Mother cleared out one of the basement libraries and bolted nethersteel pads to the walls and the grounds. It was to be a training room, just for Ruyi. It was modeled after what they used for the Emperor’s highest-security dungeons; it was built to withstand the stress of a Demon King.

Here Ruyi could throw around demon essence as she wished. In preparation for their normal practice she started demonforming.

The second time was almost as hard as the first. When Mother found her missing one morning practice, she went to Ruyi’s basement lair where she found her curled up in a corner shivering. It took her the rest of the day to demonform.

The third time went a little easier still. It didn’t hurt any less, but it was possible to get better at dealing with it. It was mostly a mental victory, she felt—she’d beaten it twice. She knew she could beat it again.

***

Ruyi loved being drunk. Only the more demon she became, the less she liked the taste of wine. It was quite annoying, until she found she could distill blood into her wine herself. It wasn’t so different from making elixirs.

Now she had a healthy serving at dinner. Never in the mornings or at lunch, when it’d compromise her reflexes for the day’s practice. During the day she hardly needed it anyway; she was drunk on training.

The trick was to be forever drunk on something. If she just kept moving, and just kept drinking, maybe she would never have to stop and think.

***

Ruyi prowled the courtyard, growling at the nethersteel dummy. She leapt, her claws glowing so bright-blue they were nearly white, and slashed.

It left a trail of frost as it went, and five long gashes split the dummy shoulder-to-waist. If it was flesh it’d be instantly frostbitten. The wound began to glow white as the arrays on it worked their magic, linking the nethersteel fibers back together.

She trained it exactly like she’d trained the jab. Slash-slash-slash. It was much more fun than a jab; each time she saw the guts of the dummy exposed felt a burst of vicious joy. She trained it hour after hour, day after day, trained it until she she could chain one slash into another seamlessly, slash, twist around, slash again, up-down, down-up, left-right, in-out. It felt kind of like throwing hooks.

She was faster, stronger than even she’d thought; sometimes she moved so fast she surprised herself. Her claws were like five of the realm’s sharpest blades, enchanted for deadliest effect; her body was a lethal weapon, and when she stalked around the yard she could feel the raw energy humming in her legs. She was so full of life. If she fought Jin now she knew she could trounce him. She could trounce anyone, she was sure of it.

This feeling, this little madness, came and went a few times a day. She knew, intellectually, she wasn’t as strong as she felt. If you asked her she’d have said so, albeit a little grudgingly. Still she let herself be swept up in the feeling. She liked being drunk on it.

“You sure look happy,” said Mother in the middle of one of her drilling sessions. She was laying into the the dummy, imagining Chen Qin’s face on it. It helped a lot.

“Do I?” said Ruyi, knowing full well she had on the smuggest grin known to man.

“If you feel you’re ready,” said Mother. “Perhaps we can spar?”

“Hmm,” said Ruyi. She shrugged. “Why not?”

***

Mother used an ironwood staff. Ruyi used her demonform. They set an hourglass for a three-minute round.

“I’ll limit myself to Core,” said Mother. “If you want to stop at any time, let me know.”

Ruyi hid a grin. Mother was in for a rude surprise.

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Still, she had to be smart about this. Maybe Mother was underestimating her, but she wouldn’t make the same mistake. She would be slow, methodical, careful. She started circling, growling low, searching for an opening. Mother tracked her, pivoting to keep her blade between them.

Ruyi gave her two probing lunges, two feints, then lunged on the third. She slashed, got within a nail’s width of Mother’s robes.

Then Mother whacked her on the face.

Ruyi roared. How dare she?! It felt like she’d been struck with a full-face electric shock. She lunged and swung, got whacked in the face again.

She blinked. What had she been thinking? She shook her head, growling. She was meant to feint high, swipe low—

She fell flat on her butt, face stinging.

She went wild.

Five minutes later she lay spread-eagled, groaning and panting.

“Oh, dear,” said Mother, testing the ironwood staff. It seemed to have broken down the middle. That was how much she’d hit Ruyi in the face.

Ruyi shrank back to her human self. The damage transferred—her face was red and puffy and smarting, lightly bruised. “Water…”

Mother was kind enough to fetch her a glass, plus a change of clothes.

“I don’t know what happened,” she mumbled. “I was meant to stay calm… I had a plan, I swear! Then…”

“I know you did,” said Mother. “That’s why I kept hitting you in the face.”

“Heh?”

“It’s not easy to keep your composure while eating blows. It’s a learned skill. And your demonic instinct makes this even worse—you’re more susceptible to berserking. We’ll have to train you out of it.”

“How?”

“There’s nothing for it,” said Mother with an innocent smile. “We’ll have to do more sparring.”

Mother, Ruyi learned, was actually a very mean person. So long as Ruyi could still wobble to her feet, Mother took it as she could go another round.

By day’s end Ruyi lay there wheezing, feeling like her lungs were about to collapse. Everything hurt. Breathing hurt.

Mother had a seemingly unending stash of ironwood staffs; she kept breaking them and a new one would magically appear. Ruyi resolved to find them and burn them all.

“We’ll have to work on your endurance,” mused Mother. “Same time tomorrow!”

***

“Um,” said Sen.

“Shhh,” said Ruyi, leaning in.

They stood in the back stacks of a quaint little bookstore in the Wonder District filled with knickknacks and collectors’ items and old musty books—it was Sen’s favorite.

Ostensibly they were here because Sen wanted to introduce a new novel to her, a Weng spinoff series. Sen, bless pretty little head, was still blissfully unaware how painfully boring Ruyi found it. They’d done this routine four or five times now. She always seemed surprised when halfway through her gushing, Ruyi got bored and started trying to kiss her, which as far as Ruyi was concerned was the point of the trip anyways.

“But… I’m not done…” Sen protested, all red.

“Who cares?” breathed Ruyi, leaning in.

“You don’t like it?” She looked so adorable when she was confused.

“I like you.”

“Am I boring you?” said Sen, pouting. “You said you’d tell if I was. You promised.”

“Of course not.” But Sen pulled away.

“What?” she said, annoyed.

“Um,” said Sen. “Last time we only got through a tenth of what I wanted to show you… maybe after?”

“Fine,” she growled. She supposed she could pretend for a little while. At least Sen was happy—she liked seeing Sen all excited. She was happy Sen was happy.

Even if she felt like someone had sanded down her brain by the end of it.

***

She devoted her evenings to Alchemy, where being drunk actually seemed to help—it loosened the thinking bit of her brain, she found, made it play nice with the creative bit. There was a sweet spot of drunkenness. She sometimes overshot it. Most of the time nowadays she overshot it. But she was still getting a lot done.

A third of her time she spent researching. Two-thirds she spent brewing. She’d had a giant lodestone cauldron custom-made, so big she needed a stepladder to get over top of it. She set up a new brewing area too. With them she began qi elixirs and Healing elixirs in bulk. She had it down to a science; where most would Alchemists take a day for a small batch she could whip up barrels’ worth in an hour. She could brew even blind drunk, as she found out.

Mother wouldn’t let her go out to the Lower City herself, but she’d been in correspondence with the remains of the field hospitals. When the Cult had shattered and it was revealed they were backed by the Lord of Demons, what little good they’d done had been set back decades. So that was that—Mei died pointlessly, believing in a cause that was false to begin with. She’d died for nothing.

Ruyi wouldn’t allow it.

There were still folk like Mei, folk that cared, folk that saw the great need and did their very best to fill it. Ruyi enlisted their servants, plus a cadre of Li family guards, to see her supply safely delivered each week. She sponsored her own set of wards where the Street Hospitals had been; she called them Mei’s Wards.

Her research interests were changing—from exploring the limits of what Alchemy could do to figuring out how to the things it was already capable of more efficiently. It was reminiscent of her very first work, using blue ginseng as a cheap hyper-fertilizer for the masses. How could she make it easier, cheaper, faster to brew useful elixirs, elixirs that could help folk now?

***

One evening they got a letter which drew a long sigh from Yun. “Your Father’s not coming home for quite some time,” she said.

“What’s happened?”

“Nothing yet—but scouts say the Lord of Demons is massing a horde at the border. Demon raids grow more frequent… the Emperor is getting nervous. Next week, your Father says, a draft will be announced.”

Her daughter had gotten much subtler about it, but Yun saw the way she froze with a spoon in her mouth, the way her chewing started to slow.

“I think,” Ruyi began. “This would be a great opportunity for me to practice my—”

“No.”

“But—“

“No.”

“But it’d really help my training if—”

“No.”

Ruyi stuck her tongue out at Yun, then went back to sipping her soup in sullen silence.