Reach Heaven Via Feng Shui Engineering, Drug Trade And Tax Evasion

Qian Shanyi breathed in, filling her lungs with air to the bursting point, and slowly exhaled. Her senses were focused inward, on the spiritual energy circulating through her meridians. She was finally seeing the first signs of the formation of the yin-yang cycles, and she couldn’t tear her attention away from them.

Every cultivator possessed twelve primary meridians that transported spiritual energy throughout their body, with each one named after one of the major organs it passed through. The relationship between the organ and the meridian was reciprocal: the more spiritual energy passed through the meridian, the healthier the organ would become, and correspondingly, if the organ was damaged or affected by disease, the passage of spiritual energy through the meridian would suffer. The only exception to this rule was the heart, which was linked to two separate meridians - the heart meridian and the pericardium meridian - and the sanjiao meridian, which didn’t pass through anything in particular.

Almost all of the energy flowing through the meridians had the type appropriate to the cultivator’s constitution - in Qian Shanyi’s case, yin-metal - but a small part corresponded to the type of each particular meridian. Six of the meridians had a yin nature, with the other six being yang; there were two meridians for every one of the five major types of spiritual energy, except fire, which had four.

Back when she was cultivating Seven Flowers Bloom, spiritual energy flowed freely between the yin and yang meridians, mixing together with little direction. Now that she practiced a proper, typed cultivation law, she was finally seeing the first signs of separation. Two separate cycles were forming among her meridians - one for yin and one for yang - with the energy moving between them only among specific pathways. As the cycles would continue to develop, the energy flow would accelerate, and her yin meridians - already better developed than her yang meridians due to her constitution - would further strengthen and expand. A similar process was happening to her metal meridians, and she could swear her lungs were already growing deeper.

Qian Shanyi forced her eyes to open. That was only a trick of the mind: she had been cultivating Three Obediences Four Virtues for a mere three days. It would take a couple weeks for the energy vortices to fully form, let alone for her internal organs to catch up. For now, she had work to do.

She ended up underestimating how long the night would last. They’ve spent a full day within the world fragment, going to sleep twice, and the morning sun only rose once they woke up - that meant the time within the world fragment was moving four or five times faster than on the outside.

Wang Yonghao was lazing about on the grass as she finished her morning cultivation, using a dagger to skillfully carve a chunk of oak wood into the shape of a small animal figure.

“You could have at least worked on our lathe, if you do not want to cultivate,” she chided him, getting up off the grass and dusting herself off, “I don’t want us to carve every little thing we need by hand.”

She had never seen a lathe, and only had a vague awareness that a piece of wood was spun around an axis in order to make smooth circular shapes. The motion of it seemed clear in her mind - now they just needed to figure out how to turn it into reality.

“I am not a refiner like you,” he said, shrugging, and motioning with his halfway finished figurine, “I don’t know how to make a lathe. I only know how to use a knife.”

“It doesn’t take refining to put a couple planks together,” she grumbled, “you know what the problem is, what is so difficult about trying things until you figure out a solution?”

She spent most of the last day memorizing the foraging advice of the Three Obediences Four Virtues in preparation for setting off into the forest again, but she did make sure to carve out several shovels and cobble together a large, though somewhat rickety table. For now, she avoided using nails, deciding to save them for something that would need to be especially robust.

“Well, you’ll figure it out, right?” he said, “What’s the hurry?”

“You don’t feel in a hurry to sleep on a good hammock, instead of the cold hard ground like a dog?”, she squinted at him, “Would you rather I didn’t make one for you?”

He gaped at her in horror.

“You wouldn’t…” he started, then paused, studying her face.

“Your poor, poor back,” she continued, twisting the knife, “It must be starting to hurt. I know mine did, after a couple days, and I sleep on way more padding than you do.”

“How could you be this cruel?”

“To cultivate is to be cruel to fate itself. What is one more cruelty on top of that?” she said, “Besides, why would I waste my time if you won’t spend some of yours?”

Wang Yonghao shuddered and got up off the grass. “Fine,” he said, “what do you want me to do?”

“If you see a job, it’s yours,” she said, heading over to their meat stores, “Figure out what can be done, then do it. It’s really that simple.”

After breakfast, they finally left the world fragment. Morning sun was shining through the leaves, and dew covered the moss and the tree trunks around them. After a short discussion, they decided to head further into the forest - now that they knew what they were doing, building the hideout would only take them a couple hours when the evening approached, and there was no reason to waste the rest of the day. They had to keep moving.

The forest slowly woke up around them as they walked among the gently swaying shadows cast by the heavy canopy down on the ground. As birds’ cries filled the air one after another, Qing Shanyi tried to count their species by their songs. It was hard to keep track of their voices in her head, but it kept her mind occupied while her eyes searched for plants to forage. Perhaps they could climb the trees and look for bird nests? Surely working together they could manage to strike a bird out of the air, even if neither of them was much of a hunter. It would break up their diet of bear meat, at the very least.

“Do you just cultivate?”, Wang Yonghao suddenly asked, bringing her out of her ruminations.

“What?” she asked, confused.

“I mean, do you do anything else besides cultivating?” he asked, “You keep saying cultivation is this or that, and I am starting to wonder.”

“I eat. I sleep,” she answered, raising her eyebrow, “I do the work I think needs doing. One would hope most people would be similar?”

“I mean, besides all that,” the petulant junior rolled his eyes at her, “you have to have hobbies, right? You can’t just cultivate all day long.”

“Of course you can,” she said, “cultivators in the foundation building stage can easily spend an entire month in closed door cultivation.”

“You know what I mean,” he sighed in exasperation, “Do you, I don’t know, like birdwatching? I do woodcarving, for example.”

She stayed silent for a moment, thinking through her answer. There was nothing in it that could give her game away, but it still felt strange to talk about something so… casual.

“I like games,” she finally said, “gambling games.”

Before she became a cultivator, she studied under her father, who wanted her to inherit his small merchanting business. She took to it like a fish to water, but what she liked most were the talks with the clients, the push and pull of negotiating wills, of bluffs and counterbluffs. After she joined Luminous Lotus Pavilion, she missed the thrill of it, but found it again in gambling. On the rare days when she managed to keep enough of her time free, she would stalk the city streets far away from the sect compound, enter gambling parlors where none knew her, and find some hapless victims for an evening. All she had to do was flap her eyelashes a couple times, pout her lips, and they would immediately put her out of their minds as a gullible girl way out of her depth.

Then they would lose miserably, and the look on their faces at the belated realization of her skill would warm her soul on even the coldest nights. That it gave her more spending money was just a nice bonus.

“Games!” Wang Yonghao clapped his hands together in satisfaction, “That’s great! I also love them. We should play a game together.”

“With your luck? It’s pointless.”

“There are games that don’t depend on luck!” he said, pleading in his voice.

“Why are you so insistent on this?” she asked, keeping her tone casual.

“Because I like playing?” he ruffled his hair, “It’s one of the few things I can do in between running away from one crisis or another. Besides, it’s good to know the people you live with, right? Come on, you can’t be all work and no play. We could share a story or two?”

“Hm,” she paused, “Very well, as long as it does not cut into our work time too much.”

The forest floor was uneven, with hills and gullies breaking up their line of vision, forcing their path through the forest away from a straight line. Halfway through the day, they crossed over the top of one such hill, and suddenly walked out onto the clean, sandy shores of a calm, narrow river. The sand was black to match the trees, and surprisingly warm even under the forest shade.

Qian Shanyi came all the way to the edge of the stream and dipped her fingers into the clean, cold water, feeling it out.

“You think we should fly over?” he sighed, rubbing the collar of his robes.

“I think we should stop here for the day,” she responded, “We’ll build our cabin for hunting Glowing Rosevines at the crest of that hill for the night. For now, I want to take a real bath. I am sure you’d appreciate one too.”

For a bath, they would need soap, and that meant two things: ash and grease.

She sent out Wang Yonghao to chop down some more pines to replenish the wood within his Inner World, and to gather as much tree bark as he could. In the meantime, she started preparing the shore of the river. She waded into the water and hammered sharpened wood planks into the riverbed, forming a cul-de-sac against the flow of water, then deepened it with the help of her new shovel, turning it into a natural bath. Some of the water flowed in between the planks, but that was fine by her; it would simply carry the dirty water downstream.

Having finished her crude construction, she went back to the shore, picked up one of the smaller pots they took from the dead sect, and started furiously scrubbing it with the sand from the river.

Out of the four pots from the sect, two were so rusted through that they could not hold water. The other two had to be thoroughly scrubbed before she would dare to put anything in them, let alone use them to cook. The sand was a bit too fine for what she was doing, and she had to strengthen the spiritual energy shield surrounding her hand to keep it from being cut by the rusty flakes of metal, but inexorably the pot was getting cleaner.

When Wang Yonghao returned, they started a large fire from all the bark and pine wood. On her own, starting a fire from fresh bark would have been a pain, but he just blasted it with pure fire spiritual energy until it lit up like a torch.

While she was still busy with the pot, she gave him one of their shovels to start building their hunting cabin. He seemed more motivated to work than before: she figured that the prospect of a bath and a hammock bed worked its magic.

It took her a good half an hour of cultivating the scrubbing arts before she felt the pot could be declared ready for cooking. She added some more wood to the fire, fashioned a suspension for the pot from a couple planks and a sturdy pine branch, and called Wang Yonghao back. Together, they quickly filled the pot with cuts of bear fat and a little water to keep it from burning on the fire.

The trouble with fat within a living creature was that it was attached to muscle, with no good way to pull the two apart. What she needed for the soap was pure fat, and the way to get it was quite simple: melt the fat away from the muscle, and then solidify it back from the liquid solution after filtering out the solid pieces of meat left behind. They would only need a small bit of fat for the soap, but she figured they might as well process all of it at once.

While the fat slowly rendered, they finished up the shack on the hill, threw out the old wood from Wang Yonghao’s Inner World, cleaned the rest of the cutlery in river water, and even fully scrubbed the other, much larger pot. Once the fat seemed liquid enough to her eyes, they carefully poured it into the other pot through a silk sheet, and then Wang Yonghao carried it into a water trench of the chiclotron to be frozen into pure lard until further notice.

That left the ash, which had to be rendered into lye. The fire served two purposes: heating up the fat, and turning the wood and bark into ashes. Qian Shanyi quickly washed the smaller pot, and then carefully gathered the ashes from the fire into it with some water to dissolve them. She didn’t know any alchemy, and so could not hazard a guess as to why bark made for better ashes than the wood - all she could do was follow instructions in Three Obediences Four Virtues and hope for the best.

They strained the water through a sheet of Silvered Devil Moth Silk several times to separate out the solid parts of the ashes, and then waited around for an hour until most of the water boiled off. To pass the time, she decided to measure the factor of time dilation between the world fragment and the outside world, by leaving one of her clocks outside with Wang Yonghao, and then cultivating within his Inner World for two hours. Assuming her math was correct, with the entrance to the world fragment closed, time passed within it four point six times faster than on the outside.

Once the lye solution looked concentrated enough, Qian Shanyi threw a chunk of solidified lard into it, eyeballing the needed mass, and then they waited for longer still until the mixture became homogeneous. For flavor, she added in some finely chopped pine needles. After another half hour, she declared it good enough, and sent the pot into the chiclotron to make the soap harden faster. Freezing it wasn’t strictly necessary, but the daylight was beginning to fade, and she did not want to bathe in the darkness.

The soap looked… underwhelming to say the least. It was a mass of brown and green, and she doubted it fully went through whatever alchemical process turned grease and ash water into soap, but it turned into soap bubbles just fine when she rubbed it in the water, and that was all that mattered.

She stripped, then brought a brick of igneocopper into her makeshift river bath and channeled spiritual energy into it until the water warmed up to a comfortable temperature, and laid there, letting it wash off all the sweat, grime, blood and poison slime of her last two weeks, her hair spreading freely in the gentle current flowing through the gaps in the walls of her bath. For a moment, she could almost forget that she was in the middle of untamed wilderness, and still in mortal danger.

Of course, she brought her sword with her into the bath. She wasn’t an idiot.

Wang Yonghao wanted to make himself scarce, but she told him that if some telepathic crab sneaked up on her while she was bathing because he was too bloody awkward to keep watch, she would make sure a dozen would end up in his pants while he slept. She could feel awkwardness wafting off where he was sitting on the river shore, but he would get over it.

She washed off with soap, then made sure to wash her robes - the ones she was wearing right now, as well as the set that got covered in poison slime. When she was done, her mood had improved by leaps and bounds.

“It’s your turn, oh lord of decorum,” she said, tossing the rest of the soap over to him as she went back to the shore, squeezing water out of her long black hair. He pointedly did not look at her. “Bathe quickly, and then let’s go slaughter those demonic plants. It’s what cultivators do.”