“So what is it that worries you?” Wang Yonghao asked when they finally got back to the tavern, and started to descend into his inner world.

She sighed. How to explain this…

“You said you didn’t have any problems?”

He nodded. “Yeah. I mean, it was disgusting, but aside from that...”

“And that’s what worries me.”

He actually stopped in midair, still a good ten meters above the ground. “You are worried because the plan went too well?”

“Yes.”

“Shanyi, this is insane. Even I feel better now that it’s done.“

She glared up at him, gesturing to the open air below her feet. “Just get down to the ground, will you?”

He resumed his descent, but didn’t shut up. “We set off on this heist, and I am worried sick. You, on the other hand, entirely blase,” he said, “Now we are done, and you’ve changed your mind? This makes no sense.”

“It makes perfect sense,” she said, touching down on the grass and stepping out of her rope harness. “I expected opposition we could deal with, yet we found none. This means the Heavens are plotting something else, and the plot I do not see is a hundred times deadlier than the one I can.”

“Didn’t you say Zhao Jingxin could have spotted me?”

She waved him off. “It was barely anything. Now where did you put these worms? Perhaps they are sick, and our heist will be for naught.”

He motioned towards the metal node of the chiclotron, right next to the baths. “Into the chiclotron, like we talked about, safe from the rosevines.”

“Strange,” she frowned, heading there together with him. “I can’t feel their - ”

Realization reached her mind at the same time as her own words reached her ears, and she dashed towards the stone cap on the node, wincing at her ribs as she tried to pull it aside. Wang Yonghao reached her just a moment after, and together, they opened the node.

Inside, she saw several bricks of stone arranged into a sort of cage, with only small gaps left for air, and a stone plate placed on top. When Wang Yonghao lifted it up, they saw that the cage was entirely empty.

“I left them still in their bag,” Wang Yonghao said, confusion plain on his face as he looked into the empty trap. “They were still asleep, I think.”

“They must have eaten the bag and climbed out, looking for more food,” she cursed, casting out with her spiritual energy senses, and sighed in relief when she felt the two worms in the next water node over, evidently still alive. “I guess without any bones these hungry girls can squeeze through pretty much any hole.”

A moment later, she got the worms out of the chiclotron. They seemed to have spent quite some time there, pushed further in by their ravenous hunger, and then pulled back by the uncomfortable drop in air temperature. Holding each one in one hand, so that they wouldn’t wiggle out, she started to inspect them for damage.

Her worries turned to once again be unfounded. The two worm queens - as long as her elbow, bulbous, and as pale as their name implied - were a bit cold, but otherwise in decent health. There were no cuts or other wounds, no sites of discoloration, and the soft fur that covered their bodies was even and in good condition. Hopefully that should mean they would live long enough to produce the next set of queens.

Wang Yonghao stared at her studying the worms with a grimace. She raised an eyebrow at him, momentarily looking away from her work. “What?”

“How could you just,” he made a vague gesture, “touch them so easily?”

Her eyebrow climbed further. “Why wouldn’t I?” she said, lifting the queens to her eye level. One of them was trying to gnaw her fingers off with its hard black teeth. They were more than sharp enough to bite through bone, but it was just scratching uselessly against her spiritual shield. The other one curled up and seemed to have fallen asleep, it’s fur - or was it whiskers? - rising and falling in slight waves along its length. She supposed it looked kind of cute, in a worm-like sort of way. “Are you afraid of insects, Yonghao?”

He sighed, covering his face with his hands. “Because they are covered in poop?”

“What?” She spread her hands slightly, framing Wang Yonghao in between the two worms. “No they aren’t.”

“They literally make their hives out of poop.”

She rolled her eyes at him. Wasn’t he listening when Zhao Anquan explained this? “No they don’t. They consume sewage, but they consume pretty much everything they can bite through. That’s why they also dump rotting vegetable matter into the mixture, so the worms would have more nutrients. And the queens don’t even touch the sewage - that’s for the worker worms.”

“Which they eat to make worm poop. And then they build their hives out of it.”

“The term is humus, Yonghao. It’s not so different from what fallen leaves turn into in a forest. And it is not pooped, it is secreted.”

“As if there’s a difference?”

She gave him a flat stare. “Truly?” She gestured at his clothing with one of the queens. “Your robes are made of silk. Where do you think that comes from?”

His eyes shifted to his clothing and then back to her. Like a rabbit caught in a snare. “From…silkworms?”

“Which side of a silkworm, Yonghao?”

“It’s - look, it’s different.”

“Or what of the bees - shall I call honey bee vomit?”

He groaned, burying his face in his hands. “Why would you say that?! Now I won’t stop thinking of it!”

She shrugged. “You are the one who asked.”

He’d get over it.

Probably.

Best not to let him dwell on it, just in case. “Let’s build a house for these little babies,” she said, getting up off the grass. “I can’t hold them all night, and they’d happily chew through everything in here if we left them alone.”

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

The temporary nest for the paleworms was quick to build. It consisted of a hole in the ground, only a couple feet deep, lined with flat stone plates and clay to keep rosevines from digging in or the paleworms digging out. At the top, they angled the stones inwards, to make it harder for the worms to climb out, and covered it all with a stone plate.

Well. Wang Yonghao did it, still refusing to let her help with physical labor until her ribs healed entirely, while she kept the paleworm queens from wriggling away to carelessly chomp on a demon beast core and blow themselves up. She also talked to him about the design, and helped measure and draw out the cuts on the stone plates to make them slot into each other, making the whole structure more stable.

image [https://lh7-us.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXeNtsaE1OMmaucVKtr9o4cdAfHO--uyIqkiiWFKRyw3PpGblGQmfgVpQ1RFCZljsurXaby0hRlYUf9H4vpubHC_4Dv6LSKUToxDRsoAG5GQFoY8kLmVwwLApQP0aQ7jXDpc4DaSTZIlQkj0KbBS-YXsdBM?key=yizAPDewrQmqPPn4DzfAIA]

They would have to build a much larger version based on the same principles when they added a latrine to the system, but for the time being, it would do. Building solid sleeping quarters took priority, and with the paleworms safely deposited in their new dwelling, with plenty of freshly cut grass to chew on, they should have gone right to it.

Emphasis on the should have.

“You’ve tricked me!” Wang Yonghao accused her, sitting on the foundation of their new house - a wide wooden frame, on top of stone plinths. His arms were crossed on his chest.

Qian Shanyi stood opposite him, her arms on her hips. “How, precisely?”

“By distracting me with all this talk about the worms,” he said, “we were going to talk about how it makes no sense for you to be worried now.”

“Were we?”

“Yes.”

She sighed, and laid down on the grass to stretch her legs. “Oh fine,” she said, waving her arm around casually. ”What is it that confuses you?”

“Usually, when something goes right, people relax.”

“According to who? No law mandates this.”

Wang Yonghao pursed his lips, repositioning himself on the frame a bit closer to her. “According to me. Because it makes sense.”

She sighed in exasperation. Why was this so hard for him to get? “Suppose you go to dinner with your extended family,” she said, “You expect one of your aunts to twist things into an argument against you, as she always does, yet she is quiet and cheerful. Would you not grow anxious, not knowing what she is planning this time?”

“I don’t have any aunts, so I wouldn’t know. And you are still avoiding the question.”

“You call an answer an avoidance?”

“I call an avoidance an avoidance. All this stuff about aunts - it’s all very clever, but also has nothing to do with why you were worried.”

“Have I not answered already?” She said, raising an eyebrow. “I do not know what the Heavens are doing, so I am worried.”

“But you didn’t know that before, either.”

She opened her mouth to respond, and then closed it as the meaning of the words caught up with her. “Hm.”

That was… True, annoyingly enough. Just because the Heavens were doing something obvious, it didn’t mean that they weren’t also planning something sneaky. So why was she worried now?

She shifted around, steepling her fingers together under her chest, drumming them against each other as she considered this. “Fine,” she grudgingly admitted after a minute of thinking. “Perhaps I just needed the contrast of a job gone well to realize I was being a bit too careless.”

“A bit?”

She shoed him off like an errant pigeon. “Not in the way you think - it’s about thinking ahead, considering the possibilities,” she said, pausing to think some more. “So what, do you think I am being too paranoid?”

“About my luck?”

“Yes.”

“Probably not,” he said slowly, “I just think you should relax.”

She turned her head to look directly at him. For a moment she was sure she misheard. “You are telling me to relax?”

“Yes,” he said, with a smug look on his face. ”Panic never helps.”

She was worried, not panicking. But more importantly…

“Junior, do not seek to use the techniques I taught you against me.”

“If a master forgets a technique, they deserve a reminder.”

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

She shook her head. When did he get this introspective? At this rate he’d start to behave like a scholar, instead of simply looking like one.

“The world gone mad, ducklings teaching fish to swim,” she said, ”And how do you suppose I do that?”

“Ideally, you’d just become relaxed on the spot. Could you do that?”

“No.”

His smug grin grew wider. “A shame. In that case, simply focus on my opinion - it should be almost as good.”

She narrowed her eyes at the cheeky bastard. “You know, Yonghao, it’s said that debating Dao with a fellow cultivator is the best balm for the soul out there.”

“Would that help?” he asked, leaning forwards with a bad imitation of interest.

She scowled at him in return. “Feh. It’s not entertaining if you are going to be all reasonable,” she said, and then breathed out. Alright, enough sulking. “I’ll feel better when I have something to work on. So if you want to help, let’s talk about your luck.”

“Alright.”

“Give me a bit to collect my thoughts,” she said, gesturing vaguely. “You can work on the house in the meantime - we do need to finish it eventually.”

Wang Yonghao nodded, and went over to where they piled up the pine tree trunks, while she closed her eyes to think. He did have a bit of a point, even if he was wildly off in scope - simply worrying would achieve little.

Five minutes later, she opened her eyes, and folded her hands behind her head. “So,” she began, “I think I have narrowed down the possibilities for the factor X behind your luck to about ninety six primary theories.”

Wang Yonghao snorted, lining up another trunk to be cut to shape by the Honk of the Solar Goose. “Well, this mystery is practically solved then.”

She grimaced. “Yeah. Hold your insults until I finish, it’s actually much worse than this.”

With four precise swings of his sword, the trunk was turned into a long, rectangular beam. She had to time her speech to be heard over the call of the goose, echoing around the world fragment. “I didn’t mean to insult you.”

“Fine, I’ll hold my own insults at this travesty of a theory,” she groaned. “If it could even be called that. The way I see it, there are four primary questions. One: what is the mechanism? Two: why you? Three: what is Heaven’s motive? Four: why no communication?”

She turned over on her side, supporting her head with one hand. “Let’s start with the first one. I don’t mean the precise spiritual mechanics of your luck - that would be pure speculation. What I mean is this: does your luck cause unusual events, or does it attract you to them?”

Wang Yonghao kicked the separated bark to the side and picked up the beam, stacking it up alongside the others. “It could do both.”

She nodded, not that he was looking at her. “It certainly does do both - any luck should. The question is about what dominates. If it merely attracts you to sites of conflict - then the world is no worse for your luck, but it is also no better. If it causes it - then we could think about where creating a bit of chaos could benefit everyone.”

He glanced at her with worry in his eyes, and she raised one hand to forestall his objection. “If you don’t want to think of it in those terms, that’s fine. But let’s move on. The second question is - why are you the one affected? I see four possibilities.”

She raised her hand, counting them out on her fingers. “First possibility is random chance,” she continued, “You just stumbled into some factor X when you were young - be it a quirk of your constitution, or an encounter with some treasure or artifact - and this initial event changed your luck, leading to everything else that had happened to you afterwards. Could have happened to anyone, you are just ‘lucky’ enough to win the initial draw. Second possibility is ancestry.”

Wang Yonghao turned around, raising an eyebrow. “Ancestry? I am a nobody.”

“Have you ever met your parents?”

“No,” he said, frowning. “I am an orphan, remember?

She shrugged with one shoulder. “In that case for all we know you might be the Emperor’s own son. If we don’t know exactly where you came from, we can’t dismiss the possibility.”

Wang Yonghao’s eyes widened in shock as he contemplated the possibility of his august heritage. She hurried to continue before he had a chance to object. “Ancestry could mean that you inherited your constitution, or that your mother slapped your ass with some ancient divine artifact just after you were born, or something else,” she said, then frowned. “Actually, about a hundred other things, but the point is: it is due to something incredibly specific to your past. Maybe ‘ancestry’ is a poor term.”

Wang Yonghao rubbed his face, then looked back at the pile of wood right next to him. “I don’t know,” he sighed. “I don’t think this is it. I can’t remember exactly, but I don’t think I had any insane luck until I became a cultivator.”

“And when was that?”

“When I was about nine years old, I think.”

Of course he did.

Cultivators generally unlocked their spirit root between the ages of ten and eighteen, and ten was supposed to be almost unheard of. She had unlocked hers at fifteen.

“This doesn’t necessarily mean anything,” she said, not feeling even a little bit bitter. “If you have a special constitution, perhaps it was simply dormant until then. In fact… You’ve said you’ve fallen into a barrel of Asure Heart Cleansing Dew which unlocked your first dantian. This means you had to already be not that far from such a mysterious barrel when your spirit root unlocked, correct? At least in a town close by - and I doubt that there are many such ruins across the empire. One could certainly argue that your luck was setting things up for you in advance.”

He grimaced, acknowledging the possibility, and then went back to the tree trunks.

“Third possibility is that you were chosen deliberately,” she continued, “Either through some act of your own, or because you have a fitting personality, or something of that nature. The choice was not random, and it was not done because of who you are, but because of what you might be expected to do.”

“Personality? The heavens are bad at reading people.”

“They don’t necessarily have to be good at it,” she said, prepared for the question. ”Take a house: I could not begin to guess what makes one stand and another one topple over. But if I saw a well-known architect making measurements…”

She let her words hang, and Wang Yonghao finished her thoughts. “You could rely on their opinion.”

“Right.”

He turned back to look at her. “So you think, what?” he said with a frown on his face, “There is someone going around figuring out who would be a good target for divine luck?”

She shook her head. “Not necessarily so direct, but it’s not impossible either. It is something to consider, in either case. And the final possibility is…”

She paused. Should she even mention it? This was really speculative, and she didn’t know how Yonghao might react…

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him still looking in her direction. “What?” he said, bringing her back to reality.

She sighed. Well, it was going to come out eventually. “That you weren’t always an orphan,” she said quietly. “It is said that when Gu Lingtian broke into the Heavens, he tried to paint a bridge out of his familial love. In retaliation, the Heavens erased his family, and made it so that he was an orphan all along.”

This time Wang Yonghao actually stepped back in shock. “What?!”

“Yeah, tell me about it,” she muttered, before gathering her thoughts together. “His rebellion comes from before modern history,” she said, hoping to lessen the blow. ”What is known of it freely blends fable with fact. If the Heavens have such a power, then as far as I know, they haven’t exercised it since, even when it would have served them well.”

As far as I know. As if such words meant much. It seemed to help Yonghao, at least.

“Which brings us to the next question,” she continued, “what is Heaven’s motive? We know they are somehow related to you. If we assume that they have done something truly drastic, then they must be getting something out of it. Again, several possibilities: opportunism, crippling, grooming, bystanders.”

“Bystanders?”

She grimaced. “We don’t actually know for sure that the Heavens are involved with your luck. All that we know is that they’ve granted me a vow I used to find you, that your inner world blocks whatever method they use to spy on the vows, and they were ready to retaliate in force when I broke it. This may or may not mean something, but it’s all circumstantial. It could still be that the Heavens are merely paying attention to you in some way, but otherwise staying out.”

Wang Yonghao gave her a considering look. “I didn’t expect you to say that.”

She rolled her eyes. Please. “I am not blind, Yonghao. I still think the evidence leans in their direction - but that is not enough for me to dismiss the possibility entirely. The bastards up top are not the only ones with bizarre horrors in their vaults, after all.”

She wasn’t sure what would be better - to know for sure it was the Heavens, or to know that it wasn’t. The other candidates were no less malicious, and certainly less studied - if also, generally, less powerful. She spent a minute thinking over the possibilities in silence.

Wang Yonghao went back to the beams. Having cut and cleaned a few of them, he started measuring out lengths, using his sword as a ruler, and cutting two wide notches into each beam, where they would lock into each other. She quietly watched him work, holding herself back from offering advice.

Finally, she sighed. “Where was I?” she said, “Right, opportunism. This would mean that the Heavens didn’t plan on your luck, but are still using it for their benefit. Taking out talented cultivators opposed to them, saving karmists, stealing artifacts that are too dangerous to their eyes, but would gather dust in your inner world - that sort of thing.”

Wang Yonghao straightened up, flicking sweat off his forehead. “I don’t collect those kinds of artifacts.”

She raised an eyebrow at him. “Those kinds?”

“Yes, you know,” He waved his arm vaguely. “There are swords and then there are Swords. Whenever I find one that has a blade made of wind and sings poems into my mind, I just turn around and walk away. Most of the time that’s enough.”

“Interesting,” she said mildly. “That you find them at all could be evidence, or it could be nothing.”

There was determination in his eyes. A good sign, she supposed. “Yeah. You said there are four possibilities? What’s next?”

She nodded. “Next is that they could have tried to cripple you. Your luck does not behave like normal luck should - what if this is not a coincidence? Imagine how much you could do if your monstrous luck obeyed your whims.”

“Like what?”

“If I had it, I’d be an empress in fifteen years and lead a new war on the Heavens in thirty.”

“I really do not want to lead any kind of war.”

She nodded readily. “Of course - but you have grown up with your current luck causing you anguish all your life. If it obeyed your whims, you would have a different mindset - and this is exactly my point.”

He paced around, a thinking look on his face, the construction forgotten. “You may be right. And the last one?”

“The final possibility is in some sense the reverse - that they sought to build your mindset to their benefit from the ground up. To either make you obsessed with cultivation, or hateful towards other cultivators, or… something. Failing that, simply to make you strong, to serve whatever strange plan they may have at a later point.”

He gave her a baffled look, and she chuckled. “I didn’t say they had to be good at it. Which brings me to the final question. Why did the Heavens never try to talk to you? Remember: we have, more or less, established that they are involved somehow - at least indirectly, at least as bystanders. So why not communicate with you? They have many ways to do so - that they do not talk to most people is immaterial. They could send a messenger, twist your luck into meeting a karmist with the right ideas, or get your hands on one of the vanishingly rare artifacts that were made for that purpose. Instead, you get deafening silence. Why?

He stopped in his tracks, staring off into space. “That’s… a good question.”

“When it comes to cheating at cards -” she began, and Wang Yonghao’s face whipped in her direction.

“Of course you’d know how to cheat,” he said, scowling at her slightly.

She blinked in surprise. They’ve never played cards together, on account of it being a luck game. “You don’t?”

“No. Because I play fair.”

“Bah,” she said, rolling her eyes at the hypocrite. “‘Fair’ he says, when his luck eclipses the sun. Cheating - and spotting cheating - is as much a part of the game as any other. But no matter - I was leading up to a point.”

“Which is?”

“It is said that there are three types of invisibility,” she continued, “can’t see, don’t see, and won’t see. First - your mark has no physical ability to see the trick, because you do it behind their back. Second - they could see it, but they do not notice it. Third - they do notice it, but they say nothing, because you’ve threatened to break their legs.”

“And you think it’s the same with the Heavens?” he said, frowning in concentration. “They either can’t talk to me, for whatever reason, or they try but I don’t notice, or they don’t even want to?”

She nodded. “Exactly. Two, four, four and three possibilities for the answers - and any combination of them is potentially plausible. Multiply them together, and that’s your ninety-six primary theories for your luck, and I can’t outright dismiss any of them. But actually it’s much worse - all of this is pure speculation. I might be missing key possibilities entirely, or one of these questions may be completely irrelevant. We just don’t have enough information.”

Wang Yonghao sighed, ruffling his hair. “This is a lot to take in.”

She hummed in agreement. “That it is.”

“Do you at least feel better now?”

She blinked, considering her own thoughts. “Yes,” she finally stated with certainty, “Thank you for your help. But I could feel even better.”

She got up off the grass, and went off to fetch her writing set and a solid wooden board, settling down next to the house that was slowly coming together.

“I need data,” she said with determination, pushing the grass down with the board and pinning a sheet of paper to it. “Tell me about your adventures.”

“What do you want to know this time?”

She grinned. “All of it. Start from today and go backwards - I want to know everything. Towns, names, directions, battles fought, ruins visited, enemies made… Everything. And then, I am going to search for gaps amid the patterns.”

Wang Yonghao grimaced at that. “You realize that would take forever, right? I don’t even remember most of it.”

Her grin grew wider. “Got somewhere else to be? I am a gambler, Yonghao, but this game is played in a pitch black room with a cloth tied around our eyes. You can’t win like this.”

She tapped the sheet of paper in front of her with the back of her writing brush.

“So let’s light a lantern, and hope we see something in the shadows.”