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Xueyie knelt in front of her family.

"Say those words again," her father, a pale handsome man with luxurious locks of hair said.

"I'm going off on my own now," she said.

"Out of the question," the man replied.

Now, I know that this was her dream and she had a ton of impostor syndrome all blended up with being the daughter of two high functioning narcissistic parents but this was a low blow even for me. Still I watched, impassively trying to get her to confront the ideal image of her family.

Or at the very least to not crumple into a yes woman immediately. Like, hey girl we just talked about this.

"Take it back," I said as the scene replayed itself.

"Father, I'm doing my own thing and there is nothing that you can do to stop me. I'm going to form my own group and if you want a part of my life, you're going to need to adhere to my desires."

We had determined that boundaries were far too therapy speech for her parents. Her parents had never met a red flag that they didn't wave like it was pride month in Los Angeles.

"Unacceptable. Xueyie, you are part of this clan and you will do what your mother and I tell you."

"Father, this isn't a discussion. I'm not coming to terms with you. You can take my presence in your life under my conditions or not have it at all."

I nearly cried. The tissue I grabbed was for my allergies, really. I sniffed them out.

Her father looked shocked, as if he had never considered her as not a part of him.

Narcissists want control over you. They want you to do what they want to do. They don't want you going rogue and standing up for yourself. They need you to give them the attention they deserve, the obedience that they think that they are due.

You don't owe them anything. And in this case, Xueyie had done more than her fair share of work for the clan, above and beyond what anyone could reasonably be expected to do.

The dream stuttered.

Xueyie brightened.

"You know what? I think I get it now."

"Get what?"

"I want to be the kind of person who stands up for others, who builds them up, like you do. What I don't want," she said, eyeing the paused sequence, "Is to waste my time away doing what the clan wants. This? This is my time. I can make it to a higher realm on my own."

"When?"

"Today. I feel it. I know who I was, and now... I know who I am going to become."

She smiled and that was it. No profound wisdom, just a light that showed her path to the second realm and farther.

"It only took how many tries to get here?" I whispered to Min's avatar.

"Twenty nine, but who's counting?"

"I'm glad I'm in whatever hellish committee runs her clan because damn, girl."

"I'm looking through your memories to see what a committee and damn you were part of a commune? This is hella interesting."

I couldn't roll my eyes harder. With access to all of my memories, Min had the totally important job of finding more ways to nag at me to stay on task. Not that I wasn't on task. If this went well, I would potentially have another ally in the second realm.

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

"Joseph, let us depart," Xueyie said as she came to talk to me, "I know what I was. And where I need to go next."

The fire in her eyes warmed me to the core.

It took her two solid hours to push through her limits to the second realm.

Min was pleased.

I was happy.

Xueyie was ecstatic.

The entire Jin family would be celebrating tonight. She left before dinnertime with a skip in her step. I expected Egiya to hear everything and want something similar for her own stalled cultivation. More and more I was finding a lot of imposter syndrome where there honestly shouldn't have been any. But you worked with the patients you had, getting them on the path. It was nice to finally see someone able to physically show the difference as well.

Not everyone I worked with was super jacked when they left. This one? Yeah I wanted credit for this. Even when she went away, the feeling that she had achieved something made me feel warm inside.

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That happy feeling blinded me on my way back. I was too sure of myself and I didn't notice my tail.

That's fine. I stopped when three of them had to run ahead of me.

They looked as if they had been sprinting and hadn't yet caught their breath.

Three men in unmarked white robes stood tall in front of me.

"They have the fang mark," Min said.

Each man had a clear fang tattoo that was only visible through the infrared spectrum. They also sported long straight hair. It gave me an idea.

"Min," I whispered, "any others?"

"Scanning. Beep boop."

Her new thing was pretending that she was a robot. She tried new things frequently enough to give me heartburn. I had the sinking feeling that she would settle on something truly terrible as her schtick, making me stone face every time she changed.

"No others are present, but surely someone at the peak of the second realm can handle two low second realm and one first realm fighter."

"Great," I muttered.

This time, instead of just turning and running, I jumped, grabbing the corner of a first story brick building with my outstretched arm. If they wanted to get some of this, they would have to work for it.

They weren't expecting parkour. I don't know how many times I needed to run away from these people to get it to stick. I certainly wasn't going to wait for them to pick up the dumbfounded look off their faces as I raced over the stone rooftops of the two and three story buildings that infringed upon people's right to walk all over the place.

Most of the building may have been stone but it had been polished to a marble finish.

I easily jumped from roof to roof, gaining more than a block of distance when I saw two heads pop up from where I had come and one runner desperately trying to follow me from the ground level.

"This path," Min said as she lit up a route in front of me,"Is the most optimal way to get away from them faster, you'll note it's in blue and this other path is for if you're what's called a podcaster, the lowest of the low."

The red path led straight to the two second realm cultivators, nearly the exact opposite way the blue path went.

And with that, I was off, blue all the way. It took the better part of fifteen to lose my tail and I cursed that I wore the brightest thing I owned for this little jaunt. True it was just something in clear pure white, but I was going to definitely reconsider my choices again until I got a lot stronger.

"Thanks Min," I said, catching my breath on a stairwell that led to the outer docks on the western side of my neighborhood,"That was pretty great."

"I still think that you should have fought them."

"Oh, *you*," I said, pointing at her nose,"You're just so full of mischief, aren't you?"

"You know it. Plus you never know what they could want. They might just want to throw you a pizza party. You recall pizza parties, right?"

"You know I remember them."

Back when I was in college, I was running around between jobs all day and night and those campus pizza parties lifted my spirits. That and I had kids part way through college, like an idiot, and yeah most people think that a pizza party is just your job trying to make you stay but without paying you what you're worth-and it is- but free pizza y'all. Don't knock it.

"I'm almost certain," I said, turning my robes inside out to expose the blue to the outside,"that that is the most miniscule of my favorite things, but go on then, girl boss closer to my actual feelings, why don't you?"

"I'll drop the pizza party thing if you drop the girl boss one," she said, her face a mask.

I steeled my face.

"Deal."

Across the water, I saw them running along the tops of buildings. I slid into the long shadows of the forthcoming twilight. If they wanted to, they would have seen a man with far different robes in quite a lot of shade.

One ran past me, then another as I held back on even the barest of breaths.

It was both the best and worst game of hide and seek ever. Only my newfound ability to suppress my aura saved me.

The third man looked nearby me for a short second, then turned as he heard something else.

They were drawing the wrong type of attention. A new group I had only heard of appeared with dark blue robes and after a long tense standoff where no words were said, the red fang enforcers ran off.

I farted a sigh of relief. The stress of the run had made me clench my bowels, not that I really had to go, but it was like all of a sudden the relaxation caused a series of more and more pungent gas to hover around me.

I slipped past the blue robed men, taking care to give every impression of being not a party to whatever had just transpired. I had a real emperor palpatine thing going on with the robe.