Wang Yonghao continued to freak out while she checked up on the rice, and took the vegetables off the burner.
“Are you suicidal?!” He shouted at her, “Why would you ever make a heavenly vow you intended to break?!”
“Oh relax.” She snorted at him, bringing the large cut of mushroom to a cutting board to dice it up. “I wasn’t just being a bit reckless.”
“A bit reckless?” He scowled at her. “You are in the middle of the refinement stage! Tribulation would have the strength of the peak of the refinement stage - it will murder you!”
“Bah.” She scowled back. “That isn’t how strength works, and you should know this better than anyone. You cannot put a number to it, and say that since I have a strength of 500 points, and the tribulation has a strength of 1000 points, it would kill me every time. Circumstances, environment, allies, techniques, treasures and pills… all of it can swing the odds massively, and in either direction.”
“Circumstances? What circumstances?”
“Well, for one, I have you.” She nodded at him. “I hope you would help me fight?”
“I mean - of course, but what if you didn’t find me?” he said, “Or if I refused? I ran away from you! How could you be so reckless as to rely on my help?”
“If I didn’t find you, then I would have simply died.” She shrugged. “That was a risk I was taking - but it was a calculated one. I asked for enough luck to find you, and the Heavens, for all their faults, always uphold the letter of their deals. If they didn’t think I could do it, they wouldn’t have granted me the vow in the first place.”
“Shanyi - I am in the high refinement stage, not the peak! I can’t stand up to a heavenly tribulation either!”
“You frankly could, but I don’t need you for your strength.” She snorted. “You could simply stand right next to me, keep your sword sheathed, and my odds would already improve drastically.”
“What?” he asked, confusion plain on his face. She hummed in response, gathering the diced up mushroom into a bowl, and headed towards one of the metal nodes of the chiclotron.
“Do you know why you couldn’t properly cook this mushroom?” she said, popping the hatch open, and carefully lowering the bowl in. “It comes from a spirit - you can still feel the spiritual energy within it, right? That makes it a spiritual ingredient, and you need to weaken it first.”
Three Obediences Four Virtues had several sections on the various techniques one could use to do just that, but with the chiclotron at hand, the choice was obvious.
“It is a wood-type ingredient,” she said, getting up off her knees and dusting herself off, “putting it in a metal-type environment will create inauspicious feng shui within this node. Inauspicious feng shui, among other things, weakens and damages many spiritual materials - which is exactly what we want, in this circumstance. Ordinarily, you would leave it alone for months - but with how much spiritual energy circulates through our chiclotron, I think it should be ready in about an hour.”
“And what does this have to do with the tribulation?” he said, frowning.
“Nothing. It has to do with your luck,” she said, going over to her bags, and starting to unpack what few personal possessions she had. “Many people think that auspicious feng shui is always good, and inauspicious feng shui is always bad - but that is not so. It’s true that humans have vastly more uses for auspicious feng shui than the opposite, but that is not the same as one being ‘good’ and the other ‘bad’. Some valuable plants require inauspicious feng shui to grow, and sometimes, you need it to brew a pill. It’s much the same with your luck.”
She gestured to him with one of her pill bottles to illustrate her point. He had his arms crossed on his chest, but listened patiently. “You must think your luck is always bad, don’t you?” she said, “You say it’s cursed. I imagine you think it kills people. But that is a dangerous simplification, and it’s much more productive to think of what your luck actually does, and what motivates those who granted it to you.”
“And those would be?...”
“The Heavens, I suspect.”
“Wait, no.” Wang Yonghao frowned. “In the forest, you said we couldn’t even begin to guess why I am lucky. And now you say it’s the Heavens for sure? This makes no sense.”
“You are correct.” She smiled. “I don’t have proof - this is still only conjecture... But it’s solid enough to gamble with. I am betting my life on it, after all.”
“Because of one heavenly vow going your way?”
“No.” She shook her head. ”All the signs point the same way. First of all, I am not a karmist, I do not follow the Heavenly laws, and I have been vocal about my disgust for them all my life - yet still, the Heavens have granted me my vow. It’s not unprecedented - but it is certainly unusual. On the other hand, if we assume your luck is caused by the Heavens, then it would make perfect sense - for I have vowed to make you cultivate as hard as you can for an entire month.”
Wang Yonghao scowled at her, and she waved him off.
“I already said I have every intention of going back on my vow. Which brings me to my second point -” she said, knocking on the side of her head. “- inside your Inner World, the damnable vow is silent. It is yet another link between you and the Heavens.”
Wang Yonghao froze for a moment.
“That’s why you openly admitted that you were going to break off your vow?” he asked, faintly.
“I didn’t know it would be safe for sure, but sometimes, you have to take a risk to confirm your theory.” She shrugged. “If you are unwilling to take it, then it will tie your hands in chains of uncertainty. But now I am sure.”
“That’s…” He paused. “It’s something, but it’s not proof.”
”It isn’t.” She nodded. “Which brings me to the question of means. I have no doubt that the Heavens could manipulate someone’s luck enough to bring challenges to their feet, for their tricks are many and vicious, but could we expect the same of some natural quirk of your constitution? I do not think so. There are natural limits to what a constitution could achieve, just how there are limits to the weight of a newborn. Your luck, on the other hand, is so extreme, it is as if you were born as large as a fully grown man.”
“Shanyi, no,” Wang Yonghao started, then sighed, “this explains nothing. If my luck really were down to my constitution, then it could have simply made the Heavens accept your vow. And as for my inner world… I don’t know. How do you know that all inner worlds don’t work this way?”
“Ah, but there is a way to prove this theory, fellow cultivator Wang,” she said, waggling her finger at him with a smile, ”tell me, in all your travels, have you ever been faced with a Heavenly tribulation? You have not mentioned any back in the forest.”
“I am still in the refinement stage, and I don’t make vows,” he said, “why would I face any in the first place?”
She shrugged easily. “Sometimes the Heavens send down a tribulation in response to some treasure being unveiled,” she said, “Some techniques - ones that rely on the Heavens, for example - risk calling down the tribulation as well. And of course, sometimes the tribulation descends without any known reason. it’s very rare, but with your luck, shouldn’t it have happened a dozen times by now?”
Wang Yonghao froze again, his brow creasing in deep thought, and started pacing. She waited patiently, gathering up the healing pills she dumped into her knife chest back on the glassy fields back into their bottle.
“Twice, I think,” he finally said, turning back to her, “I… wasn’t the main target though, it was other people nearby.”
“And did the tribulation attack you?” she pressed, “Harm you in some way?”
“I… don’t remember,” he said, ruffling his hair, “It was a long time ago… I think… Maybe not? At least, mostly? What does this mean?”
“Well, consider what we know, and what we do not,” she said, ”we don’t know why your luck acts the way it does, but whatever it’s true goal, it seems to attract various challenges to you. Let’s say that it is caused by some factor X. If we assume X is the Heavens, then it’s clear why you have never faced a tribulation - the Heavens have no reason to waste their own precious energy when they can already attract all sorts of other threats to you. But if it was caused by something else, then it wouldn’t make much sense. Why should some non-Heavenly factor X throw demonic cultivators, ravenous spirits and ancient ancestors at you, but not a tribulation?”
“You are right,” he said, pacing around, “why haven’t I seen this before? It’s obvious in retrospect. It’s not just the tribulation, I almost never have any problems with karmists…”
“It’s easy to miss the forest for the trees when you are living in it.” She shrugged. “But that brings me back to my oncoming tribulation. Whatever goals the Heavens have for you, they clearly want you challenged, but not dead - and so by simply standing right next to me, you would tie their hands. Out of two hundred odd known forms of the Heavenly tribulation of the refinement stage, a good two thirds are far too indiscriminate, and your mere presence should eliminate all of them. The fewer options I have to prepare for, the easier it will be - now do you see what I mean by your luck not being all bad?”
He looked at her skeptically. She smiled.
“Your luck is just a tool,” she said, “a dangerous one, perhaps, but a tool nonetheless. It can hurt people - or it can keep them safe. It all depends on what you do with it.”
She paused, to let him take it in. The man had a real problem with being stuck in a funk, and they needed to resolve his issues before he had another panic attack and left her in the lurch.
At first, she thought his mood started to improve - but then he stopped in his tracks, and spun around to face her.
“Oh no…” Wang Yonghao groaned, his breathing speeding up, eyes widening. He clutched his head in his hands. “Oh Heavens, what did you do?!”
“What?” She frowned. What did she say?
“Shanyi, if you are right, then the Heavens will murder you!” He bit his lips, breathing faster. “You said you’d help me get rid of my luck! Out loud, in the forest - they couldn’t let you live. They will squash you with all their might!”
“I know,” she said, her frown deepening, “what of it?”
“No, you don’t understand,” he whined, “your tribulation won’t be something ordinary - it will be one of the worst ones.”
“Yes, I know, Yonghao,” she pursed her lips in annoyance, “I am counting on it.”
“You are what?!” he said, pulling on his hair.
“The same principle as with your luck,” she continued calmly, “it narrows their options, makes it that much easier for me to prepare - playing the best move every time is a poor strategy in many gambles for this exact reason. Of course, if I were in the Heavens' place, I would have picked a tribulation that was less predictable, even if it was also somewhat less deadly - but the Heavens are known for their wrath, not their cunning.”
He stared at her in shock, before his legs gave in, and he fell down on his knees.
“No, no, no…” he said, covering his face in his hands, “You can’t do this.”
“I can do whatever I want, Yonghao,” she said, raising her eyebrows in surprise, “that’s what it means to be a cultivator.”
“No, that’s… You can’t just kill yourself on my behalf!” He moved his hands away, and grimaced sadly. “Because that’s what this would be, you realize?”
“To cultivate is to rebel against the Heavens, Yonghao, and no rebellion is free from danger,” she said, “Heavens already tried to murder me when they sent that fish after us in the forest, I suspect - and it did not change my mind on the righteousness of my promise in the slightest.”
“You are in the middle of the refinement stage! Going up against the best the Heaven has to offer is not rebellion, it’s suicide!”
She pursed her lips. “First of all, I am on the cusp of entering the high refinement stage - six out of seven of my dantians are already unlocked. With another month of training in your Inner World, I might get there - in terms of my raw spiritual energy capacity, there is not much more to go.”
Dantians were the areas where spiritual energy was stored within a cultivator’s body. If meridians could be compared to rivers - constantly flowing, but narrow - then dantians would be lakes, deep and expansive. From birth, all dantians in a human body were “locked”, storing only a small fraction of their true capacity due to the same impurities that blocked the flow of spiritual energy through the meridians. Through cultivation, they could be purified, and greatly expand the power of a cultivator - which is why how many dantians one had unlocked was one of the primary measures of advancement through the refinement stage.
Traditionally, the refinement stage was split into four substages: low, middle, high and peak. A nascent cultivator was considered to have entered the low refinement stage once they have unlocked at least one of their dantians, and created at least a single contiguous pathway for spiritual energy - finally allowing them to practice spiritual energy circulation techniques. Once they have cleared all twelve of their primary meridians of impurities - not completely, but enough for the spiritual energy to flow freely - and unlocked three dantians, they were considered to be in the middle refinement stage. Once all of their dantians were unlocked, they would enter the high refinement stage.
Peak of the refinement stage stood separately from the other three: once all dantians were unlocked, there was little else one could do to expand their raw spiritual energy capacity. Instead, the true measure of entering the peak refinement stage was whether you were ready to reforge your flesh, challenge the heavenly tribulation, and ascend into the building foundation stage - and to do that safely, you had to have purged your meridians of all impurities. The difference between the strength of the peak and the height of the refinement stage was thus relatively small.
“Shanyi, you are grasping at straws,” Wang Yonghao said, not convinced by her deflection, “Six dantians? You need all seven! That’s almost a twenty percent difference in your spiritual energy capacity - going without it is like tying one of your hands behind your back.”
“It’s a weakness, but not an insurmountable one,” she continued, shaking her head slightly, “on top of that, I had purchased very good pills and talismans. This town has plenty of cultivators - and you are here too, of course, as well as your protective luck. I have memorized all the most dangerous forms of the heavenly tribulation, as well as the advice on overcoming them. I am as prepared as I could be.”
“Oh yeah? You think you are prepared?” He glared at her. “You are a gambler, right? So what are your odds?”
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She bit her lip. It was a damn good question. She could dodge it, but…
The truth was, she already knew the answer, and it scared her.
“Twenty percent,” she finally said, “there’s a lot of uncertainty, obviously, but… Twenty percent I come out the other end unscathed. I expected to only have a couple days to prepare, before, so perhaps it’s higher now - but not by much.”
Wang Yonghao closed his eyes.
“You can’t even say it’s better than a coinflip,” he said faintly.
“I am not in the habit of lying for no reason.”
They stood together in silence.
“What was the vow, again?” Wang Yonghao finally broke it, “To make me train as hard as I could for a month? Fine, I’ll do it.”
“No.”
“What do you mean, no?” His eyes flew open and he stared at her in shock.
“It means no, I won’t let you do this.” She crossed her arms. “This is a problem mostly of my own creation. If you want to help - help, but I won’t push it off on you.”
“Shanyi, you will die!”
“Even odds I’ll end up crippled instead,” she said, “but there is no other way.”
“What do you mean there is no other way?” he said, leaping up onto his feet again. “I could just train! I hate it, but I’ll do it -”
“No, there is no other way.” Her lip twitched in annoyance, and she let out an exasperated sigh. Did she really have to explain this? “Look, you said it yourself - if the Heavens are behind your luck, then they will want to kill me for helping you get rid of it. This one, singular tribulation is not the problem - it’s all the shit that will come after it. This isn’t just about me not wanting to make you cultivate - though of course forcing cultivation on you is just a hair short of turning you into a cauldron. This isn’t even about sticking it to the Heavens - though fuck every single celestial individually for making either of us go through this. This is about their fucking vows. I need to beat it into their thick angelic skulls that I will never go along with their bullshit, that any vow they put in front of me I will break, even if it might kill me - because otherwise, they will scheme, and they will cheat, and they will contrive things to force me into one vow after another, until I am nothing more than their hand on your throat.”
She ran a hand through her hair to calm herself. “I knew things would come to this when I made my promise - I just didn’t expect it to be this fast.”
“Forcing cultivation on me?” he said, completely ignoring most of what she said, “Isn’t that exactly what you are doing by telling me I can’t help you?”
“You don’t want to cultivate - we both know this. I am not forcing you into anything.”
“Well what if I do?” He scowled at her. “What if I am fine cultivating to save a friend’s life?”
“This is sophistry.” She narrowed her eyes at him. “you don’t want to do it. That you also apparently want to save my life changes nothing about you not wanting to cultivate.”
“Oh so what?” His scowl grew deeper. “Are you going to stop me?”
“I won’t stop you - I’ll just tear up the vow in my mind the second you try, and risk transcending the tribulation on the spot,” she said calmly, “It won’t matter one bit how much you cultivate after that - the Heavens are strict in their dealings. If the vow in my mind is gone by the time I leave your world fragment, the deal is off, and lightning comes out.”
He crossed glares with her, but she held steady, and he looked away with another groan. He walked off towards the edge of the world fragment to sulk, and she took the opportunity to check up on the rice again, deciding it was best to give him some space.
When he returned, his face was even more ashen than before.
“I never should have come to the Golden Rabbit Bay,” he said, his voice hollow, “this is all my fault. I should have known better - my luck warps everything, and now even you, the one person who wanted to help me, are trying to put your neck in the path of a flying sword. And you won’t even let me do it instead. It’s bad enough that I have to go through this, but why does it have to turn people around me into maniacs?”
“Yonghao,” she said, giving him a flat stare, “what are you even talking about? I’ve wanted to fight the Heavens since I was five, sitting on my mother’s lap, listening to stories about cultivators. My decision has nothing to do with you in particular - you just made it a lot easier for me to do so.”
“Of course it has to do with me!” He waved his arms around erratically, “How else do you explain this path you are dead set on?”
“Not everything that happens around you is due to your luck.”
“Oh come on.” He scowled at her. “Really? This is what you tell me? After all that happened to you, you still say it’s not down to luck?”
“Yes, Yonghao, this is what I’ll tell you,” she said, her lips twitching in annoyance again, “that’s not how luck works, Heavenly or otherwise - and if you insist on ascribing everything to luck, you are just flat out wrong.”
“Since when are you an expert on luck?”
“This doesn’t require expertise.” She sneered. He was really starting to get on her nerves. “This is the basics.”
“Yeah, I think I know a bit more about luck than your “basics”.”
“Do you know why my birthplace is called the Golden Rabbit Bay?” She spun to face him, and poked him in the chest with one finger. “Used to be, the bay was covered in a dense forest all the way down to the shore, full of demon beasts. Among them there was a certain species of rabbit, its fur as bright as gold, and legs as quick as lightning - a most vicious predator. See, it had this luck - it would always come at you from the one direction you weren’t watching, at exactly the worst moment. And if you tried to chase after it, you’d always miss it, always take the wrong turn among the trees. Impossible to hunt, and far too dangerous to leave alone - and so no human lived anywhere within a hundred miles of that forest, and only a rare few used the river flowing into the bay for trade.”
She pushed herself closer still, baring her teeth, and poking him in the chest again.
“Do you know why I say ‘used to be’?” she said, lowering her voice dangerously, “because there are no more Golden Rabbits. Because eighty years ago, when cultivators had enough, we surrounded that damn forest, and burned it all to the ground! And the thing is - once there were no trees to hide behind, once all cultivators were looking in the same direction, once the clouds of rain were chased off, once there wasn’t even a single hole in the walls of fire and death sweeping through the landscape, nothing for the little rabbits to slip through, then their luck didn’t amount to shit. They simply died. Because luck needs something to work with. And so now, we have a beautiful city, with gardens that are the envy of all the empire - for plants only grow stronger among the ashes.”
Wang Yonghao pushed her away, and she didn’t resist.
“Luck can push you towards a better path - but if there is no path, then it’s not going to make one for you,” she continued, “It can’t manifest things out of the aether. It can’t make your strikes stronger or faster. All it does is shift things, rearrange pieces, but it’s just that - a rearrangement. Do you know why you found me in that restaurant? I suspect the Heavens wanted someone to motivate you to cultivate harder, and I fit well enough to their blind eyes. I cultivate hard, after all. I taught outer disciples in my sect. Would it not make sense that I would force you to cultivate hard as well? To a celestial, blind to the nuances of human motivations, it must make enough sense - and there simply are very few options for women who could keep up with the sort of bullshit your life is made out of. And so luck rearranged things, and we met - but that was a fuckup on their part, because I am not who they imagined me to be.”
“Oh, so you admit our meeting was due to my luck, huh?” He scowled at her.
“Of course I admit it.” She snorted, and pulled out the jade slate for the Three Obediences Four Virtues, waving it in front of his face. “See this manual? I found it in that sect ruin you stumbled into after kidnapping me. It’s perfectly suited to my constitution. This cannot be a pure coincidence - this had to have been a little gift from the Heavens to sweet talk me into sticking around with you - and no doubt yet another reason why they chose me, for how many undiscovered manuals were in easy reach of the Golden Rabbit Bay? But I never said that nothing is down to your luck - just that not everything is.”
“And how could you possibly know that?” He swept his arms wide, “look at this! An entire Inner World, full of treasures! All of this, luck! Who are you to know its limits?”
“You decided to pick the treasures up.” She scoffed. “Luck only brought you to them - which is nothing unusual.”
“And I decided where to run, didn’t I? But you still said the manual you found was down to luck, even though it served you perfectly!”
“Not much luck needed to lead a drunk fool where he needs to go.”
“So what, it can affect my decisions, but not yours?” Wang Yonghao laughed, and his face split into a fake, arrogant grin, “that is stupid. How do you know your decision to battle the tribulation isn’t just down to my luck trying to fuck me up again by seeing someone die right in front of me?”
She clenched her teeth, rage settling into her heart. It flooded her all at once, and she didn’t even know where it came from.
“What?” she said, her tone cold enough to liquify air.
“Luck can affect the decisions of other people, right?” he said, “That’s how it draws people to me. So how do you know it didn’t affect you?”
“It was my decision, Yonghao,” she said, barely managing to keep her tone level, “even if I was drunk or high on pills, it would still be my decision. Luck does not mindrape people, its influence is always subtle.”
“Subtle?” He looked around the world fragment again, “You call this subtle?” He turned back to her, and snapped his fingers at her face. “Fine - tell me this. You said you got those scars by slipping on the glassy fields? How did that happen?”
She narrowed her eyes at him, and paused, giving herself a moment to let her burning rage abate. It did not help in the slightest.
“I arrived in Reflection Ridge, and needed to cross to get to you,” she finally said, “rain started, and I got caught up in a flash flood, and was almost swept away downstream. A couple scars is nothing - they will heal by morning. What are you leading to?”
‘Oh, ‘rain started’?“ He laughed again, the annoying sound raking at her ears, “Well, tell you what - when they pulled me into their hunt, Jian Shizhe said he was preparing to hunt shamblers, and just waiting for the first rain of the season to do so. It flushes them out of their hiding spots, you see - and then I arrive in town, and of course it’s time for the rain to start. Won’t you say this is down to my luck?”
“What of it? I already know your luck could be dangerous to those around you.”
“But it’s not just dangerous! My luck tried to kill you, again!”
“Yonghao, the vow in my mind was still whole - still is,” she said. “The Heavens would have had no motive to kill me. You are grasping at straws.”
“So what if they have no motive?” He snorted. “My luck is not just the Heavens, it can’t be. My luck still works right here, in my inner world - where you say the Heavens are blind. It still lets me run away from problems that the Heavens bring to my plate. Whatever is going on with it, it’s at least somewhat independent - and since I was trying to run away from you, wouldn’t my luck try to kill you?”
She took a step back. That…was a good point.
“Still my decision,” she said, her voice wavering for a moment, “nobody forced me into the hurricane.”
“Was it though?”
“Yes it was!” she scowled, her mind flashing back to her talk with Junming. If she spent less time talking to them, she would have gotten ahead of the waters. “Of course it was, you asshole! I could have asked for help, I could have waited until morning - I simply assumed that crossing was safe because the one person I asked did not say it was dangerous!”
“Was it though?” His grin grew wilder. “You told me a lot about assumptions, and how you shouldn’t make them - and you are saying you ‘just’ made a mistake? ‘Just’ assumed wrongly?”
“Yes I did! I make mistakes too!”
“Fine. Let’s take what happened in Xiaohongshan. Spirit hunters came after you right when I left - clearly luck, no?”
“Stop being ridiculous.” Her scowl grew wider, and she clutched her hands into fists. “You’ve just said you shouldn’t assume things - in Xiaohongshan, your luck was not at fault. The empire requires all sword sales to be checked. The exact same thing would have happened if I tried to sell the swords halfway across the world, knowing what I did at the time. This was simply a natural consequence of bureaucracy.”
“A check?” He quirked his eyebrow. “Well why did you try to sell the swords in the first place then?”
“I did it because I didn’t know about the damn check,” she said, “and because I didn’t listen when you told me about it. See, I - stupidly - assumed that all your problems were down to luck, and not actual fuckups on your part.”
“Yeah, but you could have decided to sell all sorts of things - demon cores, for example.” Wang Yonghao laughed. There was a mad, masochistic twinkle in his eyes. “Why not sell those? What, more stupidity? You should really get your head checked.”
“Because the first thing any merchant with half a brain would ask me is ‘what kind of beast did it come from’, you imbecile.” She bared her teeth in full. “Which I couldn’t fucking answer, could I, because you don’t remember anything about your own treasures! And they would check my answer - there are techniques for this, though not ones I am familiar with. And then what would they assume? That I somehow slaughtered and butchered a demon beast without even remembering its form? No, that I stole the damn core! They don’t simply get left to lie around in sect ruins or inheritance shrines, cores go bad and sometimes explode if stored improperly, and most spirits would happily eat any they come across. It is plausible that a loose cultivator could stumble on a small, unexplored ruin, and find a sword in a good condition. Hell, it’s even somewhat plausible they could stumble on one out in the wilderness - demon beasts savor the flesh of their kills, but leave the weapons alone. But what is not plausible is that they somehow stumbled on a loose demon beast core.”
“And what about that core from the fish?” He laughed at her again, the sound breaking through the blood pounding in her ears. “Could have sold that.”
“Because I forgot we had it, you piece of shit,” she hissed, raising her hands up between them. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to pull at her hair or strangle the man. “I made the plan to sell the swords before we fought the fish, did not re-evaluate, and so didn’t bring it with me.”
“Doing a lot of forgetting around me, aren’t you? Awfully unlucky.”
“My plan,” she hissed, “my execution, and my fuckup. Where the fuck does your luck even enter the picture?!”
“Well, if not for my luck, you wouldn’t have made such a shitty plan -”
She punched him in his arrogant fucking mouth.