Time passed swiftly during those peaceful days. The people of Urayama built their village and aided in the academy’s reconstruction, people began to settle into a comfortable routine, and Yoshika split her time between discussing policy with her friends and councilors, and preparing for the reopening of the Grand Academy.

Soon, spring turned to summer, and summer to autumn. The academy’s revival was swiftly approaching, and Yoshika began to grow nervous about how few responses she’d received to her letters of invitation.

On a quiet park bench, Li Meili rested her head on Jiaying’s shoulder and sighed heavily.

“Why is this so hard?”

Jiaying giggled and gave Meili a conciliatory squeeze.

“Did you think running a whole nation would be easy?”

“It’s just a little one!”

“Mhm. Imagine how the God-Emperor must feel.”

Meili wrinkled her nose.

“I don’t think he actually runs the empire anymore. The sects handle their own business, and Qin Yongliang mediates between them.”

“Maybe it’s a matter of scale. In an empire as big as Qin, you can’t expect one person to make every decision.”

“Bleh, I don’t want to talk about this right now. We’re supposed to be on a date.”

Jiaying shrugged.

“You started it. If it’s that stressful for you, maybe talking it out is exactly what you need.”

Meili pouted, watching the colorful leaves and petals fluttering in the wind.

“Three of us never stop talking about it. I just want to relax quietly with my cute girlfriend.”

Jiaying blushed and averted her eyes.

“W-well, that’s very flattering, but I know that this isn’t your idea of a good time. If you ask me, I think you need to find time for each of your identities to relieve stress. You can’t relax enough for Jia, Eui, and Kaede combined—and you have your own worries to deal with too.”

“What do you mean? I’m enjoying myself!”

She shook her head.

“I know you too well, Meili. You’re not happy unless you’ve got a problem to solve. You crave challenges—it’s the one thing every part of Yoshika seems to share. The problem is that right now the challenges you’re dealing with are too big.”

Meili frowned, but Jiaying had a point. She’d always thought that she worked as hard as she did because she didn’t have a choice. She needed to keep working harder than everyone else or she’d be crushed underfoot.

Except now all of her problems were large and slow-moving. Rumblings of war in Yamato were concerning, but it would be months or even years before anything actually came of it. Developing Jiaguo kept her busy, but the major challenges weren’t so imminent or life-threatening as the ones she had grown up with.

Life was peaceful, and it was stressing her out!

“What am I supposed to do about it, though?”

“I don’t know. Find little things that you can work on. Personal projects, stuff to do for fun! When I was still living in the Everwatching Mists, I used to really look forward to saving up enough credit to pay for personal tutoring from inner disciples.”

Meili looked askance at her.

“The ones that kept ripping you off and refusing to teach anything to you because you’re a woman?”

“They weren’t all like that. They never taught me any techniques, but I wouldn’t have been able to learn the ones you shared with me so quickly if they hadn’t given me a foundation to work from.”

“I guess. I appreciate the advice, I’ll try to think of something.”

Jiaying sighed.

“Not just you, either. You all need to learn how to deal with your own stress instead of offloading it all onto Meili!”

Yoshika pursed her lips.

“We’ll keep that in mind, thank you.”

----------------------------------------

Kaede and Yue were in the middle of discussing how to proceed in case their plan to leverage the academy for social power on the continent didn’t work out, when one of Melati’s drones zipped in through the window to interrupt.

“People approaching from the northwest!”

Melati’s report came as a surprise. The northwestern passes were a fairly treacherous route between the Qin Empire and Jiaguo. Larger groups and caravans would typically take longer routes around the mountains and approach from the west—as they had themselves, when the coalition forces led an army of Qin cultivators to retake the academy grounds from the demonic enclave.

Kaede stood up immediately, heading out towards the main gates as Yue rushed to keep up.

“How many?”

“Less than a hundred. Most of them are mortals—Melati only senses a few strong auras.”

Yue frowned and bit her thumbnail.

“A group of mortals coming from Qin? Identify the leaders, please.”

Melati closed her eyes in concentration as she flew alongside Kaede. She had a hard time telling humans apart, but as Jiaguo’s entire border patrol she’d been learning which features to focus on.

“The two strongest are a man and a woman, we think. A big guy with lots of muscles, carrying a sword on a stick.”

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

Kaede sighed.

“That’s a polearm, Melati—either a spear or a glaive.”

Yue shook her head.

“A guandao—it’s got to be Guan Yi, but who’s the woman with him?”

Melati scrunched up her face and focused.

“She has long hair and a pretty face. She’s very close to the big guy—mates, maybe?”

Yue grimaced, and Kaede could feel a twinge of jealousy in her aura.

“What? Since when did he have—no, wait a minute...Mel, this woman, does she resemble Lin Xiulan?”

“Yes! Really similar—maybe they’re related!”

Yue doubled over laughing, and Melati frowned.

“Did we get something wrong?”

“No Melati, that’s perfect, thank you. Keep up the good work. I should have guessed it would be Xin Wei—those two are practically inseparable.”

That made things much simpler—they were definitely allies. Yoshika had been worried that nobody from the other nations would attend, but it seemed that her friends had managed to pull through.

While Jia headed out to meet them, Eui met with Lin Xiulan to tell her the good news.

“We’ve got a caravan approaching from Qin, and it’s being led by your daughter.”

“Oh! That’s excellent—”

Xiulan did a double-take.

“My what?”

Eui cackled gleefully at her reaction. Xin Wei was never living this one down.

----------------------------------------

Yi Lan was not an ungrateful person, really. Master Luo and Mistress Wu had taken her in when she had nowhere else to turn to, and the life of an apothecary’s apprentice wasn’t bad—even if Master Luo had a habit of neglecting her education. Still, she was uncertain about their current course.

Luo Huang was a surly old man, but to hear his wife, Wu Yuan tell it, he hadn’t always been. It was before Yi Lan’s time, but he’d cared a great deal for his son, Luo Mingyu, before he’d become a cultivator and left to pursue alchemy in a nearby sect.

Since then, the master had become grumpy and irritable, and shirked his duties as a doctor—spending most of his time huffing that acrid pipe of his. Wu Yuan did most of their clinic’s work, and Yi Lan had been trying for years to help wherever she could.

Unfortunately, the mistress only knew most of the recipes by rote, and Luo Huang hadn’t been the most forthcoming teacher.

It wasn’t an easy life, but it was comfortable enough. Yi Lan had experienced worse. She was happy enough, but things changed after they were visited by strange foreigners.

Not only had Luo Huang treated them in person, but it was as though their visit had ignited something within him. He began to take patients again, had Yi Lan sit in on consultations, and even allowed her to treat a few patients on her own—under careful supervision, of course.

It had been hard work, but fulfilling. Yi Lan couldn’t help but thank Lee Jia and her companions for the blessing.

But then things changed again. Master Luo returned from a routine medicine delivery to a regular client in a foul mood. He ranted incoherently about ‘that ungrateful lout of a son’ and how he ‘should have known’ and then retreated to his room and the comfort of his pipe.

Yi Lan learned later from the mistress that Luo Mingyu had arranged for money to be funneled to them in the form of a generous buyer who would always pay a hefty premium, even for the most mediocre salves. That was how they had been able to support themselves for so long, even after Master Luo fell into indolence.

She thought it would be the end of it. Back to the old routine of fixing up simple salves and remedies and occasionally prying bits of wisdom out of the washed up old doctor in the hopes that she might one day be able to run an apothecary of her own.

Instead, the doctor’s despair lasted only a few days before he emerged with a vengeance. He wouldn’t let some upstart brat look down on him like that. Luo Mingyu would be nothing without his father’s lessons, and he swore to remind the little brat where he came from.

Using connections Yi Lan didn’t even know he had, Luo Huang learned that his son had become a core disciple to one of the Grandmasters of the Flowing Purewater Sect—an incredibly lofty position. Despite Wu Yuan’s begging, he left to travel north, apparently intent on giving one of the most powerful people in the empire a piece of his mind.

Against all odds, he’d apparently gotten his audience, and just when Yi Lan and her mistress were prepared to mourn the old man’s passing, he returned with a simple two-word announcement.

“We’re leaving!”

Which finally brought Yi Lan back to the present. Traveling through the frontier with only a few Flowing Purewater cultivators to keep them safe. To a new land—a sect town that had no sect, and wasn’t even part of the empire. That made no sense to Yi Lan—the empire was as eternal as the God-Emperor himself. Once people settled there, would it not then be part of the empire?

Though at least, she supposed, there’d be no shortage of work for an apothecary in a newly established frontier town.

But as bothersome as those philosophical quandaries were, her real issues were much closer to the ground.

“By the emperor, I’m exhausted. How much further are we meant to walk through these accursed mountains? My feet are killing me...”

Luo Huang scoffed, sucking on his pipe from the comfort of their wagon—he didn’t have to walk. He was too old.

“Quit your whining. This is nothing. In my time we’d have to cross a mountain like this every day just to gather herbs. Sometimes our trips would last days, and we’d have to camp in the wilderness with nothing but a few sticks of incense to ward off magical beasts.”

His wife rolled her eyes.

“Easy for you to say from up there, you old lout. And I seem to recall your master beating you with a cane after one of those ‘herb gathering’ trips of yours after you returned empty-handed despite stealing his warding incense.”

“Tch, what do you know? Sometimes the land just doesn’t cooperate.”

“As if you even needed the incense with how you smelled back then—did you ever think to find a river to dip yourself in on those trips?”

Yi Lan ignored their bickering, distracted by a distant flash of light. Out of the corner of her eye, she spotted a figure flying through the air and her heart dropped into her stomach.

Cultivators powerful enough to fly unaided were rare, and encountering one this far out in the wilderness meant a rogue at best and a demon at worst. She wasn’t certain that the expedition leaders would be enough if they were waylaid by such a person.

The figure stopped above them and scanned her eyes across the caravan, searching for something. Yi Lan’s curiosity got the better of her, and she peered up at the cultivator, shielding her eyes from the sun to get a better look.

She couldn’t believe what she saw—Yi Lan would recognize that white hair anywhere after the sight of it had nearly caused her to faint the first time. Lee Jia! The very same visitor who’d sparked the dramatic change in her life.

To her absolute horror, Lee Jia turned her head and met Yi Lan’s gaze head-on. Though she was only a mortal, Yi Lan could still feel the weight of Lee Jia’s attention bearing down on her. She was nothing like the girl from back then, despite looking exactly the same.

Lee Jia dropped out of the sky to land directly in front of Yi Lan without so much as disturbing the dust on the road. She beamed brightly and threw her arms around Yi Lan in a shockingly gentle embrace.

“Yi Lan! It’s so good to see you again! How have you been?!”

Yi Lan stood spellbound, completely at a loss. She desperately tried to rally herself, drawing on the one thing she could remember about the impossibly dangerous person whose arms she found herself in.

“I-I’m fine. How is your sister?”

She felt her heart stop as the words left her mouth. No, stupid! Lee Jia’s sister was dying when they met over a year ago. What an unfathomably stupid question!

Surprisingly, Lee Jia only smiled wider, freeing Yi Lan and stepping back to bow.

“She’s alive and well! I didn’t expect to see you here, but I’m so glad I did. Master Luo, Mistress Wu, Yi Lan, I owe you all an enormous debt.”

Master Luo leaned out of the wagon and eyed her suspiciously.

“Is that so? I hear you found my son—did you tell him to come visit?”

Lee Jia’s smile grew strained as she chuckled awkwardly.

“Uh...we did, but circumstances—”

“Right. You can repay us by telling me where to find the ungrateful little shit so I can smack him myself. It’s about time that boy learned the meaning of filial piety.”