"On the order of his majesty, the imperial emperor, heavens guardian, you will report to recieve his grace and blessing at..."

My eyes glazed over.

That day was the first day of many days in which I was handed a letter telling me to report to the some functionary. This one came directly from the office of the emperor.

You see, as a fourth realm Nascent soul Cultivator; I had an obligation as a land and the people. This also meant that I was one of the strongest motherfuckers around.

When you’re strong? The Empire recognizes that. To give you a little ribbon and a gold star and they tell you they’re going to calling you in their hour of need.

It felt to me like they were a little ahead of the time there and asked for me. I had already been responsible the deaths of dozens, if not hundreds, of demonic cultivators, just by showing up at the right place at the right time. I had an ability to see them when they could blend in with a populist. They had a marker on their faces.

There are a few things that the general public doesn’t know about demonic cultivators. The first? Though it sounds like something that would be related to a demon, they are more close to a group of cultists than anything else. There were no demons. At least none that I knew here. What was demonic were their methods.

They took living people, and he turned them into energy. The stronger the person they grabbed, the easier it was to feed on their life essence. The more one did this, the more one needed to higher realm fodder. In the capital city of millions, if not tens of millions, there were so many people that a few disappearing here and there would not cause a lot of fuss.

They knew how to find people they could make disappear and effectively use those and to power themselves. Now there weren’t many. There are far more in Western Jewel where I came from than they were in the capital like, but that was because they had a specific operation they were doing there.

Oh yeah, and I’m a cultivator. What cultivators do is we draw upon the natural aura of the world into that of energy or qi.

We then empower our bodies with that energy to fight against the Spirit. Beasts and other cultivators and this endless war of dick waving that I am just not a fan of. In fact, there’s a lot of recruiting of people to join one sect or another just so they can have even bigger dick away from contests. When I got here, I came from Los Angeles and my great job as a therapist. Many people trying to recruit me for my skills and my ability to take an aura better than most of the average person instantly beset me. Something about being from Earth made my dantian or physical body more able to process the aura around me and energy. This also meant that it was more pure. The regular Joe on the street was very impure and spent their life trying to purify themselves from the energy around. Large sauce of this world were uncleaned and therefore many beasts roamed outside in the impurity. They had to cultivate as well, to become more pure and more strong. Starting at the baseline of that, I worked my way up from the first realm to the 4th where I could use my abilities to reach out and since the world around me was as if I had a giant telekinetic force field. I could also learn how to tap into the power of dreams, taking someone into a living daydream where they could train or develop a therapeutic relationship with them.

You might not be surprised that I started a therapeutic practice on the side because I was competent and wanted to expand it here. I even took on a student, Jin Xueyie, who got a lot of work with the victims of the demonic cultivators. One of those was my partner for my therapeutic pact is Lorenzo. Between the three of us, we were doing a lot of group therapy and a lot of individual therapy to address the post-traumatic stress of those victims.

Jin Xueyie was a part of a theater truth family who had, until recently, been a backup actor. Her cousin’s death forced her to take on a leading role. And during that time, we found out that the demonic cultivators were now setting in more agents to return their influence to Western Jewel. The first one in had been attending the Opera that she starred in and took a liking to her. Xiran the daughter of a demonic cultivator, had been sent along by our family. We abducted her and turned her over to our internal authority.

Apparently, she had been sent here under false pretenses and did not really understand the scope of the problem. Her family had basically tried to get her to bait me out. I wasn’t having any of that. We asked her if she would rather die or live after us breaking and reconstituting her cultivation to not rely on the deaths of others. She allowed us to reformat her conservation and gave us some crucial information. This being the location of the demonic cultivators’ safe house inside of the capital city. The capital city, under the guidance of the imperial Ming emperor, was very far away.

Tracking down any leads before word of her capture or death spread was a top priority for us and local enforcement. Indeed. Later that next day, we departed and caused a giant panic. We discovered nearly a hundred victims less than ten miles from the Capitol and the emperor’s courts. To save face, the emperor had given us an endowment which had yet to actually really reach my coffers. But that morning that we were summoned, I got two letters. Letters. One was from the aid to the emperor asking me to return to speak to him and the other one was from the bank telling me I finally had the money that was owed. I got it down to you for every demonic cultivator I located and or killed. Like it wasn’t on me to kill them all, but I could definitely find as many as possible. The blue rose could determine their cultivation pathway. Being a demonic cultivator was punishable by death.

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And this whole time that I’ve been here, I’ve been staying with the moon Clan. The moon clan dedicated their lives to the techniques set out by the moon spirit. Beasts and, in fact, several members of the Moonlight and were my personal friends, including my tea broker Moon Xiru, my girlfriend Moon Lee and our little intelligence mole Moon Fei. Yes, I’ve only been here for a few months and I’ve already got a girlfriend. But I broke up with my girlfriend in a last world a week before I left, and I regret every minute but that was far behind me. I left my ex-wife a long time ago and even though she decided to follow me here and set up her own shop nearby where I was working, again; we were amicably working things out. Maxine was an industrial engineer who made women’s sports bras into lingerie. She had a shop called resting bitch lace. Back on Earth, we left our two daughters there, Rachel and Courtney.

I didn’t choose to be here. Circumstance pulled here me.

Every day that I’m away from my girls, I ache.

I want nothing more than to get back to you than. I wanted to get back to Lauren and apologize, but it’s been too long for me. She’s probably already moved on and I know her son is not going to miss me how I thought he would. To be honest, I’m pretty sure they all think I’m dead. They probably think the same thing about Maxine, too. It’s going to be rough. But the Moon Clan thinks I can make my way back if I just figure out the right formation.

That brings me to the other person on my team, our formation’s expert, Kang Egiya. Egiya is a daughter of two cultivators, one who spends his time doing the formations for the emperor and the other one whose formation was broken upon trying to ascend to the third realm. Her mother Ellen stays above her shop of formations and inks and papers. It had been one of the first places I visited once I got my bearings.

It seemed like I finally gotten myself into a groove of getting closer to where I wanted to be. While I was working with a system that had so much law and so much bureaucracy and red tape. As a former social worker, I understand the need for government efficiency and for governments to not respond to every single demand. I felt that having a group of people that ate other people and turned them into energy might be high in the priority list for a government. Eternal that it was, and that no one else could kind of pinpoint these guys? It meant that my services were very much needed, and that I was in business. I wanted to be giving people therapy and coaching them through their problems and issues. But what the government wanted me to do here was to find every single ass amount of cultivator and call their number.

So, I knew what was going to happen. The emperor’s aid was going to have me go meet with the Chief inspector or someone in the government and they were You tell me I had to do this. They were going to tell me that this was the mandate of heaven or some bullshit.

Because the emperor is like the agent of heaven and the mortal realm. I would call bullshit on this whole thing and I would still probably do it because it would help people out. And the one thing I’ve learned here is that if I could just cut the problem off the knees, it wouldn’t be able to find its way to me. And even then, it would need some sort of help to get to me.

So that morning when the courier came with the two notices, I paid him his fee and rolled back over. I was going to have to get a ticket onto an airship and take the airship cross country for about 2 days and then I would be back in the court. This time, I would take my entire crew so we could go out there. Or at least the ones that were second realm and up. That meant all the girls and my spirit beast. Oh yeah, I got a spirit feast that was a part of the Moon Clans Spirit beasts. And one thing about me, bonding with my spirit beast, was that I could share my ability to see demonic cultivators with her

My spirit beast, Min, was an ephemeral cat or dog, depending on her feelings who could go intangible or invisible at will. Often she spent his time with my dantian. But also often she was out there making sassy remarks to me, all of which I endured because she was hilarious. Jersey girl and put her here. Because she could access some of my memories, she could make references and also get inside of my head a little. Maybe a little too much for my own good, but that was fine.

She was really great at being mean on the outside while being nice on the inside. It was the perfect thing for the job we were doing and if you had asked me if I wanted this? I would have absolutely said no.

But in practice? It worked out really well for me. Apart from the times when I was actively doing the nasty with my girlfriend, we were constant companions. My girlfriend also had her own spirit beast, which meant that we were always all four together. Though hers didn’t speak up as much, having decided to be a quiet dog most of the time. In fact, I hadn’t seen it in a while.

There’s only so much work for a moon dog.

It’s not like the courier came really early. We just decided to take the afternoon off from training.

In the early mornings, the two of the train can’t stand fighting and various weapons. Then I would go to do group therapy for the victims of the demonic cultivator. I would always be there with Lorenzo and Xueyie. Then in the afternoon I would have lunch with whoever was around and this afternoon, Lee and I had decided that we were a little too... We needed to take the edge off.

Listen. We’re all adults here. I made her happy; she made me happy. That was all. We weren’t trying to get married right now. Both of our sisters had been married with kids for a while and as she was, she was in no rush. Apparently, cultivators can have children until whenever they felt like it.

She, too, was a Nascent Soul Cultivator, meaning that she was about as powerful as I was. She was also hilarious. She had a dry humor that I loved and she knew enough about this world to be dangerous. She had paid attention to the trainers growing up and although she had grown to this level; it had taken her some time. I had helped her get from the third drum to the fourth realm, and she had appreciated that.

It had taken us a long time to get on the same page, but the results were worth it.

Though I might miss my old world, I had a plan to get back to it and maybe this time I would bring my girlfriend with me. Me. Just wanted to see my girls again. Maybe I’d be able to apologize to Laura for leaving her abruptly. I know she had plans for us and maybe the distance was too far, but I want to apologize properly.

But as often the case, when life starts coming at you? You hit right back. A month and a half ago. I had been trying to put this thing after thing after thing. And I thought now it was time to get back to it. I had healed from my injuries. My girlfriend was feeling up to the task and my actress could get her leave of absence approved. We were going to have to head back in and this time I was calling and end to it.