Qian Shanyi hissed in pain as she pushed her knocked-out tooth back into its socket. It had taken them ten minutes to find the damn thing, and by then, the gum had already swelled with blood. She secured it in place with her spiritual energy, and then bit down on a small bit of cloth wrapped into a roll, applying more pressure.
With any luck, it would heal back up by the time she finished making breakfast - or at least enough that it wouldn't fall out when she went to sleep.
The mushrooms still had a good forty minutes left to go in the chiclotron, and so she headed to the baths. She dearly needed one.
The baths - or rather, bath, for there was just one - was merely a circular basin in the ground, lined with the same stones as the chiclotron. The seams between them were sealed with clay, and she glanced over it approvingly - Yonghao had patched all the holes and cracks nicely.
Air shimmered faintly above the stones, heated up by the fire tunnel of the chiclotron that passed right below the bath. A tall bucket was attached to the wooden walls just above head height, full of water from a Blue Tear Stone, and she marveled for a moment how Wang Yonghao managed to put it together without seams or nails, before pulling open a small shutter in the side and letting a stream of water pour out. As soon as it hit the stones, it hissed, turning to steam, and the bath slowly started to fill up.
The bucket itself was nothing revolutionary, merely well-constructed: most water treasures that produced water had a certain, typically low, amount of pressure they could overcome, and so putting them into a bucket was the standard method of preventing overflow. The higher the level of water in the bucket, the higher the pressure on the treasure, until the two reached equilibrium; of course, if you were to empty the bucket, it would immediately begin to fill again.
She was left waiting for the bath to fill with little else to do - trying to plan her approach to the tribulation on an exhausted mind was a lost cause. Ordinarily, she would have chatted up Wang Yonghao about what happened to him while they were split up - but neither of them could talk, forced to press the dislodged teeth back in place as their bodies slowly reconstructed the severed nerves and blood vessels.
She came back out of the bath, and leaned against its wall - or perhaps a fence, depending on how one looked at it - sliding down to the grass. Wang Yonghao was sitting nearby, curiously looking through the knives in her open knife chest. Seeing her come back, he looked up, and gave her a thumbs up.
What does that mean?
She groaned, and raised her hand, going back to the same trick she used when they were stuck together on a tree - drawing characters on her hand.
They wrote for a bit, and she told him about her adventures with Wu Lanhua in the broadest details. Interpreting the hand drawings was so much easier in the ever-bright daylight of the world fragment, yet it still took excruciatingly long to say anything of substance.
she signed, shaking her tired wrist. Wang Yonghao gave her a sympathetic look.
she signed, accompanying it with a groan,
Still, this was something to celebrate. If he could teach her, they could speak far quicker - she very much doubted this was the last time they would be forced to stay quiet.
Yet this revelation still nagged at her.
He froze for a moment, and she decided to encourage him.
With a sinking feeling in her heart, she saw Wang Yonghao’s smile drop further.
She closed her eyes and rubbed the bridge of her nose. Soul shards were nothing to mess with - she would have said he was lucky to have endured the event so well, if not for the irony.
She shifted around, laying down on the grass next to the wooden wall, and kicked off her sandals, staring up into the sky, trying to process what he said. Finding treasures or manuals was one thing, but to simply have an entire language grafted onto your mind… No wonder he was so touchy about his soul.
She shook her head.
She couldn’t wait to go back to speaking with her damned mouth.
That one phrase took her a good two minutes to sign out. He smiled at that, some mirth returning to his eyes.
She rolled her eyes at him.
Over the next twenty minutes he taught her the very basics of the Imperial Sign, mixing it with her own method of signing to explain the meaning of individual gestures. The difference between the two was like comparing the sky and the earth: where drawing a glyph on the palm of the hand - especially in a way that could be understood - took at least several seconds, fingerspeaking was both faster and clearer, distinct gestures blending together smoothly and efficiently until “speech” was as fast as when saying words out loud. They’ve started with the basics of movement - go there, come back, left, right, grab that thing, and so on - figuring that would be the most immediately useful thing to communicate if they were pressed for time.
Her tired mind was straining itself, trying to keep the unfamiliar gestures in mind. She wasn’t sure how much of it she would remember tomorrow, but at least it passed the time.
Once her bath was full, she secluded herself, stripped off her robes, and sunk into the hot waters, feeling her muscles relax and her skin tingle from the temperature. The slope of the bath was gentle enough that she could easily lie down completely, water coming up to her neck.
When she went to the baths in Xiaohongshan, she did not know what to do with her life, the stress poisoning the experience. Now, even despite the threat of the tribulation hanging over her head, she felt none of it. The sheer contrast made her chuckle sadly.
Perhaps she really was insane. Would a sane person truly prefer mortal danger to a quiet life as a waitress?
As she laid there, her thoughts started to slow, despite her best efforts.
I… I still have to cook… Should just quickly wash and go… Have plans to make…
She hadn’t noticed when her eyelids drooped closed.
Just…just a minute…
----------------------------------------
Sudden pain brought Qian Shanyi back out of her dreams, and she thrashed around in the bath in a flash of panic, coughing water out of her lungs. Her heart beat rapidly in her chest.
She glanced around in momentary confusion at the wooden walls around her, until her memories floated back up to the surface. She was in Wang Yonghao’s world fragment, taking a bath. Nobody was attacking her. The skies haven’t fallen.
I must have drifted off and my head slipped below the surface.
Adrenaline coursing through her veins, she stood up and stretched. She couldn’t help but chuckle at herself.
Would have been awfully embarrassing to survive a flash flood and then drown myself by sheer accident.
She tested her tooth with her tongue - the gauze had already fallen out of her mouth while she was coughing. It still shifted a bit, but wasn’t at risk of falling out anymore. Her skin was all wrinkled - how long did she sleep for?
The water was still just as warm as before, the chiclotron working to pump heat into it, though clouded by blood and grime.
Picking up a piece of soap from a conveniently placed shelf, she quickly lathered up her long hair and body, and then washed herself off in the stream of fresh water from the bucket above her head. Opening up a wooden sluice at one end of the elongated bath, she let all the water drain down a channel and into a larger basin, situated above a neighboring water tunnel of the chiclotron. There, the dirty water would freeze, and be easy to toss out of the world fragment when they finally exited it, days later.
She smiled. Yonghao made it, but it was her design, and it felt pleasant to see it working properly.
She didn’t have a towel, and so simply pulled a fresh set of robes over her wet skin - these ones too short for her, only reaching down to her knees, black and shimmering like onyx. She wasn’t too bothered by it - in the end, cultivator robes and bathrobes shared quite a few similarities, and the ever-shining sunlight was pleasantly warm. It was a good thing Yonghao had so many robes - the set she came in was still wet from the rain, and covered in a fair bit of her blood besides, while the brilliant white ones she put on when she entered the world fragment were now lightly tinted green from the freshly torn grass.
When she finally left the bath, she saw Wang Yonghao sitting in a lotus pose in the middle of the world fragment, eyes closed. All of his spiritual pores were shut tight, his face frowned in deep concentration, drops of sweat dripping down his forehead. She walked up to him, and stared at him in confusion for a while.
He didn’t seem to be doing anything - just sitting there, but by the look on his face, he might as well have been trying to lift a mountain.
“What are you doing?” she finally asked, crossing her arms on her chest.
“Cultivating,” he said, opening one eye to look at her, “circulating my spiritual energy to clear my meridians. Can’t you see how hard it is?”
She glanced at him from top to bottom. “Usually people keep their spiritual pores open when they do that.” she snorted, understanding finally dawning on her. “The point in circulating spiritual energy is to remove impurities from your body. If you keep your pores closed and only circulate what you have inside of you, you’d just be…moving them around, I guess, achieving nothing.”
“Really?” he said, a corner of his lips twitching upwards at the shared joke, “I had no idea, Elder. I’ll make sure to try your way too… Perhaps next month.”
“That was impressive,” she whistled, “I’ve never heard anyone say ‘Elder’ with that much dismissive disdain. I don’t think I could manage that. I haven’t even heard anyone call me ‘whore’ quite like that in ages.”
“I’ve had a lot of experience,” he said, closing his eyes.
She stretched her hands, yawning widely. “I bet,” she said, “How long was I out?”
“A couple hours, I think.”
She groaned. “You should have woken me up.”
“Seemed like you needed sleep.”
She grimaced, rubbing her face. “I did, but now the rice will be too sticky and the vegetables I fried will have gone soggy. So much for making an outstanding dish.”
“Shanyi, you know half the time I just have nothing to eat at all, right?” He arched an eyebrow in her direction, keeping his eyes closed. “I wouldn’t know the first thing about the difference between an ‘outstanding’ dish and a normal one. I put the rice and vegetables in a water node, so it’s not like they would have gone bad.”
“It’s the principle of the thing,” she grumbled, “Disappoints me more than it probably should - I wonder when I managed to develop pride as an immortal chef. Well, let’s go figure something out.”
She bent down, grabbed him by the shoulder, and pulled him up on his feet. “What -” he said, finally opening his eyes and reluctantly following along, as she headed towards the node with the mushrooms. “but I can’t -”
“You can and you will,” she said casually, “you’ll teach me fingerspeak, and I’ll teach you to cook. It’d be a nice, simple exchange of pointers between two cultivators, without any of this luck nonsense.”
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
His resistance went away almost immediately, and she smirked.
“Also,” she continued, “we both have to cultivate, and I don’t want to bicker…much… about which one of us has a better plan to deal with the tribulation. This means we’ll switch up which one of us cooks, so that neither wastes too much time. Your turn is first.”
Within moments, she had all the ingredients gathered up in their kitchen area, and started arranging them on the one table they had - mildly overcooked rice, fried vegetables, and uncooked mushrooms, now tinged with metal spiritual energy, but one that wasn’t bound to the material itself. Wang Yonghao stood a distance away, looking at her curiously, as she gestured towards the table.
“So, there’s a lot I could teach you -” She yawned again, cowering her mouth with her hand. The nap in the bath helped, but she still felt exhausted. “- knife handling, how to prepare various types of ingredients, heat control, yadda yadda. All of it would be a waste of time, so I am not going to do that. You’ll either pick it up yourself or read it from a manual I can give you - and if you screw up, just do it again and learn from your mistakes. Instead, I am going to teach you about the Dao at the heart of it all, one that applies to everything from making dumplings to sewing up your robes.”
“Dao for making dumplings?” He frowned, crossing his arms and looking at her uncertainly. “That sounds a little… Unserious.”
She gave him a flat look. “Are you insulting my mistress Tang Qunying?”
“Maybe? I thought you hated your sect masters?”
She shook her head. “She’s not from my sect.”
“So how did you meet her then?”
“Didn’t.” Qian Shani shrugged easily. “Her manual’s very good though, so until she finds me and makes me stop, I’ll call her my mistress - if she’s even still alive to do so.”
“Must be quite the person, for you to declare someone your mistress without even meeting them,” he grumbled, but came closer to the table, looking it over.
“Yeah, if we had met face to face, I’d have tried to drag her into my bed to fuck her brains out,” she said absently, focusing on making sure everything they needed was available, and heard Wang Yonghao sputter next to her. She turned back to him, and saw him blushing profusely. “What?”
“How could you just say that?!” he said, blushing harder, and bringing a hand up to rub at his eyes.
She rolled her eyes at him. “Yonghao, we’ve been over this. I can do and say whatever the fuck I want - that’s what it means to be a cultivator.”
“That’s not what I - gah! Don’t you have any shame?”
She laughed at that. “Is shame going to help me ascend to the Heavens like a phoenix? No? Then why would I keep it around?”
“So you don’t embarrass yourself or people around you with how graphic you are,” he groaned, burying his face in his hands.
“You realize this will just make me do it more, right?” She arched an eyebrow at him, not that he could see it. “I could be a lot more graphic if you’d like. Did you know that cultivator senses are enhanced all over their bodies?”
“No! No, absolutely not!” He groaned again. “Fine, whatever, you mentioned a Dao of Dumplings? Can we move on from this?”
She laughed again. This was fun, but he was right - and she didn’t want to bully the poor prude too much.
“Alright, alright,” she conceded, “I’ll spare you this time.”
His intimidating glare was ruined entirely by the furious blushing of his cheeks. Honestly, it was like he didn’t know he could pinch blood vessels shut with spiritual energy. And he was going to tell her about embarrassment?
“So what is it?” He sighed, trying to bring himself back into some semblance of order as he occupied his hands with adjusting his robes. “Some kind of cultivation technique?”
“Better,” she said, knocking on her head for emphasis, “doesn’t even rely on spiritual energy. It’s all in here.”
She gestured towards the ingredients.
“Reading between the lines of what Tang Qunying wrote, the core question at the heart of all immortal cooking is this: what can you make with all this stuff?” she said, adopting her best lecturing tone.
She let the question hang. Silence stretched. Wang Yonghao looked between her and the ingredients, waiting for her to say something, but she stayed quiet.
Finally, he couldn’t take it anymore. “So…what can we do?”
“Why are you asking me like I know?” She gave him an exaggerated shrug. “I am looking at the same ingredients as you are.”
“Well, you are the chef here.”
“What does ‘chef’ mean?” She walked around the table and leaned on it from the other side, like a general might lean over a map of a battlefield. “I’ve learned some basic cooking from my mother when I was very young, and have been reading Tang Qunying’s manual for several weeks now. I have about two weeks of experience cooking for customers. Does that make me a chef? Objectively, your skill is not far from mine. Does that make me an authority on cooking?”
She grabbed one of her knives from her knife chest, and pointed at Wang Yonghao with the blade. She continued, “No. If you are the one holding the knife, then there is no authority above you in the kitchen.”
She tossed the knife to him, and he caught it easily. Not like he’d need it - everything had already been cut up - but the symbolism mattered.
“You have the knife now,” she said, her strict tone ruined entirely by an unwelcome yawn. “So what do you want to do?”
He frowned, staring at her uncertainly, playing with the knife in his hands. “So what, I can’t even ask you questions?”
“You can ask.” She inclined her head agreeably. “Just because you have the final say doesn’t mean you can’t receive information.”
“Can’t you just tell me what to do?”
“No, actually.” She shook her head. “That is the point. I could teach you all sorts of skills, but if you keep looking over your shoulder for my approval or disapproval, you’ll never get anywhere. The first step is deciding that your will is paramount, even if you will crash and burn a hundred times on your way to greatness.”
“Shanyi, we are talking about cooking rice, not overthrowing empires.”
“Indeed. You can half-ass the latter.”
He pursed his lips, leaning on the table to match her pose. “Look, this doesn’t really make sense. I don’t really know how to cook. What can I decide about the dish?”
“Whatever you think of.” She shrugged. “If I thought you couldn’t do this, I wouldn’t have bothered giving you one of my trophy knives. You are smart enough to manage, if you could only bring out some confidence.”
“First thing you said to me when you met me was to call me arrogant,” he narrowed his eyes at her, “and you say I lack confidence?”
She rolled her eyes at him. Sword duel, that he could win - but a fight of pure sophistry? No chance. “Arrogance is not the same thing as confidence - indeed, the two are often opposites. Arrogance is a perfect cover for insecurity, while confidence tends to grow into a quiet sense of self-assurance. For example,” she tossed her long over her shoulder, “I have never been arrogant in my entire life.”
Judging by Wang Yonghao’s expression, the humor was lost on him.
“Oh yeah? And what am I supposed to be confident about?”
“Your skills.”
“What skills?” He scoffed. “Ones granted to me by luck?”
“If I meant your luck, I would have said luck. I meant your skills. You are a decent teacher - I’ve had plenty, and your instruction on fingerspeaking was better than most.” She motioned to the bath. “You are a great woodworker. The Heavens have granted you neither skill…I hope… and knowing how to explain the language is entirely separate from knowing how to speak it.”
“It’s nothing special,” he muttered.
“It’s great work.” She rolled her eyes, “Don’t make me force you to admit it again. This is exactly what I mean by you not being confident. You put yourself down so much it blinds you to reality.”
“So what, am I supposed to just ‘become confident’ on the spot?”
“Ideally, yes.” She nodded readily, looking at him expectantly. “Could you?”
He scowled at her this time. “No!”
“A shame. In that case, simply focus on my opinion of you - and seeing as how my opinions are rarely wrong, it should be almost as good.”
He looked up to the sky with pleading eyes.
Fool. Did he not listen to her when she said the Heavens were not listening to them here? He’d get no help dealing with her games from the skies.
“Fine,” he said, pulling the pot of rice closer to himself. “But I need something to start with. What were you going to make before our fight?”
“I was thinking of making a stir fry.”
He shrugged. “Still sounds like a good option, so let’s do that.”
“But is it really?” She inclined her head to the side.
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
“I was planning to use rice more or less just as it came out of the pot.” She made a casual gesture towards it. ”Now, the rice is cold and sticky. A lot of moisture would have left it by now, too. This would not benefit the dish.”
He pursed his lips, and she could finally see him starting to think about what was on the table. “Are there ways to remove the stickiness? Wash the rice, or something?”
“There are.” She nodded. ”The stickiness is due to a film of starch on the surface of rice grains - washing the rice would likely remove it, yes. But…It is best to lean into the strengths of ingredients, rather than fight them.”
“So what, you want to make… something that could benefit from the stickiness?”
“I want nothing, I am but a humble, neutral observer.” She made the same exaggerated shrug again. “Perhaps there is nothing at all you could do here - but it is worth at least considering. So what would such a dish be?”
She was actually deliberately avoiding thinking about that obvious question - letting Wang Yonghao work through the problem on his own, without injecting her own perspective. It would be invaluable in the long term, even if this one dish went up in flames.
“Not a stir fry, clearly,” he grumbled.
“Clearly. Is stir fry the only rice dish you know?”
He easily named a dozen others. Some of them required ingredients they did not have, others would not have benefited from the stickiness in the slightest, but he was at least thinking, spinning the problem in his head. She kept poking him here and there, but once he was past the initial hurdles, he seemed to be doing just fine.
“It’s…I don’t know,” he said, walking back and forth in front of the table, “I keep coming back to this idea - if the rice is sticky, we could roll it into balls, right? And then… put the other ingredients on the inside, like a dumpling. But that’s stupid.”
“How is it stupid?” She raised an eyebrow at him. “It is a coherent idea. Rice can be rolled into balls.”
“I mean, I’ve never seen it done.”
“I haven’t seen it either,” she shook her head. Honestly, as if what other people did even mattered - but she didn’t want to say it and toss Yonghao back into his funk. They were making good progress, she thought. “But neither of us has been to every corner of the world, and that is not the same as stupid. I think it is worth trying.”
“But would this even work?” he asked uncertainly. “I mean - what if the rice balls we make fall apart, or the ingredients inside seep through?”
She shrugged. “Only one way to find out, chef Wang Yonghao. Heat up the pan, and let’s experiment.”
----------------------------------------
Qian Shanyi woke up feeling so full of energy she was ready to burst.
She crawled out of the rosevine bunker, stretching her limbs. It was so cramped that she couldn’t fully stretch out her legs while she slept, but Wang Yonghao’s world fragment was so disgustingly auspicious after their work on the chiclotron that she still felt like she had just gotten out of a massage parlor.
She was sure that this too would fade, and soon enough, her back would hurt again… But not today.
Wang Yonghao was still up and about, “cultivating” as he did. They’ve agreed to sleep in shifts, since they only had the one bunker where they could doze off safely without being harassed by rosevines, and he wouldn’t be going to bed for a good few hours. She briefly considered going over to talk to him - after her sleep a good plan for the tribulation started to slowly come together in her head, taking into account all the new information on the table - but no. She waited for long enough.
It was time to cultivate.
With a grin, she pulled out her sword, and started going through the movements of Three Obediences Four Virtues. High quality spiritual energy flowed into her body in rivers, not piddly streams like back on Wu Lanhua’s yacht, circulating through all her meridians, spinning together into a beautiful tapestry only visible to her inner sight, before leaving her body through different pores, bringing the impurities alongside it. Even the sword felt lighter in her hands, making the air sing as it was sliced apart.
Her breathing measured, she soon fell into a rhythm, and from the rhythm, into a meditation, her thoughts dissolving away into nothingness as all that was left in her world was the sword in her hands, the muscles dancing under her skin, and the grass trampled under her feet.
This was what she was missing.
This was true cultivation. Not counting out spirit stones and worrying wherever she had enough to last a month. Simply… freedom, freedom to build herself into who she wanted to be.
Tribulation? Please. With her knives, she could slice the very fabric of the world apart. With her needle, she could sew it back together.
Before, she was limited by her broken leg. But by now, it had healed completely.
Before, she was limited by hunger. But she had been eating well these past few weeks.
Before, she was only beginning to synchronize with her new spiritual energy recirculation law, pulled apart in two different directions. But by now, this process had concluded.
She kept going for eight hours straight, until her meridians burned like magma, until even her bones ached and her muscles spasmed erratically.
She only stopped when she collapsed down on the ground, her chest heaving with exertion, and yet her lips were split in the largest grin of her life. Oh how she missed this!
Turning her senses inwards, she giggled, and soon her giggles turned into full blown laughter, cackling about the foolishness of the Heavens. The meridians in her body were so much clearer now. Once she had entered the middle refinement stage, it had taken her a bit over a year each to unlock her fourth and fifth dantians. In Wang Yonghao’s world fragment, she had unlocked her sixth in less than a month. And she hadn't just unlocked it - it was already halfway to being cleared.
She could practically taste how close she was to the seventh dantian unlocking too, ready to propel her into the high refinement stage.
How long did it take even the best prodigies, with the support of the largest sects, to break out of the middle refinement stage? Two years at least, it must be.
Of course, even if she cleared her dantians, it wouldn’t mean that she would actually enter the high refinement stage - her body couldn’t keep up. She already felt it lagging behind, muscles struggling to contain the power of spiritual energy.
There was a reason why the aforementioned prodigies did not dump a small mountain of money into clearing their meridians faster - there wasn’t much point. You need a strong body to advance into the building foundation stage, and so you might as well proceed at the pace dictated by your body.
But for now, she could cackle. For once, she had the resources. She was the one advancing at twice the speed with half the effort. And even if she couldn’t advance into the building foundation stage yet… Simply scaling the mountain of cultivation felt exhilarating.
She laid there on the grass for a long while, simply enjoying the feeling of ever-burning sunlight on her skin, before, with great difficulty, she lifted herself up, and slowly stumbled over to the kitchen. Wang Yonghao was already asleep, so she’d be cooking on her own.
After all, food was what every cultivator burned to cultivate - and she needed a lot of fuel to ascend into the Heavens like a vengeful phoenix.