She shouldn’t have agreed to fight him.

Li Hanyi needed to remember that the next time Liu Feng got that particular look in his eye. An excited War God was a War God that broke bones and didn’t pull his punches. She hurt down to her marrow, a giant mess that only improved after several pills and an extremely hot bath. Neither of those things would help her hand heal faster, but the rest of her felt better.

But, most importantly, she had her friend back.

What were a few broken bones and bruises to an immortal cultivator in the face of that? Surely he felt the same if his satisfied grin was any judge. Even better, he returned the next day for another spar.

“You’ve gotten rusty,” he said blithely. “Do you not train when I’m not here to make you?”

She looked at him from over the edge of a particularly old treatise on qi deviations in the young and snorted. “Doctor, remember? I have no need for Bai Zhan cultivator training. Basic self-defense is all we really need on Qian Cao.”

It was sad and yet true: doctors only needed to defend themselves and their patients. Qian Cao style martial arts were mostly exercises to keep their bodies limber. She might as well be off doing tai chi in the park with the elderly.

He scowled. “What was your plan for the Immortal Alliance Conference? To self-defense it to death?”

“You do know Qian Cao doesn’t go to the actual events, right?” She drawled, shoving her book into the pouch sewn into her sleeve. “We get the unenviable task of coordinating relief with the other medical sects and rogue cultivators.”

Liu Feng grimaced. “That’s a waste of your training. Enter with me.”

Li Hanyi pressed the fingers of her unbroken hand to her nose. “Liu Feng. You just want an excuse to show off. If I go, there’s no merit for my peak. We like just being neutral medical professionals.”

“If you go, I’ll give you a letter for every monster you kill or match you fight.” He was quick to figure out that he had a useful bartering method and no longer needed to force Li Hanyi to participate when he could just dangle a letter over her head. Liu Feng didn’t lie. If he said it was up for an offer, then he meant it.

That didn’t mean she had to like it. “What, are we children now? Bribes for good behavior?” But the allure of keeping Liu Feng from reading her diary letters couldn’t be denied. “Fine. One letter for every fight. No takebacks.”

Liu Feng’s smile was blinding. No more than a quirk of his lips, it transformed his face from its surly demeanor to a veritable springtime of youth. “Done. Now, get up. I want to see if you can throw those needles with one hand and still hit a moving target.”

She took back everything nice she had thought about Liu Feng. He was a charlatan, a slave driver, the worst of the worst. At twenty paces, Li Hanyi could hit a leaf falling off a tree and he knew that. He just wanted to make her fight him with only one functional hand. “You battle maniac. I know you know what a recovery time is. We just sparred yesterday. You can wait a week.”

“You’re rusty. I want to see you fight in the Conference at your absolute best. Give me a challenge.”

There it was, the true reason he wanted her to get in all this practice: Liu Feng wanted a rival. If he couldn’t find one while roaming across ancient fantasy China, then he would make one. Sure, all that time without their usual sparring hadn’t done her any favors. But that didn’t mean he needed to coax her into things like a child refusing to eat their vegetables.

“Liu Feng. Has anyone ever told you that you have a problem?” Friends didn’t let friends harbor delusions, and this was quite the delusion to have. “Wanting to fight this much isn’t, you know, normal.”

“It is on Bai Zhan,” he said, both missing the point and refusing to think about it.

She hummed, flipping a needle between her fingers just to see him flinch and watch it warily. “And how is Bai Zhan these days? Figured out a head disciple yet?”

“Oh. Me.”

Liu Feng was a master of understatement, dropping bombshells on people without even having the decency to blink. If she ever doubted that Liu Feng was going to become Liu Qingge? This alone would have killed that particular delusion. She remembered how Bai Zhan picked its head disciple, a literal tournament, and she wondered if that was what he had been doing for all that time he wasn’t talking to her.

She’d never ask.

“Well, congratulations. Did you have fun?” She let the needle spin to a stop in her outstretched palm. He twitched and she gave him a wicked grin. “More fun than fighting me?”

He leaned away, just a hair, and frowned. “It was easy. I see not how you managed to raid Bai Zhan.”

“Hey! That was years ago. Surely they’ve trained since then.” His poor peak hadn’t been prepared for the advent of its War God. She wondered when he would finally pick up the nickname, what impressive deed he would do to earn such a title that reached beyond just their sect. “Someone had to have impressed you.”

The look he gave her was strong enough to make vinegar. “One of them tripped over his own sword.” He sounded like a child who went to a theme park and discovered all of the rides were closed. “Took him out with one hit.”

Li Hanyi bit her lip to keep from laughing at his put out tone. Of course, some random rank and file person wasn’t going to be able to keep up with Liu Feng. A god of war was a god of war, no matter what age. It was that poor soul’s bad luck to be matched up with Liu Feng without the heaps of training he put in. Li Hanyi was only just able to keep up because she focused solely on avoiding him, not on fighting toe-to-to. One lucky hit was all she needed and she could barely manage that now.

“You broke his pride and told him how to block that move, didn’t you,” she finally managed to get out with as much calm as she could force. Liu Feng did not understand how other people could be so bad at fighting.

“No. He should have known better,” he flatly replied. “A Bai Zhan disciple should have better form.” Liu Feng eyed her needle, wary still, and glared at it until she put it back into her pouch. “You have better form than most of my opponents.”

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

Now that she could be proud of. Li Hanyi puffed out her chest and grinned. “Of course! I was hand-picked and trained by the great Liu Feng himself!”

Liu Feng snorted and crossed his arms over his chest, fingers tapping idly. “The raw materials were good. I just worked with what I had.”

How very modest of him. Someone had clearly given Liu Feng grief over his training of Li Hanyi, because it sounded like he was just repeating an argument he had heard a hundred times before. False modesty did not suit Lui Feng. It made him seem stilted and wrong compared to his usual honest bluntness.

“You went home and talked to your mother, didn’t you,” she drawled.

He grimaced in turn. “Was it that obvious?” A proud and honorable fight addict like Liu Feng made a poor parody of a demure scholar. The only time that Liu Feng ever managed to bring himself to speak like that was after prolonged contact with his mother and her lectures.

Liu Feng was unique among his Bai Zhan peers in that, as the son of noble cultivators, he spent more time off his peak with his family. The Liu family did not normally join sects, and they liked to make sure that Liu Feng wasn’t regretting his choices in life. Realistically, his mother mostly wanted to make sure that her only son wasn’t disgracing the family name.

Even stranger, Liu Feng’s mother seemed to actively endorse his friendship with Li Hanyi.

Not because of any political or financial motivation, oh no. Her support of their friendship was because Li Hanyi was the first friend that Liu Feng had ever tried to make for himself and had last longer than a year. Li Hanyi had not, against all common sense, done her level best to flee from Liu Feng’s particularly violent brand of friendship.

Mama Liu reminded Liu Feng of this constantly.

For her part, Li Hanyi was content with being that nice young man who never came to visit. Mama Liu was a terrifying prospect that she was singularly unequipped to handle. No, it was best to let Liu Feng handle his own mother.

She stared at him, speechless for a long moment, as she contemplated the politest way to inform him that he was full of it. “Liu Feng. Were you also, perhaps, hit on the head during the selection battles?”

He snorted. “They’d have to figure out the basics first.” Liu Feng was always so confident in his abilities that it would have been a flaw if it wasn’t so accurate. His frank assessment of their skills was that of a genius of both hard work and talent, looking down upon the likes of mere mortals. “Unlikely.”

There was their ever confident Liu Feng, soon to become Liu Qingge, War God of Bai Zhan.

All she could do was laugh at his audacity. How blunt, how honest, how absolutely inhuman. His standards were so lofty as to be impossible. She shook her head. “I weep for the future of Bai Zhan if that’s how you feel about your fellow disciples.”

Liu Feng grunted and pointed at the remains of her lunch. “Are you going to finish that?”

She pushed the little plate of steamed pork dumplings at him with a sigh. “Go ahead. I can’t eat when you’re about to punch me around the courtyard anyway.”

He gobbled a dumpling down in a single bite, licking the tips of his fingers afterward. “If you dodged faster, then I wouldn’t hit you.”

Dodging Liu Feng was the equivalent of dodging a rampaging bear, its claws outstretched as it tried to strike her head from her shoulders. The fact that she could dodge him even the little bit she did was a minor miracle. Years of training her speed and reflexes paid off little by little until she had come this far and was deemed competent enough to stand in his shadow.

She stabbed him in the thigh with her needle, smiling serenely all the while. “Dodge that better.”

Liu Feng, as it turned out, had yet to develop an immunity to this particular paralytic blend. He dropped like a rock in a still pond, a puppet with its strings cut. She took her plate back, stepped neatly over his still body, and went back inside her clinic. “Come back when my hand heals in a week,” she called back over her shoulder.

***

Preparing for the Immortal Alliance Conference wasn’t as easy as simply clapping her hands and saying she would go. Each peak limited how many inner and outer disciples were allowed to go. In order to send only their best and brightest, each peak then devised its own qualification exams. Qian Cao, despite the peak’s overall distaste for the practical portions of whatever that Immortal Alliance Conference’s host had planned, did send a small dozen disciples and six elders to help. Experienced medical professionals of Qian Cao’s caliber tended to be in short supply, after all.

It made sense. Most people would rather learn how to stab someone through the spleen with a spiritual sword than, for instance, learn how to properly prepare a tincture to bolster’s the body’s yang energies. Being a medical professional was one of the least exciting career choices a cultivator had. The only one more boring was whatever accounting magic the likes of An Ding got up to.

[Congratulations! The joint mission “Save Mobei-jun” has been completed successfully. You have been awarded 1,000 B-Points for the completion of a core background mission.]

Good for her, but ultimately unimportant. The points would not help her pass this exam and convince her shizun to let her go to the Immortal Alliance Conference. Then again, she did have two years to figure out how to convince him.

[Would you like to accept the optional character setting mission “The Immortal Alliance Conference”? A secret route is available upon completion of necessary side objectives. Further, successful completion will result in the awarding of points based on character satisfaction levels.]

She had never poked a ‘yes’ button so fast in her life. The little window shook for a moment before flashing, blinking out of existence before she could change her mind. Not that Li Hanyi was going to. Her letters depended on her participation in whatever farce of an event the conference turned out to be. The more she did, the more letters she got back.

Congratulations, System. There was finally optional side-content that Li Hanyi wanted to complete of her own volition. How very unlike her character settings. Now, if only she could figure out why this particular Immortal Alliance Conference came complete with a side mission. It even had a bonus character unlock and varying completion rewards.

It was suspicious, to say the least. But then Li Hanyi remembered that somewhere in that pile of letters was at least one where she had referred to Liu Feng as her dearest friend. There was no way she would have thick enough skin to withstand the fallout of that particular missive. She could just imagine the teasing from Bai Zhan once that got out.

No, she did not want that, not at all.

As a child of modern China, a graduate of a decent college, and a proud member of the 996 lifestyle, there was no way that Li Hanyi would back down from a simple exam. Two years to study for one exam? An absolute luxury she would take full and shameless advantage of.

Two years would pass in the blink of any for an immortal cultivator. But Li Hanyi had the advantage of modern study methods, a shidi who wanted to get back in her good graces, and one soon-to-be War God to train her in mind, body, and spirit. There was no way she would mess this up.

But, just in case…

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>>User001: You mean the one where Shen Qingque kills his master or the next one where Luo Binghe starts getting his wives and then shoved into the Abyss?

Oh. So this was the conference where the scum villain made his appearance and went from rogue cultivator to the newest member of Cang Qiong. Well, wasn’t that just lovely? No surprises about who the secret character would be. The scum villain, a man destined to become a human stick for his crimes against the protagonist, wasn’t exactly the sort of person Li Hanyi wanted to have as one of Ning Yingying’s potential capture targets.

Somehow, she’d need to convince him to keep his hands and intentions to himself. Hitting children wasn’t exactly manners befitting a teacher, let alone a peak lord of Shen Qingque’s caliber.