"This is the stick. We let you free. You never return here again. If we detect you, then we will kill you on the spot."

"I don't want to die," she said, almost inaudibly.

"Then live. While you live, you will work for us. You will prove yourself."

"But my family-"

"They don't care about you. They threw you away. You have no value to them. They knew that we were here. They knew that the Mandarin killed the previous leader. And yet they sent you."

Finding myself pacing, I paused.

I could forgive a great many things. I could not forgive a parent literally sending their child into a meat grinder knowingly. Even the fathers that bragged to me that they never changed diapers were above these turds.

"You don't have to die. You can live."

The Taoist elders were there in the room, watching. I knew that they didn't want to let her leave the room alive. If I said the word, they would kill her instantly. The rage seeped out of them, a physical manifestation of their problems. It was written all over their faces but more so it was just a part of the air around them. The longer we sat there the thicker it got.

An attendant brought the thing that we were waiting for. Two metal shackles that would do more than we could alone.

She accepted them, allowing me to slide them onto her arms.

I was grateful that she seemed to have given up. It was one of the only things that I could really count on right now. Her weak aura all but disappeared with the shackles on.

"I will do as you say," She said, quietly.

All the fight that had been there before, all of the hope was gone. She was a new woman all of a sudden. She was sullen and downcast.

Xiran didn't even make a move against the shackles. I would have expected her to cry out or rage against me. But she accepted it. It was like she had been conquered.

She had it easy. Become a new person. That's all she needed to do, was reinvent herself.

She was a person with a limited time on life. He had a little bit of time left unless we all decided on it. I was hesitant to bring the towels sacked into this but they had things that I needed, including the shackles. The fact that that was a thing that muted or stole away someone's cultivation for a while had woken me up to the fact that perhaps things might be a little bit more difficult here than I thought. I certainly didn't want to experience that myself.

She was there for a while. Just waiting on us to decide her fate.

When really it was on us to figure out how to get her to decide her own fate for a change. There was so many times that someone had talked to me here on this world where I realized that everything about their life had been predetermined by someone else. Every single part of their training and upbringing had been someone else's bright idea. Someone's good idea of fairy okay. Life had created this woman. She wasn't just someone's daughter, she was someone's product.

She didn't even know. She thought that this was love up until about ten minutes ago, when her world was rocked. She was about to be in a world of hurt.

"All right. What do you want to know."

I smiled. She had chosen to live another day.

"Tell us everything you know about your sect. Don't hold back."

So there for the next 2 hours, she talked. Her family had their fingers in so many things that I hadn't even considered and the way that they were able to subtly traffic humans across the continent through airships made it even worse. They were doing it under the nose of the actual Mandarin. When he found that out, he would be furious.

I briefly thought about ending her life right there. It turned out that she hadn't actually killed anyone.

That was a point in her favor. I asked her if she ever wanted to kill anyone and it was the first time that she paused.

"So was there someone you've ever wanted to kill?" I said.

"I've had the urge before. I would prefer not to say as this doesn't have any any bearing on any of this. Suffice to say that it's- it's a family matter."

I got the feeling that she was actually talking about her real family deciding that she was not worth anything and her finally realizing our value was a person was not intrinsically tied to their deeds and wants. It would have been nice if she had decided that and fled the sect on her own, but she had chosen this bed and she was going to lie in it.

The poor girl barely even had any money to her name. She was expected to kill her own victims and take their money. Potter information here was that she was going to link up with the cell that we had already taken care of. I was so glad that we called her when we did because otherwise she would have figured out that that had already been taken down.

She spoke until she was hoarse.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

One of the elders took notes and we all conferred afterwards. She's stayed under the watchful eye of Xuyie of all people. She had taken the time to remove her makeup and was glaring at the newcomer with an immense sense of smug satisfaction. She had acted her way into the girl's pants, convinced her that she was about to get with a star of the stage, and had essentially captured her.

The elders deferred to me as they knew my history with the Red Fang. They were willing to listen to my very specific rehabilitation plan. I thanked them for their candor as several of the five elders were very vocal about disposing of her as soon as possible. I was certain that they were saying that loud enough for her to hear on purpose.

I thought I was done there for the day. We were going to find a place to put her where nobody was going to kill her. And then we're going to have to post a watch on. I signaled my spirit beast to come close by.

"Min, can you watch and make sure no one kills her?"

She nodded, moving back through the ornate doorway. In a way, I was glad that the Moon Spirit didn't really just sleep that much. But also if this new girl was going to sleep. We were going to have to push her someplace. I was racking my brain thinking about it for a while. I reached out with my nation soul. Trying to figure out if there's any place suitable here. I didn't want to intrude upon their hospitality for too long, but I didn't think that it would look great if I was just smiling a grill out of their Sect grounds.

I would at very least be looked on unfavorably by some passersby. If I could make an illusion of myself, I'm parenting to not be carrying her, that would be ideal. Better if she came willingly. Right now? If she seemed willing . But I didn't really have a place to put it. I guess I was going to have to make my own private jail somewhere. Well. That was something that I had never considered being a possibility.

All this was temporary and really hinged on becoming an asset for us.

So long as she was helpful, I would be happy to keep around. I wanted her to change her cultivation style for sure, but I didn't know how possible that was and I was going to consult with an expert to see if we could realign their meridians or something. Something. The whole thing kind of baffled me.

just needed a user manual for this. But no one sold a user manual. It was all locked behind very specific techniques that you could only find out if you were joining someone's sect. And that was the reason why the right thing came back to me in the first place. And that was exactly the reason why I was going to recruit her and make her do my dirty work against them.

Moon Lee met me out there and we had a little discussion.

"You still think we can save her, don't you?" She said. "You really do have a bleeding heart."

"Now you see that's not fair because I'm just here trying to not kill people. I just asked to not be bothered by people I don't want to be bothered by. And they decided to send her here and bother me so they made her my problem."

She could not have rolled her eyes any harder. I appreciate that in a woman. I liked a fair bit of sass. She was very worth coming with.

"All right, so we saved her life. And then what? Does she join our group? The group that was going to kill her because of who she is. Does she rehabilitate herself? Somehow. Her whole past study was dedicated to the study of demonic cultivation. So now what are we going to do? Turn into a different path and then hope that she can bridge the gap somehow?"

"You talking about recruiting her? I would hope that that's our goal. I would hope that she sees how much better we treat ourselves and each other and she was just about to be thrown away. I mean I used to be like a pawn but that's because she is one to me."

"I know you don't mean that. And that's one of the things that makes me like you. It's a big part of why I stuck around so long," she said. "I guess I can summon my moon spirit too. It can't hurt to have two watching her."

She took a second to have her Moon Spirit materialize in front of us. It was nice to see another Moon spirit. Hers was still part dog, part cat and all white fluff. It was a kind of thing that a man could appreciate during mandatory head pats. Once that it's very important, part of my day was done, so we set them free. It was important that Xiran understood what was going on here.

I sure as heck needed to understand it. And I was just a guy keeping my corner of damn city from crumbling into the ground.

---

The elders gave us leave to return in the morning, now the two Spirit beasts were watching her. Car to sleep on. It was not much. It was far more than she deserved. In the morning. I was going to have to ask for a lot of help but for now? I collapsed that evening, Really enjoying the feeling. The normal dreaming of scenarios and what-ifs just flew by me, leaving me there with the impression that I needed to go to a certain ink shop to pick someone up.

It was n't the strangest day but that last night was in my mind, vividly before I even got out of bed. The dream of the empress in the emperor going together and then the empress snagging at demonic cultivators in the flesh made manifest, made me smile.

That morning I went over what she had told us. The main Crux of their human trafficking was taking people from other locations, getting them on airships and then changing the log so they were not part of the airship when he arrived. Just let them have deniability that a person had actually been on the ship while using that person as chattel. She had actually arrived looking for a place to unload things for the next wave. The fact that they were going to have a second wave shortly sending another batch of zombies to set up something in my city meant that this was far from over. In fact, it sounded like they were trying to heat up this cold war into an all out brawl. If there's one thing I did I'd appreciate it. Was my new adapter City having a war against vampires? Or rather demonic cultivators. They were just so dark and I just didn't need any of that.

We had an idea about the air shifts. Getting off Mesa really helped though. I really wanted to get straight there but I stopped and thought about this again. In addition to them figuring out how to load people up onto the airship they were going to have to get them there without them notifying the people that fly the ship. They were planning on starting their own airship business with some of the funds. They've been inquiring about killing people to get their ownership. That's what of course made things easier for them as they've done a lot of work before being tagged by us.

There was a legitimate business part to their dealings. And of course involved bags of tea. They also had something that made me think of coffee. Since the poor girl hadn't had much on her, we had to figure out where she had been staying. Luckily enough for us. She even. If it wasn't that cheap, she didn't have access to flight at that moment but also.

There had to be a way for us to take advantage of their legitimate business dealings and figure out which of their airships that we're arriving. Had people in it that were destined to be used and abused. There were only so many people that could be born in this town and by raiding other villages, they could now draw more people in. The problem I kept getting back to was how were they getting people to sign up to be on these ships. Some would have to volunteer to join them. Then they would have to knock that person out because who won't do that job.

But there had to be some reason why people were either signing up or getting hypnotized into getting onto these airships. Especially if they thought it was going to be lucrative to build their own airship and rinse it out. They had a foresight into the future of these communities that none of us really did. I guess it kind of paid to know these things when you were feeding on humans as your primary food source. I kind of wondered that at that moment what humans would taste like? Were we the other other meat? Were we just long pig? These are all questions that I needed to think about deeply and I was so glad that one of my girls decided to wake me up two hours after I've been awake just because I'd walked into a shop.