Mere seconds after we chased off the remaining spirit monsters and Lin (who, apparently, was a fucking ghost who could teleport out of my fucking soul) went back to my soul yoga studio, Ichika and Yang stumbled out of the nearby woods… and, man, they looked rough. Ichika, who usually didn't have a hair out of place, even after stabbing a guy through the back or stabbing another guy through the neck, was a frazzled mess, and Yang looked like a scruffy frat bro recovering from a post-finals bender.
"I… I don't know what to do…" I croaked.
Big Shilei lay before me, his face pallid, his eyed unfocused. I was pretty sure he was going into shock. I tried to remember the mandatory first aid and CPR seminar I had to take every two years to operate a gym or exercise studio in San Luis Obispo County.
"If the face is pale, raise the tail," I recited and dutifully propped his legs up on a large rock.
Ichika very nearly stumbled into me, inky dark hair whipping into my face as she skidded to a stop. "Lynn! What happened? Did… did the empty spirits get him?"
Empty spirits? I guess that made sense - that suggested they were spirits who didn't have a dantian or core (I was unclear on how spirits usually worked) and that needed to constantly devour qi to sustain themselves. No wonder they went coo-coo for cultivator puffs.
"Yeah, they surrounded him and drained a lot of qi… he killed a bunch of them, but they were too much…"
"Was that golden flash from him?" Monkey Yang asked.
"No, that was Lin…"
"You're Lynn," Yang said slowly.
"No, there's another Lin. Look, it's a long story, but-"
"Shut up, both of you!" Ichika shouted. Tears streaming down her face, she held her hand to Big Shilei's abdomen. "Oh, thank the heavens, his dantian is still there… but he's in shock…"
"That's why I raised the tail," I informed her. "Now we're supposed to wait for medical professionals…" I shook my head. "Right… wilderness… um…"
"Is he deviating?" Yang asked.
"I… I think he is," Ichika said. "His qi feels really unstable… Lynn… can you make us one of those cultivation aids?"
"I mean… if I had fruit…"
Hana chose that moment to recover her faculties of speech. "I think there might still be spirits out there…"
That was a good point. We'd killed or scared off all of the nearby spirits, but there were still plenty of them out there and no guarantee that the ones we'd chased off wouldn't be back. Shilei needed medical attention and Ken was still MIA, but we'd have no luck saving either of them if the spirits killed us all first.
"We'll make some distance," Ichika stated definitively. "Monkey and I will carry Shilei… Lynn, you'll forage for anything you can infuse qi into… and Hana, you'll keep a look out for Ken or spirits, got it?"
We nodded. They hoisted Shilei up. We took off through the woods, away from the mountains - hopefully, away from the spirits.
I kept my eyes peeled for anything I could make cultivation aid smoothies with… a few anemic berries on stunted bushes… little curved acorns that might have edible nuts inside them… oh! Truffles! A pretty good number of them, too! I crouched over, my hand plunging into the forest soil as easily as sliding into the fluffy, well-walked sand near a beachside boardwalk. I scurried to catch up with the group and, as soon as I sniffed the telltale odor of truffle again, I repeated the process.
If I could find truffles like this back in Cali, I would be rich!
About fifteen minutes and two miles later, Ichika and Yang propped Shilei against a tree trunk, both of them looking a bit better than earlier despite having just jogged two miles carrying a guy who had to weigh three hundred pounds. Poor Hana was completely gassed, taking in labored gasps of air and shuffling along, sweeping up troughs of brown pine nettles with every stumbled step. If the empty spirits could track at all, we were fucked.
"He's really close to deviation," Yang said. "His qi's all over the place and leaking like a sieve… if his dantian collapses…"
"He'll die?" I said.
Yang nodded gravely. "That and probably attract every empty spirit for a hundred li… which I'm guessing is a lot."
"Please tell me you found something, Lynn," Ichika said, tears brimming from her eyes. I guess her and Shilei were pretty close.
"It's not much, but I found these truffles…"
Her eyes went wide. "Lynn! That's brilliant! Yes, those are heavily earth-aspected, a perfect element to bolster Big's unstable qi!"
"Um… right… that's exactly what I was thinking," I lied. "Okay, gimme a sec…"
Unfortunately, in our escape from the empty spirits, we'd also left the ruins - I say unfortunate, because that meant that, not only were all of our supplies far behind, there weren't even any conveniently-shaped rocks around for grinding up truffles…
But I still had my waterskin. Well… Ken's extra waterskin, and whatever water I filled it with tasted faintly of cheap wine after a few hours. I poured out half the contents, washing most of the soil from the truffles in the process. Fine - some of the soil. Then I employed the full fruits of my cultivation strength, mushing up the truffles in my fist and getting as many of the flakes, crumbles, and mushed up fungal bits inside the skin. Finally, I added the remaining sprigs of spiritual herbs, pinching them into oily paste between my fingers…
And I was still out of qi.
With a sigh, I sat myself upon the forest floor and cultivated, desperately pulling in the anemic, barely-colored qi of our surroundings and just stuffing it into any space I could find within my dantian. At least a third came from the random little qi spurts jetting out of Shilei like a dropped can of Diet Coke, the qi a beautiful brassy-brown that I quickly claimed as my own and stuffed with the rest. For just this once, it didn't have to be pretty… it had to work. It had to.
"Lynn… please hurry," Ichika said, the tension rising in her voice.
"I… I think I have enough," I said, and I pushed my energy into the water skin, feeling the rich ochre of the truffles flare to life, the dank green of the spirit herbs, the faint pinkish-purple of old wine residue, the deep umber of all the soil I'd inadvertently mixed in, all of it taking on a slightly wintergreen tint as I pushed what I assume was frost-aspected qi into the skin.
Sure enough, frost flecked along the waxy leather exterior of the skin and the insides thickened without freezing through. I handed the concoction to Ichika, who squeezed it into Shilei's mouth as Yang held his head back and massaged his throat.
And, like magic, Big Shilei began to rouse. I noted his qi stabilizing almost at once, the little bleeding spurts ejecting from his dantian slowing to a trickle and then to almost nothing… not quite nothing, but almost. His eyes fluttered open, bloodshot but with the spark of awareness. Ichika cradled his head, wiping her tears with her sleeves so the big man wouldn't see them.
"Are you still with us, big guy?" she asked, her voice barely a whisper.
"I… I…"
"Yes?"
"I… would rather die than drink whatever you gave me again."
I guess truffles are kind of an acquired taste?
--------
"Can you walk?" Yang asked the big man.
"'Course I can walk," Big Shilei grumbled. He proceeded to take three pained steps before collapsing to the ground with a grunt and a curse.
"So… that's a no," Yang concluded, offering Shilei a hand up.
"Shut up! Something's coming!" Ichika hissed.
The nearby trees rustled, twigs snapped underfoot, and something came lumbering out of the darkened woods. No, someone. Ken 'the Rainbow Phoenix' had managed to accomplish what the spirits couldn't and tracked us down, stumbling out of the dark with a good portion of his clothes reduced to tattered ashes and blood dribbling all along his side.
The closest thing I can think of to describing his state is to imagine if you got run down by a dog the size of a rhino. A dog that was on fire, with magma pouring out of its mouth. And imagine if that dog chomped down on you and gave you a good shake before tossing you to the side. It wasn't a good look.
"Ken! Are you alright?" Ichika shouted, racing out to intercept the man.
"Oh, just fuckin' dandy," Ken said, and he proceeded to cough up a good mouthful of blood, which he promptly spat to the ground. "Your tracks are so obvious I could've tracked you running backward… not that I can run at the moment…"
Ichika looked like she wanted to hug her friend but visibly reconsidered after taking in his physical state. "Let's get you bandaged. We're headed to the nearest town for Shilei, which is…" she looked toward Shilei and Monkey Yang.
"Emerald Vale," Shilei said with a grunt. "Shouldn't be much more than a day's walk from here. But how are we going to pay for a healer? I've got less than a yao on me… unless any of you were carrying your funds on you, we left 'em back in the cart."
"Oh… well I bet Granny P will do it for free," I said. "She might want some favors…"
"Your grandmother lives in Emerald Vale?" Ichika asked suspiciously.
"No, she's not my actual grandma, more like a family friend. Well… Lin's only living family is kind of her enemy and one of the Dark Riders. But Granny P is my friend and good people - she was there when I arrived and… oh! Ken! You're missing like half your fingers!"
Ken held up his right hand, where his pinkie and ring finger had been torn completely off. They appeared to be the main source of his bleeding… I guess the empty spirits had managed to get a lot more physical with him than with the rest of us, and he'd clearly been generous in his use of fire qi based on his burns and the state of his clothing. He frowned, seeming to notice his missing fingers for the first time. "Two is less than half, even on one hand, Lynn," he stated with a shrug. "They'll grow back."
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That definitely didn't normally happen, so that was more cultivator stuff, I guess. We waited as Ichika patched Ken up, using her own leg wrappings to bind his wounds and leaving her wearing billowy dark culottes that didn't fit with wilderness wandering or the rest of her ensemble at all. The whole time, she kept casting suspicious looks in my direction - and, once we got started off to Emerald Vale, she voiced them directly.
"Lynn… this isn't the first time you've referred to 'Lynn' like it was a different person and your story leaves a lot of questions… huge, glaring questions. I'm going to need an explanation from you before we get to Emerald Vale, and that explanation had better be good…"
I scrunched my face in thought, peering out into the nighttime woods as we trudged along. Big Shilei hobbled along with Yang's help, Hana was exhausted, and Ken had his own difficulties, so we set an easy pace.
"Fine," I said. "But this is really embarrassing… I probably should have told you a long time ago, but then it got really awkward, like… 'oh, hey, Ichika! Bee-tee-dubs, I'm not from cultivator land…'"
"Lynn!"
"I was getting started!"
So I proceeded to tell my longtime cultivator friends (plus Hana) what I probably should have divulged way back like a week ago when I first met them. There was so much weird, magical stuff in this world that I didn't think it would be that weird describing that I was actually from La Mancha Beach on Earth, that I'd astral projected into Lin's body in Emerald Vale, accidentally absorbed her soul (but she wasn't dead - yay!), that my meditation technique from Earth turned out to be a great cultivation method (not to mention an engaging pastime), that the original Lin was still alive inside my soul, yadda yadda. In brief, I recounted my story so far.
I expected a lot of frustration and disappointment - I seemed to garner enough of that from my cultivator friends as it was. I didn't expect fear from Monkey Yang, whose hand drifted to the pommel of his favorite knife.
"You devoured your body's soul? Ichi… does that mean she's a demon?"
Ichika frowned in thought - and didn't so much as fidget toward Red Harvest, though I had no doubt she could have her sword unsheathed in the blink of an eye if need be. "No, not if she's somehow got the original soul bonded with her own… demons are parasites. They haven't got dantians… they can't have dantians, by definition. They set their core into a host's and subsume it, and Lynn is most definitely not devouring qi, given that she regularly jettisons off as much perfectly-usable qi as I could possibly cultivate in a week. Yangutan and I watched her experience a breakthrough…"
"But the girl… Lynn…"
"No, Lin," I said. "Lin…" I pointed at my dantian. "Lynn." I indicated my whole body. "Lin. Lynn. I'm Lynn Lee… which is Lee Lynn by the empire's naming standards. She's Lee Lin. I dunno what it means that our names are almost the same…"
"It means the heavens laugh as mortals… and cultivators… struggle," Shilei said with a pained chuckle. "No, our Lynn is not a demon, nor is her host, whom I suspect is now akin to a bonded spirit beast… a bonded spirit human. Which is so ridiculous I almost want to slap myself for even saying it. But I saw and heard something before I lost consciousness, and it's consistent with what Hana and Lynn herself have reported. And even I wouldn't slap an injured old man, especially if he was me…"
"Aw… you're not old," I said. "What are you… mid-thirties?"
"I'm fifty-seven."
"Oh. Well… never mind, I guess. So what does that mean about me?"
"Well, Lynn… it would seem that you're… hmm… how do I put this lightly? Well… when a person dies, their soul typically enters a cycle that some call samsara. Through it, a soul may transcend into the universal soul, be reincarnated… uh…" Shilei shot me a nervous look.
"You've got to be shitting me," Ken groaned. "Are you telling me Lynn… that Lynn, who knows less about cultivation than my pinkie finger, which I don't even have at the moment… that Lynn is a transmigrator?"
"To be blunt, Ken… yes…"
Ken just laughed in response, a deep, full-throated laugh, spitting out blood several times and mumbling about his karma before he managed to calm down enough to be mindful of the noise - we seemed to be well away from the spirits, but there was no point in being careless.
I scowled at him, though in truth I was more relieved than angry - at least now I knew that mine was not a completely unique circumstance. "What? Why do you have to be a jerk about it? Why is that funny? You've heard of transmigrators before? Ichika, why is Ken laughing at me?"
Ichika didn’t bother to hide her own smirk. "Because, Lynn, whether heroes or villains, transmigrators are among the most prominent and influential figures in human history, including the Buddha himself, as well as the current Righteous Qilin Emperor. I think it would be wise for all of our long-term survival if your past and… unique experiences didn't find their way outside of our circle. Are we agreed?"
"My teacher is a transmigrator!" Hana blurted.
Ichika's smirk faded. "Are we agreed?"
"Um… yes," I said. "I think it would be wise if our zillionth-stage millennium-old transmigrator emperor didn't view me as a rival."
"It would be wise," Shilei nodded, and then the others agreed. Even Hana.
"Good. Then we shall speak of this no more - though I would like to meet this Lin whenever she's feeling amenable."
And so, with my transmigrator status revealed, we continued on toward Emerald Vale, the sounds of the forest at night slowly surrounding us. And, just as we slowed to discuss stopping for the rest of the night, another thought occurred to me…
"Oh, by the way… I probably mentioned this before, but the Dark Rider guy in charge of Emerald Vale? Black-blade Feng? He kinda wants to kill me."
"Of course he does," Ken the 'Eight-fingered Phoenix' groaned. "Just my fucking karma."
--------
Sabaku Ken grimaced as the walls of Emerald Vale came into view. He glanced at his right hand, the scaly, burned skin just beginning to flake off, the bare, bony nubs of his fingers ever so slightly bigger than the day before. Without expert healing, it would take weeks for them to restore naturally. Contrary to Big Shi's estimate, it had taken them almost two days to trek to the frontier town…
The big guy could only go four or five hours before needing a pick-me-up, which the fucking idiot savant transmigrator girl alchemied up as easily as brewing trail tea. So… at least she was good for something. That wasn't to say the girl had no potential as a martial expert - quite the contrary. But there was only so much you could teach even the most promising students. She might pick up as much in one lesson as the average student did in ten, but most initiates had years under their sashes before advancing past initiate status.
Ken looked over at his friend - his best friend - and couldn't help but feel for him. Big Shilei, who'd finally begun to progress toward the fourth realm after nearly a decade stalled, quite possibly reduced to a cripple because the transmigrator was incontinent with her qi.
"How you holding up, big guy?" Ken whispered.
Shilei responded with a pained nod, his bald head dappled with sweat. Remains of Lynn's absolutely foul-smelling 'truffle earth smoothie' spotted his lips. It looked like it took a minor miracle of willpower for the man just to keep the stuff down. How the mighty had fallen - and yet it could have been worse.
If you'd told Ken three years ago that he'd be in the retinue of a runaway noble girl with her lover (and a deserter from her father's clan guard), with Big Shi, and a fucking idiot savant transmigrator girl, he'd have warned you to stop chasing the dragon. It had started so promisingly, too, almost three years ago when Big Shi approached him in the outer grounds of the Mountain's Fury sect where Ken was slowly but surely defying the heavens upward toward the third realm…
"Ken." The big man had smiled his easy smile - of all his instructors, Ken liked Big Shi the best, probably because the man never refused to throw down in a drinking contest or a scuffle, not to mention he loved Ken's 'barbarian' cooking, which everybody else swore was next to inedible. They'd clearly never tried truffle smoothie. "How are things in the outer sect?"
Ken had looked up from his groundskeeping and smiled - being assigned to groundskeeping duty… to a duty that even a mortal could perform… was a surefire sign that the sect's core disciples didn't have great hopes for your future. "Slowly but surely, senior brother!" he said.
Big Shi made a show of craning his head about, even standing on his tiptoes to glare over Ken's head, which he could probably manage from a horse stance. "That's funny… I don't see any sect elders about…"
"Aw, come here, ya big fuckin' doof," Ken laughed, and the two men embraced. "Don't get out of the inner sect much these days, do you?"
"Indeed, I do not, my young, favorite alibi." Big Shi's foot scuffed carefully along the gravel. "Missed a spot."
"Very funny. So… what's this about, big man? Just looking to shoot the shit? Ready to invite me into the inner sect?"
The big guy's expression then shifted from pleasantly-amused to full-on serious. The expression that he made when you were going to get slammed into the ground if you didn't do your fighting drills with the seriousness they deserved. "Quite the opposite, Ken. I'm likely leaving the sect and you're the first person I thought to ask…"
It turned out that Ken was the second person that Big Shi thought to ask - but the first was his actual brother, so Ken was willing to forgive him for that. And the opportunity was an interesting one…
Apparently, the eldest daughter of the nearby daimyo, Tankano Rin Hikaru, was a bit of a genius. The girl had advanced to the body refinement stage after only ten months of cultivating experience, whereas Ken had taken very nearly two years. Since her talent could no longer be denied, the daimyo required a small retinue of cultivators to be assigned to the girl as bodyguards and training partners… but they couldn't be clan insiders.
Assigning Tankano clansmen might be viewed as a slight against the girl's older brother, the young master of the clan. Therefore, the daimyo had reached out to the nearest major independent sect - the Mountain's Fury sect - and asked his old army friend to send two trustworthy men. Men of skill, but not too much skill.
The old friend, a core sect member, had turned to his skilled (but not too skilled) junior brother, Big Shilei, who'd then asked his actual brother, Little Shilei (who was barely even taller than Ken, who was about average for a cultivator) and, when Little Shilei turned the offer down because he was utterly infatuated with a mortal townswoman, the daughter of a mid-ranked bureaucrat, Ken was the next to receive the offer. Ken was bright enough to know he wasn't going places in the sect, and he'd readily agreed - a cushy clan job with a decent salary to babysit the daimyo's bratty daughter? Ken wasn’t getting an offer better than that…
Of course, maddeningly, Ichika turned out not to be a self-centered, egotistical princess… well… she was a bit of those things. But she was also a serious cultivator with serious talent and a good person to boot. And of course, maddeningly, heavens-damned clan politics had to fuck everything up…
Ichika powered to the end of the body refinement stage after two years - two years! She pulled up even with Ken, who'd been struggling through the stage for six long years, coughing up and shitting out dollops of horrendous impurity every few months, and she surpassed him as easily as turning her hand. And then Ichika made the mistake of accepting her older brother's challenge to spar him and then defeated the little entitled fuck…
And it wasn't like Tankano Rin Yoshu didn't put up a good fight. He was a talented cultivator blessed with the full resources of his clan. It just so happened that his little sister was a far more talented cultivator and a far more principled person to boot.
The announcement of the arranged marriage came a week later and, to anybody who knew shit from sapphires the implication was clear: Lord Tankano meant for Ichika to be 'with child' as soon as possible to stunt her cultivation and remove the dire threat she posed to Yoshu's status as young master. After one tentative meeting with the Ichibo clan's second son, she returned to her quarters in tears.
"I'm not marrying that jackass," she'd sobbed, and Ken had wanted to squeeze his thumbs into the sniveling little shit's eye sockets for upsetting Ichika so. Apparently, he'd stated that he was looking forward to seeing her cultivation stunted, as usually happened when cultivator women became pregnant while in the first three realms. He looked forward to having a docile and submissive wife who was weaker than him but would nonetheless remain beautiful for many years. "I… I need you to cover for me while I go into closed cultivation," she'd said. "I'm trying to… I will break through to the third realm."
Indeed, pregnancies were very nearly as damaging to a third realm woman's cultivation… but with complete mastery over her physical body, no man could force a child upon her, not even if he was also a cultivator. And if she proceeded into realms beyond that, as Ichika seemed fated to do, not even a pregnancy would be more than a hiccup in her defiance of heaven's decree.
She broke through on a cool spring morning as the cherry blossoms bloomed, two days before her wedding and just as the daimyo's men marched down the hall to demand her presence before her lord father. With Monkey Yang's help, Ken had stalled them long enough for Ichika and Shilei to escape out the window, lowering themselves with a rope of bedsheets like scoundrels in a farcical play and absconding from the castle.
And now Ichika was hoisting Ken and Big Shi up the Emerald Vale town walls on a dusty wooden pallet because the big man was one missed medicinal smoothie away from complete qi deviation and Ken was recuperating from eight broken bones, two missing fingers, burns across half his body, and quite a bit of blood loss…
It was amazing how much severe burns made you bleed. Most people assumed the opposite, that everything would just be cauterized. It was true that you didn't often bleed right after the injury, but for a cultivator who healed several times more rapidly than a mortal, movement could easily damage the recovering blood vessels and lead to dire danger within hours of the initial wound. And Ken had been walking on burn-caked legs for hours on end for two days - he'd lost a lot of blood.
"We should've just gone through the gate," he grumbled to Big Shi.
"Oh? Are you eager to trade pointers with Black-blade Feng, junior brother? This Big Shilei will make the knave soil himself with the sheer magnitude of his crippling qi deviation."
"Okay," Ken sighed. "Point fucking made. I have terrible karma."
"On the contrary. I think you may have very, very good karma," Big Shi chuckled. "Your Lady cares enough to spirit you into a town for critical healing, and she brings with her an unusual ally who may remake our heretofore meager fortunes."
"Yeah, and Monkey Yang is the king of Kulun-Lhas," Ken said. "If this is good karma, you can keep it."
"Do you ever regret leaving the sect?"
When the big man had a point, he had a good fucking point. "You know what, big guy? Not for one second."