There was absolutely no way that Li Hanyi was leaving her bed. Not today, tomorrow, or ever again. No, she was going to stay in this bed until the world stopped hurting. Nobody had told her that being hit by lightning multiple times would hurt nearly as much as it did. There was nothing she could do about it but wait for the sparks of pain to stop shooting down her nerves. Her qi was a riot of lingering electricity, meridians flush with it, and she ached as she adjusted.

If she never left her bed? She would never have to face the consequences of her own rampant success. Sixteen, fresh from a cultivation breakthrough, and newly recognized as a sword-bearing cultivator? Oh, she refused to be the center of that level of attention. Even more importantly, Li Hanyi refused to be the center of a very specific population’s attention.

The minute she left her bed? Liu Feng would be on her faster than a rash on a plague victim. He’d make her rise with the sun, run her ragged doing sword strokes over and over and take that weird joy of his in the thought of their singular arranged fight. It wasn’t Li Hanyi’s fault that Liu Feng was so very obsessed.

She slept with her sword, hands tightly around the scabbard, knuckles white, in a fitful slumber that broke at the slightest sound. A perfectly good sword stand was in the corner of her bedroom, in pride of place atop the meager little dresser that held her every worldly possession. But she couldn’t bear to set the physical manifestation of her everything so far away from her for even a single moment. Never mind that her room was once an apothecary storage, only four paces wide and six paces long with only a single door and grated privacy windows as entry points. Anywhere she couldn’t lazily reach her arm out and brush her fingertips against her sword was too far away for her comfort.

Li Hanyi refused guests, citing her exhaustion and need to meditate as the cause. She could practice inedia now and had no real need for the porridges and tea her shizun brought her anyway, but he was the only exception to her self-inflicted isolation. For a whole glorious week, Li Hanyi was left to her own devices.

On the eighth day, she received an unexpected visitor.

“Miao-meimei, you have to leave this room,” Shang Fenhua begged, tears streaming down his cheeks as his lower lip quivered. “He’s turned into a monster.”

Li Hanyi pulled her blankets back just far enough for her head to pop out from her impromptu burrow. She stared blankly at her fellow transmigrator. “Luo Binghe? Isn’t it too early?”

He dropped to his knees alongside her bed, knees thumping painfully on the hardwood flooring. “No! Not my protagonist son, Liu Feng. He’s—.”

She cut him off with a hiss, her hand darting out to cover his mouth. “Don’t say his name! What if the System hears?”

Shang Fenhua licked her palm and she cursed under her breath as her hand dropped, wiped his spit on his robes, and slighted back to the safety of her blankets. “Forget the System! He’s acting on his own! Liu Feng is looking for you. I don’t know what you did, but whatever it was? You’re the only thing he cares about on this peak right now.”

“Bullshit. He cares about fighting me, not actually me.” Her head went back under the blankets and was replaced with her hand, flapping at him to shoo him away. “I’m in hiding. Seclusion. Tell him I’m sick, cultivating, something. Tell him anything but where I am. Now, go away.”

“Fighting you?” Shang Fenhua murmured under his breath. “Aren’y you his personal doctor? Why would he want to fight— oh no. Tell me you didn’t. Miao-meimei, tell me you didn’t do that paralysis trick on the future War God of Bai Zhan. Tell me you didn’t.”

Her head popped back out, hair frazzled and messy, and she snorted at him with a roll of her eyes. “He deserved it.”

“Oh my god,” he said in stilted English. “Miao-meimei, no.” Shang Fenhua looked at her like she had committed a crime against humanity, equal parts horrified and fascinated. “Did. Did you let him have a chance to beat you in a fair fight after?”

“No.” She clicked her tongue at him with a huff. “That’s what the sedatives are for. I’m not stupid enough to fight even teenage Liu Qingge.”

He put his head in his hands, hunched over into a ball as he moaned. “You’re doomed. He’s not going to stop until he beats you. Miao-meimei. Han-dage. You pulled aggro.”

“I know,” she drawled. “That’s why I went and got a sword. We have a deal that he gets one fight. I’m going to lose, Liu Feng is going to leave me alone from then on, and then we can get back to avoiding the protagonist ruining our lives.”

Airplane looked up at her, a faint sense of dawning horror leeching the color from his tear-stained face. “He’s never going to leave you alone now. You’re his rival now.”

“Bullshit.”

“Miao-meimei. I know my own characters.”

Li Hanyi leveled him with a flat look. “Do you? Millions of words and hundreds of chapters later, you think you still remember the motivations of a single cannon fodder character that dies in order to set up your overdone scum villain?” She shook her head at him. “I seriously doubt you do. Not when you’ve dropped so many plots and characters.”

He sniffled at her. “Miao-meimei, why are you so mean? After everything I do for you in this world.” Oh, but Airplane knew how to act like a wet little rabbit in order to ingratiate himself.

“This is all your fault anyway. If you weren’t such a hack sellout and maintained even a shred of your authorial integrity, we could have transmigrated into a world with more common sense and less wife plot materials.”

“Ah. You made it to the aphrodisiac plants then.” He at least had the grace to wince. “They were bound to turn up in your studies eventually. At least you haven’t been exposed to any.”

“You shut your mouth. I refuse to be a victim of ancient fantasy China tropes. Consent is important. The medicinal value of most of those plants would be great if they weren’t so… gross.” Li Hanyi supposed she couldn’t be all that surprised that a fair many of the ‘sex pollen’ and ‘powdered aphrodisiacs’ could be used in pills and tonics to affect anything from blood circulation to overall alertness. Their practical uses were probably the only things that kept some of the absolute worst from being driven to extinction by cultivators and normal people alike.

No sane person would want to grow something like the Illustrious Fair Maiden’s Peach Tree if the only thing it was capable of was turning anyone who ate its fruits or consumed its juice into a mindless sexual deviant that could only be cured by papapa with their One True Love. Lucky for the tree, its sape (once properly distilled into a thick orange syrup) functioned exactly like a non-drowsy medicine popular in pharmacies worldwide in her first life. That was only one of the hundreds of plants with similar wife-plot material potential, and Li Hanyi was determined to memorize them all so she would know how best to avoid them.

Airplane shrugged. “They paid the bills. At least you won’t have to worry about them as long as you keep up the act. Just attach yourself to Liu Qingge’s plot as his rival and childhood friend and double down on that whole creepy ghost assassin thing you’ve got going on.”

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

He grinned up at her from behind his hand. “Nothing gets less wife plots in a YY novel more than the cannon fodder’s add-on. The NPC’s NPC as it were.”

“The System wants to turn on otome mode.”

“Oh,” he winced. “You might be doomed then. Maybe less being anti-social and lazy? What do women go for anyway?”

“Airplane, if there was ever any doubt in my mind that you died a virgin bottom gay? That killed it.” She burrowed back into her blanket pile. “I’ll figure it out. Now go away so I can actually cultivate in peace.”

***

Lie Feng was not particularly known for his patience or understanding. Bullheaded to the end, it shouldn’t have surprised Li Hanyi that he didn’t have the patience to wait for the end of Shang Fenhua’s explanation. All he had probably bothered to hear was that Shang Fenghua had talked to Li Hanyi, and Li Hanyi was still abed over a week after returning from Wan Jian. That had been enough to spur him into whatever this nonsense was.

Wang Huo had let him into their shared home and directed Liu Feng to Li Hanyi’s room. It was the only thing that explained why her shixiong stood glowering at the side of her bed, arms crossed over his chest.

“Are you ill?”

Safely buried beneath her blankets, she raised her fist and faked a hacking cough. Silence reigned. She coughed again. “Liu-shixiong,” she gasped out weakly. “Is that you?”

He ripped the blankets from her in one swift motion. Liu Feng was not one to stand on manners and propriety when in the presence of the person who spent most of her time stabbing him with needles, but the sight of her in her thin silk under-robes was enough to make him pause. Normally he was the only one nearly nude, and he didn’t like the change of scenario. “What happened to you?” He growled, voice cracking halfway through as puberty did its worst. “Who beat you?”

Beat her? Could you even call the Heavenly Tribulations a beating? He stared at her chest, the white linen bandages she used to bind her still-developing breasts just barely visible through the thin silk. Oh, oh shit. The jig was up, her ruse uncovered in one fell swoop. Her heart was in her throat, beating fragile butterfly wing strokes madly. “Nothing happened,” she managed to gasp out of her terror-strangled throat. Belatedly, her arms rose to cover her chest as she slowly sat up beneath her blankets. “Just a bit of uh… cultivation backlash.”

She winced even as the words left her mouth and she turned her head so that she wouldn’t need to see the seething anger growing on his face. Oh shit, he was going to kill her for pretending to be a boy. Li Hanyi shrank away from him and tried to curl into a ball to make a smaller target. “Please don’t—.” Kill her? Punch her lights out? Report her to her peak?

Liu Feng barked out a disbelieving laugh. “Cultivation backlash? You? If you’re going to lie, Li Hanyi, you should at least try to make it believable.” He was stock still, qi almost tangible in his fury. “With all the signs of a beating on you? Tell me, who did this to you.”

He sounded less like someone plotting a homicide and more like a child having their favorite toy taken away. Li Hanyi dared to look up at him through her lashes, her knees trying to merge with her nose even as she tried not to visibly panic. This was it, the destruction of a six-year-long ruse at the hands of a stubborn teen. And it wasn’t as if said teen had the emotional intelligence to just keep it to himself or let it go. “Don’t—don’t look.”

Liu Feng wasn’t letting it go. Like a dog with a bone, he was determined to figure this out. “What does that matter? You’ve seen me in less.”

She gave him a bitter laugh. “Oh, it is not the same.”

“True. I’d never have gotten beaten so badly that I needed weeks to recover.” He sounded like he was granting her a favor, so proud of himself that she gave herself whiplash from the speed that she turned her head at in order to stare incredulously at him. “Aren’t you a doctor? Shouldn’t you have fixed that already?”

“Oh my god, you’re actually an idiot,” she whispered. Li Hanyi was so awestruck by his grossly incorrect conclusion that she didn’t know if she wanted to cry or laugh herself sick. “I see now why people say Bai Zhan is full of meatheads.”

“Watch it,” he barked out, the muscle in his jaw jumping as he very politely resisted the urge to wring her neck.

Li Hanyi flapped her hand in front of her to dismiss the very thought of her own impending demise. “Nobody beat me up. I had a breakthrough at the same time I got my sword. So unless you want to go fight the Heavens for giving cultivators tribulations? Quit worrying. It makes you look constipated.”

“Your sword?” Liu Feng perked right up. “Show me.”

If there was anyone outside of Wan Jian and her shizun who would show her sword the awe and care that it deserved, it was Liu Feng. His own sword was always well-sharpened and oiled until it gleamed, clearly the recipient of what little was left of his brainpower. She still hesitated as she drew back the blankets to reveal her sword. “Here.”

His fingers twitched and he gave the most beautiful smile. A normal person would have had this kind of reaction if she had a puppy or a basket of kittens in her bed. “Can I hold it?” The biggest pain in her backside looked like he was about to vibrate out of his skin, fingers clenching and unclenching on empty air as he so clearly longed to hold her sword.

She laughed and quickly covered it with a fake cough when he glared at her. It was patently unfair for such a pretty young man to be both so very dangerous and still manage to look like an overeager puppy. She could all but see a tail wagging furiously behind him. But that was not enough for her to just let him hold the physical manifestation of her soul. Li Hanyi pulled the blanket back over her sword and pulled it back towards her with her feet. “No,” she said flatly. “No, you may not.”

He clicked his tongue at her. “Fine. What’s its name? What does it do?”

“Do? It’s a sword. It doesn’t ‘do’ anything.” She frowned up at him. Some distant part of her brain kicked into gear at the very thought of giving him her sword’s name. Somehow, she doubted that running around with a known sword name of Bones of a Dead Ghost was going to win her any awards or favors. But with Liu Feng? It might just be enough to convince him that she wasn’t the kind of upright and proper righteous cultivator he so desperately wanted to fight. “This? This is the Huanxiang Gu sword. I have been trying to meditate on what that means.”

She was, in fact, doing no such thing. Li Hanyi was attempting to become a shut-in, snacking in bed, covered in blankets, and pretending that the world didn’t exist. Her bones didn’t even hurt anymore, and no more toxic sludge came out with every cough or sneeze as her body rid itself of various impurities. Li Hanyi was the very picture of health, fresh from the creation of her golden core, and the only thing stopping her was herself.

Liu Feng’s eyes narrowed as he glared at her. “All spiritual swords do something. There’s one on Wan Jian that glows in the presence of demons.”

Airplane, it was one thing to borrow ideas from good and sensible Chinese classics. It was something else entirely to borrow from a major western franchise. What a hack, a cheap sellout, of an author. Where was the integrity, Airplane?

“So then what does Liu-shixiong’s sword do? Hit people more efficiently?”

The look he gave her could have peeled paint and pickled a field of cabbage. “Cheng Luan is a crucial part of my cultivation and represents the justness of the fenghuang.”

“Uh-huh,” she replied faintly. “Next, you’re going to tell me it lights on fire when you’re in perfect balance with the universe.”

Liu Feng grunted and shifted slightly on the spot.

Li Hanyi blinked back up at him. “No. Really? That’s what it’s supposed to do?” His sword, the fanciest expression of Airplane’s shoddy world-building, was supposed to light on fire. The War God of Bai Zhan at his absolute best had a flaming sword. Airplane, with all due respect, what the actual fuck. “How am I supposed to have a fair chance against a flaming sword?”

He gave her a flat look, emotionless down to the beauty mark under his eye. “That’s why I’m going to train you. And when you are at your absolute best? Then we will fight seriously and I will beat you.”

Li Hanyi was going to die. Again. Only this time would be a brutal beat down just so an idiot teenage cultivator could feel secure in his superiority. Well, at least he was so stupid that all of her attempts at cross-dressing only registered in his birdbrain as injuries. She cleared her throat and licked dry lips with a tongue turned to sandpaper. “Ah. Any chance we could skip all of that and just assume your victory?”

“No. That wouldn’t mean anything.”

Well, he couldn’t blame a girl for trying.