Ken held out his palm, a smirk plastered across his face. "Two days," he said.

"I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about," Ichika huffed. Of course she knew what Ken was walking about - she just didn't like to lose bets.

Perhaps Ichika was just a born pessimist, but she'd been certain that something horrible would happen within two days of entering the wilderness around the Heaven's Abyss mountains. Either the imperial inspector would track them down and apprehend them, or else something terrible would come lumbering out of the wilderness and threaten them all. The girl would almost certainly die. Ken had disagreed, claiming that nobody would be seriously injured or clamoring to leave within that timespan - and he'd been right. Things weren't great, but they weren't terrible, either. Not even the spoiled daughter of Mayor Shan.

When Ichika had prayed to her ancestral kami that she might travel with and even, dare she hope, mentor some fellow women cultivators, this definitely wasn't what she'd had in mind. An idiot savant who made everything she could do look insultingly easy and didn't even know enough to ask about the things she couldn't do. And a chubby little girl whose qi wouldn't fill a thimble.

"Yes, fine," Ichika grumbled, handing the Rainbow Phoenix the two yao she owed him. Let it never be said that Tankano Ichika, first daughter of Tankano Rin Hikaru, did not honor her wagers. Honor was all she had anymore…

Well, her father would disagree over even that. She'd fled her familial duties at the first word of the interclan marriage and was sleeping with the deserter protégé of her father's house guard. At least now they had a nice mattress to dishonor themselves upon… Lynn did occasionally have good ideas, even if the woman was completely mad.

"What do you think of our two disciples?" Ken asked, quickly pocketing the brass coins.

"I've never thought I'd meet somebody so talented nor so oblivious, much less that they would occupy the same body," she said of Lynn. "As for the girl… well… she's trying."

That wasn't quite the backhanded compliment that it sounded like - as the old saying went: riches add to the house, virtues to the cultivator. Plenty of scions with mediocre potential had been handed the resources of entire sects or noble houses and proceeded to waste fortunes. Countless yun and dozens of cores wasted as their elders desperately tried to advance their scion while he refused to so much as break a sweat.

At least Hana, when given the opportunity to study beneath not one but five cultivators of the second and third realms, worked her chubby hands and feet to blisters. Despite copious gasping and complaining, she always got back up. Whether she'd collapsed from exhaustion or a light (by cultivator standards) strike to the side, she always got up. Still, Ichika couldn't help but worry that Lynn was giving the girl false hope.

Currently, Hana and Lynn sat across from one another in a little clearing, the peaks of the Heaven's Abyss looming and hazy in the distance. Her eyes went wide when she felt the ambient qi rise in a roiling mess, only to calm back to its normal fuzz a few seconds later.

"We're sure she knows what she's doing?" Ken asked.

"I'm fairly certain, yes," Ichika said coolly. She took a sip of berry smoothie… Lynn was obsessed with the cool, fruit-based beverages and Ichika couldn't fault her tastes. Apparently, one of the local forest fruits had gummy juices that made for a 'good, plant-based emulsifier' whatever that meant.

It meant Ichika had access to delicious cultivation aids out in the middle of a poor-qi zone, her dantian brimming with energy despite their surroundings. Preposterous but true - outer sect members back in civilization might pay fifty yao apiece for the smoothies that Lynn mixed from random things she'd foraged in the wilderness. Utterly preposterous.

And now Lynn had just burned off a whole step of her cultivation just like that, depending on how you defined steps within the qi refinement realm. She'd asked Ichika what to do when her dantian got too full of qi, to which Ichika had replied, like a good mentor and with only a hint of jealousy: "You can either condense and refine the qi to progress in your cultivation, expend the qi in techniques… of which you know precisely zero, or you can expel your cultivation back to a previous step and hope to do better…"

"Expel my cultivation. Great! How do I do that?" Lynn had asked.

It was not meant to be a serious option. Junior cultivators battled the heavens for each step, never knowing if the current advancement would be their last, if their quest for immortality would stall, only officially failing with their inevitable death years hence. One simply didn't undo one's cultivation unless there was no other option. But Lynn, in her idiot brilliance, thought to challenge thousands of years of orthodoxy. If she was unhappy with how her cultivation had progressed… why she'd just… what was the term she'd used?

She would just 'take a mulligan'. A novel idea…

And given that Lynn could apparently cultivate every bit of errant qi in what most practitioners considered a dead zone, it was actually doable. The girl flitted up and down her steps like a forgetful monk doing morning chores, apparently concerned with which qi patterns were 'sustainable', whatever that meant.

"Oh! I felt that!" Hana said. If expelling enviable amounts of qi in a bout of well-intentioned self-destruction was good for anything, it was awakening the qi senses of a highly-motivated mortal.

Lynn nodded without opening her eyes or moving any other part of her body. "Good… but don't fixate on the qi around you. I want you to accept the world around you and put it to the side - we're focusing internally. There should be part of you in there, your inner light, that reacts to a pulse of qi, to a sound, to a thought, to anything. But especially to qi. Give me a few minutes to gather some trash qi up and I'll release it again. Try not to pay attention to the qi, though. Pay attention to the strand within your dantian that reverberates with it. Do you understand?"

Hana nodded, her eyes clamped shut. "Yes, Mistress Lynn! I'll try my best."

That was one of the many strange things about Lynn's cultivation technique - it started with the inner senses rather than the outer senses, which was completely backwards to everything that Ichika had ever learned on the topic. It was impossible to gather qi to ignite one's dantian without first being able to sense the stuff. Sure, there was quite a bit of nuanced spiritual process that went on to accomplish this, but the student didn't need to understand that bit until much later in their cultivation…

Was it possible that Lynn had somehow discovered a better way? Surely after thousands of years and countless geniuses, there was no improving upon a long-perfected process.

"Should I… destroy my cultivation?" Ichika muttered.

"What?" Ken sputtered, understandably aghast. "Are you serious?"

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"N-no, of course not, idiot! Especially not out here in the wilderness! I just wonder… if I could start again, could I start better knowing what I know now?"

He shrugged, not offended in the slightest. "There are some decisions you just can't unmake."

And Ichika knew that he was absolutely right.

--------

We were finally back on the road again after three days in the pleasant little clearing. Well… 'on the road' wasn't quite accurate since there was no road out here, but we were on the move. We'd just gone through a morning martial training session, followed by some cultivation, wherein I walked everybody through my meditation technique once again. Of all the group, only Hana, the mayor's daughter, seemed to be getting it.

The rest of the group - the other cultivators - were full of skepticism, insisting that this thing or that couldn't possibly work, all while admitting that it apparently did work for me. I didn't need that kind of negativity in my life, so I acknowledged their criticisms without affirming them and continued trying to teach Hana. She was trying so hard!

After riding with Hana in the cart for a ways, during which we continued our meditation lessons, Ichika asked me if I wanted to ride one of the horses - obviously, I did! I was never what you might call a 'horse girl', but I still liked the creatures and riding them. I'd only ever had a handful of lessons, but it was enough that I didn't make a fool of myself when mounting and riding.

Monkey Yang frowned as Ichika asked him to dismount, but he did so anyway, falling back to walk alongside Big Shilei next to our cart.

"Lynn… I worry you're giving the girl false hope," Ichika said quietly.

"Who? Hana?" Ichika shot me a flat look - of course, Hana. What other girl was accompanying us? "What kind of false hope?"

"You've gotten the idea in her head that she can be a cultivator. Fewer than one in ten people are capable of awakening their qi, even with training. What reason do you have to think that Hana is one of them?"

I tapped on my chin in thought. I hadn't known that at all. Obviously, most people weren't cultivators, but it never occurred to me why most people weren't cultivators. Probably for the same reason that most people on Earth weren't successful: lack of opportunity and lack of ambition. Was it possible that Hana would never be a cultivator? That didn't seem to track… after all, the girl could already sense my qi when I pushed it at her.

"She can already sense qi when there's a big flux of it," I said.

Ichika snorted back a laugh. "Lynn… almost everybody can do that…"

"Huh. Then maybe almost everybody can be a cultivator? Did you ever think of that?"

"Yes, I'm sure thousands of years and thousands of cultivation masters have all been wrong, Lynn. If anybody could be a cultivator, then why wouldn't the emperor or the sects elevate entire villages? My fa- uh… I know of clans that would be overjoyed to make every clan-member and vassal a cultivator."

I shrugged. "Before nets were invented, I bet spear fishers thought only fast people with good hand-eye coordination could catch fish. But guess what? All you need are the right tools. I think that anybody with the right tools and enough determination can be a cultivator…"

Ichika sighed. "I wish I could believe that, but some of us must reside in the real world, Lynn. I just want you to be mindful of your promises."

"I bet you two yao she'll be a cultivator before we reach another town," I said.

"I was taught not to engage in a bet that I wouldn't be equally happy to lose - in which case I accept. If that girl is in the first stage by the time we reach civilization, I will happily give you my last two yao."

"Oh…" I said, my face drawing into a frown. "Then how will we go shopping?"

Ichika chuckled. "You are a very strange woman, Lee Lynn. Now… will you go tell Yang I invite him to ride on his horse once more?"

I shrugged. "His horse? In case you forgot, we basically stole these horses. You can give your boytoy your horse if you like or convince Ken to get off his. I want to ride for a bit."

Ichika sputtered in protest, but what could she really say? She wasn't my boss, and nobody had any more or less right to ride a horse than anybody else. I'd go back and ride in the cart with Hana in a bit - and, until then, Ichika would just have to deal with not riding side-by-side with Yang in the wilderness like the wholesome, lovestruck protagonists of a Hallmark special. Really, Iron Ichika could be so self-centered!

Plus, I really didn't want to go on the cart right now. A light rain had swept in from the mountains and the contents of the cart (Hana included) had been draped in waterproofed canvas to keep everything dry. This was especially important for the remnants of Ichika's wardrobe, which no longer had a proper top, and our mattresses, which would soak the water right up. I didn't mind the rain so long as it was light, and I rode along.

The rain was a gentle hiss in the trees, the little sprinkles wetting my hair and clothes without threatening to soak through. And, in the late afternoon light, the shadows stretched long lines from the tree trunks… with the odd outcroppings of rock, it almost looked like we were riding through the ancient remains of a city…

"Is this an old city?" I asked.

"Don't be absurd. There have never been any cities in the Heaven's Abyss," Ichika huffed, still a bit annoyed at me. She rode forward and out a bit - it was almost like we were riding down a road again. A very old and overgrown road. "I can't believe it. I think you're right," she called back. "Ken, were there ever any towns this close to the mountains?"

Ken pulled even with us, his keen eyes peering out into the forest. Sure enough, there were dozens of ruined buildings out there. The remains of houses and towers, walls and courtyards. Whatever settlement had once stood here might well be the size of Rushing Rivers or even larger.

"As far as I know, there's never been a major settlement this far into the diffuse qi area, and the public records go back to the Resplendent Dragon Emperor," Ken said.

"Which was… really long ago?" I said.

He nodded. "Almost three thousand years ago, predating the Golden Phoenix Emperor…"

"So this is either super old or it's a secret. This place looks old, but I don't think it looks three thousand-plus years old. More like a few hundred."

"And pray tell, how would you know that?" Ichika asked.

"I visited my cousin out in New Hampshire a few times as a kid - in the summers, obviously. It gets really cold there in the winters, plus I had school. We'd sometimes go out to state parks… sometimes riding like we're doing now, or just for hikes, and there would be these ruins out in the woods from, like, the 1700s. So two hundred and fifty or three hundred years old. Old houses and mills, that sort of thing. They looked about like how these ruins look."

"Um," Ichika shot me a confused look. "There's a lot about that statement that I'd like to explore…"

"I thought you said you didn't go to school," Ken said with a skeptical sneer.

"Uh… right…" I wasn't exactly keeping the fact that I was from another planet secret, but it was a little bit embarrassing that I hadn't brought it up yet despite it probably being the most important fact about me. "I'll have to tell you guys about that some other time. Besides, I think you're burying the lede here: secret old city! Why would there be a secret city out in the wilderness?"

"Why, indeed?" Ichika said. "The only reason there aren't cities out here is because no cultivators want to protect them - I'm fine with a jaunt into the wilds, but my cultivation is stalled for as long as I'm here."

"Mine isn't," I observed.

"Yes, Lynn. I'm aware of that," Ichika huffed. "My point is that, maybe there was somebody protecting this town, but they abandoned it."

"Right… and protecting it from what, exactly?" I asked. "We've been traveling through here for a few days now and the scariest thing we've seen is a bear that I probably could have chased off before I was a cultivator."

"There are far worse things than bears out here, Lynn," Ichika insisted.

"But are there?"

"Yes!"

"Then how come we haven't seen any? It's really weird, right?"

"I agree with Lynn," Ken said. "It is odd that we haven't seen so much as the hint of a spirit beast. With no sects or clans to keep their numbers in check, they should rule these lands… and yet we've seen not a clue of them."

"I knew it was weird," I stated. As we continued through the abandoned town, we reached the ruin of a great wall - a wall that was surprisingly intact except for several spots where it had seemingly been blasted into smithereens from an outside force. There were dark stones the size of a person or bigger scattered for many yards behind where a massive force had, like a massive cannonball, pulverized the outer stones and flung the inner ones in all directions.

Beyond the ruins of the wall was a broad, lightly-forested slope with a clear path wending up to the top of a sizable foothill, at the top of which were yet more ruins like the remains of a great hilltop castle. "Hey, is that a castle? I wonder what's up there?"

"I think…" Ichika muttered to herself, seemingly unable to believe what she saw. "I think that's the remains of a sect…"