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

“What are you doing?”

Qian Shanyi glanced up at Wang Yonghao, who was bent over her, leering curiously. She was sprawled on the grass, her back to one of the mounds where the chiclotron trench rose above the ground, a book in her lap and a cup of rosewine tea in her hand. At her side, she had a crude scratchpad - a wide plank of wood with a piece of paper pinned to it with several needles, with columns of notes written out in her quick-flowing shorthand. A small writing brush laid on top of a small inkwell, resting securely in a depression in the grass, with the jade slate for the Three Obediences Four Virtues right next to it.

“What does it look like I am doing?” she said, lowering her eyes and marking down another dozen symbols on her scratchpad. “You told me to relax until I am fully healed, so I am relaxing.”

“You are doing math, I can see it. You aren’t relaxing, you are working.”

“And math cannot be relaxing?”

Wang Yonghao paused, as if thinking it over. “No.”

“Quite prejudiced of you, Yonghao,” she said lightly, “Perhaps I should challenge you to a duel over it.”

He sighed. “I have never seen you do math to relax.”

She grinned up at him, tilting her head backwards to look him in the eyes. He looked funny upside down. “You’ve never seen me fuck either. Perhaps I have simply never felt like it before.”

Wang Yonghao groaned, covering up his face.

“Fine, fine,” she chuckled, “I was thinking about growing food.”

She picked up her scratchpad, before thinking better of it. It would take her longer to explain her shorthand than any benefit it might provide.

“Ideally, an adult person should eat two to three thousand calories per day,” she said instead, ”For a cultivator, closer to four or five thousand, even more for body fundamentalists. The hard minimum is somewhere around one or two thousand - any less and you are just burning your own body for energy. So between the two of us, we need to grow between four and ten thousand calories of food per day in order to be remotely sustainable. That’s the basis we have to start working from.”

“I knew this was just going to be about math,” Yonghao complained, sitting down next to her with a grimace. “So what, you want us to plant rice?”

“You say it like staving off hunger is an imposition,” she said idly, frowning at her notes. Where did she write this down? She flipped to the next sheet of paper.

Wang Yonghao sighed next to her. “No, no, it’s nothing,” he grumbled.

She glanced back at him, and then turned to face him fully. His lips were pursed, as if she kicked his favorite puppy, and then blamed him for it. “It’s not ‘nothing’,” she said, her eyes piercing him. “This affects both our lives - so what about my plan makes you so annoyed?”

He didn’t respond, rubbing his eyes with the backs of his hands. She reached out and flicked him on the forehead. “Tell me what the problem is, Yonghao.”

He moved his hands away and grimaced. “It just… sounds like a lot of work.”

She glanced at where a hut was slowly coming together. The fool insisted on doing it on his own, and had spent the last day expanding the hole leading down to the granite base of his inner world, and pulling out stone blocks to use as a foundation. By now, all that he had to show for it was a single square frame, resting on six stone posts - though she had to admit that that was probably the hardest part.

Bringing her attention back to him, she snorted. “I am not looking forward to it either. Would you prefer starving?”

“Maybe?”

She rolled her eyes. Drama queen. “No you wouldn’t, you are just tired. Tired from stubbornly deciding to do this work alone, mind. And it’s not like we have to start planting right away - I just want us to have a plan for the future.”

He laid there for a moment, before his face relaxed. “Okay, fine. I am sorry I was dismissive.”

She nodded. “That’s better. Now, do you have a better idea?”

“Why do we have to plant anything?” he said, lifting himself up on one elbow. “Can’t we just buy a whole bunch of rice and store it here? I could build us a larder, I think. It’d be way easier.”

She nodded. This was a valid point, though one she had already thought of. “It’s all because of dependencies,” she said, “currently, we depend on outside sources of food to not starve. If we stored a lot of food at once, our dependence on the outside would go down - but only until we ran out again. Heavens would, of course, know how much food we have, because they’d see us bring it in - and if they forced us into a situation where we had no external food sources for months, we’d be fucked. Too risky for my tastes.”

“Couldn’t they just as easily… Sneak some kind of parasite into our world fragment that could eat this farm of yours?”

She nodded again. “They could, yes - which is why we will still need the larder. But it’s a question of sequential failures. With a larder, Heavens only need to put enough pressure on us to exhaust it - but if we also have a farm, they need to disable the farm, and put enough pressure on us to get through our stores, and make sure we couldn’t re-plant the farm before we run out, or get back to civilisation. It makes us a lot more robust.”

“Fair enough.”

She finally found the sheet she was looking for, and pinned it to the top of the stack with a pair of needles, showing it to Wang Yonghao. It was a simple diagram with three nodes. “I see three broad strategies for how we could produce food,” she continued, “first would be to plant berry bushes or fruit trees - something that would produce fruit all year round, since your inner world doesn’t have winter. The problem is that they take a long time to grow - years, potentially - and even with the time moving faster here, I would prefer not to wait. But maybe keep your eyes out for small apple trees that could fit through the entrance - we might be able to dig them up and replant here wholesale.”

He gave her a baffled look. “What, you really think we’d just run into an unclaimed, healthy apple tree?”

“I think that with your luck this is entirely possible, yes.”

He closed his eyes and sighed. “I hate that you are right.”

“I always am,” she said casually, “But enough about the trees. The second option is animals - chickens or rabbits, for example - that we could raise for meat, but this runs into our as of yet unsolved rosevine problem. As long as we are around and awake, keeping them safe shouldn’t be too big of a deal - but we cannot do so if we are on the outside. We would need to build some kind of safehouse, one that could be safely left locked up for weeks at a time - and that is an engineering challenge in its own right. I think it would be too difficult to start with - which brings us to grains and vegetables.”

Yonghao told her that he tried to freeze the rosevines out by radically dropping the temperature in the world fragment and leaving it alone for a day, but it didn’t seem to kill them. His other idea was to burn them out - but he didn’t try it, since he didn’t want to burn himself. She had concerns that it could also break whatever property of the world fragment allowed the dead air to diffuse - until they knew exactly what caused it, any large-scale modifications seemed too dangerous to attempt.

Wang Yonghao watched her explanation with interest, and nodded. “So, rice?”

She shook her head. “No, rice would be a very bad choice. It takes too much work to plant and harvest.” She gave him a meaningful look. ”Do you want to spend your days bent over a rice paddy?”

“No.”

“Neither do I. This means that rice is right out. No, here is what I was thinking.”

She put her scratchpad down, and picked up her jade slate, handing it over to him. It was already opened to a page with a picture. He took it from her hands, looking at it curiously.

“Beans?” he asked eloquently.

“Yes, beans,” she said, flipping to a different sheet of her notes. “Ten thousand calories per day equates to three kilos of dried beans, or about a ton of beans per year. Conveniently enough, a square meter of planted beans produces about a kilo, which means we need about a thousand square meters of plants per annum.”

Three Obediences Four Virtues had figures on the caloric density of beans, but not on how much space they needed to grow. This is where her other book helped - after returning from the forest, they went straight to the postal office, and checked out some common books from the library about all sorts of farming topics. An immortal chef wanting to learn how plants are grown shouldn’t be too suspicious.

Wang Yonghao raised his eyes from the manual. For all his hatred of math, she saw him easily do the numbers in his head. “That’s more than a third of the world fragment,” he winced, “we’d never be done planting.”

“On paper, if this was a regular farm, yes,” she nodded, “but it isn’t. For one, your inner world doesn’t have winter - this means we should be able to get several harvests done every year. Depending on the variety, beans take from sixty to a hundred and twenty days to grow to harvest - which means we could do three to six harvests per year. For another, we would be the first farm to raise beans in an environment with this much spiritual energy - nobody else would be insane enough to waste it on beans. I wouldn’t be surprised if that doubled the productivity at the very least. We might be able to get away with just a hundred or so square meters, which should be very manageable.”

She shrugged, closing the book and getting up off the grass to stretch her back. “Of course, that’s just a theory,” she said, “I’ve never planted anything in my life, so I am sure I am missing something. For all that my sect specialized in alchemical plants, tending to the greenhouses was done by outer disciples, not cultivators.”

“Now come on,” she said, heading towards the center of the world fragment. “I am bored with math, and you are tired from building a house. Let’s go steal something.”

Two figures glided silently through the night, black cloaks of leather all but invisible against the night sky. They leaped over the fence, grabbed the goods, and vanished, leaving behind not even a single whisper.

Or at least, that was the plan.

“You shouldn’t have come,” Wang Yonghao grumbled quietly, disturbing the ambiance of the dark forest as they circled around Glaze Ridge, beyond even the outermost farms, slowly creeping up on the facility built a good distance away from the town, lower down the hill. They were walking at a leisurely pace, and the dim moonlight that pierced the tree crowns was more than enough to light their way.

“Please,” Qian Shanyi snorted. They were still several kilometers away, and speaking barely above a whisper, voices sure to be swallowed completely by the forest. “Without me, how will you know what to grab?”

“You don’t know either!” Wang Yonghao said, so scandalized that he was barely managing to keep himself quiet. “You said you only read about this ages ago!”

“I make better guesses.”

“Guess what your healer would say about you running around the forest at night?”

“That this is just a restful walk through the woods. It’s good for my health.”

“It’s good for your ego.”

“Are the body and soul not two halves of a whole? What is good for one is good for the other.”

He sighed in exasperation. “You know I am right.”

“I most certainly do not.” She smirked, and stepped in front of Wang Yonghao, walking backwards so she could stare him in the face. The forest floor was flat and clean, with few roots, and she had memorized the next fifty meters of their path. “Besides, what will you do about the workers?”

He glared at her, and her smirk only grew. “We don’t even know if there will be any!”

She rolled her eyes at him. And this man called her stubborn? “Please.”

“Fine,” he said, sighing. “Nothing. I’d go back and we’d try it tomorrow.”

She wagged a finger at him. “You know we can’t give the Heavens time to prepare,” she said, “Tomorrow something will happen, and there will be more defenses. We do it in one sweep.”

“All the more reason for us to have waited until you were healthy.”

“No reason at all,” she slashed her hand through the air, and turned around so that she could see where they were going. “The plan does not rely on my fitness.”

They walked in silence for a while, the midnight forest silent around them but for the slight movement of the trees in the wind. Even the earliest rising birds weren’t due to wake up for another couple hours.

Navigating through an unfamiliar forest was difficult, but not too much. Glaze Ridge was built on a hill, above even the level of the forest around it, and they could see the lights of the town shining through the tree crowns, as well as the moonlight reflected off the glass in the valley to their right. Somewhere to their left, beyond their range of vision, was a road: even if their direction wavered, they couldn’t deviate too far.

Soon enough, they saw lantern light shine through the forest ahead of them, and tasted the foul smell wafting from their target, and slowly came to a stop. “This should be close enough,” she said quietly, closing her spiritual pores as she looked around, and pointed towards one of the pines. “Now help me up this tree.”

The branches were quite high up off the ground. A bit over a day had passed since their tribulation, though for the two of them, it was closer to three, and her lungs and ribs were starting to heal quite well… but not well enough to start leaping around like a mountain goat.

“Didn’t you say the plan doesn’t rely on your fitness?”

“Still doesn’t,” she grinned at her own blatant contradiction, daring him to argue more. “It relies on you helping me climb this tree.”

Wang Yonghao sighed. He would have flown up, but they were trying to stay hidden, and his technique created a pair of clouds of fiery fireflies as bright as a campfire. Instead, he put his back to the tree and laced his fingers together. She stepped onto his hands, and he lifted her up to the lowest branch, leaping up soon after.

Climbing without straining her ribs was difficult, but manageable: she simply had to imagine the tree as a staircase, and rely more on her legs and her sense of balance than on pulling herself up by her hands. In a couple minutes, they ascended to the top of the tree, and stared at their target out over the forest.

There were a dozen pools dug out of the earth, roughly circular and arranged in two rows, each a good thirty meters in diameter, and paved in stone, with high edges. Half of the pools were full, liquid glistening in the moonlight, and the other was empty, revealing the greasy stone walls. Channels ran between them, connecting them to each other, and terminating in a pair of buildings on each end of the facility.

In the center of each of the pools was a small circular “island”, with a thick “walkway” arch connecting the island to the edge. The walkway had a channel running over the top of it, filled with water even in the empty pools, heading towards a much smaller pool off to the side, with large, conical piles of something black rising out of the water.

The whole structure was surrounded by clean pathways, lined with lanterns on poles. A fence, a good five meters tall, encircled the whole facility, with trees cleared out all around it.

“Those must be the hives,” she said, pointing to the smaller pools as she balanced on top of a branch, hugging the tree trunk. They both wore their dark leather cloaks to better blend in with the night. “Queens should be inside them.”

“Are you sure you want to do it?” He sighed. “We could still turn around.”

She raised an eyebrow at him. They’ve already discussed this before setting off. “Yonghao, we need a permanent solution to the waste problem. I don’t want to keep having to dig a new hole any time I need to take a shit.”

And if we are going to start a farm, we’d need a way to compost dead plant matter.

She kept those thoughts private. There was no way to conceal the purpose of this raid from the Heavens, but the farm plan should still be secret.

“I know, I know,” he sighed. “It’s just… I am not used to this.”

“You’ll be fine.”

He stayed silent for a while. “How do you think they feed them?”

She shrugged with one shoulder. “The sludge, I think. They eat it, and clean the water at the same time. Should be easy enough for us to reproduce.”

She wished she could have simply looked this up in the library. She didn’t find any obvious tomes on the subject in the library in Reflection Ridge - and she did not want to attract attention by asking about it. Perhaps there were none to be found - treatment of sewage was a fairly specialized topic.

Wang Yonghao stared at the facility quietly for a while. “I don’t think it could be that simple,” he finally whispered. “Beast trainers have ways to keep the beasts from escaping, right? Perhaps there is a technique they use on the worms - something that could alert them to the theft. I’ve seen that happen several times. We can’t just walk in like this.”

She hummed in agreement. “Mhm. More to the point,” - she pointed towards one corner of the facility, where an older cultivator was slowly patrolling around one of the outer pathways. He wore a mask, wrapped tightly around his mouth and nose, and practical robes of leather. “I told you there would be people. Someone has to be on guard to chase any errant animals out.”

“Yeah, yeah, rub it in,” Yonghao sighed again. “So how do you want to do this?”