As soon as I had control of the body, I tossed off the bed covers, and found some other bandages that I was able to tightly tie around the bottom of the leg stump.

Almost immediately the white fabric started turning red as the blood soaked through. “For fuck’s sake,” I said aloud. “Come on, can’t you stop for half an hour? I want to hang out with people without leaving a mess.”

To my enormous surprise, the blood immediately coagulated and the dripping stopped.

I stared at the bloody bandaged stump.

Was the emperor’s magic primed somehow to be friendly to me but not Sesako? Well, I supposed that was nice of the emperor?

I made myself float upwards from the bed and flipped in the air so that I was properly upright.

Well… that is less bad than I expected losing a leg to be. And apparently if we worked consistently at it for a while, it would grow back.

In this context, I suppose it sort of made sense for the emperor to see hacking my leg off as an almost friendly way of saying ‘hey, guess which of us is better at fighting’.

If he’d gotten the chance, Sesako would not have just hacked the emperor’s leg off.

I did not want to be alone, and as Sesako had chased off Hinete — didn’t the man realize that she wanted him to not be obsessed with murdering the emperor for her own, private, reasons? — I had to go look for my own company.

After experimenting with using magic to try walking with a force projection instead of a leg, I decided to just not bother, and set off floating on a bed of air. I moved faster this way than on foot even when I was healthy anyways.

Night had fallen, but the big mess hall, with the giant windows, was kept bright by a variety of magical lamps, spells, and devices. Outside the glass fireworks regularly went off, and the whole room was jammed with cultivators chugging wine and daintily sipping beer.

Food, shouting, laughing, more than a few people huddled and sobbing.

Under the flickering lights of the powerful light spells that served in the place of fireworks, the matriarch of the dragons lay outside, all stretched out. Giant bandages had been placed around her huge, destroyed eye by healers. An entire team of cultivators, including Akane sat next to her, drinking themselves, but also observing carefully to ensure that the process of healing progressed well.

“Her eye won’t ever come back.”

Fitzuki floated up next to me and he put his arm around my shoulder. We both noticed that many of the cultivators in the hall were staring at us. “Our great hero! He survived fighting the emperor again! The Celestial of Yatamo. Cheer him!”

I was thoroughly cheered.

Fitzuki had a slight sway to his motion, and a strong scent of alcohol on his breath. He grinned at me. “Let’s talk a bit — you have any idea what She said to the emperor?”

“You know that I am Isaac, not Sesako.”

“Of course.” We flew up to the highest level of the eating hall, and then Fitzuki led me to the room he’d appropriated as his own office.

The entire left wall was a single piece of glass looking out over the valley. It likely took two purified cores three tries to set the pane correctly. It had probably been put in place shortly after the rising when this tower was built. There certainly had not been the time or resources for such refinement with the new construction that had been made as the war came closer and closer.

I settled into one of the armchairs, as I felt more comfortable doing that than simply floating in the air, while Fitzuki hopped up, and just sat on the wide table covered with maps that served as his desk.

The room was wholly dark; through the window we clearly saw the matriarch and the cultivators who surrounded her, the ongoing display of fireballs and lightning bolts. In the darkness between the blasts the half moon was beautiful, and the distant stars shimmered.

With the enhanced cultivator’s vision I had, I saw deep out into space, and into the immense dusting of stars in the core of the galaxy. I saw the spiral formations of nearby galaxies. None of the constellations matched those I knew from earth, and I was pretty sure that none of the galaxies I saw in the night sky matched Andromeda. This was a wholly different galaxy than the Milky Way..

Fitzuki offered me a glass of wine that smelled excellent and complicated. There didn’t seem to be any distilled spirits in this world. If I figured out how to make them, it would be worth a lot of money. I knew the general principle and figuring out the details probably wouldn’t be that hard.

Though maybe I’d make the world a worse place, even after accounting for how I’d donate most of the money. Distilled alcohol did caused serious alcoholism in people who were fine with wine or beer.

So yeah. I was going to permanently lose rum and coke, especially since I didn’t have a clue how the flavor for Coca-Cola was made.

I sipped the wine.

“You don’t seem ecstatic,” Fitzuki said. “I expected Sesako to be glum, but not you.”

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

“Oh,” I laughed. “Sesako is far glummer than I possibly could be. He chased Hinete off by thinking aloud his plans to still chase down and kill the emperor.”

Fitzuki laughed. “Does Sesako know that his apprentice is in love with him?”

I shrugged. “He probably now knows that you think she is. I do to.”

“He’s an idiot. But that is none of my business.”

“And are you planning to also spend the rest of your life trying to get revenge on the emperor for killing the Great Ones a hundred years ago?”

Fitzuki slowly shook his head and sipped his wine. “No… no. I’ve always seen the future as what matters, not the past. The past is gone. It doesn’t exist. I only care about what I can affect. Sesako — poor fellow, he isn’t going to change. Determined fellow.”

I grimaced. “I’d strongly prefer if he would. But whatever. We have agreed to work together — how long will it take for this thing to grow back?” I gestured at the missing leg.

“A lot of work. Twice as long for you as it would for me. The more dantians you open, the harder it is for you to channel your magic correctly to cause the body to regrow. A healer working for a couple of hours a day can regrow the limbs of someone without their spark in less than a month, while when I lost my leg… oh it was a hundred years ago now. One of the early wars in the rising. I had to meditate for an hour on the cycling each day for a year and a half.”

“Do most of the people without sparks actually get that care?”

“What?” He shrugged. “Almost none of them. You ask rhetorically — only a healer with a purified core can manage to guide the process in someone with no spark. I doubt that this would be the most efficient way you can help people. Oh, by the way — I’m going to give you two billion imperials to efficiently help.”

“You are?” I smiled at him. “I think you said that to Sesako at some point when I was paying attention.”

“I always assume that anything I tell either of you might make it to the other one — anyways, yes. Another big hunk of money. Much bigger actually than the one Sesako owes you. Go forth, nutty friend. Do something useful.”

“I will.” I grimaced. “I suppose I ought to contact that librarian who offered to set up a research organization. And maybe offer prizes or something for people who suggest good ways to help.”

“Don’t do a cash prize. Offer some enchanted device or something.”

“But cash is the universal sign of actually caring about something.”

Fitzuki laughed, “That is nonsense. You never married in that other world?”

“No,” I shook my head.

Fitzuki drained the rest of his wine glass, and as he refilled it, he said, “Should you ever somehow marry, I advise you not to believe that your wife will be more impressed with a bag of gold than some gift that shows actual thought and knowledge of her character.”

I laughed, and finished my own glass of wine, and offered it to Fitzuki to refill.

It was impossible for powerful cultivators to become really drunk. A golden core like Hinete could get drunk it if she had vodka or rum and took lots of shots, but once the second dantian was opened the magic in the body would automatically breakdown the alcohol faster than it could reasonably accumulate.

It took continuous concentration to keep that from happening. And a great many cultivators who enjoyed alcohol had a talent for suppressing the magical breakdown of alcohol, but the ‘problem’ was that once a cultivator started to move past being tipsy to being really drunk, it became impossible for them to keep sufficient control over their magic to keep the body from clearing out the alcohol.

Fitzuki was near that edge, and he seemed to be in a good mood, grinning, happy, and quite willing to forget the dead. Or maybe he was celebrating their sacrifices.

Fitzuki looked out at the valley beneath. Deep down I saw that there were three other dragons. They spoke to each other, and a group of farmers herded big fat cows up to the group for a midnight snack.

“Do you regret it?”

“The war and all the deaths? Should I in your view?”

I shrugged. “I cannot decide whether to despise the emperor for being a monster, or like him for being highly capable, or forgive him since he’s stopped making things worse.”

“Ah! Yes, didn’t you, or did Sesako say that he wanted to offer you a job.” Fitzuki laughed and pointed at the stump of the leg. “No hard feelings?”

“He did that to Sesako, while he offered me the job.”

“The old goat fucker likes you.”

“Did he ever actually fuck any goats?”

Fitzuki coughed while laughing, and sprayed wine out his nose. As he giggled and sputtered, he reached around for a cloth to wipe himself off with. “No one else ever asked that question. Not as far as I know. I started calling him that because I wanted to see if it would start rumors.” Fitzuki added smugly. “It did.”

I laughed. “You monster.”

Fitzuki groaned, sighed, and stretched out his legs. He looked out at the stars outside. “Beautiful, isn’t it? — I’m as much of a monster as the emperor is. It just — my loyalty was to the Great Ones. Him too, but the Great Ones more. That’s why I switched the instant I heard what happened. I don’t think it makes sense to judge great statesmen and generals as individuals. They are tools of fate.”

“A man is still a man. And a man is still responsible for his own actions, and he ought to be punished when he behaves wrongly.”

“Feel free to punish me, the emperor, or anyone else you want as a man. But as an emperor he sits above that. As the chosen general of the Yatamo, my duty was to the state, not to morality.”

I frowned. I did not like that notion, but at this moment — perhaps because of the pain from my leg, and that continued mixing of the emperor’s magic in it. I couldn’t phrase exactly my objection. “I suppose,” I said after a while, “That even though I judge outcomes in terms purely of their consequences, I think of individuals as being intrinsically bad or good.”

Fitzuki shrugged. “You have the mind of a peasant more than that of a great cultivator who stands above and outside the normal course of men.”

Neither of us said anything for a bit. But then I said, “Thank you for putting money towards my projects to improve the world.”

“There will be more coming. Eventually ten percent of everything I own. Though I want to see how you manage what you have now before I give you even more. But I’m convinced. It is a simple thing to do: Spend ten percent on good deeds, and then no one can call you an asshole for not doing anything.”

“With the giant amount of money you, presumably, have control over, you ought to give more than ten percent to get absolution.”

Fitzuki laughed. “Never satisfied, are you? Always needs to be more, more, and more.”

“No — it doesn’t. The idea is that —”

“Do you know what the problem is with you?”

By now I’d drunk enough of the fine wine that Fitzuki had been refilling that I replied by sneering and saying, “I don’t have any problems.”

Fitzuki laughed. “The problem is that you think too hard about things. And that you talk too much.”

“That isn’t a problem.”

“Yes, it is: Forget everything else you say and make your message simple and useful.”

“Okay, what is my message?”

“Do good if you can. Ten percent of your resources is a good benchmark. And since some ways of helping people make a bigger difference than others, do the ones that make the bigger difference. Say that and shut up.”

I considered. “I suppose that is the core of what I want to tell people.”

“Yes — stop talking about everything else.”

“But I like talking about everything else.”

“As I said, you have a problem.”

I laughed, drank the rest of my wine, and extended the glass out. Fitzuki obliged by refilling it.

The two of us sat together for a while in silence, quietly looking at the stars and the dragons, and a world that was a little more peaceful today than it had been yesterday.