The smell of cherry blossoms in the sun was so meticulously crafted that I could almost believe it was real. Madam Gao was sitting cross-legged beneath the great tree and the mountain air seemed to whisper around us, not strong enough to disturb our meeting. It was an amazing replication but it was still not quite enough to still the itch that I got inside of Osiris. I knew it wasn't right.

"Madam Gao," I said in Chinese as I approached.

"Are you my jailer?" Gao said, her voice even and polite. She was a small Chinese woman and she had not bothered to wipe the age from her face.

"I am." My role as a provisioner for SWORD's containment division wasn't exactly public knowledge but it wasn't a secret.

Gao kept looking into the distance and not bothering to surveil me much. "Siddhartha Gautama would be impressed with the metaphor I suppose, a prison where our desires are always satiated. I am mostly frustrated it is not the real thing."

She had shaped the prison to her liking, a monastery village of some sort - Dedicated to the spirit of a great dragon. Kunlun, most likely, though the village was small enough that no signage was necessary, and Gao had felt no need for books or scrolls. "You don't expect me to believe you knew the Buddha," I said as I sat down in the grass next to her. That she had been his contemporary, sure, that she had coincidentally met him? No. The grass was so close to being right, but it ran against my fingers a little bit wrong. She had been meticulous but my senses were much, much better than hers. Still, the texture for the grass would be a useful export.

"I do not expect anything of you," Gao said. "But you want something from me which is beyond my conjuring, I think."

I looked at the old woman, who may well have seen as many millennia as I had seen decades. "I want to know if I should help you break into Kun Lun."

That got her attention and she looked at me, "Is this avatar the real thing?" She held up a hand and said, "It must be. Only a fool would pretend to be the man who got half a dozen of my men killed and arrested while trying to destroy the world."

"I don't think you care about that." There was no way Madam Gao had lived millennia on this planet and not learned to put away a bit of bad blood or realize that mind control victims weren't to blame. It was irritating for her to pretend.

"You must learn some manners," Gao said with a sigh. "There is no need for such indelicacy."

Madam Gao was so full of it, but I reached into my pocket and fished out my Ankh, summoning a traditional tea arrangement from China onto a table next to us. "Tea?"

"Of course," she said politely, taking her cup and taking a sip. "It's very good. Everything here is always perfect."

"You can make something defective if you like."

"I will take my luxuries," Gao said, "since you have deprived me of company."

"If you would talk to the historiographers, I'm sure that they would be fascinated to hear your opinions."

"When you have seen as many dynasties fall as I have, it begins to mix together. Every emperor's wax paper ego cracks when he realizes that his empire and his powers will not outlive the little woman who visits him."

I could kill her right now and solve that problem. Heaven knew Gao deserved it. She had her underlings blind themselves. I was fairly sure that from a purely personal cruelty perspective, Gao was the worst of any of my acquaintances. I expected she had heard all that before. And probably, though only probably, she had no idea she was referring to my ambitions in a non-metaphorical sense. Besides, she was right - No global empire I forged would last a millennia. "I'm not an emperor."

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

"My mistake," Gao said, taking a sip. "As to Kun Lun, well, I feel there would be little there for one such as yourself."

I nodded silently and waited. Gao drank her tea, age and patience were on her side, but I wasn't going to ask her what she meant. She would explain if she felt like it.

"Kun Lun is a simple paradise," Gao said as she put down her cup. "When I left there, all those millennia ago, it was not on friendly terms. It still remembers to hate me, even after so long. But my… experimentation… It is humbled by yours. The hatred that it will have for you… impressive."

I wondered if that was true or if she was just lying to protect her old home. Either way, it contained my answer. She wasn't going to help me capture Kun Lun for my interests. "Would you be willing to share your alchemy?"

"Ah, we are running out of a key ingredient," Gao smirked. It was a smug look for a woman saying she might die. "I think you know that, little emperor."

"I am not an emperor." I hadn't known that, but I knew they were going to destroy New York for some reason, which was good enough reason to arrest them.

"You have learned some humility, since that disaster in California. A little patience, a sign of temperance, and you might have been a Senator or a Governor. Now you are a loser. But you no longer seek such acclaim, you learned the temperance you had lacked. I have wondered why."

"I found other ways to fulfill my desire for public service."

"You mean power?"

"Is your intention to spend our conversation insulting me?"

"Should I be polite to my captor?"

I just looked at her. I wasn't going to play this game. I had come too far to grovel and I had come this far to actually learn and gain power, which put a problem between me and her. She knew she was being rude, she had mocked my manners earlier.

"Little emperor," she said after a long pause. "I, your humble servant, beg your forgiveness. I was merely attempting to offer you the chance at honesty."

She was very, very rude when she wanted to be. "If you have anything you would like to say, feel free to say it."

"Little emperor," she said, taking a sip, "you have broken death's gates, trespassed the celestial spheres, and delivered gold from heaven's chamber. They will sing songs of you forever."

I got up to leave. She was now insulting me through flattery and I didn't need to hear it.

"But the forest is not broken by a chorus and the people will not answer for a song. You need an ax if you want to bring them down."

"I don't want to bring down the forest."

Gao laughed a little laugh, lowered her teacup onto my conjured table, and closed her eyes. I took that as the end of our conversation and logged out. I took off the helmet and looked over to the camera where we were watching Gao's body. She had a small smile on her face and I wanted to wipe it off.

Then I thought of her earlier remark about the wax paper ego of tyrants and I laughed too.