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

Is it good to resolve an argument calmly? Is it bad to fight?

No one true key will fit all feuds among all people. Emotions might need airing to make progress, even if this will turn an argument into a fight - but in the end, what is the true danger? Perhaps you would come to blows - but even that is quite unlikely.

This sort of logic is common among ordinary people, but in the world of cultivators, it is a dangerous road to thread. An open quarrel between two cultivators is always deadly, and the first person to strike is most often the one to walk away alive. Worse still, in the moment, how could you tell why your opponent bursts forth with spiritual energy? Are their emotions out of control, or are they about to strike you down with a technique? Activating your spiritual energy in front of another cultivator without warning is like swinging a sword at their neck: even if you are fast friends, can they really trust you to stop before it cuts into flesh? Perhaps it would be safer to cut you down first.

By provoking Wang Yonghao, Qian Shanyi was playing with fire, but frankly she felt this conflict was long overdue a conflagration.

“A couple deceptions?!” Wang Yonghao threw his hands up in the air, “It was way more than a couple! I thought you wanted to be friends, in your bizarre way! Friends don’t deceive each other!”

“Friends?” She sneered, “Because I like your stories? Do you even comprehend the situation I am in?”

“Oh what, does your ‘recuperative training’ require you to lie all the time?” he rolled his eyes, making mocking finger gestures in the air.

“I am stuck in the middle of demon beast infested forest, fighting for my fucking life!” she ceded through her teeth, advancing on Wang Yonghao, “You have your luck, but I don’t. Do you know why I built the chiclotron? Because the feng shui deviation in your damned inner world almost murdered me! A dozen threats compete to see which one will take me first, but do you try to help me? No, you would rather sit around and relax. Is this what ‘friends’ do?”

His face gradually went white, and he took a step back. Qian Shanyi followed after him.

“How was I supposed to know you needed help?” he muttered, “I thought you were some kind of old monster and didn’t need any! I am sorry, but you didn’t even ask!”

“You apologize.” She stabbed her finger in his direction, ”I pay my debts.” She continued, pointing back at herself, “That’s the difference! And in terms of debts, you owe me. You owe me for beating me up, you owe me for cleaning up your inner world, and you even owe me for saving your life from the dead air last night! And yet you bring up my deceptions?”

“I said I’ll pay you back!” He threw his hands up in the air, recovering his composure, “But just because someone owes you, it doesn’t mean you get to lie to their face! At least say you are sorry it turned out this way!”

“What is there to be sorry for?” she threw her hair back, “I didn’t know whether I could trust you, so I deceived you. If I had to do it all over again, knowing what I did at the time, I wouldn’t change a thing.”

“Seriously? Not a single thing?” He said, “Did I do anything untrustworthy to you? You would just keep lying forever then?”

“Forever? No.” she snorted, “I would have preferred to reveal this once we have reached a city, where we could have simply decided to walk our own separate ways, not in the middle of a deadly forest.”

“So you admit you still don’t trust me? Then you are awfully confident for someone a full minor realm below me!” Wang Yonghao narrowed his eyes at her, “What if I, the traitorous villain that I am, were to just beat you up again?”

Well, if threats were how he wanted to play this…

Qian Shanyi bared her teeth, and put an entire fifth of her spiritual energy into strengthening her spiritual shield, making it glow faintly and sparkle from energy overflow. Wang Yonghao took a careful step back.

“I am a cultivator,” she hissed, “and to cultivate is to rebel against the heavens! Do you comprehend what that means, junior? To wage war against a foe that could squash you at any second? To burn your life and soul to cinders, even if all you can do is break their single finger? Confident? Of course I am not confident! But I would rather detonate my dantians than bow my head in fear.”

She spat on the ground between them, unsheathing her sword with deliberate slowness.

“You want a fight?” she sneered, “Come on, then! This daoist will not die quietly.”

Wang Yonghao took another step back, and she felt his spiritual energy vanish as he finally got his emotions back under control.

Coward.

“You are crazy,” he said, breathing out, “you are actually just crazy.“

“I am a cultivator,” she snorted, sheathing her sword back in a single move. On some level, she was glad her bluff got him to back down, even though she wouldn’t have minded blowing off steam with a proper spar, “It comes with the job.”

“No, it doesn’t,” he shook his head vigorously, “I must have met hundreds of cultivators in my life. Do you know how few of them would throw their life away on a point of principle? I’ve seen dozens beg for mercy in front of demonic cultivators or angry sect elders, drowning in tears, even when they must have known their ending was a foregone conclusion.”

Wang Yonghao grabbed his head in both hands.

“When normal cultivators break their leg, they take it easy until it’s healed!”, he continued, his voice raising in pitch, “They don’t just go around getting into more fights!”

“That may be so, but what do normal people matter here?” Qian Shanyi said, crossing her arms.

“I am saying you are insane!”

“It takes a bit of insanity to break into the heavens. Anyone who steps on the path of cultivation should know this.”

“No they don’t! You keep talking about breaking into heavens, but not even one out of a dozen cultivators would care about this! It’s ancient history!”

“Their ignorance of the roots of cultivation is no excuse.”

“I just - I need a minute,” he breathed out, walking off in the direction of the river. She let him go.

While she waited for Wang Yonghao to come to terms with reality, she picked up one of the ropes and started practicing thread control techniques.

Her control over the rope was still weak, but getting better over time. Many days of practice while floating down the river were starting to add up, and by now, she could easily construct both spiritual energy envelopes, though the actual movement of the rope remained slow and jerky.

By the time she ran out of spiritual energy, a good hour had passed, and he still hadn’t returned. Unlike within the world fragment, spiritual energy concentration in the forest was very average, and she figured she would need several hours just to recover her reserves. To pass the time, she opened up Three Obediences Four Virtues to the page with the needle control diagram, and started to analyze it.

The rest of the manual claimed to be suitable for cultivators in the refinement stage, and all other techniques fit this assessment, with the needle control diagram remaining as the only exception. Qian Shanyi suspected that she must have simply missed something - perhaps there was a secret sub-diagram hidden within the picture, or a code that would lead her to an expanded version of the manual, or something else of that nature.

After half an hour, it finally clicked for her, and she groaned, raising her eyes to the skies. She saw a solution, but she almost wished she didn’t.

The diagram could be broken up into different parts: ones responsible for directing the “needle”, controlling levitation and acceleration, strengthening the material beyond its normal tolerances, and so on. Many of these subcomponents were duplicated in order to push the “needle” to the peak of speed and power. If she were to remove three quarters of the duplicates, the diagram would shrink radically, and thus would become much easier to manage at her level of cultivation.

She could even see where Tang Qunying intended for these changes to happen - small marks she previously dismissed as irrelevant delineating sections that could be removed wholesale, and so on. She must have been legendarily talented in order to design a technique that could be broken up in this way without sacrificing its stability, and left the process of actual modification as a teaching exercise for her inheriting disciple.

The problem was that she couldn’t just erase some sections of a picture - parts of the structure would need to be strengthened, others weakened, all by very precise amounts in order to ensure that everything was balanced. This was due to a principle that the flow of spiritual energy into a junction must always be equal to the flow out of it, lest the technique blow up in your face - but because the development of new cultivation techniques was far outside of her education, all she could recall was that the name of the daoist who discovered it sounded quite foreign.

In order to apply the changes, she would need to meticulously go through every point on the diagram and recalculate every single flow ratio of spiritual energy. This would be a massive undertaking, and she didn’t even have an abacus on hand.

She put the jade slate back into her robes and went off to find Wang Yonghao. She would deal with this problem when she at least had some paper to write on.

When she came over to the river shore, she found him sulking, using his sword to cut a small tree into a statue of a fish. He glanced over at her, then turned away.

“You are really taking this harder than I expected,” she said, leaning against a nearby tree.

“Why do you care?” he grumbled, not turning her way.

“We are still in a life threatening situation,” she said, “it would be awfully stupid if we couldn’t manage to get along and work together simply because of some personal issues, at the very least until the danger is over. I prefer not to turn my life into an overdramatized theater play.”

“Oh yeah?” he scowled, turning towards her, “Then why did you make fun of me so many times? Even if you wanted to deceive me about your strength, that wasn’t at all necessary.”

“I will readily admit my own hypocrisy. It doesn’t make my point moot.”

“I don’t know,” he glanced at her again, and sighed, “I guess I sort of get why you pretended to be an old monster. I often pretend I am weaker than I am so people don’t notice me, and that’s different, but not that much. But still, how am I supposed to trust you now?”

She let the question hang for a while before responding.

“You really care that much about lies?”

“You don’t?”

“No. I care about actions.”

“But those aren’t separate,” he sighed, “how can you trust someone to do good things if they aren’t honest?”

“By looking at what they actually did in the past?” she raised her eyebrow, “Have I ever done anything to harm you?”

“You tricked me into digging for rocks,” he squinted at her.

“Which we both needed to do, to prevent the feng shui of the world fragment from worsening,” she shook her head, “You get a safer inner world and a bath out of the deal. It’s hardly harmful when it benefits you in the end.”

He stayed silent for a while.

“I guess nothing else comes to mind,” he finally said, “but that doesn’t mean much. You can just do it in the future.”

“Why would I do that?”

“I don’t know? The whole point is that I don’t want to have to guess.”

“But you always have to guess,” she said, “someone can tell you the truth and then still harm you. People change their minds all the time, they can be confused, speak in error, or misjudge their abilities or those of others. Sometimes they get drunk and act out in rage. Honesty doesn’t buy you safety.”

“You are trying to trick me again,” he sighed in exasperation, “being honest obviously helps.”

“To an extent,” she said, conceding the point, “but less than understanding the actual motivations that guide the actions of others.”

“So what motivates you to lie?”

“I enjoy tricking and embarrassing people,” she answered bluntly, “My mother once told me that if I didn’t look so similar to herself, she would have been sure I was a kitsune switchling. The first thing I did after I was old enough to enter an imperial library was look them up - It turns out they eat people, and when I told her about it, she just asked me what my favorite type of victim would have been.”

He turned to her with wide eyes.

“That is a terrible thing to say to a child.”

“How so? I thought it was hilarious. The answer is sailors and pilgrims, they go missing all the time.”

He turned back to his unfinished statue with a sigh.

“When it comes to you,” she continued, “cultivating within your inner world has accelerated my growth by leaps and bounds. Since I need your cooperation to access it, I have no reason to harm you. Nor do I know how to take it away from you, before you ask.”

“And what if I want to get rid of it?” he asked, “I want to get rid of my luck, and all the other nonsense.”

“Yonghao,” she sighed, “I have no clue how someone could completely change their luck. I have certainly never heard of it happening, outside of some frankly questionable myths and legends. It should be possible - there is nothing impossible beneath the heavens - but finding a way to do so will take you many years, and I doubt your special luck will assist you in getting rid of itself. I am more than willing to help you, since by the time you manage it, I would have long gotten stinking rich from selling all the treasures within your inner world.”

“I told you, you can’t sell them. It doesn’t work.”

“Junior, with respect, you suck at managing your inner world,” she smiled, “I think I can figure out a trick or two you didn’t.”

He narrowed his eyes at her.

“Junior?” he asked, “How old even are you?”

“Twenty three.“

“Twenty three?! I am twenty six! I should be calling you junior!”

“Seniority comes from skill, not age,” she snorted, “You can call me junior when you manage to trick me.”

“I don’t want to trick anybody!” He grit his teeth, turning away from the statue and sending some slashes of light into the depths of the forest in frustration, “Why can’t you just be honest?”

“I have laid all my cards on the table. Why can’t you?”

“Me? I’ve always been honest!”

“Really?” she raised her eyebrow, “I saw how you reacted when I asked you why you travel alone. You are very much hiding something.”

“That’s different,” he scowled, “It’s a personal secret. Everyone has those. You wanted to trick me about much bigger things. And you still haven’t apologized for any of it!”

“Sure, I apologize,” she blinked, “But what good are these words? Apologies are worthless, people say they apologize and then keep doing all the same things. What matters is wherever I would continue to deceive you, and I have no intention of doing so. Deceptions are always impermanent, and a flawed basis for a long term relationship. I have no secrets to keep.”

“Really now?”

“If you don’t believe me, then ask away.”

“Why do you want to establish a new sect? Why not just join one?”

“Rare few sects accept a loose female cultivator, but I have been a part of one in the Golden Rabbit Bay,” she answered, “It’s not acceptable. I want to start from scratch to do it better.”

“Better how?”

She took a bit to answer, and Wang Yonghao went back to carving his statue.

“You said I talk about the heavens more than the other cultivators,” she said, “you are right about that.”

“So what, you actually want to break into the heavens? Be the next Gu Lingtian?”

“It’s not…about the heavens,” she frowned, “It’s about what they represent. Every cultivator - even the karmists, no matter their own self-deceptions - chooses to cultivate even though the heavens will try to strike them down. They reject the unjust will of the heavens and impose their own will on the universe, their desires, ones they are willing to fight and bleed for. Cultivation is a tool of infinite freedom - it can let you soar through the sky like a bird, live as long as you want, and crack any wall in your way.”

He kept his eyes on the statue, but she could tell he was listening attentively.

“Most cultivators would agree with this,” she continued, “They have learned some history, and they know all the usual platitudes, such as ‘to cultivate is to rebel against the heavens’. But for them, this is just…ancient history, like you said. They do not grasp, deep within their soul, the fact that the only reason they are alive at all is because Gu Lingtian broke the gates of heaven. And because of this, they betray his rebellion through their own actions.”

He finally turned to look at her.

“Do you know how many times I have heard one of the elders speak of the heavens a scant few minutes after refusing to teach me their alchemical secrets, because they couldn’t trust a woman to keep her mouth shut?” She scowled, feeling her skin flush from the echoes of that old anger, “Talk of needing to cultivate until my muscles ache, right after giving medicines and resources that rightfully should have belonged to me to disciples who worked one tenth as hard, but who happened to have a powerful relative? I will not even mention how hard it was to even join a sect. Why should their will overwrite my own? If I want to break into heaven, who gave them the right to ensnare my legs?”

She spat on the ground.

“Sanctimonious pieces of shit, you simply replaced the heavens! The need to rebel is referring to you!”

She paced a bit, calming herself down. Wang Yonghao watched her with a strange expression.

“So you want your own sect so the elders wouldn’t bully you?” he said, folding his arms on his chest.

“I want freedom!” she snarled, spinning around to face him again, “For me, for others, for everyone! And you can’t be free alone. Look at what we are doing here - even for something as simple as a chiclotron, we need to strain our backs for days on end. The higher your realm, the more resources you need - spirit stones, medicines, special cultivation rooms, spiritual food - and getting those takes time which you aren’t spending on cultivation. This is why cultivators form into sects in the first place: they put the manual work on the shoulders of outer disciples to free up their own time, and this is fine - most people will never open their spiitual roots and become cultivators, after all. But this exchange is lopsided, warped until those higher up get everything and those below get almost nothing. This is what disgusts me. Freedom for fair treatment - that’s what I want!“

“You hypocrite!” he responded, “You yourself said you liked to embarrass people! When they push you down you hate it, but when you push me down it’s fine?”

“My jokes and trickery aren’t going to permanently sabotage your entire life,” she glared at him, “they will merely leave you annoyed and frustrated. What I am talking of will. There is no way to compensate for being deprived of resources at a critical moment in your cultivation. It is a dagger stabbed into your stomach simply because someone else could.”

She stabbed her finger at him.

“You want to get rid of your luck?” she continued, “Just figuring out a plan for doing it could take you decades. You can’t do that alone, but if you tell anyone about it - a sect, the empire, even a random loose cultivator - how could you be sure they wouldn’t soulrape you to take your riches for themselves? Inner world like yours would be a temptation for even the most studious monks. You wanted to know how you can trust me? You can trust me because I’d rather eat dirt than let Heavens get away with anything they did, because if I told anyone about you I would be the first one on the chopping block, and because I need your help too.”

“If this isn’t all just an even bigger lie,” he said, squinting at her, but she could tell she got through to him.

“Would I do that to you?” She responded, brushing a hand through her hair casually.

“Yes?”

“Come now, really?” She put a hand on her chest, “This here cultivator is best known for her honesty and trustworthiness. I barely even know how to haggle, let alone lie.”

She managed to keep her face in a schooled mask for a good ten breaths before her laughter burst forth. Wang Yonghao scowled at her.

“Jerk,” he said, heading back towards the entrance to his inner world, “we can discuss details later. Let’s go deal with my inner world.”

They left the rosevines within the world fragment for the time being. After the night they have spent in the tree, the plants have burrowed deep into the earth, and pulling them out would be a nightmare while the air was still full of poison. Instead, Wang Yonghao simply moved the fire treasures around to cut off the open fires, and closed up his internal world. Their hope was that with no new dead air being produced, the problem would solve itself.

They spent the rest of the day foraging around the river bend. Wang Yonghao managed to catch another small fish, and she gathered some forest flowers, which they cooked on a small wood fire while discussing their future plans. It wasn’t enough for both of them, and their stomachs rumbled in hunger.

As the evening approached, they opened up the world fragment and she poked her head inside to check the air. It felt much fresher to her, and they decided it was worth the risk to try spending the night inside.

Another long argument spiked when she asked Wang Yonghao to carry her down. He again insisted that her previous way of standing on his back was far too embarrassing, and also completely unnecessary when he could use the much more comfortable bridal carry. She stood her ground, and said that not only did they have an agreement, but also if he tried to hold her like that then he wouldn’t need to worry about marriage for the rest of his life. In the end they settled on him tying a rope to his waist, and her hanging off that rope a good meter below his feet.

Once they descended down to the ground, they quickly discovered that their troubles weren’t over: all of their food reserves had vanished.