From twenty feet apart, a young man and a veiled woman stare at one another. The young man has a deep look of respect in his eyes as he looks at the woman who, with the help of his ignorance, laid Moxian out on her back. The woman, unknowing of why she is being respected, feels self-conscious as she considers her current tattered dress and bruised body. She desperately wants to change her clothes or, at the very least, put something on to cover her undergarment revealed through the missing piece of fabric on her chest and the bits of skin visible through holes in her sleeves, though, she hesitates in doing so because it would mean she’d be showing her vulnerability.
Even as she frets over it, she is thankful that she is wearing her current dress because it has the tendency of bunching up when she kneels and that fact alone spared her the humiliation of having the skin of her legs seen through the tears in her dress’ skirt.
Each second that passes as they stare at one another feels like a year for Qingshui and her embarrassment quickly grows to the point she begins reprimanding herself silently.
“What ‘retain my dignity’? What ‘comport myself properly’?” She hisses at herself within the tumultuous currents of her mind. “At least Moxian only allows others to see what she wants to be seen whereas I am showing everything I don’t want to be seen!”
If she knew that the young man couldn’t be bothered to look at her skin or undergarment because he thought she wasn’t revealing anything, her expression would likely shock even herself.
“That was you, right?” The young man asks while pointing at Moxian’s face.
Qingshui has no choice but to force herself to calm down as she tries to hide her anxiety and consider the young man’s question.
She can tell that the young man is pointing at Moxian, but she doesn’t understand his meaning.
“Her face,” he clarifies. “You’re the one that gave her the panda eye?”
Qingshui looks at Moxian’s face and immediately feels even more anxious. Moxian has a large dark mark around her right eye that seems just larger than the size of Qingshui’s fist. Under normal circumstances, Qingshui would be delighted that she did such a thing to Moxian, but now? Under the gaze of an outsider, she felt like a brute who had been caught doing something dirty.
Even still, she cannot help but honestly respond in a quiet voice, “Yes.”
“Nice!” The young man replies with a grin on his face. “She deserved it.”
Qingshui is stunned into silence. She expected a look of disdain or reproach, but instead, she received a type of approval that she could easily understand.
“She definitely deserved it!” Qingshui thinks to herself.
A small part of her anxiety slips away and Qingshui is able to focus more on the situation as she examines the young man closely. She immediately wishes she hadn’t as she sees things she had never wanted to see and her anxiety spikes up even worse than before. Her already red face quickly surpasses the shade of Moxian’s eyes and keeps going.
In her life, she had at most seen men from a great distance while traveling outside of the Bright Moon Immortal Palace to perform her responsibilities. As few men were bold enough to approach a woman under the umbrella of the Twin Moon Divine Palace, she always felt like a fish swimming happily downstream in all things. Yet, today, the first time she interacted with a man she found that not only was he completely naked, but she was also little better off with her chest hanging out in the open like a common whore!
With her appearance hidden behind thick clothing, the young man is unable to tell how embarrassed the woman feels, he just assumes she doesn’t want to talk so he shrugs his shoulders and turns around before swimming deeper into the river.
When he arrived at the River of Fate moments ago, he found he was in the same spot he had been when he left earlier. So, this time, he wanted to make sure he was far enough in the water and completely submerged before leaving so nobody would notice his arrival if he ever had a reason to return in the future.
Qingshui sees him beginning to swim away and she feels relieved, but she also remembers that she hadn’t figured out anything about him or how he was in the River of Fate so her relief quickly shatters.
She groans inwardly as she watches the young man’s retreating form before finally squeezing her hands into little fists and calling out.
“Wait!”
Her voice is quiet, but it easily reaches the young man’s ears and so he stops in the water before turning around.
“Yeah?” He asks, feeling confused.
“Can you answer a question for me?”
He immediately responds, “If I respond doesn’t that mean that I’ve already answered a question for you?”
Qingshui blinks, her mouth opening and closing at the young man’s cheeky reply. She thinks about it and, realizing that his words did seem to be true, she nods her head.
“That should be the case. Then, can I ask another que—“ She pauses, realizing that she had made the same mistake and doesn’t know how to continue the conversation anymore.
Chuckling, the young man says, “Sorry. What’s up?”
Qingshui feels uncomfortable with the pace of the conversation as she already felt anxious enough before the conversation began and now she also has to consider her words carefully or be made to look foolish.
Trying to take control of the conversation, she asks, “Your name is Lan Jin, right?”
The young man blinks before shaking his head. “Nope.”
Qingshui is stunned again and begins cursing Moxian for lying to her. She should have expected it, but now she had demonstrated her ignorance and lost a shred of credibility for assuming things that she didn’t actually know.
A minute passes and Qingshui regains control over her emotions and asks, “Then… can you tell me your name?”
Once more, the young man replies, “Nope.”
Qingshui feels awkward with his blunt refusal so she asks, “Why not?”
He immediately replies, “Because I’ve played Dungeons and Dragons and Pathfinder, and rule number one when dealing with people who know magic is that you don’t tell them your name.”
“Magic?” Qingshui asks, confused. In her mind, magic was something only devils and their descendants could do, but to the young man, magic is everything that could not be explained by his old world’s logic.
“Mhmm.” He nods his head. “I saw you flying, so I know you can use magic.”
Qingshui pauses and considers his words before remembering Moxian had called him a mortal. She had heard that mortals were very superstitious, and now, it seemed, that was proven to be true.
She tries to explain, “I can walk on air because of my understanding of the world and the attainments I have made in my cultivation. It has nothing to do with magic.”
Shaking his head while remembering his misplaced trust in Moxian, the young man says, “That’s what a soul-sucking demon would say right before it learned my name and sucked my soul.”
Qingshui doesn’t know how to reply. Part of what he said is a reasonable fear, as there are indeed demonic cultivators who would gain someone’s trust before tearing their soul away from their body in order to refine it for malevolent purposes, but that is something that would go against her understanding of cultivation but, even if she were inclined to do so, she wouldn’t need his name to do it. She didn’t even know if names were relevant when it came to techniques that could affect someone’s soul.
“Then is there anything I can call you?” She asks hesitantly. She feels as though she had completely lost all control over the conversation already and had gained nothing from it. She also felt as though the conversation was abnormal. For a mortal who seemed superstitious, she felt he should be in awe in front of an Earth-Bound Immortal like herself and be trying to prove himself worthy of her attention. Yet the first thing he did was congratulate her for acting like a brute and proceed to talk to speak with her in an overly-familiar manner.
“Uh… I haven’t really come up with anything. You might as well call me Lan Jin. I’ll think of something else when I have time.”
All of a sudden, Qingshui’s anxiety flees her and she finds herself wanting to smack the young man in front of her.
***
Lan Jin watches the veiled woman closely. He decides she has a very nice voice and he even wants to record it so he can listen to it as an ASMR. The only problem is that her speech pattern is a bit off and she pauses for long periods of time between saying anything.
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“Then, Lan Jin,” she starts, her voice quiet and succinct, “Can you tell me how you got here?”
“Yeah, I could.” He admits while deciding to tease her.
The two of them stare at one another for a short while before the woman lets out a huff.
“How did you get here?”
Lan Jin grins and says, “I was listening to music that brought me here.”
“Music?” She asks, her voice hesitant and unbelieving.
“Yup.” He confirms flippantly.
Lan Jin can imagine the gears running in the woman’s head as she is very clearly not used to his brand of conversation. He feels a little guilty because she’s just trying to talk to him, but he’d be lying if he said he wasn’t having fun with the conversation.
“Can you tell me where— Where were you listening to the music?”
Lan Jin grins as she catches herself and then, not seeing any harm in telling the truth, responds, “I’m listening to it on a cliff by a pear tree.”
Silence fills the air for a long period of time as Lan Jin watches her while wondering if he went a little far with his teasing.
Eventually, he finds the silence to be uncomfortable so he asks, “So, what’s your name?”
“My name?” She echoes, uncertainty filling her voice. “You want to know my name? Are you even qualified to know it?”
Lan Jin squints his eyes at her and then shrugs his shoulders. “Suit yourself.” Then he turns around once more and starts swimming away.
Behind him, Qingshui doesn’t initially believe he is going to leave, but when she sees him getting farther away with no sign of turning back, she visibly struggles between wanting to ignore him until he turns back and wanting to call out to him in fear that he really will leave. Eventually, her desire for information wins out and she says, “I will tell you my name if you tell me the name of the music you are listening to.”
He doesn’t stop swimming as he turns his face to the side and calls out, “No thanks! I don’t want to know your name if you don’t want to tell it to me.”
“You!” Qingshui huffs in disbelief. If not for the fact that he was out of reach in the River of Fate, she would have throttled him and made him beg her for forgiveness.
She watches him slowly swim further and further away before clenching her fists and saying, “My name is Qingshui. Now will you stay and answer my questions?”
Pausing in the water, Lan Jin shrugs. “I can, but in return I want you to answer some questions for me also.”
Qingshui nods her head slowly, but she adds, “That’s fine, but I will not answer what I cannot answer.”
Lan Jin thinks, ‘Obviously’, but has the wherewithal to not say it aloud. He also finds it strange that he can hear her clearly from so far away and, even more, that she can hear him. He assumes it is some kind of magic, but without knowing more, he can’t be certain.
Not waiting for her to ask her first question, he asks, “So what’s cultivation anyways?”
He had heard the word from both Moxian and Qingshui, so he assumes it is something amazing, but he wants more information to go off of because he is pretty sure he had been doing it wrong so far.
“This… You speak of magic but you don’t even know what cultivation is?”
“Obviously,” he responds plainly.
Qingshui can’t believe it, but as far as she can tell, Lan Jin has no signs of Qi running through his body, so he’s either someone so much more powerful than her that he can easily hide his Qi fluctuations, or his appearance is genuine and he really wants to know about cultivation. She doesn’t know which one disturbs her more, the fact that a powerful cultivator might have invaded the territory of the Twin Moon Divine Palace, or that an absolutely ignorant person got his hands on an object that allows him to do something that even True Immortals would kill to do.
Hesitantly, she chooses to answer in the same manner that was explained to her when she was still a child, “Cultivation can be defined with two words: Comprehension and attainment. Comprehension can be considered the form that cultivation takes whereas attainment can be considered the substance that fills the form. Therefore, a cultivator constantly seeks to broaden their comprehension so that the form of their cultivation becomes a distinct and accurate representation of the world. The cultivator then fills that form with their attainments so that the form matches perfectly with the outer world.”
Staring at Qingshui with a dumb expression on his face, Lan Jin can’t help but wonder if she just said words at random or not. Either way, he learned nothing from what she said and Qingshui quickly realizes that her description was wasted on him.
She feels pleased with him losing out and at the same time, irritated that her time was wasted explaining such a simple concept to someone who couldn’t understand it. Nevertheless, she moves on.
“What is the name and substance of the music you are listening to?”
If Lan Jin could see past her veil, he would notice a small, smug smile on her face as she quickly learned how to deal with the strange way he replied to her questions. Unfortunately for her, Lan Jin was pretty sure it would be hard for Qingshui to get the recording so he chooses to reply honestly.
“It’s called ‘Three Realms Fate-Guiding Verse’. As for the substance…” He grins, “It’s a recording of a naked nine-tailed fox girl playing it for the guy recording her. They definitely just had sex and they both clearly want to have more sex.”
At first, Qingshui was delighted to get this little bit of information out of Lan Jin, but the second part of his explanation confounded her completely and her hands spontaneously jump up to cover her mouth as her face turns red again.
Lan Jin is happy with Qingshui’s response even if it loses some of its effect with how distant they are at this point.
After a moment, Qingshui gathers herself and her face is still red beneath her veil, but this time it is from anger as she calls out, “You are toying with me! There is no way anything like that would have such profound effects!”
Lan Jin’s grin widens. “Hate to break it to you, but I’m telling the truth. Pretty sure it’s from somebody’s homemade collection.”
Qingshui feels frustrated because she doesn’t want to believe in Lan Jin’s words, but judging by the expression on his face and the calm manner in which he is speaking, she believes he is speaking the truth.
“My turn,” Lan Jin calls out, not bothering to care about Qingshui’s discomfort. “How do I start cultivating?”
Qingshui blinks. Other than his current location, she already got the most important information she wanted from Lan Jin, but he had already been vague with his location so there was no point in attempting to clarify it through him. Now what she needed to do was search for the fox woman who recorded the Three Realms Fate-Guiding Verse or pass the information along to her master so her master could search for the woman in her place. Regardless of anything else, something with such magnificent effects would be jealously guarded and there were only a limited number of fox clans in the universe, so finding the right one would be equivalent to finding Lan Jin and the recording he had.
But, she had two problems. The first is that she has never heard of a nine-tailed fox. She also hasn’t ever seen mention of such a race in any of the scrolls or jades she has examined. So, if he’s telling the truth about the woman, then it might be that her race is located in a mysterious realm that never contacts the outside world. In that case, Qingshui’s one lead would turn out not to be a lead at all.
The second problem is that Lan Jin doesn’t have any features that make Qingshui think that he has something to do with a fox clan. Even if she finds the correct clan, Lan Jin is not guaranteed to be nearby. It might even be possible that the recording was lost at some point and he just happened to be the one to pick it up. Even worse would be if the clan had already gone extinct and he just happened to find their inheritance.
So she wants to ask Lan Jin to clarify some points about the recording and see if the two people within the recording had communicated any important information, but she doubts he’d do so until she answers his question about cultivation. Finally, she lets out a sigh and figures she may as well humor him for a little longer.
***
Qingshui’s body shakes in anger, embarassment, discomfort, and another strange feeling as she glares at Lan Jin with one white finger pointed at him.
“What do you mean by telling me all of that?” She shouts loudly.
Lan Jin smirks and replies sarcastically, “What do you mean? You were so helpful in telling me how to cultivate that I decided to answer your question extra-thoroughly. Isn’t that what you wanted?”
In fact, Qingshui had given him a broad but detailed account of how to cultivate. Without knowing about his body’s condition, she chose to be holistic and covered everything from tempering his body with Qi to beginning to comprehend the Dao. Granted, what she could tell him was limited by her own experience, but since her master was a powerful True Immortal, even though she personally was only an Earth-Bound Immortal her experiences could be considered very good.
Unfortunately for her, she may as well have been giving a sermon to the deaf as Lan Jin was incapable of understanding any of what she had said. He knew the words, but without having a reference point for what Qingshui said, to him, it sounded like she was just feeding him a whole lot of nonsense in order to get out of having to answer a question.
Consequently, when she asked him to describe the woman and any words she said, he made sure to do so very thoroughly. Except for her back, which he hadn’t seen, he was pretty sure he hadn’t forgotten a single inch of the naked Nine-Tailed Fox woman. From the shape of her body to the sweat running down her skin, he made sure to describe everything as an act of petty revenge against Qingshui.
Needless to say, Qingshui was incredibly embarrassed, angry, and frustrated with the sheer amount of information she received. She wanted identifiable features like the woman’s hair color, the color of her skin, the shape of her eyes, any marks she had, and so on. But instead, with the things Lan Jin placed importance on, she felt like she was a dirty-minded voyeur. She even felt guilty having listened to Lan Jin as the love and lust he described in the woman’s eyes made Qingshui feel a strange sense of longing while also causing her to be disgusted in herself— both for feeling that longing in the first place and for invading the sanctity of someone else’s pure relationship.
She also lost a great deal of hope in ever finding the recording because, from what Lan Jin described, the Nine-Tailed Fox race may have already died off. From what Qingshui knew, the River of Fate was thought to be a natural treasure that was found by the Divine Matriarch of the Twin Moon Divine Palace, but Lan Jin’s description of a conversation the Nine-Tailed Fox woman had with the second person in the recording made Qingshui wonder if another power controlled the entire realm the River of Fate was located in long ago.
So she chose to take out her frustration on Lan Jin.
“I told you so much about cultivation that even a pig could find a way to reach immortality! What do you mean by giving me such crude and personal information?” Her voice is still loud and a tremor runs through it as her anger slowly builds.
“So much? Yeah right!” Lan Jin scoffs. “Every time you answered a question you just gave me some vague, unactionable response! At least I was being sincere with my answers!”
Qingshui’s mouth works slowly. Up, down, up down. Her lips tremble in fury as she searches for something to say. Her finger waves about in the air as she glares at Lan Jin and she considers taking a risk to grab him out of the River of Fate just so she can throttle him for a while. If she was not so tired from having dealt with Moxian, she might even do it.
“What do you mean by ‘unactionable’?” Her voice comes out in a hiss.
“Unactionable is unactionable! It means I can’t do anything with the information you gave me!”
Minutes quickly pass as they stare at each other from afar, one on the verge of exploding and the other just feeling used and disregarded.
Finally, Qingshui realizes something and, in a cold voice, finally lets out, “I told you I wouldn’t answer what I couldn’t answer! Do you actually think I would divulge a cultivation practice to you in exchange for a little information?”
Lan Jin blinks. “What’s a cultivation practice?”
Qingshui’s jaw drops and she feels dizzy.
“You don’t even know what a cultivation practice is?” She shouts, but she is no longer angry. Instead, she is so stupefied that she doesn’t know if she should laugh at Lan Jin for wanting to know how to cultivate without first having the single most basic thing required to cultivate, or cry for all of her wasted efforts.
“Nope.” He shakes his head.
Her feelings choose to resolve themselves as she begins laughing so much that she cries.