Finding Cang Qiong turned out to be ridiculously easy. Aside from the abundance of signs on the road, there was a completely unexpected variable: other children. It was easy to forget just how important Cang Qiong sect was to the cultivation world and just how many children would chop off their own legs to get a chance for greatness. For some, joining a sect was the only way to escape abject poverty and starvation.
The trick, if one could even call it that, was to not go alone. While the truly lucky children were found by wandering cultivators and brought back to become their personal disciples, the rich brats hired guards and travelled in style. Everyone else? They all tried to group up with other children, hitched rides with strangers, or just tried to make it on their own with whoever they accidentally ran into. Li Hanyi was no different.
She followed the roads and signposts religiously, kept her head down, and did her absolute best to become part of the background scenery. But somehow, despite her best efforts, she picked up a shadow. A sticky little shadow, fluffy like a little rabbit, and twice as terrified. Li Hanyi wasn’t cruel enough to turn a scared child away, not when bringing him with her all but guaranteed her success at making it to Cang Qiong in one piece.
Shang Fenhua was destined to become Shang Qinghua, the An Ding Peak Lord. The sticky little rabbit that clung to her side, curried favor with his Han-gege, was going to outrank her. This meant that he absolutely was going to make it to Cang Qiong. All she had to do was follow whatever route Shang Fenhua suggested and keep him from vibrating off into the stratosphere every time something moved in the underbrush. Li Hanyi didn’t even have to feed him, just let him hold onto her ratty sleeves and say something soothing every once in a while.
“Gege, could we go a little slower?” Shang Fenhua whined as they stumbled down the packed dirt road. Neither child was truly used to even the idea of cross-country travel and it was obvious in every blister and bit of sunburned skin. But the little rabbit was clearly worse off than Li Hanyi, the fifth child of rural cabbage farmers.
She spared him a glance over her shoulder and sighed at his ruddy little cheeks and sweaty neck. “If we go any slower we’ll be late. And late means fewer peaks will be there. The more peaks present means the higher our chances of being picked.” They might be blessed with destinies, but they could still fail the first time and have to come back the next time Cang Qiong opened its gates. And, unlike Shang Fenhua, it wasn’t like she was going to be allowed by her family to try again.
The only thing waiting for Chen Mingming was forced marriage and a lifetime of being some poor farmer’s second wife.
Shang Fenhua pouted at her. His pudgy little cheeks only made her want to pinch them and he all but deflated when she stared flatly back. “But my feet hurt,” he whined.
“And you can rest them at Cang Qiong,” she replied mercilessly. His whimper and whines pulled at her heartstrings, and eventually, she broke down and heaved a sigh. “Look.” Her arm, the one unencumbered by her little rabbit’s sticky grip, rose to point at the mist-covered shapes off in the distance. “They’re right there. All you have to do is walk.”
“But it’s so far.” His whining was truly beginning to grate on what was left of her nerves.
Li Hanyi rolled her eyes. “You only have to do it once. Think of it like that instead. The next time you have to go to Cang Qiong? You can do it by flying there on your own sword.” Even the accounting peak had to have swords for transportation, as they were basically a staple of the PIDW setting. Never mind carriages and horses, she would keep her little rabbit going with the carrot of superhuman powers.
Shang Fenhua didn’t buy it. “But that won’t help me get there now. Can’t we take a break?”
“We just had one.” Not even an hour ago, and he had spent the entire time stuffing his little cheeks with melon seeds from god knew where. If Shang Fenhua had his way, they would get there long after the peak lords selected the candidates for inner circle disciples, if they even made it at all this year. “Fine. Take a break if you want one.”
She rolled her eyes at the dramatic way the boy all but threw himself to the ground. “Thanking Han-gege for his kindness,” he simpered out.
Li Hanyi waited for the boy to get comfortable before nodding. “All right then.” Without another word, she turned on her heel and began walking away.
[Warning! Mission failure imminent! Shang Qinghua must make it to Cang Qiong Peak. Escort Mission status critical. Warning! Warning! Warning! Important things must be said three times!]
“Wait for it,” she whispered under her breath. “Just wait.”
[Core Mission failure will result in the automatic termination of guest account privileges.]
She curled her fingers against her chest and counted. “One.” She stepped forward. “Two.” Another step. “Three.” One last step.
Shang Fenhua sprang to his feet and seized at the bottom of her robes. “Han-gege! Don’t leave me behind! I’m so sorry!”
The System’s derision was almost palpable. [… Side character “Shang Qinghua” loyalty +5 points. Character complexity +10 points.]
Li Hanyi carefully ripped her clothes out of his fingers. “Who’s your gege, ah? I don’t have a brother who can’t handle a bit of walking to change his entire life around.” She turned up her nose and clicked her tongue at him. “I’m going on. You do what you want.”
Shang Fenhua was not a pretty crier. His nose ran, tears streamed down his blotchy red face, and he blubbered out little spit bubbles. “Pwease don’t weave me. Han-gege, I’ll bwe bwetter.”
“Heavens preserve me.” She reached up and tore one of her sleeves off, the stitching worn and frayed enough to have landed it in the rag pile in the first place. Li Hanyi was not gentle as she wiped at his face, unwilling to let such a snotty mess touch her for any longer than she absolutely had to. “Pull yourself together or I’ll leave you here.”
“Gege,” he cried. “Gege is so kind—.”
She kicked him away before he could blubber all over her any more than he already was. “Enough! Get your shit together.”
Shang Fenhua froze in disbelief. “Get my shit together? Such… foul language from my gege.” His eyes narrowed as he muttered up at her. “The mods won’t like that.”
“Fuck your mother, who cares what the mods think—.” She paused mid-tirade and blinked. “The mods are asleep, post sinks,” Li Hanyi said slowly, tongue tripping over English pronunciation.
“Are… gege, are you familiar with… Proud Immortal Demon Way by any chance?” Shang Fenhua hesitated as he spoke, almost stalling out over the words as he forced himself to ask.
Li Hanyi almost growled at him before she forced herself to take a breath and calm down. It wasn’t Shang Fenhua’s fault her life was as awful as it was right now. “Piece of shit novel with no common sense that was written by a forever-alone virgin? I’m familiar, why?”
“Bro, you don’t have to be so mean. What makes you think Airplane was a forever-alone virgin and not just, I don’t know, trying to pay his bills?” Shang Fenhua clearly had mastered the art of pouting and pleading very early in his life. “You don’t know his life.”
Li Hanyi stared at him like he had just grown a second head or was a particularly repugnant slime mold on her shoe. “Ha, ok. No one who can get a date would write that many wives who all loved a man who was that bad at ‘papapa’. Airplane is either a forever-alone virgin or a bottom gay with a size kink that lives so far in the closet that Aslan wants him to pay taxes.” She blinked at him, watched him splutter in stops and starts, and hissed at him. “What, are you a fan of his? Is that why you’re defending that piece of shit author who gets his sex scenes from Pornhub gifs and wouldn’t know a GDP if it hit him in the face?”
Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
Shang Fenhua’s mouth opened and closed as he appeared to seriously think about what she said before settling on righteous indignation. “GDP? Sex scenes from Pornhub gifs? I’ll have you know I did my best to keep up with my readers’ demands! You have no idea how hard that is!”
“You tried?” Li Hanyi was not proud of how swiftly she descended upon a child in an attempt to strangle him. “This piece of shit scenario is all your fault! I could have had a nice afterlife, not this guest account nameless background character destined to become one of hundreds of wives!”
He gurgled as she shook him, hard enough that his head bounced back and forth. “A wife? Bro, Lou Binghe isn’t gay!”
“No shit,” she bit out.
The pair of children paused in their scuffle, Shang Fenhua’s head trapped under Li Hanyi’s arm as she slapped at it. He curled his fingers around her forearm and yelped. “Hold on a minute! Bro, what, are you like Hua Mulan-ing and cross-dressing just to avoid my protagonist son? Harsh, bro, harsh.”
She slapped his head one more time for luck and dropped him like a hot brick. “Harsh? Who was the one who wrote their novel’s women like cattle? Would you like to be in a triple digit sized harem where your spouse trips his heavenly pillar into every ravine he can see?”
“Oh my god, you’re Miaomiao996,” he breathed out like it was a state secret. “Miao-Mesmer, what were you doing, reading this gege’s regretful pornographic web novel like it was required reading for the exams?” Shang Fenhua shook his head shamefully like he was some last bastion of proper morals. “You know Luo Binghe will just take that as a challenge, right?”
“Gege your mother. It was this guest account character or Ning Yingying. At least I have a snowball’s chance in hell on this character.” She crossed her arms over her chest and scowled. “I don’t see you coming up with a better plan.”
***
Airplane did, in fact, have a better plan. It would require his utmost cooperation in his given role as Shang Qinghua and hers as a nameless Qian Cao member, but their mutual-aid pact was nigh-foolproof. He would help her pretend to be a man to escape Luo Binghe’s attention, and she would help him win Mobei Jun’s protection. When Shang Qinghua disappeared before Cang Qiong’s ruin, so would Li Hanyi.
He would help her become a tragic cultivator. She would help him become a better spy for his demon lord. Neither of them would die. Everybody won. Well, everybody except for Luo Binghe. But he didn’t need any help from them at conquering the Three Realms.
They plotted and planned as they walked along the road to Cang Qiong, careful to shut their mouths when carts rumbled by or when they stopped at the rare little roadside stand to beg for food. Most of the time, the two children slept off the side of the road, covered in leaves and hidden from sight.
Finally, days later, they arrived.
[Mission stage complete. A bonus of 20 B-Points will be awarded for speed of completion.]
How very kind, she thought bitterly to herself as she took up a shovel from the haphazard pile at the gate. A whole twenty points for forcing a named side-character to move with something resembling a sense of urgency. Li Hanyi rolled her eyes and ripped off her other sleeve. She tore it into strips with her teeth. “Come here, brat. No sense n tearing your hands up.”
Shang Fenhua blinked at her as she wrapped his hands best as she could, half-remembered snippets of martial arts movies the only guidelines she had. His eyes watered and his lower lip quivered. “Han-gege, you’re so good to this little bro.”
She’d never thought that she would need a blubbering little rabbit of a child to help her lie about her gender, but here she was. The least she could do was keep him from turning his hands into blistered messes. Li Hanyi snorted as she wrapped her own hands. “Yeah, yeah. Come back if you start getting blisters. Try to remember to take reasonable breaks.”
Another boy, some nameless applicant amid a throng of other boys, laughed at her. “Look at this idiot. Trying to sabotage someone else just so you can have his spot.” He was bigger than both of them, a full head taller and older than the little group he was with, clothes far finer, and had the air of a bully about him.
Li Hanyi’s eyebrow crawled up her forehead. Was this what passed for a bully in this world? “Really? Our Hua’er doesn’t need to work like a dog to be noticed. Can’t say the same for you.” She hissed, hackles up in defense of her fellow transmigration and partner in mutual self-saving. “Watch and learn how it’s done, idiot.”
The other boy purpled as his friends snickered, raised his fist to strike. “Why you little—.”
A cultivator, ageless and perfect in the fine gossamer robes of his station, clapped his hands from his position by the gate. “No fighting!”
Shang Fenhua was quick to shove her, hissing and spitting all the while, away from the group of boys. “Now now, Han-gege. No need to start a war over me. No one appreciates that except for your laoshi anyway.” He pushed her gently across the way by the simple expedient of a hand between her shoulder blades, off to a good spot to start the trial.
It was a nice day: sunny and clear, not too warm nor too cold. The ground wasn’t packed tight from harsh drought or swampy from recent rain. Clearly the grounds at the base of Cang Qiong were dug up frequently, as there were very few weeds or plants to hold the dirt in place. All the conditions were, objectively speaking, perfect for digging holes until someone told them to stop.
There were dozens of hopefuls spread out across an area the size of a football field, complete with stands full of spectators. Said observers were neatly divided by colors, and each one of the twelve peaks had clearly sent at least one representative for the trials.
Shang Fenhua scoped out a good spot in full view of the colors that he whispered meant the An Ding and Qian Cao peaks. “Remember, Han-gege. Never mine straight down.”
“Right, right. Show off all my good qualities by digging a hole to the core, but make sure I can get back out of it.” She rolled her eyes and rubbed at her shoulders. Unlike the rest of the hopefuls, Li Hanyi did not immediately begin digging, much to their confusion.
No, instead she stretched. First her arms, then her legs, until her entire body was nice and limber.
Shang Fenhua already had a hole plotted out and a dent several shovel-lengths long by the time Li Hanyi even began. She didn’t mind being outpaced by the boys around her. How could she, when they each began to groan from pain and exhaustion as their bodies protested every movement? Meanwhile, Li Hanyi dug her shovel into the dirt over and over and didn’t feel her bones screaming at her. Lift from the legs and not the waist; dig at an angle and not straight down. She kept her dirt piled safely to the slide and stayed focused on the task at hand.
The point of the exercise was to impress, yes, but nowhere did the guidelines state that they needed to destroy their own bodies to do it. No, what the cultivators were after (at least according to Airplane) were the echoes of their peak’s ideals in moldable bodies with good spiritual roots. Stupidity and failing to take care of your own body were automatic disqualifiers for the cultivating world’s number one medical sect.
After all, she wasn’t after something violent like Bai Zhen Peak, so her movements didn’t need to be perfect so much as get the job done.
Li Hanyi was not ashamed to admit that she dug her hole and used the repetition to fall into a near meditative state. It was like the worst kind of yoga, the kind of mental repetition she’d been forced to do at the end of every work week when her body wanted to give up and her mind still ticked away. These children had no idea how to do the forced mental labor of a veteran’s 996 schedule, and she put her skills there to good use.
The sun crawled across the sky and made sweat pool in places it should never go. But still, still she dug. Dug and dug while an uncaring collection of immortal cultivators looked on and judged them all by an arbitrary set of guidelines that not even Airplane knew.
“Little shimei. Come out of your hole and come home.” The shadow that stood over Li Hanyi’s hole would have been entirely welcome if not for two very important things. First, that the gentle and elegant voice belonged to a beautiful woman in Xian Shu’s light purple. Second, that said woman had pegged Li Hanyi (rightfully so) as female.
Well, shit. There was nothing for it. Joining Xian Shu was either a death sentence or a tacit agreement to join a harem of hundred as the token ‘ugly’ lesbian. After all, there would be no competing in the beauty department against the likes of Liu Mingyan, and the only appeal left to a character like Li Hanyo’s would be the same disgusting logic that scum-sucking straight men at a bar used when they claimed that they could turn a woman straight by the power of their heavenly pillar’s might.
The thought alone had her shuddering in revulsion before she buried it under what courtesy a ten-year-old could manage. “Honored cultivator,” she began with a bow, sweat dripping into her eyes as she gripped her shovel tightly to her chest. “This one thanks you for the courtesy and compliment, but this one must regretfully inform Madam Cultivator that this one is, most regretfully, male.”
“What,” the beautiful woman said flatly. “What kind of joke is this. Little shimei, is my Xian Shu Peak not good enough for you?”
Li Hanyi licked the salt from her upper lip. “This humble one apologies if this one’s face has misled Madam Cultivator, but this one only received this one face from his parents. And, in all the ways that matter, this one is male.”
The woman clicked her tongue as someone else bit back a laugh. “Unbelievable! You dare lie—.”
“Now now shijie. The child says they are a boy.” The laughing voice chided the woman. “Has your Xian Shu decided to change its requirements at the first pretty-faced boy of this new generation?” A genial man neatly cut in before the woman could burst a blood vessel or qi deviate out of rage. “Come along, little shidi. Qian Cao would be delighted to have a little brother who cares so for his fellows and elders.”
Oh. Oh thank fuck. There was no way this would come back and bite her in the ass, right?