Cheng Luan was a cheating hack.

It was either that, or Liu Feng was an OP side character that had to die or the protagonist would never have stood a chance. If Liu Feng ever figured out how to put himself in perfect balance, the sword could catch aflame. And, to make matters worse, it seemed Airplane had gotten confused about his mythological creatures lore and combined the perfectly good symbolism of a fenghuang with the western phoenix.

And why ever would Li Hanyi think that?

Because by channeling his qi into his sword, or some other ridiculous qi channeling tricks, Liu Feng could heal himself.

She had spent an entire year as this man’s dedicated doctor, aligning his meridians and caring for his every little daily scrape, and he could have fixed it all himself. She wanted to cry and throw things at him if there was even a chance that she could even hit him.

Liu Feng was not yet Liu Qingge. He was still a wet-behind-the-ear brat that needed to train and cultivate for a few more decades before he could be called a war god. That was probably the only reason Li Hanyi was even surviving his so-called training regime.

The problem was that Liu Feng did not actually know how to train himself, let alone teach someone else. His entire plan boiled down to ‘come at me, bro’ and on-the-spot corrections of things that irritated him. If the move was good, Li Hanyi would be expected to repeat it, over and over, until Liu Feng declared her proficient enough. Then he would go back to beating her into the ground for the rest of the evening.

He did not consider any of their nightly training sessions to be fighting. No, what they did was training. Every once in a while, when Liu Feng felt particularly confident in what Li Hanyi had learned, they would ‘spar’. His version of sparring was the exact same thing as training, but with the minor alteration that he didn’t stop to correct any of her mistakes and made her pay for each one.

Li Hanyi got better at fighting with an alarming amount of trips to the clinic to tend to her own injuries. She started wearing high-collared shirts beneath her usual robes, relying on the sleeves and stiff brocade to hide her bandages and provide just a bit more protection from the flat of Cheng Luan. Speed and flexibility became her only true defense, as the best way to fight Liu Feng was simply not to let him hit her.

And that would have served her just as well and been perfectly fine…

If Liu Feng wasn’t also improving with every spar.

It was a vicious cycle with no end. Airplane, much as it hurt her to think it, was entirely right when he had said that Liu Feng considered Li Hanyi to be his one and only rival. Liu Feng brought his best to every training session and expected her to do the same. Some warped sense of pride made Li Hanyi subconsciously try her best not to be beaten into the ground by a boy who might as well be half her mental age. Over and over, every single time he had a spare moment from running missions off the peaks.

Sometimes, she wondered if this was even worth the pain, broken fingernails, bruises, and general agony. Then she remembered that a side character’s side character was by far a safer role than being attached to the plot as a potential wife candidate. Then she sighed, strapped her sword to her waist, and met Liu Feng in her shizun’s courtyard for another evening of suffering in the name of martial prowess.

Her days were filled with clinical duties, nights with studying medical texts, and every random free moment was filled with Liu Feng’s special brand of sparring. This was the kind of grind towards perfection that had killed her the first time, where not a single moment was left for herself. No hobbies to soothe her mind, only the grind, for as long as Liu Feng had a say.

It was no wonder that Li Hanyi almost cried with relief when Liu Feng got that look in his eye that meant he would be gone for the next month on some monster hunt.

***

At seventeen, people began to notice that Li Hanyi wasn’t growing like his fellows. Li Hanyi was short for a cultivator, minuscule for a man, or middling height for a woman, and appeared to have never truly entered puberty. His voice never deepened, the baby fat only slightly slimmed from his face, and Li Hanyi remained curiously stuck in a state of youthful androgyny.

It could be said that Li Hanyi was on track to be considered Qian Cao’s hidden beauty, a reclusive acupuncture master that never left his peak.

Li Hanyi sat with her head in her hands and fingers laced over her mouth to hold back her horrified scream. There was no denying the text box hovering in front of her face.

[Current role: “Li Hanyi” of Cang Qiong Mountain Sect, Inner Disciple of Qian Cao Peak. “Mad Doctor,” “Ageless Beauty,” “War God’s Rival,” and “Bearer of Huanxiang Gu” titles unlocked. Pending reward: Otome Genre Change.]

Everything after that meant absolutely nothing when right there, right in front of her face, was a giant neon blue and white sign that ominously flashed in defiance of seven hard years of work: here was a potential wife candidate.

How was she supposed to overcome this body’s own genetics? It wasn’t like she had any control over the shape of her face. Not when it was so very close to the one she had been born with the first time, just with changed eye colors, skin no longer pale from sitting in front of a computer for hours, and different hair texture.

Even the most basic of skincare routines would only make her face slimmer and skin dewier with every mask and swipe of a gua sha stone. Airplane hadn’t seen fit to equip the human cultivators with any righteous ways to alter their faces beyond standard cosmetics, and the dumb idiot of an author had no idea how modern Chinese women even used the most basic of cosmetics.

So, of course, there was no way for her to go make some Hollywood-quality prosthetics and give herself some dreadful new features. She’d kill for a birthmark at this point, some port wine stain on her face that defied ancient fantasy China’s ridiculous beauty standards and let her just live her own life. Hell, even some cute little freckles across her nose and cheeks would have been nice.

Glutting herself on greasy food to give herself horrible acne and a fat gut might even have worked. Except she lived on the most health-conscious peak in all of Cang Qiong, where you couldn’t eat more than a stick of tanghulu without some elder preparing to give the lecture of a lifetime about moderation and how a doctor should be an example for their patients.

No, what she needed was something permanent enough to change how the public perceived her and yet not so awful that she couldn’t live with it. Burns, scars, things she could play up as worse than they actually were. But whatever it was needed to be distinctly masculine in origin. Nothing that could be in a song about a tragic beauty, only a manly ballad about brothers-in-arms.

There was nothing manlier than a song about two martial cultivators where one took a blow for or from another.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

With enough time, cultivation, and good medicine? Li Hanyi could probably recover from anything short of being stabbed in the heart. But if there was anything that cultivators pitied, it was gnarly scars.

***

Liu Feng was never late to a spar. He might miss one or two while completing his duties as a Bai Zhan disciple, but he was never late. His punctuality gave her the perfect window to finish all of her preparations.

If the manliest thing was to take a blow intended for your dearest friend, then the next manliest would be to take one from your sparring partner. It would forever cement their rivalry, remove her swiftly from the list of known beauties, and all but staple Li Hanyi to Liu Feng’s narrative. The plan was brilliant in its simplicity and she hadn’t even needed Airplane’s advice to figure it out, just her own extensive medical and film knowledge.

She’d numbed the right side of her face from the corner of her mouth to her ear with the same qi trick she used to paralyze and anesthetize her victims and patients alike. As far as she was concerned, she might as well have had a slab of yellowfin tuna slapped to her face for all she could feel of the fatty tissue.

Liu Feng grunted at her in lieu of a proper greeting. “Li Hanyi,” was the most he would ever really say before a spar.

She inclined her head gracefully at him in respect and acknowledgment. “Liu-shixiong,” she replied.

He drew his sword and she did hers, and they met in the middle of the courtyard in a clash of steel and qi. It was the kind of scenario fit for a ballad, a dramatic and poignant scene from the latest hit web drama. Two cultivators, graceful and beautiful as mist covering the moon, clashed in a symphony of steel against steel.

If they had been any other cultivators, that might even have been true. But neither Li Hanyi nor Liu Feng cared about the gracefulness and picturesqueness of their spars, only for how practical and deadly they could be. Bai Zhan valued martial might while Qian Cao favored the surgeon’s scalpel, and neither one cared to engage in the kind of artistry preferred by the likes of Qing Jing. Every spar between the two was akin to watching a tiger try to fight a scorpion: the tiger might be strong, but the scorpion only needed to get one good sting.

This was a very polite way of saying that Liu Feng spent most of his time tearing after Li Hanyi while she spent most of her time attempting to be everywhere but where his sword was. Her entire plan was duck, dodge, weave, and somewhere in there, she tried her best to hit him with her sword. Liu Feng had banned her from using any of her ‘cheating assassin’ tricks, so Li Hanyi was forced to fight with one hand behind her back in the hope that that would keep her from whipping needles out of nowhere.

The frantic dodging was all the set-up she needed.

It was easy, too easy, to let them fall into a rhythm of strikes and near misses. A predictable comfort in routine was necessary to make this seem like such a dramatic mistake that it changed the course of whatever plot hooks the System wanted to use on her. But there she was, stalling, waiting for the perfect moment that would never come, out of fear of the pain that she wouldn’t feel. Self-preservation, at long last, and achieved at the worst of times.

Liu Feng grunted. “Pay attention.”

Oh, but she was. “Always,” she said, sword raised perfectly in preparation for some fancy moon-named move that was supposed to evoke the feeling of autumn leaves in the moonlight. All Li Hanyi cared about was that it was the opening to a sequence designed to catch a weapon with the flat of her sword.

He didn’t disappoint.

And it was easy, far too easy, to accidentally let the blade slip, to not brace enough for his hammer of a blow. She didn’t even feel it bite into her face, the blade catching on the corner of her mouth and cutting deep. But, oh, oh she saw the horror on his face as the blood ran down her neck. She saw as he flinched back from the blow he hadn’t intended to land.

Not like that. Never like that in a spar.

She didn’t feel the cut, but she felt his qi flickering warm and bright over her skin. Fire shaped metal, overcame it, and melted it down to be cast anew. But his hand slipped, faltered, her cheek moved, and the jagged thing bloomed to stretch from the corner of her mouth up to her hair line.

It would not be a pretty scar. No, but it would be a manly one to be proud of for as long as she could keep it.

At least, that was what she had thought until she locked eyes with Liu Feng and watched the panic set in. It occurred to her, rather belatedly now that the deed had been done and blood poured down her face, that cultivators didn’t like scars. Scars were for bandits, immoral cultivators who struggled to keep their qi clean. A good and righteous cultivator aspired to ascend to the Heavens as a perfect and flawless immortals… and Liu Feng had just given her the biggest flaw possible.

[Criteria for the title “Ageless Beauty” no longer met, title has been removed. Character complexity increased, “Liu Qingge” ??? Total increase. Warning, character settings have reached critical deviation levels.]

Critical deviation levels? Deviating from what? The character arc and setting she hadn’t agreed to because it didn’t even exist? Absolutely not, no thanks. She wanted to complain, but that would have meant she would need to open her mouth and risk even more damage.

They called it a Glasgow smile in the western parts of the world, a dueling scar in others. No matter what it was called, cultivators would see it as a sign of moral failure on Li Hanyi’s part. Liu Feng at the least certainly couldn’t stand to look at his own handiwork.

He moved like the very definition of confidence equating grace, his hair whipping through the air with a crack as he pulled her to him by her wrist. Cheng Luan vibrated from where it had been impaled in the ground as Liu Feng spun the pair around it. “Wang-shibo,” he cried out.

None of that mattered as she watched the text scroll down those thrice-damned boxes. Huanxiang Gu cluttered uselessly to the stone below as Liu Feng crushed her hands to his chest in his desperate attempt to staunch the bloodflow. There was a strange ringing in her ears as she read and re-read the words again and again.

[Character settings revised.]

[Thank you for your continued hard work in transforming the narrative. Your revisions have been fully accepted. Character “Li Hanyi” has reached the required complexity with the named side character “Liu Qingge.”]

[Now confirming character settings.]

Wait, what? What did that even mean? What character settings? The panic made bile rise in the back of her throat, acrid and clinging, words bit back bitterly from her usual vitriol. If she said a single word, her face would split faster than an urban legend, and Li Hanyi didn’t have that kind of confidence in her ability to fix that level of damage later. Nor did she think that the pain-killing she had to by acupuncture would even last through it.

[Now loading Character Archetype: Mystic Assassin.]

[Applying tropes: Wicked Cultured, Combat Pragmatist, Instant Death Stab, Stealth Expert, Mystical White Hair, Rugged Scar, Childhood Friends, Deadly Doctor, and Martial Medic.]

[Loading …]

[Loading …]

[Application successful! Character “Li Hanyi” has been created. You have received the achievement “By Popular Demand”: Unlocked a secret character. You have been awarded 300 points.]

[Congratulations! Congratulations! Congratulations! Important things must be said three times! Your hard work in transforming the narrative has led to an increase in narrative complexity. A new side character has been named in “Liu Qingge,” “Shang Qinghua,” and “Mu Qingfang” back-stories. As such, your account has reached enough notoriety to warrant an account type change.]

[Please enjoy the following expanded features as part of your new User account: Direct messaging, expanded B-Point Store, bookmarks, character insight, glossary—]

No, no. She didn’t care about all that. It was great and all that she was going to get to bother Airplane with messages at the weirdest times, and that she wasn’t going to have to keep paying a subscription fee to keep her guest account active. But go back to that list of tropes applied to her character. What were all those? Hello? System?

Liu Feng was quick to react and even quicker to raise his voice when needed. “Wang-shibo,” he bellowed until the sound of socked feet pattering across the wood floor of her shizun’s home was much closer.

The only thing Li Hanyi could really focus on (past the wet trickle of blood going down the side of her neck, the smell of sword polish from Liu Feng’s robes, and the comfortable knowledge that she weighed as much as a sack of rice to Liu Feng) was the truly awful sense of impending doom as the status windows all blinked closed at once.