Three months and twelve days. It took three months and twelve days for the rumor mill to stop putting Li Hanyi through the wringer. It wasn’t for lack of desire, oh no. No, it was only because the rumor mill seized upon something new to chew on, something even more dramatic and important enough to change the course of the entire sect’s future.
The head of the entire sect had a new personal disciple. Hand-selected, doted upon, and almost a shoo-in to become the next head. If the rumor mill was to be trusted, he was a calm and studious young man. Blessed with solid spiritual roots and impressively solid bones, that young man would be a gift to the future generation.
His arrival brought a flurry of activity across the sect as each Peak Lord began looking closer at their personal disciples to see which one was better suited to the legacy of their peak. The selection process had begun, for good or ill, with the arrival of one Yue Yuan.
It only mattered to Li Hanyi that this new disciple took the attention off her own mistakes by making horrible new mistakes of his own. Yue Yuan, nameless before his new master bestowed upon him a name, had decided that his newfound status as a cultivator would be best used to train as much as possible with little care to the personal ramifications. She could respect drive like that, especially if it meant that she could finally put a pin on the timeline and triumphantly send off a series of messages to Airplane about it.
< >> User001: You do know I never really made a concrete timeline, right? < >>User001: When you're dealing with immortal cultivators, all timelines are relative. How’s house arrest going? Any closer to being let out to actually see the plot? < < < < >>User001: Huh. That’s weird. He’s been back to Bai Zhan a few times. < < Liu Feng, that idiot, had run away. It had just been a little cut on her face and hadn’t even hurt. But no, the absolute moron was either terrified of what her shizun would do to him or still embarrassed that it had even happened. She couldn’t decide which one was worse when both explanations were equally bad. The more she thought about it, the more she wanted to wring his neck like the chicken he was. That settled it: Li Hanyi needed to get off her peak. Somehow, she needed to get past her ever-vigilant shizun, sneak past the gate guards, and fly herself from Qian Cao to Bai Zhan without anyone crying the alarm. But even if she made it, there was no guarantee that Liu Feng would still be at his peak. There was no set schedule for when he would bring the latest offering, and she hadn’t heard a peep from him since her house arrest had begun. She bit at her thumbnail as she paced, deep in thought. There had to be something that she was missing. Liu Feng wasn’t the sort to just give up when it was difficult. She knew that. His truly dogged determination was why Airplane had killed him off in the first place, lest the Bai Zhan Peak Lord killed the protagonist as a baby in the cradle. There was a catch here that she just wasn’t seeing. Oh. She hadn’t seen him since her shizun confined her to the peak and removed all of her official reasons for seeing Liu Feng. Which meant that the only reason left was that she wanted to go see her friend. Li Hanyi had never actually asked if she could go see her friends, few as they were, or if they could come and see her. She had just assumed that if she was confined to the peak, that meant that she wasn’t allowed to send messages or invite her friends to visit. Her shidi had no problems at all coming and going, so maybe the same would be true of anyone else who came to visit. Wouldn’t it? *** Something was clearly wrong with Liu Feng. She sent him messages. Politely worded, at Wang Huo’s command, requests for Liu Feng to stop by at his earliest convenience. Li Hanyi wrote one every day and apologized for her misdeed in each one. Letter after letter, day after day, she wrote to Liu Feng and received nothing in return. Simple requests became more and more complex. She could no more help it than the tree outside her window could stop growing. “Hey, I’ve got something to tell you— Li Hanyi,” wouldn’t get him to stop by? Perhaps talking about her day would do the trick. “Today I sorted through mugwort. Are you ever coming back?— Li Hanyi,” didn’t get his attention either. She tried poetry. “If you have friends who know your heart, Distance cannot keep you apart, — Li Hanyi.” Poetry was to no avail. Months passed and eventually, Li Hanyi determined that he wasn’t reading them at all. With that knowledge in mind, she was free to write him whatever she felt like. Recipes for new kinds of pills and muscle balms, fragments about how her day would have been better if she could spar with him just one more time. She cut up the monster parts he had given her and had them made into all kinds of things. Li Hanyi carved her own hairpin out of some horrifying snake’s jaw bone, the hollow venom ducts perfect for storing a spare needle. She loaded it with poison, the end safely corked off so that she would always have a weapon on hand. That seemed like something Liu Feng would appreciate. She had even used part of the snake’s original venom in the mix. You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author. He didn’t answer that letter either. Li Hanyi came o the inevitable conclusion that he didn’t care, and so she began using him as a personal diary. Dear Diary became replaced with Dear Liu Feng. As far as she knew, he tossed every letter into a campfire as kindling. Unkindly, she wondered if he would even know half the characters she used to describe her day-to-day life. Her shidi certainly never mentioned that Liu Feng was particularly thrilled to get her letters. He had kindly offered to deliver them all for her when he went off the peak to gather more plants, but never had much to say about his shixiong’s letters other than that he had delivered them. Months of contrite daily letters convinced her shizun that she was truly sorry about what she had done. After all, all the heartfelt apologies in the world mattered little if the recipient didn’t want to hear them. She was free to move about the peak as she pleased, even to leave it if she wished. Li Hanyi was even eligible to join the next Immortal Alliance Conference. Seven days of showing off as one of her peak’s best and, if not most eccentric, certainly one of the hardest working disciples. Something about that niggled at the back of her mind, some facet of something plot-related that must have been important. A thing with a name in Airplane’s work? It must have a plot attached to it like a bad cold. The only problem was that with so many plots begun and discarded like old tofu? Li Hanyi didn’t remember what was so significant about this particular Immortal Alliance Conference. It wasn’t the one the that protagonist would collect a bunch of wives in. But something about the timing was just odd. There had to be something about this, she just couldn’t place what was so special about it. *** Yue Yuan was a terrible patient. He was polite enough to cover a world of sins, but he was rapidly shaping up to be more irritating than Liu Feng ever was. Where Liu Feng refused to ever leave, Yue Yuan refused to go over to Qian Cao unless he was physically forced to go by his shijies and shixiongs. Unlike Liu Feng, Yue Yuan had real injuries that needed tending by a medical professional. He wouldn’t say where his injuries came from, but it was obviously not from the normal course of training. Yue Yuan very clearly was overworking himself. Something rode him like a dog to near exhaustion and beyond frequently enough that he had bags under his eyes and desperation in every word. It was enough to make him try to leave the clinic with half his bandages done, claiming that his treatment was enough for the likes of him. Li Hanyi only knew this through the rumor mill and the good old-fashioned information-gathering skills of the bored rank and file. Yue Yuan was a problem patient, and she was almost an expert in handling problem patients. She really should have seen it coming. “Li Hanyi, you have a new patient.” She loved every time one of her fellow disciples decided that they no longer wanted the stress of her newest headache and would pass that patient off like expired makeup. They wrapped it up beautifully, describing them as the greatest vote of confidence in her skills. Normally this conversation would happen right before she opened the door to see yet another Bai Zhan disciple trying to escape out of the window. A series of high speed acupuncture needles to the backside tended to dissuade even the hardest headed idiot, and Yue Yuan was no exception. He clapped his hands to his bottom with a yelp even as Li Hanyi turned to her fellow with a raised eyebrow and slowly falling arm. Yue Yuan, the rising star of their sect, was just as easy to disable as any other problem patient. While he winced and plucked needles from his lower robes, Li Hanyi sighed. “Many thanks for shixiong’s esteem. This shidi will do this shidi’s utmost to ensure this patient is well cared for.” It was a very kind and poetic way of saying the Li Hanyi was prepared to use methods better suited to Bai Zhan than the hallowed halls of healing. She bowed politely and her shixiong sniffed, clearly taken aback that his attempt to make Li Hanyi miserable hadn’t worked. She waited until her shixiong left in a huff before locking the door behind him. “Sit down before you hurt yourself,” she drawled. “Don’t give me more work than you already have.” Yue Yuan blinked at how swiftly this childlike doctor went from being a polite and simpering soul to a cranky and no-nonsense one. “Ah, begging shimei’s pardon—.” She had a fist full of needles before she even thought about it. “Call this shixiong a shimei one more time and see what happens,” she barked out. He wasn’t technically incorrect, but her great plan to avoid the harem route relied solely on her ability to convince her sect that she was, in fact, a man. Besides which, this Yue Yuan was being staggeringly disrespectful to someone who had been cultivating far long than he had and was already a full-fledged member of their peak. “Have some respect for your seniors.” Yue Yuan, in defiance to all common sense, gave a broad grin at that. “Ah, my apologies, shixiong. I hadn’t expected someone of your youthful beauty to be my doctor.” She wanted to bathe in steel wool and shuddered instead. Clearly, this Yue Yuan was used to placating the eternally prissy and scathing. His skill probably wouldn’t have caught her attention if she wasn’t already on a hair trigger to avoid whatever weird plots the System wanted to throw her into next. [Mission “Currying Favor” has now begun. Successful completion will award 300 B-Points and 100 ??? points.] Like that. Yue Yuan was somehow tied to a subplot like a particularly onerous canker sore. And, to make matters worse, he seemed to come with that irritating ??? score attached. The System like to give those out like candy with certain quests, usually right before it asked if she wanted to activate the Otome Genre Change reward from years ago. She squinted as she peered suspiciously at Yue Yuan. No, poor Ning Yingying didn’t need this big brother type as a potential capture target. Li Hanyi wouldn’t be activating that reward for this guy either. She’d be a terrible shijie if she did. “Uh-huh,” she said flatly. “A good attempt at flattery. So, are you going to tell me why you’re here today or will I have to do a full exam to find out the details?” He seemed taken aback, but covered it up swiftly. “Ah, I—,” he stammered out. “Nothing?” “Congratulations. Full exam it is.” Oh good, her favorite thing: completely invasive medical examinations. Ancient fantasy Chinese medicine was completely without modern amenities like MRIs, x-ray machines, lubricants for rectal exams, all of the best things. Instead, cultivators made do with checking meridian points for qi deviation. Li Hanyi had been informed on multiple occasions that her qi wasn’t the most pleasant experience on the Earthly Plane. The metal aspect of her yin energy tended to feel cold and sterile to the warmer male counterpart, probably because she wanted nothing to do with anything male. It was like wearing a permanently cold stethoscope, never caring to warm it, and slapping it onto someone’s bare wrist for hours at a time. This was a fact that tended to make Liu Feng resist even the most cursory examinations. Yue Yuan was not immune to the effect, and the teenager yelped again as Li Hanyi pressed her qi to his. “That’s cold!” She nodded, eyes drifting shut as she followed the flow of qi to each obstruction. “So I’ve been told. Make do, no one else is going to check for me.” Needle after needle went into the worst of the mess as Li Hanyi did her best to undo the heaps of damage he had done to himself with overwork and too much training. “Is this really necessary?” “Do you train every day and night until you pass out from exhaustion? Yes? Then yes, this is necessary.” It was entirely rhetorical, as even a cursory touch of her qi to his revealed that as a fact of his life. She’d spent long enough dealing with Liu Feng’s level of nonsense that Li Hanyi could recognize qi exhaustion a peak away. He tried to chuckle and meekly rub at the back of his head but was stopped by the veritable porcupine’s worth of needles sprouting from his arms. “Ow! Is it supposed to burn?” Li Hanyi looked up from channeling her qi through her needles. “You want to be in and out of here, yes? Then the quick and dirty way it is.” Bolstering his qi with her own was something similar to slapping scaffolding on a crumbling building, but it did the job. “I’m using my own qi to hold up yours. Light training of the scholarly variety for three days until it wears off.” “You can do that?” He looked gobsmacked at her explanation. “Willing donor, anything is possible,” she murmured as she wrapped up her work. “I don’t recommend trying this with anyone outside of Qian Cao unless you want to go into Dual Cultivation or find a cauldron. Not that you’re going to need it again. Now are you, Yue-shidi?” Yue Yuan nodded furiously. “No, no I wouldn’t waste your time like that, shixiong.” She gave him an acerbic look. “Because you won’t need it at all. If you get this bad again? I won’t make this gentle.” He gulped even as she gave him a wicked grin. “Understood, shixiong.”