It was not exactly a comfortable breakfast.
The food wasn’t bad but he didn’t taste much.
Overall, the Shi members didn’t talk much.
It fell on Shi Ling, who fearlessly spoke whatever was on her mind, and the men at the table to urge conversation from the other daughters of Shi.
Without augmentation, Ebony decided to give up trying to lift a porcelain plate. The chopsticks were the most he could handle.
At least, he was very familiar with the eating or meal culture. His mother subtly taught him that she had to put something on his plate before he could start eating. In the same way, Shi Tao had to pick something onto Shi Qiang’s plate and Shi Qiang would have to do the same to the younger generations.
In the same way, he embraced the fact that he was induced as part of the third generation and picked a steamed prawn wrapped in a thin rice paper roll to Shi Ling without any hesitation. Shi Han of the fourth generation already had Shi Qiang catering to her and there wasn’t anyone else of the fourth generation. As for the husbands, they were served by their wives, just like how his father was forced to wait for his mother to plate him food if not directly fed with an ‘ahh’
They tried their best to be womanly outside of battle. It would look extremely awkward to other people but all the husbands here embraced the awkward show of love or feminine act.
Shi Tao very forcefully insisted on feeding him as much as she could.
He could taste halfway through the meal, he excused himself to the grasslands right outside the tea break room he first arrived in. He needed some time alone.
Family. It didn’t feel real to him but he knew that he was taking it quite well and didn’t have much rejection in him.
‘Am I taking and accepting changes too lightly since I’m used to massive changes? Even when it comes to family members? Or do I feel kinship with these people to a certain extent?’
It didn’t help that they all looked and acted so similar to his mother. Though all with their unique habits and differences.
He wasn’t even confused about the situation and Boundless Serenity Geyser likely didn’t matter. It was just his personality of taking abrupt situation changes lightly.
‘Some company might be nice.’ He found himself Flickering out of the Shi Clan towards the Nings. Rather than staying silent about his dislike of how easily he was accepting these people as ‘family’, he felt like he now had someone he could talk to about these minor annoyances.
‘I shouldn’t see these as annoyances. Having a problem with myself is…is human.’ His mind settled even more at that thought.
Fortunately, it wasn’t hard to find the Nings despite being moved near the Shi by space magic. He just had to Flicker upwards, look around and find a small village with a gate.
He called Xin’s callstone with his mana alone since he lost his callstone long ago but could still connect to hers with mana and sound magic but she didn’t pick up. Fearing some kind of home defence, he made sure his presence was known. Kong Jing picked up.
It took her half an hour before she came out to get him at the gates and walk him in. Kong Jing was oddly silent and reserved but he thought that was because they were on Xiaoya and she had been acting this way since.
“This is Grandaunt’s house.”
Ebony learned that their form of address is by generation and not clan.
It was not much different from every other house down the street.
Ebony sniffed a thick scent of blood.
Slowly, he removed his shoes and let Kong Jing guide him to a room.
Bedridden was a bloody masked woman with countless bone-deep open wounds. Black blood stained the mattress and floor but the room was otherwise clean and could even be considered luxurious.
There was already a chair beside the bed that Ebony shamelessly took over from the previous person.
“How are you?” He grabbed her hand.
The treatment he received from the Shi Clan and the treatment she received from the Ning Clan were polar opposites.
“Good.” It took her a while before she answered.
“Where is your grandma?” The house had similar levels of privacy settings that shut off mana perception. It likely shut off most types of perception outside of physical, arcane or elemental.
“Don’t blame her. She can’t walk either. She’s resting like I am.”
“...I’ll set your elbow back, don’t bite your tongue.” Ebony guessed that she probably didn’t let Kong Jing do it because the crafter didn’t know how to do it properly or gently.
Her outer garment was removed and it proved that the female set of dress had pants as well. No sleeves remained so the torn flesh around her jutting elbow was hanging loose. “You can’t recover or regenerate?”
He distracted her, twisted and popped the elbow back in without pause.
“Nuhuh.” Shaking her head left to right, she guided his attention to the half-wrapped bandages around her left shoulder.
“You sound happy.” Ebony thought about how he had never used bandages in decades. It was clearly a special type of bandage but it looked and felt like normal bandages.
“Hmm…” Ning Xin pondered audibly, likely muddled about how she felt.
“I’m happy for you too. Looks like they care immensely for you.” Ebony smiled and redid the bandaging from the start. Kong Jing did a sloppy job for someone good with her hands.
Beating her up so perfectly was the greatest show of familial love. Every cut she sustained was weak points that he never managed to punish her for thanks to her superior speed. Although he had confidence that wasn’t the case now that he could sustain his Domain, they hadn’t sparred seriously in over a decade. Although he never met another Ning, the injuries on Xin’s body told him what he needed to know about them.
Her injuries didn’t stop bleeding but the bandages could stop the unnatural bleeding and close her wounds.
‘Looks like the clan doesn’t matter. The Xengs are all hard on the outside and soft on the inside. Despite what Sister Jing said, they care about her safety and can’t believe her inability to protect herself. All that talk about shaming their bloodline is a bunch of half nonsense, they’re just worried their descendants aren’t better than they are.’ Ebony sincerely felt this longing from his mother and it was proven by every married Shi he met so far.
They obsessed over their children’s potential to become stronger and better than themselves. When it came to fighting strength, sharpening this ability boiled down to beating them up.
He might be wrong with the Nings but it didn’t appear that way. Not with a few people clambering outside the door with Kong Jing trying to hold all the gifts and medication. Of course, there were a lot of ‘insults’ about how they didn’t expect Xin to be exceptionally weak and whatnot but Ning Xin only smiled wider.
He didn’t need her ability to read other people’s emotions to understand that the Xengs were just stating the truth they saw as it was.
“I’m going to sit you up, pull your shirt up for me.” Ebony was done bandaging her arms and noticed she had been hiding the wound on her belly. The legs could wait.
“Huh?” Xin sat up immediately but hesitated to pull her inner garment up. The hesitation didn’t last long.
Ebony put the large scissors down before he started wrapping her skinny waist up.
And then a burst of rage stunned his body and it wasn’t figurative. “WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO MY GREAT-GRANDDAUGHTER YOU BASTARD!”
He barely looked up in time to see black hair transform to bright yellow and a woman’s back that faced him, protecting him from the lightning blade.
A bunch of black-haired men and women, some masked and others not outside opened doors and gasped audibly.
From the window behind the chair Ebony sat on, a few Shis similarly looked in shock.
‘What on earth is happening?’ He was not shocked by the sudden meeting and breakfast with the Shis, but so many of them just gasping at him confused him greatly. Where did they even come from?
Not being able to perceive with gravitational perception was troublesome indeed.
“Shi Han, what is going on?” He asked the person who blocked the loud zapping materialised lightning by grabbing onto it with her barefist for him. They might look very similar but each of them were different enough for him to differentiate.
“What’s going on? You’re asking me that? Unhand the young lady of the Nings and go home with us young man! Uh, I mean Uncle!”
Without warning, he was blasted out of the room along with the entire wall. As for Xin, she was surrounded by many people and had her head and body covered by her outer garment. “Heheh”
‘Did she just giggle through the callstone?’ Ebony realised that she foresaw something coming, her hesitation was intentional.
“I’ll calm him down, you kids, bring your granduncle back.” Shi Han clicked her tongue at the raging yellow haired beast whose hair continued to spark with lightning and grew longer by the second.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
“Granduncle! You’re so daring! Sneaking out into a girl’s room.” Shi Ling painfully poked his side. He didn’t realise he followed their pace and was running back to the Shi village.
While he exited without going through the obstacle course since there was no need to, he was guided towards the obstacle course again. It seemed like a waste of time since all of them were forced back to normal humans and took a lot of time to get through but the Shi women surrounding him might have inadvertently pushed him here.
One by one, they went on ahead after smashing the start button.
‘They're so fast, do we really have the same strength and speed?’ Ebony watched them jump across the river in three to four hops.
“Don’t need to show us face okay!?” Shi Ling leapt off the last after the sixth generation and her fellow fifth-generation sisters, Shi Ke and Shi Yi.
‘Second try, by the looks of it I have no chance of overtaking them in the first two sections.’ Ebony dashed off, trying the new explosive snapping of muscles but it didn’t produce any sort of effect other than hurt himself or a minimal push off the ground. It was slightly different from Treading Steps or Flicker but the logic was the same.
The hill gave the women an even larger gap between them but he caught up slightly when the hill turned into a climb since he could almost run up vertically with good footing. He realised there was no need to climb or swing himself like a monkey. It was similar to when he was trained by a kappa except he had a slightly stronger than average human body right now. He just needed his hands to grab onto the wall once in a while.
At the sky-high poles, they opened the gap again but none of them turned back to look at him. He noticed a couple more vines appear at the end of the course and guessed that the obstacle course could change itself according to how many people were taking it together.
Despite a couple of them on the same course, none of the ladies crashed into each other at their side or forward hopping and their perfect landing didn’t even shake the thin footholds.
‘They have better balance than Xin, by a long shot. I should bring her here to try this course.’
Only Shi Ling and Shi Yi did something else altogether. They hopped off the footholds and kicked off the poles from one to another, controlling their descent while still moving forward. The sixth generation was rappelling down the vines right about now.
Ebony didn’t let their lead get to him. He wasn’t here to prove himself but he did want to get a better time than before.
This time, he got a bit more forward momentum instead of free-falling down.
Ever so slightly, he was able to use the vine to snap himself into the air further than his first attempt. He didn’t notice the looks he got from below since he had to be wary of traps before and after he landed. When he got into the trees and jungle the older juniors he had couldn’t even catch his shadow anymore.
‘Good the lake is still here,’ Ebony smashed into the liquid pool and swam out. He redirected to the right for a fire tunnel trap to dry himself off. He did get slightly baked but the wet clothes helped.
He discovered a dozen new types of traps he didn’t encounter on his first attempt but nothing that fatally ended his attempt to break his previous record. It was too bad he barely improved by half a minute and was still in the same rank.
‘The ‘guest’ is gone and they put me as Shi Clan but left my name alone. Auntie is quite considerate.’ Ebony wouldn’t have liked it if they just changed his name and put a Shi in front and it looked like they understood.
He didn’t wait up for the girls who were wall jumping up the last stretch or rolling away from arrows further back. Walking past the demarcation line, he healed the muscle tears since he knew the course length and how much he could push himself. Cleaning himself off with mana manipulation worked a lot better than running into a fire tunnel too.
“That was so awesome! You flew!”
Ebony sustained a double back pat that gave him internal injuries and sent him rolling forward a few times.
“Ah? I-I’m sorry granduncle, I didn’t mean that! Yo-you’re so fragile!” Shi Ling’s words were starting to hurt more than her strength.
‘I’m pretty sure my mana pool is fully compressed…where is all that brute strength coming from.’ Ebony would understand his injury if an Emperor used a skill but this was all unaugmented, unbuffed by skill and just casual motions.
“I’m only 37 standard years old.” He might as well probe for information but he realised that saying this felt too much like an excuse.
“You’re less than half my age?!” She gasped, “but that doesn’t explain your fragile body even if you’re only…a Grandmaster?”
“Mmm.” It looks like he was right. Despite being the fifth generation, she was likely younger than many of the sixth generation. Using Kong Jing’s rate of levelling or evolving, Shi Ling was probably Emperor ranked but maybe not capped out. Since none of them had ever Identified or Appraised him, he also didn’t do the same to any of them.
“So you’re the technique caste instead of the power caste.” She then went on about how she didn’t expect to have a granduncle using the specific term for a great-great-grandmother’s sister’s child. It was honestly confusing even with all the mental stats, he just didn’t want to know these terms.
While waiting for the others who needed another minute or two, he heard that Shi Ling was also on Elcra till she was a Grandmaster before she took off to train elsewhere. But she moved immediately after evolving at level 300. She was a bit more sheltered with both her parents with her outside of her travels and dungeon hopping. She asked about a friend or two knowing that he was on Elcra not long ago.
“Magus Consortium? They were still around when I was there.” Ebony picked up a familiar term from her.
“Is he still doing well? It’s too bad their genes are terrible and they can barely get over King ranked.”
“Who is he?”
“Dai-Damien? Yeah, I think that was his name. I still remember that awful magic of his.”
“I remember, he was still an Arch Mage when I met him. I only met him once, I joined the so-called Magus Consortium but had to leave for something else and never had the chance to go back.” Ebony felt bad that he wasted their time during the meeting, and the old lightning mage, Wilcox’s effort for introducing him.
The Arch Mage Damien was a human who had the Elves' basic respect during the meeting and he never broke down to Ebony’s mana so it was not hard to recall him. But for a Xeng, a Shi to call his magic ‘awful’ made him more curious as to what type of magic or element Damien used.
It was too bad the other Shis caught up and cut off their conversation, it didn’t take a minute before he was alone in a room with his supposed cousin, Shi Qiang of the third generation.
“I heard what happened.”
“What is the fuss about?”
“...cousin, I am aware that you’re young and didn’t have Xeng’s upbringing but sneaking off into a girl’s room and..and touching her intimates is unbecoming!”
Ebony was speechless over the next hour.
Why was he getting a lecture by a ‘cousin’ he knew for less than a day?
It really didn’t help when Huo Tianyu, Shi Han’s husband, walked by and gave a thumbs up by the door.
Be that as it may, he learned about the common sense, culture and tradition that they were so focused on. It helped him understand them better. As much as Ning Xin had been distanced from the Xeng, he knew she cared about their tradition. There was no other reason that she wore their mask all the time. She was brought up by them after all.
Some of the traditions such as the mask make sense since it had actual power and their logic behind it was to make their woman appear less feminine was reasonable to an extent. They didn’t have many rules or anything like that either but many acts appeared ‘not right’. They were tough on their family members but protected each other from external threats even more adamantly regardless of whether their clan members or fellow Xeng committed some kind of crime.
The proper channel to courting women was to first check if they had any blood relations which made complete sense to him. He did slightly dread what would happen but recalling that his mother was a second generation pretty much cleared the possibility of him sharing any sort of blood ties with Xin.
However, every step in between was rigid. Physical touch was a touchy topic and was considered extremely intimate to a certain extent. Outside of punching the daylights out of each other. Looking at too much of a woman’s skin was not well looked upon and was bad for the woman. If a Xeng man touched a Xeng woman’s feet, they can pretty much be seen being engaged the next day or the woman would find it hard to get married to another man if it was known.
In fact, quite a few marriages happened because male combatants ‘accidentally’ got too much physical contact with their partner during spars or training. Whether this was an actual courting technique or ‘accidents’ was not known to Ebony but he believed it was the former since it matched the Bridal Battle or duels that they opened up to people outside of Xengs and combat ability was always their main focus.
In that regard, he understood why Kong Jing had different values and outlooks since the non-combatant Xengs worked and thought differently from the combatants. They were more ‘normal’ and less traditionalist when it came to bloodline.
So the fuss is that he was seen as an obscene leecher pushing himself onto a young, seventh-generation right now. In terms of seniority, even if she was stronger than him, it wouldn’t be weird if she listened and showed her belly to him so the only one looking bad was him.
‘More like, why or how did so many of them appear out of nowhere…superspeed and perception make privacy a real problem. No wonder they make their buildings so airtight. Should’ve closed the windows and pulled the curtains.’
“Qiang, that’s enough. Leave the room.” Shi Tao walked in with a stern expression.
The door was closed before this aunt of his smiled widely, “good job boy! That’s more like a man of Shi!”
After his stunned lecture, he received praise for his bold act for another half an hour.
“Worry not, I’ve already double-checked the register while I was putting you down but it’s not like I have any male descendants that managed to marry out so there is no clash. A Ning descendant is a great choice for a wife! They can both be demure when desired and ferocious when needed.” Shi Tao paced about the small tea room.
‘Is the multiple personality swap a common ability amongst the Ning?’
“Of course, although I said good job you must take responsibility. No takebacks or you’ve ruined a good woman, obviously I doubt I have to tell you but we practise strict monogamy. When is the marriage? Have you proposed? I can help you write a proper letter as your guardian, since you’re part of the third I have to address it to Ning Xue. Ahh but the only Shi and Ning couple hasn’t managed to bring me another descendant so that is worrisome…hmm.”
“I already have plans to propose after we return to Elcra, I just need a few months to brush up on some skills that I couldn’t train on Cinderash or Teheil.” Monogamy seemed pretty much common sense for him be it his upbringing or the more common Earthen standard. He couldn’t imagine another woman as a wife anyway.
“Why do you need that for a proposal?”
“...The bridal battle I was told about.”
“That old thing? That’s for outsiders, if we take it strictly you both have blood of Xengs so it’s not necessary.”
“How else am I supposed to assure her that I’m capable of protecting her.”
“...My sister raised you well. I guess I’m far less capable than her in raising sons or grandsons.”
“You’ve been a great auntie so far.”
“Thank you, boy. But I do have a bit of bad news for you.”
“What is it?”
“The fifth generation Ning girl brought her granddaughter back obviously to train her up. Purify the Ning blood and strengthen her.”
“Purify? What does that entail?” He frowned at the dismissive tone.
“Cleansing it and bringing out the full extent of the Nings.”
“You think she’ll do that for power? Cleaning away her father’s genes or physique. Auntie, would you do that if it were you? Did Veronica…Ning Xing’s daughter did that when she knew she was half blood? I never heard any stories about that but I highly doubt so.” The word ‘cleanse’ was irritating him. The context didn’t need to be said for him to understand she was talking about bloodline.
“You’re right. Since the Nings took her in, they already see her as one of their own. Although they probably are very harsh on her with their sharp words and they have a particular dislike of weakness just like all of us do, they will not do something like wash out her father’s genes so you can relax. She already denied that ‘offer’ or they wouldn’t have thought of her as a real Ning or Xeng.
“So what’s the bad news?”
“You think you can beat her after the Nings give her proper guidance? I’m sorry to say but there’s a reason why Shi descendants are all female. Because we are stronger than men and your fragile body proves it further. I can’t explain it well, hurry up and read a bit of the basics on baseline traits. In any case, I bet they will teach her how to best make use of their state swap. It doesn't look like she can use any mind magic so the Nings might have some trouble teaching her in that regard.”
“I know I can.”