A few days later Professor Jibeidi's negotiations with the sect finished up, and it was time for her to return to the Alchemist's Tower in the city. As usual, she invited me to take a walk through the city with her, and as usual, I happily obliged.

We went down to the so-called entrance gate of the sect, where the professor's pet was rolling around on the grass. He was a yellow-headed cerulean warbler, a plump bird of which a single wing was larger than my entire body. His plumage, catching the light as he lazily shifted around, shone brilliantly but modestly like the evening sun over a tranquil sea.

We climbed onto his back. Professor Jibeidi leaned down over his head and whispered, "Fly, Xiaolan," as she ran her hand down his down, and with three quick chirps he took off into the sky, quickly rising several hundred feet, so the sect disciples on the ground seemed no larger than the width of a barb on one of his feathers.

Here, from the sky, you could see just how wide the lands of the sect were. It utterly dwarfed the city, what was merely a patch of densely-built buildings surrounded by fields in the distance, compared to the endless uninhabited forests and mountains of the sect. But even then, more people lived in the city than in the sect.

"It's so big..." I muttered. "How do normal people even cross it...?"

"They don't," said Professor Jibeidi, and then she frowned and scrunched up her face, and after some seconds she continued, "...But, Chunxue, I believe that you'll be able to cross it one day."

For a second I could not understand the implication of her words, but then I suddenly realized that she was talking about me leaving the sect, that one goal of mine that had always seemed as impossible as grasping the moon in my palm. But now, with Natsuki by my side, with this newfound power, I had some hope of achieving that goal. Yet I could not tell Professor Jibeidi about my power. My silence now was for the same reason that I had not defended myself against Canyue or Xiaolong: I did not yet have the confidence to let my power be known. My shoulders could not carry the weight of others' expectations, not even Professor Jibeidi's!

"—Actually, I asked the elders about it some time ago. They told me that they had no real attachment to keeping you in the sect, other than because the Bai family insisted."

I sighed. "Why they would insist on something so meaningless?"

Professor Jibeidi rubbed her forehead, and with a deep frown, she said, "Chunxue, do you... really want to know the answer to that question?"

—Did I? Honestly, I was not sure. Somewhere in my heart I hoped that I could write it off as an accident. A condition of some foolish ancestor's will, or a bet gone wrong, or something absurd like that. If I could write it off as an accident, then I could one day go on to the Imperial University with my head held high, and I could prove my worth to the family. But what if it wasn't an accident? What if they did it precisely because they knew I had a talent for scholarship and not for cultivation, precisely because they despised me and wished to torture me? If the truth turned out to be this latter, how could I hold my head high enough to call myself a human being? How could I avoid letting my life's candle-flame smolder and suffocate under the weight of grief and regret?

Perhaps I was only alive because I did not know the answer to the question.

I was still pondering this matter when we landed in Kangtian. Professor Jibeidi jumped off Xiaolan's back, and then I dismounted, and then Xiaolan wandered off to a patch of grass in the shadow of a tree, where he huddled up in a ball and dozed off.

"Come, Chunxue," she said with a smile. "Let's take a walk through the market district."

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We entered a long alleyway between two much wider roads— an alleyway that, honestly, was so overpopulated that it ought to be rebuilt, an alleyway that was filled on all sides with filth and dirt and also vendors hawking their goods, through which resounded the sounds of discussions and screeches and arguments, in which one could smell the scents of death and roses and feces. This is how a city should be, I thought, though I could not smile, because I had to hold my nose to keep myself from vomiting at the stench.

"How are your alchemy studies going?" Jibeidi asked, so quietly that I could barely hear her over the chorus of voices all around us.

"Oh, uh, I think they're going well." I pulled out my notebook from my robes, and flipped to a page covered in problem statements and array designs. I offered the notebook to Professor Jibeidi. "I was working on these recently."

She held the notebook open in one hand and held her other hand to her chin. "This looks good... this looks good... this looks good..." She flipped slowly through the pages, until she landed on one array that seemed to bother her. Furrowing her brow, she paused and ran her fingers through the array several times, before leaning down and showing me the notebook.

"Look here," she said. She traced her finger along a cyclical path weaving through the entire array. "If the execution flow goes like this, then this variable over here ends up being dependent on itself, and it'll cause a runtime failure when it's used later on. Actually, let me show you something."

She pulled some sort of pen from her bag, then used it to outline the array I had drawn. She pressed the reverse end of the pen into the entry point of the array, causing its ink to glow orange around the array markings for the variable.

"Since it glowed orange, that means that there's something that might be incorrect in the array design. A recursive variable definition is usually an mistake, though there are some valid usages for it. If the ink glows red then it's a strict error, and if it glows green then everything is fine."

I pored over the array I had drawn, but only found a bigger problem.

"But then how do you fix this? If you add another variable, then they'll just become dependent on each other, right?"

"In these cases, you usually need to change the variable into a procedure parameter."

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

Like a flash of enlightenment I understood! I nodded eagerly. "I get it, that makes sense!"

She spun the pen around her finger and then offered it to me. "Here. Take this as a gift from me. It'll help you in your studies."

I reached for the pen, but stopped just short of laying my fingers on it.

"Is it... really okay for me to take this?"

She laughed. "It's mine, so who but me has the right to decide who I give it to?"

I smiled and took the pen.

—"Doctor Jibeidi Feixing? What a pleasant surprise it is to see you out here."

A voice interrupted us, so we turned to face it. There in the middle of the street stood a scholar, a rather tall one, wrapped in robes of modest mints and sky-blues below a sparkling red coat with golden accoutrements, holding stacks of paper under one hand and a fan spread out in the other.

"Magistrate," Professor Jibeidi said with a bow.

Magistrate? I paused for a moment. The Magistrate of the local county centered on Kangtian... hadn't Wujiu spoken of her before? If I recall, her name was—

"Magistrate Sima Rui?" I muttered.

The Magistrate turned her piercing gaze towards me, and yet I could not help feel but like she was looking at only the wall behind me. Then, donning a crooked smile that poked out from the edges of her fan, she cackled,

"I am surprised that one of the Phantom Orchid Sect would have enough knowledge of us common folk to know the name of this county's magistrate."

"Ah, yes... sorry..." I said with a sheepish smile.

"I must say, these sects have been a thorn in the shoes of us civilian administrators for some time now," the Magistrate sighed. "Not that long ago they would go around and kidnap common folk to force into servitude. With some great effort the previous Emperor managed to prohibit such atrocity, but even today, the way they treat their servants and their disciples is still quite unacceptable. Regrettably this city of Kangtian does not have the power to confront the Phantom Orchid Sect on this matter."

For a moment I did not understand the meaning of her words, and then I realized that she was— perhaps— sympathizing with me, me, who could not escape the Sect's grasp. But in order to sympathize with me she would first need to know who I am, and I was not sure how she could possibly know that.

Then again, she was the Magistrate.

"—If not the Sect, then what about the Bai family?" I asked with only half my voice.

The Magistrate raised her eyebrows, but spent no delay in replying, "Unlikely. The Bai family's influence stretches quite wide across the Great Plains. In fact, these large clans are usually more troublesome than the sects, since the clans spend much more time weaseling their way into our bureaucracies and economies. Even the provincial government would have a hard time dealing with them."

I turned my gaze down.

"Magistrate, is there something you are looking for here in the market district?" Professor Jibeidi asked.

The Magistrate tilted her head to the side. "Actually, we are working through a proposal to rebuild the market district. For all the business that goes on here, it is one of the most sordid places in any city I have ever seen, where putrefaction and pestilence run rampant, where neither the air nor sun shine through." She flicked her fan closed and pointed it upwards, to the thin gap between the buildings towering over the alleyway, the gap so thin that the entire road lay in shadow. "I have brought some people with me to take some notes and conduct some interviews, just to make sure that we have adequate justification. You must know what it is like dealing with the central authorities, Doctor."

Professor Jibeidi winced. "Yes, of course. The auditors from the Alchemist's Tower in the Capital are quite troublesome as well."

The Magistrate nodded, and spread out her fan once again. "Well, I will leave you with that. Good luck with PSCs, Doctor. And Bai Chunxue..." she turned her gaze to me, for the first time. "...I, as well, am hoping that you do not die."

The Magistrate disappeared into the crowd, and I was left feeling slightly confused.

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We wandered into some alchemy shops in the market district, where Jibeidi showed me some of the tools of her trade: talismans, brushes, qi-infused ink, and so on. She bought me a book— not an alchemy one, but rather one on statecraft, which is what I would, with certainty!, one day end up studying. We had lunch on the side of a wide boulevard, after which she left for the Alchemist's Tower, leaving me with a talisman that, when torn, would call Xiaolan to take me back to the sect. In fact I had a few such talismans from her, but I rarely had the opportunity to use them.

I strolled down the boulevards for a bit, not entirely sure what I should do.

"Are you there, Natsuki?" I whispered.

She stepped out of my own shadow, cast to my right, and turned to face me.

"Yes."

"Is there... anything you'd like to do in the city? Since we're already here."

She put a finger to her cheek and fell into thought. I was not sure if this city, this unremarkable city in the corner of Dong Commandery, in the shadow of the Imperial Capital, could have anything that would pique her interest, but I thought I ought to ask.

"Actually, I would like to see how they run auctions in this land. I have seen many auction houses across the span of this world, but none yet here in this land east of Altyn-Tagh. Yet until I do, I cannot say that I have fully understood the nature, the truth, of the institution."

"Ah— yeah, there's a cultivators' auction house here. But I don't have any money, so I'm not sure I could buy anything."

Natsuki paused, then put a finger to her chin, then reached into her drooping sleeves and began pulling something out. Only then did I notice that the front side of her sleeves was sewed close except for a small opening through which her hand passed, which made it possible to store small items in it, small items, like perhaps a few coins or biscuits. I turned my gaze to the object she was drawing out. It was a bar of gol—

"Don't pull out something like that here!" I hissed, pushing her hand back into her sleeve. If somebody saw that, we would undoubtedly get attacked in the middle of the street!

"Do you... consider this valuable?" she asked slowly. "I had learned that the Golden Plateaus— Altyn-Tagh, that is— were named as such because this land to their east is filled with endless gold. Naturally, it follows that gold should be quite cheap here, unlike, say, rhodium, which is rare everywhere in this world, since there are no minerals known to bear it."

I collected my breath. "I don't know what, uh, lowdien is, but gold is just as rare here as it is everywhere else. A'erjin-Shan is called the Golden Mountains because their peaks shine like gold when the setting sun shrouds them. Anyways, that ingot is probably worth two hundred or so spirit stones. The cultivator's auction is expensive, but you could probably buy a few things with that."

With a slow sigh, Natsuki shook her head. "Though it pains me to hear that I have put my belief in falsehoods, at the least, I do carry many such materials in my possession. It seems that there will be no issue in attending the auction."