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

Qian Shanyi stared grimly as Wang Yonghao put the last couple beams on top of their new hut, her hands crossed on her chest. Her idea of collecting stories while he worked ended up distracting him too much from the construction work, and she decided to just let him finish.

The hut itself looked like a brick of wood - all lines and right angles, made easy with the Honk of the Solar Goose. The individual beams weren’t actually attached to each other, but rather laid freely, interlocking at the corners with notches cut almost halfway through each beam. The roof was much the same - just another layer of notched beams over the very top. Here and there, they cut narrow window slits in between the logs - partly for airflow, partly to let in some light, and also to have somewhere to tie their hammocks.

In place of a door, they made a set of free-standing beams that could be buttressed into special notches in the floor and ceiling, and secured in place with a couple swords they had lying around.

Despite Wang Yonghao’s best efforts, the beams did not rest flush with each other, leaving many gaps in the walls - but that didn’t matter, because there was neither wind nor rain in the world fragment. All the hut had to do was let them sleep without the rosevines getting in - and for this, it should serve perfectly. They’d plug up the largest holes with clay to block off the sunlight, and the rest they could ignore.

There was just one problem.

“So I’ve been thinking -” she began as soon as Wang Yonghao hopped off the roof.

He sighed, dusting off his robes. “Do you ever stop?”

She gave him a baffled look. “Do you ever stop breathing?”

“I do not breathe mysteries.”

“Tragic,” she said, shaking her head in mock dismay. ”Crippled from birth. My condolences.”

He rubbed his eyes with one hand. “Well, what is it?”

She pointed at the wooden building. “This hut. We are going to be sleeping there. That makes it a bedroom.”

“Sure. And?”

“And a bedroom is supposed to have the door facing south. So riddle me this: where is south?”

Wang Yonghao looked around the perfectly circular world fragment, and its complete lack of any suns, moons, or anything else that could indicate a direction. “We could get a compass,” he said uncertainly.

“Sure,” she agreed, ”But there is a bigger problem. Do you know why the door is supposed to face south?”

“Something about feng shui?”

“I also don’t know. That’s geomancy, and I only ever went as far as the elemental interactions. Do you see the issue?”

A frown creased his brow. She gave him a moment, but he still didn’t speak, and so she simply continued. “Control of environmental feng shui depends on the environment.” She motioned around the world fragment for emphasis. “And where do you think we could find a reference book for our environment? We don’t have rain, snow, or night. The concentration of spiritual energy here is absurd. The wind doesn’t blow, and we can change air temperature on a whim. All of which means…”

“That general instructions on geomancy won’t apply here,” Wang Yonghao concluded.

She raised a hand, turning it this way and that. “Some will, some won’t, but we have no easy way to distinguish. And because of how much spiritual energy is around us, any significant drop in the auspiciousness of feng shui is a mortal danger.” She sighed, and headed over to her tools. “I am not sleeping in there until I check it over with my luck bottle.”

“Chiclotron should handle it, surely.”

“That thing almost killed me several times,” she said, shaking her head as she returned, bottle in hand. ”I won’t trust it blindly. Let’s hope we don’t have to rebuild this house several times.”

Wang Yonghao rubbed his hair. “I mean… We’d still need to, at some point. The wood will warp and splinter as it dries. Some beams will need replacing.”

“One thing after another,” she said, hopping into the hut through the open doorway. Perhaps they should also consider adding some stairs. “First, I need to know which is safer - the cold bunker that is growing dampier and moldier by the day, or this hut of dubious structural stability.”

Wang Yonghao hopped in right after her, and she handed him a piece of paper, a brush and an inkwell. “Here, you can help me note down the rolls,” she said, “geomancy is a precise science - I’ll teach you how to make the graphs later.”

Qian Shanyi woke up from the sharp smell of pine sap tingling her nostrils. She rubbed her eyes open, sneezed, and wrinkled her nose. Pleasant in moderation, but this was a bit much.

Still better than that damp bunker.

Comparatively, the hut turned out to have somewhat better feng shui, though measurably worse than out in the open air of the world fragment. Perhaps having a door on the roof was worse than on the side, or perhaps there was some other reason, but the results were hard to argue with. It was possible that if they built the door pointing somewhere else it would have been better still - but Wang Yonghao didn’t feel like rebuilding it just for an experiment, and frankly, even if she was ready to lug heavy beams around, neither would she. It was more than good enough to sleep in.

As she focused on her spiritual energy senses, she felt another unexpected benefit - in the darkness of the hut, spiritual energy became yin-polarized. Even the bunker let in too much light for this to work, and after so long in the ever-present sunlight of the world fragment, feeling this much yin spiritual energy sent a pleasant shiver down her spine.

Yin turned to yang, and yang to yin quite easily, and with no real harm - but one still felt more natural to her, and it was good to vary the two. Without a moon to bring in more yin, or even a day and night cycle, darkness might be their only source for the foreseeable future.

She yawned, and hopped out of her hammock, slotting her feet straight into her sandals with the grace of a cultivator. When she felt something wet touch her sole, she pulled one off to check, and saw a sticky glob smeared all over the wood. She raised her eyes upwards, and in the dim light of the hut, saw many droplets all over the ceiling.

Pine sap. Must have dripped while we were sleeping.

She ran her hand through her hair, and grimaced when she felt more sap stick to her fingers. It was all over her robes, too. This would be a joy to wash out.

Walking over to the “door”, she pulled out a pair of swords holding the two beams in place, and with a light tap of her foot, sent them toppling out of the hut. Bright sunlight flooded through the opening, and she squinted at it. Clean air felt like a sip of cold water on a hot day after the sharp smell of the hut.

The beams fell down on the ground with a loud thud and a clunk, and she heard Wang Yonghao stir behind her. “Bwuh?” he said eloquently.

“We’ve got a sappy problem,” she responded, stepping out to check the clock. Six hours of sleep - good enough. “Any ideas?”

She heard Wang Yonghao sigh, and after a short scramble with the ropes of his hammock, he stepped out of the hut. “A what problem?” he asked, squinting at her.

There wasn’t even a single drop of sap on him.

“You know, it’s the small things like this that make my blood boil,” she said, gesturing to his clothes.

He looked at her, then at his clothes, then back at her, before shrugging with a lazy yawn.

She tore off some grass, using it to pick out spots of sap from her hair. “Infuriating as this is,” she sighed, trying to get her temper under control, “I suppose it does further prove that your luck is not dependent on the Heavens to function.”

“Did you need more proof?”

“Not even slightly,” Qian Shanyi cursed, tossing the useless clump of grass aside. It wasn’t getting the sap out, it was adding the stalks to her new hairstyle. “I am just looking for any excuse to not be absolutely livid that I will need to spend a good hour picking sap out of my robes and hair.”

She spat on her hand to see if the liquid would help. It didn’t.

“It didn’t seem that sappy when I was cutting the wood,” Wang Yonghao said, hopping out of the hut and heading towards the kitchens. “I figured it would take several days to start dripping. I guess it was hidden a bit deeper within the grain. You should use oil or alcohol to get it out - water won’t do anything.”

She sighed, and dropped her hands. Well, at least they already had oil - she bought some for cooking before they left to steal trees from a forest. “Thank you,” she said, heading to their food storage. “I don’t know how I would have explained getting sap in my hair in the middle of the night within a tavern. I suppose I will just have to wear different robes to sleep, and something to cover my hair, until all of it drips out of the wood. How long do you think that will take?”

Wang Yonghao shrugged. “No idea. A year? Maybe more - wood dries pretty slowly.”

She gave him a long-suffering stare. “It will drip slower over time,” he clarified. “But that’s what you get from fresh wood.”

“It’s a Heavenly plot, all of this.”

“We could try to dry out the logs faster with a fire treasure?”

“And burn down our hut in the process,” she said grimly, picking up a bottle of olive oil and heading to the bath.

The oil worked surprisingly well, and after a good breakfast, Qian Shanyi felt leagues better. She and Wang Yonghao split up for the morning - he headed off to the edge of the world fragment to dig out a latrine hole, while she busied herself with scraping the droplets of sap off every surface of the hut. It was annoying work, but not too physically exerting, and after an hour she had a small pile of sap and resin collected into one of their spare bowls.

Perhaps she’d find a use for it later. She’d have to scrape the hut in the evening too, just to keep the droplets small through the night.

With her job finished, she joined Wang Yonghao, and once again helped him measure and sketch out cuts to the stone plates they were going to use.

The latrine itself would double as a composting pile, and so they were designing it with space in mind. They decided on a roughly cubic chamber, about a meter to the side, lined with stone and sealed with fried clay. It would keep the paleworms from escaping, and water from seeping in or out of it. On one side of the chamber, there would be an inclined tunnel, leading up to a much wider, but shallower chamber for the paleworm hive itself, surrounded by raised walls of packed earth, and likewise lined with stone and clay.

A similar design to that of a regular paleworm farm, if in miniature.

The first step was, of course, to dig out the two chambers. Since Wang Yonghao still refused her help - and they only had the one shovel, in any case - she spent her time writing down more of his adventures over the years. Fortunately, digging was easy enough that he managed to multitask, and she got quite a lot done. The work was progressing slowly, but surely - though organizing her notes was becoming a challenge in and of itself, as he kept correcting himself about where, when and in what order the various events had occurred.

“Tell me specifically about the various sects you have met,” she asked when they stopped to cook some lunch. “ideally ones from outside the Empire.”

“You saw some pattern?” Wang Yonghao asked, trying, and failing, to conceal his excitement.

She motioned for him to go back to washing the rice. It was his time to cook. “No,” she said, “This is about my idea for making money. Seems to me that the Heavens rapidly drain your cash, if you ever manage to acquire some - perhaps to keep you moving. That means we need a way to make money whenever we need it - and the easiest way would be by selling some of our treasures, but the Empire has a dozen different mechanisms that make this exact thing difficult.” He looked up at her in surprise, and she clarified. ”It’s done to catch thieves, poachers and the like - Lin Fang told us as much. They are not hunting you specifically. But if we were a registered sect, many of these issues would fall away.“

Wang Yonghao grimaced at her words. She eyed him carefully, considering his reaction.

“So you want us to register a sect?” he said, exchanging the rice water. There was a tension in his voice, though concealed.

She shook her head sadly. “We can’t. But we might be able to pretend we represent a sect from outside the Empire, and get recognition that way, which I think amounts to much the same thing. Do you know any sects that conveniently killed themselves off down to the last man, unbeknownst to the world at large?”

“Maybe a couple,” he said after a moment, and then frowned. “Was that what you meant when you said you got us a business partner? That you’d get Jian Wei’s help in pretending to be a sect?”

“I’ve considered it,” she said mildly, “but no, or at least, not directly. He has no reason to help us, and even less reason to trust our word with no evidence, on something of this nature. I might still find a way… but until then, his role is much simpler. His sect is actively expanding, and every new cultivator needs a new sword, and every old one wants one of higher quality - we could sell some to him under the table, and his sect could handle all the paperwork. We wouldn’t be able to sell everything, not without tipping him off to the fact that we are much more than just some very experienced ruin delvers - but the possibility is worthwhile in itself.”

“And you think he’d go for it?”

“I think it’s likely, and I am all but certain he wouldn’t be offended if I ask.”

Wang Yonghao’s grimace grew wider. “I guess I get the idea, but… I don’t know. It doesn’t sit right.”

“Why not?”

“It’s…I don’t know.” He sighed. “Do we have to talk about this? It’s not like we need more money right this moment.”

“Hm. Money can come and go, but that you don’t want to talk about it makes me a hundred times more interested.”

Wang Yonghao groaned, pouring out the last of the rice washing water, and setting the pot on the fire node to cook. “You just like pushing boundaries, don’t you?” he said.

“To cultivate is to shatter all boundaries on human nature, Yonghao. Now fess up, what is it?”

He stayed silent while he chopped up some of the heavenly rooster for their dish. She let him think in peace, and picked up a kettle for their rosevine tea - it had reached just about the right temperature. She brewed it lightly - just enough for the taste, but not enough to affect her circulation of spiritual energy. Healer’s orders.

“How do you imagine me establishing a sect?” Wang Yonghao finally said, while she was pouring a cup for each of them. “Patriarch Yonghao? Elder Wang? Ridiculous.”

She hummed, not even looking away from the tea. “You are simply restating the same thing - that you don’t like the idea.”

“What?” he said in confusion. “No! I am saying it wouldn’t be plausible for me to be one.”

She rolled her eyes, then turned back to him and rolled them again, just so he could see. “Of course it wouldn’t be plausible - that’s why I wouldn’t make you do that. Elders are almost always in the building foundation stage, though I do not recall if it’s a strict legal requirement. We’d be playing the roles of regular inner disciples, not elders. Now stop dodging around the question, Yonghao.”

He narrowed his eyes at her. “Fine, maybe I am.” he said. “But it’s not like I can see into my soul!”

“You are a cultivator, Yonghao. You can literally take a look.”

He scowled at her, and she couldn’t help but laugh. “You know what I mean. How am I supposed to know why I dislike something? Sometimes I just do!”

“By thinking.” She snorted, gesturing to her head with her cup of tea. “Take as much time as you need.”

He fumed all the way through their lunch, and didn’t speak again until they were back to digging. With nothing else left to do, she was supervising. “I guess I just don’t like the idea of belonging to a sect in general,” he finally said.

“Because of your history with them?” she guessed.

“Partly? But it’s not the whole thing.”

She nodded. “Because you are worried this would make your luck worse?”

“No, I don’t think it will.” He shook his head, leaning on his shovel in contemplation. “At least, not directly. I mean, it’s just a label at the end of the day, right? But it’s just… I guess I don’t like leaving traces.”

She gave him a weird look. “You can’t help leaving traces. The remains of your battle with that one mushroom spirit blocked off a whole town gate.”

“Something that obvious isn’t too common,” he said, “Most of the time, I am just some face in the crowd. If I come into town, and something strange happens - well that’s probably not related to this one loose cultivator, right? But if I am from a sect, then that’s a bigger deal. That gets people to notice, and… I am already too noticeable.”

She tapped her cheek with one finger, considering it. Wang Yonghao wasn’t wrong, per se - there was a danger of the wrong person putting the picture together - but it seemed to her that if that was a possibility, then someone would have done it by now. Which meant that either his luck or the Heavens must have been actively running interference, and it shouldn’t matter much wherever it was the rumors about a “loose cultivator Wang Yonghao” or about “Wang Yonghao, inner disciple of the Wang sect” that had to be interfered with.

“I don’t see a point in announcing our arrival to all the world,” she conceded, “we could be a sect on paper and claim to still be loose cultivators. Traveling incognito - it’s not too unusual, I don’t think, though I would have to consider how to best tie it into our story. And we could keep you off the claimed sect rolls entirely. It would put another layer of obfuscation between you and any paper traces we leave behind.”

“Thank you.” He sighed. “That would make me feel a lot better.”

“And now, about those sects you mentioned,” she said, settling down on the grass next to her notes, “tell me everything you know.”