Young Master Xian Sure Has Changed

I wake the next morning, refreshed, hungry, and to the sight of Meng Yi walking in with a small table laden with food.

“You have to be a mind reader,” I say.

“You cultivated for hours yesterday and ate nothing besides a qi pill, anyone in your shoes would be hungry,” she says.

She sets the table down on the bed with me, and I check out the spread.

I don’t recognize most of the dishes, but everything smells delicious and looks professionally made.

About to dig in, I notice Meng Yi standing to the side, head bowed.

“Uh, have you had breakfast?” I ask.

“No, Young Master,” she replies.

“Oh, well, join me then. I’m sure there’s enough for the both of us.”

“I only brought chopsticks for you, Young Master.”

Right.

“Well, can you get some more?” I ask slowly. “Because, I feel uncomfortable having you stand there hungry while I eat.”

Meng Yi stares at me for an uncomfortably long time, considering the simple offer I made.

Finally, she nods and walks out.

A couple minutes later, she returns with cutleries of her own, and I get another stare when she sees that I’ve waited for her return without eating.

She joins me on the bed, then clasps her hands and says with a small bow; “Thank you for the meal.”

“Well, you prepared the meal,” I say, “so, if anything thanks should go to you.”

“In that case,” Meng Yi says, “thanks really should go to Chef Po. He made the meal.”

I blink. “Wait, the chef’s name is Po?” I ask.

“Yes, it is,” Meng Yi says slowly.

I feel my amusement growing. “Please, don’t tell me he’s a chubby, clumsy guy with a heart of gold, who’s really into food and martial arts.”

It's Meng Yi’s turn to blink. “Not at all. No.”

I tsk. “Would have been pretty cool if he was though.”

“May I ask, why?”

“Oh, there’s this really popular… story in my world about this character named Po. He was a chef too. Right up until the greatest kung fu master in all the land chose him to be the legendary dragon warrior.”

“Dragon warrior?”

“Yeah, the dragon warrior is the—”

And, before I know it, I’ve launched into the legendary tale of awesomeness that is Kung Fu Panda.

Meng Yi

It is a strange thing, conversing with a stranger wearing the face of someone familiar.

You… forget. More often than you might think. Right up until a strange word, or a strange gesture, or a strange story about a panda martial artist destined to save the land from an evil leopard, reminds you that, no, the person before you is not the one you’ve known.

In moments like these, Meng Yi couldn’t help but wonder who this person inhabiting the body of Xian Qigang was.

What was his name? What was his story? Did he have family? Friends? A job? What did he look like? Was he really who he said he was, or was he some other, potentially nefarious entity playing games that she couldn’t possibly understand?

Did it change anything for her if he was the latter?

She’d talked a big game when they first met, but the truth of the matter was, the balance of power in their relationship did not favour her.

It favoured him. He might not see it yet, but that didn’t change facts.

That was why she needed him. Just as much as he needed her, if not more.

Meng Yi was a nobody. Worse, she was a nobody who was well-known to be the trusted Manager of Xian Qigang’s estate. And while it might look like the Xian family had forgotten about their wayward son’s existence, that was far from the truth.

Meng Yi had no idea who their informants were, but she knew they existed, because, twice had a Qi realm servant from the main family shown up to “see how their Young Master was faring”, and both times had said servant—a short woman named Pan Cai who seemed to be perpetually annoyed with the world—been fully informed of Xian Qigang’s activities without ever needing to confer with Meng Yi.

Worse, the woman had made no effort to keep from making Meng Yi aware that Xian Qigang, and herself by extension, were under surveillance.

Being under surveillance by people she hadn’t identified made running off with Xian Qigang’s wealth a risky proposition at best. And reporting his current circumstances to his family meant giving up the position she’d sacrificed so much to get.

Neither of these were palatable to her, so here she was, trying to make the most of a bad situation.

Unfortunately for her, Xian Qigang the former was a much simpler creature to manage than his replacement.

He was a self-absorbed narcissist. And what it had mostly taken to keep him on her side was to keep him well-fucked and his ego well-stroked.

His replacement, on the other hand, was a more nuanced individual who honestly looked like he wouldn’t appreciate sycophancy.

The longer she knew him, the more she began to suspect that what Xian Qigang the new wanted and needed was friendship. A true companion to walk beside him.

He did not know how to be waited on. He didn’t want to be fawned over. He was scared, and he was lonely, and he wanted a friend.

More important than what he wanted though, was what he didn’t want, and he did not want to be Xian Qigang.

It had been a strange feeling for Meng Yi, seeing that face, hearing that voice, express disgust for the actions of Xian Qigang; as strange as being looked at with those eyes without feeling a strong urge to bathe.

Luckily for them both, thanks to the noble rank cultivation manual he’d pulled out of… somewhere yesterday (a fact she really didn’t want to dwell on too much), Meng Yi had come up with a plan that just might get them both what they wanted; for her, an acceptable replacement for Xian Qigang, and for him, a reason to not have to be Xian Qigang.

Xian Qigang

Despite my recounting of the first of the Kung Fu Panda movies, with many digressions to explain the myriad details of the universe and such that she doesn’t understand, breakfast doesn’t take too long.

Since I can tell that she’s not too interested in the adventures of the dragon warrior, most likely due to my lacking narrative capabilities, I round up the story soon enough and, after a moment of silence, ask; “What do we do now?”

Meng Yi cocks her head in question.

“What I said yesterday, I mean it. I refuse to comport myself in a manner befitting Xian Qigang. I can’t. So, in light of that, where does that leave us?”

Meng Yi says nothing for a moment, and when she finally speaks, her words sound like an arbitrary shift in the topic of conversation; “Young Master Xian has always hated having peasant ranked cultivation. He considers it to be something fit only for peasants.”

I blink, temporarily thrown by the randomness of the statement, but then I recover, waiting to see where she’s going with this.

“For someone from a family with members who have Royal permission to cultivate at the divine rank, he saw it as another way his family tried to keep him down and smother his genius,” Meng Yi continues.

“Uh-huh,” I say dubiously. “I’m guessing in reality he was actually not a genius at all and was given a peasant ranked cultivation because he simply wasn’t worth the expense of anything higher?”

Meng Yi’s only response is a small smile and a noncommittal gesture.

She might as well have screamed ‘yes’ honestly, because, from the little about cultivation I’ve learned, I know that lower ranked cultivation resources don’t really do anything for cultivators.

Meaning that, if Xian Qigang’s family had given him sage or noble rank cultivation, they would have then needed to also give him sage or noble rank cultivation supplies to grow that cultivation.

Considering how expensive everything cultivation related seems to be, and considering his family would rather send him off to the boonies than put up with him, that loser is lucky he even had peasant ranked cultivation in the first place.

“Anyway, the rank of his cultivation was a sore point for Young Master Xian,” Meng Yi continues, “and being sent here didn’t help.

“I told you about your position as Commander of the outpost nearby, yes?”

I nod.

“There are maybe a dozen peasant ranked cultivators here in Silver Springs, all of them people who might as well be paupers compared to Xian Qigang,” Meng Yi says. “But, no peasant ranked cultivator got on the Young Master’s nerves like Vice Commander Xiuying.

“She was slated to take over after the death of the last Commander, a man who was her father in all but blood. But due to the Xian family pulling strings, you came here and took the job she’d worked years for.”

I nod in understanding. “So, it’s bad blood that goes both ways.”

“Yes,” Meng Yi concurs. “But you must understand, Xiuying is your subordinate. She is a woman who clawed her way up from being a gutter rat. And, on top of all that, she is a cultivator at the second layer of the Sprouting phase of the Formation Realm.”

Thanks to the little I know about cultivation layers and such, it takes me a moment to understand, but when I do, everything makes sense.

Cultivation in this world is somewhat more complex than in the stories I’m familiar with.

On this world, there are three realms of cultivation; the Formation Realm, the Qi Realm, and the Domain Realm.

Each realm has three phases, or stages, and each of those stages have five layers, and for the Formation Realm, the phases are Ignition, Weaving, and Sprouting.

The Ignition phase is the very first step on the journey of cultivation. It is the phase Meng Yi sits at the fourth layer of, and, according to her, its members are barely cultivators because they have no cultivation method yet.

In the Ignition phase, a cultivator ignites their qi and tempers their meridians to handle the strain of a cultivation method.

At the peak of it, their bodies are ready, and to advance to the Weaving phase (the phase I apparently sit at the fifth layer of), they must learn a cultivation method.

A cultivation method connects a cultivator’s meridians in a pattern unique to the method (hence the ‘weaving’), and as their meridians adapt better to the patterns of the method, they grow within the phase.

Complete adaptation brings advancement into the Sprouting phase, named thus because, much like a seed sprouting from the dirt to reach for the sun, so too is this the phase where a cultivator truly begins their quest to reach heaven.

All of that is secondary to what Meng Yi said though, because the primary thing is power, and there is a clear boost in power upon advancement to a higher phase.

According to Meng Yi, the boost is as great as, if not more so, than a step up in cultivation rank.

In other words, a five times boost at minimum.

So, with this Xiuying at the second layer of the Sprouting phase, while having the same cultivation rank as Xian Qigang, who was only at the fifth layer of the Weaving phase, there’s no question about it. She’s stronger.

“I can’t imagine he liked that very much,” I say.

“No, he didn’t,” Meng Yi agrees. “He hated that he couldn’t intimidate her; hated that everyone liked and respected her more than they did him. He despised that he wasn’t obviously better than some peasant.”

“And he blamed it on his cultivation,” I guess.

Meng Yi nods.

“Every now and then, he would write home, demanding a higher rank cultivation.”

“Guessing that didn’t work out too well for him,” I say.

“Not at all. In fact, after two years of these letters, his mother got so annoyed that she threatened to strip him of the family name and all of his wealth if he asked again.”

I snort. “Nothing spoilt, rich kids fear more than losing Daddy’s money,” I say. “What a loser.”

“You realize that this is your wealth we’re talking about?” Meng Yi asks casually, and my smiles withers.

She laughs at my expression; a small, cute sound that makes me stare.

I’ve never heard her laugh before.

Looking almost self-conscious at my stare, Meng Yi comports herself and continues; “Anyway, upon receiving his mother’s threat, he flipped into a rage unlike I’ve ever seen him. And, before I could stop him, he grabbed his sword and marched off into the mountains, saying he needed to kill something.

“It was six days before he returned, dirty, sulking, and with his sword missing.”

“What happened?” I ask curiously.

“My guess, he got lost; misplaced his sword and starved for days,” Meng Yi says simply, eyes alight with something like delight at the memory.

“He must have come across a landmark or something that pointed him the right way in the end, because on the sixth day, he slinked in at midnight. I bathed him, fed him, and put him to bed. That was four days ago.”

I stare at Meng Yi, my jaw literally hanging open at just how ridiculous Xian Qigang was as a human being.

“Okay, um, interesting as this is, why are you telling me?” I ask finally.

“Because, I have a plan,” Meng Yi says, her brown eyes glowing once again with that sharp intellect I’m becoming more familiar with. “A plan that works thanks to the noble rank manual you have sitting in your drawer.”

Meng Yi begins to detail her plan, and the more she talks, the more I begin to understand exactly how devious this young woman is.