Wang Yonghao slowly got up off the ground, rubbing his bleary eyes.

"How long was I out?" he groaned.

"I told you, you are a lightweight," Qian Shanyi said.

"I am not a lightweight -," he said in an exasperated tone, turning to face her. As his eyes fell on her, his face blushed red, and he turned away, covering his eyes with his hand.

"Why are you naked?!" He exclaimed.

Qian Shanyi looked down on herself. Her “bath”, if one could call it that, was just a mud hole in the ground filled with cold water. On top of that, she didn’t have any soap - while she managed to mostly wash the poison off, she wasn’t clean by any measure. Not wanting to soil another set of robes after her previous one was soaked through with poison, she wanted to at least wait until she was dry in the warm air of the world fragment, and most of the dirt would start to fall off on its own.

"What are you, a baby?" She sighed, "Never seen a naked tit?"

"Just…put something on, please."

“I suppose I will have to, before you knock yourself out from all the blood going to your cheeks,” she grumbled, got up and headed towards the pile of robes that served as her bed.

“Don’t you feel even a little embarrassed?!”

“What do I have to be embarrassed about?” she asked, picking through the pile of robes for something that would fit her well. Her first set of robes was the best of the lot, but ruined by the poison and the gashes left behind by the bear’s paws.

“Being naked in front of others?”

“What of it? Cultivators are naked all the time. Has your clothing never been torn in battle?”

“Not to that extent!” he said, his voice tinged with annoyance, “I cover them in my spiritual shield, like a normal person!”

“If you have the spiritual energy to spare, I suppose,” she said, throwing a glance in his direction. He was still hiding his eyes, “Besides, many body fundamentalist cultivators fight only in their underwear, to leave fewer places for an opponent to grab onto. Are you scandalized from seeing a shade of a pectoral muscle?”

“Oh that is so not the same.”

“How is it not?”

“Because you are a woman?”

“So?”

“So - what do you mean, ‘so’?”

“Woman, man, naked, clothed, what does that matter?” She said, finally finding a robe that wouldn’t drag on the ground for her, “As long as a cultivator carries their sword, aren’t they already dressed to kill?”

He didn’t have a response to that.

"There, all done," she said, tying off her belt and hanging her sword guard from her waist. "Your highness can rest assured that your eyes will remain unmolested."

She headed back to her pan, and put another, smaller cut of the bear on. Having starved for a whole week, she was feeling peckish again.

Wang Yonghao finally turned around, and slowly approached her, looking cautiously at the large bear in the middle of the world fragment.

"While you were out, I found the exit," Qian Shanyi said, quickly searing the meat on the pan, "we can leave after picking up a couple things from the sect."

Wang Yonghao sat down in front of her, eyeing her meat hungrily. After she finished cooking and cut it into small parts with a pair of daggers, she saw him reach out for a piece, and slapped his hand away with the flat of her blade. He yanked his hand back.

"What do you think you are doing? That's my food." She said.

"Are you too greedy to share? I'm hungry," he responded, looking hurt.

"He who doesn't work doesn't eat," she noted with a wise look on her face. "If you want food, then see that bear? Drag it to the edge of the world fragment, and turn it over on its back, we'll need to butcher it later."

Wang Yonghao threw a glance at the bear.

"It must be more than half a ton," he whined, "can't you at least help?"

“Didn’t you care so much about me being a woman mere moments ago?” She said, “Women aren’t supposed to carry weights.”

“Oh come on!”

"You are a big guy, you'll manage it," she cut back. With her leg and ribs broken, she wasn't going to be dragging anything unless forced to at sword point.

Wang Yonghao looked uncertainly between the meat on the shield and the heavy bear. She made sure to moan a bit as she swallowed the next piece of meat, smacking her lips in satisfaction.

"It's so good, you can't believe it," she said.

"Oh fine," he scowled, got up, and walked dejectedly towards the bear.

"Careful, that slime it's covered in is poisonous," she called after him. He threw an accusatory glance back at her, but didn't say anything.

He circled the bear a couple times, and finally decided to pull it by its front paws, where most of the slime was burned off by the flames. While she watched him drag it away, she took out her jade slate and made sure she remembered the butchering steps correctly.

Finally done with her meal, she set aside the daggers she used to cook and eat food, picked up a longer dagger she would use for the bear, as well as a short axe, and headed after Wang Yonghao.

When she arrived, he was massaging his own shoulders, and looking at her warily. He seemed a bit shaky on his feet: it seems that the effects of the egg have not completely faded. She motioned for him to grab hold of the bear.

"Pull its front paws apart, and as far away from its body as you can - I need its chest and stomach taut," she commanded. Now that she looked at the bear from this angle, she could see that it was female - this would make the entire process simpler.

Wang Yonghao did as she said, grumbling throughout. It was nice having minions - she would have had so much trouble doing this alone.

"I'm only doing this for the food," he said, seeing the look on her face.

Well, some adjustment was still needed, but he'll get there in time.

"Sure," she said, choosing to keep her plans hidden, "just keep holding like that, this will take a bit."

She stepped down on the one back paw of the bear, fixing it in place. In retrospect, it may have been a bad idea to cut off its other back paw in advance, but damn it, she was so hungry.

She sliced vertically through the pelt with small, shallow cuts, trying to slowly get through the layers of fat and muscle. The flesh was stiff from rigor mortis and the freezing temperature - Ice Crystal Bars might have prevented decomposition, but they sure didn’t help with the butchering.

“Why are you going so slow?” Wang Yonghao echoed her thoughts. “Can’t you just, you know, take a sword and slice it apart in one blow?”

“Because if I fuck up I might pierce the intestines, and I don’t want poop all over the meat I will be eating,” she said slowly, concentrating on her work. She opened a vertical gap into the body cavity, showing the entrails, and was slowly widening it. “This is my first time doing this, don’t distract me.”

She heard a sound from Wang Yonghao, and looked up to see him go green in the face at the sight. She snorted.

“What did you think was inside the animals you eat?” she said.

“I just…didn’t think about it, alright?” he said, looking away.

“Well, then you will like this part,” she smirked, putting down her dagger, and picking up the axe. “I’m going to need to widen this rib cage.”

She stepped around the bear and started chopping upwards, straight through the middle of the rib cage. In a few quick chops, the rib cage was split in half, and she stretched it apart with her hands to look inside.

She rolled up her sleeves, picked up her dagger, and reached deep into the body cavity - the next step was to cut the connective tissues keeping the organs attached to the rest of the body. Wang Yonghao tried backing away, and she yelled at him to keep holding the bear so that it wouldn’t tip over.

“Why are you so disgusted by this?” she said, her hands up to the shoulder in guts and blood. “You have all the same organs inside of you.”

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“My organs stay on the inside,” Wang Yonghao muttered, looking as far away as he could manage without becoming an owl. “I don’t need to think about them as long as that is true.”

“Thinking about your organs is good for cultivation,” she said, slowly pulling the pile of entrails out of the bear’s body cavity. Her own broken rib sent a spike of pain through her body, and she suppressed a groan. “For example, take the heart,” she picked up the bear’s large heart to punctuate her point, “there are two major meridians that pass directly through your heart, and one of the seven dantians also sits right on top of it. Out of all the organs in the body, it has the highest concentration of spiritual energy - which is also why it tends to explode from severe feng shui deviation or spiritual energy overload. Condition of your heart is directly linked to the condition of your meridian network, and you can monitor one by monitoring the other. The better you understand your organs, the faster you can cultivate.”

She threw the heart onto clean grass nearby, and started picking her way through the other organs to see what was edible, checking them for poison.

“All the more reason not to think of them,” Wang Yonghao muttered. Qian Shanyi stopped what she was doing and looked at him.

“You don’t want to cultivate faster?” she asked incredulously, gesturing with bloody hands. “Every cultivator wants that.”

“I want a normal life!” he exclaimed. “This luck already pushes me much harder than I can keep up with.”

He looked at her clearly incredulous face and laughed.

“You don’t believe me?” he said, ”Fine. How long did it take you to fully unblock your first dantian?”

She frowned. “Just about average, around two years. Why?”

“It took me one month,” Wang Yonghao said smugly.

“You liar,” she sneered.

“It’s what happened,” he said, folding his hands on his chest.

“How?” she said.

He shrugged. “Luck, like I say.”

“It’s impossible,” she flatly stated.

“Why not?” he asked, looking curious. “I am lucky at finding treasures. Why can’t I also cultivate faster?”

Qian Shanyi squinted at him. He seemed genuinely confused. “After a cultivator unblocks their first minor meridians by luck, their entire meridian network is still filled with impurities,” she started explaining, trying to keep herself calm. “They can’t circulate spiritual energy because there is no unblocked path for their energy to circulate through. The only thing they can do is keep their unblocked meridian filled with spiritual energy, and wait until it slowly washes away at the impurities on the path to one of their dantians. Only once at least a single full closed pathway has been partially cleared from the impurities, can they start to circulate their spiritual energy and actively purify their meridian network. Even with the high quality spiritual energy in your Inner World - ”

“I only got it much later,” Wang Yonghao shook his head. Qian Shanyi sighed in frustration.

“It doesn’t matter, because the quality of spiritual energy does nothing if you can’t circulate it,” she continued, “Local concentration of spiritual energy doesn’t matter either - early in cultivation, your meridians are so narrow that you can fill them up to bursting in a single breath. Learning how to manipulate your meridians helps, but at the end of the day, it is still just a waiting game until the first closed pathway clears up.”

She pointed a bloody finger at him. “Which is why you saying you did it in a month is a clear lie!” she said, triumphantly.

“What if I discovered a secret art for clearing the meridians faster?” he asked curiously. She could tell he wasn’t being serious, but she decided to humor him.

“Any secret art that could clear meridians faster without the cultivator circulating their spiritual energy could also be used to unblock them for ordinary people,” she said, “any sect that developed such a secret art would take over the cultivation world, as they could turn ordinary people into cultivators whenever they wanted.”

Wang Yonghao nodded, and scratched his head. “Well, I didn’t really find such a secret art. But how about drugs?”

Qing Shanyi got a bad feeling.

“I have heard of some medicines that could loosen up the impurities,” she said slowly, “but they are rare and very expensive. I have never been given any. And besides, their effect plateaus - you need to take ten times as much for one tenth the effect. For example, young master Yao, the direct disciple of the Golden Rabbit Bay’s city regent and the richest noble for many miles, still took a full year to open his first dantian. Are you saying you found some?...”

She trailed off, uncertainly. Wang Yonghao looked away guiltily.

“Well, not so much found as fell into a barrel, but yes,” he said,

“A barrel?” she asked, incredulously.

“Yeah, a barrel,” he laughed ruefully, “I think it was Asure Heart Cleansing Dew - I had to look it up later.”

“You simply fell into an actual barrel of Asure Heart Cleansing Dew? It’s measured in drops!” she clutched her head in her hands, paying no mind to the blood staining her hair. Her left eye was twitching violently.

“Yeah, I fell into some ruins,” he explained, laughing slightly, “hit my head, spent a day within the barrel before I woke up. Absorbed most of it. After that, my first dantian unblocked pretty quickly.”

“How? Your skin should have rotted away from an overdose!”

“Just…lucky, I guess?”

Qian Shanyi blinked, then stood up, and headed towards Wang Yonghao with a slight smile on her face. He backed away from her.

”Come here, I am not going to hurt you,” she said, motioning with her bloody butchering dagger.

“Weren’t you going to, uh, finish with the bear?” he laughed, backing away more.

“I’ll get right back to it after I strangle you for being so disgustingly lucky!” she shouted, and set off after him. He turned around and ran away. It was a comical scene, as her legs felt sluggish after her brush with poison death and the sharp spikes of pain from her broken bones sent her off balance, but Wang Yonghao also kept stumbling from the aftereffects of the egg omelet. In the end, they were actually fairly closely matched in speed.

When she chased him all the way to the edge of the world fragment, he circulated his spiritual energy, and jumped into the air, rising up on top of two clouds of fiery fireflies. She scowled up at him.

“Come back down here!” she said. Running around had calmed her down somewhat, but her blood was still throbbing angrily in her ears.

“I think I’ll stay here for now,” he said, wiping sweat off his forehead. “It feels safer.”

She squinted up at him, and pointed towards the rope hanging from the entrance of the world fragment. “See that rope?”, she said, ”Who do you think put it there? You really think I can’t reach you in the air if I need to?”

His face had the decency to grow white when he glanced at the rope hanging from the sky. She snorted, and turned away.

“Whatever,” she said, walking back towards the bear, “If you feel like flying, then fly around the sect, I need some materials. Pots and plates from the kitchens, tables, bookshelves, barrels - it is all going to be decaying and rusted, but I am sure we could salvage something from it. Oh, and there should be a pair of holes near the gazebo filled with heavenly materials and earthly treasures - bring them down here too.”

Wang Yonghao nodded shakily, and walked on air up to the World Fragment entrance. She considered wherever she should follow, but decided against it. There was a risk that Wang Yonghao would close the entrance and leave her stranded, but she estimated it to be minor. He was still clearly intimidated by her, and didn’t seem like the ruthless type that would simply wait for her to starve.

She got back to her autopsy. The lungs and stomach were unsalvageable - the bear had breathed and swallowed far too much toxic slime during their chase. The liver seemed fine - Three Obediences Four Virtues, when discussing poisoned animals, mentioned that it might absorb poison, but she figured that the bear died before that could happen. The kidneys, spleen, and the heart were fine too.

After she was done with the organs, she moved over to skinning the body and breaking it into parts.

The bear’s pelt was soaked through with the poison slime, and would need to be thrown away. Her heart ached at the waste, but even if she could clean it, she had no idea how to tan leather to prevent it from rotting. At least it kept the poison away from the meat.

Bear’s jaw, one of the front paws, and many of the ribs were broken in the fall. The other bones were mostly fine, and she was careful to cut between the bones as she separated the meat into parts. She would find a use for the bones later.

To deal with the poison slime, she set up a washing station. It was a simple construction - three different spears tied into a tripod, with a Blue Tear Stone and an Igneocopper bar hanging from the middle, wrapped in one of the spare sets of robes. Water produced by the Blue Tear Stone soaked the robes and flowed down, and made it easy to wash the meat before it could be stored in the cold water trenches of the chiclotron.

She piled everything she would be throwing away together. If not for the poison, she could have considered reusing it for a compost pile, but as it was it would simply contaminate the ground.

By the time she was done, Wang Yonghao had bought back what she asked. Somehow, he seemed even more wary of her now - staying up in the air, stepping from one leg onto the other. She squinted at him.

“You want to ask something,” she stated.

He cringed. “How did you get rid of the fog?” he finally said. “There was so much of it.”

“I blew it away,” she said matter-of-factly, washing her hands under the tripod. “Now, do you want those steaks?”

Wang Yonghao nodded vigorously.

“You’d need to come down then,” she said, smiling at him.

His face went white again, and he swallowed.

----------------------------------------

She watched the steaks sizzling on the pan carefully. The heart of cultivation was constant improvement: as long as this piece of meat was cooked better than the last one, then eventually, she could cook it perfectly.

Wang Yonghao sat opposite her, sipping from a bottle of spirit wine. She glanced up at him, and he looked away. She sighed.

“I think I believe you about how quickly you cultivate,” she said, bringing up their previous discussion. Hacking the bear corpse apart had brought her blood pressure back down. “It would fit the overall picture. But that does not explain why you think it is bad.”

He groaned, and stayed silent for a while.

“Because my luck tailors itself to my realm,” he said, finally opening his mouth. “When I was in the low level of the refinement stage, I got into fights with other low level refinement stage cultivators. Now, they are high level ones. If I advance to the foundation establishment stage like this, then I couldn’t even walk into town without putting ordinary people in danger.”

“Your luck makes no sense,” she said, bluntly.

“Tell me about it,” he groaned further, flopping down on the ground.

“I mean it,” she said, flipping the steaks over. This time, she got the timing just right: they were browned, but not charred. “It’s not just that it is absurd in scope. Your luck should depend on your desires - if you don’t want to cultivate, why would it push resources at you?”

“Are you saying I want this?” he asked exasperatedly, raising his head. “I don’t!”

“I am not saying anything,” she shook her head, “If your luck worked the same way it does for everyone else, it would not be anywhere as powerful. Maybe what it does has changed too.”

She took the steaks off the fire, and handed them over to Wang Yonghao. He bit into one, yelped, and started blowing on it to cool it down.

“The real question is, who in Heaven has your name on their desk, to grant you such luck?” she wondered out loud, “And what else about it might have changed?”