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

The black void of death hung above her head, chittering and squeaking, rats growing in number second by second. Qian Shanyi paced below it, flicking her sword left and right to warm up her wrists. Seconds ticked by painfully slowly, stretched as they were by the adrenaline and stimulants in her blood.

Too far away to attack. Not yet.

They fell like water from an upturned bucket, a mass of flesh, tails and teeth, squeaking on the way down. Rats, the cleverest of the twelve heavenly beasts, tricksters and trapmakers, ready to drown her in a flood of flesh. Some of them would die from the fall, but most would survive - and then they would swarm her, biting and clawing until she couldn’t hold out. With only her flying sword, she couldn’t hope to compete - one needed a wide technique, something like Wang Yonghao’s sweeping cuts and bursts of fire, but he said out loud he would not interfere. Other cultivators might have - but by the time she called on them, it would be too late.

A perfect weapon, aimed straight at her throat… Or so the Heavens must have thought.

Qian Shanyi grinned, opened her mouth, and Cursed.

Air warped in front of her face, and then a wave of force sped off towards the swarm and smashed into it, pulverizing their little bodies, crushing bones and tearing flesh. The force of it split the swarm apart, revealing the rats further behind, and she Cursed again, shattering it into pieces.

By the time the rats reached the ground, only a few were left breathing. Her sword danced above her head, batting aside the corpses falling down on her as the rain of blood and viscera drenched her robes. She grabbed one of the few still living ones out of the air with her free hand. It struggled futilely against her fingers.

She bit the rat’s head off and drank the sweet blood straight out of the neck stump, shuddering in bliss as the dense spiritual energy within flowed into her meridians, refilling them after the curses. Water-type: not ideal for her metal constitution, but not too harmful either. Dimly, in the back of her head, she heard cheers from other cultivators around the hill.

“One down,” she growled, tossing the empty corpse aside, and wiped most of the blood off her face with a careless gesture, “eleven to go.”

What few black bastards survived her attack huddled down on the ground, false life leaving their bodies almost at once. Spiritual energy circulated between the little corpses scattered all across the hill, and she closed her eyes, reaching out with her senses. Her left hand quickly tied her rope to the handle of her sword.

The attack came from directly behind her, because the Heavens had no imagination. The world tilted, and she tossed her body to the side, rolling across the blood-soaked grass to get out of the way. An enormous ox, taller than her head and the color of ochre clay, burst out of one of the rat corpses, eviscerating it into dust in the process. It shook the ground as it landed, chuffing and mooing, loud as a trumpet. Its head was adorned with a pair of razor-sharp ivory horns, ready to gore any who would dare approach.

Even a single hit from this beast would shatter her spiritual shield and smear her across the grass.

Yet for all that the ox was strong, it was not agile. She turned her roll into a sprint, gaining distance while the dumb beast stomped around, slowly turning in her direction. Her sword sliced through the air, flying up and encircling the flagpole in the middle of the hill, tying her rope a dozen meters above the ground, before returning to her hand. She switched the rope to her left and gripped it tightly.

The ox was soon after her, hooves thundering against the ground like an avalanche. She did not look back, sprinting away, careful of the length of the rope in her hand. When the beast was mere meters behind her, bright like a sun to her spiritual energy senses, she turned to the side, and used the rope and her momentum to fly upwards, carrying her above the ox. It passed so close to her that she could smell its sweat, and she swung her sword at its neck, slicing clean through the spine in one strike.

The beast fell to the ground, dead, and she swung back to the ground, making her rope untie from the pole and pulling it back around her waist.

Two down, and she wasn’t even winded. Her spiritual energy reserves had dipped, but the rat’s blood filling her stomach was quickly refilling them.

Unfortunately, she knew that the others would be much, much worse… and the Heavens only needed one good hit to kill her.

The emerald-green tiger’s claw burst out of the oxes stomach, and it crawled out as if from a damp cave, drenched claw to fang in blood, yet eerily quiet. Wherever it stepped, a bamboo stalk appeared out of the ground, quickly growing to twice her height and as thick as her elbow. It circled around her, keeping its distance, fangs dripping with rage and blood.

The temptation to send her flying sword at it was there, but that would be a mistake. This beast was deceptively quick, and her aim with the flying sword was still lackluster - she could not guarantee a kill. It would be nothing more than a waste of her spiritual energy, and leave her without a good weapon. Instead, she held her sword high with both hands, carefully stepping towards the center of the hill, where the ground was flatter, easier to move on.

Through her sharp focus, she could dimly hear more and more people gathering - shouts and cheers, and a quiet murmur of speech. She pushed them out of her mind. The postmaster would know how to select the ones who could help - her job was to slay the tribulation, not worry what she would do if she failed.

Suddenly, the tiger pounced at her, baring its fangs with a roar that pierced through the air.

She didn’t even blink, keeping her breathing even, her steps small and careful, ready to strike.

Five meters away from her, the tiger pulled to the side, and retreated back. It circled her again, and then pounced again, roaring and snarling. Her eyes were glued to it, attention not wavering even for a second. It wanted to make her flinch, but this wasn’t her first dance with death.

For the third time it pounced, and for the third time she kept steady. The flagpole - and her second sword - was only five meters away now, and with it in hand, she could perhaps consider sending it out as a flying sword - even if she missed, it wouldn’t be much of a loss. Her knives were too short and wide for the technique to take.

The fourth time the tiger came at her, it did not stop. It moved so fast, she could have missed it with but a blink - but it committed, going for her throat. If she shied away, ran - its claws would have snapped her neck for sure.

When the tiger was in mid-jump, she stepped twice towards it, and sliced down, aiming for the neck. For a moment, she saw surprise in the vertical slits of its eyes. It twisted its massive body, trying to avoid the attack, but up in the air with nothing to push against, there was little it could do. For all its efforts, her sword still went through its shoulder, cutting in deep.

At the same time, the tiger’s right paw slammed down on a shoulder of her own. Her spiritual shield held, but the impact still brought her down to her knees. The tiger flew past her, yowling in pain, and she heard it roll on the grass behind her.

It still lived.

She rolled to the side, but reeling as she still was from the first hit, she was too slow. Three hundred kilograms of tiger muscle slammed into her side, and sent her flying off down the grassy hill, breath driven out of her lungs. She skipped over the ground much like a stone over a lake, rolled, and finally brought herself to a stop, her arms and legs splayed awkwardly. Her side stung like hell, but thankfully her spiritual shield only broke after she bounced off the ground, and no bones were broken.

The tiger was bouncing after her, but her hit got its mark too - it was a lot slower now, its left paw hanging limply at its side. She still had mere moments. As she rose to her feet, she pushed spiritual energy into her sword and sent the blade flying into the tiger, reconstituting her spiritual shield at the same time.

The sword hit its mark, slicing into the tiger’s stomach… but it would still live long enough to kill her. Just before the tiger slammed into her again, she reached behind herself and drew one of her knives, and then they barreled down into the grass in a tangle of limbs and claws.

She came out on top, and heaved the tiger’s heavy corpse off herself with a push of her legs. She had to burn one of her protective talismans to survive, but that was to be expected. Her knife was stuck deep in the tiger’s neck, cleanly separating its spine, and she yanked it out alongside her sword, spinning them through the air to flick the blood away.

Perhaps she should have felt terrified - but instead, the sound of her heart pushing blood through her veins was like music to her ears.

Three down… Is this the best you Heavens have?

“Annoying bastard.” She spat on the ground, reeling from another strike to her stomach. “Stay still so that your grandmother can slaughter you properly!”

The little brown rabbit did not have the strength of the ox, or the claws and ferocity of the tiger, but it more than made up for them with its speed. It rocketed between the stalks of bamboo left all over the hill by the tiger, accelerating with each bounce, and then slammed into her before she could bring her sword up. Each hit may have been individually weaker - though still strong enough to crack bone, should her spiritual shield fail again - but they added up.

The first principle of gambling was to trust yourself, and not flinch in the face of danger. But the second principle was to always know when it was time to grab the money and sprint out the door.

She could kill this rabbit, but it would take most of her spiritual energy to do it. It was time to change the game.

Really, she had already pulled it a bit close with the tiger. But slaughtering it with her own hands felt so good…

At the edge of her perception, she felt several cultivators moving around, keeping their distance as the fight shifted around the hill, never coming close enough to interfere. Wang Yonghao was there too, somewhere, though she had lost him in the confusion, and she needed all her focus just to keep pace with the damn rabbit.

She whistled two short notes, calling for help, and felt one of the cultivators sprint towards her, sent over by the postmaster from among the volunteers. Coordinating was his job, after all.

The rabbit bounced left, right, left, then left again. They’ve played this dance half a dozen times by now, and she still could not guess right, only scoring glancing hits. She held one of her knives in her left hand - putting more weapons in front of her seemed like a good idea, at least.

The rabbit’s hind leg slammed into her stomach, and she hissed, her spiritual shield flickering, but holding. She sliced off one of its ears for her trouble, but it bounced off -

- and right into the path of a large, two-handed sword, the move perfectly placed and leaving it no choice but to be sliced in half.

The rabbit spun around in mid air, and pushed off the blade, sacrificing one of its legs to bounce back at her with the other. She was ready this time, but for all that her perception was so sharp that the flow of time felt like dripping honey, her muscles, still only in the middle of the refinement stage, could not keep up. She missed the damnable beast by a hair’s width, and it bounced off her chest with it’s last leg and down to the ground, ready to flee -

- and was met with the same sword, losing its head in a single strike.

In the sky above them, she heard the sharp crack of thunder as a new bolt of lightning struck the flagstock at the top of the hill. The flash of it turned the grass white for a brief moment.

Qian Shanyi breathed out, sheathed her knife, and raised her eyes to see a cultivator holding a two-handed sword with a wide cross guard, wearing a familiar cloth and leather breastplate.

She arched her eyebrow in surprise. “Fellow cultivator Jian Shizhe?” she said, quickly pulling a bottle of pills out of her bandolier and tossing it to him. It was drenched in blood, much like the rest of her, but he didn’t seem to care.

He nodded at her curtly, and spun his sword through the air, flicking the blood off, pulling the cork out of the bottle with his teeth.

She kept her eye on the rabbit, but it was not transforming. Perhaps the Heavens wanted to hit them from two directions at once.

Together, they raced towards the middle of the hill, pulling on their black goggles as they went. The glass was so dark she could barely see anything through it, moving mostly by memory and the feel of dense spiritual energy in the blood soaking into the ground. “I am thankful for your help,” she said, glancing up at the sky, and racking her brain for what she could recall of his almanac entry. It did not speak of cultivation directly, but she was fairly sure all his duels were with the sword, at the very least. “What techniques do you have?”

He motioned with his enormous sword, held casually in one hand. “I have my sword,” he said, swallowing the healing pill and quickly snorting the stimulant, clearly familiar with both. “It will be enough, or this here cultivator is not worthy of the name Jian!”

“Of course.” She nodded absently, as they reached the pole. “A flying sword, I presume? I have one as well, and curse techniques for medium range.”

“I can slice even the winds with my sword,” he said, “but I have not practiced a flying sword technique. It will not be necessary - my sword skills should more than suffice.”

“I see. And… Besides that?” she asked slowly, confusion and worry leaking into her voice.

He stayed silent, taking out a piece of strangely glittering cloth to polish up his blade. It shined even through the black glass.

“You do not have a flying sword,” she said, with dread in her heart. He didn’t contradict her.

What beasts were next?

The dragon, the snake, and the horse.

The dragon swam through the air, and the other two breathed fire.

With a pure swordmaster at her side…

“Nobody else volunteered,” he said shortly, looking up into the sky. She could hear disappointment in his voice.

Above them, a second lightning strike flashed, slamming down into the flagpost.

She grit her teeth. Time for plan C. “Yonghao, get your ass over here!” she shouted, looking out over the hill, for all that she could barely see through the blackness. Where was he?

“That honorless wretch least of all,” Jian Shizhe scowled next to her, readying his sword to break the third lightning bolt. “No wonder you two are not married, if he leaves you to face a tribulation alone.”

Her head snapped to look back at him. “Honorable cultivator Jian,” she said in a cold tone, “I would have expected someone like you to know better than to question how someone else faces a tribulation.”

She felt Yonghao approach through her spiritual energy senses, and turned to face him - for all that she spoke in his defense, for a moment she did worry that he fled entirely.

“So it is now that you finally show,” Jian Shizhe said. At least his voice sounded contrite, after her admonishment.

Wang Yonghao ignored him. “You sure about this, Shanyi?” he asked, coming closer, “three at once, right away?”

“No choice,” she said, shaking her head, “Honorable cultivator Jian has no way to kill anything more than a couple paces away. I’ll need you to handle the dragon while I deal with the rats.”

“I can deal with the rats,” Jian Shizhe scowled at her, “I do not boast of my skill lightly.”

“Before or after they eat me alive, fellow cultivator?” she scowled right back. Pride she could take, but not stupidity. “I am aware of your skill. This is no ordinary tribulation - the Heavens seek to kill me, and so I expect them to focus their wrath on me, and away from you.”

“What?” he said. She did not bother to clarify.

Another lightning struck down - still at the flagpole, not at Jian Shizhe. Not intended for him, then. Once Wang Yonghao came closer, he had already interfered - though unless her senses deceived her, his lightning seemed quite a bit weaker than theirs.

She turned back to Yonghao. “Why didn’t you tell the postmaster you were ready to help?”

She heard the wince in his voice as he glanced over at Jian Shizhe. “The Heavens control the beasts, right? I thought if I kept my intentions quiet, they would play fairer. But then when you whistled, he ran over before I could react…”

That…

Okay, it wasn’t a bad idea. They had no plan in place for every particular tribulation - with well over seventy possibilities, she had no hope Yonghao could memorize all the options - and as improvisation went, it was a good one.

Well, perhaps it would end up killing them all, so in that sense it was bad, but there was logic to it.

Another weak lightning strike fell down on the flagpost, thunder barely even shaking the ground. She could feel the heat coming off the pole from all the energy it had already absorbed.

“Especially after your rant,” Wang Yonghao sighed, covering his face with one hand. A careless move for an ordinary cultivator, when lightning could strike at any moment - but with his luck, she supposed there was no real chance of him missing it. Unlike him, Jian Shizhe kept his eyes on the sky, sword at the ready. “Did you really have to do that? You just made them a dozen times angrier!”

“I am a cultivator, Yonghao,” she snorted, “what kind of coward would I be, if I challenged the Heavens and didn’t even tell them how I feel? One must face death with a clear heart!” She grinned. “I hope your hearts are clear, fellow cultivators?”

Jian Shizhe growled, glancing at Wang Yonghao, but said nothing. She supposed it would have to do.

Wang Yonghao just sighed, and unsheathed his sword, slicing above his head casually. With an echoing honk of a goose, a razor-sharp blade of light flew off his weapon and up into the sky.

Two lightning bolts struck down at once. One, weak and feeble, was scattered by Wang Yonghao’s careless sword strike before it even finished forming. The other one, as strong as any she had ever seen, slammed down on Jian Shizhe. He leaped towards it, his form perfect, and when his sword met lightning, the bolt came out lesser for it.

She pulled her goggles down and raised her naked eyes to the sky, where two black voids were already starting to form, chittering once again echoing out over the hill. She hummed a tune, warming up her vocal cords. Cursing down two swarms at once would push her up to her limits, but she could handle it - it was the fight after that worried her.

After all, any time a cultivator interfered in a tribulation of another, they would immediately face the exact same tribulation.

Three cultivators, and three tribulations, all at the same time.

She licked her lips, and giggled. Stimulants in her blood, beast blood in her stomach, fear and adrenaline in her veins… It all mixed together until even she couldn’t tell what she was feeling.

To face down three tribulations? Surely it was madness?

Bah!

Triple the danger, triple the fun!

She spun her sword through the air, and prepared to spit in the face of Fate once more.

The postal hill burned all around them.

A scarlet heavenly horse, its mane of smoke and glowing ashes, galloped around them in a wide circle, its breath of flames setting fire to grass and bamboo all over the hill. Wang Yonghao dashed after it into the thick smoke, and she lost sight of them behind one of the corpses of an enormous oxen.

She had her own beast to deal with.

Qian Shanyi spun through the air, bouncing between the two oxen corpses lying close together on the grass. She dodged the snake leaping at her by less than a foot, liquid fire dripping off its scales and igniting the grass below. Its body was as thick as her thigh, half of the scales as black as smoke, the others glowing like hot coals.

As she passed the snake in the air, her blade slid harmlessly across the scales. Her feet touched the ground, and she leaped after the beast, hoping to strike true this time, but the fires flared, and forced her back.

Jian Shizhe’s sword was humming in the air mere meters behind her, batting away the attacks of another rabbit. Alone, he couldn’t force a killing blow so far - but she couldn’t deny his skill at keeping it away from her.

She clenched her teeth to stop them from clattering. The fires dripping off the snake’s scales were bad enough, but it was the aura of fear that surrounded it that was the real danger. A voice in the back of her head, questioning her decisions, making her hesitate and miss her strikes. Her mind was already a mess, and this just made it worse.

At least it also affected the other beasts - for of course, all three of them were going after her at once, just like she expected. They ignored Wang Yonghao almost entirely, and only engaged Jian Shizhe when he got in their way.

The snake slithered in the charred grass, rearing up for another leap. She breathed out, steadying her nerves. It was neither fast nor hard to hit, she just had to ignore her limbic system telling her otherwise.

She heard the squelch of split flesh behind her, and a moment later, Jian Shizhe’s voice. “Rabbit down! Going for the dragon.”

The snake lept before she could respond, and she spun aside, slicing her sword horizontally, and this time she struck true. The blade caught the snake on the edge of the jaw, and she immediately turned her slice into a stab, sliding her sword directly into its brain. The pressure on her mind vanished at once, and she laughed, dancing away from the fires that briefly flared around the corpse. The acrid smoke in the air obscured her vision, but up close, it wasn’t so bad.

“Snake down!” she shouted, “Prepare for the second horse!”

Behind her, she heard the flesh tear as the dragon emerged, and a clang of metal on ivory. The dragon roared in triumph, and out of the corner of her eye, she saw its long, bone-white, sinuous body slither up into the air. No kill. “Dragon’s up.” Jian Shizhe hissed behind her, “Wang, it’s yours!”

The sound of Wang Yonghao’s curses, mixed with the whine and bellows of the first horse warmed her heart a bit. “What do you mean, it’s mine?! You two think I have a second pair of arms?!” he shouted, but Jian Shizhe did not respond. He joined her next to the corpse of the snake, holding his two-handed sword high, while she took a low stance, pulling the fly whisk off her belt with her left hand.

The best time to kill the beasts was just as they emerged, after all.

The man’s skill with the sword was honestly absurd. As soon as she scattered the twin rat swarms - her throat hurt, but she managed - he hobbled one of the oxen, cut open its belly, and without stopping for even a moment, decapitated the tiger before it could crawl out in full. By the time Wang Yonghao brought down the first dragon that emerged from her rabbit, they already had a second one ready for him to deal with.

And now, a third.

The world tilted around them, and a second horse emerged a meter away, snorting a great gout of flame towards the two of them. The Heavens wisened on to their tricks quickly enough.

Jian Shizhe stepped in front of her, and spun his great sword in a wide circle, forming a shield for the both of them and batting the fire aside as if it was nothing. At the same time, she pushed her spiritual energy into the sword of her own, sending it flying just above the ground and towards the horse.

The beast leaped to the side, and she scored merely a shallow gash across its flank. It galloped away into the dense smoke, off to join its partner. She sent a gust of wind from the fly whisk after it, blowing the smoke away and hoping to catch a glimpse of it and skewer it properly, but no such luck.

She clicked her tongue in disappointment, recalling her sword back to her hand. It was no real surprise she missed - she only had a couple weeks of training with the technique, after all.

“Dragon or horse?” Jian Shizhe asked, staying close, holding his sword in a guarding stance. They learned quickly that since the beasts sought to kill her first, the best place for him was at her side, keeping her safe.

“Dragon,” she said, leaping onto one of the oxen corpses to gain some ground above the smoke. Jian Shizhe leaped right after her. She would have climbed the flagpole instead, but one of the oxen broke it in its rampage. “Can’t see shit through this smoke, won’t find a horse until it comes for us.”

There was so much spiritual energy in the air, all mixing together, that she couldn’t even rely on her spiritual energy senses anymore. Damnable heavenly beasts.

A distance away, she saw Wang Yonghao, standing on air and pulling the fire and smoke apart into a cyclone to reveal the horse below, sending slashes of light down at it. His amazing fire-type cultivation law certainly came in handy - without him, they’d have been lost for sure.

“Yonghao, where’s the dragon?” she called after him.

“I lost it,” he grumbled, focusing on the horse.

“Dragon approaching low, west of Qian!” She heard the postmaster shout from down the hill. He must have found some cultivator whose senses could pierce through the smoke. The Heavens, in their blindness, did not consider advice to be interference.

Jian Shizhe spun around, swapping places with her as if in a dance, feet steady on the muscled side of the ox, and swung his sword. The dragon burst out of the smoke mere meters away from them, its jaws open wide, and breathed out a rain of bone shards, each as large and fast as an arrow. Jian Shizhe parried most of them, and she sidestepped the rest, sending her sword out to retaliate.

“And then what, after the dragon?” Jian Shizhe asked as she kept her eyes on the dragon, its body of bone trying to dodge her flying sword. She handed him the fly whisk with her free hand, in case it would dive into the smoke again, still tied to her waist. Out of the two of them, he needed his spiritual energy less, but she needed the vision more. “They’ll cook us alive if we stay on this hill. Run away, like cowards?”

“Is it not cowardice to stick to your pride, even as it kills you?” she asked mildly. Her flying sword scored a hit, stabbing into the dragon’s long tail, and she reversed the thrust, pulling it back out. Bright blue blood dripped on the ground below. “Retreating out of a bad position is nothing to be ashamed of.”

Out above the forest, her eyes spotted a long-awaited movement, and she grinned. Just in time. “Besides… My solution to our horse problem will be arriving soon.”

“And what would that be?”

Her sword stabbed directly into the dragon’s body this time, and it roared, twirling in the air and heading straight for them.

“Yonghao, goose this dragon!” she shouted, and the dragon aborted its charge, forced to climb above an arc of sword light sharp enough to decapitate it, but her sword was already there, ramming through its eye and into the brain. It dropped down into the smoke, and she managed to recall her sword just before it vanished from sight.

At the very edge of her hearing, a faint, distant whistle grew, accompanied by a strange, droning sound.

“You’ll see it now. Sky drop, west, safe, two seconds!” she shouted, bracing herself against the corpse she stood on.

The faint sound turned into a shrill cry of air being torn apart, and then an explosion blew dirt a dozen meters up into the air at the edge of the hill as an enormous pale snake crashed down from the sky. The shake of the ground almost threw Jian Shizhe off the ox, and she had to grab him by the lapels to keep him steady.

“Fellow cultivators, I hope you don’t mind if I join?” Hui Yin shouted from his perch on top of Curls, as the great snake found its bearings, and quickly slithered into the smoke. It’s head whipped down, and then came back up, tossing one of the horses high into the air. The horse whined, great gusts of flame blowing out of its nostrils, but the snake’s jaws snapped shut, and Curls swallowed it in one gulp.

“What took you so long, honorable cultivator Hui Yin?” Qian Shanyi laughed, waving to him from on top of the ox. She worried she misjudged his motivations, and he wouldn’t come - or that he left town already - but in the end, it all fell exactly into place. “The party is halfway over!”

He squinted at her, not stopping playing his strange instrument for even a moment. Above them, thunder cracked the skies once more. “That you, lady? Small world!”

Suddenly, Curls curled up on herself, and stuck her long tail above Hui Yin’s head. Qian Shanyi had just a moment to pull her black goggles back on.

Lightning struck down, and Curls hissed, the sound as loud as a storm gale while sparks danced across her scales.

Jian Shizhe pursed his lips, giving Curls an admiring look, though it was hard to tell through the black glass. “You knew a beastmaster of this strength would come? That is why you said we should target the dragon?”

Curls turned its head over, keeping Hui Yin sheltered under her wide skull. “Beastmaster?” he called out to them, keeping himself anchored, standing upside-down. “I am an immortal musician, fellow cultivators!”

“Didn’t know he’d come,” Qian Shanyi said, “only suspected. It was only natural that a snake of this size would pounce at an opportunity to eat its fill of the heavenly beasts. But I am surprised that you are taking this as calmly as you do, honorable cultivator Jian!”

All of a sudden, she heard the beasts approach. This time, they decided to attack while they were blinded - either by the lightning, or by the goggles they wore to protect against it. She heard Wang Yonghao shout as he followed after.

“And why is that?” Jian Shizhe said, his voice darkened, even as he spun his sword to block out the fire from the other, surviving horse. It was bright enough that she could see it clearly through the goggles.

“To interfere in the tribulation of another, with no request or prior warning?” She laughed, stepping to the side to dodge the leap of a snake, trusting the spike in her sense of terror to tell her where it was. “Any one of us might die today! Is this not as if fellow cultivator Hui Yin had stabbed you in the stomach?”

She couldn’t see his reaction through the goggles, but his voice was clear enough. “Have your Elders taught you nothing?” He sneered. “To cultivate is to rebel against the heavens! If fellow cultivator Hui Yin dares to rebel, who am I to stand in his way?”

“Well said!” she laughed again.

“Can you two focus?” Wang Yonghao shouted at them, “the tribulation is still here!”

“Is your wife always this reckless?” Jian Shizhe said.

“It’s pretty common for her,” Wang Yonghao grumbled.

“Oh shut it,” she cut back, “what kind of cultivator doesn’t have time to debate Dao in the middle of a tribulation? Have neither of you read any classics?”

Thunder roared, and the beasts pounced on them once more, with claw and bloody tooth.