Linghui Mei stalked over to the edge of the world fragment, far from Qian Shanyi, fuming. Qian Shanyi kept track of her out of the corner of her eye, giving her space to relax. It was an understandable reaction, especially since Qian Shanyi had apparently been stepping on her toes every time she called her a kitsune.

Qian Shanyi spent their break drawing up the diagrams she would need for the lecture and bringing a couple other odds and ends over to the kitchens. Tea was good for the mind, there was little reason to move somewhere else.

Minutes ticked by, one after another. The time of their break had passed, but Qian Shanyi didn’t call Linghui Mei back. They were in no rush, and It was best for her to decide to return herself.

Wang Yonghao stayed in the bath, splashing around like an enormous carp.

Finally, four minutes later than she said, Lingui Mei came back, looking contrite. “I am sorry for my outburst,” she said with a short bow, “you haven’t said anything deserving of it. I should have already known there would not be a simple solution, and you have agreed to help me despite me bringing you nothing but trouble. I’ll try to keep my temper under control.”

Qian Shanyi’s eyebrows rose of their own volition. She expected her to simply try to sweep it under the rug, not apologize. “No harm done,” she said easily, “I must apologize as well, for calling you a kitsune.”

Linghui Mei let out a breath she had been holding. “Thank you,” she said, sitting down opposite Qian Shanyi on the grass.

“It seemed that there was some history there,” Qian Shanyi continued, seizing the opportunity. “I haven’t heard of ‘jiuweihu’ being an endonym. I’d love to hear what you know of your own history - I imagine it’s quite different from what the empire teaches.”

The history books called that time period the “reign of the kitsune lords”, but she didn’t think it was worth mentioning.

Linghui Mei chewed her lip nervously, thinking it over. She opened her mouth, then closed it, swallowing her first response. “We don’t know much,” she finally admitted, voice full of quiet loss. “Many songs, stories passed on from parent to child. Tales of how we have built great cities and palaces, and how it all came crashing down. I have made it my life’s work to collect more than most, but… It is still just scraps of what we had before. ”

“Nothing about cultivation?”

“Cultivators? Plenty. How you’ve slaughtered us.”

Qian Shanyi chuckled quietly. “No, cultivation. Most historians agree that jiuweihu cultivated back then - it was one of the reasons the war with them was so bloody. One of the reasons I do not particularly doubt you’d be capable of learning, even.”

A flurry of emotions passed over Linghui Mei’s face, before it settled into an uncertain frown. “No,” she said, “nothing like that. I suppose we talk more about the feats we could do - but not how we achieved them.”

“Understandable.” Qian Shanyi nodded. “Perhaps you can sing some of those songs to us later. But for now - let us talk about cultivation.” She glanced towards the bath. “Yonghao, will you join us? You must already know everything I have to tell. I’d appreciate your assistance in teaching.”

“I could assist you from here.”

Qian Shanyi frowned. “No. This is a complex topic. It has to be taught properly, not half-assed.”

There was a glimmer of appreciation from Linghui Mei’s eyes.

“In that case… I think I’ll stay out,” Wang Yonghao said lazily.

“Are you ever getting out?”

“It’s comfortable in here. Have I told you that it was a great idea to build a bath? Because it was. One of your best ones.”

“You’d soon turn into a fish.”

“Maybe I’d like to be a fish. Swimming all day, not worrying about anything, it’s great.”

“Then Mei would eat you up.”

Linghui Mei blushed. Qian Shanyi rolled her eyes. “Well, no matter,” she said, pulling out her diagrams, arranging them in front of herself. Creative and destructive cycles, a sketch of the meridian network, key differences between an ordinary person and a cultivator. “If you won’t help, then stay quiet while I teach Mei. She won’t need more distractions.” She nodded to the jiuweihu opposite her. “Are you ready to begin?”

Linghui Mei nodded, sitting down in a lotus pose. It took her a moment to fold her legs, clearly unused to it as she was. Much calmer than before, at least, ready to listen.

“You don’t have to sit like me,” Qian Shanyi said, gesturing to her legs. “Sit how you are comfortable, please.”

Linghui Mei breathed out, and untangled her legs, putting her feet to one side.

Qian Shanyi nodded. “Tell me what you know about spiritual energy.”

“My mother taught me about qi,” Linghui Mei said self-consciously. “Is that what you mean?”

Qian Shanyi inclined her head, considering another outdated term. If her mother taught her - one jiuweihu to another, all oral tradition - no wonder they were still using it. Hopefully there won’t be too many bad habits that would have to be unlearned. “Qi is an old term,” she finally said, motioning for her to continue. “It’s not used anymore, but it used to be mostly synonymous. Just give me the summary, so I know where you are starting from.”

“Okay,” Linghui Mei breathed out, “Qi is -”

“Why isn’t it used anymore?” Wang Yonghao’s voice interrupted them.

Qian Shanyi pursed her lips, angling her head slightly towards the bath. She specifically asked him to shut up. “Is this relevant, Yonghao?”

“I mean, I am interested. It’s all over the scrolls and manuals, and some of the old monsters -”

“I ask,” she cut him off sharply, “because we were starting the most introductory class on cultivation, and you’ve said you’ll stay out of it. I have done this lecture many times back in the sect. There is already a lot to remember, all out of the gate. Offsides like that only make the students more confused.”

“So what, if a student asks a question -”

“And if Mei asked me this question, I would have responded differently,” Qian Shanyi said, eyeing Linghui Mei. Jiuweihu in question sat patiently, eyes darting between her and the bath, head bowed down slightly. “You aren’t my student, she is. I asked you to stay quiet for a reason.”

“Sorry!”

Qian Shanyi motioned to Linghui Mei with a sigh. “Do you want to know? It’s about a history of terminology, at the end of the day. It doesn’t matter what you call a pot as long as it cooks rice.”

Linghui Mei considered her question for a moment, before shrugging with one shoulder. “You’ve said I could pretend to be a cultivator, hide among them. Would this be something most of them would know?”

Qian Shanyi sighed. She still didn’t want to call herself a cultivator. Frustrating, but understandable. “No. As you can see, Yonghao is ignorant.” She tapped her cheek, considering it. “Then again, you would always be missing a lot of context. Perhaps it’s best if you could pass for a bookish disciple, someone who could speak about these topics but be too shy for much else. It isn’t such a long digression, either.”

Linghui Mei inclined her head, deferring the decision to her.

Qian Shanyi did always like talking about the history of the reformation. Perhaps she could indulge herself as well…

No. She had a duty to her student. She couldn’t afford to waste more time than necessary.

“The key question always was: what is Qi?” she said, after a short pause, cutting down a much longer lecture down to bare essentials. “Sixty years ago you could ask a dozen different cultivators and get two dozen different answers. Some would talk about the focus a fighter puts on different parts of their body as they take a swing, and how this focus switches throughout the fight. Others about the speed, movement, and the force in their muscles. Still others, about breathing techniques, how they imagine a sort of ‘energy’ spreading through their limbs. Or about emotions, how you feel anger squeezing your chest or love fluttering in your belly. And some would talk about what we today term spiritual energy.”

Linghui Mei listened attentively. Perhaps one of those descriptions resonated with what she “knew”.

“All using the same word to talk about entirely unrelated concepts - a complete mess,” Qian Shanyi continued. “It didn’t help that many sects deliberately perpetuated the confusion, to keep their lower ranked disciples fumbling in the dark, using them for their labor while feeding them scant scraps of true knowledge. The era of reformation brought about standardization in many areas, terminology among them, and so thirty-odd years ago “spiritual energy” was canonized as the new, precise term. There is a law that requires all newer books to abide by the terminology, with limited exceptions. This way, If you see ‘qi’ written in a book, you know that it’s an old text, and to be on guard for inaccuracies.”

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

Linghui Mei frowned at that last word. “So because my mother talked about Qi,” she said slowly, “it means what she told me was all wrong? I will not believe that for a second.”

Qian Shanyi shook her head, deciding to be diplomatic. “Not necessarily. It just means she would have been imprecise. This isn’t surprising - it would be a miracle if a scant few jiuweihu, working without books, without true research, based on scraps of knowledge carried all the way from… the distant past could manage to rival an entire cultivation civilization. But it does mean there may be misconceptions in what she told you, simplifications, theories that have since been proven wrong. Please simply tell me what you know - we can go from there.”

That seemed to relax Linghui Mei, and she began her tale. Much of it was already familiar to Qian Shanyi - it wasn’t uncommon for new inner disciples to come into the sect full of ‘ideas’ about how spiritual energy worked, and there tended to be many commonalities. Though to Linghui Mei’s credit, her words were fairly close to the truth - she recalled the five major types without error, and her descriptions of the process of absorbing and utilizing spiritual energy were very accurate. It came with the species, Qian Shanyi supposed - if you hunted with spiritual energy, you would know it intuitively. She made notes throughout, for later reference.

“This is fairly good,” Qian Shanyi said once the explanation concluded. “A bit imprecise, like I have said, but very good otherwise.” She glanced down at her notes. “Only one thing I have to address right away. You said that ordinary people have no ‘qi’, only ‘life force’. It’s an understandable mistake, but there is no fundamental difference between the two. These are both just different types of spiritual energy, and ordinary people of course have both. One is gaseous, the other much more solid, formed into a soul.”

“There are techniques to reverse this transformation, too,” Wang Yonghao chimed in.

Qian Shanyi sighed in annoyance, but ignored the interruption. Pivot, move on. “Yes. There are demonic cultivation techniques to reverse this transformation, to use human beings for power.” She paused, glancing at one of Linghui Mei’s tails. “Arguably, what you do is one of them.”

“Also non-demonic techniques! Though they are pretty rare.”

“Yonghao, if you don’t stop interrupting me, I’ll move this lesson into your bath.”

“...I’ll be good.”

“Thank you.” Qian Shanyi sighed in frustration, and turned back to Linghui Mei. “Now, you have said you can sense spiritual energy?”

Linghui Mei nodded silently.

“Show me,” Qian Shanyi said, taking out a blindfold and handing it to Linghui Mei.

“I’ll expel spiritual energy from one of my fingers,” she explained while Linghui Mei put it on. “You just have to say which one - the blindfold is so that you do not cheat, rely on my face to guess. It’s a standard test, most inner disciples go through it at some point.”

“Okay.”

Qian Shanyi raised her hand in front of herself and started, but stopped when she felt Linghui Mei’s spiritual tails rise up towards her hand, surrounding it from different directions. “You sense with your tails?” she guessed.

“Yes,” Linghui Mei nodded, pulling the tails away. “Should I keep them at a distance?”

Qian Shanyi tapped her cheek. Complex question, really. “Humans do not have tails,” she said, “We sense using the cilia of our soul, hair-like threads that grow on its surface. My own senses are not precise enough to tell if you have any. Yonghao, I don’t suppose you have an advantage here?”

“So now I can talk?”

“When I ask you a direct question, obviously.”

“No, I can’t sense that precisely either.”

“Would it be bad if I didn’t?” Linghui Mei asked.

“It will be a disadvantage,” Qian Shanyi said neutrally. “My own cilia are a good twenty meters long, and can sense spiritual energy in all directions, even through walls. If you have to rely on your tails, only sensing through touch…”

“I don’t.” Linghui Mei interrupted. “It’s… it’s like a second nose. There is a smell to the qi, how it flows through the air.”

Qian Shanyi leaned back. “Interesting. I’ll modify the test a bit, so we can figure out the differences.”

A couple minutes of experimentation showed that Linghui Mei could sense spiritual energy as well as any other high refinement stage cultivator, and even better up close. With her tail almost pressed up against Qian Shanyi’s soul, she could even distinguish between individual spiritual pores that vented spiritual energy. Qian Shanyi had to rely on her own internal senses to reach that level of precision.

There were some drawbacks. Cilia of a soul filled a space, bending all around obstacles, even passing through walls, though it reduced their sensitivity a fair bit. Qian Shanyi could sense anything that happened near her to a uniform degree; but Linghui Mei’s senses dropped off sharply depending on the direction in which the spiritual energy moved; if it was expelled directly away from her, she sensed almost nothing. Furthermore, there was a bit of a gap between when the spiritual energy began to move, and when Linghui Mei sensed it.

On the other hand, she could follow a trail of spiritual energy in the air, left by a cultivator’s passing. Just like a scent, in that respect.

“You are sensing the degenerate form of spiritual energy as well, I think,” Qian Shanyi said, ruminating over the results. “The form it turns into once used. It would explain how you can trail cultivators so well.”

“Cultivators cannot sense it?”

“No,” Qian Shanyi said, scratching her chin. “At least, not generally. It’s interesting. Now try hiding your tails - let’s see if you can at least sense the presence of spiritual energy without them.”

She could. Very imprecisely, and only within about five meters of herself, but she could.

“Probably you likewise have the cilia, simply untrained,” Qian Shanyi said, pleased with the results. “This is very good. Now, can you sense the flow of spiritual energy within your body?”

Linghui Mei gave her a strange look. “Of course not. It’d be like smelling my own organs.”

Qian Shanyi laughed slightly. “I am afraid this is where the scent analogy breaks down. Sensing the flows of your inner spiritual energy is the first step on the path of cultivation - you cannot learn to control its movement without it. You should have an advantage here, at least - your body already has much more of it to be sensed than a normal disciple. So this will be where we start - it’s very different from sensing it on the outside, but not too complex in itself. Are you comfortable?”

“What?”

“This is important. We don’t want any distractions, and this will take a while.”

It would still take a good month in the very best case scenario, but Qian Shanyi didn’t want to discourage the jiuweihu right away.

Linghui Mei shifted around, changing her posture on the grass, rolling her neck. “Can I lie down?”

“No. You are a beginner, you’d fall right asleep.”

After a minute, Linghui Mei nodded. “Okay,” Qian Shanyi continued. “The first step is to learn to consciously focus on the sensations of your body. Close your eyes, if you still have them open beneath the blindfold. Focus on your breathing, on the feel of air passing through your nose. In and out, in and out. Gentle movement of your nostrils alongside it.”

Linghui Mei did so. Her ears flicked slightly with every breath.

“Your mind will begin to drift,” Qian Shanyi continued. “You will start to think about what happened over the last day, your plans, your fears. This is normal - do not get disappointed when it happens. I find that giving a bit of token acknowledgement to the thought helps, before bringing yourself back to just breathing. The goal is to have it occupy your entire awareness. Once you get used to bringing your mind back on track, I’ll teach you how to analyze your own body.”

“Mostly I am just smelling you two. Tea. Wood, wet grass.”

“That… might be an issue,” Qian Shanyi said, frowning. “Closing the eyes is meant to cut off your external senses, but we can’t close your nose. Perhaps we’d need to build you some enclosure, with a stable scent, to help you focus.”

“Can I go to the edge, at least?” Linghui Mei asked, lifting her blindfold over one eye. “There is too much here, next to the kitchen. I still smell the meat.”

“Absolutely,” Qian Shanyi said, standing up and stretching her limbs. “In fact, experiment on your own for a while. I’ll keep watch topside, while Yonghao takes a nap here. Then when I return, we can discuss how well it’s going.”

She walked over to the bath. “Yonghao, get out of the bath. I need your help.“

“Must you?”

“You know I won’t hesitate to walk in and dress you up myself, right?”

“Fine…”

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

Wang Yonghao’s fingers were all wrinkled from the water as he tied the rope harness around his waist. “It’s nice that you’ve figured out a plan for Linghui Mei,” he grumbled quietly, “but don’t you think you should pay more attention to this duel you got yourself into? With Jian Shizhe?”

“I am paying exactly as much attention as little Shizhe deserves.”

Wang Yonghao glared at her. She shot him a satisfied grin. “Do you at least have a plan?”

“Of course. Step one is to wait for my body to recover.”

Wang Yonghao stopped working on the harness, turning to face her fully. “Recover from what?”

“The tribulation?” Qian Shanyi said, blinking in confusion. “My healer said I should refrain from cultivation for two weeks, out of which six days had already passed, as far as my body is concerned. The duel is in three days, at noon - this gives me sixteen full days in the world fragment, if I spend all my time here. Plenty of time to quietly recover and then prepare for the duel. I’ll be entering it at full strength, while Jian Shizhe is still adapting to his prosthetic - not that he’ll know this.”

“Did you also figure out what in the name of the netherworld you were trying to do by getting into it?”

Qian Shanyi blinked. “Didn’t need to. That part was obvious.”

“Enlighten me.”

“Didn’t you read my notes?”

Wang Yonghao glared at her again, and stormed off, the rope whipping on the ground behind him. He came back, holding her stack of notes. “DP: Chakr. con-zap trap, trade F. for M-set,” Wang Yonghao read out loud, before looking up at her. “What is any of this supposed to mean?”

“Duel plan: use chakram, confidence lightning trap, trade face for - better - mindset,” Qian Shanyi translated easily with a smile. “It’s shuttle diplomacy."

“Do I even want to know what shuttle diplomacy means?”

"Hm. Let me explain with an old joke," she said, "how do you make the daughter of an ancient sect patriarch marry a completely ordinary peasant?"

Wang Yonghao stayed silent, staring at her. She waited patiently. Finally, he sighed, and gave in. "How?"

"Very simply!” She grinned wider. “First, find your peasant, and ask him: do you want to marry a woman you've never met? He says, why would I? Then you say, ah, but she is the daughter of a sect magnate whose wealth eclipses the sky - and he agrees, because it’s a completely different question. Then you go to the biggest bank, and ask - do you want an ordinary peasant to be your boss? Of course they refuse. But what if he was the son in law of an important sect patriarch? Well, then it’s a completely different question. Then you visit the sect patriarch, and you ask - would you like to marry your daughter out to an ordinary peasant? And before he laughs you out the doors, you say - alright, fine, but he is the president of this enormous bank. Finally, you visit the daughter, and you ask her - do you want to marry the president of a bank - and she says, feh, I've seen a hundred thousand young masters, they are all the same - he will forget about me in a week and I will die alone. And then you say - ah, but he isn't even a cultivator, he would live with you as equals - and now it’s a completely different question."

Wang Yonghao kept glaring at her once she finished up. “This explained precisely nothing.”

Qian Shanyi snorted. “Meditate on this, junior. Now get me back up into the tavern. I have books to read, and you should take a rest while I keep watch. We can talk more about this in a couple hours.”