Reach Heaven Via Feng Shui Engineering, Drug Trade And Tax Evasion
- Thread starter Winged_One
- Start date
- Original Novel Fantasy
HoratioVonBecker
Imperfectly Aligned
Odd juxtaposition. Babies would be familiar with naked breasts.
starved
a minion
he'd
I'm not sure how to phrase this better, but 'upward' looks wrong. Also, I think she's probably standing astraddle the bear's armpits and using overhand strikes, but she might be side-on and using baseball swings?
The comma should be a period.
Tisaku
Head Chief Thinkomancer
starved
Chapter 12: Stroll Amongst The Trees With Seeking Eyes
Winged_One
Head Engineer of ATHENA
- Location
- Low Earth Orbit
Qian Shanyi reeled back the rope she used to descend into Wang Yonghao's Inner World, and wrapped it around her waist. She had only tied it around the gazebo column a mere day ago, but it felt like ages. The knot on the rope was hard as stone, tightened to the limit after holding her weight many times that she had climbed in and out of the world fragment.
Wang Yonghao stood next to her, looking around without a care in the world.
She prepared for the trip as well as she could, which was not very. With Wang Yonghao awake and conscious, there was no need to overload herself with tools that could be retrieved directly from the Inner World, but she still carried the fly whisk, her sword, and a small axe. Several spears, additional ropes, and everything else she could think of was arranged on the ground near the center of the Inner World, easy to grab in an emergency.
She didn't want to waste the time to bring the poisoned earth out of the inner world, but they did throw out the remaining bear entrails before they had a chance to stink up the place, by making a makeshift lift out of a rope and one of the largest pots they took from the kitchens.
Once the rope was drawn fully out of his Inner World, the entrance shrunk into a dot and vanished. All it took was a thought from Wang Yonghao to do it, and she wondered what would happen if it closed on someone's hand. Probably nothing good.
She tied off the rope on her waist, picked up a new pair of stilts, and nodded to Wang Yonghao.
"Shall we go?" she said, and walked down the hill. He quietly followed after her, walking on air, clouds of dragonflies under his feet shedding enough light that she didn't bother making her own hair glow.
They got to the edge of the slime, and Qian Shanyi got on top of her stilts. Wang Yonghao got ahead of her, and walked backwards in front of her, with his hands folded behind his back. She ignored him.
"Why don't you fly?" he asked, "You said you could, before."
Qian Shanyi had already anticipated this question. If she was going to cooperate with Wang Yonghao closely, he was inevitably going to notice that she didn't do anything befitting of an old cultivation monster. This ruse would have to break eventually, but for now, she had ways to stall by relying on layers of implications.
For example, she didn't actually say that she could fly - she only said she could reach him in the air, but she wasn't about to correct his misconception.
"My cultivation law is special, and I am doing recuperative training," she replied dismissively. "I don't use spiritual energy unless I absolutely have to."
"You know, I could have just carried you," he noted.
"It's a good idea," she nodded, "it would make it much easier for me to reach your neck, if I needed to wring it."
After a long day of exploring the sect, removing the toxic fog, getting almost killed by the bear and then butchering it for food, she was quite tired, and knew that she would fall asleep as soon as her head touched the ground. The short nap she took while suffering from the poison helped, and the aches her newly re-broken shin sent up her leg kept her awake, but she still felt exhausted.
She considered sending Wang Yonghao out of the secret realm alone and just going to sleep, but the idea rankled her. If she didn't walk through the sect gatehouse on her own two feet, wouldn't it mean that in some sense, she had lost the fight to the bear?
As they passed by the fallen tree, she stopped, and headed off the road, looking around for the lost spear. Wang Yonghao followed after her curiously.
"What are you looking for?" he asked.
"I lost a spear here when I wrestled with the bear," she said, sweeping some slime aside with a wave of a fly whisk, "it would be a waste to leave it behind."
"Why would you wrestle a bear?" he said, coming closer.
"We had a spirited debate about who was going to be the food and who the chef," she said, "It lost and got sent into your Inner World. Now do you want to help me look or not?"
Working together, they soon found it, lying not far away from the tree crown. Wang Yonghao threw it into his Inner World, and they continued on, through the gatehouse with broken doors and out into the cavern beyond the sect. She saw the bear tracks in the dirt and dust on the ground, leading towards a depression on the side of the cave - perhaps her flood of poison disturbed its sleep, and that was why it was so angry.
She was the first to scramble up to the ledge where the cave opened up into the wider world, and sat down on the warm stone ground. The warm, humid wind made her long hair flutter softly amid the rays of daylight, casting long, wriggling shadows on the walls of the cave behind her, as if a bestial octopus had crawled up from the Netherworld.
The cave was set into the wall of a cliff, and opened up into the forest of towering black trees. They looked similar to the pines that grew near the Golden Rabbit Bay, with long clean trunks and a wide crown of green casting shade onto the ground below, but much taller, and with smooth, pitch black bark that shone slightly at the edges. With a start, she realized it must have simply been so smooth it was reflecting sunlight.
The ground was covered in thick red moss and tall reedy grass, blackened in a wide circle where the poison fog spilled out of the cave. Thankfully, it had long dissipated by now.
She could see where a hidden road had been cut into the forest in the past, narrow tracks left behind by carts barely visible among the vegetation. Songs of birds and insects filled her ears, almost deafening after the muffled environment of the sect caverns.
She filled her lungs with the fresh air, and smiled. She was finally out.
Wang Yonghao came over and sat down next to her.
"I like forests," he said, "they are nice and quiet. Very few people can find you here."
She glanced at him. "Speaking from experience?"
"Yeah," he said, "I spend a lot of time in between cities, running away from this sect or that. Forests are some of the best places to be - no eyes to report you, no ears to hear you moving around. Unless a sect hires a spirit chaser, tracking someone through a forest is very hard."
She frowned at his mention of sects. She didn't have the energy to think of it before, but her sect - Luminous Lotus Pavilion - must have already noticed she had disappeared, and had surely heard about the incident at the Northern Sky Salmon. Without her dead body, the only assumption - not entirely inaccurate - must have been that she was kidnapped, or ran away. Her teacher was sure to worry.
She didn't feel a great sense of obligation towards her sect. She joined it for a simple reason - it was one of the few sects near the Golden Rabbit Bay to accept novice female cultivators from a family of commoners without binding them by lines of marriage. The sect had only given her a fraction of the resources she needed, and in return, she did her best to dawdle in her assigned duties, and spent as much of her time on personal cultivation as she could. The only person there she was truly grateful to was her teacher, Elder Striding Phoenix, who gave her plenty of helpful advice, even though he obviously did not practice her cultivation law. She was sure that legally, she was still tied to the sect, but morally, she felt that she had kept her tab clean.
She decided that when they would reach civilization, she would write to Elder Striding Phoenix and tell him she was going away. He deserved that much.
Of course, she wouldn't tell him about Wang Yonghao. The sect would be only too happy to help him with his luck problems - but in doing so, they would completely sideline her. She was not about to hand over her unique opportunity to someone else - instead, she would bite into it with all her teeth and never let go.
Well, this was something to worry about later.
"If you have spent so much time in forests, does that mean you know how to forage?" she asked.
He laughed awkwardly. "I kept meaning to ask someone to teach me, but never got around to it. Just…kept having other things interrupt me, I guess."
She snorted in response. Of course he hadn't. She took out the jade slate from her clothes, and activated it with her spiritual energy, going straight to the chapter on cooking.
"Fortunately for us, I happen to have a manual on foraging with me," she sighed, slapping her other hand on her knee, and getting up, "Come on, let's follow this road. I've never been much of a forager, but if we are lucky, I may be able to get us some herbs and forest vegetables, so that we won't be forced to eat only unseasoned bear meat for weeks."
"You want us to travel together?" he looked at her weirdly, "Can't you just give me this manual or something?"
"How could I trust someone who did not even clean up their treasury with a precious manual?" she asked rhetorically, "Chances are, you will manage to lose it."
She was not about to let the jade slate out of her hands. It contained her cultivation law, and if Wang Yonghao flipped through it and realized that was what she was practicing, her ruse of being a wizened old master would go up in flames.
"Well, it's just…" he laughed strangely again, "With my luck, strange things tend to happen when I walk on the road. You fed me and helped find the sect exit, so I guess I owe you a warning."
"I am sure it will be fine," she said, walking off towards the forest. "Let's go."
As the suns made their march across the sky, they slowly made their way through the forest. It seemed peaceful, filled with sounds of nature, almost unnaturally idyllic in a way that begged her to relax, pushing on her mind, tired after a long day of clearing out the sect and fighting for her life. The bear encounter was still fresh in her mind, so she kept a hand on her sword, treading carefully, and trying to make out movement in between the trunks of reflective trees.
Wang Yonghao walked several paces away from her, humming along while swinging at small flowers poking their way through the moss with a tree branch. She did not stop him: if another bear came, he would make for a perfect distraction away from her.
The road was their best bet for finding civilization, but it disappeared entirely as they headed deeper into the forest. She supposed that was to be expected: it wouldn't do for a sect to leave any obvious trails that could be followed back to their secret realm. Wang Yonghao tried walking on air to try and see above the forest, but the edge of the world was hanging low here, barely above the tree crowns, and he could not see very far.
After some pushing (and more than a few insults), she managed to get him to admit that he could find a way out of the forest. He closed his eyes, threw his branch into the air, and pointed in the direction where it fell. Apparently, his luck let him directly divine a "good" direction for him to head in, but given that he didn't like where it kept leading him, he didn't use this method very often.
She managed to hold her tongue after seeing this "method". At least he seemed to focus on his surroundings more afterwards.
Their attempts at foraging were going badly, mostly due to her own inexperience - they managed to find a lonely oak tree and collect some acorns, but that was all. To cope with the disappointment, they took the time to cut the tree down and put it inside of Wang Yonghao's Inner World - she had many uses in mind for the wood. The entrance portal of the world fragment made easy work of the trunk and the long branches, shearing them easily as it closed - though they still needed to move the trees around, since it could only open horizontally, and could not intersect solid objects.
Right now, Qian Shanyi was staring at a plant, flipping between two pages on her jade slate. It was about fifty centimeters tall, with a narrow stalk and cream-colored flowers growing in pointed clusters. She scratched her head, and turned to Wang Yonghao, showing him her jade slate. The forest was quiet around them.
"Does this look like the same plant to you?"
Wang Yonghao looked at the picture, and nodded.
"Looks like it," he said, "What is it?"
"It's either wild garlic, which would go great together with our meat, or it's death camas," she said.
"And what's that?"
She raised an eyebrow at him. "What do you think 'death camas' does?"
"Fair enough."
She looked at the pair of pictures again. They honestly looked completely indistinguishable to her. The manual said the plants smelled differently, but that was of no help at all when she didn't know the smell of the right one. On top of that, the evening had fallen, and she needed to light up her hair to see clearly.
She sighed, and got up. Best not risk it.
As she turned towards Wang Yonghao, something put her on edge, and her hand dropped on her sword. She spun around, looking for a threat, but only saw the same quiet dark forest, reflective tree trunks, and the ground covered in red moss and reedy grass.
Eerily quiet. Mere minutes before, birds were singing, but now all she could hear was the rustle of wind in the reeds. Even the insects went silent.
She put her back against a tree, looking around for any hint of movement, and drew her sword out, extinguishing her hair and strengthening her spiritual shield at the same time. Wang Yonghao looked at her curiously.
"What are you doing?" he asked her, not even bothering to lower his voice.
"Why are the birds quiet?" she hissed at him, "Something is wrong."
"The birds?" he looked around, and to his credit, immediately went for his sword.
Suddenly, he yelped as something yanked him by the legs, making him sink down to his waist into the moss. He helplessly tugged at his sword, but it was stuck in its sheath.
Qian Shanyi pushed herself off the tree to help him, but something caught her by the throat, and she was jerked back. She clawed at her windpipe, and felt a cord of something thick and cold, pressing against her spiritual energy shield. If she didn't bring it up in time, she would have been strangled already.
A vine?
She pushed more spiritual energy into her spiritual energy shield, expanding it around her body to push the vine away. Her spiritual energy reserves, already depleted by the many hours of holding her broken shin together, dropped further, but she managed to get her sword underneath the vine. The angle was awkward, but with the push of her shoulder she managed to slice through, and tumbled forwards, using her momentum to instantly spring back to her feet.
She saw a bundle of wriggling vines enveloping the tree trunk she was leaning against. In the middle of the bundle, there was a large flower, its petals black in the dim evening light of the forest. Something white glistened in the middle of it, and as it crawled around the tree trunk to face her, she realized it was a maw full of teeth.
Spiritual energy flowed from the vine she sliced, but the rest of the flower was almost entirely blank. Even now that she knew where to sense, it was very easy to miss it.
A burst of light and a deafening cry of a goose came from behind her, illuminating the forest for a brief moment. The petals of the flower in front of her started to glow blood red, and behind the tree, she could see more patches of red, crawling closer.
She glanced at Wang Yonghao out of the corner of her eye, and saw him getting out of the hole in the moss, shaking the remains of a similar flower from his feet.
"Maneating flowers…" he sighed, "Just what I need."
She didn't have time to respond as the flower leaped at her, its hungry maw opening wide.
Author Note: If you'd like to read four chapters ahead, or read other works I write, you can find me on patreon.
Wang Yonghao stood next to her, looking around without a care in the world.
She prepared for the trip as well as she could, which was not very. With Wang Yonghao awake and conscious, there was no need to overload herself with tools that could be retrieved directly from the Inner World, but she still carried the fly whisk, her sword, and a small axe. Several spears, additional ropes, and everything else she could think of was arranged on the ground near the center of the Inner World, easy to grab in an emergency.
She didn't want to waste the time to bring the poisoned earth out of the inner world, but they did throw out the remaining bear entrails before they had a chance to stink up the place, by making a makeshift lift out of a rope and one of the largest pots they took from the kitchens.
Once the rope was drawn fully out of his Inner World, the entrance shrunk into a dot and vanished. All it took was a thought from Wang Yonghao to do it, and she wondered what would happen if it closed on someone's hand. Probably nothing good.
She tied off the rope on her waist, picked up a new pair of stilts, and nodded to Wang Yonghao.
"Shall we go?" she said, and walked down the hill. He quietly followed after her, walking on air, clouds of dragonflies under his feet shedding enough light that she didn't bother making her own hair glow.
They got to the edge of the slime, and Qian Shanyi got on top of her stilts. Wang Yonghao got ahead of her, and walked backwards in front of her, with his hands folded behind his back. She ignored him.
"Why don't you fly?" he asked, "You said you could, before."
Qian Shanyi had already anticipated this question. If she was going to cooperate with Wang Yonghao closely, he was inevitably going to notice that she didn't do anything befitting of an old cultivation monster. This ruse would have to break eventually, but for now, she had ways to stall by relying on layers of implications.
For example, she didn't actually say that she could fly - she only said she could reach him in the air, but she wasn't about to correct his misconception.
"My cultivation law is special, and I am doing recuperative training," she replied dismissively. "I don't use spiritual energy unless I absolutely have to."
"You know, I could have just carried you," he noted.
"It's a good idea," she nodded, "it would make it much easier for me to reach your neck, if I needed to wring it."
After a long day of exploring the sect, removing the toxic fog, getting almost killed by the bear and then butchering it for food, she was quite tired, and knew that she would fall asleep as soon as her head touched the ground. The short nap she took while suffering from the poison helped, and the aches her newly re-broken shin sent up her leg kept her awake, but she still felt exhausted.
She considered sending Wang Yonghao out of the secret realm alone and just going to sleep, but the idea rankled her. If she didn't walk through the sect gatehouse on her own two feet, wouldn't it mean that in some sense, she had lost the fight to the bear?
As they passed by the fallen tree, she stopped, and headed off the road, looking around for the lost spear. Wang Yonghao followed after her curiously.
"What are you looking for?" he asked.
"I lost a spear here when I wrestled with the bear," she said, sweeping some slime aside with a wave of a fly whisk, "it would be a waste to leave it behind."
"Why would you wrestle a bear?" he said, coming closer.
"We had a spirited debate about who was going to be the food and who the chef," she said, "It lost and got sent into your Inner World. Now do you want to help me look or not?"
Working together, they soon found it, lying not far away from the tree crown. Wang Yonghao threw it into his Inner World, and they continued on, through the gatehouse with broken doors and out into the cavern beyond the sect. She saw the bear tracks in the dirt and dust on the ground, leading towards a depression on the side of the cave - perhaps her flood of poison disturbed its sleep, and that was why it was so angry.
She was the first to scramble up to the ledge where the cave opened up into the wider world, and sat down on the warm stone ground. The warm, humid wind made her long hair flutter softly amid the rays of daylight, casting long, wriggling shadows on the walls of the cave behind her, as if a bestial octopus had crawled up from the Netherworld.
The cave was set into the wall of a cliff, and opened up into the forest of towering black trees. They looked similar to the pines that grew near the Golden Rabbit Bay, with long clean trunks and a wide crown of green casting shade onto the ground below, but much taller, and with smooth, pitch black bark that shone slightly at the edges. With a start, she realized it must have simply been so smooth it was reflecting sunlight.
The ground was covered in thick red moss and tall reedy grass, blackened in a wide circle where the poison fog spilled out of the cave. Thankfully, it had long dissipated by now.
She could see where a hidden road had been cut into the forest in the past, narrow tracks left behind by carts barely visible among the vegetation. Songs of birds and insects filled her ears, almost deafening after the muffled environment of the sect caverns.
She filled her lungs with the fresh air, and smiled. She was finally out.
Wang Yonghao came over and sat down next to her.
"I like forests," he said, "they are nice and quiet. Very few people can find you here."
She glanced at him. "Speaking from experience?"
"Yeah," he said, "I spend a lot of time in between cities, running away from this sect or that. Forests are some of the best places to be - no eyes to report you, no ears to hear you moving around. Unless a sect hires a spirit chaser, tracking someone through a forest is very hard."
She frowned at his mention of sects. She didn't have the energy to think of it before, but her sect - Luminous Lotus Pavilion - must have already noticed she had disappeared, and had surely heard about the incident at the Northern Sky Salmon. Without her dead body, the only assumption - not entirely inaccurate - must have been that she was kidnapped, or ran away. Her teacher was sure to worry.
She didn't feel a great sense of obligation towards her sect. She joined it for a simple reason - it was one of the few sects near the Golden Rabbit Bay to accept novice female cultivators from a family of commoners without binding them by lines of marriage. The sect had only given her a fraction of the resources she needed, and in return, she did her best to dawdle in her assigned duties, and spent as much of her time on personal cultivation as she could. The only person there she was truly grateful to was her teacher, Elder Striding Phoenix, who gave her plenty of helpful advice, even though he obviously did not practice her cultivation law. She was sure that legally, she was still tied to the sect, but morally, she felt that she had kept her tab clean.
She decided that when they would reach civilization, she would write to Elder Striding Phoenix and tell him she was going away. He deserved that much.
Of course, she wouldn't tell him about Wang Yonghao. The sect would be only too happy to help him with his luck problems - but in doing so, they would completely sideline her. She was not about to hand over her unique opportunity to someone else - instead, she would bite into it with all her teeth and never let go.
Well, this was something to worry about later.
"If you have spent so much time in forests, does that mean you know how to forage?" she asked.
He laughed awkwardly. "I kept meaning to ask someone to teach me, but never got around to it. Just…kept having other things interrupt me, I guess."
She snorted in response. Of course he hadn't. She took out the jade slate from her clothes, and activated it with her spiritual energy, going straight to the chapter on cooking.
"Fortunately for us, I happen to have a manual on foraging with me," she sighed, slapping her other hand on her knee, and getting up, "Come on, let's follow this road. I've never been much of a forager, but if we are lucky, I may be able to get us some herbs and forest vegetables, so that we won't be forced to eat only unseasoned bear meat for weeks."
"You want us to travel together?" he looked at her weirdly, "Can't you just give me this manual or something?"
"How could I trust someone who did not even clean up their treasury with a precious manual?" she asked rhetorically, "Chances are, you will manage to lose it."
She was not about to let the jade slate out of her hands. It contained her cultivation law, and if Wang Yonghao flipped through it and realized that was what she was practicing, her ruse of being a wizened old master would go up in flames.
"Well, it's just…" he laughed strangely again, "With my luck, strange things tend to happen when I walk on the road. You fed me and helped find the sect exit, so I guess I owe you a warning."
"I am sure it will be fine," she said, walking off towards the forest. "Let's go."
As the suns made their march across the sky, they slowly made their way through the forest. It seemed peaceful, filled with sounds of nature, almost unnaturally idyllic in a way that begged her to relax, pushing on her mind, tired after a long day of clearing out the sect and fighting for her life. The bear encounter was still fresh in her mind, so she kept a hand on her sword, treading carefully, and trying to make out movement in between the trunks of reflective trees.
Wang Yonghao walked several paces away from her, humming along while swinging at small flowers poking their way through the moss with a tree branch. She did not stop him: if another bear came, he would make for a perfect distraction away from her.
The road was their best bet for finding civilization, but it disappeared entirely as they headed deeper into the forest. She supposed that was to be expected: it wouldn't do for a sect to leave any obvious trails that could be followed back to their secret realm. Wang Yonghao tried walking on air to try and see above the forest, but the edge of the world was hanging low here, barely above the tree crowns, and he could not see very far.
After some pushing (and more than a few insults), she managed to get him to admit that he could find a way out of the forest. He closed his eyes, threw his branch into the air, and pointed in the direction where it fell. Apparently, his luck let him directly divine a "good" direction for him to head in, but given that he didn't like where it kept leading him, he didn't use this method very often.
She managed to hold her tongue after seeing this "method". At least he seemed to focus on his surroundings more afterwards.
Their attempts at foraging were going badly, mostly due to her own inexperience - they managed to find a lonely oak tree and collect some acorns, but that was all. To cope with the disappointment, they took the time to cut the tree down and put it inside of Wang Yonghao's Inner World - she had many uses in mind for the wood. The entrance portal of the world fragment made easy work of the trunk and the long branches, shearing them easily as it closed - though they still needed to move the trees around, since it could only open horizontally, and could not intersect solid objects.
Right now, Qian Shanyi was staring at a plant, flipping between two pages on her jade slate. It was about fifty centimeters tall, with a narrow stalk and cream-colored flowers growing in pointed clusters. She scratched her head, and turned to Wang Yonghao, showing him her jade slate. The forest was quiet around them.
"Does this look like the same plant to you?"
Wang Yonghao looked at the picture, and nodded.
"Looks like it," he said, "What is it?"
"It's either wild garlic, which would go great together with our meat, or it's death camas," she said.
"And what's that?"
She raised an eyebrow at him. "What do you think 'death camas' does?"
"Fair enough."
She looked at the pair of pictures again. They honestly looked completely indistinguishable to her. The manual said the plants smelled differently, but that was of no help at all when she didn't know the smell of the right one. On top of that, the evening had fallen, and she needed to light up her hair to see clearly.
She sighed, and got up. Best not risk it.
As she turned towards Wang Yonghao, something put her on edge, and her hand dropped on her sword. She spun around, looking for a threat, but only saw the same quiet dark forest, reflective tree trunks, and the ground covered in red moss and reedy grass.
Eerily quiet. Mere minutes before, birds were singing, but now all she could hear was the rustle of wind in the reeds. Even the insects went silent.
She put her back against a tree, looking around for any hint of movement, and drew her sword out, extinguishing her hair and strengthening her spiritual shield at the same time. Wang Yonghao looked at her curiously.
"What are you doing?" he asked her, not even bothering to lower his voice.
"Why are the birds quiet?" she hissed at him, "Something is wrong."
"The birds?" he looked around, and to his credit, immediately went for his sword.
Suddenly, he yelped as something yanked him by the legs, making him sink down to his waist into the moss. He helplessly tugged at his sword, but it was stuck in its sheath.
Qian Shanyi pushed herself off the tree to help him, but something caught her by the throat, and she was jerked back. She clawed at her windpipe, and felt a cord of something thick and cold, pressing against her spiritual energy shield. If she didn't bring it up in time, she would have been strangled already.
A vine?
She pushed more spiritual energy into her spiritual energy shield, expanding it around her body to push the vine away. Her spiritual energy reserves, already depleted by the many hours of holding her broken shin together, dropped further, but she managed to get her sword underneath the vine. The angle was awkward, but with the push of her shoulder she managed to slice through, and tumbled forwards, using her momentum to instantly spring back to her feet.
She saw a bundle of wriggling vines enveloping the tree trunk she was leaning against. In the middle of the bundle, there was a large flower, its petals black in the dim evening light of the forest. Something white glistened in the middle of it, and as it crawled around the tree trunk to face her, she realized it was a maw full of teeth.
Spiritual energy flowed from the vine she sliced, but the rest of the flower was almost entirely blank. Even now that she knew where to sense, it was very easy to miss it.
A burst of light and a deafening cry of a goose came from behind her, illuminating the forest for a brief moment. The petals of the flower in front of her started to glow blood red, and behind the tree, she could see more patches of red, crawling closer.
She glanced at Wang Yonghao out of the corner of her eye, and saw him getting out of the hole in the moss, shaking the remains of a similar flower from his feet.
"Maneating flowers…" he sighed, "Just what I need."
She didn't have time to respond as the flower leaped at her, its hungry maw opening wide.
Author Note: If you'd like to read four chapters ahead, or read other works I write, you can find me on patreon.
Last edited:
dhasenan
always lowercase
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Typo: "Striding" ?
Chapter 13: Cleave Through Groves And Dream Of Luck
Winged_One
Head Engineer of ATHENA
- Location
- Low Earth Orbit
A single flower demon beast was of little danger to someone of their realm. The flowers tried to close in and entangle their prey, but were too weak to pierce directly through a solid spiritual energy shield. As long as one kept their distance, they could slice off the vines one by one until the core body could be destroyed.
The problem was that the flowers kept coming, and each one took many minutes to kill. On top of that, their vines could absorb spiritual energy on contact: it was a battle of attrition, and she was losing, even though she cut her spiritual energy usage to a minimum. Once she would fully run out, it would be all over.
Wang Yonghao fared better, but only just. Because he didn't need to spend spiritual energy all day to keep his leg in one piece, his reserves started out full, and he dipped into them with abandon. His attacks spread fire around the moss, and the Honk of the Solar Goose technique sent razor-sharp bursts of sword light slicing through the forest. It looked very dominating, but the flowers had an uncanny ability to dodge just before the attack connected, and would keep moving even with most of their bodies sliced apart. Compared to her conservative style, she wasn't sure who would falter first.
Qian Shanyi grit her teeth. Something needed to change.
"Let's retreat," she shouted, kicking away the flower next to her, and sprinting over to Wang Yonghao. She grabbed him from behind by the collar of his robes, and planted her good foot on his back, standing tall.
"Hey!" he protested, "Get off me!"
"Less whining, more running on air," she curtly ordered, "I'll keep your back safe."
She wasn't about to tell him she couldn't fly, and she was definitely not letting herself be carried.
He went upwards, complaining loudly throughout. That put some distance between them and the flowers, but the plants gave chase, swinging from one branch to another at surprising speed. They needed a way to throw them off.
She racked her brain. How were they following them? Plants didn't have eyes to see.
The birds went silent, she thought. They knew the flowers were coming. But how?
The flower beasts moved silently, and she doubted the birds could sense them any better than a pair of cultivators. This left two possibilities: either the birds heard some kind of concealed signal, or the flowers came out at the same time every night. Many animals would hunt at specific times of the day. If these flowers were doing the same, then it wasn't out of the question for other animals to learn their schedule. That they all went quiet at once spoke to the threat on display.
"I think they can hear us," she said to Wang Yonghao, "try to keep quiet, and run in a different direction - maybe it will throw them off."
He immediately stopped complaining, and even his breathing slowed down. She smiled - the man could manage to think right when prompted. His footsteps on the fiery dragonflies were silent as they pivoted away from their path, but the flowers still kept on their trail. She frowned. Was she wrong?
No, she dismissed the thought, they probably have a spiritual sense.
All creatures needed to consume calories in order to stay alive. Spiritual creatures - cultivators, demon beasts like these flowers, ghosts, and many others - also needed to consume spiritual energy, or they would turn sick and die. Because of this, most demon beasts could innately sense spiritual energy, and right now, Qian Shanyi and Wang Yonghao must have looked like two bundles of tasty food.
"It didn't work," she said, breaking their silence, "they might be following our spiritual energy as well as the sound."
"So what then?" he said, "I can't keep flying without using spiritual energy."
"Let's descend to the ground and continue on foot," she said, eyeing the plants behind them. It was subtle, but she thought they were slowly closing in, as she could see flashes of red reflecting off the trees on their flanks.
"If we descend to the ground, they'd be on us in moments," he grumbled, "especially if we suppress our spiritual energy."
Honestly, it was a great point. She looked around, searching for a solution.
"There. See that dense copse of trees?" she pointed over his shoulder, "run through it, and use that sword goose technique to slice the trees apart. The noise of them falling down should cover our retreat."
Wang Yonghao headed towards the trees, and his sword danced in a tapestry of blinding light. In a single breath, every tree in the copse was sliced through by razor-sharp sword light, and collapsed to the ground with deafening cracks and groans as they ran past. They dropped to the ground, and started to walk away as quickly and quietly as they could while suppressing their spiritual energy by squeezing shut the 40 000 pores on their skin.
She glanced back, and saw that the collapsed trees were now positively covered in blood red flowers. They were searching around wildly, without any direction. She smiled - their distraction had worked.
She walked in front of Wang Yonghao and made a motion of a circle opening and widening with both hands. It took a minute, but eventually he figured out what she wanted, and opened his Inner World in front of them. She saw the flowers in the distance spin around and head in their direction, sensing the burst of spiritual energy, but by now it was too late.
She hopped on his back despite his protests, and they descended down into his Inner World, closing the entrance behind themselves. As he got down to the ground and she hopped off, he spun around and glared at her.
"Did you need to ride on my back?" he demanded.
"Like I said, I don't use spiritual energy unless it's absolutely necessary," she replied lazily, turning away from him and heading towards her improvised bed.
"What do you mean unless it's necessary?!" he threw his hands in the air, "It was necessary - we were surrounded! You even said we should flee!"
"Hm. No, I don't think so," she said, "You ran away just fine, didn't you? Why would I need to use my legs to run when yours are still strong?"
"I am not a horse for you to ride on!" he ran in front of her, again meeting her gaze with a scowl.
She met his scowl with a smile.
"If you aren't a horse, why didn't you throw me off?" she asked, yawning lazily, and refilling the water clock that seemed to have ran out, "Besides, it was a good division of labor. You could concentrate on running, and I could watch the flowers. Or do you have a technique for growing eyes on the back of your head?"
"Well, no - " he began.
"Excellent," she clapped him on his shoulder, and moved past him, laying down on her bed. "Looks like we agree that from this point on, you'd do the running while I relax on your back. It is the most optimal arrangement."
"Hey, no way!" he shouted again, as she picked up a spare set of robes to cover her eyes for sleep. "We didn't agree to that at all! I am not letting you ride me again!"
She glanced up at him, and saw his face blushing from what he just said.
"Letting me?" She said, "You have to pay for that in most cities."
"Shut up," he said, blushing further.
"Tell you what," she said smugly, "morning outsmarts evening, and this here cultivator is tired. Let's talk about this tomorrow."
She covered her eyes, laid down, and was out like a blown out candle.
When she woke up, Wang Yonghao was still asleep down on the grass, having followed her example by tying a different set of robes around his head. The strange sphere that he brought into the world fragment was laying by his side - he must have been tinkering with it the night before.
By the clock, she slept for ten hours. She took her medicine, cooked up a large portion of bear ribs for breakfast, and started to catalog their food supplies.
Yesterday's foraging went pretty badly, mostly due to her own lack of skill. The only thing they had to show for it was a small pile of acorns, as well as a broken up oak tree. The acorns had to be dried before they could be cooked, so she placed them all inside of an earth trench of the chiclotron, where the air temperature was a bit milder than in the adjacent fire trench.
In terms of calories, they were set for the next while. She didn't have a set of scales to weigh the meat, but the bear must have been at least six hundred kilos, and according to the Three Obediences Four Virtues, meat was about a third of a mammal's body weight. Even if each of them ate two kilos a day, they should still last for a month and a half. Remaining egg omelet would add a couple days on top of that.
This was, of course, assuming that the meat didn't go bad. For now, she stored it in the ice-cold water trenches of the chiclotron, but given how often she took it apart for her various projects, she would need to figure out a less fickle solution sooner or later.
Having gone through her food stores, she picked up her sword, and started cultivating. Her broken rib and leg made her wince in pain, but at this point, she was used to it. She wanted to adjust to her new cultivation law as soon as possible, especially if traveling with Wang Yonghao would mean she had to fight something new every other day.
She came out of her fight with the bear surprisingly whole. Besides her broken rib and leg, the rest of her body was pretty healthy, and now that she was eating her fill, she managed to keep practicing for two whole hours. At this rate, she felt that she would be back to peak shape by the end of the week.
She took a break after cultivation by relaxing on the grass and reading deeper into the Three Obediences Four Virtues, giving her tired muscles time to recuperate.
This time, she decided to read the chapter on household management. There was a lot of genuinely helpful advice, especially when it came to making containers, accounting, and conducting small repairs, as well as a fair amount about the basics of feng shui management when building a house - something that was currently useless to her, on account of living under the open sky.
Besides the general advice, there was a set of complementary techniques for keeping track of inventory. One of the techniques could create primitive talismans - "marks" - that could be attached to various items in a store room, with supplementary techniques for counting them based on type, or for locating particular types of marks in space. The marks themselves were crude, and could only last for about a month before running out of spiritual energy, but she could already tell it would be invaluable when running a large sect.
To make sure she wasn't missing any other techniques, she quickly skimmed the other chapters. Cursing techniques seemed largely self-contained, and put a large strain on the body: she would only consider practicing them once she was in her peak condition. In the cooking chapter, she found two minor techniques for managing a kitchen - one for controlling the strength of fires by manipulating their access to air and one for measuring temperature - with the rest of the chapter focused on manipulating and transforming food. The advice and information seemed very comprehensive - she was sure that if she fully absorbed the lessons here, she could become a good immortal chef.
The sewing chapter, after discussing needle control, went into thread control techniques - they were clearly meant to be used together. Thread could be controlled by linking its movement to that of a second piece of thread held in her hands, either directly or by making it repeat a recorded movement on a trigger. The rest of the chapter was dedicated towards a variety of cutting, sewing and knitting patterns for shirts, robes, bags, and other common items.
Taken together, this cultivation manual held seven different spiritual energy manipulation techniques, as well as the base spiritual energy recirculation law, and a wealth of more general advice. Even though its focus was somewhat broad, in terms of the overall quality it could probably compare to some of the best cultivation manuals out there.
She pondered this fact as she laid on the grass. This cultivation law was very comprehensive - ordinarily, she couldn't expect to simply find something like this lying around. Furthermore, it's style was clashing with her own preferences. Was it her own luck at play, or Wang Yonghao's luck in finding a good manager for his inner world?
It was said that a cultivator's luck was not transferable, but this was a simplification. In reality, luck would simply draw in events that would suit the goals of the cultivator in question - both conscious and subconscious. While luck could not be controlled directly, by focusing on specific goals, a cultivator could emphasize their effect. Direct, straightforward and immediate goals were easiest to affect by luck, while indirect, conceptual and distant ones were much harder. The goals of other people - even if those people were dear to the cultivator in question - had a much lower importance, and so luck would barely affect them.
Of course, this wasn't to say that luck could not make other people benefit. For example, if a cultivator's luck brought them over to join a sect, then the sect would also benefit from their joining. This was part of the reason why Qian Shanyi wanted to hug Wang Yonghao's thigh and not let go - just by leaching off his treasures, her cultivation could increase by leaps and bounds. But this type of benefit was almost always indirect and incidental, especially because of the limitations of what luck could affect.
Luck had the strongest effect on the subconscious decisions of the cultivator themselves, and following that, on inanimate objects - for example, a lucky cultivator would find that their clothes would happen to tear less often, even though the strength of the fabric did not change in any way.
The scope of luck dropped significantly when affecting living beings, such as animals and demon beasts. It was fairly easy for a lucky cultivator to make a die roll to one side of the table more often than not, but much harder to make a chicken stroll to a particular side of the yard.
The hardest to affect were the decisions of other people, and especially other cultivators. This was not only because they were living beings, but also because their luck would clash with your own. If you were fighting another cultivator, then it may be beneficial to you if they happened to step in the path of your sword, but it would not be beneficial to them, and so the effects of luck on their decisions would tend to balance out. Similarly, when two cultivators gambled, then unless one of them was much luckier than the other, their rolls should be more or less fair. On the other hand, if two cultivators shared a goal, then their luck would tend to work together.
For her to find this jade slate, she had to end up in Wang Yonghao's Inner World, and then he had to stumble into this destroyed sect. Did her own weak luck guide him on this path so that she could find it, or did his much stronger luck find her because she would make for a good manager of his Inner World? It would be an indirect goal mostly benefitting another person, but with how monstrous his luck was, perhaps it could actually happen.
She shook her head. It was pointless to wonder - wherever it was her luck, his luck, or just happenstance, all that mattered in the end was what she decided to do with the cards she was dealt. Luck was rarely a determining force, and the kinds of fools who relied on their luck to see them through danger were the first to end up in the graveyards.
If Wang Yonghao's luck tried to lead her astray in service to his own goals, she would simply find a way to kill him. Dead men had no luck to speak of.
"Tang Qunying… Who were you?" she asked the air, playing around with the jade slate. Was she a part of that sect? Who hid this jade slate among the womanly books? Did she do it herself, to pass on her experiences?
Her thoughts were cut short by Wang Yonghao finally waking up.
It you'd like to read ahead, or read other works I write, I have six future chapters available on my patreon.
The problem was that the flowers kept coming, and each one took many minutes to kill. On top of that, their vines could absorb spiritual energy on contact: it was a battle of attrition, and she was losing, even though she cut her spiritual energy usage to a minimum. Once she would fully run out, it would be all over.
Wang Yonghao fared better, but only just. Because he didn't need to spend spiritual energy all day to keep his leg in one piece, his reserves started out full, and he dipped into them with abandon. His attacks spread fire around the moss, and the Honk of the Solar Goose technique sent razor-sharp bursts of sword light slicing through the forest. It looked very dominating, but the flowers had an uncanny ability to dodge just before the attack connected, and would keep moving even with most of their bodies sliced apart. Compared to her conservative style, she wasn't sure who would falter first.
Qian Shanyi grit her teeth. Something needed to change.
"Let's retreat," she shouted, kicking away the flower next to her, and sprinting over to Wang Yonghao. She grabbed him from behind by the collar of his robes, and planted her good foot on his back, standing tall.
"Hey!" he protested, "Get off me!"
"Less whining, more running on air," she curtly ordered, "I'll keep your back safe."
She wasn't about to tell him she couldn't fly, and she was definitely not letting herself be carried.
He went upwards, complaining loudly throughout. That put some distance between them and the flowers, but the plants gave chase, swinging from one branch to another at surprising speed. They needed a way to throw them off.
She racked her brain. How were they following them? Plants didn't have eyes to see.
The birds went silent, she thought. They knew the flowers were coming. But how?
The flower beasts moved silently, and she doubted the birds could sense them any better than a pair of cultivators. This left two possibilities: either the birds heard some kind of concealed signal, or the flowers came out at the same time every night. Many animals would hunt at specific times of the day. If these flowers were doing the same, then it wasn't out of the question for other animals to learn their schedule. That they all went quiet at once spoke to the threat on display.
"I think they can hear us," she said to Wang Yonghao, "try to keep quiet, and run in a different direction - maybe it will throw them off."
He immediately stopped complaining, and even his breathing slowed down. She smiled - the man could manage to think right when prompted. His footsteps on the fiery dragonflies were silent as they pivoted away from their path, but the flowers still kept on their trail. She frowned. Was she wrong?
No, she dismissed the thought, they probably have a spiritual sense.
All creatures needed to consume calories in order to stay alive. Spiritual creatures - cultivators, demon beasts like these flowers, ghosts, and many others - also needed to consume spiritual energy, or they would turn sick and die. Because of this, most demon beasts could innately sense spiritual energy, and right now, Qian Shanyi and Wang Yonghao must have looked like two bundles of tasty food.
"It didn't work," she said, breaking their silence, "they might be following our spiritual energy as well as the sound."
"So what then?" he said, "I can't keep flying without using spiritual energy."
"Let's descend to the ground and continue on foot," she said, eyeing the plants behind them. It was subtle, but she thought they were slowly closing in, as she could see flashes of red reflecting off the trees on their flanks.
"If we descend to the ground, they'd be on us in moments," he grumbled, "especially if we suppress our spiritual energy."
Honestly, it was a great point. She looked around, searching for a solution.
"There. See that dense copse of trees?" she pointed over his shoulder, "run through it, and use that sword goose technique to slice the trees apart. The noise of them falling down should cover our retreat."
Wang Yonghao headed towards the trees, and his sword danced in a tapestry of blinding light. In a single breath, every tree in the copse was sliced through by razor-sharp sword light, and collapsed to the ground with deafening cracks and groans as they ran past. They dropped to the ground, and started to walk away as quickly and quietly as they could while suppressing their spiritual energy by squeezing shut the 40 000 pores on their skin.
She glanced back, and saw that the collapsed trees were now positively covered in blood red flowers. They were searching around wildly, without any direction. She smiled - their distraction had worked.
She walked in front of Wang Yonghao and made a motion of a circle opening and widening with both hands. It took a minute, but eventually he figured out what she wanted, and opened his Inner World in front of them. She saw the flowers in the distance spin around and head in their direction, sensing the burst of spiritual energy, but by now it was too late.
She hopped on his back despite his protests, and they descended down into his Inner World, closing the entrance behind themselves. As he got down to the ground and she hopped off, he spun around and glared at her.
"Did you need to ride on my back?" he demanded.
"Like I said, I don't use spiritual energy unless it's absolutely necessary," she replied lazily, turning away from him and heading towards her improvised bed.
"What do you mean unless it's necessary?!" he threw his hands in the air, "It was necessary - we were surrounded! You even said we should flee!"
"Hm. No, I don't think so," she said, "You ran away just fine, didn't you? Why would I need to use my legs to run when yours are still strong?"
"I am not a horse for you to ride on!" he ran in front of her, again meeting her gaze with a scowl.
She met his scowl with a smile.
"If you aren't a horse, why didn't you throw me off?" she asked, yawning lazily, and refilling the water clock that seemed to have ran out, "Besides, it was a good division of labor. You could concentrate on running, and I could watch the flowers. Or do you have a technique for growing eyes on the back of your head?"
"Well, no - " he began.
"Excellent," she clapped him on his shoulder, and moved past him, laying down on her bed. "Looks like we agree that from this point on, you'd do the running while I relax on your back. It is the most optimal arrangement."
"Hey, no way!" he shouted again, as she picked up a spare set of robes to cover her eyes for sleep. "We didn't agree to that at all! I am not letting you ride me again!"
She glanced up at him, and saw his face blushing from what he just said.
"Letting me?" She said, "You have to pay for that in most cities."
"Shut up," he said, blushing further.
"Tell you what," she said smugly, "morning outsmarts evening, and this here cultivator is tired. Let's talk about this tomorrow."
She covered her eyes, laid down, and was out like a blown out candle.
When she woke up, Wang Yonghao was still asleep down on the grass, having followed her example by tying a different set of robes around his head. The strange sphere that he brought into the world fragment was laying by his side - he must have been tinkering with it the night before.
By the clock, she slept for ten hours. She took her medicine, cooked up a large portion of bear ribs for breakfast, and started to catalog their food supplies.
Yesterday's foraging went pretty badly, mostly due to her own lack of skill. The only thing they had to show for it was a small pile of acorns, as well as a broken up oak tree. The acorns had to be dried before they could be cooked, so she placed them all inside of an earth trench of the chiclotron, where the air temperature was a bit milder than in the adjacent fire trench.
In terms of calories, they were set for the next while. She didn't have a set of scales to weigh the meat, but the bear must have been at least six hundred kilos, and according to the Three Obediences Four Virtues, meat was about a third of a mammal's body weight. Even if each of them ate two kilos a day, they should still last for a month and a half. Remaining egg omelet would add a couple days on top of that.
This was, of course, assuming that the meat didn't go bad. For now, she stored it in the ice-cold water trenches of the chiclotron, but given how often she took it apart for her various projects, she would need to figure out a less fickle solution sooner or later.
Having gone through her food stores, she picked up her sword, and started cultivating. Her broken rib and leg made her wince in pain, but at this point, she was used to it. She wanted to adjust to her new cultivation law as soon as possible, especially if traveling with Wang Yonghao would mean she had to fight something new every other day.
She came out of her fight with the bear surprisingly whole. Besides her broken rib and leg, the rest of her body was pretty healthy, and now that she was eating her fill, she managed to keep practicing for two whole hours. At this rate, she felt that she would be back to peak shape by the end of the week.
She took a break after cultivation by relaxing on the grass and reading deeper into the Three Obediences Four Virtues, giving her tired muscles time to recuperate.
This time, she decided to read the chapter on household management. There was a lot of genuinely helpful advice, especially when it came to making containers, accounting, and conducting small repairs, as well as a fair amount about the basics of feng shui management when building a house - something that was currently useless to her, on account of living under the open sky.
Besides the general advice, there was a set of complementary techniques for keeping track of inventory. One of the techniques could create primitive talismans - "marks" - that could be attached to various items in a store room, with supplementary techniques for counting them based on type, or for locating particular types of marks in space. The marks themselves were crude, and could only last for about a month before running out of spiritual energy, but she could already tell it would be invaluable when running a large sect.
To make sure she wasn't missing any other techniques, she quickly skimmed the other chapters. Cursing techniques seemed largely self-contained, and put a large strain on the body: she would only consider practicing them once she was in her peak condition. In the cooking chapter, she found two minor techniques for managing a kitchen - one for controlling the strength of fires by manipulating their access to air and one for measuring temperature - with the rest of the chapter focused on manipulating and transforming food. The advice and information seemed very comprehensive - she was sure that if she fully absorbed the lessons here, she could become a good immortal chef.
The sewing chapter, after discussing needle control, went into thread control techniques - they were clearly meant to be used together. Thread could be controlled by linking its movement to that of a second piece of thread held in her hands, either directly or by making it repeat a recorded movement on a trigger. The rest of the chapter was dedicated towards a variety of cutting, sewing and knitting patterns for shirts, robes, bags, and other common items.
Taken together, this cultivation manual held seven different spiritual energy manipulation techniques, as well as the base spiritual energy recirculation law, and a wealth of more general advice. Even though its focus was somewhat broad, in terms of the overall quality it could probably compare to some of the best cultivation manuals out there.
She pondered this fact as she laid on the grass. This cultivation law was very comprehensive - ordinarily, she couldn't expect to simply find something like this lying around. Furthermore, it's style was clashing with her own preferences. Was it her own luck at play, or Wang Yonghao's luck in finding a good manager for his inner world?
It was said that a cultivator's luck was not transferable, but this was a simplification. In reality, luck would simply draw in events that would suit the goals of the cultivator in question - both conscious and subconscious. While luck could not be controlled directly, by focusing on specific goals, a cultivator could emphasize their effect. Direct, straightforward and immediate goals were easiest to affect by luck, while indirect, conceptual and distant ones were much harder. The goals of other people - even if those people were dear to the cultivator in question - had a much lower importance, and so luck would barely affect them.
Of course, this wasn't to say that luck could not make other people benefit. For example, if a cultivator's luck brought them over to join a sect, then the sect would also benefit from their joining. This was part of the reason why Qian Shanyi wanted to hug Wang Yonghao's thigh and not let go - just by leaching off his treasures, her cultivation could increase by leaps and bounds. But this type of benefit was almost always indirect and incidental, especially because of the limitations of what luck could affect.
Luck had the strongest effect on the subconscious decisions of the cultivator themselves, and following that, on inanimate objects - for example, a lucky cultivator would find that their clothes would happen to tear less often, even though the strength of the fabric did not change in any way.
The scope of luck dropped significantly when affecting living beings, such as animals and demon beasts. It was fairly easy for a lucky cultivator to make a die roll to one side of the table more often than not, but much harder to make a chicken stroll to a particular side of the yard.
The hardest to affect were the decisions of other people, and especially other cultivators. This was not only because they were living beings, but also because their luck would clash with your own. If you were fighting another cultivator, then it may be beneficial to you if they happened to step in the path of your sword, but it would not be beneficial to them, and so the effects of luck on their decisions would tend to balance out. Similarly, when two cultivators gambled, then unless one of them was much luckier than the other, their rolls should be more or less fair. On the other hand, if two cultivators shared a goal, then their luck would tend to work together.
For her to find this jade slate, she had to end up in Wang Yonghao's Inner World, and then he had to stumble into this destroyed sect. Did her own weak luck guide him on this path so that she could find it, or did his much stronger luck find her because she would make for a good manager of his Inner World? It would be an indirect goal mostly benefitting another person, but with how monstrous his luck was, perhaps it could actually happen.
She shook her head. It was pointless to wonder - wherever it was her luck, his luck, or just happenstance, all that mattered in the end was what she decided to do with the cards she was dealt. Luck was rarely a determining force, and the kinds of fools who relied on their luck to see them through danger were the first to end up in the graveyards.
If Wang Yonghao's luck tried to lead her astray in service to his own goals, she would simply find a way to kill him. Dead men had no luck to speak of.
"Tang Qunying… Who were you?" she asked the air, playing around with the jade slate. Was she a part of that sect? Who hid this jade slate among the womanly books? Did she do it herself, to pass on her experiences?
Her thoughts were cut short by Wang Yonghao finally waking up.
It you'd like to read ahead, or read other works I write, I have six future chapters available on my patreon.
Winged_One
Head Engineer of ATHENA
- Location
- Low Earth Orbit
Earlier chapter since I will be traveling on friday.
Chapter 14: Debate Dao Over A Good Meal
Winged_One
Head Engineer of ATHENA
- Location
- Low Earth Orbit
"Can't we have breakfast first?" Wang Yonghao whined, using a dagger to pull nails out of a bookshelf.
"He who does not work does not eat," Qian Shanyi noted wisely, choosing to conceal the fact that she ate as soon as she woke up.
"We aren't even in a hurry," he complained, gesturing with his dagger. "And we didn't have dinner last night after that fight. Please?"
"You know, the more time you spend talking, the longer it will take us to get through this pile," she noted, "and thus the longer it will take for me to make breakfast."
He grumbled but went back to work. They were going through the large pile of things they took from the sect - a great variety of bookshelves, cupboards, tables, and so on, all in various stages of rot and disrepair - and taking it apart for the valuable iron nails inside.
Besides the furniture, there were barrels (rotting, but she could reuse the iron hoops), pots from the kitchens (rusted, and would need a lot of cleaning before she could use them to cook), ceramic and clay crockery (in strong need of washing), cutlery, and even a decent pickaxe.
Working together, it only took them an hour to go through their loot. Old wood was stacked in the middle of the world fragment, ready to be lifted out when they opened the entrance. She wrapped the collected nails in a robe, stretched, and got up off the grass.
"Alright," she said, "I think I have a plan for how to deal with the Glowing Rosevines."
"The what?" Wang Yonghao asked. Instead of answering, she took out her jade slate, and flipped over to a page in the cooking chapter she noted earlier. She turned the slate over to him, showing him a picture of the same man-eating flowers that attacked them last night.
"They are called Glowing Rosevines," she said, "Apparently their vines make for good ropes, and the leaves can be turned into tea."
Wang Yonghao nodded as he looked over the picture, then raised his eyes.
"Do we need a plan?", he asked. "If they only come out at night, we can just move during the day, and spend the night here."
She snorted. "Did you not hear what I said?" she asked, "Their vines can be turned into ropes. I am tired of sleeping on the ground, I want to make a hammock."
Her makeshift nest out of spare robes had been serving her well, but she still woke up with a sore back every day. By the looks of it, so was Wang Yonghao.
"So what, we go out at night, kill a bunch of them, and then retreat?" he asked.
"No, it wouldn't work," she said, "they are cannibals - if we leave their corpses on the ground, they would be gone by morning."
"We could grab them and run," he said. She looked at him weirdly.
"And if one of us gets caught, or our spiritual energy runs out? Any cultivator, no matter their realm, can be overwhelmed," she said, " Or perhaps they will learn better than to be tricked by some falling trees? This would be risky."
He laughed. "I think it'd be fine."
Her frown deepened. "You really aren't taking this as seriously as you should. We were in danger last night, it would be stupid to simply go in without a good plan."
"Well, what can I say," he flashed her a grin, "I guess I am just naturally lucky. I don't think I would die."
She folded her arms, and stared at him with a blank expression. His grin faltered.
"You know, normally, lucky cultivators are harder to kill because their luck protects them," she said, "but normally, luck stays within reasonable bounds and doesn't force unwanted things on a cultivator. Yours does both. What makes you so sure your luck won't straight up kill you? Especially if you keep refusing its blatant attempts to make you cultivate?"
His smile froze on his face. She grinned.
"Really, it's me who doesn't need a plan," she said, "my luck is very ordinary. If I go out just before sunrise, I can probably safely grab the last couple of awake Rosevines left wandering around. If you go out, who knows what will happen."
He stared off into the distance, and laughed hollowly as a drop of sweat slid down his forehead.
"That's…a good point," he said, turning back to her, "so…what is your plan?"
"We'll build a shelter out of tree trunks," she said, "with a narrow hole, not wide enough to let a Rosewine through. Then we'll hide inside. They shouldn't be strong enough to break through a wall of wood and packed earth, and without needing to expend spiritual energy on defense, we could kill them easily. As long as we wipe out the entire pack, there would be no problem with gathering up their corpses in the morning."
"But first, we'll build the same shelter here, in your inner world," she continued, heading towards the large pile of oak tree wood stacked at the edge of the world fragment, "if we screw up and they manage to get inside our shelter, I want us to have a path of retreat."
"Hey, no way!" He shouted after her, "Breakfast first! You promised!"
"I am not hungry yet," she said, "we can eat after a couple hours."
"How can you not be hungry?" he asked, "We haven't eaten last night, and you've been working since morning!"
"Because I had breakfast before you woke up, sleepyhead," she said, grinning. He scowled at her.
"I am not doing any more work before I eat something," he said, crossing his arms.
"So make it yourself," she said, frowning, "this was always an option."
His mouth froze open in a silent objection. Finally, he closed it, and muttered something under his breath.
"What? Speak up," she said.
"But I don't know how to cook," he sighed.
She stared at him, then started laughing. Wang Yonghao scowled at her.
"How can you not know how to cook?" she said, pushing her laughter down. "Just put meat on a heated pan, it's not complicated."
"Well I just… don't know how much to heat it?" he said, blushing.
"Big strong cultivator, would starve if left alone," she shook her head, "But fine, I can cook for you."
The fool seemed to relax, smiling.
"Just as long as you pay for it," she said casually, heading towards her cooking station.
"Pay?" he asked, far too slow to catch on, "What do you mean?"
"Surely you've been to a restaurant before? Food is not free," she said, shaking her head in disappointment. "If you want me to work as an immortal chef, I deserve some remuneration."
"But…You already can use everything in here," he continued, confused.
"Hm," she grinned, preparing to deliver her strike, "Last night, you said you, ah, 'wouldn't let me ride you' I believe?"
"You can't be serious," he scowled.
"Deadly," she said, "How about it? For the next two months, I'll cook for you whenever you want, and you'll let me fly around on your shoulders whenever I want. Do we have a deal?"
Wang Yonghao stared at her for a while without responding.
"Well?" she asked, raising her eyebrow. His scowl deepened, and he stormed off towards the trench where the meat was stored. She settled down on the grass near the pan to watch his attempt.
She had only started to study the dao of cooking a short while back, but by watching Wang Yonghao work, she already felt like a virtuoso. To heat the pan, he brought over nine igneocopper bricks: far more than what he needed. Back when she was cooking the egg, she used six, and even that was too much: if she had not been actively mixing the egg, it would have burned. For the bear meat, she only used four bricks.
When Wang Yonghao dropped the meat on the pan, she smirked, and he glared in her direction.
"What?" he said, "You said meat on the pan, didn't you?"
"You are doing great!" she flashed him a thumbs-up, "This here cultivator believes you can rebel against the heavens and cook this bear!" she continued, drawing out a second thumbs-up with her other hand like a poisoned dagger. Without a hand to support herself, she had to arch her neck to look up at him. "Even the kitchens of the netherworld demon kings could not compete with the fiery taste of your cooking!"
This fool dropped the frozen meat directly on the pan, without holding it next to the igneocopper bricks for a couple minutes to let it unthaw. Not that she was going to tell him this.
She kept encouraging him until he snapped at her to keep quiet. The look on his face when he flipped the meat and realized the other side of it had been charred black was priceless.
Stubborn to the end, he tried to eat it, but it was impossible: charcoal on the surface and still frozen on the inside, the meat was completely ruined. Giving up, he covered his face with one hand. She saw a single tear slide down his cheek.
"Fine, damn it," he said, "You win. I'll do it."
"Excellent," she smiled, getting up and approaching him, "Now let me teach you what you did wrong."
It took some figuring out - as well as a complete redesign once she realized her earlier idea was far too ambitious - but four hours later they had built a shelter that was up to Qian Shanyi's standards. It was a squat construction, halfway buried into the ground, made out of oak planks as thick as her thigh and reinforced with packed earth. Glowing Rosevines could burrow, but her manual did not say how deep: nonetheless, she made sure that their shelter was completely enclosed in wood on the inside. Honk of the Solar Goose technique turned out to be useful for more than just gardening - its sharp cutting strikes could easily make flat boards out of the oak wood they brought with them.
There was only a single cramped room, its ceiling low enough you could only stand on your knees, with a heavy trap door covering it from the top. On the inside, the trapdoor could be locked to the ceiling by sliding a thick plank into it. A single narrow slit served as the window, leading into a two meter-long tunnel before coming out on the outside. The flowers would need to either slide into this tunnel, or try to slip their tentacles inside - neither of which would be easy. On the other hand, they could easily strike them with a long spear. As far as defense was concerned, it was almost perfect.
She knocked on the wall of the shelter a couple times, and climbed out through the trapdoor, nodding towards Wang Yonghao.
"I think we are ready. Let's go outside," she said.
"If you don't want to fly yourself, can't you at least let me carry you normally?" he complained as she settled down with one foot on his back and one hand on his collar, "this way is far too embarrassing."
"Do you dare to not give face to your elders?" She said, "It's impossible for me to be carried any other way. It would go against many profound and sacred principles we don't have the time to go into. Come on, up we go."
He walked upwards, grumbling throughout, and opened the entrance when they reached the top of the world fragment. Qian Shanyi drew her sword as they went through.
Outside, it was night. As soon as she saw the darkness, she yanked Wang Yonghao by the collar.
"Back," she said, "go back!"
In the distance, she saw the glint of red reflecting from the trees, coming closer.
Wang Yonghao listened, and ducked back into his Inner World, closing the entrance, and descending back down to the ground.
"Ha, pretty unlucky for it to be night again," he laughed, "I guess we'll need to wait until morning?"
She glanced at him, debating wherever she should tell him.
"It's not luck," she said, deciding that there was no reason to hide this fact, even if it was possible, "the time in your Inner World flows at a different rate when it is closed."
"What?"
"You probably never noticed, if you have never spent the night here," she said, "From the time we went to sleep, eighteen hours have passed here. It should be midday or late evening outside, but it is night."
She watched him carefully. He didn't seem too shocked to be hearing about warped time, no doubt having had an experience with something like this in the past.
"Couldn't the darkness be because of something else?" he asked uncertainly, "A big cloud covering the skies?"
"It's not just this night," she said, "I've spent a good week inside of the Inner World before you showed up, while for you it must have been only a couple days. Unless you lied about what you did after you left Golden Rabbit Bay?"
"I am not a liar," he scoffed.
"Then it must be the time," she shrugged. "At a guess, it should be flowing three or four times faster here than on the outside, when the entrance is closed."
"Man, that must have sucked, being here alone for a week," he ruffled his hair, "I'm sorry that happened."
"I had the excruciating pain of my healing body to occupy myself," she said, heading back over to their stores of wood. "Come on, we have an entire day ahead of us before the sun rises," she said, "I want to make some furniture."
"You don't need this much fat," Qian Shanyi said, looking over what he was doing, "use less. Even less. Yes, much better, that's enough."
Wang Yonghao carefully cut off a small piece of bear fat and threw it on top of the shield they were using to cook. He moved it around, making sure enough of the shield was covered with grease so that the meat wouldn't stick to it.
He glanced at the mysterious woman sitting by his side, carving a wide oak plank with a small axe to make a shovel. Even though she stayed focused on her work, she had an uncanny ability to glance up just as he was about to make some kind of mistake.
He put his foot down on having dinner first, and she agreed readily, offloading the cooking on his shoulders. He tried to argue that she agreed to cook, but she responded that if she left he would have nobody else to cook for him, and he had no real argument against that. Even though he felt annoyed at being forced to do it despite their deal, he still appreciated the pointers she was giving. If he could eat better in the future, it would all be worth it.
He still didn't really know who she was or why she was originally looking for him, and when he tried to find out more, she kept deflecting his questions.
"After we are done with dinner, we really need to make a table," she said, interrupting his thoughts, "I need a workbench, my back is starting to hurt after working on the ground for many days."
"Haven't we done enough work for today?" he sighed, "Where's the rush?"
"Do you have somewhere else to be?" she asked, throwing him a baffled look.
"Well, no," he said, "but we could just relax. Talk about stuff, like normal people."
"I'll relax when I can live like a civilized person instead of a barbarian that sleeps on the ground," she said, "and for that I need a woodworking station, which means I need a workbench, which means I need a table. So, we are making a table."
"We've spent the entire day digging and lugging wood around," he said, "My arms are tired, and you said your back hurts. Can't this wait until tomorrow?"
"So?" she snorted, "Work while tired. Are you a cultivator or a baby? I work with a broken leg and don't complain."
He narrowed his eyes at her. Some of the things she said had to be jokes or exaggerations, but he could never tell what was true and what wasn't.
"You don't have a broken leg," he said, testing her, "We've been walking around all day yesterday. You don't even limp."
Instead of answering him, she stretched out her leg in the air, and for a moment, her shin flopped around like a limp noodle. He recoiled at the sight, a shiver going down his spine. After a moment, her leg snapped back into shape.
"Why are you like this?" he complained, recovering his composure, "Aren't ladies supposed to be gentle and kind?"
"Why?" she laughed, putting her carving to the side, and focusing fully on him, "Because it would make you more comfortable?"
"And what's wrong with that?" he said, crossing his arms and crossing glares with her, "We basically live in the same house! What's wrong with making your housemate comfortable?"
"Keep your eyes on the meat, junior," she snorted, "it's going to burn."
The memory of eating burned meat made him flinch, and he looked down.
"To cultivate is to spit in the face of heaven," she continued as he carefully flipped the bear stakes on the pan with a pair of chopsticks made from long oak splinters, "If I only did what made other people comfortable as opposed to what I want, I wouldn't be much of a cultivator, would I?"
"But then people will do things that make you uncomfortable," he sighed, "Why do you want to be mean to others?"
"They already do, what of it?" she said, "Did you think of my comfort when you and your brothers in drink approached me at the Northern Sky Salmon?"
"That's…different," he said, shifting in place. The memories of that night were still hazy, but he could remember the basics now. "I was drunk, for one."
"Drunk men do what sober ones want to but dare not," she snorted.
"Well you seem pretty comfortable now, don't you?" he snapped out, "Alone with a man, in the middle of nowhere?"
"I am comfortable because if you were to try anything I would open you up from your balls to your ribcage," she replied grimly, "In the city, my hands were bound by law. Do not think that a fight outside would go the same way, no matter how weakened my body may be."
He gulped, and glanced down at her hands. For a moment, he could swear he could see drops of bear blood rolling off her fingers.
"I didn't mean it like that," he muttered, "I am a good person, I don't do things other people don't want, and I already said I am sorry for that night. I definitely wouldn't have wanted to get into a fight if I was sober. I just mean, well, isn't it natural for men to approach women?"
"Isn't it natural for a cultivator to be accustomed to the sight of shattered limbs?" she noted.
"That's not the same!"
"That is true," she nodded, "there is no cultivation technique that relies on unnerving others. Human cauldrons, on the other hand…"
He flinched again.
"That's really not fair," he said, "Only the vilest of villains do that."
"Yet the context is still there, is it not?" She said, "Well, no matter. Let us eat."
It you'd like to read ahead, or read other works I write, I have five future chapters available on my patreon for a low price of 3$.
"He who does not work does not eat," Qian Shanyi noted wisely, choosing to conceal the fact that she ate as soon as she woke up.
"We aren't even in a hurry," he complained, gesturing with his dagger. "And we didn't have dinner last night after that fight. Please?"
"You know, the more time you spend talking, the longer it will take us to get through this pile," she noted, "and thus the longer it will take for me to make breakfast."
He grumbled but went back to work. They were going through the large pile of things they took from the sect - a great variety of bookshelves, cupboards, tables, and so on, all in various stages of rot and disrepair - and taking it apart for the valuable iron nails inside.
Besides the furniture, there were barrels (rotting, but she could reuse the iron hoops), pots from the kitchens (rusted, and would need a lot of cleaning before she could use them to cook), ceramic and clay crockery (in strong need of washing), cutlery, and even a decent pickaxe.
Working together, it only took them an hour to go through their loot. Old wood was stacked in the middle of the world fragment, ready to be lifted out when they opened the entrance. She wrapped the collected nails in a robe, stretched, and got up off the grass.
"Alright," she said, "I think I have a plan for how to deal with the Glowing Rosevines."
"The what?" Wang Yonghao asked. Instead of answering, she took out her jade slate, and flipped over to a page in the cooking chapter she noted earlier. She turned the slate over to him, showing him a picture of the same man-eating flowers that attacked them last night.
"They are called Glowing Rosevines," she said, "Apparently their vines make for good ropes, and the leaves can be turned into tea."
Wang Yonghao nodded as he looked over the picture, then raised his eyes.
"Do we need a plan?", he asked. "If they only come out at night, we can just move during the day, and spend the night here."
She snorted. "Did you not hear what I said?" she asked, "Their vines can be turned into ropes. I am tired of sleeping on the ground, I want to make a hammock."
Her makeshift nest out of spare robes had been serving her well, but she still woke up with a sore back every day. By the looks of it, so was Wang Yonghao.
"So what, we go out at night, kill a bunch of them, and then retreat?" he asked.
"No, it wouldn't work," she said, "they are cannibals - if we leave their corpses on the ground, they would be gone by morning."
"We could grab them and run," he said. She looked at him weirdly.
"And if one of us gets caught, or our spiritual energy runs out? Any cultivator, no matter their realm, can be overwhelmed," she said, " Or perhaps they will learn better than to be tricked by some falling trees? This would be risky."
He laughed. "I think it'd be fine."
Her frown deepened. "You really aren't taking this as seriously as you should. We were in danger last night, it would be stupid to simply go in without a good plan."
"Well, what can I say," he flashed her a grin, "I guess I am just naturally lucky. I don't think I would die."
She folded her arms, and stared at him with a blank expression. His grin faltered.
"You know, normally, lucky cultivators are harder to kill because their luck protects them," she said, "but normally, luck stays within reasonable bounds and doesn't force unwanted things on a cultivator. Yours does both. What makes you so sure your luck won't straight up kill you? Especially if you keep refusing its blatant attempts to make you cultivate?"
His smile froze on his face. She grinned.
"Really, it's me who doesn't need a plan," she said, "my luck is very ordinary. If I go out just before sunrise, I can probably safely grab the last couple of awake Rosevines left wandering around. If you go out, who knows what will happen."
He stared off into the distance, and laughed hollowly as a drop of sweat slid down his forehead.
"That's…a good point," he said, turning back to her, "so…what is your plan?"
"We'll build a shelter out of tree trunks," she said, "with a narrow hole, not wide enough to let a Rosewine through. Then we'll hide inside. They shouldn't be strong enough to break through a wall of wood and packed earth, and without needing to expend spiritual energy on defense, we could kill them easily. As long as we wipe out the entire pack, there would be no problem with gathering up their corpses in the morning."
"But first, we'll build the same shelter here, in your inner world," she continued, heading towards the large pile of oak tree wood stacked at the edge of the world fragment, "if we screw up and they manage to get inside our shelter, I want us to have a path of retreat."
"Hey, no way!" He shouted after her, "Breakfast first! You promised!"
"I am not hungry yet," she said, "we can eat after a couple hours."
"How can you not be hungry?" he asked, "We haven't eaten last night, and you've been working since morning!"
"Because I had breakfast before you woke up, sleepyhead," she said, grinning. He scowled at her.
"I am not doing any more work before I eat something," he said, crossing his arms.
"So make it yourself," she said, frowning, "this was always an option."
His mouth froze open in a silent objection. Finally, he closed it, and muttered something under his breath.
"What? Speak up," she said.
"But I don't know how to cook," he sighed.
She stared at him, then started laughing. Wang Yonghao scowled at her.
"How can you not know how to cook?" she said, pushing her laughter down. "Just put meat on a heated pan, it's not complicated."
"Well I just… don't know how much to heat it?" he said, blushing.
"Big strong cultivator, would starve if left alone," she shook her head, "But fine, I can cook for you."
The fool seemed to relax, smiling.
"Just as long as you pay for it," she said casually, heading towards her cooking station.
"Pay?" he asked, far too slow to catch on, "What do you mean?"
"Surely you've been to a restaurant before? Food is not free," she said, shaking her head in disappointment. "If you want me to work as an immortal chef, I deserve some remuneration."
"But…You already can use everything in here," he continued, confused.
"Hm," she grinned, preparing to deliver her strike, "Last night, you said you, ah, 'wouldn't let me ride you' I believe?"
"You can't be serious," he scowled.
"Deadly," she said, "How about it? For the next two months, I'll cook for you whenever you want, and you'll let me fly around on your shoulders whenever I want. Do we have a deal?"
Wang Yonghao stared at her for a while without responding.
"Well?" she asked, raising her eyebrow. His scowl deepened, and he stormed off towards the trench where the meat was stored. She settled down on the grass near the pan to watch his attempt.
She had only started to study the dao of cooking a short while back, but by watching Wang Yonghao work, she already felt like a virtuoso. To heat the pan, he brought over nine igneocopper bricks: far more than what he needed. Back when she was cooking the egg, she used six, and even that was too much: if she had not been actively mixing the egg, it would have burned. For the bear meat, she only used four bricks.
When Wang Yonghao dropped the meat on the pan, she smirked, and he glared in her direction.
"What?" he said, "You said meat on the pan, didn't you?"
"You are doing great!" she flashed him a thumbs-up, "This here cultivator believes you can rebel against the heavens and cook this bear!" she continued, drawing out a second thumbs-up with her other hand like a poisoned dagger. Without a hand to support herself, she had to arch her neck to look up at him. "Even the kitchens of the netherworld demon kings could not compete with the fiery taste of your cooking!"
This fool dropped the frozen meat directly on the pan, without holding it next to the igneocopper bricks for a couple minutes to let it unthaw. Not that she was going to tell him this.
She kept encouraging him until he snapped at her to keep quiet. The look on his face when he flipped the meat and realized the other side of it had been charred black was priceless.
Stubborn to the end, he tried to eat it, but it was impossible: charcoal on the surface and still frozen on the inside, the meat was completely ruined. Giving up, he covered his face with one hand. She saw a single tear slide down his cheek.
"Fine, damn it," he said, "You win. I'll do it."
"Excellent," she smiled, getting up and approaching him, "Now let me teach you what you did wrong."
It took some figuring out - as well as a complete redesign once she realized her earlier idea was far too ambitious - but four hours later they had built a shelter that was up to Qian Shanyi's standards. It was a squat construction, halfway buried into the ground, made out of oak planks as thick as her thigh and reinforced with packed earth. Glowing Rosevines could burrow, but her manual did not say how deep: nonetheless, she made sure that their shelter was completely enclosed in wood on the inside. Honk of the Solar Goose technique turned out to be useful for more than just gardening - its sharp cutting strikes could easily make flat boards out of the oak wood they brought with them.
There was only a single cramped room, its ceiling low enough you could only stand on your knees, with a heavy trap door covering it from the top. On the inside, the trapdoor could be locked to the ceiling by sliding a thick plank into it. A single narrow slit served as the window, leading into a two meter-long tunnel before coming out on the outside. The flowers would need to either slide into this tunnel, or try to slip their tentacles inside - neither of which would be easy. On the other hand, they could easily strike them with a long spear. As far as defense was concerned, it was almost perfect.
She knocked on the wall of the shelter a couple times, and climbed out through the trapdoor, nodding towards Wang Yonghao.
"I think we are ready. Let's go outside," she said.
"If you don't want to fly yourself, can't you at least let me carry you normally?" he complained as she settled down with one foot on his back and one hand on his collar, "this way is far too embarrassing."
"Do you dare to not give face to your elders?" She said, "It's impossible for me to be carried any other way. It would go against many profound and sacred principles we don't have the time to go into. Come on, up we go."
He walked upwards, grumbling throughout, and opened the entrance when they reached the top of the world fragment. Qian Shanyi drew her sword as they went through.
Outside, it was night. As soon as she saw the darkness, she yanked Wang Yonghao by the collar.
"Back," she said, "go back!"
In the distance, she saw the glint of red reflecting from the trees, coming closer.
Wang Yonghao listened, and ducked back into his Inner World, closing the entrance, and descending back down to the ground.
"Ha, pretty unlucky for it to be night again," he laughed, "I guess we'll need to wait until morning?"
She glanced at him, debating wherever she should tell him.
"It's not luck," she said, deciding that there was no reason to hide this fact, even if it was possible, "the time in your Inner World flows at a different rate when it is closed."
"What?"
"You probably never noticed, if you have never spent the night here," she said, "From the time we went to sleep, eighteen hours have passed here. It should be midday or late evening outside, but it is night."
She watched him carefully. He didn't seem too shocked to be hearing about warped time, no doubt having had an experience with something like this in the past.
"Couldn't the darkness be because of something else?" he asked uncertainly, "A big cloud covering the skies?"
"It's not just this night," she said, "I've spent a good week inside of the Inner World before you showed up, while for you it must have been only a couple days. Unless you lied about what you did after you left Golden Rabbit Bay?"
"I am not a liar," he scoffed.
"Then it must be the time," she shrugged. "At a guess, it should be flowing three or four times faster here than on the outside, when the entrance is closed."
"Man, that must have sucked, being here alone for a week," he ruffled his hair, "I'm sorry that happened."
"I had the excruciating pain of my healing body to occupy myself," she said, heading back over to their stores of wood. "Come on, we have an entire day ahead of us before the sun rises," she said, "I want to make some furniture."
"You don't need this much fat," Qian Shanyi said, looking over what he was doing, "use less. Even less. Yes, much better, that's enough."
Wang Yonghao carefully cut off a small piece of bear fat and threw it on top of the shield they were using to cook. He moved it around, making sure enough of the shield was covered with grease so that the meat wouldn't stick to it.
He glanced at the mysterious woman sitting by his side, carving a wide oak plank with a small axe to make a shovel. Even though she stayed focused on her work, she had an uncanny ability to glance up just as he was about to make some kind of mistake.
He put his foot down on having dinner first, and she agreed readily, offloading the cooking on his shoulders. He tried to argue that she agreed to cook, but she responded that if she left he would have nobody else to cook for him, and he had no real argument against that. Even though he felt annoyed at being forced to do it despite their deal, he still appreciated the pointers she was giving. If he could eat better in the future, it would all be worth it.
He still didn't really know who she was or why she was originally looking for him, and when he tried to find out more, she kept deflecting his questions.
"After we are done with dinner, we really need to make a table," she said, interrupting his thoughts, "I need a workbench, my back is starting to hurt after working on the ground for many days."
"Haven't we done enough work for today?" he sighed, "Where's the rush?"
"Do you have somewhere else to be?" she asked, throwing him a baffled look.
"Well, no," he said, "but we could just relax. Talk about stuff, like normal people."
"I'll relax when I can live like a civilized person instead of a barbarian that sleeps on the ground," she said, "and for that I need a woodworking station, which means I need a workbench, which means I need a table. So, we are making a table."
"We've spent the entire day digging and lugging wood around," he said, "My arms are tired, and you said your back hurts. Can't this wait until tomorrow?"
"So?" she snorted, "Work while tired. Are you a cultivator or a baby? I work with a broken leg and don't complain."
He narrowed his eyes at her. Some of the things she said had to be jokes or exaggerations, but he could never tell what was true and what wasn't.
"You don't have a broken leg," he said, testing her, "We've been walking around all day yesterday. You don't even limp."
Instead of answering him, she stretched out her leg in the air, and for a moment, her shin flopped around like a limp noodle. He recoiled at the sight, a shiver going down his spine. After a moment, her leg snapped back into shape.
"Why are you like this?" he complained, recovering his composure, "Aren't ladies supposed to be gentle and kind?"
"Why?" she laughed, putting her carving to the side, and focusing fully on him, "Because it would make you more comfortable?"
"And what's wrong with that?" he said, crossing his arms and crossing glares with her, "We basically live in the same house! What's wrong with making your housemate comfortable?"
"Keep your eyes on the meat, junior," she snorted, "it's going to burn."
The memory of eating burned meat made him flinch, and he looked down.
"To cultivate is to spit in the face of heaven," she continued as he carefully flipped the bear stakes on the pan with a pair of chopsticks made from long oak splinters, "If I only did what made other people comfortable as opposed to what I want, I wouldn't be much of a cultivator, would I?"
"But then people will do things that make you uncomfortable," he sighed, "Why do you want to be mean to others?"
"They already do, what of it?" she said, "Did you think of my comfort when you and your brothers in drink approached me at the Northern Sky Salmon?"
"That's…different," he said, shifting in place. The memories of that night were still hazy, but he could remember the basics now. "I was drunk, for one."
"Drunk men do what sober ones want to but dare not," she snorted.
"Well you seem pretty comfortable now, don't you?" he snapped out, "Alone with a man, in the middle of nowhere?"
"I am comfortable because if you were to try anything I would open you up from your balls to your ribcage," she replied grimly, "In the city, my hands were bound by law. Do not think that a fight outside would go the same way, no matter how weakened my body may be."
He gulped, and glanced down at her hands. For a moment, he could swear he could see drops of bear blood rolling off her fingers.
"I didn't mean it like that," he muttered, "I am a good person, I don't do things other people don't want, and I already said I am sorry for that night. I definitely wouldn't have wanted to get into a fight if I was sober. I just mean, well, isn't it natural for men to approach women?"
"Isn't it natural for a cultivator to be accustomed to the sight of shattered limbs?" she noted.
"That's not the same!"
"That is true," she nodded, "there is no cultivation technique that relies on unnerving others. Human cauldrons, on the other hand…"
He flinched again.
"That's really not fair," he said, "Only the vilest of villains do that."
"Yet the context is still there, is it not?" She said, "Well, no matter. Let us eat."
It you'd like to read ahead, or read other works I write, I have five future chapters available on my patreon for a low price of 3$.
Winged_One
Head Engineer of ATHENA
- Location
- Low Earth Orbit
After discussing it with my editors, I made some changes to the previous chapters.
First of all, I added a short prologue (you can find it at the top of chapter 1 now), giving Qian Shanyi a bit more varied characterization and showing some more advanced worldbuilding details. All of this had already been planned to be in future chapters, so all this does is pull it earlier, which I think is better for your reading experience.
Secondly, I edited the first three chapters to reduce the scope of her memory loss. Now, instead of getting an overall memory loss, she only forgot the last couple days (i.e. how she ended up in this situation). All of these changes are very minor rephrazings of individual sentences, and IMO do not require a re-read. I never really did anything with the big amnesia, and this way, I think it's a bit more consistent with how she can easily remember details about cultivation mechanics.
First of all, I added a short prologue (you can find it at the top of chapter 1 now), giving Qian Shanyi a bit more varied characterization and showing some more advanced worldbuilding details. All of this had already been planned to be in future chapters, so all this does is pull it earlier, which I think is better for your reading experience.
Secondly, I edited the first three chapters to reduce the scope of her memory loss. Now, instead of getting an overall memory loss, she only forgot the last couple days (i.e. how she ended up in this situation). All of these changes are very minor rephrazings of individual sentences, and IMO do not require a re-read. I never really did anything with the big amnesia, and this way, I think it's a bit more consistent with how she can easily remember details about cultivation mechanics.
Tisaku
Head Chief Thinkomancer
Rosevine
RighelloDi'Tutti
Ruler of All
- Location
- The speed force
MC is kinda asshole
Cinera
Deus Lo Vult!
- Location
- Gallia
The hero or the heroine?
I'm a bit unnerved at how readily the heroine is taking it for having been beaten to within an inch of her life by the hero.
I'd expect her to have more resentment towards him.
Chapter 15: Purge All Grime On The Forest Shores
Winged_One
Head Engineer of ATHENA
- Location
- Low Earth Orbit
Qian Shanyi breathed in, filling her lungs with air to the bursting point, and slowly exhaled. Her senses were focused inward, on the spiritual energy circulating through her meridians. She was finally seeing the first signs of the formation of the yin-yang cycles, and she couldn't tear her attention away from them.
Every cultivator possessed twelve primary meridians that transported spiritual energy throughout their body, with each one named after one of the major organs it passed through. The relationship between the organ and the meridian was reciprocal: the more spiritual energy passed through the meridian, the healthier the organ would become, and correspondingly, if the organ was damaged or affected by disease, the passage of spiritual energy through the meridian would suffer. The only exception to this rule was the heart, which was linked to two separate meridians - the heart meridian and the pericardium meridian - and the sanjiao meridian, which didn't pass through anything in particular.
Almost all of the energy flowing through the meridians had the type appropriate to the cultivator's constitution - in Qian Shanyi's case, yin-metal - but a small part corresponded to the type of each particular meridian. Six of the meridians had a yin nature, with the other six being yang; there were two meridians for every one of the five major types of spiritual energy, except fire, which had four.
Back when she was cultivating Seven Flowers Bloom, spiritual energy flowed freely between the yin and yang meridians, mixing together with little direction. Now that she practiced a proper, typed cultivation law, she was finally seeing the first signs of separation. Two separate cycles were forming among her meridians - one for yin and one for yang - with the energy moving between them only among specific pathways. As the cycles would continue to develop, the energy flow would accelerate, and her yin meridians - already better developed than her yang meridians due to her constitution - would further strengthen and expand. A similar process was happening to her metal meridians, and she could swear her lungs were already growing deeper.
Qian Shanyi forced her eyes to open. That was only a trick of the mind: she had been cultivating Three Obediences Four Virtues for a mere three days. It would take a couple weeks for the energy vortices to fully form, let alone for her internal organs to catch up. For now, she had work to do.
She ended up underestimating how long the night would last. They've spent a full day within the world fragment, going to sleep twice, and the morning sun only rose once they woke up - that meant the time within the world fragment was moving four or five times faster than on the outside.
Wang Yonghao was lazing about on the grass as she finished her morning cultivation, using a dagger to skillfully carve a chunk of oak wood into the shape of a small animal figure.
"You could have at least worked on our lathe, if you do not want to cultivate," she chided him, getting up off the grass and dusting herself off, "I don't want us to carve every little thing we need by hand."
She had never seen a lathe, and only had a vague awareness that a piece of wood was spun around an axis in order to make smooth circular shapes. The motion of it seemed clear in her mind - now they just needed to figure out how to turn it into reality.
"I am not a refiner like you," he said, shrugging, and motioning with his halfway finished figurine, "I don't know how to make a lathe. I only know how to use a knife."
"It doesn't take refining to put a couple planks together," she grumbled, "you know what the problem is, what is so difficult about trying things until you figure out a solution?"
She spent most of the last day memorizing the foraging advice of the Three Obediences Four Virtues in preparation for setting off into the forest again, but she did make sure to carve out several shovels and cobble together a large, though somewhat rickety table. For now, she avoided using nails, deciding to save them for something that would need to be especially robust.
"Well, you'll figure it out, right?" he said, "What's the hurry?"
"You don't feel in a hurry to sleep on a good hammock, instead of the cold hard ground like a dog?", she squinted at him, "Would you rather I didn't make one for you?"
He gaped at her in horror.
"You wouldn't…" he started, then paused, studying her face.
"Your poor, poor back," she continued, twisting the knife, "It must be starting to hurt. I know mine did, after a couple days, and I sleep on way more padding than you do."
"How could you be this cruel?"
"To cultivate is to be cruel to fate itself. What is one more cruelty on top of that?" she said, "Besides, why would I waste my time if you won't spend some of yours?"
Wang Yonghao shuddered and got up off the grass. "Fine," he said, "what do you want me to do?"
"If you see a job, it's yours," she said, heading over to their meat stores, "Figure out what can be done, then do it. It's really that simple."
After breakfast, they finally left the world fragment. Morning sun was shining through the leaves, and dew covered the moss and the tree trunks around them. After a short discussion, they decided to head further into the forest - now that they knew what they were doing, building the hideout would only take them a couple hours when the evening approached, and there was no reason to waste the rest of the day. They had to keep moving.
The forest slowly woke up around them as they walked among the gently swaying shadows cast by the heavy canopy down on the ground. As birds' cries filled the air one after another, Qing Shanyi tried to count their species by their songs. It was hard to keep track of their voices in her head, but it kept her mind occupied while her eyes searched for plants to forage. Perhaps they could climb the trees and look for bird nests? Surely working together they could manage to strike a bird out of the air, even if neither of them was much of a hunter. It would break up their diet of bear meat, at the very least.
"Do you just cultivate?", Wang Yonghao suddenly asked, bringing her out of her ruminations.
"What?" she asked, confused.
"I mean, do you do anything else besides cultivating?" he asked, "You keep saying cultivation is this or that, and I am starting to wonder."
"I eat. I sleep," she answered, raising her eyebrow, "I do the work I think needs doing. One would hope most people would be similar?"
"I mean, besides all that," the petulant junior rolled his eyes at her, "you have to have hobbies, right? You can't just cultivate all day long."
"Of course you can," she said, "cultivators in the foundation building stage can easily spend an entire month in closed door cultivation."
"You know what I mean," he sighed in exasperation, "Do you, I don't know, like birdwatching? I do woodcarving, for example."
She stayed silent for a moment, thinking through her answer. There was nothing in it that could give her game away, but it still felt strange to talk about something so… casual.
"I like games," she finally said, "gambling games."
Before she became a cultivator, she studied under her father, who wanted her to inherit his small merchanting business. She took to it like a fish to water, but what she liked most were the talks with the clients, the push and pull of negotiating wills, of bluffs and counterbluffs. After she joined Luminous Lotus Pavilion, she missed the thrill of it, but found it again in gambling. On the rare days when she managed to keep enough of her time free, she would stalk the city streets far away from the sect compound, enter gambling parlors where none knew her, and find some hapless victims for an evening. All she had to do was flap her eyelashes a couple times, pout her lips, and they would immediately put her out of their minds as a gullible girl way out of her depth.
Then they would lose miserably, and the look on their faces at the belated realization of her skill would warm her soul on even the coldest nights. That it gave her more spending money was just a nice bonus.
"Games!" Wang Yonghao clapped his hands together in satisfaction, "That's great! I also love them. We should play a game together."
"With your luck? It's pointless."
"There are games that don't depend on luck!" he said, pleading in his voice.
"Why are you so insistent on this?" she asked, keeping her tone casual.
"Because I like playing?" he ruffled his hair, "It's one of the few things I can do in between running away from one crisis or another. Besides, it's good to know the people you live with, right? Come on, you can't be all work and no play. We could share a story or two?"
"Hm," she paused, "Very well, as long as it does not cut into our work time too much."
The forest floor was uneven, with hills and gullies breaking up their line of vision, forcing their path through the forest away from a straight line. Halfway through the day, they crossed over the top of one such hill, and suddenly walked out onto the clean, sandy shores of a calm, narrow river. The sand was black to match the trees, and surprisingly warm even under the forest shade.
Qian Shanyi came all the way to the edge of the stream and dipped her fingers into the clean, cold water, feeling it out.
"You think we should fly over?" he sighed, rubbing the collar of his robes.
"I think we should stop here for the day," she responded, "We'll build our cabin for hunting Glowing Rosevines at the crest of that hill for the night. For now, I want to take a real bath. I am sure you'd appreciate one too."
For a bath, they would need soap, and that meant two things: ash and grease.
She sent out Wang Yonghao to chop down some more pines to replenish the wood within his Inner World, and to gather as much tree bark as he could. In the meantime, she started preparing the shore of the river. She waded into the water and hammered sharpened wood planks into the riverbed, forming a cul-de-sac against the flow of water, then deepened it with the help of her new shovel, turning it into a natural bath. Some of the water flowed in between the planks, but that was fine by her; it would simply carry the dirty water downstream.
Having finished her crude construction, she went back to the shore, picked up one of the smaller pots they took from the dead sect, and started furiously scrubbing it with the sand from the river.
Out of the four pots from the sect, two were so rusted through that they could not hold water. The other two had to be thoroughly scrubbed before she would dare to put anything in them, let alone use them to cook. The sand was a bit too fine for what she was doing, and she had to strengthen the spiritual energy shield surrounding her hand to keep it from being cut by the rusty flakes of metal, but inexorably the pot was getting cleaner.
When Wang Yonghao returned, they started a large fire from all the bark and pine wood. On her own, starting a fire from fresh bark would have been a pain, but he just blasted it with pure fire spiritual energy until it lit up like a torch.
While she was still busy with the pot, she gave him one of their shovels to start building their hunting cabin. He seemed more motivated to work than before: she figured that the prospect of a bath and a hammock bed worked its magic.
It took her a good half an hour of cultivating the scrubbing arts before she felt the pot could be declared ready for cooking. She added some more wood to the fire, fashioned a suspension for the pot from a couple planks and a sturdy pine branch, and called Wang Yonghao back. Together, they quickly filled the pot with cuts of bear fat and a little water to keep it from burning on the fire.
The trouble with fat within a living creature was that it was attached to muscle, with no good way to pull the two apart. What she needed for the soap was pure fat, and the way to get it was quite simple: melt the fat away from the muscle, and then solidify it back from the liquid solution after filtering out the solid pieces of meat left behind. They would only need a small bit of fat for the soap, but she figured they might as well process all of it at once.
While the fat slowly rendered, they finished up the shack on the hill, threw out the old wood from Wang Yonghao's Inner World, cleaned the rest of the cutlery in river water, and even fully scrubbed the other, much larger pot. Once the fat seemed liquid enough to her eyes, they carefully poured it into the other pot through a silk sheet, and then Wang Yonghao carried it into a water trench of the chiclotron to be frozen into pure lard until further notice.
That left the ash, which had to be rendered into lye. The fire served two purposes: heating up the fat, and turning the wood and bark into ashes. Qian Shanyi quickly washed the smaller pot, and then carefully gathered the ashes from the fire into it with some water to dissolve them. She didn't know any alchemy, and so could not hazard a guess as to why bark made for better ashes than the wood - all she could do was follow instructions in Three Obediences Four Virtues and hope for the best.
They strained the water through a sheet of Silvered Devil Moth Silk several times to separate out the solid parts of the ashes, and then waited around for an hour until most of the water boiled off. To pass the time, she decided to measure the factor of time dilation between the world fragment and the outside world, by leaving one of her clocks outside with Wang Yonghao, and then cultivating within his Inner World for two hours. Assuming her math was correct, with the entrance to the world fragment closed, time passed within it four point six times faster than on the outside.
Once the lye solution looked concentrated enough, Qian Shanyi threw a chunk of solidified lard into it, eyeballing the needed mass, and then they waited for longer still until the mixture became homogeneous. For flavor, she added in some finely chopped pine needles. After another half hour, she declared it good enough, and sent the pot into the chiclotron to make the soap harden faster. Freezing it wasn't strictly necessary, but the daylight was beginning to fade, and she did not want to bathe in the darkness.
The soap looked… underwhelming to say the least. It was a mass of brown and green, and she doubted it fully went through whatever alchemical process turned grease and ash water into soap, but it turned into soap bubbles just fine when she rubbed it in the water, and that was all that mattered.
She stripped, then brought a brick of igneocopper into her makeshift river bath and channeled spiritual energy into it until the water warmed up to a comfortable temperature, and laid there, letting it wash off all the sweat, grime, blood and poison slime of her last two weeks, her hair spreading freely in the gentle current flowing through the gaps in the walls of her bath. For a moment, she could almost forget that she was in the middle of untamed wilderness, and still in mortal danger.
Of course, she brought her sword with her into the bath. She wasn't an idiot.
Wang Yonghao wanted to make himself scarce, but she told him that if some telepathic crab sneaked up on her while she was bathing because he was too bloody awkward to keep watch, she would make sure a dozen would end up in his pants while he slept. She could feel awkwardness wafting off where he was sitting on the river shore, but he would get over it.
She washed off with soap, then made sure to wash her robes - the ones she was wearing right now, as well as the set that got covered in poison slime. When she was done, her mood had improved by leaps and bounds.
"It's your turn, oh lord of decorum," she said, tossing the rest of the soap over to him as she went back to the shore, squeezing water out of her long black hair. He pointedly did not look at her. "Bathe quickly, and then let's go slaughter those demonic plants. It's what cultivators do."
Author Note: If you'd like to read four chapters ahead, or read other works I write, you can find me on patreon for a low price of 3$.
Every cultivator possessed twelve primary meridians that transported spiritual energy throughout their body, with each one named after one of the major organs it passed through. The relationship between the organ and the meridian was reciprocal: the more spiritual energy passed through the meridian, the healthier the organ would become, and correspondingly, if the organ was damaged or affected by disease, the passage of spiritual energy through the meridian would suffer. The only exception to this rule was the heart, which was linked to two separate meridians - the heart meridian and the pericardium meridian - and the sanjiao meridian, which didn't pass through anything in particular.
Almost all of the energy flowing through the meridians had the type appropriate to the cultivator's constitution - in Qian Shanyi's case, yin-metal - but a small part corresponded to the type of each particular meridian. Six of the meridians had a yin nature, with the other six being yang; there were two meridians for every one of the five major types of spiritual energy, except fire, which had four.
Back when she was cultivating Seven Flowers Bloom, spiritual energy flowed freely between the yin and yang meridians, mixing together with little direction. Now that she practiced a proper, typed cultivation law, she was finally seeing the first signs of separation. Two separate cycles were forming among her meridians - one for yin and one for yang - with the energy moving between them only among specific pathways. As the cycles would continue to develop, the energy flow would accelerate, and her yin meridians - already better developed than her yang meridians due to her constitution - would further strengthen and expand. A similar process was happening to her metal meridians, and she could swear her lungs were already growing deeper.
Qian Shanyi forced her eyes to open. That was only a trick of the mind: she had been cultivating Three Obediences Four Virtues for a mere three days. It would take a couple weeks for the energy vortices to fully form, let alone for her internal organs to catch up. For now, she had work to do.
She ended up underestimating how long the night would last. They've spent a full day within the world fragment, going to sleep twice, and the morning sun only rose once they woke up - that meant the time within the world fragment was moving four or five times faster than on the outside.
Wang Yonghao was lazing about on the grass as she finished her morning cultivation, using a dagger to skillfully carve a chunk of oak wood into the shape of a small animal figure.
"You could have at least worked on our lathe, if you do not want to cultivate," she chided him, getting up off the grass and dusting herself off, "I don't want us to carve every little thing we need by hand."
She had never seen a lathe, and only had a vague awareness that a piece of wood was spun around an axis in order to make smooth circular shapes. The motion of it seemed clear in her mind - now they just needed to figure out how to turn it into reality.
"I am not a refiner like you," he said, shrugging, and motioning with his halfway finished figurine, "I don't know how to make a lathe. I only know how to use a knife."
"It doesn't take refining to put a couple planks together," she grumbled, "you know what the problem is, what is so difficult about trying things until you figure out a solution?"
She spent most of the last day memorizing the foraging advice of the Three Obediences Four Virtues in preparation for setting off into the forest again, but she did make sure to carve out several shovels and cobble together a large, though somewhat rickety table. For now, she avoided using nails, deciding to save them for something that would need to be especially robust.
"Well, you'll figure it out, right?" he said, "What's the hurry?"
"You don't feel in a hurry to sleep on a good hammock, instead of the cold hard ground like a dog?", she squinted at him, "Would you rather I didn't make one for you?"
He gaped at her in horror.
"You wouldn't…" he started, then paused, studying her face.
"Your poor, poor back," she continued, twisting the knife, "It must be starting to hurt. I know mine did, after a couple days, and I sleep on way more padding than you do."
"How could you be this cruel?"
"To cultivate is to be cruel to fate itself. What is one more cruelty on top of that?" she said, "Besides, why would I waste my time if you won't spend some of yours?"
Wang Yonghao shuddered and got up off the grass. "Fine," he said, "what do you want me to do?"
"If you see a job, it's yours," she said, heading over to their meat stores, "Figure out what can be done, then do it. It's really that simple."
After breakfast, they finally left the world fragment. Morning sun was shining through the leaves, and dew covered the moss and the tree trunks around them. After a short discussion, they decided to head further into the forest - now that they knew what they were doing, building the hideout would only take them a couple hours when the evening approached, and there was no reason to waste the rest of the day. They had to keep moving.
The forest slowly woke up around them as they walked among the gently swaying shadows cast by the heavy canopy down on the ground. As birds' cries filled the air one after another, Qing Shanyi tried to count their species by their songs. It was hard to keep track of their voices in her head, but it kept her mind occupied while her eyes searched for plants to forage. Perhaps they could climb the trees and look for bird nests? Surely working together they could manage to strike a bird out of the air, even if neither of them was much of a hunter. It would break up their diet of bear meat, at the very least.
"Do you just cultivate?", Wang Yonghao suddenly asked, bringing her out of her ruminations.
"What?" she asked, confused.
"I mean, do you do anything else besides cultivating?" he asked, "You keep saying cultivation is this or that, and I am starting to wonder."
"I eat. I sleep," she answered, raising her eyebrow, "I do the work I think needs doing. One would hope most people would be similar?"
"I mean, besides all that," the petulant junior rolled his eyes at her, "you have to have hobbies, right? You can't just cultivate all day long."
"Of course you can," she said, "cultivators in the foundation building stage can easily spend an entire month in closed door cultivation."
"You know what I mean," he sighed in exasperation, "Do you, I don't know, like birdwatching? I do woodcarving, for example."
She stayed silent for a moment, thinking through her answer. There was nothing in it that could give her game away, but it still felt strange to talk about something so… casual.
"I like games," she finally said, "gambling games."
Before she became a cultivator, she studied under her father, who wanted her to inherit his small merchanting business. She took to it like a fish to water, but what she liked most were the talks with the clients, the push and pull of negotiating wills, of bluffs and counterbluffs. After she joined Luminous Lotus Pavilion, she missed the thrill of it, but found it again in gambling. On the rare days when she managed to keep enough of her time free, she would stalk the city streets far away from the sect compound, enter gambling parlors where none knew her, and find some hapless victims for an evening. All she had to do was flap her eyelashes a couple times, pout her lips, and they would immediately put her out of their minds as a gullible girl way out of her depth.
Then they would lose miserably, and the look on their faces at the belated realization of her skill would warm her soul on even the coldest nights. That it gave her more spending money was just a nice bonus.
"Games!" Wang Yonghao clapped his hands together in satisfaction, "That's great! I also love them. We should play a game together."
"With your luck? It's pointless."
"There are games that don't depend on luck!" he said, pleading in his voice.
"Why are you so insistent on this?" she asked, keeping her tone casual.
"Because I like playing?" he ruffled his hair, "It's one of the few things I can do in between running away from one crisis or another. Besides, it's good to know the people you live with, right? Come on, you can't be all work and no play. We could share a story or two?"
"Hm," she paused, "Very well, as long as it does not cut into our work time too much."
The forest floor was uneven, with hills and gullies breaking up their line of vision, forcing their path through the forest away from a straight line. Halfway through the day, they crossed over the top of one such hill, and suddenly walked out onto the clean, sandy shores of a calm, narrow river. The sand was black to match the trees, and surprisingly warm even under the forest shade.
Qian Shanyi came all the way to the edge of the stream and dipped her fingers into the clean, cold water, feeling it out.
"You think we should fly over?" he sighed, rubbing the collar of his robes.
"I think we should stop here for the day," she responded, "We'll build our cabin for hunting Glowing Rosevines at the crest of that hill for the night. For now, I want to take a real bath. I am sure you'd appreciate one too."
For a bath, they would need soap, and that meant two things: ash and grease.
She sent out Wang Yonghao to chop down some more pines to replenish the wood within his Inner World, and to gather as much tree bark as he could. In the meantime, she started preparing the shore of the river. She waded into the water and hammered sharpened wood planks into the riverbed, forming a cul-de-sac against the flow of water, then deepened it with the help of her new shovel, turning it into a natural bath. Some of the water flowed in between the planks, but that was fine by her; it would simply carry the dirty water downstream.
Having finished her crude construction, she went back to the shore, picked up one of the smaller pots they took from the dead sect, and started furiously scrubbing it with the sand from the river.
Out of the four pots from the sect, two were so rusted through that they could not hold water. The other two had to be thoroughly scrubbed before she would dare to put anything in them, let alone use them to cook. The sand was a bit too fine for what she was doing, and she had to strengthen the spiritual energy shield surrounding her hand to keep it from being cut by the rusty flakes of metal, but inexorably the pot was getting cleaner.
When Wang Yonghao returned, they started a large fire from all the bark and pine wood. On her own, starting a fire from fresh bark would have been a pain, but he just blasted it with pure fire spiritual energy until it lit up like a torch.
While she was still busy with the pot, she gave him one of their shovels to start building their hunting cabin. He seemed more motivated to work than before: she figured that the prospect of a bath and a hammock bed worked its magic.
It took her a good half an hour of cultivating the scrubbing arts before she felt the pot could be declared ready for cooking. She added some more wood to the fire, fashioned a suspension for the pot from a couple planks and a sturdy pine branch, and called Wang Yonghao back. Together, they quickly filled the pot with cuts of bear fat and a little water to keep it from burning on the fire.
The trouble with fat within a living creature was that it was attached to muscle, with no good way to pull the two apart. What she needed for the soap was pure fat, and the way to get it was quite simple: melt the fat away from the muscle, and then solidify it back from the liquid solution after filtering out the solid pieces of meat left behind. They would only need a small bit of fat for the soap, but she figured they might as well process all of it at once.
While the fat slowly rendered, they finished up the shack on the hill, threw out the old wood from Wang Yonghao's Inner World, cleaned the rest of the cutlery in river water, and even fully scrubbed the other, much larger pot. Once the fat seemed liquid enough to her eyes, they carefully poured it into the other pot through a silk sheet, and then Wang Yonghao carried it into a water trench of the chiclotron to be frozen into pure lard until further notice.
That left the ash, which had to be rendered into lye. The fire served two purposes: heating up the fat, and turning the wood and bark into ashes. Qian Shanyi quickly washed the smaller pot, and then carefully gathered the ashes from the fire into it with some water to dissolve them. She didn't know any alchemy, and so could not hazard a guess as to why bark made for better ashes than the wood - all she could do was follow instructions in Three Obediences Four Virtues and hope for the best.
They strained the water through a sheet of Silvered Devil Moth Silk several times to separate out the solid parts of the ashes, and then waited around for an hour until most of the water boiled off. To pass the time, she decided to measure the factor of time dilation between the world fragment and the outside world, by leaving one of her clocks outside with Wang Yonghao, and then cultivating within his Inner World for two hours. Assuming her math was correct, with the entrance to the world fragment closed, time passed within it four point six times faster than on the outside.
Once the lye solution looked concentrated enough, Qian Shanyi threw a chunk of solidified lard into it, eyeballing the needed mass, and then they waited for longer still until the mixture became homogeneous. For flavor, she added in some finely chopped pine needles. After another half hour, she declared it good enough, and sent the pot into the chiclotron to make the soap harden faster. Freezing it wasn't strictly necessary, but the daylight was beginning to fade, and she did not want to bathe in the darkness.
The soap looked… underwhelming to say the least. It was a mass of brown and green, and she doubted it fully went through whatever alchemical process turned grease and ash water into soap, but it turned into soap bubbles just fine when she rubbed it in the water, and that was all that mattered.
She stripped, then brought a brick of igneocopper into her makeshift river bath and channeled spiritual energy into it until the water warmed up to a comfortable temperature, and laid there, letting it wash off all the sweat, grime, blood and poison slime of her last two weeks, her hair spreading freely in the gentle current flowing through the gaps in the walls of her bath. For a moment, she could almost forget that she was in the middle of untamed wilderness, and still in mortal danger.
Of course, she brought her sword with her into the bath. She wasn't an idiot.
Wang Yonghao wanted to make himself scarce, but she told him that if some telepathic crab sneaked up on her while she was bathing because he was too bloody awkward to keep watch, she would make sure a dozen would end up in his pants while he slept. She could feel awkwardness wafting off where he was sitting on the river shore, but he would get over it.
She washed off with soap, then made sure to wash her robes - the ones she was wearing right now, as well as the set that got covered in poison slime. When she was done, her mood had improved by leaps and bounds.
"It's your turn, oh lord of decorum," she said, tossing the rest of the soap over to him as she went back to the shore, squeezing water out of her long black hair. He pointedly did not look at her. "Bathe quickly, and then let's go slaughter those demonic plants. It's what cultivators do."
Author Note: If you'd like to read four chapters ahead, or read other works I write, you can find me on patreon for a low price of 3$.
- Location
- United States
Making soap by hand is annoying and useless to most people, but is something I think everyone should have to do a couple times. Just to know how awesome commercial soap is.
- Location
- Queensland, Australia
Huh, that prologue was definitely interesting. So was she liked by the Elders because those new Cultivators she trained tended to be better for their purpose (of which one is 'don't mess around with an Elder's desires) or disliked because she taught them all sorts of things that weren't quite as they'd prefer?
Blazinghand
O cursèd spite
- Location
- California
I like the new prologue! Enjoying this so far.
Chapter 16: Play Your Melodies On Soul Strings
Winged_One
Head Engineer of ATHENA
- Location
- Low Earth Orbit
Qian Shanyi grabbed a tentacle reaching into their hunting shack and pulled it closer. Glowing Rosevine lodged itself against the far end of the window slit, and Wang Yonghao speared it until it stopped moving. She released the tentacle, and the rosevine fell into the corpse pit in front of the hunting shack.
"It feels a bit unfair," he said.
"Hunting isn't supposed to be fair," she raised her eyebrows at him, "We are cultivators, and they are demon beasts. We can plan, and they cannot. It's not 'fair' no matter how you slice it."
"Well, I mean that they can't hurt us at all, and we just keep killing them," he said, "it feels unsporting."
"These flowers are too dumb to recognise a trap for what it is," she responded, yanking a new rosewine by the tentacle, "If they didn't want to die, they should have cultivated some brains."
Glowing Rosevines tended to hunt in groups. They were not smart enough to coordinate a proper "pack", but by swarming their prey in numbers they could cut off paths of retreat through sheer numbers, with no direct organization. Qian Shanyi put this advantage to work against them - the two of them would sing to attract rosevines from a great distance away, and as long as even a single one heard them, the whole pack would swarm over. This was the second swarm that found them over the night, and they were sure to be busy with ropemaking for quite a while.
"If you want to make it more equal, the hatch is right there?" she said to Wang Yonghao, motioning towards the ceiling.
Wang Yonghao shook his head and kept working the spear.
When the sun rose again, they laid the rosevines out on the grass in the Inner World to dry, and went to sleep. In the morning, Wang Yonghao cut them apart into leaves (that could be brewed into tea after drying), tentacles (for the ropes) and the rest (useless, to be thrown out), while she spent a couple hours cultivating. He seemed much more willing to do the butchering when the beasts weren't made out of meat.
They made a good haul: forty six demon beasts in total, with each of them having from ten to twenty tentacles of around five meters in length. Once they braided them, they wouldn't be lacking rope for the foreseeable future.
After the rosevine leaves were drying within the chiclotron, they made breakfast. To spice it up a bit, Qian Shanyi tried her hand at brewing tea out of pine needles - thankfully, they weren't at risk of running out of those in a pine forest. It didn't taste like real tea, but at least it was more interesting than pure water.
After some discussion, they decided to follow the river downstream: chances were that if there was civilization nearby, they would find it near a river. Before they left their bath camp, they collected some sand from the shore and popped the cover on one of the fire nodes of the chiclotron, warming up the world fragments to dry out their collected vines.
The stream wasn't deep enough to swim in, and so they simply followed the river along its banks. It slowly grew in width as they followed it, smaller streams bringing more water into it. Occasionally, they saw fish splashing in the water. Wang Yonghao tried his hand at killing them with the Honk of the Solar Goose, but by the time the swordlight hit the water, it was long gone.
Halfway through the day, they saw an enormous anthill in the distance, towering as high as the trees, and had to move away from the river to circle around it. On the way, they crossed paths with two insect trails - the 'ants' were reflective like the trees around them, and each was the size of her arm. She didn't want to think what an entire anthill of these could do to a person. After that, they were even more careful about following the river.
By the time evening fell again and they returned into his Inner World, all of the tentacles were dry enough to be worked. They only traveled for twelve or so hours on the outside, but within the Inner World, two and a half days had passed. They ate dinner (more bear, with a side of omelet and a salad of forest flowers), she cultivated, and then they started to process the tentacles. Each of them had to be carefully split open with their fingers to avoid damaging the fibers, then pulled apart into individual fiber bundles. To make the fibers elastic, they needed to be bent as much as possible, which Qian Shanyi did by repeatedly stretching them over the sole of her foot.
They didn't quite manage to breach into the rope-making realm before they called it a night. After she woke up, Wang Yonghao was still asleep, so she focused on her cultivation to pass the time. Her overall state was rapidly improving, as her meridians continuously adapted to Three Obediences Four Virtues, and her broken bones had slowly started to mend themselves back up. That she was starting to run low on Mo's healing tablets worried her a bit, but as long as she avoided breaking more of her bones, she should be fine.
There was a surprising disadvantage to her situation: because of the high quality of spiritual energy within the world fragment, her meridians were being cleansed at a much faster rate than she would have expected - she was already coming close to unlocking the sixth out of of her seven dantians - and her body was starting to lag behind. Soon enough she would be stuck between realms, with the meridians of a high refinement stage cultivator and the body of a middle refinement stage one. Thankfully, this was not dangerous, but it would make purchasing medicinal pills a lot harder until her body caught up.
She shook her head. This wasn't much of a "disadvantage", as most cultivators would pray to end up in a situation like this. Training your physical body was a lot easier, all things considered.
She stopped once her meridians started to ache, and saw that Wang Yonghao woke up some time ago. He smiled, and waved her over, presenting her with a square board of eight by eight squares cut out of a solid piece of oak, with small carved figurines on both sides of it.
"This is shatranj," he said, motioning for her to sit down on the grass, "it's not really played in this part of the empire, but it's one of my favorite games. Come on, I'll explain the rules to you."
"When did you make this?" she asked, raising an eyebrow.
"While you were busy cultivating, obviously," he said, "I started yesterday, but finished this morning."
A corner of her mouth twitched downwards. Her back ached every morning from sleeping on the ground, and now she might need to wait another full day because this man wasted two good morning hours.
"You could have at least started on making the ropes, or done something else productive," she frowned, "I don't know if we'll make enough for our hammocks before the evening falls."
"Eh, it's not my first time sleeping on the ground. I can wait one more day," he grinned, "Besides, if you can waste time on playing around with cultivation, I can waste it on games, right?"
"Cultivation is not a game," she sneered, "it's the path to infinite freedom! The more I cultivate, the faster I would be done with my recuperative training and would get off your back. Is this not what you want?"
"I don't know about that. I almost never cultivate and just play games, yet my realm keeps going up by leaps and bounds," he said, still wearing that insufferable grin, "perhaps you just aren't very good at it?"
She stared at him with a blank face. The bastard was clearly baiting her, and it was working. It was made all the worse by the fact that she knew she could not properly confront him about his unintentional kidnapping - even if she ended up benefiting from it greatly - lest their fragile cooperation shatter here and now, leaving her to slowly stew in her anger.
"Look, we'll be cooped up in here for two full days every night, right?" he continued, raising a hand in a placating gesture, "You might as well play a game or two. What's the harm?"
"Fine," she said, coming over and sitting down on the grass, starting to plan her small revenge, "You want games? We can play games."
She stayed quiet while he explained the rules to her. They were surprisingly simple, when compared to mahjong she used to play, and she memorized them with practiced ease. She had a fair amount of experience winning games she had never seen before - there was more to gambling than the play itself.
She waited for him to finish before she sprung her trap.
"What are we betting?" she asked casually.
"Betting?" he blinked.
"Well it's boring to play without a bet," she responded, casually fixing her hair, "so what are we betting?"
"Can't we just play for fun?" he asked, still not understanding what he was getting into.
She snorted, exaggerating her expression. "Come now," she said, "What's the fun in playing without stakes? It would be like fighting without your life on the line, and didn't you yourself say that was unsporting?"
"But we don't have any money to bet…" he scratched his head.
"How about this," she said, as if the idea only now entered her mind, "if you win, I'll do all the work in the world fragment for two weeks."
She saw his eyes glint with avarice, and she knew that she hooked him. She continued, keeping her tone casual. "And if I win, oh, I suppose you'll be the one reinforcing the chiclotron."
"Reinforcing what?"
"The trenches," she said, motioning towards them, "It's just carrying some stones to keep the fire ones from collapsing. I wouldn't worry too much about it."
She picked up one of the carved figurines, rolling it over her knuckles, watching Wang Yonghao with hawkish eyes.
"Is this a trap?" he said, drawing out his words uncertainly.
"How could this be a trap?" she asked, fluttering her eyelashes innocently,
"You've never even heard of this game, and you want to gamble right away?"
"The deal is in front of you," she said, "Have I ever been deceitful?"
"Yes?"
"Junior, you strain my patience," she frowned.
"You aren't going to cheat, are you?" he asked, "If you win by cheating, it doesn't count."
"I swear on my cultivation that I won't cheat or lie throughout this game," she said, putting her right hand on her heart. She wasn't going to in the first place: with a board this small, there was no way she could make sleight of hand pass by unnoticed, especially against another cultivator.
"Alright then, I won't be polite and will accept your gamble," he grinned, "You realize you are just going to lose, right? I've played this game for years."
"Well, I admit the sides are not in balance here," she shrugged, "so I hope you will allow me to even out the odds?"
"Sure, as long as it's not too ridiculous," he waved her off, putting the figurines in their starting positions.
"First of all," she raised a finger on her right hand, "I don't want a single match to be decisive. We'll play five matches, switching sides. First to three wins wins it all."
He nodded easily.
"Secondly, we'll begin by playing five practice matches," she continued, "A certain familiarity with the game is crucial when playing, is it not?"
"Be it five or ten games, you still won't be at my level," he snorted.
"That is true," she nodded, "To account for that, I propose we use a clock to play."
She got up and brought her replacement water clock over, and quickly fashioned a new water bottle for it that would drip faster.
"We'll count our turns in drops of water," she said, "Three drops fall for every breath. Whoever fails to make a move before a fourth drop falls on their turn will lose the game."
That brought him up short.
"Hey, wait a moment," he said, "this is a strategic game! You can't think through your moves that quickly!"
"Hmm, that is true," she said, pretending to consider this, "how about this: we'll each have ten additional drops, to be used throughout the game whenever we want?"
"Come on, that is ridiculous!" He exclaimed with his hands, "You can't think that quickly!"
"A new player can't think at all, no matter how much time they are given," she smiled, "really, am I not granting you a far greater advantage appropriate to your great skill?"
"No way," he shook his head, "You need more time to think."
"Fine. How many additional drops do you want?" she raised an eyebrow.
He paused, thinking through his answer. She waited for him patiently.
"At least a hundred," he finally said.
"Come now, that too is unreasonable," she shook her head, "Thirty drops will be enough for you."
In truth, she didn't care how many drops it was, and only picked the ridiculously low number of ten to anchor his own proposals. If he was more cunning, he would have argued against the existence of a time limit in the first place, not where it was placed.
When she played mahjong, the parlor clocks were often set to limit a player's turn to five seconds, with an extra twenty seconds for the whole game. New players were often given more time, but in truth, it mattered little: those who weren't used to making decisions in a split moment would ironically find themselves paralyzed by the fear of losing time, even when their skill should have been sufficient to play quickly.
Whether it was a hundred or three hundred drops, she was sure that Wang Yonghao would see them all drain away. Still, it always paid to push your opponent. In the end, they settled on seventy drops, with her ceding ground willingly.
Once the practice matches started, she played carefully, stalling the game to think through the principles behind the rules and give herself time to develop a good strategy. Even with the sharp time limit, Wang Yonghao's sheer skill shined through, and she lost the first four practice matches with little to show for it. She could feel the arrogance wafting off him, an anticipation of victory shining through his eyes. She kept her face calm and casual: it would simply make her trap stronger.
"You know, this is the last practice match," he said in the middle of their next game, "are you prepared for the real matches?"
"Are you?" she raised an eyebrow at him. She was laying on the grass, with one hand supporting her head, "I hope you appreciate my courtesy of giving you time to practice."
"What?" he asked, pausing with a hand on a figurine, "Giving me time?"
"Of course," she nodded, spinning lies with every breath, "I can see that you have never played speed shatranj before."
"What are you talking about?" he asked.
"The game we are playing?" she looked at him as if he asked wherever the sky was green. "Speed shatranj? I didn't want to be unfair to you by making you play without getting adapted to the clock."
"Are you bluffing me?" he narrowed his eyes at her, "You are the novice here."
"Make your move," she rolled her eyes at him "You have forty drops left."
He moved his figure, and she responded in kind. Two turns passed in silence.
"No, really," he couldn't hold his tongue back, "what was that supposed to be? You even said you have never played regular shatranj before!"
"I can't recall ever saying that, no."
"Yes you did!" he pointed an accusatory finger at her, "Stop lying!"
"I didn't," she rolled her eyes again, "for a cultivator, you really are quite inattentive. That I have never played this game was merely an assumption you made, one I didn't saw fit to tamper with. If you think back on what I said, you should see it as plain as day."
"No but… You…" he rubbed his face with one hand, the other one hovering over the board with a figure in hand. She heard his heart start to beat faster.
"You are at thirty drops, in case you lost track," she helpfully noted, and he made his move. She immediately moved her own piece, sending the turn back to him.
"You listened to me explain the rules!"
"If you wanted to hear yourself talk, why would I stop you?"
"You said a new player can't think right!"
"I was referring to you."
"You said you weren't at my level!"
"A hawk is not at the level of a mouse, even if they fly at half their height. Twenty drops."
"This… No way," he shook his head, "you are just trying to trick me."
"Am I?" she raised an eyebrow, "If you do not believe me, then why are you wasting time?"
"You lost the last four matches!"
"What of it? They are practice matches, they matter not," she shook her head in mock ruefulness, "and to think I tried to encourage you to play better by giving you some early wins, and stalling as best as I could. It seems giving you more time to adapt to the clock was a mistake. Truly the youth have no appreciation for the efforts expended on them."
She could see the thoughts circling in his head, questioning every little thought he had, everything he saw and believed. Did he lure her into the game, or did she lure him? Who was really a better player? If he had more time, he would have figured out her ruse - saw through her moves in the past games, thought back on times where she could have easily stalled for longer if that was really her goal - but time was the one thing he didn't have.
"Seven drops," she noted, pushing him further, and she saw him start to crack. He moved his knight without thinking, then had to move it back because it would have illegally exposed his king. Even despite this, she still couldn't manage a win, and they ended up in a draw.
"Well, are you prepared for the real matches?" She cracked her knuckles, grinning wolfishly as they set up the figures again, "This was the last practice match, you know."
She felt warmth in her soul at the sight of his eyes opening wide in fear.
"So this was a trap!" he said, his spiritual energy starting to flow freely out of his body as he started to lose control of his emotions.
"I never said it wasn't. Make your first move."
"You…you swore!" he pointed a finger at her, "You swore you wouldn't lie or cheat!"
"Still haven't," she raised an eyebrow at him, "what of it?"
"Setting this trap is cheating!"
"It isn't," she shrugged, "and besides, even if it was, what of it? I swore I wouldn't lie or cheat during the game, not before it, when we discussed the terms."
He just scowled at her.
"Admit it," she grinned, "you walked right into this one."
His agitation made his moves sloppy, and she captured both of his rooks before he could get his game back under control, and won the first real match. He scowled at her angrily, but she heard his breathing and heartbeat slowing back down.
Well, that certainly wouldn't do.
"I suppose I have been somewhat dishonest with you," she started slowly, "when I said that if you lose, I wouldn't worry about the work too much."
"What, are you going to try to go back on your word?" he replied grimly, "I agreed to move some stones, that's all I'll do."
"Oh no, that part is true, it's just a question of where those stones are," she said, concentrating back on the game. She couldn't afford mistakes right now.
"And where is that?"
She shrugged, and pointed down at the ground. "Somewhere down there," she said, "best guess, under two or three meters of soil, though I haven't checked."
"What?" he scowled, "You want me to mine them from bedrock?"
"Oh it would be soooo much work," she dragged the words out, pushing her bluff further, "Hard work, too. I bet you'd need at least a week for everything. Just imagine yourself working with a pickaxe - and thank me that I thought to bring one from that sect, or else you'd have been doing this with a sword."
"Are you a demonic cultivator?" he spat out, his heartbeat going back up, "With how evil you are, you must be."
"Oh don't you worry, there is a point to it," she said, savoring her minor revenge, "Those trenches really need strengthening. I was going to do it myself, but now that you've volunteered, why should I mar my delicate hands?"
With how agitated he was, it wasn't too difficult for her to score a second win in a row.
"Two to zero, fellow cultivator Wang," she grinned, helping him reset the board, "Are your hands prepared for the sturdy handle of a pickaxe?"
The pressure of losses compounded on top of the pressure of time, and turned into a death spiral, a whirlpool from which none could escape. Like an experienced sailor, she guided his mind directly into it. He started making mistakes, which only made him more anxious, which led to more mistakes. Halfway through the third match, he gave up and admitted defeat. She gently clapped him on the shoulder, accepting her victory.
Her teachers always wanted her to pick up an instrument. Personally, she preferred playing on the raw human soul. The sound of it was…exquisite.
Author Note: Sorry for the late chapter, I had to move flats on a pretty tight schedule so straight up didn't have the time to do an editing pass. Now that I am settled again we should be back to regular schedule.
If you'd like to read five chapters ahead, or read other works I write, you can find me on patreon for a low price of 3$.
"It feels a bit unfair," he said.
"Hunting isn't supposed to be fair," she raised her eyebrows at him, "We are cultivators, and they are demon beasts. We can plan, and they cannot. It's not 'fair' no matter how you slice it."
"Well, I mean that they can't hurt us at all, and we just keep killing them," he said, "it feels unsporting."
"These flowers are too dumb to recognise a trap for what it is," she responded, yanking a new rosewine by the tentacle, "If they didn't want to die, they should have cultivated some brains."
Glowing Rosevines tended to hunt in groups. They were not smart enough to coordinate a proper "pack", but by swarming their prey in numbers they could cut off paths of retreat through sheer numbers, with no direct organization. Qian Shanyi put this advantage to work against them - the two of them would sing to attract rosevines from a great distance away, and as long as even a single one heard them, the whole pack would swarm over. This was the second swarm that found them over the night, and they were sure to be busy with ropemaking for quite a while.
"If you want to make it more equal, the hatch is right there?" she said to Wang Yonghao, motioning towards the ceiling.
Wang Yonghao shook his head and kept working the spear.
When the sun rose again, they laid the rosevines out on the grass in the Inner World to dry, and went to sleep. In the morning, Wang Yonghao cut them apart into leaves (that could be brewed into tea after drying), tentacles (for the ropes) and the rest (useless, to be thrown out), while she spent a couple hours cultivating. He seemed much more willing to do the butchering when the beasts weren't made out of meat.
They made a good haul: forty six demon beasts in total, with each of them having from ten to twenty tentacles of around five meters in length. Once they braided them, they wouldn't be lacking rope for the foreseeable future.
After the rosevine leaves were drying within the chiclotron, they made breakfast. To spice it up a bit, Qian Shanyi tried her hand at brewing tea out of pine needles - thankfully, they weren't at risk of running out of those in a pine forest. It didn't taste like real tea, but at least it was more interesting than pure water.
After some discussion, they decided to follow the river downstream: chances were that if there was civilization nearby, they would find it near a river. Before they left their bath camp, they collected some sand from the shore and popped the cover on one of the fire nodes of the chiclotron, warming up the world fragments to dry out their collected vines.
The stream wasn't deep enough to swim in, and so they simply followed the river along its banks. It slowly grew in width as they followed it, smaller streams bringing more water into it. Occasionally, they saw fish splashing in the water. Wang Yonghao tried his hand at killing them with the Honk of the Solar Goose, but by the time the swordlight hit the water, it was long gone.
Halfway through the day, they saw an enormous anthill in the distance, towering as high as the trees, and had to move away from the river to circle around it. On the way, they crossed paths with two insect trails - the 'ants' were reflective like the trees around them, and each was the size of her arm. She didn't want to think what an entire anthill of these could do to a person. After that, they were even more careful about following the river.
By the time evening fell again and they returned into his Inner World, all of the tentacles were dry enough to be worked. They only traveled for twelve or so hours on the outside, but within the Inner World, two and a half days had passed. They ate dinner (more bear, with a side of omelet and a salad of forest flowers), she cultivated, and then they started to process the tentacles. Each of them had to be carefully split open with their fingers to avoid damaging the fibers, then pulled apart into individual fiber bundles. To make the fibers elastic, they needed to be bent as much as possible, which Qian Shanyi did by repeatedly stretching them over the sole of her foot.
They didn't quite manage to breach into the rope-making realm before they called it a night. After she woke up, Wang Yonghao was still asleep, so she focused on her cultivation to pass the time. Her overall state was rapidly improving, as her meridians continuously adapted to Three Obediences Four Virtues, and her broken bones had slowly started to mend themselves back up. That she was starting to run low on Mo's healing tablets worried her a bit, but as long as she avoided breaking more of her bones, she should be fine.
There was a surprising disadvantage to her situation: because of the high quality of spiritual energy within the world fragment, her meridians were being cleansed at a much faster rate than she would have expected - she was already coming close to unlocking the sixth out of of her seven dantians - and her body was starting to lag behind. Soon enough she would be stuck between realms, with the meridians of a high refinement stage cultivator and the body of a middle refinement stage one. Thankfully, this was not dangerous, but it would make purchasing medicinal pills a lot harder until her body caught up.
She shook her head. This wasn't much of a "disadvantage", as most cultivators would pray to end up in a situation like this. Training your physical body was a lot easier, all things considered.
She stopped once her meridians started to ache, and saw that Wang Yonghao woke up some time ago. He smiled, and waved her over, presenting her with a square board of eight by eight squares cut out of a solid piece of oak, with small carved figurines on both sides of it.
"This is shatranj," he said, motioning for her to sit down on the grass, "it's not really played in this part of the empire, but it's one of my favorite games. Come on, I'll explain the rules to you."
"When did you make this?" she asked, raising an eyebrow.
"While you were busy cultivating, obviously," he said, "I started yesterday, but finished this morning."
A corner of her mouth twitched downwards. Her back ached every morning from sleeping on the ground, and now she might need to wait another full day because this man wasted two good morning hours.
"You could have at least started on making the ropes, or done something else productive," she frowned, "I don't know if we'll make enough for our hammocks before the evening falls."
"Eh, it's not my first time sleeping on the ground. I can wait one more day," he grinned, "Besides, if you can waste time on playing around with cultivation, I can waste it on games, right?"
"Cultivation is not a game," she sneered, "it's the path to infinite freedom! The more I cultivate, the faster I would be done with my recuperative training and would get off your back. Is this not what you want?"
"I don't know about that. I almost never cultivate and just play games, yet my realm keeps going up by leaps and bounds," he said, still wearing that insufferable grin, "perhaps you just aren't very good at it?"
She stared at him with a blank face. The bastard was clearly baiting her, and it was working. It was made all the worse by the fact that she knew she could not properly confront him about his unintentional kidnapping - even if she ended up benefiting from it greatly - lest their fragile cooperation shatter here and now, leaving her to slowly stew in her anger.
"Look, we'll be cooped up in here for two full days every night, right?" he continued, raising a hand in a placating gesture, "You might as well play a game or two. What's the harm?"
"Fine," she said, coming over and sitting down on the grass, starting to plan her small revenge, "You want games? We can play games."
She stayed quiet while he explained the rules to her. They were surprisingly simple, when compared to mahjong she used to play, and she memorized them with practiced ease. She had a fair amount of experience winning games she had never seen before - there was more to gambling than the play itself.
She waited for him to finish before she sprung her trap.
"What are we betting?" she asked casually.
"Betting?" he blinked.
"Well it's boring to play without a bet," she responded, casually fixing her hair, "so what are we betting?"
"Can't we just play for fun?" he asked, still not understanding what he was getting into.
She snorted, exaggerating her expression. "Come now," she said, "What's the fun in playing without stakes? It would be like fighting without your life on the line, and didn't you yourself say that was unsporting?"
"But we don't have any money to bet…" he scratched his head.
"How about this," she said, as if the idea only now entered her mind, "if you win, I'll do all the work in the world fragment for two weeks."
She saw his eyes glint with avarice, and she knew that she hooked him. She continued, keeping her tone casual. "And if I win, oh, I suppose you'll be the one reinforcing the chiclotron."
"Reinforcing what?"
"The trenches," she said, motioning towards them, "It's just carrying some stones to keep the fire ones from collapsing. I wouldn't worry too much about it."
She picked up one of the carved figurines, rolling it over her knuckles, watching Wang Yonghao with hawkish eyes.
"Is this a trap?" he said, drawing out his words uncertainly.
"How could this be a trap?" she asked, fluttering her eyelashes innocently,
"You've never even heard of this game, and you want to gamble right away?"
"The deal is in front of you," she said, "Have I ever been deceitful?"
"Yes?"
"Junior, you strain my patience," she frowned.
"You aren't going to cheat, are you?" he asked, "If you win by cheating, it doesn't count."
"I swear on my cultivation that I won't cheat or lie throughout this game," she said, putting her right hand on her heart. She wasn't going to in the first place: with a board this small, there was no way she could make sleight of hand pass by unnoticed, especially against another cultivator.
"Alright then, I won't be polite and will accept your gamble," he grinned, "You realize you are just going to lose, right? I've played this game for years."
"Well, I admit the sides are not in balance here," she shrugged, "so I hope you will allow me to even out the odds?"
"Sure, as long as it's not too ridiculous," he waved her off, putting the figurines in their starting positions.
"First of all," she raised a finger on her right hand, "I don't want a single match to be decisive. We'll play five matches, switching sides. First to three wins wins it all."
He nodded easily.
"Secondly, we'll begin by playing five practice matches," she continued, "A certain familiarity with the game is crucial when playing, is it not?"
"Be it five or ten games, you still won't be at my level," he snorted.
"That is true," she nodded, "To account for that, I propose we use a clock to play."
She got up and brought her replacement water clock over, and quickly fashioned a new water bottle for it that would drip faster.
"We'll count our turns in drops of water," she said, "Three drops fall for every breath. Whoever fails to make a move before a fourth drop falls on their turn will lose the game."
That brought him up short.
"Hey, wait a moment," he said, "this is a strategic game! You can't think through your moves that quickly!"
"Hmm, that is true," she said, pretending to consider this, "how about this: we'll each have ten additional drops, to be used throughout the game whenever we want?"
"Come on, that is ridiculous!" He exclaimed with his hands, "You can't think that quickly!"
"A new player can't think at all, no matter how much time they are given," she smiled, "really, am I not granting you a far greater advantage appropriate to your great skill?"
"No way," he shook his head, "You need more time to think."
"Fine. How many additional drops do you want?" she raised an eyebrow.
He paused, thinking through his answer. She waited for him patiently.
"At least a hundred," he finally said.
"Come now, that too is unreasonable," she shook her head, "Thirty drops will be enough for you."
In truth, she didn't care how many drops it was, and only picked the ridiculously low number of ten to anchor his own proposals. If he was more cunning, he would have argued against the existence of a time limit in the first place, not where it was placed.
When she played mahjong, the parlor clocks were often set to limit a player's turn to five seconds, with an extra twenty seconds for the whole game. New players were often given more time, but in truth, it mattered little: those who weren't used to making decisions in a split moment would ironically find themselves paralyzed by the fear of losing time, even when their skill should have been sufficient to play quickly.
Whether it was a hundred or three hundred drops, she was sure that Wang Yonghao would see them all drain away. Still, it always paid to push your opponent. In the end, they settled on seventy drops, with her ceding ground willingly.
Once the practice matches started, she played carefully, stalling the game to think through the principles behind the rules and give herself time to develop a good strategy. Even with the sharp time limit, Wang Yonghao's sheer skill shined through, and she lost the first four practice matches with little to show for it. She could feel the arrogance wafting off him, an anticipation of victory shining through his eyes. She kept her face calm and casual: it would simply make her trap stronger.
"You know, this is the last practice match," he said in the middle of their next game, "are you prepared for the real matches?"
"Are you?" she raised an eyebrow at him. She was laying on the grass, with one hand supporting her head, "I hope you appreciate my courtesy of giving you time to practice."
"What?" he asked, pausing with a hand on a figurine, "Giving me time?"
"Of course," she nodded, spinning lies with every breath, "I can see that you have never played speed shatranj before."
"What are you talking about?" he asked.
"The game we are playing?" she looked at him as if he asked wherever the sky was green. "Speed shatranj? I didn't want to be unfair to you by making you play without getting adapted to the clock."
"Are you bluffing me?" he narrowed his eyes at her, "You are the novice here."
"Make your move," she rolled her eyes at him "You have forty drops left."
He moved his figure, and she responded in kind. Two turns passed in silence.
"No, really," he couldn't hold his tongue back, "what was that supposed to be? You even said you have never played regular shatranj before!"
"I can't recall ever saying that, no."
"Yes you did!" he pointed an accusatory finger at her, "Stop lying!"
"I didn't," she rolled her eyes again, "for a cultivator, you really are quite inattentive. That I have never played this game was merely an assumption you made, one I didn't saw fit to tamper with. If you think back on what I said, you should see it as plain as day."
"No but… You…" he rubbed his face with one hand, the other one hovering over the board with a figure in hand. She heard his heart start to beat faster.
"You are at thirty drops, in case you lost track," she helpfully noted, and he made his move. She immediately moved her own piece, sending the turn back to him.
"You listened to me explain the rules!"
"If you wanted to hear yourself talk, why would I stop you?"
"You said a new player can't think right!"
"I was referring to you."
"You said you weren't at my level!"
"A hawk is not at the level of a mouse, even if they fly at half their height. Twenty drops."
"This… No way," he shook his head, "you are just trying to trick me."
"Am I?" she raised an eyebrow, "If you do not believe me, then why are you wasting time?"
"You lost the last four matches!"
"What of it? They are practice matches, they matter not," she shook her head in mock ruefulness, "and to think I tried to encourage you to play better by giving you some early wins, and stalling as best as I could. It seems giving you more time to adapt to the clock was a mistake. Truly the youth have no appreciation for the efforts expended on them."
She could see the thoughts circling in his head, questioning every little thought he had, everything he saw and believed. Did he lure her into the game, or did she lure him? Who was really a better player? If he had more time, he would have figured out her ruse - saw through her moves in the past games, thought back on times where she could have easily stalled for longer if that was really her goal - but time was the one thing he didn't have.
"Seven drops," she noted, pushing him further, and she saw him start to crack. He moved his knight without thinking, then had to move it back because it would have illegally exposed his king. Even despite this, she still couldn't manage a win, and they ended up in a draw.
"Well, are you prepared for the real matches?" She cracked her knuckles, grinning wolfishly as they set up the figures again, "This was the last practice match, you know."
She felt warmth in her soul at the sight of his eyes opening wide in fear.
"So this was a trap!" he said, his spiritual energy starting to flow freely out of his body as he started to lose control of his emotions.
"I never said it wasn't. Make your first move."
"You…you swore!" he pointed a finger at her, "You swore you wouldn't lie or cheat!"
"Still haven't," she raised an eyebrow at him, "what of it?"
"Setting this trap is cheating!"
"It isn't," she shrugged, "and besides, even if it was, what of it? I swore I wouldn't lie or cheat during the game, not before it, when we discussed the terms."
He just scowled at her.
"Admit it," she grinned, "you walked right into this one."
His agitation made his moves sloppy, and she captured both of his rooks before he could get his game back under control, and won the first real match. He scowled at her angrily, but she heard his breathing and heartbeat slowing back down.
Well, that certainly wouldn't do.
"I suppose I have been somewhat dishonest with you," she started slowly, "when I said that if you lose, I wouldn't worry about the work too much."
"What, are you going to try to go back on your word?" he replied grimly, "I agreed to move some stones, that's all I'll do."
"Oh no, that part is true, it's just a question of where those stones are," she said, concentrating back on the game. She couldn't afford mistakes right now.
"And where is that?"
She shrugged, and pointed down at the ground. "Somewhere down there," she said, "best guess, under two or three meters of soil, though I haven't checked."
"What?" he scowled, "You want me to mine them from bedrock?"
"Oh it would be soooo much work," she dragged the words out, pushing her bluff further, "Hard work, too. I bet you'd need at least a week for everything. Just imagine yourself working with a pickaxe - and thank me that I thought to bring one from that sect, or else you'd have been doing this with a sword."
"Are you a demonic cultivator?" he spat out, his heartbeat going back up, "With how evil you are, you must be."
"Oh don't you worry, there is a point to it," she said, savoring her minor revenge, "Those trenches really need strengthening. I was going to do it myself, but now that you've volunteered, why should I mar my delicate hands?"
With how agitated he was, it wasn't too difficult for her to score a second win in a row.
"Two to zero, fellow cultivator Wang," she grinned, helping him reset the board, "Are your hands prepared for the sturdy handle of a pickaxe?"
The pressure of losses compounded on top of the pressure of time, and turned into a death spiral, a whirlpool from which none could escape. Like an experienced sailor, she guided his mind directly into it. He started making mistakes, which only made him more anxious, which led to more mistakes. Halfway through the third match, he gave up and admitted defeat. She gently clapped him on the shoulder, accepting her victory.
Her teachers always wanted her to pick up an instrument. Personally, she preferred playing on the raw human soul. The sound of it was…exquisite.
Author Note: Sorry for the late chapter, I had to move flats on a pretty tight schedule so straight up didn't have the time to do an editing pass. Now that I am settled again we should be back to regular schedule.
If you'd like to read five chapters ahead, or read other works I write, you can find me on patreon for a low price of 3$.
Qian Shanyi seems like a scary, ruthless, practical, vindictive, and shameless person. Good actress too. She has damn near the perfect personality for a cultivator.
If she can avoid pissing off her seniors too much before she grows strong, she's going to go *far* in her battle against heaven's will. She seems like she'll either burn bright or fade away.
But she's barely even a real cultivator at this point in her cultivation, though. Basically still a mortal. Absolute bottom of the totem pole. Qian Shanyi's got a looong way to go in her quest for freedom. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing for the world around her.
The lady seems like a few nasty setbacks from developing the principles and attitude of an absolute monster. Very fitting for the setting, though.
She reminds me a little of Meng Hao, from ISSTH, in his early days, before he just became...a grotesque mess of characterization; the scheming, tricking, and falling through sheer luck into opportunity and profit.
Though she's a lot more bitter than he was before he entered the cultivation world, which is understandable, given she has to fight shitty societal norms as well as the heavens from the very beginning.
Good stuff. Personally, I hope that romance does not enter into this at all, at least for a long time, and she remains focused on her own goals of cultivation and freedom first and foremost.
Thanks for writing, Winged_One!
If she can avoid pissing off her seniors too much before she grows strong, she's going to go *far* in her battle against heaven's will. She seems like she'll either burn bright or fade away.
But she's barely even a real cultivator at this point in her cultivation, though. Basically still a mortal. Absolute bottom of the totem pole. Qian Shanyi's got a looong way to go in her quest for freedom. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing for the world around her.
The lady seems like a few nasty setbacks from developing the principles and attitude of an absolute monster. Very fitting for the setting, though.
She reminds me a little of Meng Hao, from ISSTH, in his early days, before he just became...a grotesque mess of characterization; the scheming, tricking, and falling through sheer luck into opportunity and profit.
Though she's a lot more bitter than he was before he entered the cultivation world, which is understandable, given she has to fight shitty societal norms as well as the heavens from the very beginning.
Good stuff. Personally, I hope that romance does not enter into this at all, at least for a long time, and she remains focused on her own goals of cultivation and freedom first and foremost.
Thanks for writing, Winged_One!
Chloe Sullivan
Subdefective
- Location
- 1630 Revello Drive, Sunnydale CA
- Location
- Moscow
Brains, brains
It's okay!
It's not a matter if it isn't grey!
And if at first they think it's strange
They won't think twice if they don't have a brain!
Chapter 17: Braid The Strands With Wheels Of Oak
Winged_One
Head Engineer of ATHENA
- Location
- Low Earth Orbit
Making rope ended up being more complicated than Qian Shanyi expected.
Three Obediences Four Virtues was of no help here: it simply said that the fibers could make decent ropes, and left it at that. Instead, she had to closely study the structure of the ropes from one of the wine crates with the secret divine art of destructive analysis.
The rope was composed out of yarns - bundles of fibers - that were bound together into strands, and those finally composed the rope. The fibers themselves overlapped within the yarns, held together by friction, and allowed the rope to be much longer than any individual fiber. Every layer of the structure was twisted, with the fibers and strands twisted leftward while yarns and the overall rope were twisted rightwards, probably to keep the rope from untangling.
Figuring that she might as well kill two demon beasts with a single flying sword, she opened up Three Obediences Four Virtues to the sewing chapter, found the description of thread control techniques, and started practicing her first proper external spiritual energy manipulation technique.
Spiritual energy manipulation techniques could be split into two categories: internal, and external. Internal techniques manipulated spiritual energy within the body of a cultivator, moving it around their meridians, strengthening their spiritual shield, or increasing the strength and durability of their limbs. Most of these techniques were unstructured, relying on the body itself to help stabilize the spiritual energy and guide it where it needed to go, and were no more deserving of being called a "technique" than taking a single step of being called a "martial art". The way she had been holding her broken leg together was an example of such an unstructured technique, and every cultivator learned them simply as a matter of course.
If spiritual energy was to be used outside of the body, this support had to come from somewhere else. Talismans and artifacts could be used for this purpose, but their expense and rigid design greatly limited their use - to achieve true flexibility, a cultivator had to learn to construct the support structure on the fly out of the spiritual energy itself, casting it into shape much like a smith melted down metal to make some pots.
The simplest example of this process were the techniques to project swordlight, like that of the Honk of the Solar Goose. First, spiritual energy would be collected on the surface of the sword, and then, with the slash, this razor-sharp "envelope" of spiritual energy would fly towards an enemy.
Thread control technique Qian Shanyi was practicing was quite a bit more complex than a basic swordlight technique. For one, it required her to shape two separate spiritual energy envelopes in parallel: one around her target thread, and one around the thread she would use to control its movements. For another, threads weren't solid objects like a sword: they were elastic and porous, making it much harder to collect spiritual energy on their surface. It certainly didn't help that she had relatively little experience manipulating spiritual energy outside of her body.
After trying and failing to get the technique to work for a full hour, she gave up. She would spend more time practicing in the future, but for now, she needed another solution.
She headed over to their large table. It was time to build a lathe.
The lathe didn't so much get built as it put itself together - all she had to do was pick the most natural solution to every individual problem.
The basic principle behind a lathe was to spin a piece of wood around an axis while cutting into it with a knife, shaping it into smooth and round parts. This presented two concrete engineering challenges: affixing a piece of wood to an axis, and making it spin.
To solve the first problem, she took a spear from the treasury, then drilled holes through a series of planks a hair narrower than the width of the spear shaft. After pushing the weapon through the holes, she hammered the planks tightly to the surface of the table, fixing the spear in place. Then, she built the same structure on the other side of the table, aligning the spearheads to face each other so they would form an axis. Any piece of wood jammed in between the spearheads would be secured, free to rotate as much as need be.
At first, her mind was filled with overcomplicated designs for how to make the wood spin, but in the end she cut it down to the bare basics. She took a long oak branch, planted it into the ground on the other side of the table, and tied one of her silk ropes to its end. In front of the lathe, she dropped a plank on the ground that would serve as a pedal, tied the other end of the rope to it, and wrapped the rope around the wood stuck between the spearheads. By pushing down on the pedal, the rope would be pulled down, making the wood spin. The branch on the other end kept the rope taut, flexed, and brought it back up when she released her foot. All she had to do now was get into a rhythm and start cutting.
She pressed her sword against the edge of the table, carefully guiding it into the wood on the lathe. It was time to cut some axles.
She curiously approached the hole where Wang Yonghao was digging down into the dirt. It was time for lunch, and she would have expected him to come out already, but he was still working, earth quietly flying out of the hole. When she said it would take a week for the stones, that was a pure bluff: after only a couple hours, he had already dug a hole as deep as his height, and at that rate she figured he'd be done in only a couple days.
"Are you hungry?" she asked him, squatting near the edge of the hole, "I need to know if I should cook a portion for you."
"Yeah, and then you'd poison it," he said, not raising his head. She blinked.
"Poison it?" she repeated slowly, "I have no reason to harm you."
"Maybe you'd do it as a joke," he said.
"That isn't a joke," she frowned, "that would be a disgrace to my skill as a chef."
He didn't respond and kept digging.
"You seem…frustrated?" she asked uncertainly.
He finally put the shovel down and looked at her.
"You tricked me!" he shouted, throwing his hands up in the air, "You pretended like you didn't know how to play shatranj, and then you made me lose this stupid bet!"
"You knew what you were getting into."
"No I didn't! I thought you didn't know how to play!"
"You thought I didn't know how to play, yet you accepted the gamble?" she asked, blinking twice, "Doesn't that mean you are mad because you were trying to trick me? You can't claim your soul is as pure as jade if you reach into another's pocket with your free hand."
It was a common principle: one of the best types of marks were the people who thought they were conning you.
Confronted with his own irrationality, he scowled at her.
"How was I supposed to know why you wanted to gamble?" he asked, "You old monsters have all sorts of deviances!"
"You could have tried to convince me not to do it, or at least to reduce the stakes," she said, "you didn't do that, did you? When you thought it was in your favor, an unfair gamble was fine; it's only when you lose that it becomes an issue."
He ignored her and went back to digging. She sighed: it seems she had pushed him a bit too far. Ideally, she wanted to keep him in a constant state of bewilderment, annoyance and confusion: that way, he wouldn't notice any inconsistencies between the image of an old monster she was projecting and what she actually could do. This ruse could not be sustained long-term, but for now, even though she wasn't acutely worried for her safety, the fact remained that she was quite vulnerable while she was changing her cultivation law, recovering from her broken bones and being stuck away from civilization. Coming clean about her real power would put her in a vulnerable position she would rather avoid.
If he started to truly stew in his frustration, there was no telling how he would react. She doubted he would attack her, but it was entirely possible he would try to run away, leaving her stranded in the wilderness - from his perspective, she would be perfectly capable of fending for herself. No matter how entertaining it was, or how irrational his frustrations were, it was time to pull back a bit and mend relations.
"I've never explained to you why we need those stones, did I?" she sighed.
"Does it matter?"
"I think it does," she said, "I assume you'd be happier about this if you knew I wanted to make a bath."
"We already had a bath yesterday."
"Do you always travel near a river?" she raised her eyebrow, "I want a permanent bath, much like in a bathhouse. So that one could take it whenever they want and wherever they are. Did you not mention you never know if you would have to sleep on the street? I figured you would appreciate this."
That finally got him to raise his head and look at her. She smiled pleasantly.
"You said it was for the trenches," he said, narrowing his eyes suspiciously.
"Those are related," she said, getting up, "come on, I'll show you."
She led him over to the closest fire trench.
"Look here," she said, "The high temperature desiccates the ground, making the trenches collapse. Right now, I put the fire and water nodes together to keep their temperatures close to normality, but this isn't a good solution - the trench walls still turn to sand, only slower. They are already nearing the point where they'd need maintenance, which is just in time, because we'll be rebuilding them from scratch. Once we line them with stones, the problem of desiccation would be in the past."
"And the baths?" he asked.
"I am getting to that," she responded, "with the trenches secure, we could move the fire and water nodes away from one another, and then we will have a lot of heat to work with. Be it dried meat or a warm bath, anything would be possible. We'll use the stones to line the bath as well - you don't want to swim in a mud hole in the ground, do you? I already have a design in mind."
She turned back towards him. He was still scowling.
"You could have told me all this right from the start!" he accused her.
"And miss seeing your anguish?" she blinked, "Never."
The scowl grew wider, and she couldn't hold her laughter back.
"You asshole!" he ceded through his teeth.
"Oh, permit this old cultivator her eccentricities," she waved him off.
"I thought you were different from all the other old monsters because you weren't trying to make me cultivate, but you are like all the rest!", he continued.
"Did the others trick you at shatranj too?"
"Shatanj is not the point!" He stabbed his pointer finger at her, "You just want to bully me for your own amusement!"
"And?" She asked, smugly folding her hands on her chest.
His face grew as red as a sunset. Perhaps she shouldn't have done that, but she couldn't have simply let an opening like that lie.
"Alright, alright, before you try to bite my throat out, I promise to cut down on the bullying," she chuckled, raising her hands in an apologetic gesture, "I got my fill with the shatranj game in any case. How about this: from this point on, I would not trick you for longer than an hour whenever you are personally affected?"
"Are you going to apologize?"
What good would that do?
"Sure, I apologize for my horrendous behavior," she said. The color slowly started to recede from his face, and she headed towards their cooking station, "I assume you must want to eat? I did promise I would cook for two months."
He grumbled, but followed along. Now she would need to find something else to amuse herself with…
After lunch, she got him to play Shatranj again. At first he resisted, slandering her good name by saying she would "cheat" again - as if she would ever be caught cheating by him - but when she said they could play without any bets, he cautiously agreed on a couple matches.
Without the psychological pressure, the outcome of these games was never in doubt: even though she was a fast learner, Wang Yonghao's experience eclipsed hers by miles. When he won the first time, he rubbed it in her face, and she accepted it readily: the fool didn't know he was simply playing into her hands by improving his own mood. But after the second loss in a row, he started to frown, and when he put her king in checkmate for the third time, he sighed and looked straight at her.
"Are you losing on purpose?" he said.
"I am playing to the best of my abilities," she replied honestly.
"Yeah, right. You play like a novice, but I know you can do better than this."
"Perhaps I am just a novice?" she asked innocently.
"You are lying again!" He folded his arms on his chest. "No way you are a novice. You won against me three times in a row."
"If you don't think I am a novice, then why would I play worse deliberately?"
"I don't know." He narrowed his eyes at her. "to lure me into another bet?"
"Would I do that to you?"
"Yes. Definitely," the brat nodded his head.
"Oh fine," she scoffed, "I am not luring you into another bet. Happy now?"
"You could just be lying again."
"When did I ever lie to you?" She raised her eyebrows, "I've been nothing but a picture of perfect sincerity."
"Are you joking?" he boggled at her, "You lied just now! You said you are a novice!"
"I don't believe I ever said that, no."
"Yes you did!"
"I asked you wherever you thought I was a novice. I didn't say I was one."
"Oh that's the exact same thing," he scoffed.
"How is it the same thing? One is a statement of fact, and the other one is an open question."
"A question that's a lie!"
"A question is hardly a lie, it is just a question," she said,
"Yes it is!"
"How could it be a lie? I am not making a statement, I am asking you what you think."
"That…doesn't matter?" He said, "It's still a deception. If you ate the last pastry from the kitchens, and then shrugged when I asked you if you knew who ate the last pastry, that would also be a lie, even though you didn't even say anything. What matters is wherever you are trying to get the other person to believe a false thing."
She frowned. That his thinking was so clean on this subject was troubling, as it would make it much harder to run rhetorical circles around him. Perhaps it was to be expected, if he had to regularly deal with old cultivators.
"Wait," he frowned, "you did this during the game too. Do you say you don't lie because you didn't say anything that was strictly speaking false?"
"Well yes, quite obviously." She tucked an errant strand of hair behind her ear. "What else could I mean?"
"That's so wrong," he said, "so you just lie and pretend that you didn't?"
"I very rarely lie," she said, "and I don't think I have ever lied to you."
"Yes you did! You've been deceptive every time you opened your mouth!"
"Semantics," she rolled her eyes, "Anything can be deceptive to someone. Perhaps if I say that I have stabbed a bear to death, you would assume I have a stinger like a bee, for you have never seen a steel weapon in your life. Would you claim I was lying then?"
"That's absurd," he said, "Obviously everyone assumes some common knowledge all the time. You don't have trouble recognising deception, you are just playing with words."
"Maybe so."
"Then why do you want to lie?"
"I don't, unless I need to."
"Oh fine," he scowled, "why do you want to be deceptive?"
"Because it amuses me?"
"But if it's just about you," he said, "and I end up believing false things anyways, why not outright lie? It's not like I would be able to tell."
That brought her up short, and she took a while to answer.
"It's something of a game, I suppose," she said, "if the other person pays attention and is clever enough, they could figure out what I truly said, and respond in kind. Otherwise, they will be tricked."
"Games need two players," he said, "a game with one person is not a game at all, it is bullying."
She raised an eyebrow at him, and couldn't help but laugh. He narrowed his eyes at her.
"Are you saying I am bullying you by winning and losing at shatranj?" she asked, "At least when you complained of me tricking you it made sense. Stop fooling around and set up the new game, junior."
After shatranj ran to a natural end, she went back to engineering.
She finished cutting an axle for her rope-making machine, and then made a wide disk - a wheel - to fit on top of it. Making the axle hole wide enough for it to spin freely but not so wide as to wobble took careful cutting in several steps, but her lathe served its job admirably.
She attached the axle to a small wood table, then quickly made a spool and attached it to the wheel on top of a second axle. Then, she took a bundle of fibers, fixed it to the spool by jamming it into a cut on the side, and pulled on the soon-to-be yarn to keep it taut.
The biggest problem she had when spinning the rope by hand was that it took far too much time. With the wheel, she could quickly spin it with a single foot and easily control the twist of the fibers by counting the number of wheel turns. Once a yarn was properly twisted together, she took out a peg fixing the spool in place, and wound a bit of yarn onto it. In her hands, she held the other end of the yarn, carefully adding more fibers into it to keep increasing its length. It took her some experimentation to settle on a number of twists that would keep the yarn from kinking, but once she did, it was all about keeping the number of wheel spins per meter of thread consistent.
Once she had some thirty meters of yarn wound onto the spool, she took the spool off, cut the yarn into three parts, and started winding it into a strand using the same process. The strand got cut into three parts as well, and in the end, she ended up with three meters of solid rope, about as thick as her finger. She went over to Wang Yonghao, who was strengthening the walls of his hole with wooden planks.
"Come on up," she said, "I need you to fly up and hold this rope."
She gave him one end of the rope, held the other, and did her best to tear it by yanking on it with her entire weight. The rope held fast, and she considered the test a success.
A much better test would have been to load the rope up until it broke, but she didn't want to waste the time to build a testing rig. In the end, as long as these ropes could hold a person, it was enough.
The rest of her day was spent spinning, spinning and spinning hundreds of meters of rope. After a while, the movement of the wheel and the weaving of fibers into the yarn became so automatic that she started practicing thread control techniques at the same time just to keep her brain occupied.
She worked late, many hours after the clock told her it was bedtime, silently cursing Yonghao for distracting her with shatranj and herself for being baited, and for leaving him to dig when he could have been making more rope. She was far too arrogant, thinking she could finish the work alone and go to sleep on time, and by the time she realized her time estimates were off it was already too late to build a second spinning wheel to get him to help, as it wouldn't save that much time.
Her eyes were drooping by the end, but she had pushed through and managed to braid two separate long ropes and weave them into a pair of hammocks. She and Wang Yonghao hung them up in between a pair of tall wooden tripods, and she finally climbed into what she could call an actual bed.
She sighed in content, feeling her tense back properly relax in the soft embrace of a hammock.
"Well, fellow cultivator Wang, what do you prefer?" she said, feeling her eyelids slowly close beneath the robe covering her eyes, "Deception that grants you a bed, or sleeping on cold hard ground?"
"Lying didn't make this bed."
"Is that so?" she sighed, "I suppose we'll never know."
For the first time in weeks, she drifted off into calm, quiet sleep, unbroken by the aches in her back.
Author Note: If you'd like to read four chapters ahead, or read other works I write, you can find me on patreon for a low price of 3$.
Three Obediences Four Virtues was of no help here: it simply said that the fibers could make decent ropes, and left it at that. Instead, she had to closely study the structure of the ropes from one of the wine crates with the secret divine art of destructive analysis.
The rope was composed out of yarns - bundles of fibers - that were bound together into strands, and those finally composed the rope. The fibers themselves overlapped within the yarns, held together by friction, and allowed the rope to be much longer than any individual fiber. Every layer of the structure was twisted, with the fibers and strands twisted leftward while yarns and the overall rope were twisted rightwards, probably to keep the rope from untangling.
Figuring that she might as well kill two demon beasts with a single flying sword, she opened up Three Obediences Four Virtues to the sewing chapter, found the description of thread control techniques, and started practicing her first proper external spiritual energy manipulation technique.
Spiritual energy manipulation techniques could be split into two categories: internal, and external. Internal techniques manipulated spiritual energy within the body of a cultivator, moving it around their meridians, strengthening their spiritual shield, or increasing the strength and durability of their limbs. Most of these techniques were unstructured, relying on the body itself to help stabilize the spiritual energy and guide it where it needed to go, and were no more deserving of being called a "technique" than taking a single step of being called a "martial art". The way she had been holding her broken leg together was an example of such an unstructured technique, and every cultivator learned them simply as a matter of course.
If spiritual energy was to be used outside of the body, this support had to come from somewhere else. Talismans and artifacts could be used for this purpose, but their expense and rigid design greatly limited their use - to achieve true flexibility, a cultivator had to learn to construct the support structure on the fly out of the spiritual energy itself, casting it into shape much like a smith melted down metal to make some pots.
The simplest example of this process were the techniques to project swordlight, like that of the Honk of the Solar Goose. First, spiritual energy would be collected on the surface of the sword, and then, with the slash, this razor-sharp "envelope" of spiritual energy would fly towards an enemy.
Thread control technique Qian Shanyi was practicing was quite a bit more complex than a basic swordlight technique. For one, it required her to shape two separate spiritual energy envelopes in parallel: one around her target thread, and one around the thread she would use to control its movements. For another, threads weren't solid objects like a sword: they were elastic and porous, making it much harder to collect spiritual energy on their surface. It certainly didn't help that she had relatively little experience manipulating spiritual energy outside of her body.
After trying and failing to get the technique to work for a full hour, she gave up. She would spend more time practicing in the future, but for now, she needed another solution.
She headed over to their large table. It was time to build a lathe.
The lathe didn't so much get built as it put itself together - all she had to do was pick the most natural solution to every individual problem.
The basic principle behind a lathe was to spin a piece of wood around an axis while cutting into it with a knife, shaping it into smooth and round parts. This presented two concrete engineering challenges: affixing a piece of wood to an axis, and making it spin.
To solve the first problem, she took a spear from the treasury, then drilled holes through a series of planks a hair narrower than the width of the spear shaft. After pushing the weapon through the holes, she hammered the planks tightly to the surface of the table, fixing the spear in place. Then, she built the same structure on the other side of the table, aligning the spearheads to face each other so they would form an axis. Any piece of wood jammed in between the spearheads would be secured, free to rotate as much as need be.
At first, her mind was filled with overcomplicated designs for how to make the wood spin, but in the end she cut it down to the bare basics. She took a long oak branch, planted it into the ground on the other side of the table, and tied one of her silk ropes to its end. In front of the lathe, she dropped a plank on the ground that would serve as a pedal, tied the other end of the rope to it, and wrapped the rope around the wood stuck between the spearheads. By pushing down on the pedal, the rope would be pulled down, making the wood spin. The branch on the other end kept the rope taut, flexed, and brought it back up when she released her foot. All she had to do now was get into a rhythm and start cutting.
She pressed her sword against the edge of the table, carefully guiding it into the wood on the lathe. It was time to cut some axles.
She curiously approached the hole where Wang Yonghao was digging down into the dirt. It was time for lunch, and she would have expected him to come out already, but he was still working, earth quietly flying out of the hole. When she said it would take a week for the stones, that was a pure bluff: after only a couple hours, he had already dug a hole as deep as his height, and at that rate she figured he'd be done in only a couple days.
"Are you hungry?" she asked him, squatting near the edge of the hole, "I need to know if I should cook a portion for you."
"Yeah, and then you'd poison it," he said, not raising his head. She blinked.
"Poison it?" she repeated slowly, "I have no reason to harm you."
"Maybe you'd do it as a joke," he said.
"That isn't a joke," she frowned, "that would be a disgrace to my skill as a chef."
He didn't respond and kept digging.
"You seem…frustrated?" she asked uncertainly.
He finally put the shovel down and looked at her.
"You tricked me!" he shouted, throwing his hands up in the air, "You pretended like you didn't know how to play shatranj, and then you made me lose this stupid bet!"
"You knew what you were getting into."
"No I didn't! I thought you didn't know how to play!"
"You thought I didn't know how to play, yet you accepted the gamble?" she asked, blinking twice, "Doesn't that mean you are mad because you were trying to trick me? You can't claim your soul is as pure as jade if you reach into another's pocket with your free hand."
It was a common principle: one of the best types of marks were the people who thought they were conning you.
Confronted with his own irrationality, he scowled at her.
"How was I supposed to know why you wanted to gamble?" he asked, "You old monsters have all sorts of deviances!"
"You could have tried to convince me not to do it, or at least to reduce the stakes," she said, "you didn't do that, did you? When you thought it was in your favor, an unfair gamble was fine; it's only when you lose that it becomes an issue."
He ignored her and went back to digging. She sighed: it seems she had pushed him a bit too far. Ideally, she wanted to keep him in a constant state of bewilderment, annoyance and confusion: that way, he wouldn't notice any inconsistencies between the image of an old monster she was projecting and what she actually could do. This ruse could not be sustained long-term, but for now, even though she wasn't acutely worried for her safety, the fact remained that she was quite vulnerable while she was changing her cultivation law, recovering from her broken bones and being stuck away from civilization. Coming clean about her real power would put her in a vulnerable position she would rather avoid.
If he started to truly stew in his frustration, there was no telling how he would react. She doubted he would attack her, but it was entirely possible he would try to run away, leaving her stranded in the wilderness - from his perspective, she would be perfectly capable of fending for herself. No matter how entertaining it was, or how irrational his frustrations were, it was time to pull back a bit and mend relations.
"I've never explained to you why we need those stones, did I?" she sighed.
"Does it matter?"
"I think it does," she said, "I assume you'd be happier about this if you knew I wanted to make a bath."
"We already had a bath yesterday."
"Do you always travel near a river?" she raised her eyebrow, "I want a permanent bath, much like in a bathhouse. So that one could take it whenever they want and wherever they are. Did you not mention you never know if you would have to sleep on the street? I figured you would appreciate this."
That finally got him to raise his head and look at her. She smiled pleasantly.
"You said it was for the trenches," he said, narrowing his eyes suspiciously.
"Those are related," she said, getting up, "come on, I'll show you."
She led him over to the closest fire trench.
"Look here," she said, "The high temperature desiccates the ground, making the trenches collapse. Right now, I put the fire and water nodes together to keep their temperatures close to normality, but this isn't a good solution - the trench walls still turn to sand, only slower. They are already nearing the point where they'd need maintenance, which is just in time, because we'll be rebuilding them from scratch. Once we line them with stones, the problem of desiccation would be in the past."
"And the baths?" he asked.
"I am getting to that," she responded, "with the trenches secure, we could move the fire and water nodes away from one another, and then we will have a lot of heat to work with. Be it dried meat or a warm bath, anything would be possible. We'll use the stones to line the bath as well - you don't want to swim in a mud hole in the ground, do you? I already have a design in mind."
She turned back towards him. He was still scowling.
"You could have told me all this right from the start!" he accused her.
"And miss seeing your anguish?" she blinked, "Never."
The scowl grew wider, and she couldn't hold her laughter back.
"You asshole!" he ceded through his teeth.
"Oh, permit this old cultivator her eccentricities," she waved him off.
"I thought you were different from all the other old monsters because you weren't trying to make me cultivate, but you are like all the rest!", he continued.
"Did the others trick you at shatranj too?"
"Shatanj is not the point!" He stabbed his pointer finger at her, "You just want to bully me for your own amusement!"
"And?" She asked, smugly folding her hands on her chest.
His face grew as red as a sunset. Perhaps she shouldn't have done that, but she couldn't have simply let an opening like that lie.
"Alright, alright, before you try to bite my throat out, I promise to cut down on the bullying," she chuckled, raising her hands in an apologetic gesture, "I got my fill with the shatranj game in any case. How about this: from this point on, I would not trick you for longer than an hour whenever you are personally affected?"
"Are you going to apologize?"
What good would that do?
"Sure, I apologize for my horrendous behavior," she said. The color slowly started to recede from his face, and she headed towards their cooking station, "I assume you must want to eat? I did promise I would cook for two months."
He grumbled, but followed along. Now she would need to find something else to amuse herself with…
After lunch, she got him to play Shatranj again. At first he resisted, slandering her good name by saying she would "cheat" again - as if she would ever be caught cheating by him - but when she said they could play without any bets, he cautiously agreed on a couple matches.
Without the psychological pressure, the outcome of these games was never in doubt: even though she was a fast learner, Wang Yonghao's experience eclipsed hers by miles. When he won the first time, he rubbed it in her face, and she accepted it readily: the fool didn't know he was simply playing into her hands by improving his own mood. But after the second loss in a row, he started to frown, and when he put her king in checkmate for the third time, he sighed and looked straight at her.
"Are you losing on purpose?" he said.
"I am playing to the best of my abilities," she replied honestly.
"Yeah, right. You play like a novice, but I know you can do better than this."
"Perhaps I am just a novice?" she asked innocently.
"You are lying again!" He folded his arms on his chest. "No way you are a novice. You won against me three times in a row."
"If you don't think I am a novice, then why would I play worse deliberately?"
"I don't know." He narrowed his eyes at her. "to lure me into another bet?"
"Would I do that to you?"
"Yes. Definitely," the brat nodded his head.
"Oh fine," she scoffed, "I am not luring you into another bet. Happy now?"
"You could just be lying again."
"When did I ever lie to you?" She raised her eyebrows, "I've been nothing but a picture of perfect sincerity."
"Are you joking?" he boggled at her, "You lied just now! You said you are a novice!"
"I don't believe I ever said that, no."
"Yes you did!"
"I asked you wherever you thought I was a novice. I didn't say I was one."
"Oh that's the exact same thing," he scoffed.
"How is it the same thing? One is a statement of fact, and the other one is an open question."
"A question that's a lie!"
"A question is hardly a lie, it is just a question," she said,
"Yes it is!"
"How could it be a lie? I am not making a statement, I am asking you what you think."
"That…doesn't matter?" He said, "It's still a deception. If you ate the last pastry from the kitchens, and then shrugged when I asked you if you knew who ate the last pastry, that would also be a lie, even though you didn't even say anything. What matters is wherever you are trying to get the other person to believe a false thing."
She frowned. That his thinking was so clean on this subject was troubling, as it would make it much harder to run rhetorical circles around him. Perhaps it was to be expected, if he had to regularly deal with old cultivators.
"Wait," he frowned, "you did this during the game too. Do you say you don't lie because you didn't say anything that was strictly speaking false?"
"Well yes, quite obviously." She tucked an errant strand of hair behind her ear. "What else could I mean?"
"That's so wrong," he said, "so you just lie and pretend that you didn't?"
"I very rarely lie," she said, "and I don't think I have ever lied to you."
"Yes you did! You've been deceptive every time you opened your mouth!"
"Semantics," she rolled her eyes, "Anything can be deceptive to someone. Perhaps if I say that I have stabbed a bear to death, you would assume I have a stinger like a bee, for you have never seen a steel weapon in your life. Would you claim I was lying then?"
"That's absurd," he said, "Obviously everyone assumes some common knowledge all the time. You don't have trouble recognising deception, you are just playing with words."
"Maybe so."
"Then why do you want to lie?"
"I don't, unless I need to."
"Oh fine," he scowled, "why do you want to be deceptive?"
"Because it amuses me?"
"But if it's just about you," he said, "and I end up believing false things anyways, why not outright lie? It's not like I would be able to tell."
That brought her up short, and she took a while to answer.
"It's something of a game, I suppose," she said, "if the other person pays attention and is clever enough, they could figure out what I truly said, and respond in kind. Otherwise, they will be tricked."
"Games need two players," he said, "a game with one person is not a game at all, it is bullying."
She raised an eyebrow at him, and couldn't help but laugh. He narrowed his eyes at her.
"Are you saying I am bullying you by winning and losing at shatranj?" she asked, "At least when you complained of me tricking you it made sense. Stop fooling around and set up the new game, junior."
After shatranj ran to a natural end, she went back to engineering.
She finished cutting an axle for her rope-making machine, and then made a wide disk - a wheel - to fit on top of it. Making the axle hole wide enough for it to spin freely but not so wide as to wobble took careful cutting in several steps, but her lathe served its job admirably.
She attached the axle to a small wood table, then quickly made a spool and attached it to the wheel on top of a second axle. Then, she took a bundle of fibers, fixed it to the spool by jamming it into a cut on the side, and pulled on the soon-to-be yarn to keep it taut.
The biggest problem she had when spinning the rope by hand was that it took far too much time. With the wheel, she could quickly spin it with a single foot and easily control the twist of the fibers by counting the number of wheel turns. Once a yarn was properly twisted together, she took out a peg fixing the spool in place, and wound a bit of yarn onto it. In her hands, she held the other end of the yarn, carefully adding more fibers into it to keep increasing its length. It took her some experimentation to settle on a number of twists that would keep the yarn from kinking, but once she did, it was all about keeping the number of wheel spins per meter of thread consistent.
Once she had some thirty meters of yarn wound onto the spool, she took the spool off, cut the yarn into three parts, and started winding it into a strand using the same process. The strand got cut into three parts as well, and in the end, she ended up with three meters of solid rope, about as thick as her finger. She went over to Wang Yonghao, who was strengthening the walls of his hole with wooden planks.
"Come on up," she said, "I need you to fly up and hold this rope."
She gave him one end of the rope, held the other, and did her best to tear it by yanking on it with her entire weight. The rope held fast, and she considered the test a success.
A much better test would have been to load the rope up until it broke, but she didn't want to waste the time to build a testing rig. In the end, as long as these ropes could hold a person, it was enough.
The rest of her day was spent spinning, spinning and spinning hundreds of meters of rope. After a while, the movement of the wheel and the weaving of fibers into the yarn became so automatic that she started practicing thread control techniques at the same time just to keep her brain occupied.
She worked late, many hours after the clock told her it was bedtime, silently cursing Yonghao for distracting her with shatranj and herself for being baited, and for leaving him to dig when he could have been making more rope. She was far too arrogant, thinking she could finish the work alone and go to sleep on time, and by the time she realized her time estimates were off it was already too late to build a second spinning wheel to get him to help, as it wouldn't save that much time.
Her eyes were drooping by the end, but she had pushed through and managed to braid two separate long ropes and weave them into a pair of hammocks. She and Wang Yonghao hung them up in between a pair of tall wooden tripods, and she finally climbed into what she could call an actual bed.
She sighed in content, feeling her tense back properly relax in the soft embrace of a hammock.
"Well, fellow cultivator Wang, what do you prefer?" she said, feeling her eyelids slowly close beneath the robe covering her eyes, "Deception that grants you a bed, or sleeping on cold hard ground?"
"Lying didn't make this bed."
"Is that so?" she sighed, "I suppose we'll never know."
For the first time in weeks, she drifted off into calm, quiet sleep, unbroken by the aches in her back.
Author Note: If you'd like to read four chapters ahead, or read other works I write, you can find me on patreon for a low price of 3$.
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J.I.M.S
BookWyrm
- Location
- Latveria
Ah semantics I love playing it with my siblings. Wang Yonghao has the right of it, the game is more fun with more than a single player. Good stuff I laughed.
Shanyi playing the words game isn't just for amusement, it's partly motivated by being of unequal standing cultivation wise.
Shanyi playing the words game isn't just for amusement, it's partly motivated by being of unequal standing cultivation wise.