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Linghui Mei's spit went into two small pill bottles, mixed with water, and sealed up with tight stoppers, washed thoroughly from the outside to remove any residual scent.
Wang Yonghao took a quick bath, to rid himself of the kitsune's scent. Qian Shanyi thought his robes would be a problem - but they turned out to be self-cleaning, because of course they did. Linghui Mei couldn't smell herself on him, at least.
The kitsune stayed behind in their world fragment, while Qian Shanyi and Wang Yonghao went back to the tavern. She explained the broadest strokes of her plan on the way.
"Do you need me to do anything?" Wang Yonghao asked once they were back in their room.
"Yeah", she said, heading towards the window, carrying a piece of the maid's dress on a long splinter to avoid it touching her clothes or skin, "break the bed."
"What?"
"We need an excuse for why I was deathly embarrassed to let the spirit hunter into our room," she said casually, "our excuse will be that we fucked like rabbits and broke the bed."
"What?!"
"Unless you can come up with a better one in the next… Twenty seconds, I suggest you start on it," she said, and stepped out of the sound muffling formation to reach the windowsill. They've already wasted far too much time - any more would begin to look suspicious.
She dropped the dress piece on the windowsill, reached between the blinds with her splinter to tear her secret hair, and then used it to carefully flip the window latch open. She didn't want the scent of her hands anywhere on the blinds.
Taking out the first of the two bottles she prepared, she opened the stopper, and, being very careful to not let the tainted water touch her skin, let a couple droplets fall onto the latch, the windowsill, the floor below it, and leading further into the room. The start of the scent trail.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Wang Yonghao start kicking the bed, shattering its structure in several places. Good.
Standing next to the windowsill, she reached out with her spiritual energy senses. She felt the three cultivators at the very edge of her senses, several rooms down the corridor. Glancing through the small slits in the blinds, she couldn't see the spirit hunter's partner either - he was supposed to be on the roof somewhere, but the garden had plenty of trees to obscure sight.
Perfect.
Qian Shanyi pulled out a piece of thread, and spun her rope control technique to link it to her gloves, making it tie itself around the small piece of the maid dress she brought along. Controlling the thread was awkward - it was thin and bent easily, and she didn't want to put more power into the technique to compensate, lest she be noticed. She quickly made it wipe the drops of water away with the cloth, leaving only the scent behind, and then sent it through the narrow gap between the blinds and the windowsill, until the cloth piece was lodged on the branches of a bush a good five meters away. She forced the thread to untie, and reeled it back into the room.
Having done her part, she walked back into the sound muffling formation, and gave the bed a critical look. The breaks looked sensible enough - she tugged on the blanket, smoothing it out, and tossed one of their cloaks over the backboard, to make it seem as if they tried to hide the damage. The bags they brought with them were laying down on the ground loosely, and she quickly gathered them all into a pile to make them seem more presentable.
"Open the world fragment again, please," she said to Wang Yonghao, grabbed the top bag and tossed it in, alongside the used scent bottle and the loose thread. Giving the man himself a once over, she frowned. They've spent so long in the world fragment that the scratches on his face had almost healed. "Come here," she said, and with a quick circulation of the Crushing Glance of the Netherworld, applied lines of white makeup to his face. They should pass for some sort of healing paste.
Appearances: check.
Scene: check.
Scent trail: check.
"Come on," she said, heading to the doors, "it's time for our performance to start. And if anyone asks: you were naked when I answered the door."
When she opened the door, the three other cultivators were already heading back towards their room. She bowed deeply in their direction, putting on her most grave look. "Honorable spirit hunter Bao Sheng," she said, "I must humbly apologize, for I am afraid your dog was correct. The kitsune
had been in our room."
Bao Sheng grimaced, and tapped the dog on his shoulder, rushing towards her. The dog leapt off, springing ahead. Qian Shanyi stepped aside, letting them into the room, and the dog stuck its nose to the floor, beginning to track.
Rui Bao and Jian Shizhe followed suit. "Yonghao said I should apologize," she said quietly, when the latter passed by her. He stopped for a moment, not even sparing her a look. "I will do no such thing. You deserved all I have said and then some."
Jian Shizhe walked past her without a word. She returned his generous favor by giving him as much attention as a patch of lichen.
"How did you know the kitsune was here?" Bao Sheng said, following after his dog. His brow was creased, though he did not look around the room, nor towards her, as she would have expected.
"One of our bags is missing," she said, re-entering their room after the others, and gestured towards where she had stacked their bags neatly against one of the walls. "One we purchased today. There were some of my new clothes, some pills… It must have taken it, though I don't understand how we could have missed it."
Bao Sheng's dog circled around the room, before it quickly found its way to the window, leaped up onto it, and began scratching at the blinds. The man himself kneeled down next to a pair of talismans from their formation. "May I examine the talismans?"
"But of course. It is safe."
Spiritual energy flooded out of his fingers as he picked up the two talismans, one after the other. She observed what he did curiously - some sort of forensic technique, perhaps? "You have a spirit gathering and sound muffling formation," he said, "when did you set them up?"
"As soon as we entered the room."
"Then you would not have heard it sneaking past you," he said, rising and heading towards the window.
"Oh!" Qian Shanyi said, opening her eyes in recognition of the idea she herself planted in the spirit hunter's head. There was a gap between the formations and the wall, one just wide enough for a person to pass. "So that's how it is. We have been… a little distracted, it is true. If it snuck behind our backs - then perhaps…"
She trailed off as Bao Sheng reached the window, and laid his hands on it, spiritual energy once again gushing forth. One of his hands reached for the latch, but he paused, running a finger alongside the bottom of the blinds. His forehead creased once again.
"There is a hair tied around the blinds here," he said, "your work?"
She nodded. She didn't actually expect him to notice the hair, and only tore it to be meticulous about the details. Seems it wasn't a waste. "Yes. We store some artifacts in our rooms, and I wanted to know if someone snuck in. I haven't touched it since."
"It's torn. Kitsune must have snuck out through here," he said, pushing the blinds open. "Use an alarm seal next time."
She did, in fact, already purchase one earlier today, but she stayed quiet. Alarm seals were of a niche use for them - they would not be alerted within the world fragment, and they did not truly care if someone stole anything they stored in their actual room.
The dog leapt out of the window, immediately located the scrap of cloth she left on the bush - and promptly "lost" the trail. Bao Sheng grimaced, looking around the garden. It was a wide space, with a lot of places to hide, stone trails on the ground making sure a passing person would leave no footprints.
"If it went out through the gardens, it could be anywhere," Rui Bao said lazily, leaning against a wall. "We would have to sweep the entire tavern again."
She silently thanked the man for making her job easier. "Me and Yonghao would like to assist," she said, bowing to the spirit hunter. "to make up for our earlier interference. Salt and ash upon my head for my carelessness."
"Loath as I am to admit it, they are reliable cultivators," Jian Shizhe ground out from somewhere to the side.
Bao Sheng turned back towards her, and she was struck by the same sense that he wasn't truly looking at her. "I accept," he said after a moments' thought, "I will search the garden. Honorable cultivators Qian Shanyi and Rui Bao - sweep the corridor to the left. Honorable cultivators Jian Shizhe and Wang Yonghao - to the right. This kitsune is highly dangerous - please brief them about it, like I have briefed you."
All according to her expectations. This was the only configuration that made any sense - Bao Sheng was the only one who could work with his dog and search the gardens for the scent trail that wasn't there. That left the four of them - two and two, to not leave either group too vulnerable. And of course he would neither put her with Jian Shizhe, nor with Wang Yonghao, whose skill he could not estimate on the spot.
The four of them bowed, and left through the door.
"All kitsune can alter and suppress their spiritual energy flow, becoming all but indistinguishable from an ordinary person," Rui Bao explained as they walked, their spiritual energy senses stretched to the limit. "They can assume the form of any person they have seen, and absorb the memories of those they have fed on. This information is under imperial seal."
The shock stopped her in her tracks, only a short distance away from their room. Her head whipped to stare into Rui Bao's eyes. He stepped back in surprise. "
Why?" she asked, aghast at the very idea.
She thought they simply
didn't know. What
utter imbecile -
"The concern is that some demonic cultivators might try to capture a kitsune and reverse-engineer the techniques," Rui Bao said neutrally, "I am sure you can see how that would be a problem."
"Everything
can be a problem," she sneered, starting down the corridor again. There were no people in the rooms they passed, kitsune or not - all of them were sent to the central building of the inn, where the other spirit hunter made his perch, though without an explanation. Protected from the kitsune's clutches. "To cultivate is to rebel against the Heavens - we slaughter our problems, we don't
run from them. How are some
hypothetical demonic cultivators worse than the
actual kitsune already among us? This ignorance puts
all cultivators that might
ever encounter one at deadly risk."
"I know, honey." Rui Bao sighed. "I am just telling you how it is."
She snorted dismissively. Little she could do. At least, for now.
"Speaking of risk," Rui Bao continued without a pause. "This duel you will have with Jian Shizhe - I think I could help you get out of it, if you wanted."
She gave him a sidelong glance. "Did you tell him we had sex?"
He raised an eyebrow at her. "No, of course not."
"Hmpf. I thought that might have contributed to his resentment."
"Resentment?"
"He seems like the type to seethe when people around him are happy in ways he despises."
Rui Bao laughed. "Don't let him hear this, but he
absolutely is. But you didn't answer my question, darling."
"He wanted to barge into my room when I told him to leave," she said, pursing her lips in annoyance. "We barely know each other, and I already have a partner, who was
completely naked just around the corner when I answered the door. What was I to think about the true intentions of this man? He is lucky I
merely insulted him, and didn't try to rip out his throat from sheer embarrassment. He is
doubly lucky that my heart is not
too resentful, or every nearby sect would have heard
exactly what he was ready to do. Perhaps with a touch of exaggeration."
That was a blatant lie, she would never have been stupid enough to do that. What she actually wanted was to shock Rui Bao a bit, get him to talk to Jian Shizhe and explain her obviously correct perspective, and leave him to stew in his own shame until the day of their duel. His righteous anger over the insult would not last long, but the doubts will.
"Do you know who he is?" Rui Bao asked curiously, though without judgment in his voice.
"He could be the son of the emperor and it would not make this acceptable."
"I don't mean his sect," Rui Bao said, "I meant his dueling skill. He has been called a sword saint, so good he is with that sword."
"So what?"
"So you will lose the duel, I think," he said calmly, "especially since you are still injured after the tribulation."
"
So what?" she sneered. "I would prefer to be
dead than lose my honor like that. If he is so good, he can force me to concede
himself."
"So you are set on your course?" he said curiously, "Hm. Well, you know, I am one of the few people he could never manage to beat…"
"Are you offering to train me, or fight my duel in my place?" she said, raising an eyebrow at him.
"Both?"
"In either case I must humbly reject the offer," she said, looking back at the corridor. "I will focus on recovering my strength, and I already gave him the terms. Backing out would be dishonorable in itself."
She had to fight the duel herself for her plans to work. The offer to train was more tempting, but it would just make it obvious she was healthier than she should have any right to be.
"Wait," she said, as they entered the main inn building, and veered towards a side room, "let's look here first."
"There is nobody there," Rui Bao said curiously, as they approached a nondescript door. A sign on it said "disposal and cleaning".
"How do we know the kitsune is still in the tavern?" She asked rhetorically instead of answering his implicit question.
"There is a spirit hunter on the roof, surveying all exits out of the tavern," he said, "he wouldn't let it pass unnoticed."
She could feel him above them, in fact, above a big room with all the guests. Just on the edge of her awareness. She nodded grimly. "This presumes there is no other exit," she said, throwing the door open. Within were some cabinets with cleaning supplies, a window leading out into the garden, and a large wooden hatch in the floor. When she threw it open, she revealed a wide stone shaft, and a flowing stream of pungent water down below. More than wide enough for a person to pass.
"Sewer access," she said. "All taverns have one of these, for the trash - but this one is larger than usual, because they also use it to dump loose plant cuttings from the garden. Think this kitsune could swim?"
She found out about this hatch in the early morning, after asking one of the maids, curious after her talk with the Zhao couple. She'd make sure to rub Wang Yonghao's face in this fact later - it should make for an instructive example.
Rui Bao cursed. She motioned towards the open window, while she pushed several crates over to the door to block it from the inside. "Get Bao Sheng. His dog would be able to smell if the kitsune was here."
Rui Bao nodded, and lept out into the garden. She closed the window behind him, and immediately took out her second scent bottle and a piece of clean cloth. She had to work quickly.
She sprinkled some water drops on the windowsill and on the floor next to the open hatch, wiped them off with her cloth, and then spilled the rest of the water on the stone walls of the shaft. With a quick swing of her sword, the empty bottle shattered, glass fragments vanishing into the sewer waters below alongside with the cloth, never to be seen again.
She sheathed her sword, and even had enough time to fix her hair before Rui Bao returned, Bao Sheng in tow. The dog caught "kitsune's" trail right away, and stopped in front of the open pit, growling at it dangerously. Bao Sheng kicked the wooden hatch in frustration.
"Damn it, no!" he growled, "How could this happen? We
almost had it!"
"You
could still follow it," Rui Bao said, staring dubiously into the sewer, "though I am afraid I would have to rescind my assistance."
"Follow it upstream or downstream?" Qian Shanyi said with a shake of her head. "If the kitsune is a good swimmer, it could be anywhere in the city by now. And I doubt the dog's nose would be any help down there." She bowed to Bao Sheng. "I truly am sorry. Perhaps if I had let you investigate our room first, you could have caught it before it managed to slink away."
Bao Sheng's eyes remained impassive, even as disappointment, mixed with determination gushed from his voice. "No. This is my fault," he shook his head, clutching his hands into fists. "I should have thought of this, and locked this hatch as soon as we arrived. Two sleepless days chasing it, and all for nothing. But I
will find it. This kitsune
will not escape again."
"Congratulations! You have escaped once again," Qian Shanyi said cheerfully to Linghui Mei, once she was back in the world fragment. "At least, for now. The spirit hunters caught the bait - we just have to reel them in."
"When can I leave?" the kitsune asked immediately. She was pacing around the center of the world fragment like a caged animal, though still in human form.
"The spirit hunters are going to search the town and the entire surrounding area now, but they are off your immediate trail," Qian Shanyi said, heading to their stove. All this subterfuge made her quite hungry. "In a couple hours, we'd finish out the other end of the deception. And then, in a week or so, we should have a good excuse to leave town. We'll extract you then, and they'd be none the wiser."
Wang Yonghao crossed his arms, following after her. "I think what Shanyi
actually means is we'd be leaving town
tomorrow, before she walks into a duel she can't possibly win."
Qian Shanyi rolled her eyes. Linghui Mei watched the two of them warily, though without comment. "Why in the name of all the netherworld kings would I avoid a duel I
myself instigated?"
"Because you'd
die?"
"Mmm. No, I don't think I will."
"You are the one who told me how fierce of a duelist Jian Shizhe was!" Wang Yonghao exclaimed. "What changed?"
"Fiercest duelist this, sword saint that," Qian Shanyi said in a mocking tone, "people focus so much on the titles that they turn their brains off and stop thinking. What does it even mean?"
"It means that Jian Shizhe fought in more duels than anyone else."
"So?"
"So he is one of the strongest duelists out there."
"Please," she scoffed, "This is
exactly what I mean by people turning their brain off. Tell me, is a shatranj player who has played in ten thousand games a strong player?"
Wang Yonghao paused, searching for a trap. He didn't find it. "Well, yeah," he said slowly, "With that much experience - one of the best, I would wager."
"One caveat - all the games were against seven year olds. Do you still think he is particularly good?" She picked up her knives and sliced through the air, cutting off all objections. "The sheer number of opponents is meaningless in a vacuum - you need to know
who they were. So who did Jian Shizhe fight?"
Wang Yonghao frowned. "I don't know."
"Well,
I do, down to their last detail. It's all in the almanac - I've been memorizing my copy while Junming explained to you how to properly use the post office. Let me paint you a picture of our little Shizhe: an arrogant, self-conscious frog in a well with a sword whose size only rivals that of the golden spoon in his mouth. Guess: are people challenging
him to a duel, or is he challenging
them?"
"The latter," Wang Yonghao said immediately.
"Correct. And
who is he challenging?"
"People who insult his honor?"
"Wrong." She snorted. "People who he
thinks insulted him. Does he strike you as a particularly discerning person?"
"No."
"Also my judgment," she said while she picked up the ingredients for a meal, "He's challenging people left and right at any perceived slight. Most of those people are completely average cultivators who just happened to look at him funny or made a wrong joke at the wrong time."
"Like you?" Wang Yonghao asked sarcastically.
"Please, my slights are anything but average," she said dismissively, pointing her knife at Linghui Mei to shift the conversation for a moment. "I am making soup from a heavenly rabbit. Are you eating?"
Linghui Mei narrowed her eyes a fraction. "No."
"Suit yourself," Qian Shanyi said, shaking her head. She turned back to Wang Yonghao. "Now you, riddle me this: how many times does an ordinary refinement stage cultivator end up in a fight to the death?"
"Per year?"
"No, in their
entire life. All hundred or so years of it."
Wang Yonghao frowned, really thinking through the question. "Twenty?" he guessed.
Qian Shanyi laughed. "Ha! No. It's
less than one. A fair bit less, actually."
Wang Yonghao gave her a look as if she had just suggested the Heavens were kind, caring, and respectful of human life. "There is
no way that's right."
"Thinking of yourself?" She smirked. "You aren't representative, I am afraid."
Wang Yonghao's face twisted, disbelief plain in his tone. "Less than
one?"
She waved her knife vaguely in the air. "It's simple demographics," she began to lecture, "When you enter a fight to the death, you either kill your opponent, or your opponent kills you. At best, you both manage to limp away to lick your wounds - but the chance of your death cannot possibly be less than thirty percent, can it? Otherwise, it's not much of a fight to the death. If such a thing happened to every cultivator even once every five years, then half of all cultivators would not live past thirty, and not even one in a thousand would live to a hundred."
Wang Yonghao moved from disbelief to denial. "So you are saying - what?" He said, "That Jian Shizhe's opponents didn't have enough killing intent?"
She snorted. What a question. "Why would they?" she said, "Whatever offense Jian Shizhe used to draw them into a duel will be obviously flimsy. They know that if they actually
kill the man, Jian Wei would bury them so deep not even the netherworld kings can dig them out, even if he couldn't act directly. And on top of that, if they have even
fought in a duel before - which, mind you, a good half of them have not - it was surely one to first blood, or to being disarmed, or to their spiritual shield failing. So why should they fight their hardest?"
"Because if they don't, they will lose honor."
"Not at all," she said, shaking her head. "Honor depends on courage, your willingness to risk your life - not on slaughtering fellow cultivators. This is why
refusing to duel someone is just as grave of an insult as defeating your opponent in a single strike. You are denying them the chance to show their own strength and tenacity."
A second wave of weary realization passed over Wang Yonghao's face. "Oh."
She grinned at him. No doubt he was thinking back on a dozen different things that happened to him. "The best thing for them is to agree to the duel, and then
lose as soon as it's clear they do not do so out of fear. That way, they walk out alive and well, and Jian Shizhe feels mollified. And therefore:
most of his duels do
worse than nothing for his skill, merely making him overconfident from his many easy victories."
"Shanyi, overconfident or not, he's still really good with the sword. Better than you, I can tell that much."
Qian Shanyi rolled her eyes. "
Obviously he is
good with the sword, but you didn't say that he is
good with the sword - you said he is one of the strongest
duelists, and that is a different question entirely," she said in annoyance, "to say that a duel is determined entirely by your skill at swordsmanship is to say that a mahjong game is determined entirely by the tiles you draw. It is simply not true."
She gestured upwards, towards the - closed - exit out of the world fragment. "Take that spirit hunter," she continued, "he had surely worked with his dog for years, and I do not doubt he can run circles around me when it comes to tracking. But that matters not, because he didn't even consider the
possibility that a cultivator
might be helping a kitsune, and so didn't see through my fairly amateurish tricks. And
because of how confident he is in his skill, he will
never question that he missed something. Power turned against itself."
Chopped rabbit went into a cauldron, alongside vegetables and spices. "If it was just a question of skill with the sword - I would surely be like a mantis challenging a crane, and my loss would be assured. But it's not. The key to defeating Shizhe doesn't lie in however many duels he had fought before. It lies in the circumstances of
this duel: that he had lost his foot and will have no time to adjust to it, that he will believe me to be still injured when I will be fully healed. It lies in his false ideas about how I fight."
She tossed her knife back onto the table, putting her hands on her hips and facing Wang Yonghao. "So no, I don't think I'll die. I think I am going to
win."
