As luck would have it, the man was not the Peak Lord of Qian Cao. Wang Huo was a kind man, portly beneath his gray and white robes, and incredibly fond of stroking his long beard and mustache whenever he said something particularly insightful. While he was not a Peak Lord, he was a Peak Elder, and that was what mattered. More importantly, Wang Huo had unilaterally decided that Li Hanyi was just the right sort to become his personal disciple.
The so-called “right sort” to Wang Huo was the kind with manners, basic medical knowledge, and quick with their wits.
Never mind that she had the qualifications to become a cultivator. Wang Huo cared more about the fact that Li Hanyi had very politely told another peak to kindly go stuff themselves, no matter what the reason behind it was. Even if it was a very valid reason.
Joining Qian Cao after a day of digging holes was frankly a letdown. She started in a cluster of other new Qian Cao disciples, waved goodbye to Shang Fenhua as he went off and joined his own little cluster of An Ding disciples, and was neatly herded off for intake and orientation. They crossed a bridge made of rainbow glass like a herd of ducklings, which was fun to walk up for the first ten minutes… right up until she noticed how terrifyingly close they were to the clouds. Looking down through the bridge was straight up not happening after that.
Wang Huo neatly separated her from the other children for a special intake process all her own, even as other cultivators came by to pick and choose from amongst the gaggle of children. He was quick to hand her a selection of bars and bottles in a little basket before he beckoned her to follow him, with a bundle of mustard yellow and ash gray fabric stuffed under his arm. Li Hanyi was not ashamed to admit that she had no idea what any of the bottles and bars were for. She wanted to assume that they were soap, but who needed a soap that smelled like medicine?
She found out quickly enough what they were for.
Every new disciple went through the same entrance process, but Wang Huo made Li Hanyi go through hers in the privacy of his personal quarters. She was stripped down to her skin, deloused, scrubbed within an inch of her life, and her hair was neatly detangled and oiled. The dirt beneath her nails was scrubbed with the tiniest little brush and her hair combed and combed until it slipped through Wang Huo’s fingers.
He showed her how to dress from the socks up and didn’t say a word about her gender the entire time. It was “martial son” this and “martial son” that. He waxed philosophical on the merits of politeness and proper terms of address. Disciples that had entered before Li Hanyi would refer to her as shidi, and she would answer their courtesy by calling them shixiong or shijie. No disciple of Wang Huo’s would be a mannerless miscreant raised in a chicken coop.
All of that was fine, welcoming even, as he tied her hair up like a man twice her age and secured it with a polished wooden stick. After all, there was no sense in using silver or jade on a child who would be falling from a sword in practice soon enough, and his martial son might as well start learning how to tie his hair up properly.
Wang Huo was a good and fair man. He treated his disciple well, with square meals a day. He opened his home to his disciple, kept a roof over her head, and asked no horrible questions about her past and what had led her to being how she was. All he wanted to know was if she had committed a crime that Li Hanyi was running from and, if so, whether she needed Qian Cao’s assistance to make it go away. If not? Whoever Li Hanyi had been did not matter compared to the new life of Li Hanyi the Qian Cao disciple.
It was mind-blowing and progressive, especially in ancient fantasy China.
All Wang Huo asked was that she attended her lessons with an open mind, paid respect where it was due, and that she behaved in a manner befitting a member of a righteous cultivation sect. He said it all while he sipped his tea and opened his home to her as his home.
Li Hanyi would commit murder for this man.
She spent the first few days crying in relief, the System blearing at her that her mission was complete and she had received the such and such reward that she didn’t care about. Some new feature was unlocked for ‘further character customization and development’ and she closed that window without even reading it. After she had cried herself dry, Li Hanyi picked herself up and got to work. She wasn’t destined or inclined to become the Peak Lord, but Li Hanyi was perfectly willing and content to be the best disciple she could be for this portly grandfather who had taken her under his care.
Sword forms? Li Hanyi would learn every single one that Qian Cao offered until she found the one that worked for her.
Medical texts? The disciple would like some paper and ink, because she was making study guides and flash cards.
Talisman formations? Your incantations ain’t got shit on spreadsheets, but boy could she optimize that array like it had macros.
Qi cultivation? Bring it on.
Meridian pathway charts? No more complicated than learning the optimal bus and train routes to get home before the last one stopped running.
She meditated when Wang Huo told her to, built up her golden core bit by bit, purged the impurities from her body with special tea, and learned how to move both her energy and that of the world around her. Li Hanyi wore her robes with pants, tied her hair up just like all the other male disciples, and was the very image of a perfect Qian Cao disciple.
Puberty was awful the second time around, but Wang Huo was a saint who quietly left her a basket of things and a manual on how menstruation worked for people with a uterus. He didn’t say a word and neither did Li Hanyi, but the supplies kept coming and that was the end of it.
The knowledge that she could use the finer aspects of her dual metal and earth spiritual roots to make her acupuncture that much more effective? Oh, that made up for the awkwardness. The way Shang Fenhua twitched every time her hand moved towards any slender bit of metal and she mentioned practicing her acupuncture on a live subject?
Priceless.
***
“Shizun. This disciple does not understand why we’re doing this.” Li Hanyi, fifteen years old and far too jaded for her master’s liking, rolled her eyes at his request. “This disciple would respectfully like to remind shizun that routine check-ups were already performed on the new disciples this year.”
Wang Huo waved his hand dismissively and chortled behind his mustache. “Ah, but my Han’er has yet to attend. Humor this old master. One day, Han’er will have to treat a patient without this old master, and how will Han’er know how if Han’er never practiced?”
She blinked back at him. “Respectfully, shizun, this disciple does not see how this disciple is supposed to learn a proper bedside manner from… shizun, why does it have to be them? Any other peak would be fine.”
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“Why not? Make some friends.”
Li Hanyi did not make friends with Ku Xing either.
***
There was a small child crying in her shizun’s sitting room. A quick check provided some very important information: Qian Cao uniform colors, no visible injuries, no sign of her shizun, and nothing was broken in the room. None of that explained why said child was in her shizun’s sitting room, but at least Li Hanyi didn’t need to worry about an immediate crisis. Aside from the existence of a crying child.
“Shidi. Shimei. Whoever you are.” Li Hanyi nodded in the crying child’s general direction as she passed by on the way to her shizun’s kitchen.
The child sniffled, wiped their snotty little nose on their mustard yellow sleeve, and hiccuped. “Shidi, please, shixiong.”
Li-shixiong always had a great ring to it. It was like her whole peak had just come together one day and had a sensitivity course about respecting people’s pronouns. It was truly some groundbreaking and heartwarming inclusivity in ancient fantasy China. Now, if the idiots on Xian Shu and Ku Xing could attend the same course and follow it? She’d die of joy.
Li Hanyi hummed under her breath at her shidi. “Shidi. Why are you in my shizun’s home, shidi?” She returned from the kitchen with a pitcher of water and two cups, gently setting one in front of the crying boy.
He hiccuped as he sipped at the water, eyes furrowing in confusion as he realized he hadn’t been handed yet another cup of tea. “The other disciples are making fun of me.”
“Ah. You’re what, ten? Eleven?” She sat down across the little sitting room table with her own cup of water, crossed her legs and neatly arranged her robe sleeves with a flick, and sipped idly. “What, did they say your hair looked stupid? We all have the same hairstyles.”
Maybe it was how bluntly his shixiong was speaking to him or maybe it was how very clearly Li-shixiong didn’t care, but the little boy paused in his crying. “I’m ten.” He slapped at the table. “They say I’m stupid! Because I don’t understand the class.”
“Uh-huh.” She took another sip. “Ten.” Gently, ever so elegantly, she put the cup down in front of her. “Here’s the thing, shidi. The best part about being ten? All ten-year-olds are stupid. No one understands the world at ten. Then you go out in the world, learn you’re really good at some things, discover you’re really bad at some other things, then you learn how to get better at both. Eventually, you grow up and you teach the new batch of ten-year-olds how to not be stupid at the thing you’re not stupid in anymore.”
The boy stared at her, mouth gaping wide like a fish. “Li-shixiong, you— are you even allowed to call all your shidis and shimeis stupid?”
She blinked, paused for a moment, and perked up. “Oh! Shizun has snacks!” She brushed imaginary dust from her knee and got up from the table, rummaging around in one of the cabinets on the walls that was supposedly only for storing old paperwork. The tin box buried beneath bound manuscripts of weird and fake-sounding medical conditions? Definitely not paperwork. She set the box down between them and popped it open with a triumphant gasp. “Well, you see, shidi—whatever your name is. That would require me to care what my shidis and shimeis thought. But they’re ten. And stupid.”
Slender fingers pushed the tin box closer to the boy. “Now, eat a cake, drink your water, and figure out how you’re going to be less stupid than the rest of my shidis. Or not, I’m not your shizun.”
***
The boy came back.
Frequently.
Every time, Li Hanyi would make him drink a glass of water, eat a little cake from the tin that never seemed to empty, and leave before her shizun came back. Sometimes, he complained about how his fellow disciples treated him Other times, he came to her with the results of his studies. More and more often, her little shidi just wanted someone to talk to about whatever weird little botanical experiment he was running in the gardens.
She didn’t really pay attention, as the brat clearly just wanted someone to talk at, not to. He was determined to prove his worth and smart enough to figure out how to do it but needed someone to let him talk it out. Rarely, her shidi needed a levelheaded person to remind him of his own age and inexperience compared to those who ignored or mistreated him, and that he needed to act accordingly.
Li Hanyi often meditated or cultivated when he came by, gave noncommittal noises when he asked rhetorical questions, and practiced her acupuncture on her willing new dummy. If there was a rubber duck supply available, she would have thrown one at his head and have done with it all.
He had a shizun of his own and friends he could talk to.
Until the one day that her little shidi didn’t.
Months after that first day, her little shidi burst into her shizun’s house in tears. His qi was disturbed enough she could feel it across the room, hair all askew, robes covered in dirt, and there was a bruise purpling on the side of his face. “Li-shixiong! They—they ruined it!”
Li Hanyi had never really understood the concept of cold fury before that moment. She went from peacefully writing out a copy of her old study guide on the uses of a particular common weed, one she fully intended to hide in her shidi’s pile of scrolls he liked to read before bed, to on her feet faster than she could blink. “Who did what to what?”
Her shidi gave a mournful sound, let her hold his hand, her fingers on his wrist to probe his qi even as her other hand pulled at his chin to examine the bruise. “Those Bai Zhan brutes! They just— all my hard work! Gone!”
His qi was a complete mess, one that would take a much smarter and more experienced cultivator to put to rights. The most she could do was poke a meridian or two with her needles and bolster his roots with her much more stable qi, staving off a qi deviation until he could return to his shizun.
[Secret side mission “To Fight Fire With Fire” has been unlocked! Successful completion with reward you with 50 B-Points.]
The inconvenience of being stuck on a guest account had been worth a measly two hundred points, while this secret side mission was worth fifty? Oh there was no way she’d turn down that kind of payoff!
Yeah right.
Li Hanyi did not care about earning points. She had been doing tiny little quests for chump change for years, only deviating when there were mandatory missions that would terminate her account if she didn’t. The only missions she cared to complete were the ones that clearly held the secret and forbidden lore, the ones that added depth to the narrative of her character in the pre-Luo Binghe days.
But someone had messed with her shidi.
[Completion of side mission with hidden objectives will result in unlocking further Optional Genre Change quest routes.]
“Shidi, stay here. You know where shizun keeps his cakes. This disciple has some miscreants to educate on why you don’t start things with healers that you don’t want them to finish.” Li Hanyi didn’t have a personal sword yet, but that was fine. Bai Zhan solved all of their problems with swords, and they would probably beat her black and blue if she tried things their way. No, Li Hanyi thought, that would not do.
A few packets stuffed to the brim with acupuncture needles in her qiankun pouch would serve her far better than a sword.
“Li-shixiong?” Her little shidi hiccuped as he panicked, even as he tugged at her sleeve like it would dissuade her. “What are you doing? Shixiong?”
How many sleeping draughts could she take without shizun getting upset? Did she care if he got upset? Not really.
Li Hanyi steadily emptied her shizun’s supply of mild poisons, paralytics, and miscellaneous sundry into her pouch until she ran out of space. There was no telling what opposition Bai Zhan would put up before they coughed up whichever idiots had decided to pick on her shidi, and it was best to be prepared for… all of them.
Fight fire with fire? In what world? No, thank you, she’d just sedate them as every doctor with an awful and belligerent patient had done since time immemorial. She didn’t need to win, after all, just demoralize some other peak’s shidis so they minded their manners and behaved the minute they saw Qian Cao yellow and gray. Ancient fantasy China had no idea what chemical warfare was, but they were about to find out the fun way.
“Hush, Mu-shidi. Li-shixiong is just going to deal with some human trash.”
And probably get her ass handed to her while doing it, then a long lecture and punishment from her shizun. But who cared about that?
The System promised her optional genre change routes.