There was a fair bit of paperwork for some other poor schmuck to do. It wasn’t for me, thankfully. I never found the vendor again, sadly.
The best part about being the guy that had to hit the guy was that I didn’t have to do the paperwork. I made sure that was part of my contract. It looked oddly at me, but after I explained my situation with the bureaucrats from my side of the house, they were more than happy to oblige me.
The blue coats took over, and we regrouped at the hotel. This time, we walked. I wanted to let the heat of the battle simmer down.
“That was such a rush!” She said. “I can see why people fight! I mean, we practiced a lot, but... Xueyie tossed a guy casually through the wall like it was nothing.”
“She is impressive. I’ll give her that,” I said, reaching up to pet Min.
“And then I tried the same thing, and I didn’t get so far, but I got them stuck in the wall and it was so...” she beamed. “It was so outstanding!”
I was a bit taken aback by how young she felt. Like she was just not able to do things on her own and was taking full advantage of not having every minute of her day devoted to reading demonic scriptures. How that came to be, I just couldn’t imagine. It sounded like they were going to make her some sort of high priestess or something.
They might have turned her into the figurehead.
They made her into a weapon.
“You realize that there’s more to life than fighting, right?”
She went all wild-eyed at that. I would give her the benefit of the doubt at this moment.
“Relax. I’m not going to jump down your throat,” I said. “It’s just that I have plans for after this is all done and...”
I kinda gestured vaguely up, like the future existed in the air above us.
“I haven’t really thought about what I’m doing next,” Xiran said. “I have only been thinking about the next mission.”
“In time, I’m not going to need your services anymore. Then you can do your own thing and...”
She couldn’t think about that because they had taken her dreams away. Not the things that happened at night, but how people looked forward to things. Dreams were important because they gave you something to look for. It was a bit of a thing when I was dealing with someone with depression or anxiety. I would ask them if they had something that they were looking forward to.
“After this?” I said. “After all of this, I want to explore this world. Hopefully, with my daughters and Lee. Maybe you could tag along.”
“Maybe.”
“It’s something to look forward to. It’s important to have something to look forward to or a goal,” I said. We were getting close to a large open air market. The smells were getting me going. Without clocks, we punctuated our time with meals. It was time for a meal.
“You hungry?” I said. “Obviously, my treat.”
I turned to see the rest of the group. I motioned to the market and got some indifferent nods. When in Rome, though...
The meat on a stick here was at least on the same level as I had expected. It’s good to know that humans everywhere liked street food. It was good enough for this guy, at least.
---
After we finally got together with the blue robes for debriefing, I found my evening free. Should I go to another opera? Something itched at the back of my head. The last time I went, I was still paying dividends for.
If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
Xiran had retired to go into closed door cultivation. We all expected her to take about 4 hours to return to the second realm, if not halfway through it. Her New-path ought to use the surrounding aura much more efficiently and because she was retracing steps with a better base, it was like she had my advantage. Maybe I should sell the whole thing to them.
‘Come back train with Joseph Pidge. You had the demonic cultivation pathway before, but now you’re going to have an actual cultivation pathway. Oh, and you’ll have fewer impurities because Joe knows what to do and you’ll be using some Earth technique that is forbidden to the locals.’
Rachel would have loved that. She loved it. When someone presented some stupid fake argument for their own thing. Then she loves taking apart the argument. Not that I thought my argument had zero merit, but who would believe me?
I sure as heck wouldn’t believe me. I was living proof of the actual worthiness of the technique. Then I thought about the cultivator who tried to take me aside and sell me some tea and how I’d blown him off. Those eyes came up to my dream. Distinct hazel eyes stood out to me in everyone that interacted with me in my dream.
To be fair, it was a pretty mundane dream about washing clothes in a river and then putting them out to dry. I was already living with the woman of my dreams. The other dream would be to fuck off wherever I wanted to whenever I wanted to.
Fuck you, money only really matters when someone can’t get to you with violence. You’ve heard about these people before. People that have done the right thing for years invested in their retirement accounts and now they don’t really feel like they have to work, so they don’t. That kind of wealth takes time. Unless, of course, the emperor's hands are straight to you for your honorable service.
But just having that also gave the emperor the impression that I was going to keep hunting down to my cultivators like it was vintage early 2000s rap albums. I didn’t need those. I wanted them. If I didn’t have kids, maybe I would be really into that. But also who was a record player now? And with media all being digitized, how is supposed to take it across to a different world? That got me thinking about hipsters and how they would take their record collections. Tran is migrating across a universe and then not realizing until too late that they didn’t have a backup record player.
I shuddered at that dream.
I had enough of that and when brunch finally rolled around, Xiran had made it to the second realm.
“I did it, senior!” She said.
“Well done,” I said. “Keep it up.”
I wish I had some cool catch prices for her, but I really had little. We would celebrate with brunch. There wasn’t much else to do about it.
That was about the time when the Kangs walked in. They obviously had gone through a lot. Egiya had been crying, then applied makeup, giving her rosy red cheeks. At least that seemed like the order.
“Good morning, sir,” I said, offering him some tea.
He readily accepted it.
“I suppose you have big plans for today?” He said.
“Not really. The blue coats they owe us more information and that is about the end of Xirans lived experience. I was thinking that we would make plans to head back, but the travel time is just horrific. If only there was somebody that could let us just make a way there faster,” I said, leaning forward.
“There... uh... Might be a way,” he said.
For a moment, it felt like I was talking to a friend’s dad when I was young. He obviously knew me as his kid’s friend and didn’t want to rock the boat. But how much did he really know about me? I wasn’t a high schooler trying to get a prank pulled. I had a group of people that I took care of back at Western Jewel.
“Well, I ... we.... Have a plan for that,” he said.
“You don’t say?” I said. “You, the man with the formation circle, might get us back there faster?”
“We could work something out,” Egiya said. Something was troubling her.
“Actually, do you mind if I step out for a second? Lee, can you take over?” I asked the gorgeous woman who the elder Kang had sat next to. “I need some fresh air.”
“I’ll convince him of the merits of saving us two days of travel,” Lee said, smiling.
She got a little closer to him and poured a bit of tea into his now empty mug.
“I feel like I need some fresh air too,” Egiya said.
The capital was so beautiful that I was a bit taken aback. I have forgotten how much I love the hustle of a large city.
Egiya and I took a quiet minute.
“I just found out all this time that he could have been coming home. He said that he didn’t even think about it, but ... Now? Now he says that he wants to try?”
“You have an idealization of your father in your head. He is not that person. He is who he is right now. You can’t change who he is. You can choose to accept him or not. No one is going to tell you that you’re doing the wrong thing by shutting him out when he could have visited you often.”
I let that stand there for a second.
“He could have just gotten the ability recently and-“
“He’s had it for two years,” she said.
I whistled. That was a lot of bullshit to put up with. It explained why she was crying so much this morning.
“Let me be brutally honest with you right now. If there was a way for me to see my daughters? I would be there with them. Me not having a way to get back to them and I’ve been trying to do anything I can to get back? That’s how you want him to be.”