Twinned Destinies: A Cultivation Progression Fantasy

They held a funeral for Mei in the Bakery’s front yard. Jin said it’s where she would’ve liked to be buried.

Mei didn’t have paintings of just herself hanging in the Bakery—she wasn’t that kind of person—but she did have a painting of the two of them sitting at the edge of a roof, hands held, smiling at the horizon. It seemed to have been done in some haste; the strokes lapped over each other, but still the painter had captured something of her. Maybe it was the way she smiled; you could feel her kindness like sunlight on your face. You could tell it was her. Jin set the picture as a kind of gravestone. He would be back, he said, with a real one. He meant to carve it himself.

Jin dug the grave with his bare hands. The sack he incinerated, and its contents too. He couldn’t bear to bury her as she was. He found incense candles inside, just three, which he put in a triangle which framed the dirt plot.

All done, he knelt in silence at the foot of the grave. Ruyi did too.

He couldn’t seem to stop crying. Even when he ran out of tears he just knelt there, head bowed, shuddering.

But he’d been in denial for hours. In that time Ruyi had had time to think. She still grieved, but she’d come to terms with it. In a way she’d known since last night.

Now she was angry more than anything.

It wasn’t only that they’d killed Mei. It was the way they’d done it, the carelessness of it. She imagined hordes of faceless men prancing through the door, laughing as they ripped her apart. She imagined Chen Qin at their fore, smiling his slimy smile, and wondered how it could be that someone worth so little could put an end to someone worth so much.

It was him, and it was the Emperor. The Emperor in his fat palace, with thousands of lives no less than his—worth far more than his, as far as Ruyi was concerned—hanging on his every careless sentence. In that moment she didn’t think she could hate two men more.

But in a way it was also herself, sitting pretty in her big manor, dipping by once a week, as though on vacation, thinking she was doing so much to help while she gave so little of herself. She remembered what Mei had said—‘if you truly believe in something, you should be willing to sacrifice for it.” Did Ruyi really believe? She wasn’t doing a good job of showing it.

And it wasn’t just herself Mei had sacrificed. Mei had a father, a father who clearly couldn’t take care of herself, and she’d still gone and done it. With her gone who would take care of him? Why did she have to be so noble? Couldn’t she see what she was doing? Folk cared about her, needed her—look at Jin.

He looked so broken Ruyi was worried he would be like some bones, that cracked and healed crooked.

And had she thought about how bad it would hurt Ruyi? Clearly not, or she wouldn’t have gone and said yes to that bastard Cao’s offer. Stupid Mei.

It was dumb, and it was senseless, and it was utterly unfair, and she knew it, but Ruyi still felt a little resentment even as she felt tears prickling at her eyes.

A shadow fell over her and she leapt. Was curfew here, already? But it wasn’t a guard. It was the potbellied neighbor they’d asked earlier, a butcher by trade. His name was Tong. He knelt beside them too. He’d known Mei since she was a little girl, he said—she used to trade her finest loaves for his finest flank, which she’d roast as a treat for her father each winter solstice. One harsh season when he’d run dry of silver he’d gone to her for a loan. Instead she’d gifted him and his boy bread every week that winter, free of charge. That was years ago; he’d never forgotten. “I should’ve fought for her,” he said thickly. “Should’ve been there. Some man I am, huh?”

Jin was silent.

Ruyi noticed there was a huddle gathering in the street behind. Word must’ve been spreading; the huddle grew and grew. Some curious faces, most somber. A few stepped out, shambled over, knelt beside them in silence. A girl with half her face mottled with burn scars, a limping man, clutching at his ragged leather coat with a shriveled arm. Folks who’d had a hand or a foot cut off. Some seemed hale but each had a little story about how Mei had helped mend a broken leg or nursed them through fevers, staying with them through long hard nights, feeding them elixirs and whispering hope to them. Ruyi had only known one side of Mei; the picture she got was of a girl so giving she ended up giving all of herself away. By the time curfew neared there must’ve been close to fifty, some kneeling in the yard, some standing in the street, heads bowed.

Mei had said she felt helpless. She’d thought what she did as a healer was so little it meant almost nothing. Ruyi wished she could show her this scene. She wished she could show her how much she’d really mattered.

***

Half an hour before curfew, Jin rose, wiped his face with a sleeve, and made for the bakery. She found him coaxing Mei’s father.

“We won’t be far,” he said. “We’ll go somewhere safe, somewhere kind people can take care of you.”

“I don’t want to go,” said the old man. When Jin tried pulling him to his feet, he screamed and thrashed. “I said I don’t want to! I want my Mei-Ling!”

“Me too,” croaked Jin, and for a second she thought he might break again.

“I’ll handle him,” she said. “You go rest, okay?”

“Let me.” Jin sounded strangled. “Please.”

It took so much coaxing Ruyi was worried they might have to stay here for curfew, butJin kept whispering to him. Eventually the old man relented.

At first Jin wanted to take him to live with them, in the Upper City, before Ruyi pointed out that this was insane—how would they explain it to mother? Did Jin have even have the time and energy to take good care of him? Jin was sick with guilt but she talked him out of it. He knew a lady who worked in one of the Cult’s old shelters. She agreed to take the old man in for a weekly fee.

***

In the weeks that followed Ruyi tried not to think of the Lower City. She lost herself in her research. She picked out one of Golden Problems, famously unsolved problems in the field—hers was a hypothesis about a way to make gold from lead which required no qi influx—and threw herself at it dawn until dusk. Her lab became a conspiracist’s lair of scattered papers and chalk wall scrawlings. She stopped answering mail; she let the letters pile up, unopened, except for Sen’s, which she answered in increasingly unhinged prose—so much so Sen asked if something was wrong.

That should’ve been a warning. If Sen could pick up something was wrong, something was very, very wrong.

If Ruyi tried she could pretend this little lab was all there was. Things could be like they were before.

She started drinking again. What the Hell, right? Gao wasn’t here to tell her what to do. Her body still didn’t take well to qi, so she had to down half a casket to get that light floaty buzz. She carried a flask like a fletch of arrows, slung over an arm. She told Mother it was water.

Compared to Jin she was coping well.

Jin didn’t say a word of it; didn’t bring it up; the one time she’d hinted if he wished to talk of Mei she thought he might scream at her. He tried to go about as he always did but it was like all his muscles were tense all the time, even when he smiled. He was wound so tight Ruyi was scared to speak to him sometimes. Once, late at night when she came outside for water, she heard sobs coming from his room.

Mother could tell something was wrong. But when she’d tried to broach the subject with Jin he’d blown up badly at her. He’d sounded like Ruyi when she got mad, but with none of the whininess; his anger was cold. He had apologized profusely right after like the good boy he was, and Mother didn’t speak of it again.

One night over dinner he announced, “I’m joining the Imperial Guard.”

Ruyi dropped her fork. “What?!”

At the same time—“Why?” Mother seemed equally surprised.

“Why not?” Jin shrugged. “It serves a good cause.”

Mother swallowed her beans. “That is a wonderful impulse, dear,” she said carefully. “But perhaps there are other jobs you might choose—jobs that might suit you better? You can take up a post with Father! Be a corporal, perhaps. Apprentice with him. Doesn’t that sound nice?”

It had always been assumed that Jin would take up Father’s post as General eventually. He was to become the Spear of the Dynasty, vanquish the demon hordes for good, and so on.

“I can do that when I come of age,” said Jin. He stabbed his steak with a fork, gnawed off a chunk with his teeth, knife untouched. “Until then, isn’t the Guard good practice?”

“Perhaps…” Mother looked unconvinced, Ruyi knew, because it was so far beneath Jin it was laughable. No one wanted to police the Lower City. Nobles sent failsons to the Guard. If Jin joined he’d be one of the ten best fighters there. “It’s only…I’m not sure it’s safe, dear. What with all that nasty Cult business…”

“I’m nearly Nascent Soul, Mother. I can take care of myself. Besides, I don’t need to be on patrol,” said Jin. “I can work my way to a command spot, like a Captain of the Guard. Order folks around. Like Chen Qin does.”

“Hmm,” said Mother, in a tone that sounded a lot like ‘I don’t think so.’

“My mind’s made up,” Jin said. “Please don’t get in my way, Mother. I’ll join Father in a few years. Right now I’ll see justice done.”

***

Ruyi approached Jin in the courtyard at the end of his evening spear practice, when he was too sweaty and tired to get too angry. She found him with his back to one of the training boulders, gasping in lungfuls of air.

“I’m not going to dissuade you,” she said. She thought she’d be the one who’d have to do something; she didn’t think Jin had it in him.

“No?”

“Do it,” she told him. She doubted she could stop him if she tried. “Just don’t get caught.”

“Don’t worry.” Jin wiped a line of sweat off his temple. “I can be discreet.”

“Will you go for Qin too?”

“…If I can get to him.” Jin grimaced. “He’ll be well protected. But I’ll find out who the others were for sure.”

“What’ll you do to them?” She still couldn’t imagine Jin hurting someone, much less killing someone. But by the look on his face now she wasn’t so sure.

It took a few breaths for Jin to answer.

“I don’t know,” he whispered.

***

A few days later she received a letter from Gao, inviting her to tea at Gao’s abode.

Gao had never done that before, not in nearly ten years. Gao hated even speaking of her personal life—showing it to Ruyi? Something felt wrong.

Could it be a faked letter? But that was ridiculous; it bore Gao’s seal…

It was probably nothing.

Still, just in case, Ruyi declined. She asked to keep their usual time. At her place.

She’d have to ask Gao about it when the old lady came.