Squeaky’s master tapped his catnip cigar on the ashtray, breathing a cloud of minty smoke over the mouse. The latter coughed, but maintained his form. To allow discomfort to sway you from your task was not the Way, for as the Master (Confucius) had said: ‘The superior man thinks of virtue; the small man thinks of comfort.’

Squeaky the Rat slowly, painfully, completed the push-up, ensuring the half ton boulder remained steady on his back as he did. That made one set.

Only three more to go.

It had been months since the Noodle Shop Repair Demon had helped Squeaky meet his master, the cat Akhjarr, and the mouse had never felt happier. Each day he woke up was a new adventure - at least, an adventure so far as a scholarly mouse was concerned.

“Focus - don’t let distraction cause you to stray from the Path,” the cat observed, and Squeaky fixed a small error in his form.

They were in the middle of their morning workout, a series of gruelling exercises meant to strengthen the mouse’s body and temper his will. The cat was a firm believer that ‘exercise is the music of the body, as much as education is the music of the soul,’ and insisted that the mouse’s refinement of character include all aspects of his being.

Hence, after the morning’s rituals - the offering to the spirits and the greeting to his master, both of which Squeaky made with full sincerity - he proceeded to the gymnasium for his routine. He exercised in public; his master said it was good to be with others, and good to train with them.

As noon approached the cat and mouse would shower and spend some time meditating in the sauna, before proceeding to eat a small and frugal lunch.

And then came the real fun of the day - it was time to study!

Squeaky had done his best to attain an excellent literary education when he was with his fellow mice, but they’d had all sorts of constraints on their learning - lack of available space, their budget, the need to not upset the restaurant patrons as the latter were eating their dinner.

These constraints had prevented him from seriously studying any of the Six Arts - music, the rites, calligraphy, mathematics, archery, and charioteering.

(The last restraint - that of the restaurant patrons - had been added after Squeaky and some of the other mice had tried to study the Six Arts by driving teensy weensy chariots through the restaurant on a Friday night. That particular project did not end well.)

This had seriously impacted his cultivation. To quote Squeaky’s favourite scholar, Xu Gan, ‘The arts are the servants of the heart, the voice of humaneness, and the model of rightness.’

Sure, he had a little bit of theoretical knowledge involving, say, the performance of the rites or the interpretation of calligraphy: but the difference between reading words and internalising that reading through experience was profound. As Xu Gan said, ‘if one reflects in solitude, one will remain blocked and hence fail to comprehend… This is why Fu Xi was able to draw the Eight Trigrams only after observing Heaven and Earth…’

But now, now his knowledge was complete, and Squeaky the Rat could feel his cultivation levels improving by leaps and bounds as he broke through barrier after barrier.

And then tragedy struck - the Author realised that he had never bothered to introduce the cultivation ranks. He sweated, wondering if the twenty-seventh post was too late. Could he explain that there were nine Circuits one completed on one’s way to immortality, and that each Circuit consisted of nine Orbits? Was it too much now to mention the growth of the Dragon in the First Circuit, the establishment of the Heavenly Root as one entered the Third Circuit, or the return to the Immortal Foetus? He decided it was, and that it was best to just ride the flow here on out. But to return to our story—

Yesterday, the cat had called out a piece of advice, rectifying an error in Squeaky’s archery form. Squeaky nodded to himself and fixed the mistake, at which point he felt a click before going up another small realm.

This was the normal way his master assisted in the study of the Six Arts: calling out advice, fixing techniques directly, or occasionally bringing in another master to train Squeaky. It was only later, in the evenings, that his master trained him more personally.

Then they would study the histories and the Classics, and the cat would take on a leading role. He would let Squeaky seek to explain the meaning of the text, listening carefully until he had made Squeaky’s words his own. Then he would attempt to raise doubts in Squeaky’s exegesis - disassembling key terms, arranging one passage against another, or applying Squeaky’s views in a case - until Squeaky adjusted his initial view, at which point the process would repeat all over again.

There was a playfulness in the way his master dismembered arguments, offering absurd elaborations of premises or jesting about a possible conclusion. It reminded the mouse a little about an ancient scholar he’d studied - Sockratties, he thought his name was, though his master claimed to have learnt the method from someone called Hermes.

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It was a fun time, and the mouse found himself more and more absorbed in his learning.

When they were finally done it was often nearing the hour of ghosts and spirits. The mouse would perform the nighttime observances and then retire to his mousehole, exhausted, only to wake up a few hours later and begin the routine all over again.

He wouldn’t trade it for the world.

But that was all in the future. Right now, Squeaky knew, was the boulder and the pain; and he would master both. His master had told him stories of great wrestlers of the past, who lifted cattle overhead to train, and Squeaky the Rat knew he had to be more diligent in his cultivation if he wanted to be like them. He steadied himself and began his third set.

This morning, however, his master seemed a little distracted. A friend of his had visited - a strange apparition, rotund and hillish in shape, with a grey-green skin that oscillated in consistency between rubber and wisps of shadow. Sticking out the top of its spheroid body was what were either floppy ears or horns, waggling slightly in the dockyard breeze.

It had brought the ‘latest chapter’ of some sort of manuscript and handed it to the cat to read. Then it turned to stare at Squeaky - its wide eyes glowing like lamplights - and scritched like a madman on another pile of paper as it waited for the cat to finish.

The cat read some more of the papers before him, then angrily slapped them on his knee, taking a drag on his catnip cigar as he turned to the apparition floating on his right.

“The villains have yet to be enough of a threat.”

The being nodded its head.

“Inconsiderate, that’s what I call it. What do they think this is, a story for toddlers? You need at least the mind of a small child to appreciate this writing; they need to start pulling their weight. You were unsteady on that rep, do it again,” the cat idly observed to Squeaky the Rat.

The mouse blushed, realising he had become distracted, and slowed down as he reset his form.

The cat took another puff of his catnip cigar. Though his words were harsh, his eyes were jovial, and his voice had a jaunty tone as he continued tearing the poor, innocent manuscript to shreds.

“Bah— we’ll never compose a tune with such discordant notes. No, it’s time to take action.”

***

Gan Mao swore. The sect master of the Flaming Bloody Organs Sect was not having a good day. First, he’d learnt that another team of agents had been disposed of by the noodle shop guy, and then there was this.

He looked at the missive in his left hand as his right massaged his temples in frustration.

“This makes no sense.”

Tou Tong looked over his master’s shoulder, popping a pill for his headache as he did.

Indeed, the missive made no sense. None of the morning had, not since the stranger arrived.

***

“You’re here to deliver a Start and Persist Order? What in the ballyhoo does that mean?”

The man standing in front of him had no face, but if he had, he would be staring at Gan superciliously.

“Precisely what it sounds like, monsieur. My masters have been greatly unimpressed with your incompetence, and have sent this letter to inform you that it has long passed the time for you to start committing horrible acts of evil.”

Gan Mao briefly read this missive, which informed him in no uncertain terms that he was to cease and desist from lollygagging and start and persist in heinous and despicable villainy, and looked back at the faceless servant.

The servant steepled his long, thin white hands. He had no robes for them to slide into (he wore a traditional greatcoat), and they hung in the air as he waited patiently for Gan’s reply.

“And if I don’t, then what are your masters going to do? Fire me? They’re not my bosses.”

The servant sniffed, which was impressive given that he had no nose. “If you decide not to do your job as a villain, then he will charge you before the courts with gross negligence and incompetence.”

“Hah! Jokes on him - I never registered with the Bureau for Unorthodox and Demonic Cultivators.”

“Not that court; the other one.”

Gan froze mid-jeer. The servant nodded once.

“I see you need to know no more from me. I will be off, then.”

He spun on his heel and walked away without another word, leaving several very confused demonic cultivators behind him.

***

“But can he actually-” Ke Sou started to ask, but Tou cut him off.

“Probably not, no. We would likely survive a court challenge if he went to them,” he said, unwilling to name out loud the Courts of the Underworld, who administered the Destiny of mortals and could convict them for failing to live up to their True Potential(™). One did not want to draw their attention, not if one could help it.

“That’s not the problem,” Gan growled, tapping the missive, “the problem is we’re such jokes that even people we have no relation to are now ordering us around as if they were our superiors. That is unacceptable. No, it’s time for us to get serious, in order to spread the dominance of evil worldwide.”

“…You want us to start a soup kitchen?” Ke Sou inquired in some confusion.

“Not THAT kind of evil, you raging idiot. Real evil - traditional evil, with murder and robbery and stuff,” Gan swore. “Now, help me think of a way to show the world what evil REALLY is.”

Tou Tong grabbed his head, straining as he thought. At last an idea occurred to him. “There’s always contracting our… special friends.”

Gan Mao’s hideous face split in a grin.