“Is your arm really alright?”

Qian Shanyi sighed. He’d asked her several times already, but it seems that the shock of the river drop affected him in a different way from her. She was feeling alert, filling her lungs with air as her mind raced ahead at lightning speed. Meanwhile, he seemed to still be stuck on what happened in the distant past of ten minutes ago.

“Yes, it’s just a dislocation. Given that I had to hold up a fish five times my weight with a single hand, I frankly got off easy. Speaking of the fish -”

She approached the inner age of the caldera, putting her good hand on that life-saving tree to keep her footing stable. Glancing down, she saw the corpse of the fish that almost killed them smashed down on the rocks below, lying close to the edge of the water. Its skin was smooth like that of a human, black without any scales. Its jaw was surprisingly small, poking out below a fat, bulbous head, with beady eyes set on both sides of it. Organs have exploded out of its stomach from the impact, and overall, Qian Shanyi thought that it was the ugliest fish she had ever seen in her life.

“Help me down, will you?” she said, throwing him her rope, “I killed that fish, so I want to butcher it.”

“What, do you want to cook it?”

“That one?” She snorted, “Fuck no. It looks far too strange, and since it’s not in my recipe book, how would I know if it’s poisonous? No, I want the demon beast core.”

“Those are pretty rare, aren’t they?” Wang Yonghao frowned, tying the rope around his waist, “How do you know it even has one?”

“Ordinarily, they would be pretty rare, yeah,” she nodded, then grinned at him, “However, since this fish clearly came here to get a certain Wang Yonghao through the tunnel, the chances of it having a fire-type demon beast core that could greatly assist his cultivation are almost one hundred percent!”

“You can’t possibly know that,” he scowled at her, “and I am not going to use any demon beast cores!”

“Want to bet? Besides, it’s my kill, remember? I want to sell it, not give it to you. No use wasting resources.”

He declined to bet, and five short minutes later she dug out a fist-sized yellow stone out of that giant bulb on top of the fish head. She figured that it was probably what it used to make those annoying sound attacks, and casually tossed it into their world fragment.

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

They descended down the mountain, still following the path of the river. The climate here was different from the pine forest - much drier, with grass and ferns clinging onto the gaps in the rock where little soil still stuck around despite the erosion of water and winds.

She fashioned a crude sling for her arm out of her rope - it was best not to disturb it too much, especially while they walked over bumpy terrain. She figured her arm would be back to perfect working order in only a couple days.

The canyon in the distance was their current goal. If they could get on a ship, then they could travel to a town, and find out where they ended up. Most importantly, they could finally enjoy such luxuries like food prepared by an actual chef, tools that weren’t just cobbled together from random planks, and access to imperial libraries for information.

Wang Yonghao sulked as they walked along, and it took her a lot more coaxing than usual to get him to start talking. Eventually, they started to argue over what would be an ideal first meal after coming out of the forest, even though neither of them could know what the cuisine was like in the local area. Wang Yonghao held a solid edge due to his wealth of travel experience, compared to her who had never left the Golden Rabbit Bay in her life, and his vivid descriptions of food made her mouth water.

Their discussion took a backseat when they entered a forest at the foot of the mountain, and she saw a dilapidated slaughter post hammered into the ground on one of the river shores.

It was a very simple thing - a tall, solid stake with a cross-bar at the top, and various stones, animal bones, and carved pieces of wood hanging off it on strings, clacking together lightly in the wind. The cross-bar was painted with a faded image, its paint peeling and falling off, leaving behind only the overall shape of a lotus with thirteen petals. She couldn’t discern any of the symbols that she knew were supposed to be drawn on the petals, but there was no mistaking the emblem of the thirteenth lotus empire.

Even though she was so far from home, her heart still felt warmer. They weren’t alone against the wilds any longer.

She approached the post with a smile, and gave it a respectful nod, putting her hand on her heart. Wang Yonghao looked at her curiously.

“What are you doing?”

“Giving my respects to the spirit hunters who have bled and died to push the wilds back up to this point,” she responded, raising an eyebrow at him in return, “Surely you know the tradition? You can’t open a history book and read about the slaughter posts without stumbling on it.”

“Why would I read about them?” he scratched his head, “They are just sticks, aren’t they? You aren’t going to tell me they are a part of some enormous formation, are you?”

“I keep forgetting that you didn’t have a foundational education,” she shook her head, smiling slightly, “No, the posts have no power of their own. They are just a symbol.”

She motioned to the forest floor around the post.

“These posts form a border. On one side are the wilds - on the other, lands of the human nations. They are a message for the humans to tread carefully, and another message entirely for the beasts of the forest.”

These are the lands of humans. Flee, or be slaughtered.

Wherever the posts stood, local spirit hunters and sect cultivators would sweep through the area every other week, clearing out dangerous animals and demon beasts. Smarter beasts would move away, learning the lethal threat of the quiet clacking sounds. Dumber ones would be exterminated. The border of the empire stretched between the lonely posts, expanding year to year.

The shape of the posts themselves changed all over the world. In some places, they were carved with elaborate decorations, while in others, a simple pair of planks would do. Some posts were adorned in stone, others in wood, animal bones, feathers, chitin, or whatever other materials were at hand. Some carried flags or emblems - where the borders of other countries brushed up against each other - while others had none. But wherever they stood, one thing remained the same: if you were a human, you could feel safer, knowing you could count on the help of others.

“And that’s why it’s polite to offer thanks when passing by one of these posts,” she concluded her short lecture, “because without the spirit hunters, we wouldn’t have fields to farm or towns to live in.”

“Well now I am definitely not offering thanks.” Wang Yonghao folded his hands. “You know how many times spirit hunters chased after me? Persistent buggers.”

“Hm. Yes, I suppose you would have an atypical experience there.”

He stared at her in silence for a moment.

“What, no joke at my expense?” he asked warily, “I was starting to get used to it. You have been strangely friendly over the past three days.”

“It’s true, I apologize for missing my mark,” she frowned theatrically, “In my defense, I am no longer feeling constantly stressed from wondering if you would finally choose to finish what you’ve started by beating me up, and either kill me or turn me into a cauldron.”

He winced, and she couldn’t help but laugh.

“Oh come on, you have to stop flinching when I joke about this,” she shook her head ruefully, “Or people will start to think I am the one who kidnapped you instead of the converse.”

“How can you joke about this?!” He snapped back, gathering his composure, “You almost died today!”

“What matters is that I didn’t die.” she grinned, “Why would I be stressed about living instead of dying?”

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

In the end, they didn’t need a ship, as they saw a town only a short hike away. It was cut into the red, rocky sides of the canyon, terracing away from the waters where they split around a thick pillar of rock, with rope bridges stretched between different levels and across the canyon like the web of a busy spider, linking different parts of the town together. The entire place felt like tightly packed luggage - not quite cramped, but space used and reused for a dozen things at once until nothing was left.

There were hardly any farms around - the forest here must not yet have been quite safe enough to farm - but small orchards were already starting to flank the entrances to the town, and most of the place was covered in green, from small parks to gardens and potted plants on the windowsills. All the way down below, they could see half a dozen ships moored to wooden docks, looking for all the world as if the spider that wove this town had put on boots.

They followed a narrow path cut into the side of the canyon, passing by a crew of workers that was chipping away at the rock to widen it enough for a cart to pass through. Lookouts were standing watch over the group, and Qian Shanyi could hear their conversation trail off into deferential silence as they saw the pair of cultivators leaving the forest. They nodded to the workers, and passed by unhurriedly.

At the end of the path they came to a stone gate crowned with a pair of ballistae on rotating platforms. A shocked guard greeted them and lead them into a small room inside of the gate structure, and after apologizing profusely for the poor reception (if only they knew that honorable cultivators would appear today, he assured them, the captain would have greeted them personally), he meekly asked if they could be recorded into the entry books. Not seeing a reason to refuse, she took out her sect seal and passed it to him, seeing Yonghao do the same.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

“Shouldn’t a cultivator be here with you, in case of a demon beast attack?” Qian Shanyi asked him curiously, startling the poor lad while he fumbled with their paperwork.

“Well, ah, honorable immortal, of course there should be,” the guard hedged his response, “but most cultivators only pass through Xiaohongshan and we don’t have any local sects, so we only have a couple spirit hunters - they can’t sit around at the gates all day. If we need help, we will ring the alarm.”

He motioned towards a large bell that was hanging off the room’s ceiling.

“But this rarely happens,” he continued, “most things we can chase off with just our crossbows and spears.”

She hummed, and asked him some more about the town while they finished signing in. As they left the gatehouse, she noticed that Wang Yonghao seemed to be grumpier than usual.

“Did you not want to leave your name behind in the books?” she guessed.

“It’s not that,” he sighed, “I just hate being recognised as a cultivator. It brings trouble.”

“You didn’t mention this,” she raised her eyebrow, “We could have snuck in after nightfall, if you wanted.”

“No, sneaking in tends to go worse.” he sighed again, “The best is to pretend to be a common pilgrim, but it doesn’t really work when you stroll alone out of a wild forest - everyone knows you have to be either a cultivator or insane to travel that way. It’s hard to hide even at the best of times - one glance at our clear skin, defined muscles, long lustrous hair, and people start to put the picture together. What could we have done? Sown us thick, concealing clothing from the hides of demon beasts? That would only attract more attention.”

“I see,” she nodded, “if it’s any consolation, I despise it as well.”

“You?” He gave her a baffled look, as they headed through a market in the direction the gate guard gave them for a good tavern, “But you like cultivators. You always talk about how they are the sabers of humanity and what not.”

“It’s the constant deference,” she sighed, eyeing the stalls around them. They were getting some looks from the shopkeepers, though when she met their eyes, they pretended it was anything but. “You’ve seen how that guard talked to us. I am not dressed like a spirit hunter or an imperial official, I am not from a local sect, he doesn’t know me and hasn’t heard of anything good I might have done. For all he knows, I am a complete scumbag, perhaps just one step shy of being a demonic cultivator. Why should he give me that much face? Because I can snap his spine like a twig? That isn’t a good reason at all for such debasement.”

“But you could be any one of those things. How is he supposed to know? He was just playing it safe.”

“And what if I am? That still isn’t a reason to all but kiss my boots. In fact, if I was the sort of person to assault him over lack of deference, he should have spit in my face. Cultivators only expect deference because they think they can get away with it - if people stopped giving in, the culture would shift until the demands would stop.”

“You want people to put their lives in danger because maybe that would make the culture better?” He raised his eyebrows at her.

“I don’t,” she shook her head, finally spotting a stall filled with cloth and making a beeline for it, “but it is why I hate it. In the end it all comes down to strength, but there is no justice in that.”

“Sure didn’t mind your own strength when tricking me…” he muttered, following after her.

“You had all the same tools and information as I did,” she snorted, “You just used them worse. A challenge on equal terms is fine, it is the asymmetry that bothers me.”

She approached the merchant with a smile, hoping to put him at ease, and began haggling, though her heart wasn’t really in it. In the end, she was still pretty sure he ended up selling the goods to her at half price. It rankled, but until they could sell something, they had to be careful about their own funds.

She bought a backpack, a pair of hooded leather cloaks, a sewing set with needles, thread and scissors, as well as some assorted cuts of fabric she figured she could use for repairs, and a compact writing set in a nearby stall for the letters she wanted to write. The damn cloaks took almost half of her remaining money. That left her with three silver yuan and seven jian: three or four days wages for an outer sect disciple, or a good week and a half for a laborer from outside a sect. She threw most of it into her backpack, then handed one of the cloaks to Wang Yonghao, who took it with a raised eyebrow.

“It will make you stand out a lot less - consider this as a gift of apology,” she said, putting her own cloak on, “For playing on your heartstrings as much as I do. Perhaps I pushed the line a bit too much on a rare occasion.”

His expression turned grateful.

“I had one before. Lost it though,” he said, “Thank you.”

“Now let’s hope I still have enough left for a private room at an inn,” she said, heading off.

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

The tavern they were directed to was a two-story building wedged in between the back wall of one of the terrace levels and a small park, built to service various cultivators that passed through the town. The rooms were a bit larger than usual, with thick walls and solid locks, each having their own fireplace, and even the window looking out over the street had wooden blinds that could be latched from the inside. The two-person bed could be raised and attached to a hook high up on the wall, freeing up most of the floor space. It was a safe, isolated place: a cultivator could easily practice here without being disturbed, as long as their techniques were not destructive or required a lot of movement.

Of course, the price for the rooms was similarly high: three yuan for a week, but Qian Shanyi paid it willingly. Without rooms like these, they could not have easily opened Wang Yonghao’s inner world without risking discovery. At the very least they only needed a single room, since they could sleep in their separate hammocks in the world fragment.

After they got their room, they paid for a meal, and ate in their room, toasting each other to a successful escape from the forest. Heading off to a restaurant was far too dangerous with Wang Yonghao’s luck - if something happened on the first day they were in town, their payment for the room would be wasted.

“So, what do we do now?” Wang Yonghao asked, lounging on the bed while she was quickly grinding ink at the table.

“I’ll write a couple letters, and then I will find out who would be willing to buy swords in town and see what they want for them,” she responded, “if we are lucky, and as long as they are reasonable, we might have enough money to last us for months by the evening. If we aren’t quite so lucky, I’d need to negotiate, or find a buyer among one of the wandering traders in town. I still have some money left - enough for me to buy us food for the rest of the week, I think, as long as I can get ingredients for cheap.”

“Letters? You know someone here?”

“Letters are unrelated,” she said, looking over at him, “One is for my parents, while the other is for my sect. They should know I am alive and safe, at the very least, since from their perspective I vanished after you beat me up in public. They must think I have surely been killed, or worse.”

He winced, and she sighed.

“That you didn’t necessarily have bad intentions at heart does not change the fact of what happened, nor the reactions of other people to it,” she said, “You are making amends, so why do you keep blaming yourself for it?”

“Won’t they think I am forcing you to write it?” He asked, looking away, “After kidnapping you?”

“Why would you bother after weeks of silence? I suppose my sect might, but my family wouldn’t. My father taught me a code to tell him if I am under duress, and other such things, in an otherwise ordinary-looking message.”

“Your father did what?”

“He is a merchant,” she shrugged, “the business can be somewhat cutthroat. When I was young, there was always a distant possibility I might be kidnapped by one of his rivals as leverage, and we prepared accordingly.”

She wrote for a bit, until he sighed again.

“It’s not going to work though, I told you,” he said, “The sale, I mean.”

“Why not?”

“Because I tried it before. It always went wrong somehow.”

She put her brush down, and turned around to face him once again.

“Well, you are the expert on your own luck, so I would be remiss not to listen to you here,” she said, “how many times did you try and how did it go wrong?”

“Maybe a dozen,” he shrugged, “It’s different every time. Sometimes I get interrupted. One time spirit hunters chased after me for a whole week. Once the shopkeeper told me that I’d get my money in three months, and then I had to leave town for other reasons. I think of it as pressure points - if I go somewhere and it’s one of those, something bad happens. Near sects, places of high spiritual energy concentration, shops, big restaurants…those kinds of places, there is a lot of pressure there. Things go bad quickly.”

“I see,” she said, “But you also thought you couldn’t have a bed or bath, and then we built those inside of your inner world anyways.”

“And then it went wrong, and you almost suffocated.”

“That wasn’t due to your luck,” she told him bluntly, “that was due to me being stupid and fucking it up by doing too much at once.”

He threw a baffled stare at her.

“The point I am driving towards is that even if some things didn’t work in the past, if we do them differently, they might work now,” she sighed, “and even if something unexpected happens, we just have to be proactive at handling it. Luck only works in probabilities: as long as you can stay on top of the ball, there should be a way to resolve it.”

He didn’t respond, instead simply shrugging. She supposed it would have to do.

She turned back to her letters, quickly finished both of them, and left them alone to dry.

“Then, once we have the monetary question handled for a while, we should travel to a larger city,” she said, turning back to face him, “One with a good imperial library, and start researching your luck problem. Depending on how quickly I will figure out a way to offload your massive treasure trove without raising eyebrows, we might need to start hiring experts to do some of the work for us too. I doubt we would hit anything worthwhile soon, but it’s the best path forward that I can think of.”

“You still want to help me?” his eyes widened.

“Why wouldn’t I?” She raised an eyebrow at him, “I am getting the best side of the deal here by far, from the spiritual energy in your world fragment to the wealth I’d get from the sales. Even direct disciples of most sects would jump at the opportunity. Helping you with some research in exchange is nothing.”

He didn’t respond, and somehow his mood seemed to worsen.

What a strange man.

Qian Shanyi quickly descended into the world fragment and picked out four swords that, to her eyes, seemed safest to try selling initially. She avoided any weapons with unusual properties, instead focusing on the lowest common denominator - which is also why she picked swords, as they were the most common weapon type by far in the world of cultivation. She wrapped them up in Silvered Devil Moth Silk to keep them concealed while walking around town, threw them in her backpack, tied a new rope around her waist, and climbed out.

When she returned, Wang Yonghao was pacing nervously around the room.

“Well, let’s go I guess,” he sighed, motioning for the door.

“You know, you don’t have to go if you don’t want to,” she raised an eyebrow, guessing at the reason behind his distress, “I can manage the sale myself. If you want, you could stay in the room until I return. I can see your view on the pressure points, even though I think my reasons for it are different - without meeting other people on the street, there should be much fewer factors for your luck to affect, and so the chances of it causing a catastrophe should be lower.”

He stopped and did a double take. She smiled, approached him, and patted him on the back.

“I’ll make sure to buy groceries on my way back. With a market to work with, I could even buy some spices, or at the very least salt.”

He actually teared up at that, and had to wipe his eyes off with the back of his hand.

“Shhh, there is no need to get emotional over this,” she said, patting him some more, “I’ll be back to annoying you in no time whatsoever.”

“Thank you,” he said, going back to bed, sniffling throughout, “it was - nice - to have some help for once.”

She rolled her eyes at him, and left through the door. She was just leaving for a couple hours, not forever, for the love of the netherworld.