They had been watching me.

After Egiya and I parted ways, she returned to her shop and I made a beeline to the Green Air inn. I took my time approaching it, and after a curt nod to the bellhop I went up the back stairs.

My room was a mess. Papers were strewn everywhere. It looked like a murder scene. The bed was flipped, and it was just a jumped up bedroll.

That was the part that bothered me the most as I took stock of my situation. Sure, they could always make a mess, pour my ink out all over my notes, and smash anything valuable, but I drew a hard line against anything that disturbed my bed. Or in this case my bed roll.

I was pissed. Not just because of how expensive getting all the paper together and the notes I had meticulously made in English had been in man hours, but you don't invade a man's castle. The Green Air inn had been a castle. Now I needed a fortress.

Of course the pile of invites to the Sects had not been touched, because we wouldn't want them to think that we would dishonor any of them.

I stared at the pile. If there was a fire I would have summarily tossed them all into it in a dramatic huff. But no, I hadn't been in the room for long enough to light one.

I did take note that the Red Fang invites seemed to be on top.

And now I had a likely perpetrator.

Thankfully I had been carrying a small pouch with the most important notes and the three path manuals I had acquired. I grabbed the few papers that had important mundane information on them and then a handful of others to throw them off the scent. They would be looking to see what I did, perhaps even laying in wait outside.

I cursed, thinking about how I would get out if they were watching. They couldn't have eyes everywhere. I freaked open the door looking down the hallway.

It was time to make a move. I crept down the hallway, my heart in my throat. Two turns would get me back to the servant stairs. I stopped at the first before talking several calming breaths. Then I peeked around the corner. Two disciples in red robes sat waiting by the stairs. I hadn't seen them on the way up. I quickly ducked back.

The main stairs were the opposite way, naturally so I turned that way. My brown hair would make me stand out, if they had more men posted. They probably were first realm if the Sect was going through such an onerous expense. One disciple on a red robe stood next to the main stairs. I was on the third floor. Did I have time to jump?

No. He spotted me and made a beeline right at me.

"Brother, it is with great pleasure that I extend-"

I wanted to punch him in the face. Red robes? Fang emblem? Yeah. Approaching me with open arms after touching my stuff? You're dead to me, guy.

"Excuse me," I said, dropping into an even balanced stance as I attempted to walk around him while facing him.

"Brother, the Sect welcomes you with open arms!"

"Not interested, thanks!"

"Brother, you..."

His demeanor changed.

"Pardon this one, but we are looking for a first realm cultivator, you are...?"

Then I understood him. He expected me to be weaker, someone that he could dominate. Someone that would just go along to get along. Yeah, no that's not me, if it ever was.

"Leaving!" I said as I got between him and the stairs.

His eyes seized up and he blinked several times in rapid succession. I kept creeping back, facing him.

"But, you..."

I ran.

Fresh from the high of breaking through, I jumped down first one, then four flights of stairs and then ran out of the front door.

They hadn't left anyone to mind it. I didn't mind that.

Then I put everything into a sprint. My high school PE teacher would have been proud.

When I was a block away, I heard yelling.

I didn't turn back. I was all too familiar with how fast other first realm cultivators could run. Sure I had just advanced, and the system agreed with that, but testing it out had just become a game.

I wasn't going to wait around for these guys.

I sighed a few blocks south, then west. They either hadn't kept up or they had send slow cultivators. I had no doubt that they would have easily beaten me in a straight jog before I had advanced.

As I ran I went through my options. The Inn was burned. I would have to send someone else to pick up whatever I had left there.

There were only a few places where I was sure I could be safe right now.

The Moon clan would probably be a safe spot, or behind Moon Xirus tea stand. But I wouldn't be able to just go straight there.

I made for the next district to the west.

I quickly ran out of the Spirit Hall neighborhood.

A large sign welcomed me to Crows murder. Two to five story tenements cropped up all around me. The roadway split into upper and lower levers, allowing foot traffic to move around like they were in an open air mall.

It was at least a welcome change. Xiru kept his tea shop there, though he told me not to leave the well trod main pathways. I circled around the main market area. Crows murder had been the city center before, and now it was a different sort of center. It was a hub for all kinds of independent non cultivator owned business. The mundane, living only one life type human. My people.

Xiru was working despite it being the later afternoon.

"Moon Xiru."

He gave a curt bow. I bowed back ever so slightly less.

"Cultivator Pidge Joseph. Good evening, this one is pleased to see you again."

"I hope that you did well today with your business."

"You as well. This one wanted to ask about your relationship with the Kang woman?"

His face was unreadable. He knew here but didn't want to indicate how. I thought back to how he had seen her earlier.

"She's... A friend. An associate you could call it."

"Ah. Does she assist you with your business?"

"I guess you could say that. She's been almost as helpful as Moon Fei. Come to think of it, how is your cousin?"

Xiru sighed.

"The aunties have made him take time off work. They worry about his..." Xiru waved his hands ineffectively in a wheel motion, "Soul? Spirit? They're just over protective."

I hadn't looked into how healing would work. I could have kicked myself for not asking that of the aunties, but I hadn't known at the time. There would be some costume changes in my future.

"I feel like I barely know him, but his... I wouldn't call him a friend. The fact that they were trying to get to me through him..."

Xiru coughed.

"We think that there's something else going on here," Xiru said.

The royal we could have meant him, the Moon clan, the tea brokers union, or even just him and the aunties. I took it to be all of the above. Not knowing what I could know, it kinda chafed. It wasn't going to get blisters on my memory but it felt like a damn near close thing.

"What do you think is going on?"

"An unaligned cultivator? Who suddenly shows up? They may think that you're a demonic Cultivator, or worse."

I bit my lip and didn't ask what or how it could be worse.

"This is getting outrageous. Xiru, I need a new place to stay and a way to contact my people," I started a tally with my fingers, "I'll need people for that matter, and some way to mask my presence."

"It sounds like you want to form a crew," he said in a low fatherly tone, "I know just the guy."

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

I took the next several hours to take stock of the situation. There was a loft above his tea shop that was regularly used by tea brokers union members. I wasn't a member, having not cultivated enough connections to earn the monthly average. Like the rule was about selling more tea month over month.Members could be ejected for not keeping up their work, except for emeritus members. They kept up the pension and lobbying work that I was surprised to find was a part and parcel of every bureaucracy here. The mundane normal humans wanted to at some point not work and the union took care of that, through contributions from their current members. People who wanted to broker tea sales outside of the union would get a stern talking to as a first warning.Or at least that was what all the signs on the second floor lead me to believe. It wasn't long before the first person arrived.

"This is going to be good," I said as the woman I had spent the afternoon with appeared at the door.

"Well, you called and I'm here now. Ink stains on your life if I don't write down every interesting thing you do in your time here. Just watching your cultivation alone has made me feel closer. So yeah, whatever it is you're doing, I'm in."

I had expected as much and when the dark haired woman took a seat I nodded. She would be a great help.

"Good to see you."

Before we could get into a discussion over what had happened today, another person arrived. An older woman in blue robes walked in. She had a mask over her face but I recognized the eyes. They were the same eyes that had watched me as if measuring me for a potential match. Their yellow tint gave it away.

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

"So you're reading all this anime harem type novels and it's affecting your dreams?"

"Yes. I keep feeling like I had this life before and it's just... I don't tell anyone about this but they feel real."

It was my third season with Wei Zhao. He had come in with a complaint of sleeping issues and had run through the gamut with different doctors before they released him to me. He was also homeless, or he had been until the state intervened. The only job he could hold was as a bouncer or in a martial arts gym.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

"Well that's good to know. Not that it's good to be kept up by your dreams, but I appreciate your honesty. You didn't tell your other clinicians this?"

His worn asian face held a good short beard, but otherwise he dressed like he worked for a mob boss.

"Like I'm dreaming of this other world where men and women have incredible Kung Fu magic powers."

I wrote down *Kung Fu magic powers*. That would be good for his chart notes.

"Tell me about it. Were you a Kung Fu magician?"

"I was a cultivator. I was an enforcer for a Sect.. one that..."

I wrote down *Sect problems?*.

"One that worked with demonic Cultivators. They killed people to grow stronger."

"Very interesting."

I wrote down *Sexual issues because of puritan upbringing?* But then crossed it off. Sometime the allegories and stories really showed the inside picture of what was going on. But sometimes, they were just stories. Sometimes Sects were just Sects. He hadn't spoken a lot about his parents. It seemed like a sore subject.

Wei just seemed disconnected with reality which bothered me a ton at the time. He often would disassociate right in our sessions for several minutes at a time before he would mutter apologies and then ask where we were.

He was quick to blame others for his problems as well. He didn't want to play with others and if he wasn't acting out due to his chronic homelessness and challenging other people to fights all the time, he would be an okay guy.

"And in your dream, were you one of the men who killed people? Or?"

"I remember taking someone and then a senior member would... They would do something to their body, taking away their life... Their qi. You always knew who the senior ones were because they had two or more fangs embedded as tattoos above their lips."

His only tattoo was a single fang above his lip, just between his nose and it. It was a special kind of ink that lit up in ultraviolet light and he had shown it to me once much later. You wouldn't see it normally.

"Tattoos like yours, huh? And how did they treat you then?"

"They treated me like ... I was a piece of meat to be ordered around. Like a Renfield."

Wei had recently gotten into vampire novels, and sadly he had really deep into Twilight. I wasn't going to drop him as a patient because he liked to read about sparkly vampires, but the thought had crossed my mind more than once. And this was his third session.

"You didn't have any agency in your own dream, huh?"

The whole thing about lucid dreams had me back to the drawing board for him. For his dreams to be so vivid, we needed to talk these out and they kept coming to him disturbing his sleep and my peace.

"I... It's like I'm stuck in my body. I don't... I haven't tried to do anything except sit back and dream the dream."

I hadn't had a problem with dreams. I was basically living my dream as a divorced dad of two awesome daughters. I had my Lauren and my group practice and things had been settled for long enough that I was feeling antsy.

"Okay, here's what I want you to try. In your dream tonight, I want you to try to take an active role and change the way that it goes. It could be a specific thing you do, or you could just add hundreds of kittens through your imagination."

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

A dozen kittens poured into my mind as I put several pieces together. Ultraviolet light on the spectrum lit up a half moon on the cheek of the woman in front of me. It fizzled briefly but it was clear for a long minute.

Everything that Wei Zhao said rushed back to me.

"Mother fucker," I whispered inaudibly.

His yellow irises blinked at me.

"Cultivator Pidge."

"We said we would be watching you," Bluey said,"and it has come to this ones attention that you're able to draw upon dream aura very well. Dream qi is very potent for wet work."

"And I suppose you know because you're a practitioner?"

"I am."

Her quipao was as blue as it had been white the day prior. I had given her the nickname Bluey as a shorthand because of her blue sash. She had been one of the three aunties who had accessories to differentiate. I guessed that they were sisters. I would probably have to make the effort to remember her as her name and not as Bluey.

"More importantly, I have brought a path manual that you may find suits you. It was one of my paths when I started on my journey and it has served me well thus far."

Her palm turned upwards as a small blue flame with eyes slowly formed. It pushed itself out into the form of a blue dog.

"That's...how... What is that?"

"It's a dream qi construct. It's different for everyone."

She held out a stone tablet for me, I accepted it with an outstretched hand.

"It takes a lot of dream qi to create it though, so make sure you have a ready source. It's something.. well we can talk about it later."

"Moon Lee, pleased to meet you," she said to my companion.

"Kang Egiya."

The two women briefly glanced at each other before turning their eyes to me. I realized at that moment that I might have started what looked like a harem unintentionally. I pursed my lips.

That was when Moon Xiru walked in. Behind his gorgeous coiffed locks walked Moon Fei.

Fei looked weak, like he had been through that machine in the princess bride that sucked a few years of life out of him. I was guessing around five.

"We're here."

Xiru looked to the two women in front of me and gave a weak smile.

"How is he?"

"He is weak, but fine, Fei?"

Fei nodded. Speech, it appeared was beyond him. I had taken a wilderness first aid course once and besides the few things I could remember from my social worker training, my best hazard of a guess was that it would take him a while to get back on his feet.

"Revenge," Fei gasped.

"That would be the sweetest tea for him. Now, let's brew up something with a lunar scent."

---

I often found that in large group settings that there was this propensity for inaction. The fact that three men had been sent to persuade me to join them meant that I was out for blood. Or at the very least we would make them feel what we felt.

The four people that I had taken into my confidence thus far had no pretense of inaction. They too had suffered.

To be more accurate, Xiru was here because he saw a profit and Moon Lee (who I kept referring to as Bluey in my mind) was really looking to have some fun. That was probably what I was looking at. I couldn't imagine Xiru asking her, but three of the crew were moon clan.

"To start off with, I assume that Fei won't be partaking in any of the plotting? Or you'll be minding the shop while you're getting better?"

He nodded, his arms crossing his body as if he was trying to adorn a K-pop album cover.

"As much as he can do. He is taking leave of the Green air inn while he convalesces. It was a great way for the Moon clan to hear the little rumors, but oh well," Xiru said.

"The Moon aunties can find someone to take his place for the time being," Lee replied, "It serves the clan and we hope that information gathered here will be shared?"

"The tea brokers union may also have a stake in this," Xiru said.

Everyone turned their heads to Egiya.

"What? I can't just want to do this for the hell of it? Also I need to pay for someone to care for my mother, so yes I can moonlight and do whatever it is that Joseph needs. And if a Sect is trying to abduct people, I need to know why for my own business."

"Who could it be?" I said, "If not the red fang sect? More importantly why... but I guess the why doesn't matter. For now, I need to figure out a way to mask my qi."

"I can handle that part. I can lay out a foundation script that will mask your qi signature at night and it will draw dream aura as well," Lee said.

With that problem solved I needed to think about actively veiling my dantian. Lee and her family were working on that. I didn't think I would be able to veil while I was sleeping, but at least I could hide my presence while I slept. It wouldn't be sleeping easy, but it would be sleeping unmolested.

"That said, we need to get back at them. I take it that they're looking for more members. We could do a sting operation?"

The faces next to me all looked perplexed.

"Okay probably not that."

"The red fang respect strength. If we show them strength, then we'll be able to push them off. Your advancement to the second realm in such a short time it incredible and you should continue to push yourself. We need more information," Lee said, trying to direct the conversation.

I was happy to bop along to her ideas. If they were going to keep sending agents to the Green Air Inn, we had a bunch of options.

We could rob them blind, leaving them humiliated. This would be done well because both Lee and I were second realm Cultivators. She was at the peak of second realm with several techniques mastered along her path. She would set them up and I would knock them down. Egiya, Xiru or Fei would be the lookout. Technically more powerful cultivators generally dictated terms, but she saw the opportunity in my being around to develop her won path by teaching me. I relished the opportunity.

"If they want strength, then we can bring them strength," I said.

We could also let them think that I had left Western Jewel, and I would learn the veiling technique that made me blind to Lee. It was a strong pathway that adapted to any type of qi but she had learned to make hers so it felt like she not only wasn't there, but if you didn't look for her you wouldn't sense her. Like she was a shade of herself.

I'll be honest I wanted to rush to learn that, but she said that it would take several hours of instruction to complete and she hadn't brought the path manual with her. She would pass it to me during my training session the next day. I was grateful for her help in particular. Egiya had given me the paper I needed to take the notes to begin cycling through Lees brief session, but there was a lot in those path manuals that she couldn't express easily. The more advanced ones like hers drew you into a dreamworld to briefly show you how the technique worked. When I heard that, I almost salivated.

Her first technique proved to be invaluable, though.

"Alright, so for our plan to work we all need to be on the same page. Lee, you're in with us?" I asked.

"Of course."

"Egiya, you're going to take notes from the others as well as observe the comings and goings of those red fang cultivators that show up at the Green Air inn. Just work outside the shop tomorrow. Fei, if you can track down Jin Xueyie our old friend I think she might want in on this."