The fifth warehouse of the Northern Scarlet Stream sect was a quiet place, air still and dry, dust swept away by the daily flow of goods and the brooms of sweepers. Dim light came down from specially engineered slits cut into the walls - safeguarding sensitive goods from direct sunlight. They let in just enough air to keep the large room ventilated, keeping moisture and wind out through the shape of the openings alone. Stacks of crates occupied most of the space, kept within zones outlined on the stone floor in red paint, leaving open passages more than wide enough to walk through.
Three pairs of footsteps broke up the quiet. Guo Hu, an outer disciple of the Northern Scarlet Stream sect, Wang Yonghao and Qian Shanyi, heading toward one of the corners.
If only there were more hours in the day and less things taking up her time, Qian Shanyi would have gone over this warehouse with a careful eye and a wax slate to take down notes. The entire building was like a perfectly balanced shovel - nothing out of place, and every little nail serving a key purpose, all without using a single drop of spiritual energy. Those windows were only a small part of the whole - she still couldn’t figure out why their footsteps did not echo, even though it seemed like they should. Deep mysteries of engineering.
“And finally… Ah, yes, here, honorable immortal -” Guo Hu said, tapping the lid of one of the crates. It was almost a cube, a meter to each side, with a detailed paper label nailed down on top. “The glass cauldron. Five hundred liters, as discussed, together with tubing and valves.”
“Thank you,” Qian Shanyi said, bowing slightly. This was to be the star of their collection - she couldn’t wait to take a look at it. “Is there a place where we can inspect the merchandise, away from prying eyes? We have some tests we would like to run, to make sure it is fully suitable.”
After the excitement of the duel, and negotiating with Jian Wei - twice, now - Qian Shanyi sorely needed to relax, let her hair down, and do something with no risk to her life, limb or sanity. And so they decided to head to the warehouse, inspect the glassware she had just haggled over, and write down instructions about where it was supposed to be shipped.
And then they were going to steal it, from themselves, and make sure nobody ever found out. A nice, calm, uneventful heist, with everything going according to plan.
“Of course,” the disciple said, bowing back. “One of the processing rooms can be made available.”
“These tests may take some time,” Qian Shanyi warned. “Perhaps well into the night. Would it be alright for us to occupy it this long?”
“It is no trouble at all,” the disciple said, shaking his head. “We have three processing rooms, and no large deliveries are expected today.”
“Thank you,” Qian Shanyi said, moving to the side of the crate. She placed a long roll of fabric she had been carrying on top, together with a couple bags, and crouched down. “Yonghao, if you don’t mind, help me carry this.”
“Ah, honorable immortal, perhaps it would be best if our workers…”
“We’ll be done faster if we help you,” Qian Shanyi said, lifting the crate and maneuvering it into the passageway. For her newly strengthened muscles, it felt light as a feather. “I have a meeting in the evening, so I would like us to start as soon as we can.”
They needed the glassware for about a hundred different reasons, but they couldn’t simply buy it from a store. If someone kept track of them, they would know that neither Qian Shanyi nor Wang Yonghao had any reason to purchase hundreds of kilograms of specialized glassware, nor any place to store it.
Through her deal with Jian Wei, Qian Shanyi solved the first half of this conundrum: she wasn’t purchasing this glassware for herself, she was purchasing it for her entire sect. That left only the second half. They have faced a familiar problem with the rabbits, but glassware could not be eaten, could not vanish without a trace, which left only one option: theft.
It took them only ten minutes to move the crates through the wide gates on the side of the warehouse and into an adjacent processing room. It was only ten meters to the side, with shelves along the walls - full of chains and hooks for moving the crates, instruments, hammers and nails, and a stack of wooden boards up against one of the walls, next to a sawing table and a tall ladder. The stone floor was swept clean, practically spotless except for occasional pitting and scorch marks, where some alchemical fluid had been spilled a long time ago.
The room was well-lit, much more so than the warehouse - with two skylights, and a long row of glass windows along the top of the wall, just above the gates leading out into the street beyond. The walls were wooden, but fairly thin, and the shuffling of the town gave the room a cozy atmosphere - murmur of conversation, click and clack of hoofs and sandals, the soft creak of boots, and a quiet whine of hinges from some distant door.
Right between the two skylights, a railing was bolted to the ceiling, stretching across the room and then back out into the warehouse. A pulley hung down from it on a pair of steel wheels - to help the ordinary workers lift and move the heaviest goods around when necessary. Two more pulleys hung from the ceiling on large iron hooks at the sides of the room.
Qian Shanyi thanked Guo Hu and the three other workers he called in to help them move the crates, and carefully wheeled the warehouse doors closed, chaining them shut. Wang Yonghao did much the same to the doors on the other side of the room, leading out into the street.
“Windows next,” Qian Shanyi said decisively.
They brought a large spool of the cheapest fabric they could find with them for this exact purpose, and she helped Wang Yonghao unfurl it and cut it into shape, eyeballing the size of individual windows. They didn’t need to be very precise.
Ordinarily, there would be no reason for someone to try looking inside to find out what they were doing - but with the Heavens out there, it was best to be careful. Picking up a hammer and some nails from the shelves, she headed to the windows facing the street, while Wang Yonghao took care of the skylights.
Ten more minutes of awkwardly balancing on top of a ladder later, hammering the fabric to the window frames, they were done. All sources of vision blocked, the gates locked shut, with another piece of fabric covering the narrow gap in between. Even if someone wanted to look in, they wouldn’t be able to.
Unless they used some kind of divination technique, of course, but they couldn’t ward against everything. Not yet.
With the windows blocked, the room fell into darkness, only a scant few rays of light piercing through the fabric. Qian Shanyi lit two oil lamps she brought along to help them see better, setting them around the room. Cultivator vision was more than sufficient to navigate in the borderline darkness, but she still didn’t want to stub her toe on the edge of a crate by accident.
Their heist plan was very simple. They would bring the crates into Wang Yonghao’s inner world, unpack the glass, replace it with plates of stone or wood of equal weight, and then seal the crates back up. As long as nobody else opened the crates again, they would never even know that the glass had vanished.
By the time she was done with the lamps, Wang Yonghao had already arranged the noise-muffling and spiritual energy-gathering formations in two concentric circles and opened his inner world. The gently scintillating rainbow membrane that covered the entrance portal took on an almost psychedelic quality in the darkness.
Qian Shanyi could only guess at what that membrane did - though she suspected it might have been one of the reasons the Heavens could not look inside. It stopped the flow of air and light - there was even a bit of a resistance when they passed through it, which Qian Shanyi thought was down to a mild difference in air pressure. Practically speaking, it mostly meant that if she wanted to look inside, she had to poke her head through the membrane every time.
Wang Yonghao was just about ready to dive in when Qian Shanyi had waved him over. He gave her a surprised look. “What?”
“Don’t bother with our lift,” Qian Shanyi said, gesturing to the pulley on the ceiling. “They have a better one, and our tripod still requires work. If it cracks, or slides into the portal… I’d rather not take the risk.”
Seeing Wang Yonghao’s disappointed expression, she hurried to clarify. “We’ll still need it eventually, just not today. Lifting something in or out of your inner world - hardly a rare occurrence. But we’ve only had a couple days to test it, and if we drop a crate from thirty meters up, it’d be all for nothing.”
That seemed to cheer him up, at least, and he closed his world fragment. While he was busy moving the talismans below the central pulley, Qian Shanyi headed off to the side of the room, one of her oil lamps in hand, to take a look at the chains. The ceiling in the warehouse was only six meters tall, and the chains were sized accordingly - they would need to link several of them in sequence, to get thirty meters of length.
“Could you take the ones off the other two pulleys?” she asked Wang Yonghao. “I think we’ll need them as well.”
Linking the chains together with carabiners took the two of them all of five minutes, most of which was due to Qian Shanyi needing to pause to write down a list of equipment they were borrowing, so that they could put everything back more or less as it had been. Nails and hammers were one thing - blocking the windows was only expected, if their tests would include sect secrets. Using the chains, on the other hand, might reveal more than they wanted to.
Once they were done, the long chain reeled in and pooling on the ground, Qian Shanyi tied her rope around her waist, and handed Wang Yonghao the other end. He raised an eyebrow at her - this wasn’t a part of their plan.
“Tie me to that hook,” she said, gesturing to one of the pulleys they were not using. “If I’m going to be working here alone, I want a safety line.”
While Wang Yonghao was busy with the rope, Qian Shanyi laid on the ground next to the entrance portal into his inner world, and poked her head inside.
She saw Linghui Mei in the bath - washing her hands and feet, not even taking her robes off. She looked fully human again - out of an overabundance of caution, just in case a small fraction of her jiuweihu musk might be left on the crates.
While Qian Shanyi and Wang Yonghao had been running around town, dealing with the duel, Linghui Mei had been stuck inside, with little to do except work on their farm. She had finished plowing the bean farm, planted the saplings, and started work on the coop for the rabbits.
For now, all the rabbits frolicked together - but as time went on, they would need to separate them to keep the population from exploding, young females away from the males, children away from adults, and males being fattened up for slaughter away from everyone else. This meant they would need several coops, large enough for the rabbits to have plenty of grass to eat; but to start with, they needed at least one, just to keep the rabbits away from the bean farm.
Since neither of them knew how much grassland the rabbits actually needed to feed themselves, they decided to start with a coop ten meters to the side, up against the edge of the world fragment. If it seemed that the grass couldn’t keep up, they’d add more sections from there.
But the rabbit fence had been a long-term concern. Today they had to focus on the glassware, and for that reason a dozen square meters at the center of the world fragment have been paved with rough plates of stone. If they lowered the crates down onto the ground, unpacked them, and some blades of grass had gotten stuck to the bottom - it would have broken some of the illusion they were trying to create. An obvious loophole to be closed.
image [https://i.imgur.com/J9M3MVR.png]
“Mei!” Qian Shanyi called out, and the jiuweihu raised her head, waving back. “We are just about ready to start here. Could you set the clock?”
Linghui Mei nodded, heading towards the center of the world. They agreed on a very simple division of labor: Qian Shanyi would lower the crates, Linghui Mei would carefully unpack them, while Wang Yonghao would weigh the glass and cut stone block replacements of equal mass.
“What do you want to start with?” Wang Yonghao asked, once Qian Shanyi raised her head out of the world fragment.
“The cauldron, definitely,” Qian Shanyi said immediately. “It’s the heaviest crate by far. Best get it over with.”
Wang Yonghao nodded. “Yeah, that’s what I thought too. I’ll help you attach it.”
Wrapping the chains around the heavy crate might have been a little difficult for the ordinary warehouse workers - but for the two cultivators, it was simplicity itself. Within a minute, they had it secured, and Qian Shanyi began to lower it into the portal, slow and steady. Wang Yonghao descended alongside it, keeping a hand on its side just in case.
On his shoulder, he carried a bag of instruments - a pair of crowbars, hammers, and a small box of extra nails, for the work down below. Since they were already in the warehouse, they figured they might as well use the good tools. The knowledge that they could not keep them ached Qian Shanyi, but such was life.
Once Wang Yonghao vanished through the portal, Qian Shanyi had to work by feel, carefully letting out more and more of the chain until it went slack. They’ve reached the bottom, then. She took out a piece of thread and tied it around the chain link in her hands - so as to remember the length - and carefully approached the entrance again, kneeling down to look inside.
Linghui Mei and Wang Yonghao had already unhooked the crate from the chains, and were carrying it towards the hut, to free up the delivery spot. Qian Shanyi quietly rose, and began to reel the chain back up.
The work proceeded steadily, repetitive motions of chaining the crates and slowly lowering them into the world fragment quickly blending together, and Qian Shanyi’s mind started to drift. She thought once again about the future - Jian Wei told her that he’d like her to visit the sect in the evening, for a meeting with his disciples. And Jian Shizhe would be among them.
He had roped her into teaching Jian Shizhe in the end, so she had to come up with a plan, think about what she could even do with him. Her professional pride wouldn’t let her sleep if she didn’t at least make an effort, even if the man was as blind as a mole with two separate bags over its head. An amicable relationship with Jian Shizhe was almost certainly unrecoverable after what she did, but that simply meant she would have to take a different approach, more confrontational -
Her foot slipped just as she was turning away from the entrance, and she instantly snapped back to reality. Her hands whirled, trying to catch her balance, and fingers just barely caught the edge of the entrance portal before she fell inside.
Blinding sunlight. Someone screaming in terror. Sharp yank on her abdomen, and then she wasn’t falling anymore.
“Shanyi!” she heard someone shout from down below. Wang Yonghao, probably, but with the blood hammering in her ears she wasn’t all that sure.
“I’m fine!” she shouted back, her heart beating a mile a minute. Good thing she had that safety line. She was hanging only a couple meters below the entrance to the world fragment, spinning around on the safety rope wrapped around her midsection. “Just slipped a bit.”
Did I scream? Oh sweet heavenbreakers, I am the one who screamed.
She breathed out, grabbed onto the rope, and started to climb back up. Passing through the entrance, she carefully got her feet under herself, and rolled onto her side, far away from that damnable falling hazard.
Okay. I am okay.
She took a minute to calm down, poked her head back inside to tell the others not to worry, and got back to work. They still had a third of the crates to go.
But no more multi-tasking. She’d think about other things after she was done.
----------------------------------------
Only about half of the equipment she bargained for was already in the warehouses of the Northern Scarlet Stream sect. The other half would have to be custom-made over the next few weeks - which suited Qian Shanyi just fine. She still wasn’t sure whether they were going to repeat their heist, but even if not, it could serve as cover for what they already stole today.
Once she was done with her part of the job, she decided to take a break, and slid down into the world fragment. Unlike falling, moving of her own volition always gave her a bit of a rush, and she was grinning from ear to ear by the time she touched the ground, the chain rattling slightly beneath her fingers.
Wang Yonghao was busy weighing the glass, fussing over a large set of scales they built on top of their hut: one beam tied down on top of the roof, sticking out half a meter past the end, and a second beam balanced crosswise on top of a stone fulcrum. One of the crates was now chained to the left side of the scales, while on the right side was a wide board, with variously weighted stone blocks piled up on top.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Linghui Mei was nearby, unpacking the glass and shaking the wood shavings out. She had three new crates already lined up for Wang Yonghao as soon as he was done with the current one, while another two stood aside, lids nailed back, ready to be lifted out of the world fragment.
The weighting was something of a bottleneck in their process. They only had one set of scales, and working with it was a bit awkward. They didn’t have any convenient containers for the glassware except for the crates it already came in, and this meant they had to weigh it in the crates. To do that, they first had to unload each crate individually, before attaching it to the scales to balance out its empty weight. Then they had to put the glass back into the crate to find an amount of granite that weighed the same. On top of it, the crates were filled with wooden shavings, which made the whole process quite messy.
image [https://i.imgur.com/Pq7LU16.png]
Linghui Mei greeted Qian Shanyi with annoyance concealed behind a soft glare of worry. “When I heard the chain rattle, I thought you had fallen out again,” she said.
“I wouldn’t make the same mistake twice,” Qian Shanyi grumbled self-consciously. “Besides, I had a safety line.”
“And if it broke, or it snapped your own back in the fall?” Linghui Mei snapped back, “When will you start caring about your own life?”
Qian Shanyi gave her a baffled look. “What is it you mean, Mei - that I do not care about my life because I slipped by accident, or because I thought to use a safety line?” she asked sarcastically. “Because neither of those makes a lick of sense. If you have an actual problem with what I am doing, then come out and say it.”
Linghui Mei snorted and turned away, and did not say anything whatsoever.
Qian Shanyi had been getting a strange feeling from the jiuweihu even before the duel; she had been neglecting her meditation, making little pokes at Qian Shanyi during her training. Not quite antagonistic, but snippy. Before, she had too much on her mind to properly handle it - but no longer.
“Is this about the duel?” Qian Shanyi asked, making a blind guess. “You barely reacted when I told you I won - I thought it was because Wang Yonghao had told you already. Did you not think I should have gone?”
“What does it matter what I think?” Linghui Mei said bitterly. “To cultivate is to rebel against the heavens, isn’t that what you always say? You cultivators are always busy either killing yourselves or someone else.” She sighed, rubbing her face. “I am sorry, but… can we talk about something else? What is our plan?”
Qian Shanyi silently raised her eyebrow. She really wanted to push this topic now, before it became a much larger problem - but it would require a bit of subtlety.
“The plan is mostly unchanged,” she said after a moment, deciding to back off a bit. She glanced at the water clock that Linghui Mei put up on the grass next to the scales. “I have a meeting with Jian Wei and his disciples in… about half an hour. Hopefully you two can finish up with the crates in the meantime, and then we could leave our shipping orders, and head back to the tavern for the night.”
Wang Yonghao put another small block of stone onto his side of the weights, and they finally seemed to balance. “Why did you want to ship them out, again?” he said, turning around.
Qian Shanyi gave him a tired look. “I swear I’ve explained this twice already.”
Wang Yonghao shrugged. “Maybe,” he said, taking the stone blocks off the scales while Linghui Mei dealt with the glass on the other side. “But you say so much that I honestly forgot.”
“You should try writing things down next time,” Qian Shanyi grumbled. “I want to ship them out because it would make no sense for our sect to keep them stored here, all packed up. Someone might get curious, open a crate, or drop and crack one by accident. It’s a running risk.” She paused, letting her words hang for a moment. “And, of course, we’d also have to keep paying the costs for the warehouse space, which I have no interest in. We are running short on money as it is.”
After shopping for pills, buying the medicine for Linghui Mei and the fortifying baths for Qian Shanyi, they were left with only around fifty three spirit stones. More than enough for the foreseeable future, but it was best to be economical.
“But that will still be true even if we ship them, right?”
“We’ll be shipping the crates to Blooming Plum Warehouses, in Golden Rabbit Bay,” Qian Shanyi explained patiently. “The owners steal from their clients. Their workers steal as well. Whatever we ship there, we might as well be tossing into a bottomless hole, as far as anyone else is concerned.”
“You know them?”
“Not personally - through my father, rumors among the merchants back home. They are a pair, husband and wife. Their marriage is a long-running affair of self-hatred and misery, and both steal from each other - I even started a discreet betting ring on when they would divorce.” She sighed wistfully, memories clouding her eyes. “I hope my dad took it over after I vanished.”
“You have gambled on other people’s marriage?” Linghui Mei said, giving her another glare - this time, one of scandalized anger - before turning away with a huff.
“Why wouldn’t I?” Qian Shanyi asked, confused. “It would have been better for both of them if they did. And it’s not like I was going to push them one way or another.”
She did consider it, but in the end decided against it. Rigging the bet would have made for a great payout, but there was just no way to get away with it cleanly.
While they talked, Wang Yonghao and Linghui Mei finished with the glass tubes, and were now loading the crate with the stone plates - burying them deep in the wooden shavings, careful to arrange them evenly, to keep them from shifting around.
Qian Shanyi, in the meantime, headed over to look at the already unloaded glassware. It was arranged in loose lines on the grass next to the hut, the glass cauldron taking center stage, like a general surveying their troops. It was cylindrical, precisely a meter in height and eighty centimeters wide, with a hemispherical bottom ending in a glass valve - for decanting the contents. On its sides were a pair of solid handles, for suspending the apparatus, and another five valves, arranged in a spiral, top to bottom.
“Of course you’d know a bunch of thieves,” Wang Yonghao said. “How do they even stay in business?”
“They have low prices, lots of space, and so out of towners often make the mistake of storing goods with them, and most of the time it’s fine - it’s not like they steal every shipment. They’d never get away with it.” She continued her line of thought, looking over the beautiful cauldron. She opened one of the valves in curiosity, and the glass stopper slid softly in its housing, like silk over her fingers. “Just pilfering off the top.”
“And then what?”
“Once our crates will be in their possession, and our advance on the storage runs out, they’ll open them up to sell some of our goods to pay for our own rent,” she continued, glancing back at the other two. “It’s standard practice - and find out that the glassware is missing completely. Then each will assume the other one must have already sold it off, and neither will believe any protestations to the contrary, until they both decide to cover it up, doing our job for us.” She paused, thinking it over for a moment. “If I was in their place, I’d burn down a section of the warehouse, and claim the glass was lost in the fire. We might even get some payout out of it, if they get scared of offending a sect.”
“Won’t that link back to you?” Wang Yonghao asked. “Shipping to Golden Rabbit Bay, the betting ring?”
Qian Shanyi rolled her eyes at him. “Yonghao, half the rivers in the entire province flow towards Golden Rabbit Bay. More than three hundred thousand people live in it. It would be odder if we didn’t ship our goods through there, at some point. As for the betting ring, half the merchants in port were in on it - it took some effort to keep it secret from the pair, or they’d have raised quite a stink. There’s nothing there.”
“So much effort for just some glass,” Linghui Mei grumbled.
“Some glass?” Qian Shanyi turned around to stare at her incredulously. “It’s not some glass, it’s alchemical hardware most smaller sects only wish they could lay their hands on.”
She picked up one of the smaller flasks next to her, and bumped it against the side of the cauldron with a satisfying, happy clink. “There are three pillars of modern cultivation - spiritual cultivation, refining, and alchemy,” she said in a lecturing tone. “Cultivators may be the sabers of humankind, but a saber cannot swing itself without a hand to guide it. Alchemists supply us with pills and medicines essential for our advancement and health, while refiners refine our weapons and artifacts, as well as the tools the alchemists use. In turn, cultivators gather spiritual herbs and slay demon beasts the others use for their craft. A triangle, where each vertex supports two others.”
“I’ve seen a saber that could swing itself, actually.”
“That’s not the point, Yonghao.”
“And where do talismans fit into this?”
Qian Shanyi sighed in exasperation. “It’s just a saying, not a treatise categorizing all cultivation. Don’t think too deeply about it.”
With the stone plates loaded into the crate, Wang Yonghao and Linghui Mei carefully unhooked it from the scales, and moved it aside, onto another platform of stone plates. Linghui Mei picked up a hammer to nail the crate lid back in place, while Wang Yonghao started to balance out another empty crate on the scales.
“Alright,” Wang Yonghao said, “So you want to try your hand at alchemy? I guess you would be the type to spend days mucking about with beakers.”
“I think you’d make a good alchemist, actually,” Qian Shanyi said casually. “One of the big limits to alchemy is the cost of experimentation - you can only try so many things with the most precious Heavenly Materials and Earthly Treasures before it becomes prohibitively expensive, even though most of your experiments will produce nothing of interest. But with your luck, if every experiment would produce either a brilliant success or a catastrophic failure…”
She trailed off, seeing Wang Yonghao’s face start to turn pale. “You don’t have to, of course,” she said instead of mentioning more of her theories. “We have far more spiritual energy to play with, compared to an ordinary sect. Even without your luck, I could do much - figure out exactly how to deal with dead air, at least. That would be my first project.”
Qian Shanyi put the beaker down, and rose, heading to the kitchens. “But that is for the weeks ahead,” Qian Shanyi said, going back to the question Linghui Mei asked her. “More immediately… Tomorrow, I’ll meet with Li Zhong from the Thrifty Bat Bank about an account, and see if I can set the process of registering our sect into motion. Then I’ll be mostly free, aside from needing to spend some time every day forcing Jian Shizhe to ascend beyond the cockroach stage of morality. I’ll finish up the last of my baths, and then -”
“Of course you’d go back to those demonic baths, karalhi n’gara!” Linghui Mei cursed, glaring at her again. “No sense of self-preservation, like I’ve said.”
“I -”, Qian Shanyi paused, blinking at Linghui Mei in confusion. That was far too sudden. “What? The baths are medicinal. They fortify my body -”
“You scream like a slaughtered pig when you take them,” Linghui Mei snarled, and threw her hammer down on the ground in frustration. “You tie your own hands behind your back so you don’t scratch your face off! Nothing will convince me that this is healthy.”
Wang Yonghao stopped his work for a moment to look at them, an eyebrow raised, but quickly turned back to the scales. Didn’t want to get in the middle of an argument, it seems.
“I told you why I needed the damnable baths!” Qian Shanyi said, annoyance creeping back into her tone. Mostly at herself, for somehow failing to catch… whatever this was. “My body has started to lag behind my meridians, and I need it to catch up -”
“And then what?” Linghui Mei said, “Will you smash your head against a stone wall for five months to harden your skull? Break your own bones with a hammer to cultivate their strength? All cultivation is insanity at its core.”
Something familiar shifted in the back of Qian Shanyi’s mind, but now wasn’t the time for it. She squinted at Linghui Mei, trying to figure out what was up with the jiuweihu. She was furious, that much was clear, but there was a hint of something else there. But of what?
“What?” Linghui Mei snapped at her calm, analytical expression. “Nothing to say, cultivator?”
“This isn’t about me,” Qian Shanyi responded. “You didn’t worry nearly as much when we discussed my duel, training for it. This only started once I began with the baths -”
And then it clicked in her mind, and Qian Shanyi slapped herself on the forehead, wondering how she ever missed it in the first place. “This is about your children, isn’t it?” she said, “You are worried they’d have to go through the same thing, to learn to cultivate, to solve the circulation problem? That’s also why you have been slacking on your meditation?”
Linghui Mei’s snarl grew, but she didn’t object. “This cure looks worse than the disease,” she said instead.
“But I told you - ugh, why didn’t you just ask -” Qian Shanyi groaned, stopping herself. Of course she wouldn’t think to ask. She told Linghui Mei that the jiuweihu wouldn’t need these baths, but she didn’t explain why, because it was not relevant, and the explanation was complex. The petulant jiuweihu, on the other hand, seemed to have a block about appearing ignorant, and so simply made more assumptions instead of speaking up. Again with the teaching expectations she didn’t share.
“Look,” Qian Shanyi said forcefully, starting over again. “First of all, none of the jiuweihu will be getting any medicinal baths at all well into the future. It took alchemists many decades to develop the recipes to the point where they could be safe, reliable, and effective for humans, but even now, a fortification bath is still a major shock to the system. Your physiology is different - maybe you’d just die if you tried, and even if you survived, there is no way to predict the effects. But even if you could take them, you wouldn’t have to do it. Most cultivators don’t bother, because they can’t afford good ones. Out of those who do bother, most don’t brew them as hard as I do, and then it doesn’t even hurt!”
“Really?” Wang Yonghao asked curiously, turning around. “I thought all baths were just like that.”
“Of course you’d think that,” Qian Shanyi grumbled, but whirled back towards Linghui Mei. The jiuweihu was still glaring at her, arms folded on her chest, but her fury seemed to have abated. “And I only brew them hard because I want to eventually break into the building foundation stage! I am not Yonghao with his stupid luck, I can’t afford to lose any advantages. Fewer baths of a higher concentration lead to much more fortification before the effect begins to fade entirely - a bit of temporary pain is nothing.”
“Well how was I supposed to know that?” Linghui Mei snapped. “I thought you cultivators go through the harshest training, so that only one out of a dozen dozens can hope to see the dawn, or something like that?”
“Ask! With your mouth! Like I told you to - ” Qian Shanyi shouted back, raising her arms in frustration, before the words Linghui Mei said caught up with her and she shut her mouth, another realization snapping into place in her mind. “Wait, did you say a dozen dozens?”
“What of it?” Linghui Mei said, her glare intensifying again.
Qian Shanyi couldn’t help it, and a giggle escaped her mouth as all her frustration fled her body at once. “It’s - it’s from an adventure novel,” she said, still giggling, “one of the best of the last decade, Sever The Sky, about a cultivator that is sent back in time to when Gu Lingtian rebelled against the Heavens. I didn’t know you read them.”
So was the bit about smashing heads into walls, come to think of it - though that one was from a different novel.
Something broke behind Linghui Mei’s eyes. Her lips trembled, a grimace passing over her face, before her teeth clenched, lips pulled back into a snarl. Her hands curled into claws of their own accord, though not transforming. “I do not,” Linghui Mei growled, a sharp, guttural sound unfitting for her human guise escaping her throat. “Read your vainglorious trash!”
“But how else -”
Linghui Mei turned on her heels, and stormed away, past their kitchen table. There were not a lot of places to hide in the world fragment, but she hopped over the fence surrounding the rabbit coop, and vanished from sight.
Qian Shanyi ruffled her hair. The idea of Linghui Mei reading Sever The Sky was absolutely comical, but what did she step into this time?
“What’s gotten into her?” Wang Yonghao said quietly, coming over. “You weren’t even asking anything bad?...”
Qian Shanyi sighed, putting her hands on her hips, looking after Linghui Mei. “Hard to guess,” she said, matching his tone. She wasn’t sure how good Linghui Mei’s hearing was in her human form - perhaps she could hear them. “All of those novels are really -” she made a vague gesture. “- glorifying of cultivators, you know how it is. I wouldn’t have expected her to read them. Perhaps she simply heard the quote from someone else, or maybe it’s a guilty pleasure.” She glanced at Wang Yonghao out of the corner of her eye. “You wouldn’t like those novels either, and in her position…”
Turning fully to Wang Yonghao, she frowned. “You know, I keep expecting you to talk to her about your own experiences being chased around, but you never do. Why is that?”
“I’ve been busy,” Wang Yonghao said defensively. “Training you for the duel and all that?”
“Yeah, yeah. I am not blaming you. Just making an observation.”
“- I’m not that great at talking to women in general, and she is not the easiest person to talk to,” Wang Yonghao continued. “Especially with how she treats me compared to you.”
Qian Shanyi looked Wang Yonghao straight in the face. He had his lips pursed, a petty curl to them. “Yonghao, if you are avoiding talking to her because you think she’s too hot -” she began.
“What?!” Wang Yonghao said, scandalized, more than loud enough to carry all across the world fragment.
“- then I will beat you with a stick. Be sensible, for the love of me.”
Wang Yonghao scowled at her, fire in his eyes. “I don’t love you!”
Qian Shanyi snorted, some of her cheer coming back. “Shame. You should, I am adorable, except when I am not. Like right now.” She tapped a finger against her cheek. “You know, you’d make a good couple. Lonely cultivator who can never settle down, jiuweihu who must always travel? Perhaps I should play matchmaker, see if she’d like you.”
“Shanyi, if you do that, I will beat you with a stick!”
She snorted, heading to the kitchens. “Very well. I’ll make something to eat, and then see about apologizing. What are your thoughts on rice?”