There was a limit to how much nonsense Li Hanyi was willing to tolerate.
Liu Feng was rapidly reaching the point where her tolerance wouldn’t be enough to keep them friends. Not only did he keep showing up to pummel her into the ground, but now he wanted to take her on a field trip to do the same in public. To make matters worse, he wanted to do it at night.
She had no idea how he managed to get Wang Huo’s permission to take her out of the sect. Li Hanyi had a sneaking suspicion that Wang Huo had agreed solely as revenge for springing the Brothers Pang on him. Or, for all she knew, he had agreed because he thought the experience would benefit her education. More likely it was both.
No matter how it had managed to happen, it ended with Li Hanyi on the back of a horse, clinging to Liu Feng’s back, and terrified out of her mind.
They couldn’t fly on their swords to the village, oh no, and neither of them was important enough to take a horse-drawn carriage. Riding their swords would have used qi, qi that they would need to fight whatever monster plagued this village. And, unfortunately for Li Hanyi, she had never learned how to ride a horse.
The Bai Zhan disciples she accompanied were very careful not to say a single word about it. Li Hanyi got the feeling that they didn’t like her enough to tease her and that Liu Feng might have something to do with it. She wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that he had threatened to fight anyone who had anything to say to her at all.
She didn’t fit in with the cheerful group. Some of them were on foot, some rode horses of their own. They chattered as they traveled, clearly used to this sort of thing, and Li Hanyi was reminded that she was the outsider looking in.
Liu Feng didn’t seem to mind. In fact, he actively encouraged his fellow disciples to leave Li Hanyi alone. Every time someone worked up the courage to come near, he scowled and kicked their shared horse in the side to make it speed up, carrying Li Hanyi away in one swift motion. “Don’t talk to them. They’re not worth your time.”
“How would you know,” she protested. “They could know how to unlock my sword’s potential. There has to be some trick we haven’t tried.” Anything to avoid facing an unknown monster by herself. There were too many chances for her to mess up and die miserably for Li Hanyi to be truly comfortable with even the idea of this night hunt. With her luck, the target would be some ridiculously powerful monster with more heads than she cared to count and a temper to match.
In the meantime, she was being shepherded around the countryside like a young master on a spring excursion. Liu Feng didn’t seem to mind that Li Hanyi had no idea how to ride a horse, only grunted and pulled her into the saddle behind him. The horse didn’t seem to care, merely shuffled in place to get used to the weight before gamely trotting on. The only one who seemed to be bothered by any of it at all was Li Hanyi.
Then again, everyone else didn’t have a text box floating in front of their faces. Said box proudly proclaimed the start of a new side-quest, which Li Hanyi was putting off for as long as possible.
[Side-quest “The Ghost of Xiaolian” is now available. Successful completion will award the advanced weapon skill “???”. Do you wish to accept this quest?]
Whatever it was, there was no way that Li Hanyi was going to just let Liu Feng be right. He could have been wrong, that would have been perfectly fine with her, but instead, he was going to be right about awakening her sword’s true potential. The worst part about it was that the only options the System gave her were “Yes” or “YES”. Experience had taught her that ignoring the box for long enough would end in the quest auto-accepting itself anyway, so she didn’t feel the need to gratify the System with a response.
The box blinked furiously as the System tried futilely to get her attention. No, thanks but no thanks, she didn’t want to start talking to herself or hitting the air while surrounded by meat-heads from Bai Zhan. The System could wait until she was alone to force her into another quest. The box blinked again and again, and she merely buried her face into Liu Feng’s back to avoid it.
He grunted, swaying with the horse’s movement. Liu Feng rolled his shoulders slightly to get her to stop digging her mask into the space between his shoulder blades. “Are you crying?”
“What,” she replied, confused as to how that could even be a question. “No! Why would I be crying?” He was making no sense at all.
Liu Feng shrugged, squishing her face into his back as his muscles flexed. “I thought you might have gotten homesick. You’ve never left the peak, after all.”
Li Hanyi pulled back just enough to punch him lightly between his shoulders. “I wasn’t born there, you know. Besides, we haven’t even been gone for a day yet.” Homesick after less than six hours? Did he think she was a toddler? The idea of being homesick held zero appeal to Li Hanyi.
All she got back for her sass was a low chuckle. “Then are you frightened of horses?”
She couldn’t say no. Li Hanyi had never, in either of her lives, been this close to an animal this size. Sure, she could zip around on a magical sword hundreds of feet in the air and not worry about going splat on the ground below. But that was her sword, the manifestation of her own qi and potential. A horse? A horse had a mind all of its own.
“You never bothered to learn how to ride a horse.” He said it like it was a fact of life, the logical conclusion after watching her flounder. “I’ll teach you.”
“Liu Feng. Your version of teaching is dangerous.” She’d rather eat her own robes than let him carry through with whatever training regime he could come up with. “I’ll take lessons when we get back.” There was a peak dedicated to just beasts, spiritual and otherwise, that raised and trained Cang Qiong’s various beasts of burden. Surely, they offered lessons for any cultivators who cared to learn how to ride.
“My way is faster,” Liu Fang sulked, or as close to it as the permanently stoic man could be.
A nearby Bai Zhan disciple paled. That was all Li Hanyi needed to see to know that she was right. Whatever method he used would be nothing but terrifying and dangerous. Liu Feng was the type to teach a child to swim by shoving them into the deep end of a pond. No, she’d not take him up on the offer.
Li Hanyi shuddered. “Faster doesn’t mean safer. It’s bad enough that I’m humoring you for this night hunt. I’ll let a professional horse rider teach me, thanks.”
The Bai Zhan disciple nodded frantically to her, mouthing the words “good choice” up at her. He plodded along on foot, using cultivation-given speed to keep up with the horses trotting along. Most of the Bai Zhan disciples had chosen to go on foot, leaving the horses for the higher-ranked and thus more important cultivators.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
Li Hanyi was the only one sharing a horse. She was also, in the most annoying way possible, the smallest one there. The disciples she hadn’t terrorized enough were laughingly starting to call her their newest shidi, bold as anything as they all but began to turn her into their mascot after that conversation. She couldn’t even bring herself to complain. Not when they started passing her snacks when Liu Feng wasn’t looking.
***
Cultivators of their level did not need to eat or sleep. They could and did exist solely on the ambient spiritual energy of their surroundings. A horse, on the other hand, could not. So, each night they were forced to stop and camp to rest and tend to the horses.
Li Hanyi did not have anything to do with said horses. As the one and only doctor on the night hunt, the only thing she was responsible for was checking on the Bai Zhan disciples. For such large and loud men, they seemed to relish the opportunity to be cared for by Qian Cao’s most reclusive member.
They shoved at each other, fighting to get in line and for who was next. She solved the dilemma by staring blanking into space for a long moment, inundated by calls of “me first” and “no, me first”, then calling for her trump card. “Liu Feng? Are you Bai Zhan types always so rowdy?”
He looked up from brushing their horse down for the evening, already frowning at the mention of his name. “Just knock them out if they being too loud. Or just leave them as they are and go to sleep.” He was far too calm about sentencing his fellows to her needles.
Li Hanyi simply shrugged and turned back to look at the suddenly quiet crowd of Bai Zhan disciples before her. “You heard your shixiong. Organized and quiet line or I’m allowed to start knocking people out.” She grinned viciously and the older disciples started to pale.
“Li-shidi, you wouldn’t, would you?” The kind disciple from earlier pouted down at her. “Liu-shixiong is just playing around.”
She had no remorse in pegging him right between the eyes and watching him freeze in place. “Oh, no. I absolutely will,” Li Hanyi deadpanned, face unchanging even as the Bai Zhan disciples came to the swift conclusion that no, she wasn’t playing around.
The cute little shidi on loan from Qian Cao was the same monster who had raided their peak all those years ago and single-handedly thrown their peak into absolute chaos. A few of them, vaguely familiar in that distant way all former patients became, blanched as they mentally connected the dots. To a man, the Bai Zhan disciples silenced and stepped back.
Liu Feng snorted. “Guess their injuries were minor after all.”
“Don’t be mean to your poor shidis, Liu Feng.” Every part of her wanted to laugh at the Bai Zhan disciples. Instead, she scolded Liu Feng for picking on them.
“If they have time to whine, then they have time to train,” he replied, reaching for his sword even as he stalked towards the rapidly paling crowd. Quick as anything, the crowd dispersed, claiming all manner of chores and tasks that needed to be done around the camp. Liu Feng turned to Li Hanyi and gave the ghost of a shrug. He merely looked expectantly at her, and she shook her head.
“The whole point of going this way is to conserve our energy.” Li Hanyi began packing her needles back into her sleeves. “Sparring defeats the entire purpose of that.” She sniffed, turning her nose up at the idea. Mostly, she just didn’t want to be stomped into the ground where Bai Zhan disciples could see.
As the precious little shidi, the only one to tame Liu Feng, Li Hanyi had been given a spot to sleep by the one campfire. Now, no one would contest that spot for fear of being stabbed with mysterious needles. Either way, she spread out her blanket roll with the confidence that she would remain unbothered in her sleep. No one would discover her secret because no one wanted to get so close to the Mad Doctor of Qian Cao.
No one, that is, except for Liu Feng. He spread out his own bedroll right next to hers with a grunt. “Don’t hog the fire.” They might be cultivators, but every bit of qi they used to regulate their temperatures mattered at their level. What was the harm in sharing the fire? They were both male, after all.
Li Hanyi didn’t get much sleep that night. She lay still on her back, meditating, and rose before the sun to quietly traipse off into the woods to relieve her bladder and change her clothes where no one was looking. A branch breaking in the distance had her flurrying into motion, shoving her arms through her outer robe sleeves.
Liu Feng’s appearance shouldn’t have surprised her. For all of his gruff demeanor, he liked to make sure that Li Hanyi hadn’t wandered off and gotten lost. Or, even worse, tried to flee back to her safe mountain peak. He let out a soft sigh when he saw her, mostly dressed and red-faced before him. “Don’t wander off.” Unspoken was the threat that he would have to hunt her down if she did.
Li Hanyi folded her robes closed and belted them shut with a scowl. “I can’t even have a moment’s peace?”
“This is a night hunt, not a summer trip,” he countered. “We don’t know the target yet.” And if they didn’t know, who knew if Li Hanyi would be eaten or not by their target.
She gulped. “Point taken. Stay with the rest of the group.” She did not think herself immune to danger. Far from it, in fact. As the childhood friend of many named characters, she was first on the chopping block for dramatic backstory building. One foot out of line and Lie Feng would have a new regret to fuel his need to grow stronger.
Liu Feng nodded. He jerked his head back towards the camp as the first light of dawn began to break over the horizon. “Come. The others hunted a Horned Rabbit for breakfast.”
“Is that even edible?” Just because a monster had an animal name as part of its name didn’t mean that it was that animal. A rabbit and a Horned Rabbit were two different things.
***
She would never be able to eat rabbit again. Not after knowing the succulent complexities of Horned Rabbit, the way the fat was in the perfect marbling ratio to make the meat tender and moist. She’d never forgive the smug look on Liu Feng’s face after the first bite made her moan and the empty skewer had her looking for more.
They’d cooked it over the fire without even a trace of salt, with nothing but the meat’s own flavor to make it palatable, and somehow it was the best meal she had ever had. No, she’d never be able to eat regular rabbit again. Even thinking about the smoky flavor had her drooling.
Liu Feng tossed her the eponymous horn with a glance at her mask. “Have a new hairpin,” he grunted. Clearly, he was jealous of the gift he had never thought of and wanted to outdo the mysterious giver of such an expensive gift. Liu Feng never did anything in halves, and so Li Hanyi had a sinking feeling she’d be getting fed and given all kinds of monster parts for quite some time.
In another world, the spiral-shaped and vaguely opalescent horn might not have been out of place on a narwhal. Lacking suck creatures, but not about to lose to nature’s complexity, Airplane had taken inspiration to make his monsters that much more believable. She almost regretted not paying as much attention to the flora and fauna as Cucumber-laoshi, but she had been to the aquarium and zoo enough times to be able to recognize where the parts had come from.
Horned Rabbits were rabbits with horns. Much like how a narwhal was a weird dolphin with a horn, not like how western unicorns were horses with horns pasted on their foreheads. The Horned Rabbit’s horn had jutted out from its lower jaw, an overgrown tooth that worked it’s way up and over its head. Apparently, it used the whole of its body to jab the thing into its prey, but Li Hanyi didn’t care much about the particulars.
She cared that it glimmered, was the length of her forearm once she ignored the curled part at the end, and twisted prettily in a tight pattern. Once she spent enough time carving it with her qi, it would be a solid and pretty addition to her sparse hairpin collection. “Thank you, Liu Feng,” she grinned back gratefully.
He grunted in reply, quietly embarrassed at his gift’s success. But Liu Feng was even more pleased when she neatly shoved it into her sleeve pouch. “Good. Now let me show you how to saddle a horse.”
Li Hanyi rolled her eyes but followed after him anyway. “You just don’t want to do it yourself.”
His quicksilver grin was all the answer she needed.