Chapter 12

Tan was exhausted by the time they’d finished fitting him for his outfit for the next day, and he’d promptly fallen asleep on the lounge in the seamstress’s room. He hadn’t woken when he was carried into the cheap motel that the family was staying in, and he slept straight through the night. In the morning, when he awoke suddenly with a bladder near bursting, he and his family returned to the seamstress and he squeezed into his outfit.

It was admittedly much more comfortable now that it was sewn properly.

But the hat was still stupid.

As he walked through the streets, however, he abruptly became aware of the fact that everyone was looking at him. At him and his parents. Not just looking at them, but scurrying out of their way. He hadn’t been the only one to change clothes at the seamstress’s, with his father wearing blue and green silk robes and his mother a violet kimono.

Both were embroidered with the words for “Grandmaster.”

He wished that he could wear clothes like his father, but they hadn’t had time to wait for the seamstress to make an entirely new outfit for him. Instead she’d had to fit together two existing projects to make do. The seamstress had been excited for the prospect when she’d learned that she was designing an outfit for a young master of a powerful cultivator family. Less excite when she’d heard the time limit.

Tan told himself that the strangers were just looking at him because the embroidery said that he was a cultivator. So he decided to give them a reason to stare and he abruptly flew two feet off the ground as he followed along behind his father.

Suddenly the streets weren’t filled with people who were gawking at them. Suddenly the streets were empty. He looked around.

“Did I do that?” he asked.

“Yes. You frightened them,” his mother said.

“How?”

“The stories of cultivators having tempers are not always as exaggerated as I wish they were,” Wensho said sadly. “When a commoner in a city sees a cultivator using magic, it’s not like in our sleepy little village where they had a personal relationship with the cultivator for most of their life before ever learning about our mystical powers. They saw you and they saw someone unknown with a suit that says you’re powerful, and they took your appearance at face value.”

“But I wasn’t going to hurt anyone,” Tan objected.

“We know that and you know that, but they didn’t know that when they ran from us,” Tren explained. He scratched his nose. “I hope nobody got hurt in the stampede to get away from us.”

Tan felt a bit guilty that he’d scared everybody without meaning to. He was used to everyone knowing that he could fly and it not being that big of a deal. After all, to him, it wasn’t much more difficult than walking. In fact, it was much easier to fly fast than it was to run fast, so whenever he was in a hury his feet would inevitably leave the ground before long.

“I’m sorry,” he told his parents.

“That you scared those people? It’s fine,” his father assured him. “Let’s go inside.”

They went into the fancy estate, which belonged to a local merchant who was privately more than a little annoyed to have been abruptly kicked out of his primary home at short notice by the powerful cultivators who only contributed to ten percent of his bottom line and were, he thought, often more of a headache than they were worth.

Like when they demanded he vacate his home on short notice for a playdate for their children.

It was a very nice estate, with plumb trees everywhere in the front courtyard. Tan looked at the trees and squinted slightly. Did they have spirits in them? No, he thought. They weren’t spiritual trees. They had corpses planted beneath them and they were haunted.

“Why are their dead people beneath the trees?” he asked his mother.

“I don’t know and it’s not really our business to ask,” Wensho answered.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

“Did the Zang family kill them to fertilize their trees?” he pressed.

“I’m sure that’s not what happened at all,” she said. “If it bothers you I can ask for you.”

Tan frowned as he looked at the ghosts which were lingering in the branches of the trees. “I don’t think they were murdered,” he said eventually. “They all look old and kind of happy. One of them is laughing and feeding the other a ghost-plumb.”

“It might be how the family honors their dead,” his mother said. “I’m a little surprised that you can see them at your current cultivation. You’re even more sensitive than we realized.”

“You’ve said that before,” Tan said.

“It was true before, and it’s true now,” she said.

They walked through the courtyard of the dead-people-trees and met with a wall of servants, who showed them into a parlor where a young looking man and a pale woman who gave off an icy radiance were waiting for them. There were cushions on the floor, and Tan abruptly sat on the one in the middle.

His parents exchanged looks, grinning, before kneeling at either side to him.

“Hello, honored cultivators. I am pleased that you have accepted the invitation to resolve our dispute peacefully. I am Toh Zang,” the woman said. “This is my husband Mahn Zang. Our daughter, Kora, is still dressing, but will join us shortly.”

“I am Tren Shen. This is my wife, Wensho Shen and my son, Tan Shen. Tan is bound to the spirit which you claim belongs to your family and we are not willing to discuss any option for resolving the dispute in which that becomes untrue,” Tan’s father said.

“Of course not. We’re not barbarians, as we said in our letter,” Toh said.

“Furthermore, it takes more than pursuing a spirit to establish a claim on that spirit. Do you even know its name?” Tren pressed.

Toh frowned. “We called it Onmigosha.”

“Wrong,” Tan said, giggling. “Really really wrong.”

“Whatever you named it, the fact remains that you disregarded our claim, entered the territory of our family and poached it--”

“Your family does not own the black sky mountains. It owns one mountain in the range. I went nowhere near it,” Tren objected.

“You destroyed the wards that were keeping the spirit isolated and weakening it. You benefited from our efforts in your own capture of the spirit,” Toh argued.

“That’s what you were doing? I was wondering why she was injured when I found her. It seems that she broke your wards herself, but it hurt her. I didn’t benefit at all from your efforts at forcing an unwilling spirit on an unknowing child. It took me days to gain her trust, and it might have all fallen apart if she had not been charmed by my son’s innnocence,” Tren argued.

Toh opened her mouth, then closed it. She looked ot her husband.

“It seems that we have some philosophical differences about how the binding process should occur,” Mahn admitted. “Regardless, we are willing to overlook any tresspass that may or may not--”

“--did not occur--” Tren interjected.

“--in exchange for the rejoining of the spirit in question into the Zang clan through marriage. We believe that this is the most equitable solution, as nobody truly loses anything. You gain a daughter with a powerful fire spirit, and we gain a son with a powerful air spirit. Each of our families becomes stronger for the union.”

Tren waited until he was certain that the man had finished speaking, then he shrugged. “You have said as much in your letter. We brought our son to meet your daughter and put this farce to rest. If they get along in this meeting then his mother and I are willing to entertain negotiations to enter a courtship between them. If they don’t, then we offer you five high-grade spirit stones to break off contact without admitting to any wrongdoing on our part. Are these terms acceptable?”

Toh coughed. “Five? Did you say five high grade?”

“Yes,” Tren confirmed.

Tan frowned, but it was not, as the Zangs thought, because he was concerned for his family’s wealth. Rather he was concerned because he thought that all of the stones that his father had found over the years were of low quality, but his father had just described them as high grade. He’d never known his father to lie in a formal negotiation before.

“Very well,” Mahn Zang said. “Kora! Come out here and meet your future husband!”

The door to the parlor opened and a thirteen year old girl walked in wearing a silk dress. She frowned at Tan.

“What is he wearing?” she asked.

“What are you wearing,” he challenged back, having never seen a girl in a dress so impractical before. “Can you even run in those shoes?”

“I wouldn’t need to run if I could fly!” she challenged.

He abruptly felt the temperature begin to rise in the room, like when Won began to lose his temper. And Tan reacted the same as he would if he was dealing with Won, snuffing the fire Qi that the girl was directing at him with her anger.

She gasped out in surprise.

“Second stage of the profound realm!” she announced. “But he’s so young!”

Toh and Mahn were likewise agape at the boy’s cultivation. They had expected that it would have taken him two or three years to have bonded the spirit, and that he would be in the first or second stage of the initiate’s realm. To be so powerful already was simply unheard of, and impossible from the way they understood things.

“You’re off to a great start. Why don’t you try punching him in the nose next,” Wensho teased the girl. “He’ll like that about as much as what you just did.”