You see the thing about my friends is that they were there for me when I needed them. They were like family.

So when I saw Egiya that morning, It felt like such a relief that I nearly burst into tears. That whole last night had been so emotionally wrought.

She immediately ushered me into into the upstairs where, after closing the store, I explained the situation to her and her mother.

"This was the night that I didn't go out with out, of course," she said.

"You couldn't have known."

The two women listened for what had to have been fifteen minutes, only stopping ask for clarification a few times.

By the end it felt like the third time that I'd processed the entire thing. I hadn't realized how heavy and it weighed on my chest.

I found myself in a deep hug from the elder Kang woman before long. I blinked. I hadn't even realized that she had her arms around me. It was mood

I feel like I've been going through the motions and just pushing for days and days. Training had that effect on me. I felt sharper and stronger and faster than ever. But I hadn't really examined this aspect what I was doing. There were people in this war that were going to be killed in the crossfire. These people, similar to the hardcore demonic cultivators. We're still doing the same thing but they hadn't had the actual choice to do this.

Entire time they were just working with the illusion of choice. This, the real decision was being made by somebody else in their lives. If they decided they wanted to go on their own path? That wasn't an option. Their cultivation path and their entire life had been forced upon them.

It was like tiger parenting on steroids. But like the steroids that you would get from your math tutor in cram school. Sure you knew that they were smart but did they really have you best interests at heart? Were their math steroids just another source of incombe for the poor beleaguered math tutors?

But now, we had a chance to change the narrative. She had a chance with us. I hadn't realized until that moment that choosing to live in that moment might have been the biggest rebellion of her life. It would have been easier for her to say that she was going to do what the Sect told her to do. It would have been easy for her to just do what she was told to do.

I didn't want to be another person in her life telling her what to do. I needed her to give me information and not turn into another combatant on their side.

Otherwise, I was just going to become the same thing that her family was to her.

How would we release her?

There's no way that anybody in the Taoists would trust her a hold of her into a bargain.

This is what I laid out for the two of them.

"So what you're saying is, we can't trust her because the only reason she's trusting us is that we're not going to kill her?" Egiya said.

"That sounds about right."

"Then can we just kill her?" She said.

"You know how I feel about killing people, especially people that haven't been given a trial or happen turned into child soldiers."

"Child soldiers?"

"She had no choice in this matter. This is what she was born into. It's all she knows. I don't know why they sent her out here alone, but we want to take advantage of that."

I didn't know why they sent her here alone. She explained that she was going to link up with one of the cells but I I had her examine that a little more deeply. Knowing now what she knew, she was thinking that they were using her to probe into what had actually happened.

They knew what had happened. It had gone up in the newspapers.

It had caused a big stir. The Mandarin didn't generally intervene in local power squabbles. This particular event took on the focus of the entire city for at least a few days. There was still rumblings about it and people dropped by their old hollowed out husk of a Sect grounds. This reminded me that I still wanted to make a memorial for the people that had passed on.

That could be her first task.

---

I was going to need their help to fix this or at the very least tell me.

The familiar haunts of the moon clan were what I needed at that time. Moon Lee had gone along with me. We had seen what the government had done with the other demonic cultivators. I didn't want that. I wanted to figure out if there was a way we could get her on the right path. There was a small chance that we could get her and save her and pull her to the light side or something.

I was just going to have a little look around and maybe a little walk-through to kind of get a feel for how I felt. I didn't want to kill this girl. I didn't want to kill anybody. They made this something that I had to do.

And if they were going to bring little girls to my doorstep as cannon fodder, you would best believe that I would go back to them with the best thing that I had.

I stayed up a little bit later that night thinking through a possible response to this. I didn't know what I didn't know.

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

The thing was that I really needed a function government to step in and do their fucking job for once. The chances of that happening were about zero. As such? It was time for me to come in and do the thing that I've been trained to do.

I slept fitfully for the first time in a long time.

---

When I got up, Moon Lee was there at breakfast. We talk about our plans and the things that we wanted to do and kind of danced around the issue of the girl we had left tied up the Taoists.

" What are your thoughts now?"

"We gave her a night to think about her choices. I think that we need to follow the trail of where she was. We're going to have to get the Mandarin involved at some point in time."

" And do you think that she's actually going to do the right thing?"

"If there's anyone that can fix circle cultivation, it's us. We can take her into the dream space and figure out what the heck is going on. We need to talk to the elders about it if we can break her cultivation and reformat it somehow. We need to figure out how to turn her into a normal cultivator. Have you ever heard of redeeming a demonic cultivator ever?"

She shook her head no. It was a long shot. But if this girl wanted to live for longer than the time it would take to kill her, she was going to need to be on point. There's no way that I was going to put my faith in some sort of cultivation, caller or bracelet that sealer cultivation away just to have change her mind and begin killing people mindlessly.

She was going to have to quit cold turkey.

"I spoke to the elders last night about this. This is such a problem that none of them have ever had. One of them told me that he felt young just by considering what we have had to put them through."

If you were going to propose for one group of people to take care of this person for long-term, I would have put it on the moon clan. Sure, I like the Taoists but I feel like they only had so much skin in the game.

As in only one of their daughters is part of my little gang. Several moon clan members are part of my gang. Thus, more skin in the game.

The mistake would be postponing what we had to do with this girl. We needed some actionable intelligence that we could work on. We needed her to tell us where her family was. Most importantly, we needed a plan on how to get there and alert the local authorities. And deep down up into my stomach, I realized that some of the authorities might be in the pocket of the demonic sect already.

There's a theory that one bad apple will spoil the lot. Let me be the first to tell you that If one Bad Apple is inside of a barrel it's going to turn them all.

So I wasn't excited to see what kind of place could shelter demonic cultivators. There had to be some sort of top cover, especially if they were doing the heinous things they were doing here in Western Jewel. But I didn't know the answer to that. So I just added it to the list.

They were probably hiding in plain sight. I had to imagine that someone dedicating their life to a cultivation might not be to most observant of the people around them.

If I was a demonic cultivator? That's what I would do. Then probably they would stalk arrogant young masters on their training quests and then make their deaths look like an accident or natural causes. That part of my brain that just came up with me scared the fuck out of me.

That cold calculation had to be a part of her everyday.

The small chance that she wasn't one hundred percent in on it was getting smaller and smaller.

I decided that Xueyie, my therapist in training and Lorenzo would probably be the two that I would talk with about this. Memphis, I expected that it would be a good exercise and how to treat someone that is probably going to only be interested themselves or others. There's a chance that she could make a way back. What was I going to do? I start my own private prison? That was the only thing that I was equipped to do I said definitely something that I was not prepared to pay for.

First thing, I got them together that morning. Instead of doing rounds like we normally did, I asked them to take the time to go over this problem. Xueyie was about the price of this situation was well apprised of the situation and she understood. Heck, she had been part of the party that had brought her in.

I thought this might be useful for her training. I was a big believer the notion that prisoners could sometime learn and get better. It was like a regularly visited prisons, but it was part of her training. Just because someone is locked up by virus doesn't mean they don't deserve good medical attention or mental health help. It just meant that those things were filtered through the reality of situation.

"So you just kidnapped her? I mean I could see what you did but this is just a liability," Lorenzo said. "I would just turn her over to the authorities. Getting the information you got more with the stroke of genius. I just don't think that she will be much more useful for any reason."

"We are really struggling about this. But we learned so much actionable information from her and Joe seems to think that we can do something with her. I don't know if it's going to pan out. She's very reticent to do anything now. I feel like that's going to hold her back," Xueyie said.

"So is the question whether she'll have more isolation information later or is the question that do we try to save her. I know she has agreed to many things, but we haven't promised her that she's going to live."

Just because I value human life and didn't want to kill somebody instrumentally didn't make me a terrible person. In fact I thought it made me more of a good person. I didn't just go to people and snatch them up to turn into a cultivation pill or something like that. If I didn't like you, chances were that I hadn't met you. And there was a big group of people that had already tried my patients and I was more than done with. Mostly those people were improv players. It's not acting guys.

I promise.

Relaxing, had direction. Just like this poor girl didn't have any direction in life. Right now, she was stumbling through the will of us. We willed her to be in place. We willed her to devil with all of her secrets. She wasn't really that great at keeping them to begin with, she was already leaking like a sieve. This in fact made me more nervous than usual.

Lorenzo agreed to work on her. Or with her, depending on what actually it didn't happen with them. It was going to be teaching Mama for everybody. Could he get her in a spot where she could rehabilitate herself. Could he do that but we were trying to ascertain the truth of what was going on?

At some point in time we're going to double-check that what she was saying was actually true. Now I didn't understand the intricacies of everything that she was telling us about. But the elders had taken notes and I was going to confer with them. Either way, it looked like someone was going to have to go check in on them in their home base.

That fell to the actual legitimate government to to that work. I was worried that they might not actually do it chances were that they will get the information and not act on it in the timely manner. Or even worse, some bureaucrat somewhere between myself and the Mandarin would figure out a way to go by telling them this bad news. I had seen it before. They just didn't want to pass bad information up. Bad not being the type of information. Bad isn't information about bad guys. It would run counter to their narrative that they were good guys doing great stuff and that they were no bad guys around, only large cultivation beasts.

I was going to go out to talk to the Mandarin. In the back of my mind, I wanted to take direct action and I wanted to do it very soon. But I knew that I had to go through the right channels to give them the chance to disappoint me. After all, that's why they said they wanted to do. They said they wanted to support the populace. So I was going to give them a chance to do so.