The walk from the Cao family compound to the Sect was one that Yi Cao never forgot. Details of his old life had drifted in and out of focus in the intervening twelve years, but something about the long trip with Uncle Bao always stuck with him.

The way the rain rattled on the aspen leaves when they left the towering conifers of the wilderness behind. The stink of human settlements and the voices of strangers calling out to uncle Bao as they approached. The way the clouds parted around the mountain peaks while the sun set behind them and they trudged through open fields soggy from the passing rain.

Uncle Bao rarely spoke. He sucked on grass stems and chewed on bark. Showed Yi Cao how to identify the sorts of trees and plants that could be snacked on while they walked and pointed out the ones that would give him a rash if he let it touch his skin, or chose to clean himself with it when they stopped. He taught Yi Cao how to set the shelter every night and bank the fire so that it wouldn’t go out in the rain and checked to make sure Yi Cao’s bag was strapped tightly around his chest and shoulders every morning before they set out.

The details of the journey never left Yi Cao, but the sorrow he’d felt as they left the Cao family walls had faded with time until he remembered the weeks long walk, not as the melancholy affair it probably had been in reality, and more for the brief moments of excitement that came whenever he thought of the future he was moving towards, the wonders he would see, and the person he would become.

They made one major detour on their trip. They veered east as they reached the foot of one of the mountains, and followed a long winding trail along a sandy creek that burbled in the periodic rain that followed them most days as they hiked through forests green from spring. The creek narrowed until they followed a rivulet no wider than his hand hissing as it ran through scree and tumbled mountain stones.

It terminated at its source, at the base of a spear of brown rock that jutted from the gray stone of the mountainside. There they stopped to rest in the cover that spear of stone provided from the rain.

They stayed there longer than usual. His uncle Bao reclined against his bag staring up at the stone while he chewed on a stick and Yi Cao tossed pebbles into the little rivulet bubbling up from the stone.

The rain eventually passed and Yi Cao looked up as a beam of light dropped on their section of the mountainside.

“Rain’s gone.” A six year old Yi Cao told his uncle.

Uncle Bao just grunted and kept on chewing on his stick.

The daylight faded as the clouds shifted, then disappeared, a new spot of light dropping from the sky several miles to the east and higher up on the mountain.

“Shouldn’t we go on?”

Uncle Bao took the stick out of his mouth then teased at the crevice between two teeth with a corner of it. He gestured up at the stone above them with the little piece of wood.

“What do you think of this?” He asked his nephew.

Yi Cao looked up at the spear of rock. It was smooth, almost perfectly circular and two hundred yards long, like the trunk of a massive tree suddenly turned to stone halfway through falling to the ground.

Yi Cao turned back to his uncle. “I think it’s drier here than beneath the trees.” He said, then looked around at the rubble they’d made their resting place. “But too bumpy for a camp.”

Uncle Bao chewed on his stick for a moment, nodding sagely before he gestured further along the barren gray slope.

“What about over there?” He asked.

More sunlight fell from the sky only to disappear the next moment as Yi Cao looked along the slope. Another leaning tree of stone jutted from the mountainside a half mile away, this one broken at the middle so that a hundred yards of the thing lay broken and strewn on the ground beneath it.

Yi Cao looked down at the pebbles at his feet and he tossed another one into the stream before he looked back at the second stone pillar then back at his uncle.

“Are they trees?” He asked.

Uncle Bao chuckled low in his throat and shook his head. “Try again.”

Yi Cao studied the stone tree in the distance, then shook his head and went back to throwing stones. They plopped as they dropped into he stream, like unusually large raindrops.

“They’re weapons.” His uncle told him. “Old cultivator’s weapons thrown in some battle nobody remembers anymore.”

Yi Cao looked up at the stone above him. He watched the rain running down the length of the stone spear for some time before he looked down at his pebbles again and threw a few more into the stream.

“There are more.” Uncle Bao told him. “Go another day’s walk and the mountain is littered with their fragments.” He chewed on his stick then spat out a bit of woodchips and stuck the twig back in his mouth. He put his hands behind his head. “Only the immortals remember who threw them anymore. Centuries later. The woods have grown up around a few down in the valley. Trees thick as they are, and almost as tall.”

Yi Cao dug up a pebble that glittered with embedded crystals out of the ground and spun it in the shifting light while his uncle stared up at the stone in silence.

“You’re going to be a cultivator now.” His uncle told him after a while. “Might be throwing more than pebbles, in a couple of centuries.”

The lustre of the crystal pebble disappeared as the sunlight dropped away and Yi Cao twisted it in the palm of his hand before he tossed it into the stream. He looked up at the spear and remained looking at it in silence with his uncle until they rain began again and they set off.

He had to piss.

He had to do more than piss after his night spent on the floor of a rancid room in the back of some hostel on a technomancer’s station beyond a fold in reality itself from the world where he’d sat looking up at a stone with his uncle a decade before.

This world wasn’t like the one he’d left behind though, and as he left the Young Master snoring in bed beside two whores, probably whores, he looked for one of the signs advertised everywhere for the “facilities”.

The bar was mostly empty when he entered. Izzi lounged against the counter while the hooded man with the spare mechanical arms slouched at the bar, one gleaming metal appendage wrapped around a cup that it held just below the shrouded face while another held a fume stick the creature seemed to ignore as it stared into space.

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TC sat at one of the empty tables, one taloned hand massaging his temples while the other nursed a steaming mug.

“Get Up?” The little bartender asked as Yi Cao reached the bar.

Yi Cao shook his head and asked for the facilities at which the goblin pointed down the corridor and thumbed to the left. “Last door. Used to be a pump room when these were ducts. Lots of pipes. You’ll see the sign.”

He did indeed see the sign. A green humanoid figure boxed into a triangle of thick green lines just above a crudely painted rendition of the “pissers will be prosecuted” signs posted all over the station, but in a wavering hand drawn script and modified to read “Power to the Pissers!” and something about “the fucking cunt governor who that couldn’t shit if it tried”. He didn’t read the whole thing.

What waited for him on the other side was nothing like the pits back home.

In the sect two bricks above a pit where the hogs grunted and squealed beneath you while you did your business was what waited for you every morning in the sect, or a tree down the hill beyond the wall and out of sight of masters or elders who would tan you if they caught you “fouling the sect grounds” instead of waiting in the massive line that formed at the start of every day.

This, though. This was no pit. The thing that waited, nestled amidst a tangle of rusting pipes like a spider behind the door to the facilities, was an arcane technomancer’s throne of polished steel and blinking lights replete with dials and buttons and readouts that all meant nothing to Yi Cao except that this trip wouldn’t be the quick thing he really needed it to be.

The room stank of rust and human waste, and he stared at the contraption for several moments before he reached for one of the buttons marked in red and labeled with a sigil his brain twisted into something like “Evacuation” or “Purge”.

He stopped, hand hovering over the button, then pulled it away and stared once more at the throne. He grimaced and cursed silently. He’d have just done his business and left if Izzi hadn’t threatened him if he didn’t use the facilities, but when he looked around the only instructions he saw was a ragged scrap of something stuck to the wall whose only legible text read “Sit”.

Yes. Sit.

He glared at it, then snapped his fingers and went back to the room to retrieve the welcome manual he’d been given by the librarian.

Neither of the girls stirred as Yi Cao re-entered the room, but Zihan twitched and mumbled something before Yi Cao pulled out the booklet and retreated out of the room and back down to the facilities.

What followed was an ordeal of buttons, levers, and reading between the lines of a manual that obviously didn’t want to come out and say just what exactly he was doing in the facilities despite their obvious utility. “Relief” it said, and “when you’ve finished your break, ensure that both lights are on before securing the lid.”

He secured the lid and then just about pissed himself despite his empty bladder when the throne rumbled and howled at him while the pipes around it shook.

Relief should never be so complicated, he thought to himself as he stumbled out of the room and fled.

Fucking Technomancy.

Zihan was awake when he came back to the room and half dressed while the women lay exposed, naked, on the bed.

“You’re up.” Zihan’s voice was coarse from the smoker’s he’d inhaled the day before. “Why isn’t this place cleaned up?”

Yi Cao tore his eyes from the naked women and looked around the room. Bottles lay stacked on almost every surface. Congregated in the corners and collected on the narrow chest of drawers like an audience for whatever show they might have witnessed the night before.

Clothing lay pooled across the floor like the shed skins of snakes on a forest floor, this floor littered by empty bottles instead of fallen leaves or pine cones.

Zihan watched him look around with a small smile.

Yi Cao sucked in a breath and held it for a moment then let it out in a long sigh. “I’ll start right away.” He said.

Zihan nodded then dug into the pocket of his half cloak and tossed Yi Cao the wallet he’d spilled treasure from on Elleppu station. “Put the empty bottles in there.” He said.

Yi Cao frowned and looked at the thing. “Why?” He asked.

Zihan reached for the bottles gathered on a tiny bedside table underneath a technomancer’s lamp and weighed a few of the bottles, swinging one that seemed not to have been emptied. “That pocket vault can hold over four tons of junk. Why would I throw away perfectly good bottles that I can store?”

He peered into the bottle then upended over his mouth to finish off the last dregs. He sighed and wiped his cheek on one arm then held the bottle out to Yi Cao. “You remember how to work it?”

Yi Cao took the bottle then looked at the pocket vault for a moment before he ran his thumb along the side, triggering the lights that switched it on. When he opened it he was met by the familiar shimmering void between the folds.

Zihan smiled and pulled his shirt on over his head while Yi Cao began scooping empty bottles into the vault.

“What about the girls?” Yi Cao asked as he made his way around the room.

“They wouldn’t fit in there.” Zihan replied. “Unless you wanted to cut them into little pieces.”

Yi Cao studied, them, tried not to study them, there, but catalogued the ways they weren’t like the kind of women he might have found back home.

“Do you want me to get rid of them?” Yi Cao asked.

Zihan made a face. “Not like that.” He said. “What kind of monster do you think I am?” He grinned.

“The girls are owed money.” One of the girls groaned. She was honey blonde, hair pulled up into a loose bun that let the rest of it balloon around her face framing dark brows in an unnaturally pale face. Little clips of silver metal sat on her shoulder, or extended from them, like some kind of bizarre ornamentation, blinking with a handful of lights like jewels, a third extending from her hip like the beginnings of the dress she didn’t wear. Thick black filaments lay mingled with her hair.

Zihan leaned back and pinched her. She jerked to slap his hand away then glared at him before she rolled over and closed her eyes. ‘Go away.” She growled.

Zihan grinned. “The girls worked hard last night. I think they’ve earned a little extra sleep. They can stay.”

Yi Cao tore his eyes from the naked women to look at Zihan. He studied the boy as he picked his socks up off the floor.

“Can they?” Yi Cao asked.

Zihan paused, halfway through pulling on his socks, and looked at Yi Cao. He turned his attention back to his socks and pulled them on one at a time.

“You seem to think you have some say in the matter.” Zihan replied.

Yi Cao hesitated. He picked up another bottle and shoved it into the humming vault in his hands. “I always heard they were… bad for one’s cultivation.” He replied without turning around.

“Oh, they are.” Zihan replied. “A terrible distraction, aren’t you my dear?”

The blonde flapped a hand at him as though to chase him away. “How can a man find inner peace while troubled by physical desires?”

“Will power, I believe, is the usual answer.” Zihan replied.

There was another yelp behind Yi Cao and the sound of a hand slapping Zihans. “Will you stop that?” The girl demanded.

Zihan chuckled and pulled on both shoes then stood with a stretch. “Not to worry.” He winked at Yi Cao. “I suffer no lack in that department.”

“But…” Yi Cao frowned and glanced at the two sleeping women then leaned in to whisper, “I thought you said it was expensive to live here.” He glanced around at the remaining bottles and the two naked women on the bed. “Aren’t they… expensive?”

Zihan shoved Yi Cao out of his face. Yi Cao stumbled as he stepped backwards and almost tripped on a bottle, but caught himself on the narrow chest of drawers making the bottles stacked on it rattle at him.

“That’s not your concern.” Zihan replied. He scooped his shirt off the floor and examined it, twisting it until it was right way out again. “We have plenty, or will once our business is concluded here.” He pulled it on then threw his half cloak around his shoulder.

Yi Cao pushed himself off the dresser with a twisted expression. He wiped something off one sleeve of his shirt.

“Now.” He said. “Where are these facilities they keep going on about here? I don’t think I’m looking to draw trouble down on the place we’ll be using as our headquarters for the foreseeable future. I may as well learn to act like the law abiding visitor I don’t intend to be.”

Yi Cao studied him as he buttoned the half cloak and pulled it straight. He thought of the heavens twisting in his channels and sighed before he offered Zihan the Welcome manual. . “Take this.” He said. “It’s got instructions for using the place.” He pointed. “Left before you go out to the bar. All the way down. Door’s marked.” He hesitated. “It’s, um, an experience.” He added. “An adventure.”

Zihan grinned and flourished the manual. “Just what we’re here for.” He said, then looked around as he turned to go. “When you’re done in here come and join me for breakfast. Busy day.” Then he was gone.

Zihan stood staring at the door for several moment, holding the buzzing vault in his hands and remembering the images he’d once had of himself throwing mile long spears of stone into mountains as a cultivator.

He glanced at the women still sleeping on the bed, then shook his head and returned to scooping trash into his master’s vault instead.