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

dhasenan · Sep 9, 2023

Winged_One said:
"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."

I'm with Wang Yonghao. I feel like a lot of people try to say it's not as bad to deliberately deceive someone without making any single statement that's technically untrue, and I don't know why. They want to deceive others but want to think better of themselves at the same time, I guess?

Bloodalchemy · Sep 9, 2023

Winged_One said:
chess game

Typo, they don't call the game chess.

I can see both side of the argument but I lean towards Wang's perspective. When both side play it can be an amazing game but one sided it has to be very mild as a teaching tool or it is bullying edging into gaslighting.

Aule · Sep 9, 2023

Deceptions by omissions, technical truths and speech conventions abuses are of course still deceptions. But they work best when the target has no reason to expect to be deceived or pranked. They can be spotted when on lookout for such possibility, and repeated evasions during clarification attempts make it especially clear. A properly structured, not loaded, question with clear answer options can counter those. I look forward to seeing what Wang Yonghao will do now that he is aware he is a prank target.

ShadeHawk · Sep 10, 2023

Winged_One said:
Making rope ended up being more complicated than Qian Shanyi expected.

Winged_One said:
She headed over to their large table. It was time to build a lathe.

You don't need a machine to make a rope, but it helps.

Here are the relevant videos:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHDC70iC5jg

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DG26XDPpB8

Winged_One · Sep 16, 2023

"Rise and shine," the evil woman spoke right into his ear, "It's the day of the shovel."

Wang Yonghao grunted in response. His muscles ached after an entire day spent digging, and the only thing he wanted to do was stay in his nice and comfortable hammock.

"I've cultivated and made breakfast already," she said, "Now I am bored. Also, it's time for you to get up, we have more digging to do."

"I don't want to," he groaned, "Can't you dig alone?"

Suddenly, he felt himself move, and he flailed his arms around as he was unceremoniously tipped out of the hammock, landing on his face in the grass. He pulled the robe covering his eyes off his head, and stared at her blearily.

"Wasn't a request," she grinned at him, offering him a hand to get up, "Come on, eat your breakfast while it's still warm."

"How can you be so evil?" he asked, getting up without her help and rubbing his shoulders, "Did you find a secret manual of the dao of malevolence?"

"There is no need to butter me up with compliments. Now chop chop, we are behind schedule."

While Wang Yonghao ate his breakfast, she decided to turn the acorns they gathered back during their first day in the forest into flour. The first step was to break their shells with the back of an axe. The soft acorn centers would then be steeped in cold water for hours to leach the bitter tannins out before they could be eaten - she would keep them in their large pot for the rest of the day, dry them again while they slept, and hopefully by tomorrow, they could make some dumplings.

After they finished, Wang Yonghao headed back over to his hole, and she heard him exclaim in surprise. As she came over to look, she saw that the bottom of the hole, almost two meters below the ground level, was filled with water.

"There's water!" he said, turning towards her. She supposed it was good he didn't go blind overnight.

"An astute observation, junior," she nodded, "you'd need to deal with it to dig deeper, or you'd risk the walls of the pit collapsing on you."

"How do I do that?"

"Am I supposed to tell you this?" She raised her eyebrows, "Come now, you've got to come up with an idea or two of your own. I can't think for both of us."

He squinted at her, and she laid down on the ground to wait for him to come up with something, putting one of her hands behind her head.

"You said you'd stop bullying me."

"Fine, fine," she sighed, "I will help you brainstorm, how about that?"

He nodded, and started pacing in thought.

"We've got a pot, right?" he finally said, "I could use it as a bucket and drain the water out of the hole."

"You think that will work?"

"Why wouldn't it work? It's a hole with water."

"Where do you think this water came from?" she asked rhetorically.

"From…the ground?" he said, slowly.

"And where will you pour the water from the pot?"

He rubbed his face ruefully in response to that, putting the picture together.

"Okay, I see what you mean," he said, "But I could throw it out of the world fragment, right?"

"You could," she said, "but will that help that much? You had kept Blue Tear Stones within your world fragment for ages. Who knows how much water is there deep in the ground - as you keep digging, more and more of it will seep out."

"So…What do I do then?"

"Indeed, what do you do?" She asked, looking up into the sky, "It is quite a conundrum. The water leaks, yet you can't spend the time waiting for it all to drain."

He frowned, and continued pacing. She took out her sword and started playing around by tossing it up into the air and catching it by the hilt.

"If only there was some kind of technique to prevent the water from flowing," she continued rhetorically, "seal it up somehow, away from the hole. Sadly we don't have clay or cement to patch up the walls themselves, but surely there must be other options? Perhaps something that could turn it into some kind of … solid form, so that it could not flow anymore. But could something like that really be possible?"

"I could freeze the water within the walls into ice with one of the treasures!" Wang Yonghao snapped his fingers, grinning widely, "if the walls were frozen, then it wouldn't seep out."

"An ingenious idea, junior."

His grin faded as he turned back to her with a scowl.

"You are making fun of me again!"

"Me? Making fun?" she pressed a hand of hers to her chest, shaping her face into a mask of perfect sincerity, "You really think this here cultivator would do that? I am just giving you face."

"You are!" He pointed at her with his finger, "Why couldn't you just tell me this right away?"

"Now you are just being paranoid," she shook her head, getting back up, "But if I did do this, then don't you think it's best for you to come up with it on your own? This way, you'd better remember the principle in the future. Come on, while we wait for the earth to freeze, we can start modifying the trenches."

Her new design would have all of the trenches going either up or down an incline, and that meant moving a lot of earth around, either digging deep into the ground or building ramparts that could contain the newly heightened chiclotron nodes. They worked carefully, disassembling individual nodes and moving them into their new positions one by one. When they broke for lunch, he asked her what the purpose of it all was.

"It's because of the draft," she said, "like in a chimney?"

"Chimney?" he asked, "Are you going to burn things?"

"No, I meant the air," she said, "hot air rises, while cold air falls down, and the trenches follow this principle."

"It does?" he asked, looking surprised.

"You don't know this?" she raised an eyebrow, "It's because of the air pressure, but even most peasants would be familiar with a chimney. Have your parents never showed you one?"

"I am an orphan," Wang Yonghao scratched his head, "I guess I've never looked at chimneys much."

"I see," she nodded, "Well, it's not too complicated. Let me explain it quickly."

She went over to their wood stores and brought over a flat plank she used to plan the new trench network while Wang Yonghao was still asleep, turning it over to its clean side, and started drawing on it with her finger while circulating Crushing Glance of the Netherworld Eyes.

When she was younger, her father wanted her to inherit their small merchanting business, and taught her as much as he could. As part of that, he paid for tutors to prepare her for the imperial examinations - becoming a minor court official could open many doors in her life.

Once she happened to unblock her spiritual root and stepped on the path of cultivation, all of that fell by the wayside, but she still remembered her education in natural philosophy quite clearly. Once she joined the Luminous Lotus Pavilion, it surprised her that most other inner disciples had not heard of the study of the heats and pressures, given their obvious relevance to many cultivation techniques.

She once asked Elder Striding Phoenix why this topic was not taught within the sect itself, and he told her that it was simply not relevant until cultivators actually started practicing techniques that could produce wind or fire, and disciples should focus on training their body and cleansing their meridians. To this day, she still thought that was a mistake, but there wasn't much she could do about it at the time.

Wang Yonghao was a patient listener, especially when she explained that there wasn't any direct relation between this knowledge and cultivation. Once she finished with the basic principles, she turned over the plank and showed him her plan for the trenches.

"Here is the idea," she said, pointing towards various parts of the heightmap she sketched out, "I want as much air draft as possible - this means trenches with hot air should be angled upwards, while trenches with cold air should be angled downwards. There will be two primary air flows through the chiclotron: one producing hot air we will use for drying, and one producing cold air to balance out the temperature of the world fragment."

"Wow," Wang Yonghao said, frowning at her diagrams, "this looks pretty complicated. Will we really need to dig up all this?"

"Yes."

"Couldn't we just use the fire treasures to dry things?" he sighed, "That looks like way too much digging to me."

"Proper drying requires strong airflow, not just heat," she shook her head, "and besides, many ingredients respond badly to being surrounded by fire-type spiritual energy, or aligned spiritual energy in general. It's better to set this up properly for the future."

In the Luminous Lotus Pavilion, they used wood-fed fires to dry ingredients, but the principle remained - she supposed that only a rare sect would have enough treasures to waste them simply to produce hot air.

"Wouldn't spiritual energy spill out anyways?" he scratched his head, "Through the air holes?"

"Not if we keep the air trenches - or the chimney, in case of the outgoing hot air - long enough, and shorten the nearby spiritual energy trenches," she said, shaking her head, "spiritual energy prefers shorter paths, it would not spill out of the chiclotron just because a path to the outside exists in principle. Look at where the air holes would be - they are very far away from each other."

She pointed to the crude top down diagram she had drawn on the side.

"Besides drying," she continued her explanation, "This design will have other uses. I left one of the fire nodes out of the air cycles - we will put our bath right on top of that strong heat source. Your inner world is quite humid - you have already seen how much water lies underground - and by drawing the air through the ice cold water trenches, this moisture will start to condense and turn to ice, which we can later throw out to reduce the total amount of water in circulation. Taken together, this should allow us to control spiritual energy, heat, and humidity independently of each other."

"You really thought of everything, huh," he frowned, scratching his head, "How do you come up with these things?"

"It's a straightforward application of base principles," she said, flicking her hair behind her, "Nothing more."

"Well, I don't know," he said, "I wouldn't have thought of all this. It's very clever."

"Thank you," she blinked, smiling slightly. The compliment shouldn't have mattered - she knew her own skills perfectly well - but hearing them acknowledged did feel nice.

"With how clever you are, why do you feel the need to bully people?" he sighed.

"Come on, enough chatter," she said, rolling her eyes and getting up, "It's time to get to work."

They worked on modifying the nodes in stages, starting with the metal ones and following the creative cycle of feng shui from there. By the time they went to sleep again, they only just started on the water ones, but Qian Shanyi felt they were making good progress. She left the ground and leached acorn meal inside of a metal trench to dry over the course of the day, and closed them up.

Even though based on her time measurements, the forest got fifteen hours of daylight at this time of year, they could only manage eleven hours of travel time. She had played around with scheduling, but didn't manage to squeeze more time out: needing to stop to cook and eat food, as well as cultivate in the morning and evening, ate into the daylight time too much. Ultimately, she decided that it was fine: they had plenty of food, and sacrificing some travel time to speed up her synchronization with Three Obediences Four Virtues was a worthwhile trade.

They followed the river, seeing it slowly grow wider from many smaller streams flowing into it, only stopping for a short time when Wang Yonghao noticed a good clay deposit. She told him to be on the lookout for it - they would need clay to properly seal the gaps between the stones lining the chiclotron, as well as to prevent their bath from leaking. As they walked alongside the river's shore, cutting through or flying over occasional patches of underbrush, she got him to talk about his past adventures, both to fish for information and to build rapport.

Even though at times she wanted to tear her hair out, he had a lot of good stories to tell.

The stream they were following merged into a much larger river, easily thirty meters wide, and with a quick current. Here and there, the water turned white as it flowed over a sharp rock sticking out of the river bottom, burbling among the quietude of the surrounding forest. As they walked out on the shore, Wang Yonghao stopped with a considering look on his face.

"Do you think we could make a boat?" he asked her, "I'm tired of walking."

"Making a boat would take far too long," she frowned, coming closer, "but we could cut down a pair of trees to stand on. We couldn't forage while on the river though."

"We already have enough plants for a couple days, right?" he said, "And this way, we could travel faster."

She nodded, conceding his point. Besides, she could practice her thread techniques while floating downstream. Working together, they quickly dropped two large pine trees into the water, and chopped off all the branches.

An ordinary person might not have dared to use a bare tree trunk to float on: without a solid boat, and not knowing wherever river rapids might be around the next river bend, it would be far too dangerous to enter the water, but they were cultivators. Balancing on top of a tree trunk was child's play for them, and even if they were to sink, swimming back to shore would be only a couple arm strokes away, rapid waters or not.

Well. She would swim. Wang Yonghao only needed to step on air to be safe.

They chatted as they floated downstream, and she practiced thread techniques, while Wang Yonghao kept a careful watch on her surroundings. He was the first to notice the forest vanish into the open horizon in the distance on the left side of the river, and called out to her.

"Could you fly up?" She said, "I can't see if that's a waterfall we are heading towards."

He did so, and then had to jog through the air to catch back up with their tree trunks.

"I don't think it's a waterfall." he said, finally landing back on his tree and regaining his balance, "I think that's just the edge of the world."

She frowned at that.

"Do you think it is dangerous?" he said, glancing at her expression.

"I can't see why it would be," she responded, "at the end of the day, it's just a wall. But I have no experience steering a ship, let alone one near the edge of the world. I might be missing something obvious."

She shook her head to clear it.

"It's probably just paranoia," she sighed, "If it comes down to it, you can fly, and we can always retreat back to your world fragment. Even if there is some danger, we should be reasonably safe."

It felt strange to float down the river alongside the edge of the world, seeing sunlight come from underneath the waters where the invisible vertical wall curved below the stream, clean of silt and detritus.

Before she ended up in the world fragment, she had never seen an edge from this close - there were none within a hundred miles of the Golden Rabbit Bay, in fact. This was fairly typical for most of the world.

Much like the boundaries of a world fragment, the edges of the entire world were invisible and impossible to pass through for anyone except legendary cultivators in the void shattering stage. Heavenly bodies - suns, moons, stars and many others - traveled alongside the edge, shedding light and spiritual energy, or blocking other astronomical bodies from doing so. This was one of the distinguishing features of the world fragments, in fact - they lacked the sun or the moons. In places where the world edge was concave, it could be seen through - though light faded into the light blue fog of the sky fairly quickly, and the edge tended to warp light passing through it.

As the day came to a close, they saw one of the solar circles pass them by, traveling alongside the world's edge, spewing fire and yang spiritual energy into the world. Its light was almost blinding from up close, forcing them to turn away and shield their eyes, though it got much better once it dipped into the water and thick clouds of steam obscured their vision. Qian Shanyi briefly considered wherever the additional sunlight from below the waters could let them travel for longer while staying on the river, but decided against it. Being attacked by the Rosevines while out in the open would be disastrous.

Once the evening fell, she carefully hooked one of her long silk ropes under their tree trunks, and had Wang Yonghao drag them over to the shore by walking on air - the idea of making a new set for each day of travel rankled her.

Wang Yonghao opened his Inner World, and she climbed on his back to descend into it. Tomorrow, they would be back to digging trenches.

Author Note: If you'd like to read three chapters ahead, or read other works I write, you can find me on patreon for a low price of 3$.

I do not generally comment on my own writing for a variety of reasons, but this chapter was very fun to write (or draw, as the case may be). In most fiction that involves some sort of sci-fi or magical "engineering", the so-called "engineering" doesn't actually look like it's namesake at all. Instead, it's just presented as an opaque, black box process - a character waves some tools around, says how hard this or that project was, and magic effects come out of the other side. But that's not how it feels to engineer things in real life - problems have to break down into discrete and individually understandable parts that combine together in order to form effects that arise as a consequence of their interactions.

There are good reasons for it - for example, avoiding black boxes is a massive amount of effort for an author to do, often for relatively little payoff if the story does not focus on it - but it always feels a little unsatisfying to me. It also leads to silly tropes (common in various urban fantasy stories) like engineers or physicists rejecting the existence of magic on principle, or mages condescending to scientists about how magic is inexplicable by mathematics and is beyond their understanding. So what if it's beyond understanding? Plastic properties of metals might as well have been magic until 1934, when the first theory for why their observed strengths differed from known physical laws by about 1000 times was developed, and experimental confirmation of that theory had to wait until the 1950s. We went through the entire industrial revolution without having any real clue how anything actually worked on a low level - as long as the practical effects are more or less consistent, understanding isn't required in order to do engineering or indeed science.

In any case, I hope other people enjoy seeing basic properties of spiritual energy (producing heat/cold, being attracted to typed treasures) lead to more complex effects (dehumidification, air drafts, etc) as much as I do.

Aule · Sep 16, 2023

With fire and water energies producing heat and cold respectively, what are the inherent properties of the other elemental energies?

Bloodalchemy · Sep 16, 2023

I'm confused why the path for hot and cold are is so long. As far as I can tell the only difference is what node the air leaves from. So why don't you have the air enter one node before instead of going though a bunch and changing back and forth from hot/cold?

NonsenseLurker · Sep 17, 2023

Bloodalchemy said:
I'm confused why the path for hot and cold are is so long. As far as I can tell the only difference is what node the air leaves from. So why don't you have the air enter one node before instead of going though a bunch and changing back and forth from hot/cold?

I think it is mentioned in chapter to be so the input is far enough away from the output, so the spiritual energy does not flow the wrong way through the air holes.

Bloodalchemy · Sep 18, 2023

I thought that was just from the exit node to the next node.

If the air enter/exit chimneys are shorter then the path from one node to the next node then spiritual energy could flow out. By having the chimney longer then that next path the energy will stay put.

But if that chimney is longer then that single step it shouldn't change anything if it follows a single node or a dozen.

Tetrikitty · Sep 18, 2023

Here's the five-element chart from Wikipedia - metal insults fire, whereas fire destroys metal. In accordance with the cycles of fengshui, Qian Shanyi called Wang Yonghao a penniless bastard and then Wang Yonghao beat her up and broke her leg. This is a destructive cycle, which is bad.

After that, Wang Yonghao put Qian Shanyi into his world fragment. What element is a world fragment? Earth, obviously. The intervention of a third element changed their dynamic from a destructive cycle to a productive one - Fire creates Earth (Wang Yonghao dumps his junk in the world fragment) and Earth creates Metal (Qian Shanyi eats, drinks, and/or builds a cyclotron out of the stuff). We immediately see an improvement - they meet again and nobody gets hurt in the process!

I'm sure the author planned all of this out from the start - it all makes sense if you think about it.

Winged_One · Sep 22, 2023

Bloodalchemy said:
I thought that was just from the exit node to the next node.

If the air enter/exit chimneys are shorter then the path from one node to the next node then spiritual energy could flow out. By having the chimney longer then that next path the energy will stay put.

But if that chimney is longer then that single step it shouldn't change anything if it follows a single node or a dozen.

Draft should be stronger (I think? Shanyi would, at the very least), and also chiclotron is a giant tube, you want air circulating to prevent water condensation in weird places, mold growth etc.

Winged_One · Sep 22, 2023

Qian Shanyi poked her finger at the clay in between the stone slabs. She made sure to seal the gaps in the new walls of the chiclotron before going to bed, and disappointingly, the clay had cracked as it dried overnight. Furthermore, a short test showed that even though the material was bone dry, it would quickly begin to dissolve in water.

She sighed. Her hopes of waterproofing the trenches this way were clearly not to be. Neither she nor Wang Yonghao had any experience with pottery, but she believed that furnaces were involved at some point: perhaps that was the key element she was missing.

She could easily fire the clay using a variety of fire-type spiritual treasures, but the problem was that she didn't know the specifics of the process: wherever the firing should happen before or after regular drying and at what temperature, if some other elements had to be mixed in, and so on. This called for experimentation.

She went over to where they had stored the river clay. The small pile had dried unevenly: outsides were cracked and dry, while the insides were still quite wet, so she had a lot of material in different degrees of wetness to work with. She rolled the clay into small balls, then put them aside.

To test the firing temperatures, she took apart the fire nodes of the chiclotron, dug several holes in the ground, and put different amounts of fire treasures inside. After adding the clay balls, she had a solid set of tests: all combinations of dry and wet clay with a variety of firing temperatures.

Seeing how she was already tinkering with the fire nodes, she decided to move the fire trench modifications up in their schedule, and called Wang Yonghao over. The trenches were covered in a thick layer of black dust, and as they were dragging the trench covers away, it puffed up into the air in clouds of darkness. Wang Yonghao frowned, and reached inside of the trenches, touching the dust on one of the walls.

"What's this?" he showed her his fingers, black and glistening where they got covered in the black powder, "Soot? I didn't think we were burning anything here."

"It's solidified fire," she said, "otherwise known as coal dust or, yes, soot. It appears whenever fire spiritual energy reaches a critical concentration point. Careful, don't breathe on it - it's very light, I don't want to spread it around, or we'd never be rid of it."

"If it's so light, wouldn't it cause problems for your air circulation plans?" he raised an eyebrow at her, "Don't want coal dust all over our bear jerky."

"No," she shook her head, "it usually burns up as soon as it appears - that's the source of the fires you often see around fire treasures. The only reason there is so much of it here is that I've artificially lowered the temperature of the fire node by placing the water node alongside it, preventing it from igniting. We'd need to collapse these trenches very carefully to cover it up without spreading it more, but the new design wouldn't have this problem."

"If it's flammable, can't I just set it on fire?" He smiled smugly at her, "I'm surprised you didn't think of this."

For a moment, she considered just letting him, but her sense won out in the end. A prank like that would not be worth further soiling their relations, no matter how amusing it would be.

"Stop," she called after him, seeing that he moved closer to the tench while she was deliberating. He turned back to her with a questioning expression.

"It's called solidified fire," she said, giving him a blunt stare, "what did you think it turns into when ignited? If you do that from up close, you won't have a face left."

"But I really do not want to dig," he sighed, and started rising into the air. As soon as she saw him move, she headed towards a metal trench on the opposite side of the world fragment and hopped inside. He looked at her curiously.

"What are you doing out there?"

"I don't have your legendary luck to save my body from horrific, full-body burns," she responded, ready to duck her head below the lip of the trench, "So I am making sure I am as safe as possible before you do this very dangerous experiment."

"...you think this is a bad idea?"

"I think it's a fine idea," she snorted, "I don't like unnecessary labor any more than you do. But it is also dangerous. Your choice on how to proceed."

He didn't respond, but retreated a couple steps more, and then sent a series of sword slashes at different parts of the fire trench.

As he finished his last sword move, his foot happened to slip, ending the fire dragonfly technique, and sending him down to the ground with a yelp.

BOOM!

Coal dust, disturbed by the movement of the sword slashes, mixed with the air and immediately exploded into a fiery cloud. Wang Yonghao fell just a hair faster than the cloud expanded, managing to only skirt the edge of it. His surprised yelp turned into a panicked yell as he rolled on the ground, trying to put out the small fires sticking to his clothes.

"Fascinating," Qing Shanyi said, hopping out of the trench, and heading over to help him, "I've never seen such extreme luck from up close. It's quite entertaining to watch."

He glared at her.

"Hey, I told you this might happen," she said, "At the very least, if what you said about your adventures was true, you were in no real danger. And if you exaggerated, like cultivators tend to do…Well, let's not think about that."

She helped him up, and motioned to the other four trenches.

"Let's do this a bit more carefully next time, shall we?"

She kept the clay balls in their furnaces for a good six hours, and in the end, all of them had cracked.

Several dozen small clay balls littered the ground around her. The first thing she did was carefully inspect all of her samples, and chip off pieces of fired clay into water to test wherever they would dissolve. The high temperatures clearly did something different to the clay as all but the two of her hottest furnaces ended up completely useless, the clay from them quickly softening in water, but those same temperatures also led to way more cracks.

Clay on the surface of the balls from the wet and dry clay seemed equally water-proof, but the drier ones had fewer cracks: this meant that drying the clay before firing was a step in the right direction, but not a sufficient one. She needed something else.

She was laying down on the ground, throwing one of the cracked balls up in the air and catching it back in her hand, thinking about the problem. What was a crack, really?

At the end of the day, a crack was a gap, a hole in the smooth clay surface. But why would such a sharp geometric discontinuity appear?

The clay balls started out soft and pliable, and then, during the firing process, hardened into solid spheres. A crack on the surface of the ball could, logically, appear either while the ball was still soft, or once its surface hardened into a shell. The former seemed unlikely to her, as the soft clay should deform rather than cracking: this meant that first the surface hardened, and then a crack appeared.

Qian Shanyi caught the ball and squeezed it hard in her hand, watching it carefully. The ball stood strong, and she had to push spiritual energy into her fingers before it cracked in half, sending a small piece of clay bouncing off her forehead. She threw the remains of the ball aside, and picked up a different ball to play with.

Once the surface hardened, a crack could only appear if some significant force pulled it's sides apart. This moved the central question to where this force would come from.

She briefly considered the temperature within the furnaces: many things would deform and crack when heated, after all - before dismissing the idea. The balls weren't all that large: they must have heated up to a stable temperature mere minutes into the process, far before any cracks appeared. The force must have come from somewhere else.

As she was deliberating this question, Wang Yonghao came over and leaned over her head, meeting her eyes.

"What?" she asked, casually tossing her ball to him. He caught it, and she picked up a different one.

"You said you'd go and quickly check out the clay, but now you are just napping," he accused her completely innocent self, "I am not going to dig alone."

"I am not napping, I am thinking," she said, tossing her ball from one hand to another.

"About what?"

"About why the clay cracks," she said, "don't distract me."

"What's there to think about?" he blinked, "it's hot, so it cracks."

She sighed, and started to explain her reasoning.

The key, she felt, was the water. She used the ingredient-testing technique from Three Obediences Four Virtues on the clay, and even though some of the unfired clay seemed completely dry to her eyes, there was still a fair amount of water inside of it. Fried clay, on the other hand, contained almost none. On top of that, wetter clay led to more cracks. This meant water must have been the real culprit, but the question was why.

"So here is what I am thinking," she said. "Have you seen fried Jiaozi dumplings? There was this restaurant where the chef would fry them right in front of you, and the skin of the dumpling would shrink a little when they were dropped in oil. Once, I've even seen it burst apart when a clumsy apprentice put in too much filling - like a large man putting on robes five sizes too small. So I think the same thing happens with clay."

Wang Yonghao sat down on the grass next to her, and she turned the ball in her hand over so that he could see the crack.

"Imagine clay as a stew," she said, "there is water, and then there is everything that isn't water. As the clay is fired, water evaporates, leaving everything else behind. But water takes up volume, right? Just like a stew reduces in size as you boil it, clay must also shrink. As water leaves the outer shell of a clay ball, it hardens and shrinks at the same time. But water can't leave the insides of the ball as easily - just like within a juicy dumpling, it is trapped. So the inner ball shrinks slower than the outer shell, and that makes the outer shell crack. This is why wetter clay cracks more - the difference is more pronounced. And this is why clay cracks in between the stone plates of the chiclotron - the plates do not move, and the clay shrinks too much to fill the gap."

"Wow," he said, "You figured all of this out from a couple clay balls?"

"I didn't figure out shit," she snorted, "this is merely a theory, a just-so story. Exactly like your hypothesis about my skill at shatranj, it's worthless unless I can prove it. There are a dozen assumptions I am making here that are, practically speaking, based on nothing."

She lifted her legs up, and leaped up onto her feet in one smooth movement.

"If I am right - and only if", she said, " - then the way to solve our cracking problem is to mix clay with something that wouldn't shrink when the water evaporates, such as the sand we have gathered from that beach. The more we mix in, the less the overall mixture would shrink, but the higher the chance it wouldn't behave like clay in the first place… We'd need to do more experiments to figure out a good ratio."

She headed over to a small pile of sand they brought into their world fragment.

"Come on," she said, "Let's take a break from digging and mix some clay."

By the time their two-day stay in the world fragment came to an end, they had finished redesigning the chiclotron, lined the trenches with stone slabs, and sealed the gaps with clay. Her idea of mixing the sand in with the clay had worked perfectly, and she decided to fry it while they traveled. To do this, she had filled the nodes on one half of the chiclotron with fire and metal heavenly materials and earthly treasures, making sure that every trench there was filled with dense fire-type spiritual energy, heating them up to the proper temperature. The feng shui of the world fragment would suffer, but the other half of the chiclotron should compensate for it somewhat, and without them in it, it should be fine.

The river widened more and more as they traveled downstream, thinner streams flowing into it from the depths of the forest. They were still yet to see any sign of civilization, and this sent pangs of worry down her neck. What if the teleportation formation sent them so far away, that they would reach an ocean and still there would be nothing?

As they entered the world fragment to cook a midday meal, she felt the scorching air temperature inside: it seemed that the large amount of fire-type spiritual energy overpowered what little cooling came from the water nodes on the other half of the chiclotron. She popped the hatches on the water nodes to make them work harder, but neither of them felt like suffering in the heat, and they ended up cooking on the shore of the river. Wang Yonghao finally managed to slice a fish in half with a sword technique from a dozen meters away while they floated downsteam, and grilled fish made for a good break in their regular diet of bear, bear and more bear.

As the evening approached, they arrived at a place where the edge of the world formed a wide tunnel, leading away from the forest. The river flowed directly into it, but they couldn't see where it ended, and without any shores to rest on, decided to put off exploration of the dimensional tunnel until the next day. Instead, they went back into the world fragment, and spent a good hour checking how well the clay firing had worked. The air in the world fragment felt stuffy, but she supposed that was to be expected due to the large number of open fires on display.

Some cracks were still there, but rare enough that Qian Shanyi felt good about the ability of the chiclotron to resist leaks, and so they spent another hour moving the heavenly materials and earthly treasures around to fry the other half of the chiclotron, sealing what little cracks were present, and working on constructing a drying chamber that would be put on top of the hot air outflow. Wang Yonghao went to sleep early, complaining of being tired and having a headache, while she decided to cultivate.

The hard work of the past days took its toll on her too. She stopped early to drink some water, and wiped the sweat off her forehead. Her skin was flushed red, and the blood was thumping in her head, making it hard to think.

She rubbed her forehead. This wasn't like her. She would finish her cultivation, and then go to sleep. She just… Needed a break. Yeah, that's what it was.

She sat down on the ground near her water clock, sipping water from a reused wine bottle. Why was she so tired?

She closed her eyes for just a moment. When she opened them, she was lying on her face on the ground, her head throbbing from a monumental headache. She rose up, slowly, and looked around in confusion, breathing heavily. Her eyes fell on the water clock, and her eyebrows closed together. Surely she couldn't have been out for a whole hour?

Something was wrong here, but the damnable headache was making it hard to think. This was… What did this feel like?

She looked down on herself. Her skin was really red. Why would it still be red if she was fast asleep for so long?

Her heartbeat sped up. She wasn't just tired, something was wrong with her.

She spun around, and saw Wang Yonghao still sleeping in his hammock. His skin looked quite red too, and his breathing was heavy.

Were they both poisoned?

Her mind slithered over the possibilities, far too sluggish to work properly. What did they have in common? Water? No, their water came from a Blue Tear Stone, it should have been safe. Food? They ate bear meat for a good week now - she doubted it was the problem. Even if it contained the sort of poison that slowly accumulated in their bodies, their weights, metabolisms and how much they ate were all different, so the chances of both of them being affected at once were quite low. Perhaps the fish they ate? No, she checked with Three Obediences Four Virtues, this species should have been completely safe…

She brought a hand to her throat, grimacing at her own heavy breathing, and an idea struck her.

The air. It had to be the air. Something…from the fried clay, perhaps?

She shook her head. It didn't matter, the first priority was to get the hell out of here.

She ran over to Wang Yonghao and shook him, trying to wake him up. He groaned, but remained asleep. Not standing on ceremony, she shook him out of his hammock, and slapped him across the face.

"Yonghao!" she shouted in his sleeping face, "Wake up! We are in danger!"

He simply groaned again.

She ground her teeth. Could she rely on his luck to survive?

No. Absolutely not. Even if his luck would save him - which wasn't a guarantee by any means, no matter how many times he slipped in front of an explosion - there was absolutely no reason to expect it to save her. Perhaps one of the weapons in the treasury could create a bubble of safe air, or one of the many unidentified pills could deal with poisons, but by the time Wang Yonghao would sleepwalk over to one of them, she might be long dead.

She quickly ran over to one of the fire nodes, wrapped her arm in a spare robe, grabbed an igneocopper brick, and dropped it on Wang Yonghao's hand. The brick, heated red hot after lying in the node for several days, sizzled on his skin until his hand jerked away. His eyes just barely fluttered open, and he sat up, still clearly out of it.

"Entrance to the world fragment," she slapped him in the face again, speaking as clearly as she could, "Open it. Now."

He didn't respond, but she heard the entrance open up above her. As soon as it did, Wang Yonghao fell over on his side and started snoring.

She cursed. Even if she woke him up now, there was no way he could manage to get his spiritual energy under control enough to fly.

She quickly picked up a spear, tied a rope around it with her shaking hands, and pitched it through the entrance of the world fragment. The spear slipped, and she cursed again.

"Come on, you damnable thing," she muttered, throwing it again, "serve your mistress."

She got it to stick in five throws, which felt excruciatingly long, given the circumstances. As she grabbed onto her escape path, she glanced back at Wang Yonghao, still drooling down on the grass.

Surely he'd be fine.

With his luck? Barely even a question.

"Fuck luck," she ground out, letting go of the escape rope and heading over to get a second one, "Fuck the heavens, and especially fuck me, for being such a bleeding heart."

She tied the second rope tightly underneath his arms and his groin, turning it into a crude harness, tied the second end to her waist, dragged him over to the center of the world fragment, and started climbing the escape rope. She gasped when her head breached the entrance, breathing in clean forest air, sweet as sugar on her lips after the dead air of the world fragment. Her vision swam from the shock, and for a second, she almost felt her grip on the spear slip. She shut her eyes, and breathed slowly, letting the shock pass her by.

Once she felt herself come back to reality, she carefully inched her way to the side, hooked her leg over the edge of the entrance portal, and sprawled out on the forest moss, breathing deeply.

"Fuck you," she breathed out, "fuck you. I am not dying here. Not today, not ever."

She got up on her feet, shaking from adrenaline and whatever poison was affecting her, and looked around. She saw a sliver of the sun just out of the corner of her eye: the night was mere moments away, and with it, the Rosevines would come.

She grabbed the rope leading to Wang Yonghao, planted her feet in the ground, and slowly started to raise him out of the world fragment. She would only get one try of this: if her knots failed, the rope snapped, or he fell out of the harness, she wasn't going to risk her life by going back in.

Once she saw his head poke out over the lip of the entrance portal, she tied the rope around a nearby tree, then went over to drag him fully out by the collar of his robes. Once he was out, she took another breather: her muscles were already burning, even though she barely did any work. Another symptom?

With the world fragment out of the question, she needed to find a safe space away from the rosevines, and she needed it fast. Her eyes ran feverishly over the forest around her, looking for something, anything. Wisps of spiritual energy were coming off the portal, like a lit up beacon for any Rosevines that might pass nearby.

She frowned. Maybe that was the key here. With the portal open and faintly spreading spiritual energy, they wouldn't be searching for other prey.

It took another ten minutes for her to use her ropes to climb on top of a tall pine with a wide crown, secure herself to a wide branch, and then lift Wang Yonghao alongside her. He was still asleep, but mercifully quiet while he was sitting down. She tied him to the branch, took her sword out, and prepared to wait out the night.

No Wang Yonghao, no world fragment, and not even a primitive shelter. All she had was her sword, some ropes, and her painfully thumping head. She didn't think she would sleep tonight.

Darkness of the forest closed in around her, leaving her alone with her ominous thoughts.

Author Note: If you'd like to read five chapters ahead, or read other works I write, you can find me on patreon where the rest of volume 1 has been posted for a low price of 3$.

beleester · Sep 22, 2023

The obvious guess is "fire used up all the oxygen," but she's not actually lighting a fire, she's just using fire-natured treasures that produce heat. And I don't think it was the clay - I'm not a potter, but I thought firing clay was a physical change rather than a chemical reaction, so it wouldn't use oxygen.

Maybe the fire nodes are creating and burning coal dust without them noticing?

Also, IIRC Yonghao's magic whisk creates air from nothing, not just wind, so it should work for emergency breathing.

Great Velocity · Sep 22, 2023

beleester said:
The obvious guess is "fire used up all the oxygen," but she's not actually lighting a fire, she's just using fire-natured treasures that produce heat. And I don't think it was the clay - I'm not a potter, but I thought firing clay was a physical change rather than a chemical reaction, so it wouldn't use oxygen.

Maybe the fire nodes are creating and burning coal dust without them noticing?

Also, IIRC Yonghao's magic whisk creates air from nothing, not just wind, so it should work for emergency breathing.

I think it's carbon monoxide poisoning, probably from the coal dust, depending on how it works.

DaLintyGuy · Sep 22, 2023

Hm. Given the five elements are in play... Is the imbalance of Fire drawing down Air?

Draconomial · Sep 22, 2023

Fired clay will not shrink anymore, nor will it absorb water. Crushed bits of fired clay is called Grog, which is added to wet clay to reduce shrinking and cracking during the firing process. It also reduces plasticity and increases the structural strength of wet clay, making larger wet constructions possible.

dhasenan · Sep 22, 2023

Winged_One said:
She could easily fire the clay using a variety of fire-type spiritual treasures, but the problem was that she didn't know the specifics of the process: wherever the firing should happen before or after regular drying and at what temperature, if some other elements had to be mixed in, and so on. This called for experimentation.

Smaller amounts of clay will crack less. She could just patch up the clay she already placed. Repeat for several rounds. It probably won't be entirely leak-free, but the remaining leaks will likely be slow.

It seems like the plan right now is to line the whole chiclotron with unfired clay and let it bake in place? Because if she were making bricks or tiles, she'd need to worry about mortar as well.

ScarletFlames · Sep 24, 2023

Red skin is only visible in 2-3 percent of those who are suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning (according to google), that both of them suffered a highly visible form of it showed her that it was dangerous, thus it's his luck at play.

Winged_One · Oct 1, 2023

Wang Yognaho groaned as he came back to awareness, and felt someone's hand clamp down over his nose and mouth. His eyes flew open, and he saw Qian Shanyi's cold stare boring into him mere inches away from his face, a finger pressed against her lips, her other hand keeping him quiet. She motioned with her free hand, and in the darkness, he saw a pair of characters written on the skin of her forearm in blood.

<Stay quiet>

He nodded, and she slowly moved her hand away from his mouth. He was tied to the tree trunk by a rope, and Qian Shanyi helped him untie himself, moving slowly and silently.

They were sitting on top of a branch, high up in the forest canopy. The forest was quiet, illuminated by faint rays of moonlight piercing through the leaves above their heads - bright enough for a cultivator to see, but not very clearly - and when a whisper of wind passed by, it sent dancing shadows all around them.

It would have been a contemplative sight, but instead it set him on edge, every shadowy movement making him think those rosevines were sneaking closer. It didn't help that the last thing he remembered was falling asleep within his Inner World.

With a start, he realized that one of the shadows down on the ground really was a rosevine. Thankfully, it didn't seem to have noticed them yet, and he focused on preventing any errant spiritual energy from leaking out of his pores.

Qian Shanyi motioned to him to bring his attention back to her, and showed him her other forearm, where more bloody characters were written down.

<Read the strokes.>

He looked at her in confusion, and saw her turn one of her palms towards him and start to use it like a writing slate, slowly tracing out characters on the skin. It took many tries - keeping track of what was written or not was difficult when no actual ink was left behind, and the darkness did not help matters - but she simply started over every time there was a problem. Eventually, she settled on closing her fist any time a character was over, and finally managed to convey a full sentence to him.

<Blink twice if you understand.>

He blinked twice. She closed her eyes and breathed out slowly, a bit of tension leaving her shoulders, then opened them again with a smile.

He held out his own palm, and slowly followed the same process. She watched carefully, turning her finger in a circle when she needed him to repeat drawing a character.

<Why are we in a tree?>

She nodded at him, and started to write for a long time.

<We were both poisoned. You were out, I was almost knocked out. I think it was something in the air. I decided we were safer outside than dead inside. You didn't wake up, only opened the entrance, and I dragged you here.>

As she finished, she shook her hand and grimaced.

<Writing takes too long, I will skip words.>

He nodded - that one paragraph took a good ten minutes - and started writing himself.

<How long was I out?>

<No clock. After you went to sleep, maybe four hours. After I dragged you here, maybe an hour.>

He motioned to her forearms where the characters were written in blood.

<Blood? You hurt?>

She shook her head.

<No. Needed ink to tell you to be quiet. Didn't bring soot. Can't use technique to make dye or else the monsters come. Blood works.>

<Poison?>

<Best guess, don't know what else would cause this. Don't know type. Skin red, breathe hard, feel weak, sleepy, stupid. Maybe never wake up. Don't know where it came from. Best guess - something from burning clay.>

He tapped his cheek in thought. Something about that description called back to him. Finally, it clicked, and he brought up his palm again.

<Maybe dead air?>

She frowned at him.

<What is dead air?>

His eyebrows rose upwards.

<You don't know?>

She pursed her lips.

<No. Explain.>

He grinned, savoring the feeling, slowly writing out his answer.

<Elder knows less than this here junior… Who is really elder here?>

She scowled at him, strokes on her palm flying faster, more angular.

<You waste time, be snarky in daylight. Need a plan now or we may die. Explain or should I throw you off the tree?>

He winced. Okay, that was somewhat fair.

<I go into caves often. Met cave explorers once. They said many dangers in caves - one is dead air. Like air, but can't breathe. Common in caves. Can't cook, or smoke will make it worse. When too much, symptoms like you said.>

She frowned, staring off into the forest. He followed her gaze, and saw the entrance portal to his inner world down on the ground. Several rosevines were stalking around it, and as he watched, one of them crawled over the edge and fell in. Just great. He couldn't even close it without immediately giving away their location.

He turned back to her, and continued writing.

<You really didn't know?>

<No.>

She paused, then continued slower.

<Never studied air, only what goes on imperial exams. Already many things to learn. Not surprised this never brought up. When the air feels bad in a city, you just open a window. Maybe house builders need to know this, but I am not a house builder.>

<Now who wastes time?>

She squinted at him, then rolled her eyes, and glanced over at the entrance to the world fragment. When she looked back at him, she started writing again.

<Why bad air when cooking? Because fire?>

He nodded.

<Yes. They also said I should not use fire techniques.>

<Timing makes sense. Lots of fire in the world fragment. How to get rid of bad air?>

<Don't know.>

Her frown deepened.

<Then maybe no more place to sleep.>

He raised his palm to respond, but she pointed towards the trunk of the tree they were holed up in. His glance slid downwards, and he saw a single rosevine slowly climbing upwards.

Did it sense us somehow?

He checked his spiritual pores, but they were closed. Perhaps it followed after the spiritual energy that leaked out while he was still asleep?

He turned back towards Qian Shanyi, and saw her grimly staring at the rosevine.

<What do we do?>

She raised an eyebrow at him.

<Nothing? When it comes close, try to sneak away.>

She shifted around on the branch, and showed him a rope hanging down, stopping a couple meters off the ground.

<Or prepare for a fight. Hope you can kill it quietly. If you have a better plan, say it.>

He shook his head, and glanced back at the rosevine. It was halfway up the tree. He turned back to her with a questioning look.

<What is your plan in general?>

She looked at him strangely, and started quickly writing on her hand.

<Wait until morning, remove the fires from the house, hope the dead air clears up. Good reason for it - you had fires in your house for years, but this only became a problem now. Bad air must vanish somehow. If that fails, come up with new plan.>



She pursed her lips at him, and continued writing. She even stopped cutting the words for clarity, and he followed suit.

<Yonghao, I want out of this damnable forest, back to civilization where I can at least buy myself a pair of solid sandals that fit like a normal human being. What else?>

<Didn't you say you wanted to take care of my world fragment?>

<The deal we made is still in place. What of it?>

<But why?>

She blinked.



<What for? Just to cultivate, to reach immortality?>

She paused, looking away for a moment, then sighed and went back to writing.



<But why?>

<It's complicated. Does it matter?>

He squinted at her.



She shrugged indifferently.

<Many are the paths to heaven. If you do not want to cultivate, then don't. I have hardly pushed you to do so, have I?>

<You push me to do a lot of stuff!>

<Forcefully interfering in another cultivator's cultivation is a violation just a step short of mind- or soul-raping them. You compare me making you learn to cook to that?>

Violation? That definitely didn't sound right, every other old monster did that.

<So you just want to use me for spiritual energy?>

She frowned at him.

<What do you care? You aren't using it.>

He folded his arms on his chest, in a gesture he hoped looked defiant.

<What if I don't want you to use it?>

She squinted at him, her eyes growing cold.

<Junior, you owe me.>

<That doesn't mean you could just steal my inner world and use it however you want.>

Her frown turned into a scowl.



He exclaimed with his hands.

<How am I supposed to know? Cut it out of my soul? Why do you think I never show it to people?>

<Even if I could do that, I wouldn't do it.>

<Well why not?>

She shrugged, her scowl slowly receding.

<Because it's yours? It wouldn't be just. I suppose if you put your foot down we would need to find another way for you to compensate me.>

He raised his eyebrows, and turned away from her, to watch the rosevine. It was a good three quarters to their branch, and he decided not to wait for it to come any closer. He took off his boot, and threw it into a tree thirty meters away. It rustled through the crown, and he saw the rosevine bolt away towards the sound. Another rosevine came from the opposite direction, heading towards his boot. Qian Shanyi watched what he did carefully, but didn't write anything. They waited in silence for a while, before he once again brought his palm up.

<You are a very strange old monster.>

She raised an eyebrow at his comment.

<Didn't you say I was just like the rest?>



Her eyebrows climbed yet higher.

<Are you complimenting me on not being a soulraping highway robber?>

He pursed his lips.



She smirked.

<If you need to be robbed to feel comfortable, you can simply gamble with me again. Besides, why do you care if you get robbed? You don't use any of your stuff.>

He stared at her, not sure if she was joking.

<Because I don't want to be beaten up and have my soul carved up for parts?>

<Why not? You want to get rid of your luck, right?>

He frowned. What was that supposed to mean?

<What?>

She stared at him if he just asked if the sky was purple.

<Your luck. It's causing you anguish, yes? But it must be caused by something. Either it's in your soul, your natural constitution, or it's some deity in Heaven watching over you. If it's the former, carve up your soul and cut it out. If it's the latter, break into Heaven and slaughter them. Is this not what cultivation is for?>

He opened his eyes wide in shock. Get rid of his luck?

He sat on the branch in silence, processing what she just wrote. Get rid of his luck. Of the one thing making his life a living hell. Was that real? He had never even thought that was possible, but just maybe…

Cautiously, he wrote to her again.

<Do you really think I could do that? If I tried?>

She simply shrugged.

<I've never heard of anyone outside of sketchy legends changing their luck, but there is nothing in all of heaven, earth or netherworld that a cultivator could not accomplish, if they set their mind on it. The only question is whether your mind can take it. If that's what you want, I could help.>

That was the nicest thing anyone had ever told him. His mind was awash with possibilities, and he quickly responded in kind.

<Maybe you aren't evil after all.>

She rolled her eyes at him.



He pursed his lips, and fumbled, needing to write a response several times.

<Well I am sorry, I don't usually travel with decent people.>

She nodded, putting on the most serene look he had seen on anyone in his life.

<This here elder graciously forgives your misstep.>

He squinted at her, but before he could respond, she asked him a question that brought him down to earth.

<Why don't you travel with other people in the first place? It must be lonely.>



<Really? I could have sworn you enjoyed telling me about your adventures and troubles with luck. Wouldn't it be better to travel with a friend?>

He turned away. It did feel nice to have someone else to talk to about everything without half-truths getting in the way, but it also brought up memories, and no matter how nice he was feeling, he wasn't about to share those.



She gave him a side eye, but didn't push him. Instead, she asked a different question entirely.

<Here is what I still don't understand. Why did you bring me into your inner world?>



She shook her head.

<That's not what I said, but let's not re-litigate this. You say you don't travel with people, and you don't even show your inner world to them. Then why would you throw me inside?>

He pursed his lips.

<How should I know? I was drunk.>

<There's always a reason.>

He turned away, and she gently punched him in his shoulder to bring his attention back to her.

<Come now, this is important. You couldn't have just dropped me inside, or else I'd have broken more than just my leg. You must have stopped, opened your inner world, descended inside and put me down. This is a conscious decision, and if you flew, you must have been sober enough to control your spiritual energy.>

<It's one of my most practiced techniques, I've used it even while black out drunk. Or asleep.>

<Even if so, why would you do it?>

He really didn't want to think about this, but she just wouldn't let go, would she? After a while, he decided that revealing a small part was harmless enough.



Her eyebrows rose up.

<You are saying you wanted to bring me to a doctor after beating me up?>



She looked away from him. They sat on the branch, quietly thinking their own thoughts.

By the time morning rose, they dropped down to the ground, sore from sitting on an uncomfortable branch all night. Wang Yonghao found his boot (thankfully unmolested by the rosevines) and they slowly made their way back to the entrance to his inner world.

Qian Shanyi tethered herself to a nearby tree with one of their two ropes, then kneeled in front of the inner world and pushed her head through the entrance to take a look.

Sure enough, the earth was dug up all over the world fragment where the rosevines burrowed into the ground. She could see a couple places where their flowers poked out of the ground and the open holes of the chiclotron, as they hibernated in the permanent daylight of the world fragment.

She didn't breathe while her face was within, fearing poison. The half of the chiclotron filled with fire and metal treasures was happily burning, no doubt producing yet more dead air. She pulled her head out of the world fragment entrance, looked at Wang Yonghao, and explained all she had seen to him.

"So what do you want to do?" he said.

"You can fly in, safely kill the rosevines, then move the treasures around to prevent the flow of dead air," she said, "Then we'd wait outside the whole day and see if the dead air clears."

He narrowed his eyes at her. What? It was a decent plan!

"Why do I have to fly in?" he said, "You can do it!"

"One of us has to, why not you?"

"You are the old monster here!" he scowled, "With your spiritual shield, you probably can block out any poison in the air in the first place. It's much safer for you to do this than for me!"

That…would have been an excellent point, if she actually was an old monster. As it was, she couldn't even block out liquids with her spiritual shield, let alone gasses.

"I already told you, I am in recuperative training," she said, trying to come up with a better way out of this, "you can kill the rosevines from the air, should they attack. I can't, not without using spiritual energy."

"And I can't block out the poison," he parried, "What if I lose consciousness there?"

She tugged on the rope tethering her to a tree.

"I'll put a tether on you," she said, "if you black out, I'd just pull you out."

"The same would work if you would go in instead. Both of us would be in some amount of danger. At best, we should flip a coin!"

"With your luck?" she snorted, "You might as well tell me to go in directly."

"Fine, how about this," he said, walking around a tree so it was between them. He unsheathed his sword, and quickly sliced across the bark with small, precise movements. She realized what he was doing halfway through and tried to step to the side of the tree to watch him work, but she was too late by far.

"Rock paper scissors, and I already picked what I play and drew it on the bark," he said, "my bet is set, and my luck is out of the picture. Now play your hand, and we'll be done with this."

She grit her teeth. If only she was a half step faster, she could have traced the back of his sword and figured out what he drew.

Her mind scrambled to find a solution, but she really didn't see one. At the end of the day, one of them would need to go in to move the treasures, and Wang Yonghao was right that they would be exposed to unknown dangers.

If she played the game with anyone else, then her chances of winning were probably about two thirds - as long as she didn't lose the first round, she was pretty sure she could figure out what he carved in the later rounds. It wasn't ideal, but it wasn't terrible either. Of course, his luck was strong enough that it might actually sway her decision, but it was hard to be sure whether it actually could. That was the usual problem with luck - proving whether a given outcome was even affected by luck at all was, outside of very simple cases, entirely impossible.

Well, whatever. All gambles come down to risk in the end.

She sighed, and threw out paper. Wang Yonghao grinned, and she went around to the back of his tree to check. He did in fact play scissors.

"This isn't fair in the first place," she complained, "with how strong your luck is, it could have easily swayed my decision here."

"Sore loser!" he cheered, "Come on, I'll help you with the tether."

She didn't move, and crossed her arms on her chest. Wang Yonghao looked at her in surprise.

Backed into a corner, she could only put all her cards on the table. What he said this night made her more hopeful, but she really was hoping she could delay this until they got to a city…

"Well, perhaps this deception has reached its natural end point…", she muttered, before raising her voice and running a hand through her hair, "I can't do that because I am just a refinement stage cultivator. I don't know any flying techniques. If I went in, I would probably just die."

"What? No you aren't," he laughed softly.

"I very much am."

"Oh come on, this again?" He threw his hands up in the air, "Stop lying and just do it!"

"I said I almost never lie directly," she scowled at him, showing her teeth, "Now I am telling you, directly, that I am not any kind of old monster. Do I need to push this idea through your skull with the back of my foot for you to understand it?"

He opened his mouth, then closed it. His hand rose in a strange gesture.

"No, wait, that can't be. You said -"

He frowned, considering what she actually said. She waited for him patiently.

"You blew away the poison fog from that giant cave," he said slowly, unsure of himself.

"It took me a full day of working your fly whisk," she responded, "Even a low refinement stage cultivator could manage it."

"No, you… You won against me in shatranj…," he trailed off.

"I've never played that game before in my life," she grinned maliciously, "How does it feel to lose to a complete newbie? Face it, you fell face first into my trap then, just as you did when I convinced you I was an old monster."

His eyes widened as the realization finally hit him.

"You… Then you did lie!" his face turned into a scowl, and he pointed an accusatory finger at her. Spiritual energy flowed out of his pores, whipping the air currents around him into a frenzy, and she dropped one of her hands on the pommel of her sword, recirculating her own energy to match. "Why didn't you just tell me who you were?!"

"Because you beat me up over nothing and then left me for dead inside of a void prison with no food or water?" her scowl grew wider, fire in her eyes. "How in the name of the thirteen gates of Heaven was I supposed to know what else you would do? Maybe you'd turn me into a cauldron!"

"I apologized!" he threw his hands in the air, "Even back then, I apologized! Yet you kept lying! How could you?"

"Apologies are cheaper than dirt."

"Did you even lie about wanting to help me?"

"It was the truth, contingent on you not being a scumbag."

"Oh fuck you," he scowled, "I am not a scumbag! You are!"

"Get over yourself," she scoffed, "You yourself said you can't be sure why you took me with you, and regardless of your intentions, kidnapping is still kidnapping. I would have been justified to kill you on the spot for pulling a stunt like that. A couple deceptions is nothing. Now will you do what is necessary to keep both of us alive, or will you keep whining?"

Author Note: Sorry for the later chapter. As I am starting a new job, I will be moving the regular chapters from fridays to saturdays so that I don't have to rush out a chapter when I am wacked out on a friday evening. Likewise, there may be a slowdown in patreon chapters, but it is hard to predict.

If you'd like to read four chapters ahead, or read other works I write, you can find me on patreon where the rest of volume 1 has been posted for a low price of 3$.

Aule · Oct 1, 2023

And the cat is out of the storage ring!

Winged_One · Oct 6, 2023

Is it good to resolve an argument calmly? Is it bad to fight?

No one true key will fit all feuds among all people. Emotions might need airing to make progress, even if this will turn an argument into a fight - but in the end, what is the true danger? Perhaps you would come to blows - but even that is quite unlikely.

This sort of logic is common among ordinary people, but in the world of cultivators, it is a dangerous road to thread. An open quarrel between two cultivators is always deadly, and the first person to strike is most often the one to walk away alive. Worse still, in the moment, how could you tell why your opponent bursts forth with spiritual energy? Are their emotions out of control, or are they about to strike you down with a technique? Activating your spiritual energy in front of another cultivator without warning is like swinging a sword at their neck: even if you are fast friends, can they really trust you to stop before it cuts into flesh? Perhaps it would be safer to cut you down first.

By provoking Wang Yonghao, Qian Shanyi was playing with fire, but frankly she felt this conflict was long overdue a conflagration.

"A couple deceptions?!" Wang Yonghao threw his hands up in the air, "It was way more than a couple! I thought you wanted to be friends, in your bizarre way! Friends don't deceive each other!"

"Friends?" She sneered, "Because I like your stories? Do you even comprehend the situation I am in?"

"Oh what, does your 'recuperative training' require you to lie all the time?" he rolled his eyes, making mocking finger gestures in the air.

"I am stuck in the middle of demon beast infested forest, fighting for my fucking life!" she ceded through her teeth, advancing on Wang Yonghao, "You have your luck, but I don't. Do you know why I built the chiclotron? Because the feng shui deviation in your damned inner world almost murdered me! A dozen threats compete to see which one will take me first, but do you try to help me? No, you would rather sit around and relax. Is this what 'friends' do?"

His face gradually went white, and he took a step back. Qian Shanyi followed after him.

"How was I supposed to know you needed help?" he muttered, "I thought you were some kind of old monster and didn't need any! I am sorry, but you didn't even ask!"

"You apologize." She stabbed her finger in his direction, "I pay my debts." She continued, pointing back at herself, "That's the difference! And in terms of debts, you owe me. You owe me for beating me up, you owe me for cleaning up your inner world, and you even owe me for saving your life from the dead air last night! And yet you bring up my deceptions?"

"I said I'll pay you back!" He threw his hands up in the air, recovering his composure, "But just because someone owes you, it doesn't mean you get to lie to their face! At least say you are sorry it turned out this way!"

"What is there to be sorry for?" she threw her hair back, "I didn't know whether I could trust you, so I deceived you. If I had to do it all over again, knowing what I did at the time, I wouldn't change a thing."

"Seriously? Not a single thing?" He said, "Did I do anything untrustworthy to you? You would just keep lying forever then?"

"Forever? No." she snorted, "I would have preferred to reveal this once we have reached a city, where we could have simply decided to walk our own separate ways, not in the middle of a deadly forest."

"So you admit you still don't trust me? Then you are awfully confident for someone a full minor realm below me!" Wang Yonghao narrowed his eyes at her, "What if I, the traitorous villain that I am, were to just beat you up again?"

Well, if threats were how he wanted to play this…

Qian Shanyi bared her teeth, and put an entire fifth of her spiritual energy into strengthening her spiritual shield, making it glow faintly and sparkle from energy overflow. Wang Yonghao took a careful step back.

"I am a cultivator," she hissed, "and to cultivate is to rebel against the heavens! Do you comprehend what that means, junior? To wage war against a foe that could squash you at any second? To burn your life and soul to cinders, even if all you can do is break their single finger? Confident? Of course I am not confident! But I would rather detonate my dantians than bow my head in fear."

She spat on the ground between them, unsheathing her sword with deliberate slowness.

"You want a fight?" she sneered, "Come on, then! This daoist will not die quietly."

Wang Yonghao took another step back, and she felt his spiritual energy vanish as he finally got his emotions back under control.

Coward.

"You are crazy," he said, breathing out, "you are actually just crazy."

"I am a cultivator," she snorted, sheathing her sword back in a single move. On some level, she was glad her bluff got him to back down, even though she wouldn't have minded blowing off steam with a proper spar, "It comes with the job."

"No, it doesn't," he shook his head vigorously, "I must have met hundreds of cultivators in my life. Do you know how few of them would throw their life away on a point of principle? I've seen dozens beg for mercy in front of demonic cultivators or angry sect elders, drowning in tears, even when they must have known their ending was a foregone conclusion."

Wang Yonghao grabbed his head in both hands.

"When normal cultivators break their leg, they take it easy until it's healed!", he continued, his voice raising in pitch, "They don't just go around getting into more fights!"

"That may be so, but what do normal people matter here?" Qian Shanyi said, crossing her arms.

"I am saying you are insane!"

"It takes a bit of insanity to break into the heavens. Anyone who steps on the path of cultivation should know this."

"No they don't! You keep talking about breaking into heavens, but not even one out of a dozen cultivators would care about this! It's ancient history!"

"Their ignorance of the roots of cultivation is no excuse."

"I just - I need a minute," he breathed out, walking off in the direction of the river. She let him go.

While she waited for Wang Yonghao to come to terms with reality, she picked up one of the ropes and started practicing thread control techniques.

Her control over the rope was still weak, but getting better over time. Many days of practice while floating down the river were starting to add up, and by now, she could easily construct both spiritual energy envelopes, though the actual movement of the rope remained slow and jerky.

By the time she ran out of spiritual energy, a good hour had passed, and he still hadn't returned. Unlike within the world fragment, spiritual energy concentration in the forest was very average, and she figured she would need several hours just to recover her reserves. To pass the time, she opened up Three Obediences Four Virtues to the page with the needle control diagram, and started to analyze it.

The rest of the manual claimed to be suitable for cultivators in the refinement stage, and all other techniques fit this assessment, with the needle control diagram remaining as the only exception. Qian Shanyi suspected that she must have simply missed something - perhaps there was a secret sub-diagram hidden within the picture, or a code that would lead her to an expanded version of the manual, or something else of that nature.

After half an hour, it finally clicked for her, and she groaned, raising her eyes to the skies. She saw a solution, but she almost wished she didn't.

The diagram could be broken up into different parts: ones responsible for directing the "needle", controlling levitation and acceleration, strengthening the material beyond its normal tolerances, and so on. Many of these subcomponents were duplicated in order to push the "needle" to the peak of speed and power. If she were to remove three quarters of the duplicates, the diagram would shrink radically, and thus would become much easier to manage at her level of cultivation.

She could even see where Tang Qunying intended for these changes to happen - small marks she previously dismissed as irrelevant delineating sections that could be removed wholesale, and so on. She must have been legendarily talented in order to design a technique that could be broken up in this way without sacrificing its stability, and left the process of actual modification as a teaching exercise for her inheriting disciple.

The problem was that she couldn't just erase some sections of a picture - parts of the structure would need to be strengthened, others weakened, all by very precise amounts in order to ensure that everything was balanced. This was due to a principle that the flow of spiritual energy into a junction must always be equal to the flow out of it, lest the technique blow up in your face - but because the development of new cultivation techniques was far outside of her education, all she could recall was that the name of the daoist who discovered it sounded quite foreign.

In order to apply the changes, she would need to meticulously go through every point on the diagram and recalculate every single flow ratio of spiritual energy. This would be a massive undertaking, and she didn't even have an abacus on hand.

She put the jade slate back into her robes and went off to find Wang Yonghao. She would deal with this problem when she at least had some paper to write on.

When she came over to the river shore, she found him sulking, using his sword to cut a small tree into a statue of a fish. He glanced over at her, then turned away.

"You are really taking this harder than I expected," she said, leaning against a nearby tree.

"Why do you care?" he grumbled, not turning her way.

"We are still in a life threatening situation," she said, "it would be awfully stupid if we couldn't manage to get along and work together simply because of some personal issues, at the very least until the danger is over. I prefer not to turn my life into an overdramatized theater play."

"Oh yeah?" he scowled, turning towards her, "Then why did you make fun of me so many times? Even if you wanted to deceive me about your strength, that wasn't at all necessary."

"I will readily admit my own hypocrisy. It doesn't make my point moot."

"I don't know," he glanced at her again, and sighed, "I guess I sort of get why you pretended to be an old monster. I often pretend I am weaker than I am so people don't notice me, and that's different, but not that much. But still, how am I supposed to trust you now?"

She let the question hang for a while before responding.

"You really care that much about lies?"

"You don't?"

"No. I care about actions."

"But those aren't separate," he sighed, "how can you trust someone to do good things if they aren't honest?"

"By looking at what they actually did in the past?" she raised her eyebrow, "Have I ever done anything to harm you?"

"You tricked me into digging for rocks," he squinted at her.

"Which we both needed to do, to prevent the feng shui of the world fragment from worsening," she shook her head, "You get a safer inner world and a bath out of the deal. It's hardly harmful when it benefits you in the end."

He stayed silent for a while.

"I guess nothing else comes to mind," he finally said, "but that doesn't mean much. You can just do it in the future."

"Why would I do that?"

"I don't know? The whole point is that I don't want to have to guess."

"But you always have to guess," she said, "someone can tell you the truth and then still harm you. People change their minds all the time, they can be confused, speak in error, or misjudge their abilities or those of others. Sometimes they get drunk and act out in rage. Honesty doesn't buy you safety."

"You are trying to trick me again," he sighed in exasperation, "being honest obviously helps."

"To an extent," she said, conceding the point, "but less than understanding the actual motivations that guide the actions of others."

"So what motivates you to lie?"

"I enjoy tricking and embarrassing people," she answered bluntly, "My mother once told me that if I didn't look so similar to herself, she would have been sure I was a kitsune switchling. The first thing I did after I was old enough to enter an imperial library was look them up - It turns out they eat people, and when I told her about it, she just asked me what my favorite type of victim would have been."

He turned to her with wide eyes.

"That is a terrible thing to say to a child."

"How so? I thought it was hilarious. The answer is sailors and pilgrims, they go missing all the time."

He turned back to his unfinished statue with a sigh.

"When it comes to you," she continued, "cultivating within your inner world has accelerated my growth by leaps and bounds. Since I need your cooperation to access it, I have no reason to harm you. Nor do I know how to take it away from you, before you ask."

"And what if I want to get rid of it?" he asked, "I want to get rid of my luck, and all the other nonsense."

"Yonghao," she sighed, "I have no clue how someone could completely change their luck. I have certainly never heard of it happening, outside of some frankly questionable myths and legends. It should be possible - there is nothing impossible beneath the heavens - but finding a way to do so will take you many years, and I doubt your special luck will assist you in getting rid of itself. I am more than willing to help you, since by the time you manage it, I would have long gotten stinking rich from selling all the treasures within your inner world."

"I told you, you can't sell them. It doesn't work."

"Junior, with respect, you suck at managing your inner world," she smiled, "I think I can figure out a trick or two you didn't."

He narrowed his eyes at her.

"Junior?" he asked, "How old even are you?"

"Twenty three."

"Twenty three?! I am twenty six! I should be calling you junior!"

"Seniority comes from skill, not age," she snorted, "You can call me junior when you manage to trick me."

"I don't want to trick anybody!" He grit his teeth, turning away from the statue and sending some slashes of light into the depths of the forest in frustration, "Why can't you just be honest?"

"I have laid all my cards on the table. Why can't you?"

"Me? I've always been honest!"

"Really?" she raised her eyebrow, "I saw how you reacted when I asked you why you travel alone. You are very much hiding something."

"That's different," he scowled, "It's a personal secret. Everyone has those. You wanted to trick me about much bigger things. And you still haven't apologized for any of it!"

"Sure, I apologize," she blinked, "But what good are these words? Apologies are worthless, people say they apologize and then keep doing all the same things. What matters is wherever I would continue to deceive you, and I have no intention of doing so. Deceptions are always impermanent, and a flawed basis for a long term relationship. I have no secrets to keep."

"Really now?"

"If you don't believe me, then ask away."

"Why do you want to establish a new sect? Why not just join one?"

"Rare few sects accept a loose female cultivator, but I have been a part of one in the Golden Rabbit Bay," she answered, "It's not acceptable. I want to start from scratch to do it better."

"Better how?"

She took a bit to answer, and Wang Yonghao went back to carving his statue.

"You said I talk about the heavens more than the other cultivators," she said, "you are right about that."

"So what, you actually want to break into the heavens? Be the next Gu Lingtian?"

"It's not…about the heavens," she frowned, "It's about what they represent. Every cultivator - even the karmists, no matter their own self-deceptions - chooses to cultivate even though the heavens will try to strike them down. They reject the unjust will of the heavens and impose their own will on the universe, their desires, ones they are willing to fight and bleed for. Cultivation is a tool of infinite freedom - it can let you soar through the sky like a bird, live as long as you want, and crack any wall in your way."

He kept his eyes on the statue, but she could tell he was listening attentively.

"Most cultivators would agree with this," she continued, "They have learned some history, and they know all the usual platitudes, such as 'to cultivate is to rebel against the heavens'. But for them, this is just…ancient history, like you said. They do not grasp, deep within their soul, the fact that the only reason they are alive at all is because Gu Lingtian broke the gates of heaven. And because of this, they betray his rebellion through their own actions."

He finally turned to look at her.

"Do you know how many times I have heard one of the elders speak of the heavens a scant few minutes after refusing to teach me their alchemical secrets, because they couldn't trust a woman to keep her mouth shut?" She scowled, feeling her skin flush from the echoes of that old anger, "Talk of needing to cultivate until my muscles ache, right after giving medicines and resources that rightfully should have belonged to me to disciples who worked one tenth as hard, but who happened to have a powerful relative? I will not even mention how hard it was to even join a sect. Why should their will overwrite my own? If I want to break into heaven, who gave them the right to ensnare my legs?"

She spat on the ground.

"Sanctimonious pieces of shit, you simply replaced the heavens! The need to rebel is referring to you!"

She paced a bit, calming herself down. Wang Yonghao watched her with a strange expression.

"So you want your own sect so the elders wouldn't bully you?" he said, folding his arms on his chest.

"I want freedom!" she snarled, spinning around to face him again, "For me, for others, for everyone! And you can't be free alone. Look at what we are doing here - even for something as simple as a chiclotron, we need to strain our backs for days on end. The higher your realm, the more resources you need - spirit stones, medicines, special cultivation rooms, spiritual food - and getting those takes time which you aren't spending on cultivation. This is why cultivators form into sects in the first place: they put the manual work on the shoulders of outer disciples to free up their own time, and this is fine - most people will never open their spiitual roots and become cultivators, after all. But this exchange is lopsided, warped until those higher up get everything and those below get almost nothing. This is what disgusts me. Freedom for fair treatment - that's what I want!"

"You hypocrite!" he responded, "You yourself said you liked to embarrass people! When they push you down you hate it, but when you push me down it's fine?"

"My jokes and trickery aren't going to permanently sabotage your entire life," she glared at him, "they will merely leave you annoyed and frustrated. What I am talking of will. There is no way to compensate for being deprived of resources at a critical moment in your cultivation. It is a dagger stabbed into your stomach simply because someone else could."

She stabbed her finger at him.

"You want to get rid of your luck?" she continued, "Just figuring out a plan for doing it could take you decades. You can't do that alone, but if you tell anyone about it - a sect, the empire, even a random loose cultivator - how could you be sure they wouldn't soulrape you to take your riches for themselves? Inner world like yours would be a temptation for even the most studious monks. You wanted to know how you can trust me? You can trust me because I'd rather eat dirt than let Heavens get away with anything they did, because if I told anyone about you I would be the first one on the chopping block, and because I need your help too."

"If this isn't all just an even bigger lie," he said, squinting at her, but she could tell she got through to him.

"Would I do that to you?" She responded, brushing a hand through her hair casually.

"Yes?"

"Come now, really?" She put a hand on her chest, "This here cultivator is best known for her honesty and trustworthiness. I barely even know how to haggle, let alone lie."

She managed to keep her face in a schooled mask for a good ten breaths before her laughter burst forth. Wang Yonghao scowled at her.

"Jerk," he said, heading back towards the entrance to his inner world, "we can discuss details later. Let's go deal with my inner world."

They left the rosevines within the world fragment for the time being. After the night they have spent in the tree, the plants have burrowed deep into the earth, and pulling them out would be a nightmare while the air was still full of poison. Instead, Wang Yonghao simply moved the fire treasures around to cut off the open fires, and closed up his internal world. Their hope was that with no new dead air being produced, the problem would solve itself.

They spent the rest of the day foraging around the river bend. Wang Yonghao managed to catch another small fish, and she gathered some forest flowers, which they cooked on a small wood fire while discussing their future plans. It wasn't enough for both of them, and their stomachs rumbled in hunger.

As the evening approached, they opened up the world fragment and she poked her head inside to check the air. It felt much fresher to her, and they decided it was worth the risk to try spending the night inside.

Another long argument spiked when she asked Wang Yonghao to carry her down. He again insisted that her previous way of standing on his back was far too embarrassing, and also completely unnecessary when he could use the much more comfortable bridal carry. She stood her ground, and said that not only did they have an agreement, but also if he tried to hold her like that then he wouldn't need to worry about marriage for the rest of his life. In the end they settled on him tying a rope to his waist, and her hanging off that rope a good meter below his feet.

Once they descended down to the ground, they quickly discovered that their troubles weren't over: all of their food reserves had vanished.

Author Note: If you'd like to read three chapters ahead, or read other works I write, you can find me on patreon where the rest of volume 1 has been posted for a low price of 3$.

Aule · Oct 6, 2023

I now imagine Qian Shanyi with fox earls and tail and the smuggest smirk in the world.

iledian · Oct 6, 2023

Aule said:
I now imagine Qian Shanyi with fox earls and tail and the smuggest smirk in the world.

That would be interesting (especially if they don't need to eat humans as much as its the most efficient thing to do and her desire to do so is yet another thing she is looking for freedom from).

Sculpt0r · Oct 6, 2023

Qian Shanyi is a huge gaslighting asshole, and I hope Wang Yonghao ditches her as soon as they hit a city. Not that I think it's likely, she's narratively latched herself onto his inner world like a limpet, but still.

Grosstoad · Oct 6, 2023

Sculpt0r said:
Qian Shanyi is a huge gaslighting asshole, and I hope Wang Yonghao ditches her as soon as they hit a city. Not that I think it's likely, she's narratively latched herself onto his inner world like a limpet, but still.

She is, she is. She is a classical cunning hero archetype, the physically weak one armed with sharp wit and cutting humor that only the audience could appreciate, because we aren't in the strike zone (typically).

But who would he ditch her for? Because by narrative emphasis, it is clear that his Luck decided to pick her as his treasure.

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