The two towns, Reflection Ridge and Glaze Ridge, were home to three sects - Nine Singing Vessels, Northern Scarlet Stream, and Palace of the Glowing Cliffs, who, collectively, controlled most of the trade in heavenly materials and earthly treasures. There was no way to sell the loot they got from the tribulation in any reasonable time without going through one of them.
The most natural choice would have been Northern Scarlet Stream - the sect of Jian Shizhe and Jian Wei, but Qian Shanyi didn’t want to put all her eggs into a single basket. Which brought her to the sect compound of the Nine Singing Vessels.
Nine Singing Vessels was a sect of refiners, making and selling swords, talismans, and other equipment that used spiritual energy. That meant they had a reason to buy the materials for their own use, or have customers that would be interested - but it also meant she had to deal with refiners. Refinement of materials held a hundred times more secrets than all other cultivation, and the sects dedicated to it grew all the more insular for it, and guarded their positions in the empire with vicious jealousy. To this day, most refinement sects were still family clans, just like a hundred and fifty years ago, all disciples merely members of a single extended family, and women barely even let out of the compound.
Ordinarily, they would have turned her around at the gates. Fortunately, a mountain of money opened all doors.
It took her a good hour to go through her list of materials together with one elder Li, a representative of the sect - a cultivator well into his age, his beard white as snow. He wanted her to sell them everything in a single go - but she could never agree to that. She and Wang Yonghao were playing at being mysterious, yet possessing great wealth, and selling everything at once would make them seem desperate for money. After all, the longer you sought a customer, the better the price you could fetch.
Instead, she wanted the sect to work as her middleman. They would put up her materials for sale in their stores, and after a month, find the highest bidder for any given ingredient. In exchange, she would grant them a percentage from every sale - or the material itself, if they could offer a higher price.
Elder Li was an experienced haggler, not giving an inch to her, for all that his style differed radically. They were swiftly approaching an impasse - which is exactly what she wanted.
“Very well.” She sighed, pretending to concede. “How about this: I will sell you one tenth of the materials immediately. In fact, I will bleed myself dry and give them to you at half price - but the other half, you will pay in information.”
Elder Li’s stare could have pierced straight to her soul, if her eyes let anything show. “Information?”
“I have an academic interest in the Heavens,” she lied, “and thus I seek out any information about them. Artifacts, tribulation records, stories of sects that have practiced heavenly techniques - anything. Anything you sell - either directly, or by refining one of my materials further - has to be paid with an article that I could not easily find elsewhere.”
Elder Li pursed his lips. “We are refiners. Not researchers.”
She folded her hands in a begging gesture. “Elder Li, this here humble cultivator begs you, do not stab a dagger of refusal straight through my heart like this. If you cannot do so, then pay someone else. Surely a sect of your eminence can open many doors with but a glance? This is already the best gift I could possibly offer you - after all, I have no way of knowing how valuable this information will be. Do we have a deal?”
They did not have a deal. It took her another twenty minutes to argue Elder Li into something they could both agree to - but in the end, she got exactly what she wanted. The supposed heart of the deal, thousands of spirit stones worth of materials, she couldn’t care less about, even if the sect ended up scamming her entirely. It was a massive amount of money - but they didn’t need a massive amount of money. A tenth of it at half price was still well over four hundred spirit stones, more than enough for the foreseeable future.
And on top of it, she got an agreement for information she would struggle to get any other way.
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The postal office seemed different with every visit. The first time, it was dark out, the hall deserted, with only Junming manning the post. The second time, she came for her tribulation, and had no mind for anything else. The third time was brief, merely a few hours later, and only to tell Junming what to do with their loot. The fourth was just before they went off to the forest to steal trees - to consult maps, check out a couple books, and ask for a copy of the cultivator almanac - but merely a single day after the tribulation, the hill still stank of blood. But the office still stood, and after yesterday’s rain, even the flowers framing the entrance seemed to straighten out.
No matter the crisis, after a while, everything went back to normal - and when she walked through the doors, she saw a good dozen people waiting for their mail as if nothing had happened. Junming was back behind the counter. Yesterday it was postmaster Chen Changjie - perhaps they simply switched up every other day.
This time, she patiently waited in line. She was the only cultivator here, and the ordinary people around her tried not to stare - or at least, averted their eyes when she met theirs with a smile. All except one.
A boy, not even ten years old, was holding onto the long skirts of his mother close to the front of the queue. His head was spinning around the room like a windmill, and when he saw Qian Shanyi walk in, his eyes widened in awe, and he immediately headed over to her. The mother was too engrossed in shuffling through some papers in her hands to notice.
“Are you the one who killed the tribulation?“ the boy asked, positively vibrating with excitement. His voice was surprisingly quiet for a child.
Qian Shanyi crouched to the boy’s eye level, lightly angling her sword sheath on her waist so it wouldn’t scrape against the floor. She had no affinity for children, and had, thankfully, managed to largely avoid dealing with them back in her sect - but if someone looked this excited about cultivation, she couldn’t just brush them off. She was much worse than this at his age, after all.
“I was the target,” she said, “but I didn’t fight alone. Did you see us transcend?”
The boy nodded. There were sparks in his eyes. “It was so cool! The ox was so big but then you went swish and swoop and it was dead just like that, and then the dragon - ”
The boy’s mother at the front raised her eyes from her papers, and gasped as she realized her son was gone from her side. She spun around, and breathed out when she saw him talking to Qian Shanyi. “Ah Muyang!” she said sharply as she approached. “I told you to stay by my side!”
A spike of panic raced across the boy’s face as he spun around to face his mother. “I just -” he said, and fell silent under her stern glare, shrinking in on himself.
Turning towards Qian Shanyi, the woman bowed. Qian Shanyi gave her a small nod in return, not rising up from her crouched pose. “Honorable immortal, I must humbly apologize for my son bothering you. I will correct this misbehavior at once.”
“He wasn’t bothering me,” Qian Shanyi said simply. Cultivators were eccentric existences, so she understood the wariness the older woman must have felt at seeing her son talk to a stranger. “It seemed to me that he wanted to hear some cultivation tales, that’s all.”
Muyang nodded vigorously. His mother sighed, rubbing her eyes. “We live nearby, and he has always been obsessed with it… He even begged to come with me today, just to look at where that terrifying tribulation happened two days ago,” she said, before turning back to glare at her son. “But that is no excuse to leave his mother’s side!”
Qian Shanyi tapped her cheek. She would have gladly entertained the boy for a bit, but this woman had, in her short-sightedness of voicing her own misplaced worries, made this quite a bit harder. By all rights, she should have been happy that someone else could keep an eye on her son while she dealt with the mail - but by publicly telling him off, she’d be losing face if she immediately backed down and agreed to do exactly what he wanted. Worse, if Shanyi proposed it, the mother might also lose face if she didn’t agree - and that just might make her take it out on the kid once they went home.
The last thing she wanted was to get this child into trouble over something so trivial. She needed to give this woman some kind of excuse…
Qian Shanyi stood up, taking a step closer to the woman and lowering her voice, so the boy would not hear. “Fellow -” she began, just as her mind reached out for something in common between the two of them, and ran into her complete ignorance. “- petitioner of the postal office,” she continued, blowing past the spot of awkwardness, “Of late, my life has been filled with trials, and this latest tribulation almost killed me. On top of that, I have not seen my family in what feels like years. To have a spot to share the brightness of cultivation would be such a contrast that you’d be doing me a favor.”
She saw the woman hesitate, and, glancing behind her, pushed her final card in. “It seems that your place in the queue is almost up.”
“Of course. I would be honored to assist you.” the woman bowed, and glanced down at Muyang. “I will take some time with the post. Entertain the honorable immortal in the meantime.”
Muyang nodded vigorously. Qian Shanyi smiled, motioning to the seats lining the walls. “Take a seat. Have you heard the tale of how the immortal monkey king helped the cultivators?”
She didn’t know how Muyang managed to not squeal.
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“...and that’s why to this day, there is a cultivator talking to the monkey king at all times of day and night, and in return, he allows us to harvest hundreds of different heavenly materials and earthly treasures from his body.” she said, finishing up her tale. Reaching into a bandolier, she pulled out a little bottle, full of powdered ivory of the rampaging divine ape, and shook it to punctuate her point.
She'd gathered a bit of an audience once she started - other people waiting in queue, mostly, and she spoke a bit louder for their benefit. They gave her looks - most cultivators wouldn’t have been quite so casual in their interactions - though their surprise faded quickly. One man even left and returned a minute later with a pair of his own children.
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“That is so sad,” one of the new girls said quietly, “they cut off his teeth every day, like some kind of fruit?”
Qian Shanyi shrugged. “It is his choice. To cultivate is to rebel against the heavens - if I was sealed under a mountain, I would have done the same thing to spite the bastards.”
“It’s not sad, it’s cool,” Muyang said, “Tell us another one!”
“I think you won’t have the time for it,” she chuckled, glancing at the boy’s mother. She could see that she was almost finished with Junming.
Muyang deflated in disappointment. “Do you think I could be a cultivator?” he asked quietly.
She snorted. “How old are you?“
“Nine,” the boy said without blinking.
Was that plausible? He seemed a bit too short to her eyes. How tall were nine year olds supposed to be, anyways?
When in doubt, bluff.
“Did you know cultivators can smell lies?” she said, tapping her nose.
He blushed, folding immediately. “Seven…” he said, quietly.
The two other kids gasped in shock, amazed by her powers of divination.
“Hm.” She hummed. “Well, Muyang, most cultivators only unlock their spiritual root around fourteen, so you have a long way to go. But even then, most likely not. Only one in a hundred ever unlock their spiritual root, and it’s down to chance who is lucky and who is not.”
He deflated further. “But I want to be a cultivator,” he said stubbornly.
She ruffled his hair, and he glared at her in annoyance. She laughed at the look on his face: if there was one thing that made dealing with children tolerable, it was honesty. No ordinary adult would dare glare at a cultivator quite like that.
“To cultivate is to rebel against the heavens,” she said, “and so if you rebel against the heavens, you are already a cultivator, aren’t you? We all do the best we can - even the monkey king still rebels by sacrificing his teeth. If you strive upwards, you’ll always find a way to help, even if you won’t be the one holding the sword.”
She saw Muyang’s mother step away from the counter of the postal office, and decided to leave the kid on a high note. “Here,” she reached into her robes, and drew out a whistle Wang Yonghao made from a bone of the Heavenly Rooster. He had taken to bone carving as easily as to woodworking, and had made three different whistles in his free time over the last couple days - they had no shortage of small bones, after all.
The whistle looked the part - dark gray and with a shine of steel. She handed it to Muyang, and he all but fainted from the excitement.
“A little present, in return for having listened to my stories,” she said, “it’s made from a bone of a heavenly rooster, and will attract a bit of metal-type spiritual energy. Treat it with care.”
“And if I get in trouble I can blow on it thrice and you’ll come and save me?”
“No.” She laughed. “It’s just a regular whistle.”
A whistle made from a heavenly material, so tough you could ram it straight through a block of stone and not even scratch the surface, and ridiculously expensive for what it was - but at the end of the day, just a whistle.
Muyang leapt up off his seat, and caught up with his mother, clutching the whistle tightly. Before they left through the doors, he turned back and gave her a comically low bow.
“Can we also get a whistle?” one of the other kids asked, bringing her attention back to them.
“One gift per day,” she said, rolling her eyes. “But I suppose I could tell you another fable.”
She still had some time to kill before her spot in the queue was up.
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By the time she managed to extricate herself from the crowd of children - she swore that they multiplied any time she looked away - a good twenty minutes had passed. Without the oversight of her sect elders hanging over her head, telling them stories felt surprisingly relaxing - though a part of it was how enraptured they were that she was talking to them at all. As soon as that faded, she was sure the usual annoyances would creep right back.
When she stepped up to the counter, Junming gave her a small nod. With this many ordinary people in the room, they were back to wearing their face-concealing cowl. It was impossible to tell their reactions through it, so she hoped they weren’t annoyed about her unintentionally turning their office into a nursery. She certainly would have been.
“I am here for my copy of the cultivator almanac,” she said, pulling three letters out of her robes, “The Postmaster said it should be ready today. And I would like your opinion about a couple letters.”
Junming glanced at the stack in her hands, and then nodded, locked up the letterboxes behind themselves, and led her into a small, private side room, with a solid table and a pair of chairs. She took her seat, setting the three letters on the table, while they pulled their cowl off and sat down opposite her.
“That is fine,” she said, “If I don’t come for it later today, send it to our tavern, if you don’t mind.”
Junming nodded, and picked up her stack of letters, giving the top one a curious look - it was already sealed into an envelope.
“That one is private,” she said, “the other two, please.”
The first letter was to Wu Lanhua, broadly explaining that she was in good health, and thanking her for the assistance. She deliberated on wherever to send it or not, but in the end, decided in favor. For all that Wu Lanhua’s overtures had been misplaced and pretty forceful, it was unquestionable that she had been incredibly helpful, and had kept Shanyi’s identity secret from her fiance. If Lanhua wanted to, she could find out where Shanyi had gone easily enough - Curls leaping into the sky was hard to miss, after all. Sending a letter was only polite, and the merchant would be a good contact for the future - not to mention being an interesting person in general.
Of course, she didn’t address it directly to Wu Lanhua - there was no need to make their personal relationship known to everyone who would so much as look at the letter. The envelope was addressed to the general offices of her shipping business, and contained a second envelope, this one addressed to Wu Lanhua personally. Her underlings could deliver it from there.
While she was busy ruminating, Junming had already picked up the next letter, and was quickly reading through it. It was a detailed account of their tribulation, with her and Wang Yonghao’s notes on what they observed, and how they dealt with various challenges.
“It’s my civic duty, is it not?” she said, running a hand through her hair, “I am sure the ministry of statistics would appreciate an update, especially with how rare the Zodiac tribulation is.”
“Just to make sure I didn’t miss anything important. I couldn’t explain what you did with the ice, for example.”
They read it quietly. Their natural inclination to stay silent made her glad it was their shift today.
“It is.” She nodded. “But do you foresee any issues?”
The third letter was her proposal for helping cultivators get out of heavenly vows.
It really was a tricky subject, especially since none of it could ever be spoken aloud. Very few cultivators made heavenly vows in the first place, and only a vanishing few made one without being sure they could fulfill their part of the bargain. Absolutely nobody, outside of fables and herself, even tried making one while intending to break it. This was why no system of help already existed.
But some cultivators might, through no fault of their own, end up in a situation where completing the vow became impossible - and realize this before the Heavens did. To save even a single cultivator from the jaws of Heavens was righteous, even if they walked into those jaws themselves - it was just a question of how best to accomplish it.
Her proposal was three-fold. First of all, cultivators had to be informed about the possibility. The simplest and most unobtrusive possibility was an informational message pinned to one of the walls of the postal office. Vow-takers could hardly be blamed for reading it while their eyes roamed around, after all.
The second step was getting a cultivator in touch with someone who could help. This was also tricky: after all, if they went to a Ministry of Helping People Get Out Of Heavenly Vows, the Heavens would know exactly what they were doing. But the Heavens could not read, and that provided an opportunity. A vow-taker could send an innocuous request for information to one of the many ministries of the empire, and attach their plea for help to the end of their letter. The clerk receiving it would be handling hundreds of letters every week, and if they later directed a new request to another ministry, it could hardly be linked to this one letter coming in.
The final step was actually receiving help. This was far too general for her to provide much advice, but when it came to information, she suggested establishing a general system of requesting copies of passages from books stored in distant libraries by mail - it would help hide the letters about the tribulations, and would also help reduce the need to move precious books around.
Junming deliberated for a couple minutes, before leaving, and returning with a brush and an inkwell. They set the letter in front of themselves, and quickly added some notes to the margins. Qian Shanyi leaned over to read them.
This is not a new idea, they wrote in regards to her second proposal, a portion of mail is already shuffled around from one postal office to the other to hide special correspondence. Adding this would not be too difficult.
“I see,” she said neutrally.
“Thank you,” she said, raising up from her chair.
“Is this about my seal?” she said, raising an eyebrow. She was long prepared for the question - she had given her name as Lan Yishan when she asked Junming about crossing the glassy fields, but Wang Yonghao shut the door on keeping a single coherent identity with his big mouth as soon as she met him, and then she sealed it up herself with bricks and cement once the tribulation came. “I have two. Lan Yishan is how I was called from birth, and what I use for official business - that’s why it’s on my seal. It is also on many other documents. Qian Shanyi was given to me by my teacher, and is the one I prefer to use.”
Junming shifted around, clearly anxious. “Not supposed to do that,” he croaked, switching to spoken language.
“And what am I to do?” she said, already knowing where this discussion would lead, “Abandon my name? I might as well cut off one of my fingers.”
“Make a pseudonym. Official.”
“I’ve never felt the need,” she said contemplatively, “nor had the time, frankly. We do not stay in one place much.”
It was still hard for her to tell, but she felt that Junming was fighting against themselves to make a decision. “Don’t make trouble,” they finally croaked.
“I am a cultivator, Junming - I can’t promise that.” She smiled. “Best I can promise is to make a little trouble for a lot less trouble later. But I’ll try to find the time for a pseudonym while I am recovering.”
Junming shook their head, but waved her off. She left the room, humming to herself.
All things considered, this morning was unfolding brilliantly. Now it was time to meet up with Wang Yonghao, and see if the Heavens were set on ruining it.