The second day in the world fragment passed much like the first, and once evening had rolled around in the world outside, Wang Yonghao had left to make a new grocery run.

He returned soon, three new rabbits in hand and cloaked in worry. “Jian Shizhe is missing,” he said to Qian Shanyi when he landed down on the ground.

“Missing?”

“Rui Bao found me while I was outside,” Wang Yonghao explained, putting the rabbit cages up on their kitchen table. They were using the same set of three - it would make no sense to toss cages into the sewers, and there was no trick to make them vanish. “He told me that the spirit hunters have left town, and that Jian Shizhe is missing. The sect doesn’t know where he is.”

Behind herself, Qian Shanyi heard Linghui Mei exclaim in surprise, as if a great weight fell off her shoulders. The jiuweihu rushed off somewhere, but Qian Shanyi had no eyes for her. She bit her lip, frowning, a spike of worry invading her heart.

She fully expected Jian Shizhe to prepare for the duel, but him leaving the sect to go into seclusion - she didn’t think it was likely. Unlikely meant unpredictable, and her plan was already pushing up against the limits of reliability. A lot of risk - if she lost the duel, her honor would suffer, and her honor was the glue holding together all the illusions they were weaving so far. Stealing the paleworms, the trees, even buying pills and talismans at a price that was not unreasonable - without honor, it would all start to crack. People might even turn an inquisitive eye to their past, start to question where the two of them came from.

Justified risk, but a risk. Risk that only rose with every unlikely happenstance.

“Hmm,” she said, mostly concealing her inner turmoil behind her casual airs. “Perhaps this duel won’t be quite as boring as I thought after all.”

Wang Yonghao kept his eyes on her, arms folded on his chest. “So what are you going to do about it?”

“Me? Nothing,” she grumbled. “Nothing I can do.”

“What do you mean, nothing?”

“My healer told me to rest for two weeks.” She made a broad motion with her arm, gesturing around herself. Towards nothing, everything, the entire world. She needed a minute of quiet to adjust her plan, consider the possibilities. “So that’s what I am going to do for the next four days. My ribs have stopped hurting, but the last thing I want to do is aggravate my injury right before a duel. That’d leave me with a bit over a week to train.”

Wang Yonghao’s look only grew more annoyed. “Jian Shizhe is doing only Heavens knows what, and you are just going to be resting?”

Qian Shanyi shrugged helplessly. “He is probably just training in seclusion. I didn’t think this was very likely - for him to take me seriously enough to try - but it’s still well within expectations.”

Not well within expectations, but she did consider it possible.

“Or the Heavens kidnapped him, to cast shade on your honor.”

She snorted at that. “Too many steps in between, I think. Kidnapping Shizhe to cast doubt on me to indirectly involve you?” She shook her head. Implausible in the extreme. “It doesn’t fit with how your luck has behaved so far. If you were the one challenged to a duel, then it would have been a different question.”

“Doesn’t fit?” Wang Yonghao scoffed at her. “I found Rui Bao. I am already involved.”

“You said he found you. He even proposed to fight my duel for me - he already had a motivation to give us information. It’s nothing new.”

Wang Yonghao sighed in frustration, throwing his hands up in the air. “I really do not think you are taking this seriously. Where’s your big plan? You always have one.”

“Of course I have a plan.”

“So what’s my role in it?”

Qian Shanyi blinked at him in confusion. What was he on about? “Yours? Nothing, for now. You can’t fight my duel for me, and that’s the most critical part.”

“Really?” Wang Yonghao said, poking her in the chest. “What, you think I can’t even teach you anything? Do you even know how many sword fighting techniques I know? I don’t even know that!”

“And if my plan relied on sword fighting, this would be relevant,” she said, slapping his hand away. “It doesn’t. I’ll welcome your help preparing in four days, once I am in top shape - but until then, the only thing I can do is rest.”

“Really now?” Wang Yonghao asked her sarcastically. His tone was actually pretty close to her own. “Just rest, nothing else? Gather information, tools?”

“Information of what nature?” she scoffed, motioning towards their kitchen table, where her copy of the cultivator almanac laid in the open. “I have a record of every past duel Jian Shizhe had ever fought right here. What new information could you bring me in three days?”

“I could go out, try to track him,” Linghui Mei said quietly, approaching Qian Shanyi from behind. She had her plush crow clutched tightly to her chest. “The spirit hunters have left. It’s safe,” she clarified on seeing Qian Shanyi’s raised eyebrow. “Then you would know where your enemy went - would that help?”

“Hmpf,” Qian Shanyi snorted, giving Linghui Mei a once-over. “Safe, she says. And what if you get spotted, or attacked? An ordinary sect wouldn’t even let you leave the compound until you could sustain a fully functional spiritual shield.“

Linghui Mei scowled, some of that old anger coming back into her eyes. “I am not a child - I know how to hide. And how to protect myself.”

“True enough.” Qian Shanyi nodded, then spread her hands in an uncaring gesture. “Of course you can defend yourself - but you can only do so as a jiuweihu, right? Simply taking your claws out would bring the spirit hunters running right back.” Qian Shanyi pointed at Wang Yonghao. “This here is a fountain of unluck - even with a new face and scent, someone could spot you, trace you back to us. Or corner you, force you to reveal yourself - even if they had no idea who you were, simply by chance.”

“My luck?” Wang Yonghao said sarcastically. “I thought you said there were too many steps in between me and what was happening. Now you are worried?”

Qian Shanyi paused. That was… not a bad point.

“Either Heavens are not involved, and it’s safe for her to go,” Wang Yonghao continued, poking her in the chest again, “or they are involved, and you need her to go, because otherwise they would blindside you!”

Damn it all. A very good point, even if she hated to admit it. “Perhaps,” she said, ceding some ground. “It’s hard to say either way.” She turned back to Linghui Mei. “I don’t want to make it seem as if you are a prisoner. If you want to take a walk through the town, track little Shizhe down - you can do it, of course. It is only your right. I simply do not think the risk is worth the benefits, but the decision is yours.”

Linghui Mei looked a bit hurt, as if Qian Shanyi said something wrong. What got these two in the mood to push her so much?

She was missing something.

Wang Yonghao simply laughed at her, disrupting her thoughts. “The actual risk is that Jian Shizhe would master a new technique with the Heavens for an instructor and blow your head clean off.”

“Including today, he has three days before the duel,” Qian Shanyi explained, her voice clean and measured, even if she wanted to snap at him. “Even if he had some manual already on hand, it wouldn’t be enough for him to master it, not unless he had already been practicing similar techniques for many months. Nor is it enough time to change his spiritual energy recirculation law. There is no real risk.”

“I could -”

“Yonghao, be serious,” she scowled at him. To his credit, he had the decency to look a bit ashamed. “In all your stories - your luck does not pull things out of thin air. It won’t turn little Shizhe into a one in a million genius overnight, a phoenix among mere pigs. At best, he might have gone to a neighboring town, bought a new weapon or some talismans - but I doubt even that. Given our relative standing, making too many strange preparations would make him seem scared, and he couldn’t stomach that. It’s possible, but not very likely. Most likely he is just adapting to his new foot - which is why I think the value of knowing it for certain is fairly low.”

“This isn’t about value,” Wang Yonghao said dismissively, “this is about you wanting to feel like the smartest girl in the entire room.”

“What?”

“Oh you heard me,” he said, giving her a short nod, acknowledging his own stance. “You do this a lot. And you may even be right most of the time - but it doesn’t stop you from putting spokes in your own wheels just to feel smug.”

Qian Shanyi blushed slightly. Who did he think he was? “I do no such thing!”

“You absolutely do. You still haven’t told me what your actual plan is for the duel!”

“Oh, so what?” She scoffed at him. “You aren’t involved in it anyways.”

“Says you?” he said, poking her in the chest again. She slapped his hand away, and he let her. “How do you know I won’t spot some error that you missed? How do you know I can’t improve on it, if you never even tell me?”

Qian Shanyi paused. That was a second good point from Wang Yonghao in only so many minutes - truly the world was turning on its head. Soon there would be demons up in the Heavens and celestials down in the Netherworld.

“- how do you know Mei can’t help either?” Wang Yonghao continued, ignorant of her thoughts. “Weren’t you the one to tell me I should pay more attention to other people, because they could help me? Should your own student teach you back, so-called ‘Master Qian’?”

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“What slander is this?” She scoffed, blushing harder, this time from anger. “I absolutely pay attention to you two!”

“But not when making your big plans, eh?”

“Yes I do?” She cut her hand across the air sharply, gesturing to the entire world fragment. “Everything we’ve built here - I couldn’t have done it alone! Do you imagine I forgot this?”

“I said plans, not execution.” Wang Yonghao scoffed at her. “You always make it seem so easy, come with a plan already prepared, don’t you? Just explain the parts I have to do, and that’s it. Not the logic you put into it, not really. That time we went to steal the paleworms? Just admit it - you only went along because you wanted in on the action.” Wang Yonghao leaned forward. “You know, if you told me more about your suspicions that Mei might not have been completely honest, when you two went to sleep together - that you thought she might still snap, stuck here alone with you - we could have avoided your entire fight. I’d have said we should feed her then and there. That’d have changed your mind, wouldn’t it Mei?”

Linghui Mei glanced at Qian Shanyi, then shrugged with one shoulder, her bobbing uncertainly from side to side. “I don’t know,” she said quietly, “Kraiat arkhalaI -, um, the river of time does not flow backwards. I can’t say what would have happened. But I was pretty wound up after two days without sleep, and it would have helped.”

Wang Yonghao’s smug grin grew wider. “Yeah. And then you wouldn’t have had to lose two days of memory, now would you, Shanyi? See what I mean?”

Qian Shanyi squinted at Wang Yonghao. Where did this even come from?

So annoying.

But…

The two of them were making good points, damn them to high Heavens. She needed a moment to think, and so she closed her eyes, considering what they said. Her breathing slowed down, blush fading from her cheeks.

Was she pushing them to stay out because it made sense, or because she wanted to keep playing alone?

Knowing where Jian Shizhe went… Speaking hypothetically, it could prove critical. He might not have time to master a new technique, but there were other things he could do. If she was in his place - she would have had a dozen different tricks to play, legal and not. If he picked up a weapon, an artifact with an unusual effect - one he wasn’t known to be trained in - he could throw her plan off and not come off as too scared of her.

It didn’t seem terribly likely. But it was possible.

But by the same logic - there were things she could do, hide cards up her sleeves, ones general enough they could counter a variety of things Jian Shizhe might be doing. She could even strengthen the narrative she was trying to build.

“Alright -” she said calmly, opening her eyes a couple minutes later.

“You admit it,” Wang Yonghao said, staring her in the eyes with triumph.

“Some of my jokes may have -” she continued, ignoring him, having to speak louder over his words.

“Oh you so admit it.”

“- given me a bit of tunnel vision -”

“Just say you were flying high on feeling smart!”

“- and I may have missed a couple good options -”

“You self-centered idiot -”

Linghui Mei stepped behind Wang Yonghao and turned around, slapping him on the back of his head with one of her tails hard enough he stumbled forwards. He turned around to stare at her in confusion, rubbing the back of his head.

“Show Master Qian some respect,” Linghui Mei said sharply. There was a smug twinkle in her eyes. “She is a hundred times smarter than a rube like you.”

Hearing that, Qian Shanyi shut her mouth. Such blatant praise took all the wind out of her sails. This degree of hero worship had to be unhealthy, and was definitely un-cultivator, but she felt there was more to it - something deeper, cultural, pure jiuweihu - and so she was hesitant to address it.

“You were on my side a moment ago!” Wang Yonghao cried, turning on Linghui Mei.

“I am always on the side of my master,” Linghui Mei said, raising her nose up high. “She just needed a bit of help seeing the truth this time, this is all.”

“Thank you Mei,” Qian Shanyi said neutrally. “And thank you again, for your offer of help with the duel. And you, Yonghao, for pointing out I was thinking a bit too narrowly. After a second thought, I do think you two could help me.”

“Does this mean you’d finally tell me what you meant with that nonsense about ‘shuttle diplomacy’?” Wang Yonghao grumbled, still rubbing the back of his head. A surprising amount of power in those jiuweihu tails.

“Sure,” Qian Shanyi continued. “The duel is just a tool to help put Jian Wei in a position where he’d help us get recognition for a sect that does not exist. It builds a narrative, in a way. That is why I scheduled it on the morning of the day when he returns back from his trip away from Glaze Ridge. And once we have that recognition, all sorts of doors will open for us.”

Nodding towards Linghui Mei, Qian Shanyi continued. “We could get help with your recirculation law, or even send a corrigendum request to the sapient life incompatibility act. It would have a lot more weight, coming from a sect - even one that only exists on paper.” She nodded to Wang Yonghao next. “It could give us access to many more sect libraries, to research your luck, seek information about the Heavens. You wouldn’t believe how frustrating it is to access some of those as a loose cultivator.”

She inhaled, getting more air into her lungs. This would be a long talk. “Here is how it would work -”

And so she told them her plan.

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

“So, now that I have laid all my cards on the table - do you still want to help?” Qian Shanyi asked, turning towards Linghui Mei first. They’ve made tea while she talked, to keep her mouth from drying up if nothing else. Wang Yonghao was laying on the grass, rubbing his eyes from all the information she piled up on the two of them.

“Of course.” Linghui Mei bowed slightly, and without hesitation. “I am obligated to assist my master.”

“You are not,” Qian Shanyi cut her off. “You really, really, are not. If you do not feel comfortable -”

“I am.”

Qian Shanyi sighed. “Very well. Do you know Jian Shizhe’s scent? He was one of the three cultivators chasing after you in the tavern, one foot replaced with a prosthetic -”

She stopped, seeing Linghui Mei shake her head. “I haven’t seen any of them, not even the spirit hunters. I was fleeing blind.”

“You might still get some scent from our door. He punched it hard enough to splinter, from the outside. If you are lucky, might have nicked his own skin.” Qian Shanyi motioned towards their new store of ordinary clothes - not cultivator robes, but ones made of simple fabric. The dress she gave Linghui Mei was left in the river, as part of their false trail - but other clothes were still available. “Pick out something to wear. We don’t want you to attract attention.”

Linghui Mei rose and bowed again, deeper this time. Qian Shanyi sighed slightly. Watching Wang Yonghao react might have been funny, but Linghui Mei continued with the deference even when they were alone. She’d really have to do something about it.

“This plan of yours is so convoluted,” Wang Yonghao chimed in from next to her.

“It’s not convoluted,” she said automatically. “It just has many stages that rely on each other.”

“That’s the same thing.”

She shook her head. “It isn’t. It would be convoluted if we needed all the stages to succeed, but we don’t. Every successful stage benefits us, even if the subsequent ones fail - at worst, we would only get a part of our goals, not all of them. Only the first one, the duel, has to go right.”

“I suppose.”

Qian Shanyi turned away, watching Linghui Mei from a distance as the jiuweihu picked out a new set of clothes to wear. Surprisingly, she went for Wang Yonghao’s clothes, not hers. Perhaps she thought a man walking about with nothing to do would attract less attention - not unjustly.

Once Linghui Mei was finished, she left the clothes next to the baths, and went inside, to transform and wash away jiuweihu musk. Wang Yonghao decided to take a nap while they waited.

Out walked a bearded man, somewhere around fifty years of age, with a face that was so average it took Qian Shanyi a moment to come up with any useful way to describe it. The nose was neither too long nor too short, neither too wide nor too thick, eyes neither too big nor too small… Even the blemishes on the skin seemed entirely unremarkable.

“Do you think -” Linghui Mei began, in the guise of an old man, showing her dagger. She didn’t finish her sentence, seeming shy all of a sudden. Her voice was scratchy, like a quill that wrote itself out.

Qian Shanyi tapped her own nose for a moment. “I would say leave it,” she said, taking the dagger from Linghui Mei. “Better for you to not stand out, if a cultivator passes by. If you have to flee, you already know how. Just send us a letter through the post once you are safe - we’ll find you, in whatever town you have escaped to. And if you have to flee again, send a letter back to the town you just left. Me and Yonghao have a similar system, if we ever get separated.”

Linghui Mei bowed again. She turned towards Wang Yonghao, ready to wake him up and leave.

“How old are you, actually?” Qian Shanyi asked all of a sudden, touching Linghui Mei’s shoulder. She wasn’t entirely sure why she did it. This question didn’t matter for anything in particular.

“Me?” Linghui Mei said, lowering her voice, glancing back at Qian Shanyi. She stayed quiet, not responding, but also not moving away. Her forehead creased, deep in thought.

“I apologize, Mei,” Qian Shanyi began after a moment. “If you do not feel comfortable, because of your secrets, your children - ”

“It’s not that.” Linghui Mei shook her head with a slight smile. “I was just thinking how to answer. If you did not know me, I would have said I am fifty-six years old, because this is how old this man was when I last fed on him. But you know me, and so this would feel like a lie…” She shrugged slightly. “This simply isn’t a question I was ever asked before, not like this. A jiuweihu would never do so. But a jiuweihu would never have called me Mei either, after I’ve changed my face.”

“Because it might connect a past identity with the present?” Qian Shanyi said, quickly connecting the dots. “If I get used to calling you Mei, I might slip up in public, throw away the game, bring the spirit hunters?”

“In a way,” Linghui Mei said softly, nodding. She sighed. “It feels strange to tell you this,” she continued, so quietly that Qian Shanyi had to strain her hearing. “You aren’t a jiuweihu, but if I had accepted you as my master, then I must at least explain myself.” She motioned towards her face. “We only ever have one face, one name. Even to talk of the ones you took in the past…it is forbidden. Dead names, we call them - the names of the dead. If you speak of them, you might end up the same.”

“I see,” Qian Shanyi said quietly, matching the volume. “Then how would you prefer I call you?”

“Mei is fine,” Linghui Mei said after a moment. “I am already straining the taboo, telling you this. I don’t want you to get confused on my behalf.”

“I assure you, I can keep as many names as you want in my head.”

“Thank you, really. But Mei is fine. I’ll keep that face, when I am here, in this world fragment. And I am thirty-three. The…inner me, that is, not the face. Please keep this between us.”

Qian Shanyi’s left eyebrow rose slightly. A full decade older than her, huh.

“Thank you for sharing,” Qian Shanyi said, bowing back to Linghui Mei. “I am twenty-three myself.” She chewed on her lip, considering the actual question she had in the back of her mind. Linghui Mei did not seem to be in a hurry to leave, at least for now. “I do have… another request.”

“Of course,” Linghui Mei said with a bow. “Anything that my master needs.”

“It’s a personal request,” Qian Shanyi said, chewing on her lip more. “One I’ve only thought of after Yonghao’s speech. Please do not treat it as a request from a teacher. At most, as from one friend to another.”

She stared at Linghui Mei until the jiuweihu nodded in understanding. “What is it?” Linghui Mei said.

Qian Shanyi opened her mouth.

Could you go to Golden Rabbit Bay and make sure my parents are still alive? Because I cannot.

She couldn’t say it.

“It’s about books,” she said instead. A deflection so transparent you could use it as a magnifying glass. “I love reading stories about cultivation, but anything we purchase that ends up in the world fragment is a potential loophole, something I have to keep carrying in my hands or else people might notice it vanished, suspect we have a cosmos ring. I was wondering if you could purchase some for me - with a false face, it’s easier.”

“Oh,” Linghui Mei blinked. “Of course.”

Qian Shanyi nodded, and motioned towards Wang Yonghao. Linghui Mei headed over to wake him back up, while Qian Shanyi turned around and walked over to the kitchen, no longer in the mood for talking.

She’d figure something out herself. She couldn’t wait an entire decade.