The next day within the world fragment passed quietly.
Wang Yonghao finished constructing the latrine, with Linghui Mei’s help, and then used fired clay to seal all the holes within it, the same way they did with the chiclotron. Two chambers - one for the latrine itself, cubic and deep, and one for the paleworms, wider and shallower, to make space for their hive - and keep it high and dry, away from the latrine itself. The chambers were connected with a stone pipe that could be sealed up with a smaller plate of stone, flush against the side of the overall chamber. They added three more pipes around the other sides of the hive chamber - currently sealed and leading nowhere - to make expanding the system easier in the future.
The paleworm queens were doing well in their small, temporary chamber. They had fattened up on the grass clippings, and laid many eggs for the worker worms. As soon as the latrine system was done cooling from the firing, they would move them into their permanent home - the faster they got acclimated to it, the better.
Linghui Mei was making good progress on their farm. Qian Shanyi helped her cut the grass - most of it now laid out on top of their hut to dry, as future feedstock for the rabbits, and the rest piled next to the latrine system for the paleworms. Now she was plowing the new field, turning the earth over to soften it, and prepare it for the beans. Her meditation practice was progressing well, too - after some advice from Qian Shanyi, she seemed to be pacing herself a lot better.
Qian Shanyi investigated the jiuweihu’s plush crow, carefully taking one of the sewing lines apart to look at the stuffing inside. Linghui Mei watched her like a hawk through the whole process, seeming ready to take her head off if she went too far. She was very, very careful when she sewed it back up.
After she was done, Linghui Mei had moved her meditation spot to sit on the grass right below where the crow sat on the roof of their hut. Perhaps it also served as good meditation.
And Qian Shanyi was… slowly going mad with boredom.
She couldn’t cultivate, couldn’t prepare for her duel that slowly drew ever closer. Couldn’t play games, because the others were busy with actual work. Couldn’t even go into town, visit the library, because she had to be economical with her time - every hour she spent outside was three point six hours of recovery wasted.
Damnable ribs.
----------------------------------------
Qian Shanyi squinted at the rabbit in her hands. It was pitch black, with red eyes, and already tried to leg her in the face twice, to no results. She had to hold it back by the ears to keep it from trying to bite her - she was a bit worried it’d break its own teeth on her spiritual shield.
The duel gave them a great excuse to stock up on food. Up in the tavern above, they set a pot to boil at all hours of the day - and she sent Wang Yonghao out to buy a second one to boot. If anyone asked, she would say she used a dangerous immortal cooking art to recover faster, one that wasted a great deal of food. Not something she would have risked doing otherwise, you see, and certainly not something she would be willing to share.
The “wasted” food that “failed” the purification of the non-existent cooking art went directly into the sewers, Wang Yonghao carrying the pots out in the open with no secrecy about it. In actual fact, the pots held only a small bit of rabbit soup, and were mostly filled with waste water from their baths, or melted ice from where the chiclotron was slowly dehumidifying the world fragment.
Everything accounted for, with nothing out of place. Like a magic trick - food went into their room, and an illusion of it went out.
“Hmm,” she hummed, jerking her hands to the side to make yet another kick of the rabbit go wide, “Mei, do you have a moment? I need your help.”
Linghui Mei put down the plow and jogged over to her. “Yes, Master Qian?” she said, giving Qian Shanyi a deep bow. Ever since Linghui Mei accepted her position as a disciple, she had been hanging onto every little word of Qian Shanyi.
Qian Shanyi smiled slightly seeing Wang Yonghao twitch a couple meters away from them. His back was turned to them, as he was busy stacking up other groceries he had bought on his excursion into the city. There was a big bag of rice and another of beans, plenty of spices and herbs, a small basket of apples - as well as three little rabbit cages.
“Does this rabbit look strange to you?” Qian Shanyi asked Linghui Mei, nodding towards the petulant rodent. “Or smell differently?”
Linghui Mei leaned in close, studying the rabbit. She sniffed the air, and the rabbit immediately tried to kick her in the face. Qian Shanyi had to pull it back again to keep her disciple safe. For someone without a spiritual shield, this kind of kick would actually hurt.
They needed the rabbits to feed Linghui Mei. Her diet had to consist of mostly meat - and rabbits could feed on grass, which was in abundance. But in order to sustainably farm them, they needed to get a whole lot of rabbits.
Linghui Mei had little experience tending rabbits - it was easier for her to keep her tails out when staying in one place, hiding them under her skirts instead of transforming many times a week, but the animals could smell the difference. It put them on edge, attracted suspicion, so she avoided them when she could.
They still put their heads together, and figured that they would be aiming for one rabbit being ready for slaughter just about every day. That meant they would need to rotate about a dozen female rabbits through pregnancies - a figure that Qian Shanyi found frustratingly imprecise, and ached to get her hands on some proper books on rabbit care. They would also have to wait for a good couple months for the newly born rabbits to grow enough to be worth the hassle. In the meantime, they had to start stocking up on fresh meat - their current stores from the tribulation could only last them another couple weeks at the absolute most.
“It seems like a regular buck to my senses, and in good health,” Linghui Mei concluded her examination, stepping back.
“It’s very aggressive. Aren’t rabbits supposed to be scared little prey animals?”
“Some rabbits are just like that, Master Qian,” Linghui Mei said, shrugging slightly. “Is there a reason to be suspicious?”
“Yes,” Qian Shanyi said, narrowing her eyes. “Wang Yonghao bought this bunny. That is a reason enough in itself.”
“Oh come on,” Wang Yonghao exclaimed, turning back to them. “You really think so low of me that you don’t think I can buy a rabbit right?”
“I don’t doubt your abilities to purchase a bunny, Yonghao,” she grumbled back, “I am suspicious of your luck deciding to sneak in a demon beast under its guise.”
Wang Yonghao laughed nervously in disbelief. “No, that’s - that’s just a rabbit, right?” he said, glancing at Linghui Mei. “Mei? Mei, please tell me that’s just a rabbit.”
Linghui Mei bowed to Wang Yonghao, her back barely bending this time. “I have never met a rabbit demon beast. I have no idea.”
“Mei!” Wang Yonghao turned to Qian Shanyi, looking at the rabbit as if it was a snake rearing up for a strike. “Shanyi, maybe we should just get rid of it. Best to be safe, right?”
“Hmm,” Qian Shanyi said, staring into the rabbit’s blank red eyes. “I suppose we can’t know for sure. Good thing we don’t need to.”
“We don’t?”
“It’s male,” Qian Shanyi said, lowering the rabbit. “You bought two girls and a boy. We don’t need a second boy for now - we already have Yihao.”
“Two does and a buck, Master Qian,” Linghui Mei corrected her with another bow. Qian Shanyi was glad to hear her start to voice her opinions directly. “Rabbits are not human. They don’t have boys or girls.”
“How about kitsune?” Wang Yonghao asked curiously, and Qian Shanyi’s glare joined that of Linghui Mei. Wang Yonghao coughed awkwardly. “Uh, jiuweihu. I meant jiuweihu. Do you have boys and girls?”
“Jiuweihu are Jiuweihu,” Linghui Mei said proudly. “You are not my master to ask such questions, and it is not for you to know.”
“Thank you for your rabbit expertise, in any case,” Qian Shanyi nodded, trying to defuse the argument before it started. She grabbed the rabbit by the neck and snapped it, her hands moving so fast it had no time to even feel its own death. “Help me skin it, will you? We’ll be freezing the meat.”
----------------------------------------
“Yonghao, I am bored. Entertain me.”
Wang Yonghao paused in his work, and glared at her in annoyance. She grinned. He finally broke after the seventeenth time she made the request.
He was making a heavy tripod out of three short tree trunks - one they could place over the entrance to his world fragment, to serve as an anchoring point for lifting things in and out, or at least as something to tie a rope ladder to. Wang Yonghao was already straining a bit, carrying both her and Linghui Mei at the same time - and neither of them was all that heavy or delicate. Not like the large glassware that they would need to study the problem of the dead air in the world fragment.
Right now, he was carving away at an attachment point between two of the legs of the tripod, while she laid on the grass next to him, hands folded behind her head.
Wang Yonghao broke off his glare with a long-suffering sigh, rubbing his forehead. “Has anyone ever told you that you are a menace to society?”
“Why thank you. I try my very best!”
“Not a compliment. Fine. Why should I entertain you?”
“Because I am bored and can’t cultivate?”
“What does that have to do with me? You could go teach Mei something.”
Qian Shanyi lifted her head up from the grass. Linghui Mei was crouching up on top of their hut, eyes glued to Yihao grazing right below her, twin tails twitching slightly above her head. The other rabbits were hidden in the hut itself, in cages of thick wood Wang Yonghao assembled earlier.
“She’s busy,” Qian Shanyi said, letting her head fall back down.
“So am I.”
“You can afford a distraction. If she gets distracted, Yihao might get eaten. I would never forgive myself.”
“You could also go and clean the hut of the pine sap.”
“Already did. It’s pristine.”
If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.
“Read books?”
“Already read everything I took out of the library. The ones you had - I ran into a research roadblock. Can’t proceed without referencing the library either.”
“Organize the pills and such? We bought a lot -”
“Already organized.” Qian Shanyi paused for a moment. “Twice, actually, I changed my mind about the organization scheme halfway through. Same with everything else we own. All packed away, inventory lists written down and indexed.”
“Maybe you should entertain me instead,” Wang Yonghao grumbled, going back to his wood chisel. “I am the one working here instead of lazing about.”
Qian Shanyi groaned. “Fiiiine,” she said after a long pause. “E2e4.”
Wang Yonghao looked at her in confusion. “What?”
Qian Shanyi waved her hand vaguely in the air. “You showed me the notation yesterday, for shatranj?” She tried to sketch out a shatranj board in the air with a finger, but she didn’t think it came across. “Let’s play it in our heads. I am white, e2e4.”
Wang Yonghao glared at her again. “I can’t play shatranj in my head!”
“Why not?” Qian Shanyi frowned. “Just remember where all the pieces are.”
“I can’t - ugh.” Wang Yonghao hefted the chisel in his hand, eyes darting between it and her forehead as if considering using her for target practice. She guarded her face with one hand playfully.
Wang Yonghao put the chisel down with a sigh. “Just… tell me a story, maybe?”
“A story?” Qian Shanyi raised her head again. “Like a cultivation story?”
“No, definitely not that.”
Head dropped back to the grass with a soft thump. “I don’t know many other stories. There’s history as well, but I suspect you won’t like it either.”
“Really?” Wang Yonghao said, “You’ve never read anything else? Romance, maybe?”
Qian Shanyi grimaced. “Many other women in my sect did, even ordered novels by post. I could never stomach the genre. Always felt that there was so much wasted time, so many misunderstandings. If I was the heroine, I would have had the hero seduced by chapter three.”
“Isn’t it usually the other way around?”
Qian Shanyi sighed. “Yes, that didn’t make it any better. But I would have seduced the heroine as well, don’t you worry about that.”
Wang Yonghao quietly went back to his work, letting her comment pass. She was about to poke him again when he asked her. “How did they even send you a novel through post? Not on a crystal chip, surely, right?”
“Letter novels,” Qian Shanyi explained, “published the same way some journals are, like Cultivation and Rebellion. You pay a fee, then get a letter every few weeks with the new chapter. Print costs for a copy are a bit too expensive for a single disciple to manage, but they’d pool their money, then pass the letters around until everyone had time to read. Our library had a whole shelf for these stacks of letters - they’d usually pay for a proper binding once the novel was over, at least.”
“I see. I don’t suppose you remember any of them?”
“Please,” Qian Shanyi scoffed. “I scrubbed them all out of my memory, Yonghao. Terrible stuff.”
“Fine,” Wang Yonghao sighed, “Then tell me about your life.”
“I already told you all the interesting parts.”
“You only ever think cultivation is interesting. Maybe I just want to hear about a normal day out of a normal person’s life?”
Qian Shanyi grinned. “Aw thank you again, Yonghao! You think I am normal? That’s a compliment coming from you, right?”
That gave her another hilarious groan of frustration. “Of course I don’t think you are normal,” he said, glaring at her, “I just think you might have heard some stories of other normal people.”
“Fine, fine.” Qian Shanyi chuckled, tapping her nose in thought. “I guess you wouldn’t want to hear about my life in the sect either. How about this: let me tell you about the Lodestone of the Red Fishmonger.“
“The fishmonger.”
Qian Shanyi nodded. “Yes, a fish merchant. I was… twelve, I think? He was being rude about his ship’s compass being broken and reared up to hit me while I was manning the counter.”
Wang Yonghao’s eyebrows climbed higher and higher as she spoke. “He tried to hit a twelve year old? I am sorry that happened to you,” he said softly.
Qian Shanyi shrugged easily. “Eh. I didn’t feel scared. If he did, he would have needed a stretcher to get back to his ship - our family had a lot of friends in the port. Still does. And as revenge, we got him to buy a whole crate of compasses when he only needed one, and at double the price at that.”
“And your dad was okay with this?”
“Why wouldn’t he be?” she snorted, “He taught me half of my tricks. Came up with the plan, too.”
“Your dad taught you how to scam people?” Wang Yonghao said, scandalized.
Qian Shanyi shook her finger at him. “Hey now, we didn’t scam people. That’s a bad word, makes customers avoid you. We just convinced people they wanted to buy more than they thought they did.”
“Yeah,” Wang Yonghao deadpanned, “That’s called scamming.”
Qian Shanyi rolled her eyes at him. “Everyone walked away perfectly satisfied. Well, except this merchant.”
“I can’t deal with you as it is,” Wang Yonghao said, shaking his head. “tell me something that’s not about scamming people.”
“Oh come on,” she whined, “those are the best ones! At least -”
Qian Shanyi heard Linghui Mei tumble off the roof, and her head snapped over to watch. She was wrestling with a rosevine, ripping into it with her dagger. A moment later, the demon beast fell still, and Linghui Mei tossed it aside, climbing back on the roof, her tails wagging happily.
All throughout, Yihao didn’t even move from his spot, calmly chewing on the grass.
Qian Shanyi looked back to Wang Yonghao, sighing. The interruption scrambled her thoughts, and trying to rebuild her line of thinking brought her back to her parents. Sour worry. “I hope they are still okay,” she muttered, eyes downcast. “I wish I could at least get a letter from them, without worrying over my sect catching me in the process.”
Wang Yonghao gave her a caring look. “I am sure they are still fine. If they dealt with you for twenty years, they could handle themselves.”
“Mmm. I also hope so.”
“We’ll figure something out. Maybe you can send them a request - something official, without your name on it? Just to see if you get a response.”
“No, I thought about that already. It’s too dangerous,” Qian Shanyi sighed, shaking her head. “At least, for now. Getting any letter from this far out of town is unusual, and if the sect is keeping watch over their mail, they might investigate as a matter of principle. In a year or two, once things calm down, maybe. But for me, with this world fragment, it’d be a good decade. Bit of a two-sided coin, this time acceleration.”
She rolled back on the grass, staring up into the empty blue sky. “But thank you for your thoughts. At least I am not as bored now. Just sad.”
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Linghui Mei sat on their bed back in the tavern with a bored look on her face. Wang Yonghao was pacing anxiously in front of her. Qian Shanyi leaned against the wall, observing the two. The window was covered with fabric, nailed in place around the blinds, not letting even a bit of light in.
“Yonghao, you are stalling.”
“I am not,” he said, glaring at her. “I am just preparing myself.”
“For what? You’d forget it all anyway.”
“It’s not every day I get my soul eaten!”
“You will now. At least every week.”
“You get what I mean.”
“I hope we won’t have to go through this every time. Seeing as how, need I remind you, you will forget it happened.”
Wang Yonghao just glared at her.
“Master Qian didn’t need to prepare herself,” Linghui Mei said lazily. “That’s why she is Master Qian and you are just cultivator Wang.”
His glare easily switched targets. “That’s because she is insane.”
Qian Shanyi snorted. “You were the one who agreed to let her feed on you first, and you call me insane? I was very careful about it.”
“You don’t even remember it!”
“I don’t need to remember. I just need to look at your face to know I am right.”
“Oh, fine,” Wang Yonghao huffed, and sat down on the floor in front of Linghui Mei. “Go ahead.”
Linghui Mei sighed, and reached out with one of her spiritual tails towards Wang Yonghao, beginning to feast on his soul. Wang Yonghao froze, staring off into space.
Qian Shanyi nodded in satisfaction, and walked over to the still open entrance to their world fragment. The only reason they were even up here was because she didn’t want to test how well Wang Yonghao’s inner world would react to his soul being damaged when they were on the inside.
She had a weight tied to a long rope, and lowered it inside, measuring out where the ground started - still thirty meters below. That meant nothing collapsed - seemed like it was stable enough. She’d wait until they were finished before sticking her head in, though.
Reeling the weight back in, she looked back at the jiuweihu. Linghui Mei’s face was creased in concentration, a drop of sweat rolling down her forehead. Her cheeks were rosy, with a slight blush.
“Having trouble?” Qian Shanyi said.
“Not really, it’s -” Linghui Mei grunted. “His soul is very -” She made a vague gesture in the air. “- hard. Like rock candy. But I am managing. It’s very filling.”
Qian Shanyi nodded. “I expected him to have some nonsense in his soul. At least you can still feed.”
“Because of his luck?”
“Yes.” Qian Shanyi paused. “You are taking it surprisingly well.”
Linghui Mei shrugged. “Luck, no luck, what does it matter? You are two cultivators helping a jiuweihu - my mother would die of shock. None of this makes sense. A couple more strange things won’t matter that much.”
“Of course we’d help you,” Wang Yonghao said softly, still staring off into space, “we are good people.”
Qian Shanyi frowned, looking at him. “Is he supposed to be conscious?”
“No,” Linghui Mei said, “usually when I feast, new memories vanish as fast as they form. You can’t feel anything, can’t see anything. Can’t even wake up, just stay still until I finish - but his soul is hard and slippery. He can maybe recall the last ten, thirty seconds at most.”
“My memory is fine.” Same distant voice, though a bit annoyed. “Please don’t damage it.”
“Hm,” Qian Shanyi said, approaching the two. She looked in Wang Yonghao’s eyes. “Hey Yonghao, what do you call a farmer that grows rare herbs to make illegal aphrodisiacs?”
“What?”
“An immorality cultivator.”
Wang Yonghao groaned. Qian Shanyi giggled, then waited a moment. Wang Yonghao’s face relaxed again. “Yonghao, do you remember a joke I said just now?”
“A joke? What joke?”
“What do you call a farmer that grows rare herbs to make illegal aphrodisiacs?”
“What?”
“An immorality cultivator.”
Wang Yonghao groaned again, just as hard. Qian Shanyi giggled louder. “This is hilarious,” she said. “Hey, Yonghao -”
It was a stupid joke, but perhaps she needed it. The duel, her parents, the tribulation, jiuweihu, the Heavens… It all mixed together into one giant ball of stress and tension, threats upon threats and dangers piled up on traps and perils, like a ball of string tangled so tight it seemed that you couldn’t even hope to untangle it. Her injury was like molasses poured on top. She couldn’t even start, even if she knew where to pull.
For all that she didn’t show it, it still weighed on her, the plans she built seeming uncertain even if she could not find the loopholes.
But now, it all felt a little more approachable. Like filling your stomach before taking another crack at a frustrating puzzle. A change in perspective, if not the circumstances.
One step at a time, even the Heavens could be conquered.