"Why shouldn't I smile, Yonghao?" She laughed. "I have a plan!"
"That just makes me even more concerned."
"What?" She squinted at him. "I make great plans."
Shanyi's right. her plans have great potential payout and great potential risk. Yonghao just wishes she'd optimize her plans for literally any other factor. Ideally "great safety". And it's not like she's
that good at avoiding the risks.
"Name one time my plan was bound to fail right from the start."
"Remember how you almost killed both of us by experimenting with the chiclotron?"
"Fine, name two times."
He opened his mouth to respond, and she waved him off. "No matter," she said, "let's talk about the tribulation instead."
"Shanyi, you'll get qi deviation from taking this many pills at once," he said, glancing up at her, "even I know that much."
"I'd only get it after two weeks." She rolled her eyes. "I've done the math on the interactions, Yonghao. I won't call nine days of this safe, but as long as it kills me slower than the tribulation, that's all that matters."
See, this is the kind of thing that makes Yonghao worry. It's like Icarus flying close to the sun based on a calculation that he'll get past the hot part before his wings completely fall apart.
She was many months away from even beginning to probe at that level of mastery - for now, she couldn't even get the basic techniques to work without wrecking havoc on her vocal cords after half a dozen tries.
Also, this wouldn't be as much of a problem if dextromethorphan and benzocaine didn't have bad interactions with part of the pill cocktail.
Not a single minute wasted, always balancing just on the edge of what she could take without breaking entirely.
In other words, exhilarating.
Though really, she was well past balancing on the edge - it was more that she had jumped off, and was simply counting on a bungee cord pulling her back to the cliff face before she fell to her death.
This is Shanyi's life philosophy in a nutshell. Well, minus the bits about self-determination and defying Heaven.
She ran into a problem quite quickly. Whatever language the book used, it clearly did not rely on characters to convey meaning - over the first few pages, she only counted forty seven distinct shapes, and a few of those looked like merely larger copies of the other ones.
Oh no, it's an
alphabet. Just learning what each character means isn't enough; each character encodes a
sound, meaning that the translator needs to know how to
speak the language being translated.
Such an inefficient system, suited only for insular xenophobes and uncivilized hicks.
"Why were you late?" she asked.
"Jian Shizhe found me, wanted a duel," Wang Yonghao said with a purse of his lips.
That couldn't possibly be a coincidence.
It probably isn't, but we can't be certain. Jian Shizhe has habitually acted like a tool, regardless of whether anyone around wanted to use him.
"I defy you, Heavens!" She shouted, turning her face back to the skies, and tore the vow into pieces within her mind, the pressure on her vanishing instantly. It was mere moments away from doing that on its own, but she'd be damned if she let the Heavens make the final decision. "I spit in your faces, I break your laws, I shatter your chains, and I swear on my life, I will climb up into the skies and tear out your throats until I will drink my fill of your blood!"
"Oh,
that's why she's getting Tribulated."
"I think the vow she mentioned has something to do with it, too."
"I think the Heavens would care more about disrespect than disobedience."
"You also think 'tribulated' is a word."
"You thought you could dictate how he lives, torture him with luck? Unacceptable! Unjustifiable! Even though the lazy fuck won't raise a single finger to save himself, I will still fight against you!"
"I admit, you might have a point. It's like this cultivator is trying to earn a lifetime's worth of Tribulations in one afternoon."
"She probably wants to get all of them out of the way at once."
"...you know it doesn't work like that, right?"
It flashed through the air, and shattered the lightning.
I feel like, despite sounding cool, this gets too much in the way of clarity. What is it supposed to describe, exactly?
I think Shanyi hit the lightning bolt with a sword and broke it. (The lightning bolt, not the sword, probably.)
