Twinned Destinies: A Cultivation Progression Fantasy

Father had to leave to man the border and make sure the demons weren’t coming back. She and Jin went to see him off. She waved, a little teary, until his carriage vanished beyond a bend of trees.

She saw the way Jin was looking at her on the way back. “I know…” she sighed. “I know.”

Jin patted her on the shoulder. “Look—all I’m saying is, Father’s a general first, and a father second. Just… remember that.”

“I know,” she said.

***

The Post unveiled a new census. The Emperor had called for it after the war. Apparently about a third of the Lower City were up to Foundation. A solid 2% were up to Core, even, though there were no Nascents. It was, yet again, a reflection of the Emperor’s immense generosity, apparently.

One day the Post announced the demons had passed all the way over the Desolate Mountains. They were gone.

Ruyi had been going around her factories all day, trying to keep them running. She’d bought them from the Dynasty at considerable cost, but they weren’t the real headaches. That was keeping them staffed. The Alchemists’ contracts were over but she still wanted to keep churning out Qi Elixirs en masse. But they were just too expensive for her. She ended up shuttering sixty-two of the seventy-nine factories in the City. She managed to cling onto a handful—she figured she could keep them going another half-year, maybe? She still planned on giving out the elixirs for free; even selling them at cost was too much for the vast majority of Lower City folk.

But they paid her back in a currency she liked far more than money. Everywhere she went they cheered her. She could hardly pass a smokehouse without rousing a chorus of clinks and chants. Children stopped to stare at her as she passed; some gave her flowers, the tiny wilted kind that grew like weeds on the side of the roads, the only kind in the Lower City. But they still pleased her. She’d made it out more popular than ever.

Not as popular as Jin, though.

The night the Post announced the demons were gone, the streets exploded in light and laughter, the clinking of glasses, folk dancing ruddy-faced, singing, it felt like dozens of troupes of musicians had popped up on every street, unplanned, playing tunes of wild joy which fed off the wild joy in the street. It was a party the scale Ruyi had never seen. None of the peacock’s dance of the noble Banquets she knew; she saw a beanpole boy bump into a round-faced girl, strangers, and suddenly they were kissing. Even the rooftops were crowded with revelers. When folk fell over, drunk, the crowd below would catch them and fling them back up. They were Foundation now. They could do that sort of thing.

On her way back home she heard at least a dozen chants of Jin! Jin! Jin! Or Praise be to the Hero!

They made murals of him on alley walls, staring over his shoulder, steely-eyed, at some unseen enemy. His jaw was not that sharp! She could hardly believe it. She’d been slowly building up goodwill for years, and he’d stood there and done nothing for a day and suddenly he was everyone’s favorite.

When she got home she frowned at him across the dinner table.

“What?” said Jin, mystified.

“You know what you did,” she told him sulkily. She finished her soup, dabbed her mouth, and swept out of the room, head held high.

Jin was left scratching his head. “…I do?”

***

Jin said Tingting wasn’t coming anymore as liaison. And Tingting had stopped replying to her letters. When she asked if the Princess would like to meet she got nothing back.

Ruyi figured it wasn’t Tingting’s fault, it was her father’s fault. She’d never met him, but the more of him she saw the less he liked. She figured him a meddling old fool.

***

Ruyi came home one evening to columns of fire streaming over the manor. It was Jin in the courtyard, hacking away at a Nethersteel dummy like it’d mortally offended him.

“What did the dummy do?” called Ruyi, leaning against a post.

“What?” grunted Jin, wiping a sheen of sweat off his brow.

“You seem worked up.”

Jin heaved a sigh, then jammed his spear into the sands. “I’m no longer with the Imperial Guard.”

“They fired you?” gasped Ruyi. She hadn’t thought they’d dare.

“No,” said Jin. “I quit. Rue, the Emperor plans to fire half the Imperial Guard. There’s no need for them now’s the war’s over.”

“Oh.”

“And he’s refusing to pay them the silver he owes. Remember all the posters? A silver per sign-up? Well, now the Emperor claims the coffers are empty. He’s paid them more than enough in elixirs, he says.” Jin snorted. “He’s planning to levy a new round of taxes, the largest in ten years. And he wants me to go out there to make the Lower City folk swallow it. So… I quit.”

Ruyi stared. “What is he thinking? I mean, they didn’t like him before. But now…”

“He and his advisors are worried,” said Jin. “He says they’ve spent too much. They have huge debts from the Alchemists’ Guild contract alone, and they need to recoup them. They say there might not even be a Banquet this year.”

He shook his head. “He feels unsettled. And now he’s trying to turn things back to what they were. Good luck with that.”

He heaved his spear out of the sands and started hacking again.

***

Jin was right.

As soon as the news hit—not in the Post, notably, which went on cheerily as usual, but everyone knew someone who’d been fired—the streets erupted in protests.

They weren’t petty Condensation level cultivators in little dozen-person crowds anymore. The crowds had blown up to fill whole squares and streets. The speakers and pamphlet-writers, who’d taken a brief pause from the war, were up on their pulpits hurling insults at the Emperor again. The graffiti artists were back lathering obscene drawings on the Middle Wall, more Emperor-fornicating-with-pig murals than the janitors could keep up with; dozens would spring up overnight. The gangs that’d joined the Imperial Guard, and were let go, were back in full force; she saw a horde of red-scarved folk, mostly young, mostly Foundation, marching down the main street chanting “WHERE’S OUR COIN?” or “SONG THE SNAKE!” or, more commonly, “FUCK THE EMPEROR!”

The Guard didn’t seem to know what to do with them. The crowds weren’t weak rabble-rousers anymore. They had the few Guards posted on street corners outnumbered and overpowered. When the Guards saw them coming, they hurried into an alleyway and waited for them to pass.

Maybe the Emperor was too used to being able to ignore the wishes of the Lower City, Jin mused to her over ham sandwich breakfast one morning. Or maybe he’d underestimated just how much of a nuisance a crowd of Foundation cultivators was. There was still this idea floating around the Nobles that the Lower City folk had a natural inclination to subservience; that it was the role the Heavens had chosen for them. They’d grow restless in spurts, but it’d settle.

Jin called it wishful thinking.

***

There were times Emperor Song wished he were not the Emperor. That he was a simple commoner living off the land. Perhaps he’d spend his mornings making salads fresh from his garden and greeting his neighbors with a lusty good-morning; they’d reply in kind. He’d be a chef, he thought, perhaps a wine-maker; he always did love his wines. He’d walk on roads built by the Emperor, farming lands owned by the Emperor, with nothing but joy in his heart, whistling a tune, perhaps. He let himself idle in the thought.

Until a whiny voice jerked him out of it.

“Father?”

Suddenly he was not a happy carefree peasant but a sad burdened Emperor, and his morning was not spent working meats, but rather sitting in his Court, listening to the yammerings of his dozen-odd advisors, sat around a wood table entirely too large. It had been a tree at one point, a very beautiful tree which he’d seen on an excursion to the Dragonspire Mountains. The local village had thought so too, since they’d named it a sacred gathering place. They were quite mad when he’d had it lopped off and made into a table. At some level he understood; he hated when his routines changed too, especially against his will. But did they not remember it was his land? All of the Dynasty was, to do with as he pleased! It was the law—did the law not apply to them, too? That tree had been borrowed from him to begin with; he’d let them worship there. He didn’t have to do that. Their entitlement was frankly galling. Besides, they could gather just fine around a stump, couldn’t they?

“Father?”

“Yes, yes!” he snapped. “I’m listening! Go on, boy.”

It was Chen Qin. A fine boy on the outside, good-looking enough, and he could summon the air of an Emperor when called upon. He was a slick, feckless shrimp of a man—not at all worthy of his Tingting, who was a perfect little angel—but what could you do? The Qin’s Crimson River Delta was some of the best farmland in the country, and Duke Qin was a useful man to have at one’s side.

He would’ve liked to marry her off to someone who made her happy, but such was life. As Emperor he had to make certain sacrifices.

“Something must be done,” Chen blathered. “These rioters—they would flout your authority in broad daylight! They’ve clogged six main streets day and night now, and just two days ago they battered a squadron of my men. And their chants…brazen! Seditious! It can be tolerated no longer. They’re an infestation on the city. Give me leave to lead five thousand Guard down the streets. We’ll clean them out in an afternoon.”

He seemed more puffed up than usual.

“Boy,” said the Emperor, wagging a finger. “You mustn’t be quick to violence. It’s unbecoming of you.”

“They—they’ve put murals of my head! Coupling with a pig!” Qin’s face had gone flaming red.

“First time?” the Emperor sighed. “They’ll settle down. They always do. They throw their tantrums every year, it’s practically their Summer Banquet. Yi, fetch me another glass of the Shen vintage, will you? Where was I? Ah—yes, yes, by winter they’ll all be in their homes. It’ll be too cold to march.”

One of the red triangle-hats cleared his throat. His Minister of Finance, a thin bespectacled with a few wisps of stringy hair left on an otherwise shiny-bald pate. “Something does need to be done, your majesty,” he said. “The peasants refuse to pay their taxes. We’ve tremendous debts to the Alchemists’ Guild already. Then there is the matter of the army’s salaries, and our debts to the Villa, and the Temple…Without the contributions of the Lower City…” He spread his hands helplessly.

“Peasants,” grumbled the Emperor. “Nothing is ever enough for them. I’ve given them months of Elixir, free of cost. And this is how I’m repaid?”

The entitlement, the greed! It shocked and saddened him. But it was always that way; they never really saw him as a fellow man. They made no effort to empathize with him, even as he empathized with them. They’d rather paint him as some hog of a man, some money-hungry monster out to suck them all dry. He supposed it was a way to cope with their little lives, their little ails. He made for an easy target.

“I must concur,” said another red hat. His Imperial Chancellor, a man who looked much like the Finance Minister. “This chaos cannot stand.”

“They’re clogging the ports,” said the Minister of Trade.

“They’re flouting Imperial decree!” said the Minister of Justice. They all looked quite alike to him.

One by one they made their cases until his head felt like it was about to burst. Where was Yi with that damned vintage? On his schedule he had lunch with Duke Guo at the Golden Stallion and an afternoon of wine-tasting thereafter; all he could hear at this latest round of blathers was that sweet, crisp sound of popping corks. What was he doing, sitting in this stuffy little room—it was a massive marbled hall but in that moment it felt incredibly stuffy—listening to these fools prattle on? Most of his mornings these days were nothing but this. His life stretched out interminably before him, dull morning after dull morning. Was this all that awaited him? Did he not deserve to claim his own happiness?

“Alright, alright!” he cried. “As you wish—Qin, take your men and make it fast. I want it clean, so clean I’ll never have to hear about this nonsense again. Understand?”

Chen’s face lit up. “Yes, Father! I won’t disappoint you.”