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

“Rise and shine,” the evil woman spoke right into his ear, “It’s the day of the shovel.”

Wang Yonghao grunted in response. His muscles ached after an entire day spent digging, and the only thing he wanted to do was stay in his nice and comfortable hammock.

“I’ve cultivated and made breakfast already,” she said, “Now I am bored. Also, it’s time for you to get up, we have more digging to do.”

“I don’t want to,” he groaned, “Can’t you dig alone?”

Suddenly, he felt himself move, and he flailed his arms around as he was unceremoniously tipped out of the hammock, landing on his face in the grass. He pulled the robe covering his eyes off his head, and stared at her blearily.

“Wasn’t a request,” she grinned at him, offering him a hand to get up, “Come on, eat your breakfast while it’s still warm.”

“How can you be so evil?” he asked, getting up without her help and rubbing his shoulders, “Did you find a secret manual of the dao of malevolence?”

“There is no need to butter me up with compliments. Now chop chop, we are behind schedule.”

While Wang Yonghao ate his breakfast, she decided to turn the acorns they gathered back during their first day in the forest into flour. The first step was to break their shells with the back of an axe. The soft acorn centers would then be steeped in cold water for hours to leach the bitter tannins out before they could be eaten - she would keep them in their large pot for the rest of the day, dry them again while they slept, and hopefully by tomorrow, they could make some dumplings.

After they finished, Wang Yonghao headed back over to his hole, and she heard him exclaim in surprise. As she came over to look, she saw that the bottom of the hole, almost two meters below the ground level, was filled with water.

“There’s water!” he said, turning towards her. She supposed it was good he didn’t go blind overnight.

“An astute observation, junior,” she nodded, “you’d need to deal with it to dig deeper, or you’d risk the walls of the pit collapsing on you.”

“How do I do that?”

“Am I supposed to tell you this?” She raised her eyebrows, “Come now, you’ve got to come up with an idea or two of your own. I can’t think for both of us.”

He squinted at her, and she laid down on the ground to wait for him to come up with something, putting one of her hands behind her head.

“You said you’d stop bullying me.”

“Fine, fine,” she sighed, “I will help you brainstorm, how about that?”

He nodded, and started pacing in thought.

“We’ve got a pot, right?” he finally said, “I could use it as a bucket and drain the water out of the hole.”

“You think that will work?”

“Why wouldn’t it work? It’s a hole with water.”

“Where do you think this water came from?” she asked rhetorically.

“From…the ground?” he said, slowly.

“And where will you pour the water from the pot?”

He rubbed his face ruefully in response to that, putting the picture together.

“Okay, I see what you mean,” he said, “But I could throw it out of the world fragment, right?”

“You could,” she said, “but will that help that much? You had kept Blue Tear Stones within your world fragment for ages. Who knows how much water is there deep in the ground - as you keep digging, more and more of it will seep out.”

“So…What do I do then?”

“Indeed, what do you do?” She asked, looking up into the sky, “It is quite a conundrum. The water leaks, yet you can’t spend the time waiting for it all to drain.”

He frowned, and continued pacing. She took out her sword and started playing around by tossing it up into the air and catching it by the hilt.

“If only there was some kind of technique to prevent the water from flowing,” she continued rhetorically, “seal it up somehow, away from the hole. Sadly we don’t have clay or cement to patch up the walls themselves, but surely there must be other options? Perhaps something that could turn it into some kind of … solid form, so that it could not flow anymore. But could something like that really be possible?”

“I could freeze the water within the walls into ice with one of the treasures!” Wang Yonghao snapped his fingers, grinning widely, “if the walls were frozen, then it wouldn’t seep out.”

“An ingenious idea, junior.”

His grin faded as he turned back to her with a scowl.

“You are making fun of me again!”

“Me? Making fun?” she pressed a hand of hers to her chest, shaping her face into a mask of perfect sincerity, “You really think this here cultivator would do that? I am just giving you face.”

“You are!” He pointed at her with his finger, “Why couldn’t you just tell me this right away?”

“Now you are just being paranoid,” she shook her head, getting back up, “But if I did do this, then don’t you think it’s best for you to come up with it on your own? This way, you’d better remember the principle in the future. Come on, while we wait for the earth to freeze, we can start modifying the trenches.”

Her new design would have all of the trenches going either up or down an incline, and that meant moving a lot of earth around, either digging deep into the ground or building ramparts that could contain the newly heightened chiclotron nodes. They worked carefully, disassembling individual nodes and moving them into their new positions one by one. When they broke for lunch, he asked her what the purpose of it all was.

“It’s because of the draft,” she said, “like in a chimney?”

“Chimney?” he asked, “Are you going to burn things?”

“No, I meant the air,” she said, “hot air rises, while cold air falls down, and the trenches follow this principle.”

“It does?” he asked, looking surprised.

“You don’t know this?” she raised an eyebrow, “It’s because of the air pressure, but even most peasants would be familiar with a chimney. Have your parents never showed you one?”

“I am an orphan,“ Wang Yonghao scratched his head, “I guess I’ve never looked at chimneys much.”

“I see,” she nodded, “Well, it’s not too complicated. Let me explain it quickly.”

She went over to their wood stores and brought over a flat plank she used to plan the new trench network while Wang Yonghao was still asleep, turning it over to its clean side, and started drawing on it with her finger while circulating Crushing Glance of the Netherworld Eyes.

When she was younger, her father wanted her to inherit their small merchanting business, and taught her as much as he could. As part of that, he paid for tutors to prepare her for the imperial examinations - becoming a minor court official could open many doors in her life.

Once she happened to unblock her spiritual root and stepped on the path of cultivation, all of that fell by the wayside, but she still remembered her education in natural philosophy quite clearly. Once she joined the Luminous Lotus Pavilion, it surprised her that most other inner disciples had not heard of the study of the heats and pressures, given their obvious relevance to many cultivation techniques.

She once asked Elder Striding Phoenix why this topic was not taught within the sect itself, and he told her that it was simply not relevant until cultivators actually started practicing techniques that could produce wind or fire, and disciples should focus on training their body and cleansing their meridians. To this day, she still thought that was a mistake, but there wasn’t much she could do about it at the time.

Wang Yonghao was a patient listener, especially when she explained that there wasn’t any direct relation between this knowledge and cultivation. Once she finished with the basic principles, she turned over the plank and showed him her plan for the trenches.

“Here is the idea,” she said, pointing towards various parts of the heightmap she sketched out, “I want as much air draft as possible - this means trenches with hot air should be angled upwards, while trenches with cold air should be angled downwards. There will be two primary air flows through the chiclotron: one producing hot air we will use for drying, and one producing cold air to balance out the temperature of the world fragment.”

“Wow,” Wang Yonghao said, frowning at her diagrams, “this looks pretty complicated. Will we really need to dig up all this?”

“Yes.”

“Couldn’t we just use the fire treasures to dry things?” he sighed, “That looks like way too much digging to me.”

“Proper drying requires strong airflow, not just heat,” she shook her head, “and besides, many ingredients respond badly to being surrounded by fire-type spiritual energy, or aligned spiritual energy in general. It’s better to set this up properly for the future.”

In the Luminous Lotus Pavilion, they used wood-fed fires to dry ingredients, but the principle remained - she supposed that only a rare sect would have enough treasures to waste them simply to produce hot air.

“Wouldn’t spiritual energy spill out anyways?” he scratched his head, “Through the air holes?”

“Not if we keep the air trenches - or the chimney, in case of the outgoing hot air - long enough, and shorten the nearby spiritual energy trenches,” she said, shaking her head, “spiritual energy prefers shorter paths, it would not spill out of the chiclotron just because a path to the outside exists in principle. Look at where the air holes would be - they are very far away from each other.”

She pointed to the crude top down diagram she had drawn on the side.

“Besides drying,” she continued her explanation, “This design will have other uses. I left one of the fire nodes out of the air cycles - we will put our bath right on top of that strong heat source. Your inner world is quite humid - you have already seen how much water lies underground - and by drawing the air through the ice cold water trenches, this moisture will start to condense and turn to ice, which we can later throw out to reduce the total amount of water in circulation. Taken together, this should allow us to control spiritual energy, heat, and humidity independently of each other.”

“You really thought of everything, huh,” he frowned, scratching his head, “How do you come up with these things?”

“It’s a straightforward application of base principles,” she said, flicking her hair behind her, “Nothing more.”

“Well, I don’t know,” he said, “I wouldn’t have thought of all this. It’s very clever.”

“Thank you,” she blinked, smiling slightly. The compliment shouldn’t have mattered - she knew her own skills perfectly well - but hearing them acknowledged did feel nice.

“With how clever you are, why do you feel the need to bully people?” he sighed.

“Come on, enough chatter,” she said, rolling her eyes and getting up, “It’s time to get to work.”

They worked on modifying the nodes in stages, starting with the metal ones and following the creative cycle of feng shui from there. By the time they went to sleep again, they only just started on the water ones, but Qian Shanyi felt they were making good progress. She left the ground and leached acorn meal inside of a metal trench to dry over the course of the day, and closed them up.

Even though based on her time measurements, the forest got fifteen hours of daylight at this time of year, they could only manage eleven hours of travel time. She had played around with scheduling, but didn’t manage to squeeze more time out: needing to stop to cook and eat food, as well as cultivate in the morning and evening, ate into the daylight time too much. Ultimately, she decided that it was fine: they had plenty of food, and sacrificing some travel time to speed up her synchronization with Three Obediences Four Virtues was a worthwhile trade.

They followed the river, seeing it slowly grow wider from many smaller streams flowing into it, only stopping for a short time when Wang Yonghao noticed a good clay deposit. She told him to be on the lookout for it - they would need clay to properly seal the gaps between the stones lining the chiclotron, as well as to prevent their bath from leaking. As they walked alongside the river’s shore, cutting through or flying over occasional patches of underbrush, she got him to talk about his past adventures, both to fish for information and to build rapport.

Even though at times she wanted to tear her hair out, he had a lot of good stories to tell.

The stream they were following merged into a much larger river, easily thirty meters wide, and with a quick current. Here and there, the water turned white as it flowed over a sharp rock sticking out of the river bottom, burbling among the quietude of the surrounding forest. As they walked out on the shore, Wang Yonghao stopped with a considering look on his face.

“Do you think we could make a boat?” he asked her, “I’m tired of walking.”

“Making a boat would take far too long,” she frowned, coming closer, “but we could cut down a pair of trees to stand on. We couldn’t forage while on the river though.”

“We already have enough plants for a couple days, right?” he said, “And this way, we could travel faster.”

She nodded, conceding his point. Besides, she could practice her thread techniques while floating downstream. Working together, they quickly dropped two large pine trees into the water, and chopped off all the branches.

An ordinary person might not have dared to use a bare tree trunk to float on: without a solid boat, and not knowing wherever river rapids might be around the next river bend, it would be far too dangerous to enter the water, but they were cultivators. Balancing on top of a tree trunk was child’s play for them, and even if they were to sink, swimming back to shore would be only a couple arm strokes away, rapid waters or not.

Well. She would swim. Wang Yonghao only needed to step on air to be safe.

They chatted as they floated downstream, and she practiced thread techniques, while Wang Yonghao kept a careful watch on her surroundings. He was the first to notice the forest vanish into the open horizon in the distance on the left side of the river, and called out to her.

“Could you fly up?” She said, “I can’t see if that’s a waterfall we are heading towards.”

He did so, and then had to jog through the air to catch back up with their tree trunks.

“I don’t think it’s a waterfall.” he said, finally landing back on his tree and regaining his balance, “I think that’s just the edge of the world.”

She frowned at that.

“Do you think it is dangerous?” he said, glancing at her expression.

“I can’t see why it would be,” she responded, “at the end of the day, it’s just a wall. But I have no experience steering a ship, let alone one near the edge of the world. I might be missing something obvious.”

She shook her head to clear it.

“It’s probably just paranoia,” she sighed, “If it comes down to it, you can fly, and we can always retreat back to your world fragment. Even if there is some danger, we should be reasonably safe.”

It felt strange to float down the river alongside the edge of the world, seeing sunlight come from underneath the waters where the invisible vertical wall curved below the stream, clean of silt and detritus.

Before she ended up in the world fragment, she had never seen an edge from this close - there were none within a hundred miles of the Golden Rabbit Bay, in fact. This was fairly typical for most of the world.

Much like the boundaries of a world fragment, the edges of the entire world were invisible and impossible to pass through for anyone except legendary cultivators in the void shattering stage. Heavenly bodies - suns, moons, stars and many others - traveled alongside the edge, shedding light and spiritual energy, or blocking other astronomical bodies from doing so. This was one of the distinguishing features of the world fragments, in fact - they lacked the sun or the moons. In places where the world edge was concave, it could be seen through - though light faded into the light blue fog of the sky fairly quickly, and the edge tended to warp light passing through it.

As the day came to a close, they saw one of the solar circles pass them by, traveling alongside the world’s edge, spewing fire and yang spiritual energy into the world. Its light was almost blinding from up close, forcing them to turn away and shield their eyes, though it got much better once it dipped into the water and thick clouds of steam obscured their vision. Qian Shanyi briefly considered wherever the additional sunlight from below the waters could let them travel for longer while staying on the river, but decided against it. Being attacked by the Rosevines while out in the open would be disastrous.

Once the evening fell, she carefully hooked one of her long silk ropes under their tree trunks, and had Wang Yonghao drag them over to the shore by walking on air - the idea of making a new set for each day of travel rankled her.

Wang Yonghao opened his Inner World, and she climbed on his back to descend into it. Tomorrow, they would be back to digging trenches.