer of notched beams over the very top. Here and there, they cut narrow window slits in between the logs - partly for airflow, partly to let in some light, and also to have somewhere to tie their hammocks.

    In place of a door, they made a set of free-standing beams that could be buttressed into special notches in the floor and ceiling, and secured in place with a couple swords they had lying around.

    Despite Wang Yonghao's best efforts, the beams did not rest flush with each other, leaving many gaps in the walls - but that didn't matter, because there was neither wind nor rain in the world fragment. All the hut had to do was let them sleep without the rosevines getting in - and for this, it should serve perfectly. They'd plug up the largest holes with clay to block off the sunlight, and the rest they could ignore.

    There was just one problem.

    "So I've been thinking -" she began as soon as Wang Yonghao hopped off the roof.

    He sighed, dusting off his robes. "Do you ever stop?"

    She gave him a baffled look. "Do you ever stop breathing?"

    "I do not breathe mysteries."

    "Tragic," she said, shaking her head in mock dismay. "Crippled from birth. My condolences."

    He rubbed his eyes with one hand. "Well, what is it?"

    She pointed at the wooden building. "This hut. We are going to be sleeping there. That makes it a bedroom."

    "Sure. And?"

    "And a bedroom is supposed to have the door facing south. So riddle me this: where is south?"

    Wang Yonghao looked around the perfectly circular world fragment, and its complete lack of any suns, moons, or anything else that could indicate a direction. "We could get a compass," he said uncertainly.

    "Sure," she agreed, "But there is a bigger problem. Do you know why the door is supposed to face south?"

    "Something about feng shui?"

    "I also don't know. That's geomancy, and I only ever went as far as the elemental interactions. Do you see the issue?"

    A frown creased his brow. She gave him a moment, but he still didn't speak, and so she simply continued. "Control of environmental feng shui depends on the environment." She motioned around the world fragment for emphasis. "And where do you think we could find a reference book for our environment? We don't have rain, snow, or night. The concentration of spiritual energy here is absurd. The wind doesn't blow, and we can change air temperature on a whim. All of which means…"

    "That general instructions on geomancy won't apply here," Wang Yonghao concluded.

    She raised a hand, turning it this way and that. "Some will, some won't, but we have no easy way to distinguish. And because of how much spiritual energy is around us, any significant drop in the auspiciousness of feng shui is a mortal danger." She sighed, and headed over to her tools. "I am not sleeping in there until I check it over with my luck bottle."

    "Chiclotron should handle it, surely."

    "That thing almost killed me several times," she said, shaking her head as she returned, bottle in hand. "I won't trust it blindly. Let's hope we don't have to rebuild this house several times."

    Wang Yonghao rubbed his hair. "I mean… We'd still need to, at some point. The wood will warp and splinter as it dries. Some beams will need replacing."

    "One thing after another," she said, hopping into the hut through the open doorway. Perhaps they should also consider adding some stairs. "First, I need to know which is safer - the cold bunker that is growing dampier and moldier by the day, or this hut of dubious structural stability."

    Wang Yonghao hopped in right after her, and she handed him a piece of paper, a brush and an inkwell. "Here, you can help me note down the rolls," she said, "geomancy is a precise science - I'll teach you how to make the graphs later."
    Qian Shanyi woke up from the sharp smell of pine sap tingling her nostrils. She rubbed her eyes open, sneezed, and wrinkled her nose. Pleasant in moderation, but this was a bit much.

    Still better than that damp bunker.

    Comparatively, the hut turned out to have somewhat better feng shui, though measurably worse than out in the open air of the world fragment. Perhaps having a door on the roof was worse than on the side, or perhaps there was some other reason, but the results were hard to argue with. It was possible that if they built the door pointing somewhere else it would have been better still - but Wang Yonghao didn't feel like rebuilding it just for an experiment, and frankly, even if she was ready to lug heavy beams around, neither would she. It was more than good enough to sleep in.

    As she focused on her spiritual energy senses, she felt another unexpected benefit - in the darkness of the hut, spiritual energy became yin-polarized. Even the bunker let in too much light for this to work, and after so long in the ever-present sunlight of the world fragment, feeling this much yin spiritual energy sent a pleasant shiver down her spine.

    Yin turned to yang, and yang to yin quite easily, and with no real harm - but one still felt more natural to her, and it was good to vary the two. Without a moon to bring in more yin, or even a day and night cycle, darkness might be their only source for the foreseeable future.

    She yawned, and hopped out of her hammock, slotting her feet straight into her sandals with the grace of a cultivator. When she felt something wet touch her sole, she pulled one off to check, and saw a sticky glob smeared all over the wood. She raised her eyes upwards, and in the dim light of the hut, saw many droplets all over the ceiling.

    Pine sap. Must have dripped while we were sleeping.

    She ran her hand through her hair, and grimaced when she felt more sap stick to her fingers. It was all over her robes, too. This would be a joy to wash out.

    Walking over to the "door", she pulled out a pair of swords holding the two beams in place, and with a light tap of her foot, sent them toppling out of the hut. Bright sunlight flooded through the opening, and she squinted at it. Clean air felt like a sip of cold water on a hot day after the sharp smell of the hut.

    The beams fell down on the ground with a loud thud and a clunk, and she heard Wang Yonghao stir behind her. "Bwuh?" he said eloquently.

    "We've got a sappy problem," she responded, stepping out to check the clock. Six hours of sleep - good enough. "Any ideas?"

    She heard Wang Yonghao sigh, and after a short scramble with the ropes of his hammock, he stepped out of the hut. "A what problem?" he asked, squinting at her.

    There wasn't even a single drop of sap on him.

    "You know, it's the small things like this that make my blood boil," she said, gesturing to his clothes.

    He looked at her, then at his clothes, then back at her, before shrugging with a lazy yawn.

    She tore off some grass, using it to pick out spots of sap from her hair. "Infuriating as this is," she sighed, trying to get her temper under control, "I suppose it does further prove that your luck is not dependent on the Heavens to function."

    "Did you need more proof?"

    "Not even slightly," Qian Shanyi cursed, tossing the useless clump of grass aside. It wasn't getting the sap out, it was adding the stalks to her new hairstyle. "I am just looking for any excuse to not be absolutely livid that I will need to spend a good hour picking sap out of my robes and hair."

    She spat on her hand to see if the liquid would help. It didn't.

    "It didn't seem that sappy when I was cutting the wood," Wang Yonghao said, hopping out of the hut and heading towards the kitchens. "I figured it would take several days to start dripping. I guess it was hidden a bit deeper within the grain. You should use oil or alcohol to get it out - water won't do anything."

    She sighed, and dropped her hands. Well, at least they already had oil - she bought some for cooking before they left to steal trees from a forest. "Thank you," she said, heading to their food storage. "I don't know how I would have explained getting sap in my hair in the middle of the night within a tavern. I suppose I will just have to wear different robes to sleep, and something to cover my hair, until all of it drips out of the wood. How long do you think that will take?"

    Wang Yonghao shrugged. "No idea. A year? Maybe more - wood dries pretty slowly."

    She gave him a long-suffering stare. "It will drip slower over time," he clarified. "But that's what you get from fresh wood."

    "It's a Heavenly plot, all of this."

    "We could try to dry out the logs faster with a fire treasure?"

    "And burn down our hut in the process," she said grimly, picking up a bottle of olive oil and heading to the bath.
    The oil worked surprisingly well, and after a good breakfast, Qian Shanyi felt leagues better. She and Wang Yonghao split up for the morning - he headed off to the edge of the world fragment to dig out a latrine hole, while she busied herself with scraping the droplets of sap off every surface of the hut. It was annoying work, but not too physically exerting, and after an hour she had a small pile of sap and resin collected into one of their spare bowls.

    Perhaps she'd find a use for it later. She'd have to scrape the hut in the evening too, just to keep the droplets small through the night.

    With her job finished, she joined Wang Yonghao, and once again helped him measure and sketch out cuts to the stone plates they were going to use.

    The latrine itself would double as a composting pile, and so they were designing it with space in mind. They decided on a roughly cubic chamber, about a meter to the side, lined with stone and sealed with fried clay. It would keep the paleworms from escaping, and water from seeping in or out of it. On one side of the chamber, there would be an inclined tunnel, leading up to a much wider, but shallower chamber for the paleworm hive itself, surrounded by raised walls of packed earth, and likewise lined with stone and clay.

    A similar design to that of a regular paleworm farm, if in miniature.

    The first step was, of course, to dig out the two chambers. Since Wang Yonghao still refused her help - and they only had the one shovel, in any case - she spent her time writing down more of his adventures over the years. Fortunately, digging was easy enough that he managed to multitask, and she got quite a lot done. The work was progressing slowly, but surely - though organizing her notes was becoming a challenge in and of itself, as he kept correcting himself about where, when and in what order the various events had occurred.

    "Tell me specifically about the various sects you have met," she asked when they stopped to cook some lunch. "ideally ones from outside the Empire."

    "You saw some pattern?" Wang Yonghao asked, trying, and failing, to conceal his excitement.

    She motioned for him to go back to washing the rice. It was his time to cook. "No," she said, "This is about my idea for making money. Seems to me that the Heavens rapidly drain your cash, if you ever manage to acquire some - perhaps to keep you moving. That means we need a way to make money whenever we need it - and the easiest way would be by selling some of our treasures, but the Empire has a dozen different mechanisms that make this exact thing difficult." He looked up at her in surprise, and she clarified. "It's done to catch thieves, poachers and the like - Lin Fang told us as much. They are not hunting you specifically. But if we were a registered sect, many of these issues would fall away."

    Wang Yonghao grimaced at her words. She eyed him carefully, considering his reaction.

    "So you want us to register a sect?" he said, exchanging the rice water. There was a tension in his voice, though concealed.

    She shook her head sadly. "We can't. But we might be able to pretend we represent a sect from outside the Empire, and get recognition that way, which I think amounts to much the same thing. Do you know any sects that conveniently killed themselves off down to the last man, unbeknownst to the world at large?"

    "Maybe a couple," he said after a moment, and then frowned. "Was that what you meant when you said you got us a business partner? That you'd get Jian Wei's help in pretending to be a sect?"

    "I've considered it," she said mildly, "but no, or at least, not directly. He has no reason to help us, and even less reason to trust our word with no evidence, on something of this nature. I might still find a way… but until then, his role is much simpler. His sect is actively expanding, and every new cultivator needs a new sword, and every old one wants one of higher quality - we could sell some to him under the table, and his sect could handle all the paperwork. We wouldn't be able to sell everything, not without tipping him off to the fact that we are much more than just some very experienced ruin delvers - but the possibility is worthwhile in itself."

    "And you think he'd go for it?"

    "I think it's likely, and I am all but certain he wouldn't be offended if I ask."

    Wang Yonghao's grimace grew wider. "I guess I get the idea, but… I don't know. It doesn't sit right."

    "Why not?"

    "It's…I don't know." He sighed. "Do we have to talk about this? It's not like we need more money right this moment."

    "Hm. Money can come and go, but that you don't want to talk about it makes me a hundred times more interested."

    Wang Yonghao groaned, pouring out the last of the rice washing water, and setting the pot on the fire node to cook. "You just like pushing boundaries, don't you?" he said.

    "To cultivate is to shatter all boundaries on human nature, Yonghao. Now fess up, what is it?"

    He stayed silent while he chopped up some of the heavenly rooster for their dish. She let him think in peace, and picked up a kettle for their rosevine tea - it had reached just about the right temperature. She brewed it lightly - just enough for the taste, but not enough to affect her circulation of spiritual energy. Healer's orders.

    "How do you imagine me establishing a sect?" Wang Yonghao finally said, while she was pouring a cup for each of them. "Patriarch Yonghao? Elder Wang? Ridiculous."

    She hummed, not even looking away from the tea. "You are simply restating the same thing - that you don't like the idea."

    "What?" he said in confusion. "No! I am saying it wouldn't be plausible for me to be one."

    She rolled her eyes, then turned back to him and rolled them again, just so he could see. "Of course it wouldn't be plausible - that's why I wouldn't make you do that. Elders are almost always in the building foundation stage, though I do not recall if it's a strict legal requirement. We'd be playing the roles of regular inner disciples, not elders. Now stop dodging around the question, Yonghao."

    He narrowed his eyes at her. "Fine, maybe I am." he said. "But it's not like I can see into my soul!"

    "You are a cultivator, Yonghao. You can literally take a look."

    He scowled at her, and she couldn't help but laugh. "You know what I mean. How am I supposed to know why I dislike something? Sometimes I just do!"

    "By thinking." She snorted, gesturing to her head with her cup of tea. "Take as much time as you need."

    He fumed all the way through their lunch, and didn't speak again until they were back to digging. With nothing else left to do, she was supervising. "I guess I just don't like the idea of belonging to a sect in general," he finally said.

    "Because of your history with them?" she guessed.

    "Partly? But it's not the whole thing."

    She nodded. "Because you are worried this would make your luck worse?"

    "No, I don't think it will." He shook his head, leaning on his shovel in contemplation. "At least, not directly. I mean, it's just a label at the end of the day, right? But it's just… I guess I don't like leaving traces."

    She gave him a weird look. "You can't help leaving traces. The remains of your battle with that one mushroom spirit blocked off a whole town gate."

    "Something that obvious isn't too common," he said, "Most of the time, I am just some face in the crowd. If I come into town, and something strange happens - well that's probably not related to this one loose cultivator, right? But if I am from a sect, then that's a bigger deal. That gets people to notice, and… I am already too noticeable."

    She tapped her cheek with one finger, considering it. Wang Yonghao wasn't wrong, per se - there was a danger of the wrong person putting the picture together - but it seemed to her that if that was a possibility, then someone would have done it by now. Which meant that either his luck or the Heavens must have been actively running interference, and it shouldn't matter much wherever it was the rumors about a "loose cultivator Wang Yonghao" or about "Wang Yonghao, inner disciple of the Wang sect" that had to be interfered with.

    "I don't see a point in announcing our arrival to all the world," she conceded, "we could be a sect on paper and claim to still be loose cultivators. Traveling incognito - it's not too unusual, I don't think, though I would have to consider how to best tie it into our story. And we could keep you off the claimed sect rolls entirely. It would put another layer of obfuscation between you and any paper traces we leave behind."

    "Thank you." He sighed. "That would make me feel a lot better."

    "And now, about those sects you mentioned," she said, settling down on the grass next to her notes, "tell me everything you know."
     
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    • Interlude: One Thousand Fortunes Of Wang Yonghao
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    • Author Note: Want to read ahead? You can find some patreon-exclusive posts, as well as FOUR more chapters, over on my patreon, for a low price of 3$. That's right, despite being busy with a move all last week, I finally started to get back to the backlog.
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    This chapter has a bit of an experimental style, based on the novel Thresholder by Alexander Wales.​
    Let's start from the beginning. When I unlocked my spiritual root, I was nine years old, living in an orphanage. I think it was in the Violet Springs city? Or maybe it was Blue Waterfalls…

    I am pretty sure there was some kind of color and something about water. There was definitely a big river passing through it.

    At least a lake. Some body of water.

    Okay, fine, I am not very sure, but that's the best I have.

    How do I know I was nine? No, I didn't have any papers. A year after I left I met a cultivator with an age-measuring technique. He wasn't from a sect though.

    Shanyi, you are distracting me again. You wanted to talk about sects.

    So. For the first year, I actually didn't leave the city. I thought I lucked out into a good life - I mean, if I could be a cultivator, I could become rich, right? Food for days, good beds… Not like the orphanage. Well, didn't turn out this way, and the reason was this beastmaster sect. They were growing these giant, rideable sea horses, and once in a while there would be a race that local loose cultivators could take part in. If you won, they'd even accept you into the sect.

    No, I don't remember the name of the sect. It's so hard to keep track.

    Right. Like I said, there was a river. So, like an idiot, I signed up for the race, got a raceseahorse, and started training it up. And of course the seahorse turned out to have a special bloodline, though I wasn't suspicious of that sort of thing at the time, so I came to the race giddy from knowing I was going to win. Imagine my shock when this guy from the sect shows up and demands I give him "his" seahorse.

    Shanyi, I was nine. How good were you at reading people when you were nine?

    That's because you are insane. Anyways, you are right. Turns out the seahorse actually was misplaced from his stables, but I didn't know it at the time.

    Like I said, I was nine. Of course I insulted him. So I don't give it back, enter the race, and then almost win it - but he sabotages me at the last moment, and I barely escape with my life. He very loudly swore he'd find me and kill me - something about how he would be gracious in allowing his seahorses to feed on my entrails, because that's the best fate trash like me can hope for. Or maybe he said something else, the threats are all so similar.

    Why would I - no, I won't gamble that you'd be able to threaten me in a way I haven't heard before. First of all, you would lose. Secondly, I will never gamble with you on any subject for as long as I live.

    No, I won't make a bet that I will never make a bet either. You'd say I lost right away.

    So after the race I decided that I best make myself scarce and ran away from the city. I tried to survive in the wilderness for a while, but that…didn't really work. I still mostly avoided cities or sects for a long time.

    No, I think I got that manual back in the city somewhere. It might have been the same ruins where I fell into a barrel of Asure Heart Cleansing Dew? There was also a cosmos ring with the drugs for it, I think.

    I lost it somewhere. What, is the world fragment not enough for you?

    Okay, that makes sense. Sorry. But I still don't remember where I lost it.

    Anyways. Next time I ran into a big sect was when I was thirteen. They lived at the very edge of the empire, around one of the world tears, and called themselves the Sky Void Island Temple.

    You've never seen one? It's a giant tear in space, blacker than anything you've ever seen. It consumes everything that falls into it, and spews out spiritual energy. A wind blows into it, growing stronger the closer you get, from all the air vanishing directly into the tear. After centuries of it, every last grain of soil had been scoured for many miles around, clean down to the world edges. You look out anywhere, and it's just the clear blue sky and the suns, like you are hanging in limbo.

    This sect lived on platforms, tied down with heavy chains around where the world edge occasionally bent into a column, like in the middle of Reflection Ridge. They all practiced flight using these hang gliders, using the local wind to move around, and I got pretty good at it while I stayed with them. Because there was nothing else that grew nearby, they had to bring in new stuff all the time - especially soil - and did their best to grow their own food, though that wasn't really my job.

    Yeah, they were good people. Really kind. I guess living in a place like that, you either all work together or you die. They are also who gave me the scroll for my Fluttering Wing Step technique.

    Did I never tell you its name? Scarlet Dragonfly technique does sound fancier, I have to admit.

    What happened? My fucking luck is what happened. World crack, completely unexpected. Half the people died immediately, and the other half when the chains shattered and the wind pulled the platforms into the world tear. I only survived because I could walk on air. My teacher was asleep when it happened, and by the time he awoke, he was halfway into the tear. Other people who mastered the technique tried to pull others out, but the winds were too strong. If there were any survivors, I've never met them.

    You think I didn't blame myself enough? This is exactly why I don't want to meet people! Hundreds of people died and all because of -

    Ow! Stop slapping me!

    Ow! Ow! Okay, fine, fine! It's the Heaven's fault, not mine!

    Did you really have to slap me?

    On a second thought, don't explain.

    Where? I don't know, somewhere in the south. I think it might have been outside the empire - I am not sure.

    Map? No, I've never bothered.

    Why would I look up a map? I just ask people where to go.

    Save your frustrations, please.

    How long? I don't remember. Around a year, I would guess.

    Maybe. Let's move on. It's been a long time ago, but I still don't like thinking about it.

    Thank you. Well, after that I've pretty much given up on cultivation. I'd get to a place, find something to eat and do, and then leave, and hope I could get ahead of the bullshit. This mostly didn't work. I don't remember where I headed right after the Sky Void Temple - maybe it was the Serpent River, or maybe it was the dwarfholds. I was really not in a good place.

    There were a lot of sect encounters after that, but you wanted to know about ones that completely vanished… I think that only leaves two.

    Do you know about the southern deserts? Right. Well, the stories and books can't tell you the whole picture. When they talk about the shifting sands, this is literal. There are these rocks, each as large as a hill, that move across the desert, and the sands are attracted to them like iron to a lodestone. I don't know why - these sands are not ordinary. Each rock is surrounded by a much larger hill of red sand, shifting and flowing in waves as it moves.

    I say sands because there are different types. The local cultivators had a whole system, but I never learned it. Red sand was slow and predictable, mostly sticking to the rocks. Gray sand flowed quickly, like enormous waves or tides across the desert, shifting with every hour, sometimes flowing faster than an avalanche. Purple sand was light, and when the winds blew strong, formed tornadoes and hurricanes. Brown sand was called the hungry sand, because it clumped up into voids beneath the surface, ones you might never get out of if you stepped on top of them. But there were more types than this, and the sands mixed together as well. When you first looked out over the desert, you just saw the dunes, but after a while, you started to read the landscape.

    There were not many people there, because the only reliable source of food was a certain type of beetle that buried itself in the sand, hard to harvest and harder to eat. I don't think that people went there because they liked it. I think most were demonic cultivators of one fashion or another.

    It's not that simple.

    No, it really is not that simple. I don't know what they did before, but in the desert they were just people trying to get by.

    Well, it doesn't matter now. There were no traditional sects there, but rather, there were clans, formed around specific families. These clans mostly made their compounds within the rocks. People were fiercely loyal to their clans, because you couldn't live there without one, and not many could afford to pay a guide to lead them out of the desert, even if they had a place to go. Though I never joined one, I lived with one of them because I wanted a place to hide, and I figured it was about as far as it got. For a bit, it even seemed to be going well, though I never got close to any cultivators. The food was, like I said, terrible, but at least it was there.

    The clan I was with lived in a rock that was heading towards another, that one with a different clan. The two started out friendly enough with each other, and even planned a marriage to bring each other closer together. But the closer the rocks got to each other, the less food there was - two clans harvesting beetles from the same area. Tensions rose. Then there was some kind of misunderstanding - I do not remember exactly what - and things descended into violence almost at once. Both clans blamed each other and started a war that got more and more bloody the closer the rocks got. I managed to mostly stay out - by that point, I was more familiar with how my luck worked, I suppose. In the end, the rocks collided, and both compounds were obliterated. Aside from a few people who fled well in advance, I do not think anyone else got out, not after their granaries and water storages were lost among the sands. Unlike me, they would have had to leave the desert on foot.

    The last one was when I was exploring the eastern jungles. The fauna there is pretty scary, but most of it can't fly, so I was pretty safe. If you have ever seen a drawing of a flock of solar geese - let me tell you, the reality is far, far more terrifying. Anyways, I needed somewhere to get food, so I kept in contact with this one small sect in the area - they paid me decent money for killing the demon beasts. They were called… Sanguine Peak Pavilion, or something like that. Their sect compound was in the middle of the jungle, up on top of a small mountain. It was surrounded by a hundred meter wide wall of poisonous bushes - crimson like blood, making the whole place look like a giant flower.

    I planned to stay there for at least several weeks, but four days into it, this ancient grandpa showed up. I don't know what hole he crawled out of, but he killed the sect elders, and then rounded up the rest of us and said he was going to pick out one cultivator who would be his direct disciple. He made us play games. Some were competitions of strength, others just normal games - cards, dice. Maybe he was weeding out the unlucky. Whomever lost a game, or tried to run was killed on the spot.

    Of course I won all of them.

    What did I do? Waited for him to fall asleep two days after it all ended, then picked out about a dozen biggest demon beast cores out of my inner world and made a crystal bomb. Not like they are hard to make, and I had a lot of experience over the years. Then I put it next to his face and blew his head clean off - wrapped in moth silk, he never even felt the danger. High building foundation or not, his brains still splattered all across the wall and ceiling, same as all the people he killed.

    Yeah, that's why I keep my inner world hidden, in case I need to do it all over again. And it's why I try to stick to traveling in the Empire. Not many secret realms left here where one of those can crawl out of.

    I guess I never thought about it. But if they were going to explode on their own, they would have done so already. And I guess my luck helps too, now that I think about it.

    Ruthless? If I was really ruthless I would have done it before -

    Ow! Fine, fine! I'll stop.

    No, I don't like killing. But I got pretty good at running away, and sometimes ancient grandpas get in the way.

    Anyways. I hope you'll figure something out while I take a break.

    Thank you. It's fine. I just… need a minute.

    I'll be back when I will stop thinking of all that blood.
     
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    • Chapter 55: Pass On Your Wisdom To Save A Thousand Souls
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    • Author Note: Want to read ahead? You can find some patreon-exclusive posts, as well as FIVE more chapters, over on my patreon, for a low price of 3$.
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    The two towns, Reflection Ridge and Glaze Ridge, were home to three sects - Nine Singing Vessels, Northern Scarlet Stream, and Palace of the Glowing Cliffs, who, collectively, controlled most of the trade in heavenly materials and earthly treasures. There was no way to sell the loot they got from the tribulation in any reasonable time without going through one of them.

    The most natural choice would have been Northern Scarlet Stream - the sect of Jian Shizhe and Jian Wei, but Qian Shanyi didn't want to put all her eggs into a single basket. Which brought her to the sect compound of the Nine Singing Vessels.

    Nine Singing Vessels was a sect of refiners, making and selling swords, talismans, and other equipment that used spiritual energy. That meant they had a reason to buy the materials for their own use, or have customers that would be interested - but it also meant she had to deal with refiners. Refinement of materials held a hundred times more secrets than all other cultivation, and the sects dedicated to it grew all the more insular for it, and guarded their positions in the empire with vicious jealousy. To this day, most refinement sects were still family clans, just like a hundred and fifty years ago, all disciples merely members of a single extended family, and women barely even let out of the compound.

    Ordinarily, they would have turned her around at the gates. Fortunately, a mountain of money opened all doors.

    It took her a good hour to go through her list of materials together with one elder Li, a representative of the sect - a cultivator well into his age, his beard white as snow. He wanted her to sell them everything in a single go - but she could never agree to that. She and Wang Yonghao were playing at being mysterious, yet possessing great wealth, and selling everything at once would make them seem desperate for money. After all, the longer you sought a customer, the better the price you could fetch.

    Instead, she wanted the sect to work as her middleman. They would put up her materials for sale in their stores, and after a month, find the highest bidder for any given ingredient. In exchange, she would grant them a percentage from every sale - or the material itself, if they could offer a higher price.

    Elder Li was an experienced haggler, not giving an inch to her, for all that his style differed radically. They were swiftly approaching an impasse - which is exactly what she wanted.

    "Very well." She sighed, pretending to concede. "How about this: I will sell you one tenth of the materials immediately. In fact, I will bleed myself dry and give them to you at half price - but the other half, you will pay in information."

    Elder Li's stare could have pierced straight to her soul, if her eyes let anything show. "Information?"

    "I have an academic interest in the Heavens," she lied, "and thus I seek out any information about them. Artifacts, tribulation records, stories of sects that have practiced heavenly techniques - anything. Anything you sell - either directly, or by refining one of my materials further - has to be paid with an article that I could not easily find elsewhere."

    Elder Li pursed his lips. "We are refiners. Not researchers."

    She folded her hands in a begging gesture. "Elder Li, this here humble cultivator begs you, do not stab a dagger of refusal straight through my heart like this. If you cannot do so, then pay someone else. Surely a sect of your eminence can open many doors with but a glance? This is already the best gift I could possibly offer you - after all, I have no way of knowing how valuable this information will be. Do we have a deal?"

    They did not have a deal. It took her another twenty minutes to argue Elder Li into something they could both agree to - but in the end, she got exactly what she wanted. The supposed heart of the deal, thousands of spirit stones worth of materials, she couldn't care less about, even if the sect ended up scamming her entirely. It was a massive amount of money - but they didn't need a massive amount of money. A tenth of it at half price was still well over four hundred spirit stones, more than enough for the foreseeable future.

    And on top of it, she got an agreement for information she would struggle to get any other way.
    The postal office seemed different with every visit. The first time, it was dark out, the hall deserted, with only Junming manning the post. The second time, she came for her tribulation, and had no mind for anything else. The third time was brief, merely a few hours later, and only to tell Junming what to do with their loot. The fourth was just before they went off to the forest to steal trees - to consult maps, check out a couple books, and ask for a copy of the cultivator almanac - but merely a single day after the tribulation, the hill still stank of blood. But the office still stood, and after yesterday's rain, even the flowers framing the entrance seemed to straighten out.

    No matter the crisis, after a while, everything went back to normal - and when she walked through the doors, she saw a good dozen people waiting for their mail as if nothing had happened. Junming was back behind the counter. Yesterday it was postmaster Chen Changjie - perhaps they simply switched up every other day.

    This time, she patiently waited in line. She was the only cultivator here, and the ordinary people around her tried not to stare - or at least, averted their eyes when she met theirs with a smile. All except one.

    A boy, not even ten years old, was holding onto the long skirts of his mother close to the front of the queue. His head was spinning around the room like a windmill, and when he saw Qian Shanyi walk in, his eyes widened in awe, and he immediately headed over to her. The mother was too engrossed in shuffling through some papers in her hands to notice.

    "Are you the one who killed the tribulation?" the boy asked, positively vibrating with excitement. His voice was surprisingly quiet for a child.

    Qian Shanyi crouched to the boy's eye level, lightly angling her sword sheath on her waist so it wouldn't scrape against the floor. She had no affinity for children, and had, thankfully, managed to largely avoid dealing with them back in her sect - but if someone looked this excited about cultivation, she couldn't just brush them off. She was much worse than this at his age, after all.

    "I was the target," she said, "but I didn't fight alone. Did you see us transcend?"

    The boy nodded. There were sparks in his eyes. "It was so cool! The ox was so big but then you went swish and swoop and it was dead just like that, and then the dragon - "

    The boy's mother at the front raised her eyes from her papers, and gasped as she realized her son was gone from her side. She spun around, and breathed out when she saw him talking to Qian Shanyi. "Ah Muyang!" she said sharply as she approached. "I told you to stay by my side!"

    A spike of panic raced across the boy's face as he spun around to face his mother. "I just -" he said, and fell silent under her stern glare, shrinking in on himself.

    Turning towards Qian Shanyi, the woman bowed. Qian Shanyi gave her a small nod in return, not rising up from her crouched pose. "Honorable immortal, I must humbly apologize for my son bothering you. I will correct this misbehavior at once."

    "He wasn't bothering me," Qian Shanyi said simply. Cultivators were eccentric existences, so she understood the wariness the older woman must have felt at seeing her son talk to a stranger. "It seemed to me that he wanted to hear some cultivation tales, that's all."

    Muyang nodded vigorously. His mother sighed, rubbing her eyes. "We live nearby, and he has always been obsessed with it… He even begged to come with me today, just to look at where that terrifying tribulation happened two days ago," she said, before turning back to glare at her son. "But that is no excuse to leave his mother's side!"

    Qian Shanyi tapped her cheek. She would have gladly entertained the boy for a bit, but this woman had, in her short-sightedness of voicing her own misplaced worries, made this quite a bit harder. By all rights, she should have been happy that someone else could keep an eye on her son while she dealt with the mail - but by publicly telling him off, she'd be losing face if she immediately backed down and agreed to do exactly what he wanted. Worse, if Shanyi proposed it, the mother might also lose face if she didn't agree - and that just might make her take it out on the kid once they went home.

    The last thing she wanted was to get this child into trouble over something so trivial. She needed to give this woman some kind of excuse…

    Qian Shanyi stood up, taking a step closer to the woman and lowering her voice, so the boy would not hear. "Fellow -" she began, just as her mind reached out for something in common between the two of them, and ran into her complete ignorance. "- petitioner of the postal office," she continued, blowing past the spot of awkwardness, "Of late, my life has been filled with trials, and this latest tribulation almost killed me. On top of that, I have not seen my family in what feels like years. To have a spot to share the brightness of cultivation would be such a contrast that you'd be doing me a favor."

    She saw the woman hesitate, and, glancing behind her, pushed her final card in. "It seems that your place in the queue is almost up."

    "Of course. I would be honored to assist you." the woman bowed, and glanced down at Muyang. "I will take some time with the post. Entertain the honorable immortal in the meantime."

    Muyang nodded vigorously. Qian Shanyi smiled, motioning to the seats lining the walls. "Take a seat. Have you heard the tale of how the immortal monkey king helped the cultivators?"

    She didn't know how Muyang managed to not squeal.
    "...and that's why to this day, there is a cultivator talking to the monkey king at all times of day and night, and in return, he allows us to harvest hundreds of different heavenly materials and earthly treasures from his body." she said, finishing up her tale. Reaching into a bandolier, she pulled out a little bottle, full of powdered ivory of the rampaging divine ape, and shook it to punctuate her point.

    She'd gathered a bit of an audience once she started - other people waiting in queue, mostly, and she spoke a bit louder for their benefit. They gave her looks - most cultivators wouldn't have been quite so casual in their interactions - though their surprise faded quickly. One man even left and returned a minute later with a pair of his own children.

    "That is so sad," one of the new girls said quietly, "they cut off his teeth every day, like some kind of fruit?"

    Qian Shanyi shrugged. "It is his choice. To cultivate is to rebel against the heavens - if I was sealed under a mountain, I would have done the same thing to spite the bastards."

    "It's not sad, it's cool," Muyang said, "Tell us another one!"

    "I think you won't have the time for it," she chuckled, glancing at the boy's mother. She could see that she was almost finished with Junming.

    Muyang deflated in disappointment. "Do you think I could be a cultivator?" he asked quietly.

    She snorted. "How old are you?"

    "Nine," the boy said without blinking.

    Was that plausible? He seemed a bit too short to her eyes. How tall were nine year olds supposed to be, anyways?

    When in doubt, bluff.

    "Did you know cultivators can smell lies?" she said, tapping her nose.

    He blushed, folding immediately. "Seven…" he said, quietly.

    The two other kids gasped in shock, amazed by her powers of divination.

    "Hm." She hummed. "Well, Muyang, most cultivators only unlock their spiritual root around fourteen, so you have a long way to go. But even then, most likely not. Only one in a hundred ever unlock their spiritual root, and it's down to chance who is lucky and who is not."

    He deflated further. "But I want to be a cultivator," he said stubbornly.

    She ruffled his hair, and he glared at her in annoyance. She laughed at the look on his face: if there was one thing that made dealing with children tolerable, it was honesty. No ordinary adult would dare glare at a cultivator quite like that.

    "To cultivate is to rebel against the heavens," she said, "and so if you rebel against the heavens, you are already a cultivator, aren't you? We all do the best we can - even the monkey king still rebels by sacrificing his teeth. If you strive upwards, you'll always find a way to help, even if you won't be the one holding the sword."

    She saw Muyang's mother step away from the counter of the postal office, and decided to leave the kid on a high note. "Here," she reached into her robes, and drew out a whistle Wang Yonghao made from a bone of the Heavenly Rooster. He had taken to bone carving as easily as to woodworking, and had made three different whistles in his free time over the last couple days - they had no shortage of small bones, after all.

    The whistle looked the part - dark gray and with a shine of steel. She handed it to Muyang, and he all but fainted from the excitement.

    "A little present, in return for having listened to my stories," she said, "it's made from a bone of a heavenly rooster, and will attract a bit of metal-type spiritual energy. Treat it with care."

    "And if I get in trouble I can blow on it thrice and you'll come and save me?"

    "No." She laughed. "It's just a regular whistle."

    A whistle made from a heavenly material, so tough you could ram it straight through a block of stone and not even scratch the surface, and ridiculously expensive for what it was - but at the end of the day, just a whistle.

    Muyang leapt up off his seat, and caught up with his mother, clutching the whistle tightly. Before they left through the doors, he turned back and gave her a comically low bow.

    "Can we also get a whistle?" one of the other kids asked, bringing her attention back to them.

    "One gift per day," she said, rolling her eyes. "But I suppose I could tell you another fable."

    She still had some time to kill before her spot in the queue was up.
    By the time she managed to extricate herself from the crowd of children - she swore that they multiplied any time she looked away - a good twenty minutes had passed. Without the oversight of her sect elders hanging over her head, telling them stories felt surprisingly relaxing - though a part of it was how enraptured they were that she was talking to them at all. As soon as that faded, she was sure the usual annoyances would creep right back.

    When she stepped up to the counter, Junming gave her a small nod. With this many ordinary people in the room, they were back to wearing their face-concealing cowl. It was impossible to tell their reactions through it, so she hoped they weren't annoyed about her unintentionally turning their office into a nursery. She certainly would have been.

    <How may I help?> they signed.

    "I am here for my copy of the cultivator almanac," she said, pulling three letters out of her robes, "The Postmaster said it should be ready today. And I would like your opinion about a couple letters."

    Junming glanced at the stack in her hands, and then nodded, locked up the letterboxes behind themselves, and led her into a small, private side room, with a solid table and a pair of chairs. She took her seat, setting the three letters on the table, while they pulled their cowl off and sat down opposite her.

    <Almanac isn't ready yet>, they signed. She had to guess at the first word, but a sign that was based on a book being opened seemed clear enough. <Scribe said it will be ready by noon.>

    "That is fine," she said, "If I don't come for it later today, send it to our tavern, if you don't mind."

    Junming nodded, and picked up her stack of letters, giving the top one a curious look - it was already sealed into an envelope.

    "That one is private," she said, "the other two, please."

    The first letter was to Wu Lanhua, broadly explaining that she was in good health, and thanking her for the assistance. She deliberated on wherever to send it or not, but in the end, decided in favor. For all that Wu Lanhua's overtures had been misplaced and pretty forceful, it was unquestionable that she had been incredibly helpful, and had kept Shanyi's identity secret from her fiance. If Lanhua wanted to, she could find out where Shanyi had gone easily enough - Curls leaping into the sky was hard to miss, after all. Sending a letter was only polite, and the merchant would be a good contact for the future - not to mention being an interesting person in general.

    Of course, she didn't address it directly to Wu Lanhua - there was no need to make their personal relationship known to everyone who would so much as look at the letter. The envelope was addressed to the general offices of her shipping business, and contained a second envelope, this one addressed to Wu Lanhua personally. Her underlings could deliver it from there.

    While she was busy ruminating, Junming had already picked up the next letter, and was quickly reading through it. It was a detailed account of their tribulation, with her and Wang Yonghao's notes on what they observed, and how they dealt with various challenges.

    <Many people forget to write these,> Junming signed once they were done, <I haven't even started mine yet.>

    "It's my civic duty, is it not?" she said, running a hand through her hair, "I am sure the ministry of statistics would appreciate an update, especially with how rare the Zodiac tribulation is."

    <You said you wanted my opinion?>

    "Just to make sure I didn't miss anything important. I couldn't explain what you did with the ice, for example."

    <I'll add it to my report,> Junming signed, and set the letter aside, picking up the last one.

    They read it quietly. Their natural inclination to stay silent made her glad it was their shift today. <This is tricky,> they finally signed, setting the letter aside.

    "It is." She nodded. "But do you foresee any issues?"

    The third letter was her proposal for helping cultivators get out of heavenly vows.

    It really was a tricky subject, especially since none of it could ever be spoken aloud. Very few cultivators made heavenly vows in the first place, and only a vanishing few made one without being sure they could fulfill their part of the bargain. Absolutely nobody, outside of fables and herself, even tried making one while intending to break it. This was why no system of help already existed.

    But some cultivators might, through no fault of their own, end up in a situation where completing the vow became impossible - and realize this before the Heavens did. To save even a single cultivator from the jaws of Heavens was righteous, even if they walked into those jaws themselves - it was just a question of how best to accomplish it.

    Her proposal was three-fold. First of all, cultivators had to be informed about the possibility. The simplest and most unobtrusive possibility was an informational message pinned to one of the walls of the postal office. Vow-takers could hardly be blamed for reading it while their eyes roamed around, after all.

    The second step was getting a cultivator in touch with someone who could help. This was also tricky: after all, if they went to a Ministry of Helping People Get Out Of Heavenly Vows, the Heavens would know exactly what they were doing. But the Heavens could not read, and that provided an opportunity. A vow-taker could send an innocuous request for information to one of the many ministries of the empire, and attach their plea for help to the end of their letter. The clerk receiving it would be handling hundreds of letters every week, and if they later directed a new request to another ministry, it could hardly be linked to this one letter coming in.

    The final step was actually receiving help. This was far too general for her to provide much advice, but when it came to information, she suggested establishing a general system of requesting copies of passages from books stored in distant libraries by mail - it would help hide the letters about the tribulations, and would also help reduce the need to move precious books around.

    Junming deliberated for a couple minutes, before leaving, and returning with a brush and an inkwell. They set the letter in front of themselves, and quickly added some notes to the margins. Qian Shanyi leaned over to read them.

    This is not a new idea, they wrote in regards to her second proposal, a portion of mail is already shuffled around from one postal office to the other to hide special correspondence. Adding this would not be too difficult.

    "I see," she said neutrally.

    <It's not my decision to make,> Junming signed, leaning back, <the best I can do is send it up the chain.>

    "Thank you," she said, raising up from her chair.

    <Before you leave,> Junming signed as she was passing by him, and she stopped, turning around to watch his hands. <One question. What is your name?>

    "Is this about my seal?" she said, raising an eyebrow. She was long prepared for the question - she had given her name as Lan Yishan when she asked Junming about crossing the glassy fields, but Wang Yonghao shut the door on keeping a single coherent identity with his big mouth as soon as she met him, and then she sealed it up herself with bricks and cement once the tribulation came. "I have two. Lan Yishan is how I was called from birth, and what I use for official business - that's why it's on my seal. It is also on many other documents. Qian Shanyi was given to me by my teacher, and is the one I prefer to use."

    Junming shifted around, clearly anxious. "Not supposed to do that," he croaked, switching to spoken language.

    "And what am I to do?" she said, already knowing where this discussion would lead, "Abandon my name? I might as well cut off one of my fingers."

    "Make a pseudonym. Official."

    "I've never felt the need," she said contemplatively, "nor had the time, frankly. We do not stay in one place much."

    It was still hard for her to tell, but she felt that Junming was fighting against themselves to make a decision. "Don't make trouble," they finally croaked.

    "I am a cultivator, Junming - I can't promise that." She smiled. "Best I can promise is to make a little trouble for a lot less trouble later. But I'll try to find the time for a pseudonym while I am recovering."

    Junming shook their head, but waved her off. She left the room, humming to herself.

    All things considered, this morning was unfolding brilliantly. Now it was time to meet up with Wang Yonghao, and see if the Heavens were set on ruining it.
     
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    • Chapter 56: Pluck The Arrogance Right Off Your Lips
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    Qian Shanyi had agreed to meet up with Wang Yonghao at the central square of Reflection Ridge once she was finished with her mail, and she headed there, keeping her eyes open for anything notable. She was done earlier than expected, so perhaps she would get ahead of him.

    She put on her leather cloak on the way. When she reached the square, she stopped, casually leaning against a column that supported the second storey of some fabric store, partly obscured from sight by a small crowd. Outer disciples of the Palace of the Glowing Cliffs seemed to be loading spools of fabric and crates of thread onto a cart - perhaps for their uniforms.

    The square itself was something to behold. The edge of the world here curled down into a funnel, falling down in a column of pure blue sky right into the middle of the square. It was only midday, so the suns were still quite high in the sky - but as the evening came, some of them would descend down into the middle of the square, spiraling around the funnel, before vanishing below the ground.

    The ground glittered in the daylight, glass crushed down into sand, the space empty and wide open - nobody wanted to build their house too close to the funnel, lest the scorching fires of the suns burn it down, after all. The only notable structure was a wooden platform built close to the center, no doubt treated to resist the heat, where half a dozen body fundamentalists were wrestling with each other, busy training throws and body locks.

    She spotted Wang Yonghao as soon as he arrived, all the way on the opposite side of the square, his pure white scholarly robes sticking out like a sore thumb in the crowd of the townsfolk. She stayed hidden, watching him head into a restaurant - an opportunity to see how he behaved without her around was precious, and not to be wasted.

    The restaurant was a two-storey building, with the second floor forming an open space, encircled by a balcony railing, the wide roof above it only supported by columns. Tables were set up on both floors, with a cooking area in front of the building, where the chef and his underlings were working with an enormous array of lenses pointed straight at one of the suns. A pair of waitresses were running between the tables, and when Wang Yonghao walked in, one of them made a beeline for him. An excitable one - wide gestures, bouncing on her feet.

    After a couple words, the waitress led Wang Yonghao upstairs, and towards one of the tables at the very edge of the balcony. After seating him, she hovered around, talking for a long time, and Qian Shanyi regretted that she had never learned to read lips. Far too many words to be merely a list of dishes.

    All throughout, Wang Yonghao barely even glanced at the woman, his answers curt, and finally just waved her off. She left, but soon returned, carrying a pot of tea. The waitress tried to get him to talk again, but he was just as stone-faced, merely looking out onto the square as if searching for someone, and soon the waitress left entirely, looking a bit dejected.

    Qian Shanyi watched the restaurant for a while longer, making mental notes. This waitress didn't seem to be doing her job right - she stuck mostly to the second floor, and spent entirely too much time talking to the customers, though her talk with Yonghao was the longest by far, and she seemed to avoid couples. Her counterpart had to work twice as hard to compensate, and Qian Shanyi wondered why she even went along with it.

    Qian Shanyi smiled. This confirmed some of her suspicions about Wang Yonghao - they'd have plenty to talk about. But first…

    With a playful smirk on her lips, she turned away from the square, and circled around it through side alleys until she came out behind the restaurant, from a direction Wang Yonghao couldn't see. Closing her spiritual pores to hide her presence, she headed inside, and straight towards the stairs leading up to the second floor.

    "Miss? Miss!" a voice called out behind her as she stepped onto the first step.

    "Hm?" she said quietly, turning around. She wanted to surprise Wang Yonghao, and didn't want him to hear her voice.

    Behind her was the same waitress she observed from afar, her hand stretched out, ready to grab her by the edge of her cloak. Qian Shanyi casually stepped around, moving neither too fast nor too slow, letting the fingers of the waitress close on empty air.

    As the gaze of the waitress swept over her, falling on the scarlet silk robes beneath her cloak and the sword at her waist, her eyes widened. "Oh!" the waitress said, covering her mouth with one hand. "Ah, honorable immortal, I didn't realize…"

    Up close, Qian Shanyi could tell that the waitress was quite young - perhaps not even twenty. Her face was cute, though not exceptional, with a button nose and wide eyes, and her robes matched her well - equally cute, soft-colored silk, with decorations around the waist and wrists. Her hair was pinned into a bun, with two hair sticks poking out from the top left side. In her hands, she carried a wax tablet, orders noted down in clean handwriting.

    "It's nothing," Qian Shanyi said, patting the waitress on her shoulder with a smile. She gave the hairsticks another glance. "You haven't done anything wrong. Now what did you want to say? Speak freely."

    "Oh, thank you." The waitress sighed. "It's just, usually you need a reservation, and I thought you didn't know. We get travelers who simply walk in sometimes, and it's so hard to keep track of everything…"

    "Don't worry about it," Qian Shanyi said, "My partner should have already gotten a table. White robes, arrogant face?"

    A strange, displeased look passed over the face of the waitress, with just a hint of a blush to her cheeks, gone as fast as it appeared. "Oh, yes," she said flatly, "he is on the second floor. Should I show you the way?"

    "That won't be necessary," Qian Shanyi said, shaking her head. "I would like to surprise him, so I will go up alone. Thank you for the offer."

    The waitress bowed again, and turned toward the room, tapping the wax tablet against her shoulder with a frown. Her lips were curved a bit downwards, and on impulse, Qian Shanyi put a hand on her shoulder. The waitress turned back to her with surprise.

    "You seem to be a bit down on yourself," Qian Shanyi said, "I am an immortal chef myself - I know this work can get a bit chaotic. You noticed me right away, so you can't be that bad, can you?"

    The waitress grimaced slightly, rubbing her face. Her open, pleasant attitude appealed to Shanyi, even if the professional pride in the back of her mind whispered that the waitress should be keeping her eyes on the customers, not chatting with her. "I have been working here since I was a child," the waitress said, "I think I just don't have any talent for it."

    Out of the corner of her eye, Qian Shanyi spotted the other waitress glance at the two of them from across the hall, her eyes full of concern. The two women looked almost identical - if her eyes were not sharpened by cultivation, she wasn't sure she could distinguish the two. Even their robes were the same, though the other waitress had her hair sticks in the typical cross. Twins?

    "What's your name?" Qian Shanyi smiled.

    "Chu Lin, honorable immortal," Chu Lin said, giving her a short bow.

    "Please just call me Shanyi. Fellow restaurant disciple Chu, not even a phoenix can ascend into the Heavens in a single flap of its wings. 'Talent' is simply what years of hard work look like from the outside. I am sure you'll get there in time."

    A sad look passed over Chu Lin's eyes. Perhaps she read her wrong?

    "I don't want to take up more of your time," Qian Shanyi said instead of trying to puzzle her out, "but there may be some disciples from the Nine Singing Vessels sect looking for me later today. Could you tell me when they arrive?"

    Chu Lin nodded readily, and Qian Shanyi headed upstairs.

    Soft, refreshing wind blew across the second floor, bringing with it delightful smells from the kitchens below. She had kept track of where Wang Yonghao was, so her eyes snapped to him right away. He had his back turned to the rest of the restaurant, looking out onto the square and the cooking area down below, and Qian Shanyi quietly approached him, stepping carefully to keep her sandals from tapping on the wooden roof.

    When she was right next to him, she brought her lips up to his ear. "How was your day?" she said, opening all of her spiritual pores at once, and reconstituting her spiritual shield.

    Wang Yonghao all but lept out of his seat, clutching his heart with one hand and the pommel of his sword with another. She cackled as she took the seat opposite him.

    Wang Yonghao grimaced, forcing his heartbeat back down. "Why did you have to scare me like that?!"

    "Because it amused me," she said, lounging back in her chair, and glanced over the edge of the balcony. She watched curiously as one of the cooks adjusted the massive lens array to keep it pointed at a sun traveling across the sky. "Great news: Nine Singing Vessels took my offer."

    "And where's the money?" Wang Yonghao said, bringing her attention back to the table. He sat back down, and was pouring her a cup of tea. She nodded to him in gratitude.

    "I didn't want to wait for it," she said, "and so I told them to find me here once they were done moving the goods to their own warehouse, and verifying the quality. Four hundred and thirty six spirit stones right away, and easily ten times that over the next several months, once the sales start coming in."

    "If they even pay us," Wang Yonghao grumbled.

    She rolled her eyes. There were reasons to be concerned about the deal, but this wasn't one of them. "I have an agreement with their stamp on it, and they have no reason to cheat us. Unless the warehouse catches fire right this moment, I don't see them backing out."

    She cackled again as Wang Yonghao winced. The Heavens didn't need her help to make their plans.

    She picked up her cup of tea and took a sip. It was black tea, brewed quite strongly, and with herbs added for taste - not what she preferred, but she could still appreciate the quality.

    Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed Wang Yonghao frowning at her. "I kept meaning to ask. Why do you do that?" he asked.

    She blinked in surprise. "Do what? Drink tea?"

    "No, with your pinkie finger," he said, making a hooking motion with his own. "Whenever you pick up a new cup, you flick a drop into your mouth before taking a full sip."

    "Oh, that," she said, curiously looking down at her hand. There was a bit of tea on the tip of her pinkie where she dipped it into the cup, and she quickly licked it off. "It's an old habit. I barely even realize I am doing it at this point. Is it that noticeable?"

    "Not very," he said, "I only picked it up in retrospect. But why do you do it? Testing for poison?"

    "Something like that," she said slowly, "Not…poison, exactly."

    "But you don't do it when we are together. At least, not anymore - you did it back in the forest, and then you stopped."

    "There's no reason to do it when we are together," she said, "But back to today -" she quickly continued, before Wang Yonghao could ask another question she wasn't in the mood to discuss, "How was your shopping trip? All went well, I hope?"

    "Well, I didn't buy anything," Wang Yongao said with a sigh, thankfully letting the topic go, "in case you couldn't get the money. Just looked."

    "Sensible," she said, looking over the railing again. The chef had caught her eye - a big man, with broad shoulders. There was some family resemblance there to the two waitresses - father or uncle, perhaps?
    "See anything interesting?"

    "A couple things, yeah. There's a blackout formation, and some decent formation ink. Some of the tools you mentioned, too. I've actually been thinking… Well." She made a motion with one finger in the air, prompting him to continue. "Would you mind if I get some bone and wood carving tools?"

    She looked back at him, and raised an eyebrow. "Why are you even asking me? Half of this money is yours in the first place. If you want to buy them, then buy them."

    "Well, we don't really need them for anything," he mumbled.

    "So?" Her eyebrow rose higher. "We have plenty of money and, at least for now, aren't under any direct pressure. Please, enjoy yourself while we can. I intend to do so as well."

    "I was thinking of how we'd carry them," he said, no doubt meaning his inner world, and the need to conceal its existence.

    She shrugged. "So buy another bag to carry them. You are a big man, I trust you to manage. Still, aside from this - no problems?"

    Wang Yonghao looked directly in her eyes. "No," he said simply.

    Very interesting.

    Sending him on the shopping trip was something of a test, to see if anything would happen. A bait for the Heavens, in a way.

    "Let's talk about this back in the tavern," she said casually, noticing Chu Lin heading their way with a plate full of steaming ribs. "Our food is almost here."

    Chu Lin engaged the two of them in conversation while she set the plates down - a big one with the ribs, and two empty plates for each of them. At least she tried, because Wang Yonghao mostly looked bored, content to let Qian Shanyi speak. Shanyi didn't mind it too much, and made up a salacious story about how they've met, to some grumbling from Wang Yonghao. When Chu Lin heard that they were merely business partners, her eyes sparked.

    After a minute, she thanked Chu Lin, saying they had something private to discuss, and the waitress left to one of the other tables.

    Wang Yonghao dug into the ribs as soon as Chu Lin was gone, and Qian Shanyi stared at him curiously. When he raised his head, his eyes met hers and he froze. "What?" he asked with a mouth full of meat.

    "I didn't say anything," she said.

    "You are looking at me like I am a bug you want to pin to an exhibition wall," he grumbled, but slowly went back to eating. "It's very creepy."

    "That's not fair at all." She frowned. "Why would I pin a bug? I'd put it in a terrarium."

    "That makes it sound even creepier."

    "I was just wondering if you really were mostly attracted to men," Qian Shanyi said casually, finally reaching for her spare plate and pulling a couple ribs onto it from the common one.

    Wang Yonghao choked while she ate calmly. "What?!" he finally said, when he was done coughing.

    Some of the other tables were giving them curious looks, but they were speaking quietly enough they shouldn't have heard anything specific, relying on their sharpened senses to hear each other. She shrugged. "It's a simple question, I think."

    He scowled at her. She winked back. "The question is not the point! How does that at all relate to what we were talking about before?"

    "Oh." She bit into a rib, and moaned in surprise. This was some of the juiciest meat she had ever t. "Well, let me put it like this: what's the name of the waitress?"

    "What does that have to do -" Wang Yonghao closed his eyes, breathing out sharply. "You are just messing with me again."

    "I am," she admitted easily, "but I also have a point. How to put this…" She tapped her cheek, thinking it over. There were several ways to phrase it, some gentler than others - but if she wanted her point to stick… "It seems to me that unless you are in the mood to talk, you treat most people as if they are barely there. Closer to furniture than human beings."

    "What?" He sat up straighter. "No I don't!"

    "Hm. I wonder." She tapped her cheek, before glancing around. None of this should be too secretive, but still… Better safe than sorry. "Would you mind putting up the sound muffling formation?"

    He glared at her a bit, but got the five talismans out of their bag, and handed her a couple. She put them on her side of the table, eyeballing the distances - the formation had to be laid out in a circle, but it didn't have to be precise down to a millimeter. The first talisman she placed was off by a whole hand's width though, and when she shifted it with her foot, the noise of the restaurant around them quieted down to barely above a murmur.

    "So what was the point behind insulting me again?" Wang Yonghao said, leaning on the table.

    "I did nothing of the sort. I know this may be hard to hear," she said patiently, "and of course, it's only a hypothesis - but it's what makes the most sense to me, taking all I know about you into account."

    "Because I don't know the name of some waitress?"

    "No, I was actually thinking about this for quite a while," she said, shaking her head. "It's also about how you talk about your adventures, what you focus on. You almost never mention any individual people, their lives, their troubles. It's all… beautiful vistas, danger, demon beasts. It's also how you met me - why was your first, instinctual reaction to pick me up like yet another sword and run away, instead of finding a healer together with other people in the restaurant? Your interaction with Chu Lin and how you've brushed her off only put the last brush stroke on the overall picture."

    Wang Yonghao narrowed his eyes at her in suspicion. "You haven't seen me brush her off. Were you hiding somewhere?"

    Qian Shanyi nodded easily. "I arrived before you did."

    Wang Yonghao rubbed his face. "Of course you did. Why couldn't you just tell me?"

    "I wanted to see how you behave without me around - telling you would have defeated the purpose."

    "And how would you feel if I did this to you?"

    Qian Shanyi tilted her head curiously to the side. "What do you mean? You already do this for me. It's hard to notice all the errors you make on your own, and you point out when I rush ahead too much. I am annoyed, but mostly grateful."

    "I don't mean that part. I mean stalking me like this."

    She shrugged. "If you think it would help, go ahead. It would be far from the first time."

    Wang Yonghao snorted. "Oh, what, you had someone following you around before to 'point out your mistakes'?"

    Qian Shanyi sighed in exasperation. How could he be so oblivious? "I've been a jade beauty from birth, Yonghao," she said, "sometimes men would follow me around town, when I went about my business. I am used to it."

    Wang Yonghao gave her a long, shocked look while she chomped down on a rib. "Um." He swallowed. "Following you around… to do what?"

    "Who can truly say?" She shrugged performatively. "I've never had the misfortune to find out. Perhaps they just wanted to say hello. But somehow it stopped once I became a cultivator and started wearing a sword."

    Wang Yonghao shifted around uncomfortably, and she waved him off. This wasn't something she particularly enjoyed talking about either. "Let's move on," she said. "What do you think about my theory?"

    He sighed, glad to get off the topic. "That it doesn't make any sense?" He said, "I didn't want to talk to her because she was asking me strange questions and I was on edge, not because of… What you said."

    "It's polite to reciprocate."

    "So? It's not like she'll challenge me to a duel over it. Why would I talk to some waitress?""

    "Well, for one, it'd make her less likely to spit in your tea," she said, timing it just as Wang Yonghao was about to bring his tea cup to his lips. He pulled his hand away, his eyes darting between the tea kettle and his cup in concern.

    She sipped her own tea casually. Chu Lin didn't seem like the type, and besides, spit was just spit. "But also, it makes you seem like an arrogant bastard. I suspect it's one of the reasons you have so many problems with other people - you are just not very likable."

    In all fairness, it wasn't just his attitude. Wang Yonghao's lips tended to be stuck in this unpleasant curl, as if he could barely tolerate the sight of his surroundings. She knew it was because his thoughts were spinning around like rats in a cage, imagining the worst in every situation - but other people couldn't read his mind. Together with his innate confidence, built upon close to two decades of getting out alive from every scrap, and his advanced cultivation, the image of an arrogant young master was hard to shake.

    "You are telling me I am not likable?" Yonhgao raised both eyebrows at her. "Have you looked in the mirror? First time we've met you tricked and drugged me."

    She shook her head. "No, that was the second time. The first time I insulted you for being a penniless bastard and spilling soup on my robes."

    "That doesn't make it any better."

    She shrugged. "I am likable when I want to be, Yonghao - which I had little interest in at the time. I don't mean this in some inherent sense - just that the way you are used to approaching people is unlikable. If you accquire different habits, that could change."

    Wang Yonghao's face twisted into a grimace. "All of this because I didn't want to talk to some waitress?"

    She sighed. "That you keep calling her 'some waitress' rather proves my point. Her name is Chu Lin."

    "Fine, Chu Lin, whatever." He waved her off casually. She frowned, but let it go, for now. "What would we even have to talk about? We have nothing in common, and there is no way she could help me with anything whatsoever."

    "But that is just your assumption. One that's based on nothing."

    "What do you mean, 'assumption'? She is a waitress and I am a cultivator! What, do you think she just happens to know some secret technique that could help me at a crucial moment?" Wang Yonghao shuddered. "Never mind, perhaps she does."

    "Hm." Qian Shanyi leaned back in her chair, gesturing with a beef rib. "No, likely not, but let's think about this carefully. Set aside everything that relates to the food. First way she could have helped you was to warn you that I was coming up the stairs, and then I wouldn't have been able to surprise you."

    Wang Yonghao frowned. "Okay, I mean - maybe that's fair, but it's not like it mattered."

    Next time, she'd be sure to scare him more. "But it's not just about Chu Lin, now is it?" she said out loud instead. "It's about the principle. How many times were you surprised by some young master appearing when you didn't expect it?"

    Wang Yonghao froze for a moment, and she grinned at him.

    "Second way she could have helped you," she continued, "was by telling you about the town. How long did you spend here before I arrived, three days?"

    "Two."

    "Fine, two days. Yet you still didn't know that Jian Shizhe was just one spark away from dueling anybody." She pointed her rib bone at him accusatorily, before discarding it onto the plate they were using for the bones. The common plate was almost half empty now. "Are you saying that in those two days, you had no way to learn this?"

    "Hey, now," foolish Wang Yonghao tried to defend himself, not knowing he was but an ant walking among the forest of traps, "I didn't know about the cultivator almanac - "

    Qian Shanyi wagged a finger at him, cutting him off. "That's a separate thing entirely - the people around you already had all the information you needed. I was told about Jian Shizhe by pretty much the first person I talked to - the only way you could have missed hearing about him in two whole days was if you just didn't talk to anyone."

    Wang Yonghao blushed, and she knew she was right. "I mean - look, I was busy," he said quickly, "And even if I didn't - so what? That means it's my fault I almost got challenged to a duel?"

    "Of course it's not your fault - it's his, the man is an idiot." She scoffed. "His pretext was clearly ridiculous. But busy with what? Shizhe's hunts? All day long, with not even five minutes left out? You are just looking for excuses - ones you don't even need, since I am not blaming you for anything."

    Wang Yonghao folded his hands on his chest, food forgotten almost entirely. "You are still putting me on the spot," he said.

    The fool would walk away hungry at this rate - for all that she was talking more, she was also eating faster. She capitalized on his distraction by stealing another couple ribs.

    "You put yourself there," she said, mirroring his dismissiveness of Chu Lin, "You asked me why you should have taken the time to talk to 'some waitress', so I am explaining why. Many cultivators think that ordinary people are worthless to them, and all of them are morons for it - we are all rebelling against the Heavens together. My point is that it'd be better for you if you took more of an interest in other people."

    "And how do you imagine this? It's not like I can tell them about what is happening to me." Wang Yonghao's lips turned sharply downwards. "Nor would they even understand if I did."

    She gave him a long, contemplative look, and flicked the fat off her fingers with a burst of spiritual energy, leaning back in her chair. "You don't think there could be anything in common between you and Chu Lin?"

    "Oh what, are you about to tell me she is also on the run from the Heavens?"

    "No, I was actually going to say that she seemed to be into you."

    She timed her response perfectly, and Wang Yonghao choked on his tea once again. "What?"

    "Well, perhaps not you specifically." She waved her hand in the air vaguely, looking out into the square. The body fundamentalists were still there, and she watched in fascination as one of them tossed another a good ten meters up in the air. "I suppose it would be more accurate to say she is into the idea of you. I think that she resents her father and wants out of the house, and away from the restaurant business - and a woman in her position does not have too many good options. The easiest by far would be marriage, and if she could score a young, attractive cultivator, she'd be set for life. If only this hypothetical cultivator wasn't so arrogant he couldn't even notice it."

    "That's…" Wang Yonghao rubbed his forehead in shock, before narrowing his eyes at her suspiciously. "How could you possibly know this? Did you spy on her too?"

    "Not particularly. We barely even spoke."

    "Then how -"

    "By taking an interest in the people around me." She shrugged. "None of it is new to me. Look, it's quite simple. Did you see her hair sticks?"

    Wang Yonghao gave her a blank look. "She was wearing hair sticks?"

    Qian Shanyi rolled her eyes. "Yes, Yonghao, she was wearing hair sticks. Two of them, on the left side of her head - that's a sign that a woman is actively looking for a partner. If she was wearing them in a cross, it'd mean she was taken, or at least not looking. Vertical cross would mean she's into women instead, but that is a little less known."

    "Hair sticks?"

    "Yes, hair sticks."

    "And what does that mean?" he said, gesturing to her head. She had a pair of her own, worn horizontally, one inserted from the left and one from the right into a knot at the base of her long hair, keeping most of it away from her face.

    She grinned widely. "That I am a cultivator and I do what I want."

    Wang Yonghao rolled his eyes at her. "Hair sticks, really? That is so stupid. Why couldn't she just say it?"

    Qian Shanyi snorted. Yes, that also was her question, way back in the day. "Because she'd get called a prostitute for being so open about it," she said, "Anyways - that, and how much time she spent with you, is how I know she was interested. But a waitress isn't supposed to seek a partner at work - it'd distract from her duties. Nor is she supposed to talk up every single man on the floor. This means she is doing this against the orders of the chef - and if you glance over the railing," she nodded her head in that direction, "you'd see the family resemblance. That's how I know there is a conflict at home."

    Wang Yonghao glanced where she indicated, and scratched his head. "Maybe he's fine with her looking for a husband?"

    She shook her head. Conveniently enough, Chu Lin walked out of the doors at that exact moment, to pick up some plates from the kitchen. "She shifts her hair sticks into a cross whenever she goes outside," she said, "The other waitress is her twin, and wears the same clothes - deliberately, I suspect, so that their father doesn't notice one of them spending so much time upstairs. It's not too surprising that two sisters would help each other, now is it?"

    "No, I guess not."

    "On top of this, she told me herself that she has no talent for being a waitress. So, her father is the chef, and doesn't want - or doesn't let - her quit this job. Now tell me: do you think you might have anything in common with someone who is forced to live against the wishes of their own heart? Someone who doesn't have a good way out?"

    Wang Yonghao groaned, covering up his face with his hands. "Fine. Okay, I get it. I'm sorry."

    Qian Shanyi raised an eyebrow at him. "Sorry for what? You are the one who suffers from your own ignorance."

    "I mean… I'll try to talk to people more." He sighed. "This is a lot to take in."

    Out of the corner of her eye, she spotted a group of disciples from the Nine Singing Vessels sect circling the square, and got their attention with a wave of her hand. "You say that a lot," she said lazily.

    "You do that a lot."

    "Why thank you." She grinned. "Now, I'll admit that the theory is a bit of a stretch - it's built on too many assumptions. But that's the thing with assumptions - until you clarify them, anything is possible. Look at the body fundamentalists -"

    She gestured towards the middle of the square, where they were still wrestling out in the open.

    "Sects used to think you had to keep all the training in house," she explained, "Show nothing, lest someone steal even the most insignificant secret. But that this was the best way to do things was just an assumption - one that nobody tested, until one of the imperial pugilism schools decided to try the opposite. I think they even swap advice about drug regimens by mail. They had very little to start with, no secret techniques, no divinely inspired recipes. On top of that, pugilism always had a bad reputation among cultivators - after all, a sword is so much more dangerous and versatile. But nowadays, I think that it's the fastest growing style in the empire, because it's so open to all the loose cultivators, ones who have no sect to speak of." She shrugged performatively. "It seems that the original assumption turned out to be quite mistaken."

    She turned back to the table, and went after the remaining ribs. She gave Wang Yonghao long enough - if he missed his opportunity now, it was his own fault for going hungry.

    He was still struggling with what she told him, even blushing slightly, clearly wanting to say something - but too awkward to go through with it. She gave him time, focusing on the ribs. "So…" he finally said, his blush deepening. "Do you think I should, um. Ask her out?... I mean, I don't want her to get hurt…"

    His voice was conflicted. She knew his attitude towards romance already, but it seemed that talking about it in the abstract was different from a concrete possibility being put in front of him.

    She thought about it for a moment, before shaking her head sadly. "Probably not. I doubt she'd be in too much danger, especially since we are already going to be moving on shortly, but… Well, if my assumption is right - and like I said, it's just an assumption - then she'd be looking for marriage, something you can't provide. But a conversation can't hurt anyone, right? As long as you are open about your intentions and don't lead her on, at least."

    To speak of the demon beast.

    Chu Lin was heading towards them from the stairs, and Qian Shanyi shifted one of the formation talismans on the floor with her foot, letting the noise around them flood back in. Chu Lin approached the table, and bowed to the two of them. "Honorable Shanyi, the disciples from the Nine Singing Vessels sect you mentioned are here."

    Qian Shanyi gave Wang Yonghao a significant look, and then nodded to Chu Lin, rising up from her chair. "Thank you," she said, "I'll go talk to them. In the meantime, would you mind keeping my partner company?"

    As she passed by Chu Lin, she leaned close to her ear. "He is far too shy to ever admit it," she whispered, "but he regrets his earlier coldness. You are actually his type."

    Chu Lin's eyes widened, and her cheeks flushed slightly. Qian Shanyi winked at her, and walked past, leaving the two of them alone.
    She gave Wang Yonghao and Chu Lin a lot of time to talk - after she was done counting the spirit stones delivered by the Nine Singing Vessels sect, she took a long walk around the square, and even went to talk to the body fundamentalists. Half of them seemed to be employees of the Thrifty Bat Bank - apparently the head of their branch here in town was an advocate of the style. It was something to think about - pugilism had always seemed far too brutish for her tastes, but her recent experiences had changed her attitude somewhat.

    After she returned to their table in the restaurant, a good twenty minutes had passed, and Chu Lin was already gone. Wang Yonghao stayed quiet for the rest of the day, while they went through a dozen different shops in town, and visited the post office again to grab her finished copy of the local cultivator almanac. He didn't tell her what the two of them spoke about, and when she tried to prod, he just blushed, his lips twitching slightly upwards. She supposed it couldn't have gone too badly. Good for him - the man desperately needed to get laid.

    By the time they returned to the tavern, loaded up with several bags after a small shopping spree, the sun had already set. She was humming a little tune as they headed to the main doors, when Wang Yonghao suddenly froze, his eyes going wide. Qian Shanyi raised an eyebrow at him, and looked around, reaching out with her spiritual energy senses to try and find whatever had alarmed him.

    She found it easily enough. A trio of cultivators, walking down a corridor of the tavern from one room to another, obvious even through a thick wooden wall. Spiritual energy roiled angrily around all three of them, but especially around the one in the middle. She could feel a dozen active amulets, like little suns to her spiritual energy senses - and that meant only one thing.

    A spirit hunter, ready for battle.
     
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