There were only so many things that one can say about being up high in the sky on the equivalent of a cruise liner. Instinctively, I knew that I could fly. Also I knew that I didn't want to fall.

Once we got to the correct altitude, we were greeted by the stark beauty of the wilds. Most of the continent looked like humans had never graced the ground there. I had to wonder how a society could even exist in such small pockets like Western Jewel. I also began to think about why in particular they had chosen to make that a city. Clearly that had been a choice, most likely affected by the proximity to the hunting grounds of the local whales. Hundreds of pounds of whale meat had been put below before we departed.

Not that I was paying attention to any of that. Moon Lee and I were taking turns sparring with Egiya. She had gotten used to her new level of power and was now trying to finish hammering out the kinks. I had invited the blue coats to watch.

"She has excellent foot work, but I worry about her close range game," Feng said.

Two of them were clearly able to discern what she was going through. One was third realm the other one was second realm, close to his breakthrough. I was thinking about talking to him about how he might break through as an exercise for me to get better in my practice because clearly something was blocking him. If I could get him through then that might be helpful to me. Although not every blue coat wanted to experience that same ecstasy of being able to advance. They didn't want to open up to a therapist. Not only did they not understand it, I was going to have to explain entirely to them. So instead, I did the classic thing where we watched two women fight and talked about stuff. That was not exactly our feelings but kind of tangential. I was trying to build a report with them because if I needed him to break through the third realm and he was very close, I wanted to give him away to do so.

"So Feng how long you been at the second realm?" I said.

"He's been there for two years," Liu said.

Neither of the blue coats had given me a last name. I feel like this was on purpose. The only reason I knew that they were blue coats was that they had given us the agreed upon passcode. Otherwise, the Mandarin did really good in selecting both of them for this clandestine work.

I would not have been able to pick out either man and for crowd. Their hair was glorious but it was exactly what the average person had.

An utterly forgettable spy is probably the best one.

"Two years?" I said.

"He's a bit incensed about it," Liu said.

"I am not," Feng said, rage dripping hot, as if someone had asked him his sisters phone number and bra size.

I watched the two guys fired each other. Despite the fact that they didn't work together, it was evident that they had done a lot of work on their own and that they were both spending the time in a shared birthing as well as ignoring the fuck out of each other. This was not going to go well. The facade of them being confident mid-level bureaucrats had crumbled faster than Lee did when told her she was cute.

The girls paws they're sparring looking at Fang. Was it his vault that he didn't want to talk about his problems? No. I blame society for not picking him up in a way that let him express himself. He could do so much. But what was happening was that he did not want to admit something to himself. He was blocked.

"Do you want to go next?" I said, gesturing to the small training room that was totally necessary on a cross country flight.

How did people do these long flights for? I knew that after this, I was going to be heading back to my birthing with my new girlfriend and perhaps taking a hot shower with her. A man has to eat after all. Some of those needs involve Tom frankly to his girlfriend on their first trip together.

We hadn't decided what to tell Egiya. In a roundabout way, it looked like this wasn't going to be a problem because the two of us were sharing a birthing. Unless something else happened it would look like we were really good platonic friends. Which we had in up until yesterday. Today? Things were a little more complicated but we were easing into it. It's not like I was able to take her on a date right this moment. In fact she had taken me on a date to the Opera and I didn't even know it was a date and it caused all these problems because we based them on a cultivator. And yeah this is just how a relationship starts, doesn't it.

Feng and Egiya went at it. She was much faster than she had been and it looked like she'd spent enough time in the second realm to get used to Lee's attacks. But this guy was excellent. He slipped in and out of shadows like it was his home. The best description I could think of this guy was that he was teleporting place to place, but I knew that had to be a very difficult thing and about five minutes and into sparring, he had to hold up sand.

She had the endurance to go for long distance and he was more of a one trick pony. That meant that I wouldn't be able to rely on him if we needed to go in someplace. He was more of liability, then. I sighed. If only they could have sent me somebody who actually could fight as well as blending with the crowd that would have been perfect. But I had to work with what I got. And I had another fourth realm cultivator as well as another third rope cultivator who was pretty good in the fight and my two liabilities. One of them was looking at the daughter and the other one was like the punk kid that wanted to date my daughter.

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Of course I wanted them all to come back in one piece, but I was going to have to make some decisions about how we were going to array our forces when we were out there. I'd almost forgotten about my spirit. Beast, and it looks like she was going to have to be their OverWatch. In addition to doing so much for me and the communication realm, she was herself with her drum cultivator, meaning that I could count on her.

This was good. In a sense, all I needed was someone to be able to make sure that the demonic cultivators were not able to escape. We went over that a few times talking it through and then after everyone was truly spent, I pulled it into the dream realm and we played through a few scenarios. Liu and Feng We're very surprised at how realistic things were and how detailed I could think .

For me, it was like playing through the first person shooter with a define story path. For them, it was like they were real and in some sort of virtual reality simulation. I never wanted to stop them from thinking that this wasn't a dream, but they kept doing things that made me realize that it was hard for them to distinguish the real from the unreal.

This wasn't Inception. This was me working my ass off to try and give the guys the proper training that they would need to not die on my watch. And one small way, I was resentful for the Mandarin for sending me people that needed to be trained. But on the other side of the card, at least now I knew that we had two government functionaries that could do the job if with a little bit of help. That in itself felt like a step off from what we had before and I was grateful that they at least pretended or seemed to want to learn. I did not know if they were actually going to follow through with what we were doing or if they were just playing along. Either way, when we were all done with that, we led them back to the birthing event and we walked back up to mine.

Egiya split to fall asleep like a log. I was surprised at how fast she fell asleep, but seeing as how she's born against all four of us and Men repeatedly that day, I could not blame her. Her. And the good news was that the other person that I was with? She was not so tired and she wanted to play.

We spent a very pleasant evening together that night and I am happy to say that the showers on that ship were world class.

---

The next morning, I woke up with a beautiful woman holding me down and realizing that we were both naked, I kind of reveled in it for a while. It had been so long since I had felt able to open somebody not just on a therapy way but I'm like in an intimate way. After I had woken up with Lauren, I didn't realize that I made a mistake and then came here. And it's been so long just pushing my feelings away. Now that I found someone that was into me in a way that I could not imagine I was just so happy. I swear that had to have sat there for half an hour just gleefully looking at her head on my chest.

When she woke up, I'm glad to say that she was not any less giddy than I was. That new relationship energy it was chaotic and unforced. It permeated everything. And I wondered if they would Chase their sheets while we were out. Because I kind of like that smell.

She smelled like everything that was good in this world. I could dig it. I let someone calling forever, but I knew that at some point in time we might have visitor and I probably was going to have to wear pants for that. I hated the idea of pants, the concept of putting things on my body just felt an asthma to who it was at that moment. But I don't think that Lee was ready for going public with what we were doing yet. She was still feeling about herself and what she wanted with this. Clearly, shear God when she wanted from me physically. Now we were just trying to nail down what we wanted in a relationship.

I hadn't even asked her if it was possible for her to have a child because it seemed like she will be able to make the decision if and when she wanted to.

So very gradually. I got myself up and changing the day clothes and realized that she was just looking my bare ass while I was doing all that. It struck me that she probably had never seen a naked band before. I wasn't sure how I felt about that. The culture of these sects was so repressed as to make me ask if they even knew basic sexual education. I was damn sure that she was going to give me some very particular answer about where babies came from that her sect had given to her if I ever asked.

I could imagine now two sect elders deciding how they were going to present this kind of information. Like women definitely could get pregnant and have children but between here and there I was not sure if she knew. Maybe they got all the facts of Life after they got married. Or maybe there was some sort of auntie underground that passed out the information at the time when it was appropriate. She hadn't mentioned anything about that, so it was pretty sure that we all knew.

Breakfast on the airship was probably one of the best things I've ever had. It was a flank steak that was just made in a way that drew out the salty and peppery flavors of the meat. I was already looking forward to getting this meal on the way back. Surely they were going to have to pick up some of this delicious meat somewhere. I knew it didn't come from Western Jewel. Now that I knew that they had it, I could ask for questions of the staff so I could figure out where to get something for myself. Hopefully there was a vendor in the capital that made all this and I would be able to find them.

Other than that, it was just another day training with the only big change being that we were training in a different location and a location now had been moving. It was odd that I could feel that the airship was moving as we were fighting. Especially when I want to fly, I had to account for the movement of the Air As it was way faster than me unless I was actively putting energy into it.

That was when we finally got to see the capital. That was fully the size of an actual City, wide enough to be Las Vegas and long enough to be not confused with the same. It was in a dry desert. On the inside of the city, marble houses and buildings Rose to be three or four stories in the center. As a clearly man-made canal with water ran through the place. The whole city itself seemed to be a mockery against nature. It's stood there as if saying that there's nothing that natural world could do to bring it down.

I loved it. If it was going to mock nature, I understood exactly what this place was. The opulence that I was getting off of it? The vibes were immaculate. Now I just needs to figure out where the fuck district forty was.

"We're going to have to move south of the port here," Feng said, breaking out the map.

By his estimation as you poured over the map, it was about a mile away from where we would be landing. This meant that we would not have to go very far, but the capital was packed. Even if it was a 20-minute walk, they were going to be hundreds of thousands of people to eat us in there. There and this is if we didn't fly. Two of us could fly. But we weren't going to because we were trying to be low profile. This meant that we had to decide how we were going to split ourselves up as we approached.

We had a plan. Now it just needed to survive first contact with the enemy.