The future Mobei Jun was not the talkative type. This was Li Hanyi’s only solace in the weeks since the midnight delivery of his gifts. The number of people who knew her secret had increased by one and nothing had changed. Nothing needed to, not when the people who knew tended to keep to themselves.

It didn’t mean she needed to like it. In fact, Li Hanyi hated that three people now knew she was cross-dressing in order to avoid being married off. But none of the three were of the mind to do anything with that knowledge, so she remained as safe as she was before.

The hairpin stayed in its box, shoved safely under her bed. One day, years and decades away, she would be free to wear it in public. Until then, she’d have to content herself with wearing it only with her door and windows locked in the quiet darkness where no one could see it.

Life moved on in a semblance of normality. She wore her new mask, thanking Shang Fenhua for his kindness, and gradually the rumors of her disfigurement dwindled. Something pretty was always preferred over something unsightly.

But the rumor mill always craved something new to mill over, and if Li Hanyi was no longer a target? It needed something else.

***

Yue Yuan was officially her least favorite patient.

No one else tested her patience like this. No one else required her to secretly pack a pouch full of supplies in the middle of the night and hop on her sword to fly off like a thief in the night. No one else made her have to do house calls.

Apparently, Yue Yuan had finally tested her sect leader’s patience and broken it. He’d gotten himself beaten badly for it, then thrown into the sect’s spiritual caves to meditate on his defeat. The rumor mill was abuzz with speculation on exactly what had happened, but Li Hanyi didn’t particularly care. What mattered was that he’d ended up horribly battered and his wounds left to fester.

[Warning: core character details of “Yue Qingyuan” must be preserved.]

“The hell they do. You want me to go against every tenet of Qian Cao and leave my patient intentionally crippled?” This high in the air, there was no one to hear her argue with the System. “Then you shouldn’t have put me in Qian Cao.”

[Life bond with the spiritual sword is required for “Yue Qingyuan” character details. Failure to follow will be penalized.]

So he had to be bound to his sword, stuck cultivating in a cave for a year. Fine, she could work with that. The specific details of just how he was bound and how much of his life was spent every time he drew his sword were never actually explained. For all anyone knew, Yue Qingyuan could lose months instead of years for every time he swung his sword.

Why that even mattered when they were immortal cultivators was beyond Li Hanyi’s expertise. What was losing a day, month, year, when the whole point was to ascend to the heavens? The drama of it was what mattered, not the actual effects.

He needed to forge his sword wrong. Fine, Li Hanyi couldn’t help with that anyway. She barely remembered how she got her own. The System had nothing to worry about on that front. Let Yue Yuan mess up his cultivation for all she cared. But she’d treated him too many times to not worry about him keeling over dead in the caves somewhere.

Li Hanyi didn’t care what he did after, but she was going to make sure that the future leader of her sect didn’t get some awful physical defect out of the whole affair. How would it reflect on her sect if their leader had aching bones because no one treated his injuries? So much for the fabled medical prowess of Qian Cao.

The System could shove it. Her job was clear, System be damned, and there was no way she was going to fail one of her patients just because some faceless automated text box told her not to go. She’d send the bill to her shizun to go over, then send it on to An Ding for processing. House calls like this weren’t free but a lucrative opportunity.

A text box blinked in front of her. [Core chracter settings must be preserved. Failure to abide by plot will result in the deduction of 10,000 B-Points.]

That had her stopping in midair, resettling herself on her blae so she could read the latest bit of absolute nonsense. “Fine. So he has to mess it up. I can still do basic first aid so he doesn’t die before he even so much as thinks about meditating for his sword.” Dying was counterintuitive to those precious character settings. “You’re making me waste time he doesn’t have.”

The text box blinked angrily at her. [“Yue Qingyuan” must be bound to his sword and spend his life force with each use.]

She clicked her tongue angrily. “So you’ve said. That doesn’t change the fact that he’s in there, slowly bleeding to death. His master was probably very thorough when he threw him in there to die.” Li Hanyi wanted to tear out her hair. “Is there anything in the original plot that truly necessitates this level of cruelty?”

[User002 is permitted limited action in this instance. Failure to abide will result in the deduction of 10,000 B-Points.]

“Limited action? I’ll take it. That’s enough to keep him alive.” Her flight was nothing short of desperate as she streaked across the sky. She was only permitted a small amount of assistance, and oh, Li Hanyi was determined to capitalize on it.

Li Hanyi had never actually been to Qiong Ding Peak or its much-lauded Ling Xi Caves. She was neither mad from qi deviations nor so morally bankrupt as to be a problem. That didn’t mean that she didn’t know where said caves were if only to avoid them.

It wasn’t as if they were particularly hidden either.

Qiong Ding was in the middle of Cang Qiong, the highest peak, and the most ostentatious. It was impossible to miss. The Ling Xi Caves weren’t even all that well guarded, not when all it took was a look at her uniform and panicked face to get her in.

The rumor mill had done its job and done it well. Li Hanyi’s existence was near synonymous with problem patients, and Yue Yuan was one massive problem. The guard at the bottom of the path shouted up at her even as she hovered overhead on her sword. “He’s in the middle!” It seemed, contrary to her expectations, that Yue Yuan was rather well liked. “You can go in, shidi, but he can’t come back out unless it’s under his own power.”

Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

Li Hanyi nodded back to the guard in thanks. “Thanking shixiong for his kindness. This one is only here for basic medical necessities.” The System would allow her no more than that.

***

The Ling Xi Caves were so dense with spiritual energy that she gagged on it. She was forced to dismount her blade in the entrance and walk, but that was the least of her problems. Her first order of business was finding her wayward patient in the veritable maze. All the while she stumbled through, Li Hanyi had to fight off the urge to plonk herself down in the path and cultivate on the sheer weight of natural serenity that filled the very air.

This place could and would be the death of her if she didn’t keep her wits about her. It would be so easy to cultivate here, breakthrough to the next stage, and keep cultivating until she would never have to worry about being forced into anyone’s harem at all. She could figure out what her sword could do, refine her fighting technique, meditate on how to bring modern sensibilities to ancient fantasy China.

Nothing would be able to stop her.

Except, of course, the agonized wailing of a broken young man. Yue Yuan’s mournful cries echoed off the stone cave walls, made her ears ring and her heart clench in sympathy. He took his exile poorly, his broken promise even worse. Here, in the cradle of Ling Xi, he would rot until there was no one left to mourn his name. Worst still, Yue Yuan knew he had been left down in the depths to die.

She followed the sound of agony to its source.

Li Hanyi resolved to never speak a word on what she found in the heart of Ling Xi. No one needed to know the truly pitiful sight that the future sect leader made. She might have been callous, but Li Hanyi was not cruel enough to feed this to the rumor mill.

He was a broken mess. Blood dripped from his mouth in great black globs of saliva, splattered down the front of once immaculate robes. His once handsome face looked like it had been slammed and dragged across stone, nose bleeding freely like a fresh wound. Once cheerful eyes were bloodshot and rimmed red from crying, if he could stand to open them at all.

Yue Yuan lay sprawled upon the cave floor, reaching for the xit with bloody hands. The stone bore the marks of where he had tried to pull himself along with broken fingers. His legs twisted at odd angles, likely as broken as the rest of him.

Li Hanyi inhaled sharply. Their sect leader had made his judgement and carried it out with brutal efficiency: Yue Yuan was here to die.

He turned his head towards the sound. “Who’s there,” he managed to spit out, mournful howls replaced with bitter agony.

“Just me. Li Hanyi,” she replied quietly. Her voice shook with a curious mix of indignant rage and sorrow for what she had found. “It’s just me.”

Yue Yuan struggled to pull himself up, not wanting to be seen laid so low by anyone. He moaned with every painful movement. “Xiao-Jiu? Is that you?”

How broken and battered was he that he couldn’t hear her? Oh, how far had he fallen into madness in the quiet darkness? But fixing that was beyond her permitted scope. All she was allowed, on pain of a ten thousand point penalty, was the absolute basics. It wouldn’t anything more than slapping a sliver of duct tape on a leaking dam.

She had to try.

Li Hanyi almost felt bad about paralyzing him with a drug-laced needle to the forehead. Unluckily for him, she hadn’t packed much in the way of painkillers. What treatment she did on his broken body would have to be felt every step of the way. Painkillers of the caliber he needed, after all, went above and beyond the reach of first aid.

He gibbered as she rolled up her sleeves and got to work.

No needles, only her hand on his back as she channeled her qi through his meridians. He coughed up more black blood all down his front as she forced him to sit up. No time to wipe it off, not when she was supposed to be in and out.

She bandaged in a frenzy, slapping as much salve as she could on every open wound. It wasn’t her finest job, nor was it her proudest moment, but it would serve.

Yue Yuan would live to become Yue Qingyuan. That was all that mattered and all she was allowed to do. Whether he believed that the spirit of his beloved Xiao-Jiu was the one who helped him or not, what mattered was that he lived to see them again.

***

Time passed as it wanted, neither too quickly nor too slowly.

For Li Hanyi, it wasn’t enough time.

The Immortal Alliance Conference was just around the corner and all she had to show for it were piles of flash cards and a migraine that wouldn’t quit. Her little shidis took to the idea of study guides and modern note-taking like ducks to water, eating up her knowledge in easily digestible chunks. But still, knowledge itself was useless in ancient fantasy China if one couldn’t be poetic about it.

She was going to fail this exam because she couldn’t wax eloquent on the moon phases required to draw out the maximum amount of yin energy or some other such nonsense. What did it matter that she had more practical knowledge than half her peers when she couldn’t praise the ancestors and recite some strange poem behind the names of the meridians? Who cared that she could nail a fly midair at twenty paces with a single needle when she couldn’t make it look like an elegant dance?

Li Hanyi was unrefined by ancient fantasy China’s standards.

She was generally considered crass and crude by the esteemed members of her peak, not a fellow scholar but easily relied upon to perform various medical tasks her shijies and shixiongs found beneath them. In short, they thought she was stupid and only good for the drudge work they didn’t want to do.

Normally, she was fine with that. She didn’t enter her peak with any delusions of grandeur, not when the System made her one of the nameless and faceless background characters. But her letters wouldn’t be returned if she didn’t participate in the Immortal Alliance Conference as a proper competitor. She had no choice: she had to learn the poetic way of answering questions.

***

Liu Feng stared at her, arms stiff at his sides, and was careful to stand outside of her usual precision needle range. “So. You lace all your needles with monster toxins these days.”

“Only sometimes,” she said with a shrug. “Most of the time, it’s just my qi that does that.” Li Hanyi had trained and trained until she could cut paper with the force of her qi alone, nigh surgical levels of precision making her needles that much more effective.

The twitch of his eyebrow betrayed his annoyance. She might as well have told him that the sky was blue for all the good that did him. “Which would you use to hunt monsters?”

“Both.” Her? Hunt monsters? A laughable idea to say the least. But, if she absolutely had to? She wouldn’t leave anything a chance in thousands to survive the first ten seconds. Venomous as a viper, Li Hanyi relied on the success of the first strike to survive. She might be able to stand against Liu Feng for longer than a breath, but he still wasn’t at his prime. A skilled fighter or particularly angry beast would have her fleeing for the hills. “Absolutely both.”

He hummed. “Sparring isn’t working. I’m taking you on a night hunt.” Liu Feng said it like it was assumed she would just go along with it, that her shizun would simply wave fondly from the gates while she traipsed off into the world to hunt some godsforsaken monster that had decided to snack on a village.

She blinked back at him. “Excuse me? You’re going to do what?”

Liu Feng’s lips twitched in as close to a grin as he ever would. “Take you on a night hunt. There are a few villages that have requests. If spars won’t unlock your potential, perhaps this will.”

“You have got to be kidding me,” she managed after a long moment, staring at him like he had lost all sense. Liu Feng did not make jokes like that, but she could hope that for once he was joking. “What, you’re just going to throw me at a monster and hope for the best?”

The look on his face was that yes, he really did think that. He was really intending to simply throw her to the wolves and hope for the best. “I’ll still be there.” Just in case she was in any mortal peril, not because he was going to actually help with slaying whatever monsters or ghosts were plaguing the villages he brought her to.

Oh, she was going to be in for a time.