"All right. So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to go speak to the emperor," I said, briefing the team. Inside of the ornate wooden conference room that my station afforded us, we had arrayed easily. Having literal help show up was just a bonus.

Moon Fei, though wounded more than a Yamcha body double had joined us. Moon Xiru's had remained at Western Jewel. This meant that we had a man back home to run operations and we had our fixer here with us to make sure that the mundane parts of our job were going to be taken care of.

"The first thing you're going to do is speak to the emperor? Look. Who's all high and mighty right now huh?" Moon Lee said.

"This one thing said it's going to be a good time to get information from moon clan contacts at the Capitol," Moon Fei said. "Once we arrive this one will head out to the compound and integrate with the local efforts."

"Okay, that's you," Xueyie said, flicking her hair back. "What are the rest of us going to be tasked to do?"

Min was sitting on her lap. Of course she was getting head pats. But to me it felt like she was petting snooki from Jersey shore. I knew the mouth that Spirit beast had. Moon Lee, sitting next to her was doing the same thing with her spirit beast. It wasn't a competition but it was clear that the two had the same idea. The two spare piece had been floating around between the two of them and Egiya.

Of course, right now I had Egiya filling out the paperwork that I was told would only be thirty pages. Xiran was watching over her shoulder, trying to get a sense of her path. Right now she had a new path where she could kind of decide where she wanted to go but she hadn't. I wish she would sometimes, but I'd already taken her away from everything she known and given her an ultimatum that was going to be a death sentence if she didn't lose everything that connected her to the culture from her previous life.

Once we gotten through with the pleasantries, the girls took her in this training our newest recruit in combat. She was solidifying her foundations right now. To get your foundations correct. You have to connect all your meridians and solidify your dantian. Or something like that. For me? I just came up having been purified enough by just not being from here. It was like stepping through a 5k finish line, after walking the whole way. It was harder to get to the fourth and third realm, by far. Those felt more like a professional fight. But I could see that she was moving well.

I asked the girls to take it easy on her as they were getting very talented by this time. But still they had to have some value to their training. Just because in one case one wasn't a drug fighter and the other one was didn't mean that they could just ignore what would happen if they were in a one on one fight.

When one of them came in with a low attack, Xiran found it back, dodging it. When the other one went with a eye attack, she dodged to the side. It was like she was doing her best to predict the next move. I know that the two were coordinating but not as much as if there were actually fighting.

They were taking turns. I like that about them. This meant that they could rest and relax while they were doing their work. Moon Lee and I were just watching them go back and forth for what had to be a half an hour before we called a halt. It was enough for them to finally get familiar fighting each other.

We might not be a great team, but we were a passable dysfunctional family.

That work would get us pretty far. Moon Lee and I gave her some pointers I wanted you to do but for the most part let them do their own thing. It wasn't really even something that we could intuit normally. They all needed to take some time to go into their cultivation. Just like my own cultivation, there was going to be some time to meditate and some time to do your techniques and fight as these el-solidified your pathway. Pathway. Once we join the basics really well, everything else kind of fell into place and that was what we're trying to get them to do here. That and keep them occupied while we're flying for two days. Somehow, we had taken a airship that was making a single stop on the way to the Capitol and that it had really pushed us back far more than I thought we were going to be.

Then, when they got too tired to continue physically, we jumped into the dreamscape. There they fought my inner demons as well as theirs. As it turned out, Xiran had a lot of location specific memories that she let us draw upon. That meant that when we got to the part where we were in the capitol, we went to a version of her parents mansion that looked over the main square in the first district.

As in, two of the leaders group that was the largest single problem that the Empire had lived underneath their noses. They were probably somewhere else now if they knew it was good for them. If I were them I would have been far far away, but I knew better than two deal with this kind. Those that live by the soil and die by the sword kind of thing.

I wasn't just in this game to make money. I wanted to make it to the point where Sects would just stop bothering me. See that in itself will be a amazing thing for me to have happen. Because here?

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In the dreamscape where all my feisty dreams about fighting bears and tigers came true? There were no suites men trying to pull me into their pyramid scheme. There were no MLM karens trying to get me to sell their herbal tea supplements either. And they definitely weren't going to be trying to get to my girlfriend to get her to sell those things. That'll be ridiculous right? But I figured those things more than I feared actual combat.

So that was when I had a chance to work with the team on what's going on with them. It was very quickly evident that there was a good foundation there for us to build from. She haven't trained in combat. She just wasn't as strong as either I or Lee were. This kept her in a competitive spot with the other ones. I could build something out of that. The only question was, how much could she take? The answer we quickly found was that she was a little bit more durable than we had initially expected.

I wanted to think that it was a mental fortune that she had that had saved her ass from being killed by me. Her reality? The change in her life? Those were huge things. The fact that she had been basically thrown into the wolves to try and figure it out the person that could distinguish demonic cultivators meant that she was expendable. Expandable people didn't last long.

Expandables people that were sent to do a suicide mission in a brand new city to them really didn't last long. But on the other hand if you took those same people? And you re-aim them back at the initial cause of their disillusionment? You can have a great time using them to undermine the exact systems that brought them out. Let me explain.

There's a difference between the institution that creates demonic cultivators and the individual cultivator. If there was no institution, the individuals could just easily leave. Xiran could just as easily get up and get out of this organization. In fact, she did so. Without the institution or the sect to back her up, there was no reason for her to do the thing she could potentially do that would support that group.

This was why we went after the institution and not just the people. Anybody who wanted out? We would give them a chance. We would make sure that they were going to get the same. Look that this one got but we were going to do it all the same.

It was just a part of our due diligence to get these people out of the institution so the institution could collapse in on itself. At least that's what I was going to tell the emperor if he wanted me to pontificate on the point. I could go on and on about left-wing violence versus right-wing violence, but the fact the matter is if she didn't have a group to return to then she would probably just do something else.

Right now?

We were about to dismantle that group wholesale. The fact that her parents who were demonic cultivators were close enough to the imperial Court to see it meant that there was some high-level cultivators that were going to find. This also meant that they probably knew what's going on and they had probably moved to some different place and assume new identity is already.

There are only so many high-level cultivators around. After the fourth realm? It was rarer to find a hire, more powerful cultivator. Were as strong as I could suspected they were, they don't be easy to pick them out of lineup of strong cultivators.

There was a bottleneck of the second round and a bigger bottle like at the third realm, which meant that the amount of people that actually got through was small and you noted those people when you saw them. It was still a significant amount of people because of the selection bias of you spending time around them or seeing them often because they were notable but it just wasn't that many in the grand scheme of things.

This meant that when we did a rehearsal of a raid on a house, we let her run through to feel what it was like to be on point. Because she wasn't really that strong yet. He was going to have more time to get to that point. She still wanted to come with us and lead us to some places that we might not have expected to go to but I wasn't going to throw her away.

She had begun to prove her usefulness.

When presented with a map of the capital, she calmly pointed out several hotspots that we would probably need to go to in person. This caused the aide to the emperor to realize that not only was this going to be a problem for him, we were going to make it a problem if he didn't do his job.

As far as I was concerned, his job was to make us happy so that we could make the emperor happy. Nothing would make me happier than making that man sweat out the small details.

We sparred there for what had to be another half a day and then we went back to the real world. If I liked to be on a virtuality into work at the reality. I knew the dreamscape was fake because I created it and it wasn't active part of my will to keep it up. I also knew that if I got too messed up in the head, I could could definitely do some damage with that.

I didn't want to think about it. I knew that in my heart, I could not use the dreamscape for terrible things. I have a code. My basic code is this. If I feel like I wouldn't be able to explain to my daughter s? I wouldn't do it. Questionable things like going to people's heads and trying to mind control them or try out them into a dream space? Yeah, I don't think I was going to want to explain that one. Rachel and Courtney would definitely say something.

It's exactly why I had decided that the dreamscape was only going to be used for happy dreams and training montages thankfully fell on the preview of training. After all, I was a big softie when I wasn't trying to save the neighborhood. And when I wanted to go see at the neighborhood? I was going to do the best damn job I could. Even if it took me away from the neighborhood to destroy cultivators. I was ready, willing, and able to put an end to this this little skirmish

---

There's this little trope that once you've done something like going on a little drive or walk once, the next time it feels a bit shorter. Somehow that happened on our way and it felt like we were there in no time. I might have enjoyed our time together. I had our s*** was because it was the size of a cruise ship. But I was glad to be back on solid ground. Even if I could fly using a lot of my energy to keep myself afloat, the people that I was with? They might have some issue with gravity. We are all victims of physics. Those that can't fly, especially so.