Qian Shanyi sliced off yet another tentacle of an enormous monster just a moment before it could batter her into mush, a creature of slime and shifting horror, and its blood and ichor bathed her from head to toe. Her heart beat rapidly in her chest. She had been fighting for what felt like hours, and she needed to find a way out now, or else she would soon be dead. She had to escape, she -
She frowned. This…Didn’t make sense. How did she get here?
The monster swung at her again, and she dashed away, breaking out of the fight. They were inside of an enormous stone temple, walls lined with statues, and as her gaze swung over the hall, she felt a sense of unreality. There were stone benches down on the floor, but far too tall for normal people, six on the left and nine on the right, asymmetric and not even lined up in rows. As her eyes flickered over the lines, she saw three more benches appear on the left, their shapes shifting, blending, as her mind made them arrange into rows again…
“Oh,” she said, her frown vanishing, “I am dreaming.”
She fixed her gaze upon the monster, and guided her mind to relax, letting her concentration wander away. The monster shifted, and began dissolving, the temple around them following suit, turning into a cloud of vines, and from there into a windy forest of mushrooms and spiderwebs.
Back in the Golden Rabbit Bay, she once stumbled upon a book about lucid dreaming, and in her search for every possible cultivation advantage she could muster, spent a good three months practicing the techniques within when she went to sleep. Her hope was that it would allow her to cultivate in her sleep - that way, she could make up for the lack of support from her sect. Sadly, this was not to be. A cultivator could no more consciously control their spiritual energy in their sleep than a person could decide to get up and cook a meal - unless they were a sleepwalker, it was flat out impossible, and even if they were, what they did would be entirely unpredictable, under no conscious control.
In retrospect, even if she could have managed it, such an approach would have been flatly suicidal. Sleepwalkers hurt themselves all the time, and messing up the flow of spiritual energy within her body could have easily led to her overloading one of her dantians and blowing it up, and all the neighboring organs alongside it.
She supposed it made sense: if lucid dreaming could have been used for cultivation, the book would not have been left out in the open access section of their library, where even non-cultivators could read it. Still, she did end up picking up a couple tricks that made sleeping much more enjoyable. For one, dealing with nightmares became almost trivial.
Dreams had no true logic of their own, and could not be controlled, but there were ways to affect the events, ride the flow of associations where you wanted it to go. Trying to think of a topic - or actively trying to ignore one, which was much the same in a dream - would only rarely get you there directly. The trick was to not focus on any given thing too much - but to accept whatever the dream threw at you, give it some token attention, and then let it sink back into the flow, gently pushing the images in the desired direction.
Qian Shanyi made herself relax, and focused on her memories of the sunny beaches of the Golden Rabbit Bay. Instead, she ended up in a bowl of sand, horizon curling up above her, where the ocean flowed upwards into the sky, and the sun shone with a cold green light.
She settled down on the sand, this dream not even granting her a proper body, merely the sense of sight, and watched fishes drift upwards into the sky like birds migrating for winter.
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Qian Shanyi woke up in her cabin on the Lunar Whisper, Wu Lanhua’s personal yacht. The sun was only just starting to rise, its dim rays poking through the curtains, and she allowed herself a few minutes of lazing about amid the silk sheets of her bed.
Yesterday, she got Wu Lanhua to sign a contract with her, making her one of the two cooks on the yacht - that way, she would be paid a respectable five silver yuan per day for the duration of their travels. She would have to cook for the sailors, but compared to her workload at the ramen shop, this was nothing, and that left her plenty of time to do her own research.
She lifted her head and looked at the table, still covered in papers full of calculations of spiritual energy flows, as she tried to cut down the needle control technique from Three Obediences Four Virtues to something she could actually execute. She got through about a third of the linear algebra in the evening before she gave up and went to bed, her mind aching softly from the exertion. Every individual calculation was simple, but there was an absolute ton of them, and she had to pay complete attention to every single one, because even a single error could make the entire technique explode in her face as soon as she tried it.
She stretched her hands under the sheets, enjoying the soft feel of silk on her skin. She was not looking forward to continuing, but it had to be done. Worse still, she’d have to do this math twice, just to check her work.
Alright, enough laziness. Time to get to work.
She got up from the bed, tied a silk rope around her waist, circulated her thread control technique to hook the other end securely around the window’s ledge, and dived down into the river below. The cold water shocked the last vestiges of sleep out of her system, and she spent some time swimming next to the yacht, as part of her daily exercise.
Even with her muscles enhanced by spiritual energy, she couldn’t keep up with the ship’s speed, and soon enough the rope stretched until she decided to pull herself back in. She climbed through the window, shook herself free from the water, dressed, and threw one last hateful glare at the desk full of math before leaving the cabin.
She’d get back to them eventually. Just as soon as she did an inventory of the ship’s pantries, planned out the day’s meals with the other chef, made breakfast for everyone…
Who knows, perhaps something else would come up.
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Wu Lanhua didn’t lie about her yacht’s speed: even though they stopped in several towns on the way, where she had to handle some business of hers, they were still traveling a good deal faster than her original plan accounted for, and indeed faster than any other boat she could find. This left her with some time to go through the local libraries for pieces of knowledge while they were moored in port.
Her first priority was finding information about heavenly tribulations. In fact, every post office had just the book she needed, one she read many years ago and largely forgotten - a complete index of all known forms of heavenly tribulation - but of course she could not ask for it directly. It was commonly accepted that the heavens either could not read, or at least had significant trouble doing so - one of the many reasons they could not fully understand the world of cultivators - but they could hear, and so if she asked, out loud, for the book about heavenly tribulations she was sure that even the distant heavens would quickly wise up to her game, and break off the vow she made.
Second priority was general information about the heavens, which ran into much the same issue. For both of those, she would need to get into the library for an inconspicuous reason and be left alone to browse the stacks, where she could find the books she needed. That brought her to her third priority: information about luck, world fragments, or tracking methods, in case she would need something more on top of her vow to find Wang Yonghao. Asking about these topics should be safe, and also grant her the access she could use to research what she really wanted.
When she asked about luck at the local postal office, they directed her to the Scarlet River Dance sect, and she decided to follow their advice. This was not unusual: the book selection at any individual postal office was by necessity small, mostly focusing on topics of general interest. Sect libraries, on the other hand, tended to collect all sorts of rare and unusual tomes, and would generally allow outsiders to peruse those that contained no particular secrets, for a small price. Luminous Lotus Pavilion tended to get at least a couple visitors every day for that exact purpose.
Scarlet River Dance seemed less prepared to answer these sorts of requests - close to the frontier as it was, she supposed they got less scholarly traffic than a major city like the Golden Rabbit Bay. Instead of leading her to their outer sect library, they showed her to a small visitation room, and left her there to wait.
And wait…
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And wait some more…
How long could finding a single book possibly take? She even told them the title. Did they not have a library index?
She was glad she brought her writing set with her to make notes, and spent the time working on the mathematics behind her needle control technique. Some parts of the problem could be split off from the larger whole, and thus could be made much easier to check without redoing thousands of equations.
Finally, almost an hour after she came here, the doors opened and let through the younger cultivator who initially greeted her, and an older one. Neither of them was dressed as a sect elder, but by how the younger man walked behind and bowed his head, she could tell that the older man had a greater position in the sect. Perhaps he was responsible for the library?
They also didn’t bring any books.
“You asked for the Seventeen Flows of Luck? It is not available,” the older cultivator told her, not even bothering to ask for her name or introduce himself. He had a haughty air about himself that immediately put her on edge.
“The postal office directed me here,” she asked, raising an eyebrow. “Was it already loaned out?”
“No, it is here,” he said, “but we cannot loan it out to a loose cultivator.”
“A loan is not necessary - I would be fine to read it here,” she said, gesturing to her writing set, “I could take notes.”
“These are delicate books,” the older man said, “we can’t afford them to be damaged by careless handling.”
“I have been trained in book handling techniques,” she frowned, already seeing where this conversation was heading, “this isn’t the first library I visit.”
“Loose cultivators such as yourself could hardly be expected to be trained properly,” he waved his hand dismissively, “perhaps it’s good enough for the empire, but not for my library.”
“This isn’t the first sect library I visit either.”
“I would like to see what sect that might have been.”
“Are you accusing me of lying?” she asked, her voice growing cold. “I have dueled men for less in the past.”
“I would never question the word of a… fellow honorable cultivator, of course,” he said, not even looking at her. She saw his lips twitch in disdain at the words. “It is just that different sects have different standards, and we pride ourselves in ours.”
Her implicit threat of the duel was more than a little hollow - she was only staying in town for a couple hours, and couldn’t risk delaying her ship - but it had to be made, if for no other reason than to keep up appearances, lest they talk and rumors spread to other towns. A cultivator that was not willing to put their life on the line to defend their honor at the first slight had no honor at all.
It took her a good while to grasp why, for of course nobody bothered explaining the system, but forced as she was to look at it mostly from the outside, the patterns became clear over time.
Cultivators’ honor grew out of a simple need to trust each other. When someone borrowed money from you, you needed to trust that they would return it. If you accepted a new cultivator into the sect, you needed to trust that they would not simply run off with all the sect secrets as soon as you let them enter the sect library. Even something as simple as hiring someone to fix your fence required a degree of trust.
Of course, sometimes, blind trust was not required: if you hired someone to kill a demon beast, and they came back with its head, you could know for sure that it died. But most of the time, things were not quite so convenient. Often enough, people disagreed about what happened, and there was no way for others to tell who was in the right.
So what did you do?
If someone came from a well-known sect or family, they could rely on their reputation, for others would trust them not to sabotage it with a simple lie. If someone was wealthy, they could stake their word on their wealth, and pay out handsomely if a lie was revealed. But what could someone stake if they had neither?
The only thing they could stake was their life.
If everyone knew that should someone challenge your word, you would risk your life and limb to fight them, then not only would they not accuse you over nothing - they could also trust you not to lie, for every lie risked your life, were someone willing to challenge it. That is what honor was, at the end of the day: the seal built out of blood. The word of an honorable cultivator could be trusted, but they could only remain honorable if they would put their life on the line every single time to defend it.
That, in turn, meant that if you could not - or would not - defend yourself, or even risk your life, you had no honor.
Hence: women, children, mortals and cowards.
Of course, nowadays a woman could run you through with a flying sword just as well as a man, but the perception stuck around, and that was the only thing that truly mattered. A challenge from a cultivator without any honor could, of course, be safely refused, such a refusal not bringing shame in the eyes of others.
If you had honor, you had to guard it jealously, for if you ever lost it, it was almost impossible to claw it back.
If you never had any in the first place…
Even if she challenged him, and he agreed, and she won, his sect might simply decide to retaliate against her anyways - and of course she would not be seeing the books she needed.
“Is there anything I could do to convince you otherwise?” she said. “Perhaps I could put some money in an imperial escrow, in case you deem the book too damaged by my hands?”
“Hmm,” he said, “perhaps an escrow of two hundred spirit stones would be enough.”
“Two hundred spirit stones?!” She scowled. “This is ridiculous. The book itself could not cost even a tenth of that.”
“The price is final, and standard for our library.” He shrugged. His eyes bore into her, daring her to disagree.
Bastard.
She quickly gathered her things, and got up from her seat.
“Thank you for your time,” she said neutrally, and headed out the doors. She would just have to try in the next town over. There was bound to be a sect that was more cooperative - the only question was if she could find one before she caught up with Wang Yonghao, because by then it would be a little too late.
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She spent the rest of her time ashore in the postal office library, trying to do the best she could with the meager book selection. She found the aptly named Comprehensive Tribulation Index, and copied down the relevant sections, which took up most of her time.
If she was to survive her tribulation, the first step was knowing which of about a hundred different tribulation forms she would have to face. This was, of course, a matter of guesswork, but the heavens tended to favor some forms over the others. The most common of them was also the most straightforward - a bolt of tribulation lightning from the skies straight at your head. In fact, every form of tribulation started out with three strikes of tribulation lightning - a little warning from the heavens, just to make sure you were paying attention.
Dealing with the lightning was hard, but manageable - with a strong enough body, spiritual shield, and some talisman formations a prepared cultivator could pass through it without too much trouble - but she very much doubted her tribulation would take this simple form. If her suspicions were correct, and the heavens were paying personal attention to Wang Yonghao, then by rebuffing them she would be getting a tribulation perfectly tailored to kill her dead. If she was to survive it, she had to guess which tribulation form they would pick based on what they knew of her, and then prepare her countermeasures without the heavens cottoning on to her schemes.
It was, in other words, a very traditional gamble, only played with the world as the board and her life at stake.
Thankfully, she was not playing entirely blind. The vow in her mind felt different from one hour to another, angrier when their boat stopped in a town, and settling down when they were making progress down the river again - it wanted her to find Wang Yonghao, and made this desire known. Through this vow, she could have some handle on the heaven's opinion of her actions.
After she returned to the boat with her notes in hand, she once again traced Wang Yonghao’s position from the safety of her cabin. He didn’t stay in the same city: instead, he was moving, but they were still gaining up on him.
The only question was if they were closing the distance fast enough, or too fast by far. If she caught up with him before she was ready to face her tribulation, she would die, but if she took too long, then the heavens would figure out her lies, send the tribulation down while she slept, and she would still die.
They soon set off, and she rested on the ship’s bow, waxing river wind passing through her hair like the hands of a lover, making her plans.
How could she help Yonghao break his curse of luck, if she couldn’t even be sure she would be alive by the end of the month?
Was she heading to her death, or to her ascension?
There was only a razor-sharp line between the two, and human feet bled when one walked on razors.