It was a little embarrassing when Xiang and Chen traded notes and realized they’d both named one of their children Fen. Well, opposite genders and different characters used, so they dealt with it. Fu and Hong were thankfully less of a hassle.

Me, I had Aya, Chie, and Fuku to worry about, as well as Song’s Hana, Kanna, and Kiyoko. She apologized about being so cross with my naming problems, then cried in my shoulder. I hadn’t heard her call me “mommy” in years, and hearing it now nearly took me over the edge.

My baby girl. My sweet Song. I’d nearly lost her, by being the worst example I could be as a mother.

When she was born… well, running from a massacre and being stressed enough to jump-start labor isn’t a great way to give birth. And thinking back on it, I never really recovered from that day. Just lost myself working, cultivating, and keeping myself pregnant in the hopes that being full of life would fill the emptiness of losing so many of my friends, not to mention the Mistress.

Well, that pattern ended now. It nearly killed me, and brought that same Mistress’s namesake far closer to death. I’d felt what Xiang and Chen had to do to keep my little girl alive that day, and it shamed me that her mother couldn’t add her own qi to those efforts. It shamed me that she looked at how I behaved, working so hard not to be me that she ended her own childhood to help out around the house. Chiaki was doing the same, and I could only add that to my shame.

But more than that, it shamed me that I couldn’t warn my girl not to let her desires overcome her sense of responsibility, because I had no credibility in that regard. Xiang and I shared that one, but I wouldn’t shirk on my end of it. Never. Again.

Then I shook my head, and laughed off the melancholy. My whole dao centered on having fun and enjoying life. If I tried to be that serious, I’d just make things worse. Both for myself and those around me. And I told Chen and Song as much when I noticed they were in the same mindset.

Then we started to laugh, and the tension eased off their faces as we worked on building up muscle again.

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I’d been bedridden for four months, and my baby girl beside me for two of them. Xiang had us doing the baby exercises, the ones she reserved for those who struggled with regular calisthenics.

I’d be embarrassed if I wasn’t exhausted at the end of each session. As usual, she was right. Annoying little bunny usually was, when it came to health and exercise. After that, we’d cultivate, with the girls putting special effort into the elements they hadn’t quite mastered. Breaking through to their Mastery would do wonders for their health at this point. I could almost be jealous no such shortcuts existed for me.

Personally, I was too busy being excited. Chen and Song had quietly proposed to their soldier, and they planned to marry in a year or so, on Chen’s seventeenth birthday. The two were putting as much as they could into planning their dresses and a small celebration, and I was getting weepy at the idea of them growing up so damn fast. It was only yesterday I was changing their diapers, now they’re doing it for their own babies, talking about marrying the father (and each other, but that was no surprise to either Xiang or myself), and were nearly Master cultivators in their own right.

And as usual, the bakabunny I happened to be friends with just took it in stride. Honestly, if it doesn’t have a big fat target on it saying “hit me” I’d suspect she’d ignore half of what she was surrounded by.

As if on cue, a sudden weight between my shoulder blades indicated the bun herself had landed.

“Embarrassed yet? I couldn’t even put any force behind my landing for fear of breaking you right now.”

I rolled onto my back, exactly as Xiang planned, then felt something shift.

Looking over from my helpless position on the ground, I watched as Chen and Song both levitated as they sat, the qi around them swirling through their systems as they hit the enlightenment of cultivation Mastery. Their eyes lit up as they opened them, and a pulse of visible qi burst into the air as they became one with the cultivation of the world.

I’d seen it pretty often now, but it never stopped being amazing to look at.

My little girl stood, glanced at her fiancee, then smirked at me.

“Race you home, ma.”

I could only watch, relieved to see my little smartass back at last.