3. Manners

“Thank you for the Tea, Mai Mai,” Di Phon said. He sat in the palace that had been designed and built for him during his stay with Lord Loshi and Omaia. Those seven words were the only words he deigned to speak, and only after Mai Mai served him tea. With the exception of that simple expression of gratitude, the diamond rank ascended one was utterly mute.

Loshi’s avatar lounged nearby. The mortal servants – anyone beneath gold rank was a mortal as far as Loshi was concerned – knew not that the Lord of the Realm was present, nor that he was disguised as a young ascendant himself.

“I’m going to make you say something eventually,” Loshi said. “It’s just a matter of time. Now that Omaia is gone, I truly wish to earn your forgiveness for turning my back. You must see that it was the correct decision at the time. On the grand scale of things… bah I’ve grown tired of repeating myself.”

“Perhaps if you had a new argument, my Lord Loshi, then Lord Di Phon would be forced to counter it,” Mai Mai said.

Loshi’s eyes narrowed at the mortal, then he shrugged. “If there is another argument, then it’s one that I hadn’t considered when I made the decision,” he admitted. “I examined the problem thoroughly. I weighed the lives of Atla versus the lives of the greater collective of this dimension, and I determined that it was better to cauterize the wound. That’s the crux of it. If things had turned out differently, then it would have been the correct decision.”

“Isn’t that just a fancy way of saying that you were wrong?” Mai Mai asked.

Loshi’s eyes narrowed again, then he forced himself to remember that this mortal didn’t know who he was. He’d deliberately enchanted this avatar to appear far beneath his true station. Nobody would think that he was the Lord of the Realm except for Di Phon, who only spoke to thank Mai Mai for the tea. He only ever thanked Mai Mai; Loshi had caused an occasion to have other tea makers perform the duty and Di Phon had never thanked them.

“It was the correct decision to make,” he argued. “There was no other choice. What choice could I have made?”

“You could have fought for the people of Atla,” Mai Mai said.

“And unleash the corruption into the Nexus?”

“Yes,” Mai Mai said. “That was the other option, wasn’t it?”

Loshi’s eyes narrowed. Yes, that was the other option. The one that he’d discarded because … because it would have involved a conflict with an entity that he didn’t fully understand. That he couldn’t predict the outcome of the conflict had been a large part of his decision. He would have had to figure out where the corruption was coming from and stop the leak, and then dilute the necromantic energies throughout his realm.

It wouldn’t have been impossible.

Just difficult.

And if the necromancer had shown himself, if he’d been forced to do battle, then he would have been exposed. While he had no doubt of his victory, not in his home dimension where every world was linked to the nexus of his power, he would have been exposed for a short time. If Divine Fates Empire took that opportunity to return, then he would have …

He sighed.

“I took the easy path,” he admitted. “The difficult path would have been to fight. This corruption was as certain of an attack on my realm as the invasion thirteen years ago, yet because it was insidious and easy to overlook I overlooked it, then stepped aside to allow the attackers to succeed. I sacrificed billions of soul to maintain my perfect order. Is that what you wish for me to say?”

Di Phon took a sip of tea.

And said not a word.

~~~~~~

Shishi cursed the twisty words of her host as she realized just how tightly he had bound them. “Do not alter the fate of anyone below the Golden Path.” Had she cast out her senses, she would have never agreed to those terms. There were only perhaps one or two hundred golden ranked beings on the entire planet! And that idiot Mioji was currently fighting nine of them together, like the oaf that he was. Still, she’d be interested in his report on the matter.

She walked through an ancient city to the south of the peach tree where they’d arrived. Far, far to the south, but it had taken her only moments to arrive. She sensed a confluence of fate that had occurred nearby, just to the north actually. She could investigate there, but it was sometimes better to get a distance from something rather than slamming your face into it while investigating.

She walked and listened to all of the various dialects being spoken, shaking her head. At gold rank, it was possible to overcome the language barrier by speaking The True Tongue, but none of these ‘mortals’ would understand her if she tried. They didn’t have the senses to understand the universal language of Qi.

She noticed a stall with fruit nearby and picked one that looked ripe, tossing the vendor a golden coin from two dimensions away. He bit it, the little bastard. Right in front of her! But then he grinned and offered her an entire basket of fruit, so she supposed he could live.

She bit into the fruit, and while it was tasty, it failed to live up to the standard of the fruit that their host had given them as a welcome gift. The Qi in that single morsel had been staggering. She sometimes forgot how Qi dense these ‘advanced’ worlds were. Although this world had just been quickened, it was still three stages above her own most advanced world. Such a gift as that peach would have been a tribute worth a century of taxes for a lesser sect, should they have found it in the wild and given it in lieu of their usual tax.

She continued to munch on the star fruit and walked through the market, studying the junk that the peddlers were peddling. Mortal fair, all of it. She sighed.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

Abruptly two figures blocked her path. She frowned, wondering who would dare—but then of course. She had reduced her cultivation down to the level of a silver path cultivator to fit in. They spoke rapid-fire in their tongue for a moment, bowing respectfully to her, and then motioning her to follow them.

So she did. So far she did not believe she had significantly altered anyone’s fate, and if it appeared that she was, she would simply vanish.

~~~~~~

“Father, this one breaks her vow,” Atla informed me.

“What do you mean? Show me,” I said, and my world-child showed me a vision of Shishi flipping a merchant a golden coin. I frowned for a moment, following the divergence in fate for a moment.

“It’s true, she did break the promise not to alter anyone’s fate who isn’t of the golden path,” I admitted.

“Shall I punish her?”

“Atla, what do the strands of fate look like when I walk through a crowd?” I asked.

“They get all tangled and twisted and move in three thousand directions at once,” He/she/it answered proudly. “It’s very pretty to watch.”

“Remember that Shishi is my peer. Compared to the mess that she could be making, she is showing considerable restraint. Let’s cut her some slack. Let’s cut them all some slack, and say that only major deviations count. Okay?”

“That man will either die or become a very rich man in six months because of that coin,” Atla predicted.

“Yes, and that might seem like a major deviation, but there might have been a chance that he would have died in that time frame anyway. I don’t know because I couldn’t look at his strands before the coin changed hands,” I said. I shrugged. “Atla, sometimes, you just need to let things go. Shishi is trying to obey the promise she made. Let it rest at that.”

“Okay father,” Atla said, and he/she/it hummed with pleasure as it continued to watch itself grow.

~~~~~~

Shishi was shown into a lavish estate, where a silver path cultivator greeted her with a bow. The young woman chatted in one of the languages that were being spoken everywhere, but not the predominant one. They retired to a lounge, where the young cultivator served Shishi tea.

Shishi was a little nervous, because she knew that any action on her part could change the weave of this woman’s fate, but so could any inaction. Her fate-senses were not particularly powerful, although they were more advanced than most any of her peers. So she smiled and took her tea, which was fairly good although lacking in spirituality, and smiled.

After being made welcome for some time, the door opened and a golden path cultivator stepped in. She too bowed to Shishi and politely made her greeting.

“Hello, honored guest from beyond the stars. I am Lady Di Tonilla. This is my sister wife Di Sana. We welcome you into our home.”

Shishi relaxed. With a golden path cultivator present, that changed matters, as any alteration to fate she made could be argued to apply to the golden path cultivator exclusively and then ripple down through the ranks independently of her actions. Lady Tonilla’s presence freed her up considerably.

“Thank you for your welcome. May I ask how it was that you spotted me?”

“We do not have so many who walk the golden path on this world that the addition of a new one in our city would go unnoticed,” Tonilla explained. “And we had forewarning from the world-father that guests would be arriving from off-world. It was the logical assumption to make, Lady …”

“Call me Shishi,” Shishi said. “Just Shishi. You have the surname Di. Do you have any relationship to Di Phon?”

“That is the name of my husband’s father,” Tonilla answered. “Why? Have you met?”

“He is currently vexing Lord Loshi considerably with his stubbornness. It’s very amusing,” Shishi admitted. “Loshi knows that he has made a grave error and refuses to admit it, yet it’s obvious to everyone by the ascension of Atla inside his domain, under the rule of a different Xian Lord, shows that he is a fool who cannot maintain a grip on his own powerbase. To have surrendered a world and for it to immediately be claimed as Atla was, and then raised seven stages as well? Hah!”

Tonilla waved her fan, which had the character for ‘pleasant greetings’ on it, not that Shishi was familiar with fan etiquette on this world. “I’m afraid that much of what you are saying is going over my head. I do not know who Lord Loshi is, but if he had any say in the night that the stars went out, then I’m not sure whether to thank him for standing aside for Little Bug’s rise or to curse him for abandonment.”

“Yes, that is how you should feel,” Shishi said.

“I see.”

A brief silence in the conversation, then Tonilla offered her guest a tart. Shishi ate it willingly, although she still had her basket of fruit. The tart was sweat and filled with jelly from a different sort of fruit, one with a tangy zest.

“Might I ask what the purpose of your visit to this world is, or is that overly presumptuous,” Tonilla asked as Shishi ate.

“It is no secret. We are here to establish relations between the Emerald Court of Xian Lords and a new Xian Lord who has arisen within our domain. We must clarify whether or not he had anything to do with the corruption that caused Lord Loshi to forfeit this world, but I find that hard to believe after feeling the purity of his aura and the purity of this world’s Qi.”

The silver-ranked woman spoke suddenly, rapid-fire in a tongue that Shishi couldn’t understand. Lady Tonilla smiled.

“My sister-wife said that her son is pure and has no taint of corruption on his soul. She is a little indignant of the accusation.”

Shishi’s eyebrows rose. “This woman is the mother of the lord of this world?”

“Indeed. He visits her quite frequently still, although only in avatar form. Is that so hard to believe?” Tonilla inquired.

“While Xian Lords have arisen from all sorts of backgrounds, I find it difficult to believe that someone could have risen to the rank of a Xian Lord while their mortal parents still lived, that is all,” Shishi explained. “How old is this ‘Little Bug’ anyway?”

“It has been eighteen years since he was born, according to his mother,” Lady Tonilla answered.

Shishi dropped her tart.

‎