Wang Huo pinched the bridge of his nose. “Han’er. Please, explain to this master what drove you to raid Bai Zhan by yourself. Try, for this master’s sake.”

She sat before a council of the Qian Cao elders, back straight as a blade, and blinked placidly as if none of this fazed her at all. “This disciple has already explained.”

“For your shizun, please, once more. This master seeks only to understand.” He was paler than usual, probably from stress, and clearly very much done with his personal disciple’s first real act of teenage rebellion. Li Hanyi couldn’t even be bothered to come up with a solid defense for her actions. “Why did you not come to this master? A peaceful and harmonious solution could have been found.”

This was just as bad as work performance reviews with her old bosses. Now she was fifteen, pretending to be a boy, and didn’t have a fancy degree that said she knew what she was doing within a certain margin of error. Was there a polite way to explain to her shizun and the other elders that she didn’t believe that they would have been effective in stopping the worst of Bai Zhan’s bullying brats? Probably.

“Has Bai Zhan filed a complaint?” Bold as brass, Li Hanyi blinked again as she calmly retorted. Her fingers fisted in her robes, crumpling the pants she wore underneath, even as she kept her eyes on the elaborately decorated wall far past her shizun’s head.

Wang Huo sighed. “No. No, they have not. But that does not excuse Han’er’s behavior.”

“An infection must be treated at the source. This disciple merely treated the disease with effective and easy-to-understand medicine.” There was no point in acting like she regretted what she had done, because she didn’t. Her shizun and the other elders deserved better from her than lies.

One of the other elders snorted as he sipped gracefully at his tea. Nondescript, average in face and demeanor, he blended into the background like so many other people living in Airplane’s fantasy world. “Bai Zhan only understands the force of a superior opponent. It’s a gift from the heavens that your disciple even returned to us unscathed when he went off to face that entire peak alone.”

The entire peak? What? When had she done that? Shouldn’t she remember if she had done that?

Li Hanyi’s confusion must have shown on her face because that same elder waved his hand dismissively at her. “Bai Zhan won’t act further. Peak Lord Wu Jinhao even claims that he sanctioned Li Hanyi’s actions as training.”

Another elder, just as forgettable in appearance as the others, tapped his fan against the small table in front of him. “If we ignore the threat of Bai Zhan descending upon us for one disciple besmirching their reputation, then our own disciples will pay for it.”

Wang Huo stroked his beard. “Wu Jinhao claims that Li Hanyi has great potential in martial aspects.”

This was not the compliment that the Bai Zhan Peak Lord had probably intended it to be.

Qian Cao prided itself on medical knowledge, in healing the sick, and peacefully performing their duties. Martial skills were only learned to defend one’s self and patients, not to actively be the attacking party. For a disciple to be referred to by the Bai Zhan Peak Lord as having great potential at martial skills? That was an insult to a peak that might as well be the cultivation world’s Red Cross.

Li Hanyi had messed up royally.

“Enough. This master has heard enough.” The man at the head of the room clapped his hands once, his stately robes barely moving with the motion. “Attend, Disciple Li Hanyi.”

There was no arguing with Chang Jinfei, Peak Lord of Qian Cao.

She remained seated, bowed at the waist, her fingertips brushing against the wooden floor. “This disciple hears and obeys!”

“You are not the first or last disciple to struggle with our principle of non-intervention and peaceful healing,” he said into the silence. “Your disregard of our ways is clear, but your loyalty speaks well of you. The forgiveness of Peak Lord Wu Jinhao and the testimony of Elder Wang Huo are the only marks in your favor. Thus, this master has decided. From this day forth, the disciple Li Hanyi will assist his shixiongs and shijies in treating any and all Bai Zhan patients.”

Huh. That wasn’t where she expected this to go at all. Cleaning the peak, sorting medical supplies, and copying medical texts by hand, sure, but not essentially volunteered to do a job. Wait a minute—

Li Hanyi was going to be forced to be around those idiots, at their every beck and call, for the rest of her immortal life. How was that fair? Shifu, please reconsider!

“Am I understood, Disciple Li Hanyi?”

She went on autopilot, fist in her palm as she bowed her head. “This disciple, Li Hanyi, has received shifu’s order and obeys.”

[Congratulations! Congratulations! Congratulations! Important things must be said three times! Through your hard work and efforts at improving the narrative, your account has gained enough complexity and reputation to gain a promotion.]

No, no, no. That was not how this was supposed to work. There was supposed to be some hard work and a conversation about new responsibilities, not a status change as the cultivation equivalent of being on permanent punishment detail.

[Scenario quest “Learning the Ropes” has automatically been accepted. Please do your best to become the best doctor you can be! Failure to complete the scenario quest will result in the automatic termination of guest account privileges.]

What the fuck, stupid System wasn’t even giving her objectives or rewards now. What made it worse was that her shifu had clearly taken the time to give her real instructions and she had missed them because Siri’s evil cousin had no concept of timing.

Oh, she was so screwed.

***

Fifteen was far too young to start drinking her sorrows away, but Li Hanyi was fairly certain that one day wouldn’t hurt. Right? The whole cultivator thing would fix the damage in a moment. Though, with her luck, cultivating while drunk would just sober her up and then she’d be back to square one.

Honestly? Her new job wasn’t the worst. It was amusing the first time she walked into the clinic and not a single Bai Zhan disciple recognized her. It was downright comical at how they all twitched and watched the door for any sign of the Mad Doctor, as they had apparently dubbed the mysterious disciple who had raided their peak. The fear made them polite, almost docile, as her shixiongs and shijies treated their injuries.

Li Hanyi was not yet far enough in her studies to be trusted with anything that would have required a fully-trained doctor in her former life. She was essentially an intern among the nurses, barely given tasks and stuck to basic bandaging or medication dispensing. Her bedside manner was atrocious and she was very quickly banned from doing the equivalent of intake questionnaires.

Or at least she was right up until one disciple needed his qi stabilized and she jabbed him with a needle from the depths of her sleeve without thinking about it. Suddenly, Li Hanyi had a proper function. She was entirely unafraid of even the burliest of Bai Zhan disciples and ordered them around like puppies.

On the second month of her new job, everything went wrong.

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A single patient limped his way onto Qian Cao peak with his face bloody and his robes dirty. He wasn’t a critical patient, just stubborn about his need to be treated by someone competent. With her newfound trusted status and efficiency at dealing with even the most stubborn Bai Zhan disciple, of course, Li Hanyi would be assigned as his doctor.

She didn’t say a word as she entered the treatment room, nose plastered to the slip of pulpy paper that listed all the things he claimed were wrong with him. The door shut behind her with a firm click and her mandatory introductions were delivered with a monotone drone. “Greetings. This one is Li Hanyi, and will be treating your injuries today.”

“You!” She looked up in time to see a vaguely familiar handsome face snarling at her as he struggled to get to his feet. “I know that voice!”

Well, shit. It was just her luck that the one person she had knocked unconscious with needles to the feet and more drugs than it took to knock out an elephant… had somehow managed to memorize her voice in less than ten minutes. Not any other identifying characteristic, oh no, but the one thing she had never considered altering was what ratted her out. “Excuse me?”

He grunted back at her triumphantly. “You’re the bastard who raided Bai Zhan! I’d know that girly voice anywhere.”

“That— you know that’s creepy, right?” She said flatly, frozen from the shock as she stared incredulously back at him.

“You owe me a fight!” He bared his teeth at her in a cruel smirk. “A real one, not that cheating you did before.”

This young man was a stubborn idiot. “Keep your voice down,” she hissed. “This is a clinic, not a bar.” She didn’t bother to grace him with a reply to his ludicrous demand. “There are actual patients here who need the quiet to recover.”

The next words out of his mouth were not at a respectable volume. Li Hanyi had no real morally sound excuse for why she stabbed him in the throat with a needle after distracting him with another needle at his foot, but watching him gape soundlessly at her was reward enough. While he was suitably distracted by his sudden muteness, she knocked him out with a sedative-laced needle.

She cleaned up his injuries, popped his toe back into place, slapped a few salves on the worst of it, and had him dropped off at Qian Cao’s gates with a note pinned to his outer robes: Don’t come back unless you need medical attention.

God, she needed a drink.

***

Liu Feng was a chronic patient.

He came every day to be treated for injuries most cultivators would have shrugged off and refused to be seen by anyone other than Li Hanyi. Each time, he would end up slumped by the gates where one of his shidis would be waiting to take him back home. But still, day after day, week after week, Liu Feng would show up after training to have his injuries cared for.

He started figuring out how to dodge needles while she figured out the fastest ways to treat him and get him off her peak. There might be something in his tea, perhaps a pinch of something in the incense, or maybe she slipped a needle in while massaging away some knot in his overly muscular back.

(The first time he had stripped his robes off, Li Hanyi had choked on her own saliva. But she was a doctor and he was her patient, so she had shoved that into a box to never think about again.)

Sometimes, he made fun of her for still sounding like a girl despite being sixteen years old. In turn, she made fun of him for sprouting like a weed. But always, always, he would ask her to fight him properly. Until one day, finally, Li Hanyi had enough.

“You can’t keep coming here like this.” She slapped her hand against the door frame and he looked up at her with a frown. “Seriously, Liu-shixiong. We’re spending far too much on your medical care alone and An Ding’s threatened to cut us off if Qian Cao can’t get its finances in order.” Li Hanyi entered what had become her personal little clinic with a frown, closing the door behind her.

Liu Feng gave her a surly frown of his own. “Why not? You’re the one who said I had to be a patient to come here.”

She gave an undignified snort. “That was before I figured out that you’d use that as an excuse to come here every single day.”

“It isn’t an excuse. See, I was cut by a sword.” He pointed to the superficial injury on his forearm and his frown deepened.

She gave him an unimpressed look, eyes flat as she didn’t laugh at his terrible joke. “Shixiong. We both know you could dodge a sword in your sleep by now.” Li Hanyi shook her head at him. “I’ve been writing it off as practice. But now I’ve done so much practice that the Elders have noticed and neither of us can keep doing this.”

“You still owe me a fight, Li Hanyi.”

“All I have is needles and drugs. One of which you counter nine times out of ten and the other you’re developing an unnecessary immunity to.” She rolled her eyes at him. “You’ve won.”

Liu Feng scowled even deeper. “That wasn’t fighting. Draw your sword and fight me properly.”

“Draw my… Oh, you have got to be kidding.” She spread her arms wide and rotated slowly in front of him so he could see every inch of her. “What sword? How am I supposed to draw something that I don’t have?”

Neither of them spoke for a long moment as Liu Feng processed what she had said. Slowly, like the words pained him, he choked the words out. “You… don’t have a sword? Are you or are you not a disciple of a martial cultivation sect?”

“Shixiong,” she gently began, in that particular tone one used to explain things to a particularly stubborn child. “This one is a member of the medical peak. We don’t get swords until we are deemed competent enough to leave the peak in some capacity as wandering doctors. And even then? Most of us only use them to fly.”

He looked like a child that had been told Santa Claus wasn’t real the day before Christmas. “So, you’ll never get a sword if you stay on Qian Cao as my doctor?”

“I mean, not unless you become important enough that you need to keep having a personal doctor. And then I wouldn’t be your doctor anymore anyway, because my peak couldn’t stand having a swordless junior disciple in that position. It would be an insult to your name and ours.”

[Warning! “Liu Qingge” must become the Peak Lord of Bai Zhan. Major deviations to the plot will result in penalties.]

Son of a bitch, Liu Feng was going to grow up to be Liu Qingge. The War God of Bai Zhan, cannon fodder NPC who would die at some point to establish Shen Qingqiu as a true scum villain. What the actual fuck, System.

She slapped her hand over his mouth to keep him from saying anything else to offend the System. “Don’t even say you won’t be important enough,” she quickly said. “You’ll never be anything less than the absolute best or die trying.” And oh, oh how awfully he was going to die trying.

“Mmph,” he grunted from behind her palm before he grabbed her wrist and pulled her hand away. “How am I supposed to be the best if I can’t even beat you?”

Li Hanyi was clearly the better person and she wasn’t going to let that insult bother her. “First of all, fighting is still not my specialty. No matter what you Bai Zhan idiots seem to think.” His fingers were warm, long enough to wrap around her wrist— nope. Back in the mental black box any thoughts like that went. “Secondly, you are the very picture of health.” Better than. She’d been practicing the most complicated things on him to the point where he might as well be a star athlete. “Your meridians are so clear that you could have a breakthrough if you bothered to cultivate instead of coming here.”

“But I still haven’t beat you at the best you could be.” He clung to that like a dog with a bone. “You need a sword. I’ll train you.”

Lessons with the future War God of Bai Zhan? No thanks, she’d rather not. She actually liked being a doctor in ancient fantasy China and didn’t need that kind of character depth tacked on. What, did he want her to become Cang Qiong’s personal assassin?

“Talk to your shizun. Or I’ll talk to my shizun. We’ll get you a sword,” he mercilessly continued. “Or I’ll keep showing up every day with new things for you to treat.”

“You— you’ve already come too many times! That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” she exclaimed. This hardheaded idiot was going to be the death of her. “Go fight someone who actually knows how to fight, not your poor shidi.”

“But you do know how to fight. You just do it underhandedly. Fight me properly: face to face, blade to blade, like an honorable man.”

Sometimes she forgot just how deep in her lies she had become. At some point, the lie that Li Hanyi was male had just become ingrained in Cang Qiong’s collective knowledge. But oh, oh she was tempted to throw open her robes, expose her bound chest, tell this idiot that she was an honor-less woman, and watch him flee from the confusion.

“You’re going to keep showing up for a whole other year if I don’t say yes, aren’t you?” She sighed, deflated. Shang Fenhua could keep fudging her paperwork for only so long, and her own elders were already suspicious enough that they might call for an audit.

He gave a single nod.

“Fine. One fight. And after you beat me? You leave me alone and go get a new doctor.”

[Mission “Acquire Spiritual Sword” has now begun. Successful completion will reward one personal spiritual sword.]

Well wasn’t that just great.