When I came to check on Su Li, I found her napping after a long night's work. I’d thought she would pace herself, and work through the day, but I suppose moon-aligned cultivators were a different breed. She'd fully dismantled one tree, and made good progress on the second. The logs were scattered haphazardly throughout the clearing.

The scene reminded me a little of one of those video games where trees would explode into a great burst of logs when a player took an axe to them. Valheim, perhaps? Or was it that Conan one that handled logging like that? I'd always tried to get into those crafting-survival games, but never really took to them. Su Li lay in the middle of a veritable explosion of firewood

It made for a cute picture. She clutched at her worn sword, clutching at it the way I used to sleep with my little T-Rex beanie baby, until the years left him too threadbare for even that. I wondered how Toothy was doing.

It hurt, thinking about him. Beyond all the bigger, more important things I’d lost, that hadn’t truly sunk in yet. Thinking about him, sitting on a shelf at my parent’s new house, a tiny memorial to a child dead or missing. God, I didn’t even know what had happened to me. Just that I was here now. What would they think? Unbidden, tears beaded at the corner of my eyes. I couldn’t do this, not now.

I mastered myself, and dried my eyes. I could think about what I’d lost once I was sure I wouldn’t soon lose this life as well.

I gathered the logs up as my disciple slept, stacking them into a loose pile. Well, except for a couple she was sleeping atop. It didn't look the most comfortable, but I couldn't bring myself to disturb her. After a moment's thought, I decided to finish the job.

A dozen effortless swings removed cross-sections of the remaining log like a hot wire through foam, without even a whisper of sound. A single long stroke split all the segments into half circles, which fell to the ground with muffled thumps.

I paused, tense, but Su Li slept right through it. A tiny thread of drool extended from the corner of her mouth. A few flyaway strands of black hair drifted through it, getting caught like threads in amber. She was a cute girl, when she didn’t have that painfully earnest expression on her face. But still, clearly a girl all the same. How old was she, I wondered. Seventeen? Eighteen? Older, by virtue of a cultivator’s unnatural youthfulness? She’d talked like she was getting old for an outer disciple, but in our world, she wouldn’t even have finished high school yet. To be here almost three years, she couldn’t have been more than fourteen or fifteen when she joined the sect. Had her father died even before then, setting her on this lonely road? Or had she been promised to the sect even before that, and he’d died while she cultivated? I shivered. That was not a life I envied.

I added the newly cut logs to my stack, leaving me with perhaps a quarter of a cord of wood. That would keep me well stocked for a very long time. Slowly, I went through the process of charging my storage ring to ingest the wood. I’d been trying to slow down the process as much as possible, to use it as a guide to actually feeling my qi. In my mind, I focused on the stack of wood, to the exclusion of everything around it. I visualized the stack, held the image as clear as I could, then let the surroundings fade to black. It wasn’t the best job. I’d always had trouble with mental images, naturally I tended to think more in words, but it was what the guide said to do, and apparently I’d been doing a good enough job for the ring to date. As I held the image, I willed the ring to act, and slowly let go of my qi. It was a curious sensation, to use the storage treasure, I didn’t need to push power to it manually, only to sort of relax my control over the power within me. Slowly, the qi flowed from all across my body, into my hand, and out into the ring. There was no sensation of heat or cold to it, only a phantom sort of motion. In its wake, where the concentration of qi had decreased substantially, there was a sort of tingling sensation and a feeling of weakness, which rapidly faded as my core spun out more qi into the body to replace it. Eventually, the ring had eaten enough.

The resulting pop was far louder than I expected, nowhere near a gunshot, but easily a small firework. Far louder than when I’d ringed the stonework stove I’d looted. I guessed the noise scaled with the volume then, and the qi consumption with mass. It made a rudimentary sort of sense.

Su Li awoke with a start, leaping to a crouch and brandishing her bared sword wildly. Slowly, she oriented herself, and as I watched her face turned red. A moment later, she cast down her sword and began futilely trying to brush the dust off her robes and tame the wild mess her hair had become.

Her fingers, I noted with a sinking stomach, were crusted with dried blood.

“Disciple.” I greeted her.

“Elder Hu. I did not expect you to return so early. Surely it has not yet been a full day?”

"It has not, I finished my own tasks earlier than I expected and thought to check up on your progress. You know, you could have gone home to sleep." I said, a wry smile popping up unbidden.

"I did not want to disappoint you master."

It almost physically hurt, how earnest she was. I looked at her hands, but I didn’t know what to say. What could I possibly tell her that would not make light of her dedication?

"As long as you do your best, you will never disappoint me."

Su Li turned to stare at the ground, not saying anything more. I waited a moment, but the silence drug on.

“I have breakfast.” I said, withdrawing a pair of oat cakes from my ring.

I’d bought a lot of food at the markets, but they’d had precious little in the form of ready to eat food that would keep. Lots of roasted meat and sweetbread on skewers, but I still wasn’t sure how exactly storage treasures and time interacted.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Oat cakes had seemed the safest option. These were more of a dense cracker, than any sort of cake, but they were filling enough, and dry enough I wasn’t afraid of them going bad.

I’d smeared some sort of dark jelly, gooseberry perhaps, on them before putting them away, trying to puzzle out if objects in the ring physically interacted with each other. Nothing else had come out covered in jelly yet, which was a positive sign.

Careful of my sleeves, I offered one to Su Li. Silently, she accepted it. We ate quietly. I got crumbs on my robe. I wasn't used to wearing long sleeves all the time, or having so many inner folds for things to get caught in.

I'd always been a danger to dress shirts, and I had no idea how the xianxia-laundry service worked yet. Thank God for big storage ring wardrobes filled with black robes.

"I would have finished by the deadline." Su Li said between bites.

"It wasn't a race."

She didn't reply, mouth filled with dry oatcake and sticky jam. I should have brought some water. That was a silly oversight. We gummed down our oatcakes in awkward silence.

"Earlier, you mentioned that you approached the other elders about tutelage. I have recently been invited to join them for tea, and it has been a while since I spoke with many of them. I am curious what your impressions of them were."

Su Li looked as I spoke, then turned back down to stare at the ground as she realized I was asking her a question. Slowly, she finished her mouthful of dry, sticky, oatcake, before finally answering.

“I have wanted to master the sword since long before I entered this sect. But only two elders here are renowned for their mastery of it, you, and Elder Xin. I sought you out at first, but I did not lay eyes on you for my first year within the sect. I asked after you frequently, so often I annoyed my peers, until an inner disciple finally told me you were out of the sect on a mission, and would return when you returned.

She swallowed, mouth dry.

"But Elder Xin, I found. He has not taught classes these last few years, but at the close of every week, he plays his guqin by the gray lake. For three weeks, I listened, before I approached him. He asked me to play him a song if I wanted to learn the sword. He offered me his guzheng, but I was afraid to touch it. I know nothing about music. I had never touched an instrument before. He told me to come back, when I could play something that moved him. He was kind to me, kinder than any of the others, but he was firm too. He would not teach me the sword if I could not play, and he would not teach me music.

"Of the elders of craft, I only approached Elder Li. He gave me a chance, but I was too stupid to seize it. I spent three months under one of his inner disciples, working with puppets, but my hands were clumsy, and my eyes were not suited to the delicate work. Li Ru declared me too imprecise, and cast me out for wasting his time.

“Elder Liang… Elder Liang was not interested in teaching me.”

“That simple? She just wasn’t interested?” I asked, curious.

Su Li looked down again. I was starting to see a pattern there, but this time she remained silent. I gave her a moment, and then another, but as the silence began to drag on. Just as I was about to open my own mouth to say something, anything, to break the silence, she spoke in a rush.

“No master, forgive this small disciple for her deception. Elder Liang… She said that lips like mine were more suited to warming her bed than cultivating. She told me that I had no talent for cultivation, and no fate with the sword, but if I became one of her concubines instead, she would help me establish my foundation.”

Holy fuck. I knew sects could get bad, but that was so much more brazen than I expected. I had no idea what to say.

It was rapidly becoming clear to me that I may have drastically underestimated how seriously Su Li was taking our new relationship. I'd assumed that she'd be more diligent than an American high schooler, but that bar was so low it might as well be buried in the soil. Between working herself to the point of injury, and revealing hurtful secrets at a single request for clarification, I would really need to watch what I said to her.

“I panicked. I ran away without saying a word. Her disciples all laughed at me as I left. Please, don’t make me come as your attendant. I know it's a disciple's duty, but I… I can’t face her again. Not until I can look her in the eyes and show her she was wrong.”

Had it been Elder Liang's disciples gathered around her yesterday? What had they been saying, I wondered. I doubted it was anything good.

“Don’t worry, I didn’t intend to bring you. I’ve been busy today, gathering materials for your lessons. Take the day off and rest up, you look like you’ve barely slept.”

Su Li’s head perked up at that, a brilliant smile on her face. I could see a tear rolling down her cheek, but I didn’t acknowledge it.

“I’ve no doubt the other elders will want to talk all day. Meet me back here three hours before sunset, and we’ll begin your first lesson.”

"Yes master!"

I knew Su Li had waited outside my door more than once, she’d said as much when I first nearly stepped on her walking out of my little house. She’d said I’d ignored her every other time. Just how many times had Elder Hu stepped over this poor girl?

“Refresh my memory. How many times did you wait outside my door, after I returned to the sect?

“Fourteen times, Elder Hu.” I wasn't sure if that was better or worse than I expected. After a moment’s pause, she continued. “Elder Hu, please forgive my impertinence in questioning you. But, I wish to know, why did you finally say yes?”

I couldn't answer that honestly. It was not in character for the stern, busy, elder I'd apparently been to show such sentiment.

“In a distant land, there’s an idiom I’ve long found darkly amusing. If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten.” It was passing strange, how easily the translated idiom came to my tongue. The flow of the sounds was wrong, do and done, and get and gotten, no longer held the symmetry they did in English. The meaning, and the fourfold repetition of ‘you’ remained, and helped give the phrase a certain gravitas, even in this strange tongue. “Recently, I decided that I am perhaps not as satisfied with what I’ve always gotten as I thought I was.”

"What you've always gotten?" Su Li echoed.

I didn't answer. I'd already strayed far too close to far too many fraught topics. I simply rose to my feet and began to walk away.

"Here, twilight, tomorrow." I reminded her, as I left to take a well earned nap. I would worry about tea later, It'd been several days since I last slept after all.