Young Master Xian Sure Has Changed

The training ground is a wide patch of cobblestoned dirt behind the manor that’s about half the size of a football field.

And by football I mean the ball game that actually involves the feet, not that weird thing the Americans play.

There’s a building with three rooms on one end of it, a room full of practice gear and weapons, a small (read: sizable for normal people) bathroom, and a room for cultivation with a peasant ranked cultivation circle in the middle.

I stare at the cultivation circle for a moment, remembering that there’s another one in the house that I’d used when learning The Path of The Sun Emperor method.

So, Xian Qigang just has two of these things in the same house because, why, he’s too lazy to walk inside and cultivate?

Rich people are so weird.

Well, weird or not, this works to my advantage, seeing as I’d struck out rolling for the last cultivation circle and items can’t be rolled for twice.

Let’s hope my luck holds out better with this one.

Placing a finger on the cold stone with its glowing silver veins, I see what I’m looking for:

1 – 500 (Beast Rank)

501 – 800 (Peasant Rank)

801 – 950 (Sage Rank)

951 – 999 (Noble Rank)

1000 (Divine Rank)

Roll: Yes || No

Good. Now, for the roll.

Rolling…

717 (Peasant Rank)

Reward: Peasant Rank LinWei Cultivation Circle

Peasant rank, huh?

Well, better than nothing, I guess.

“When was the last time you used any of this stuff?” Xiuying asks looking around.

I look around too.

Everything looks clean and in pristine condition, so I don’t really understand what she means.

“Right,” she says, staring at me now, “I suppose you wouldn’t know.”

She looks around again. “And considering what you were like I suppose the question is pretty pointless,” she adds.

Leading the way, Xiuying takes us back to the room with the practice weapons.

She pulls a practice spear (at least I think it’s a spear, since it’s really just a wooden pole with one end painted red) off a rack and tosses it to me.

“Take a stance that feels natural,” she commands.

I obey awkwardly, taking a moment to find what feels natural.

After a few seconds, I settle into a stance that I feel is comfortable enough, only to have my feeling of accomplishment die a sad death when I catch Xiuying’s pained expression as she observes me.

“No good?” I ask, already knowing the answer.

“Let’s just say you take to the spear as naturally as a fish takes to tree-climbing,” she says, gently pulling the training weapon from my hands.

“Ouch,” I say for lack of anything better.

Meng Yi doesn’t have that problem.

“Well, if you’re half as good as you like to think you are, then a lack of talent on the Young Master’s part shouldn’t be a problem, should it?” she says. “After all, wasn’t it your beloved General Mao Yun who said ‘a student with the eagerness to learn doesn’t need talent, only a good teacher’?”

Xiuying shoots the younger woman a look that I’m half surprised doesn’t set her on fire.

Meng Yi smiles back at her pleasantly.

“Who is this General Mao Yun?” I ask, both curious and trying to defuse the situation. “You mentioned him before, back at the restaurant when I did the… thing with the chopsticks,” I finish a little awkwardly, still a little uncomfortable by how she’d reacted to what to me is a simple experiment.

Xiuying looks at me, holding my gaze eye to eye for the first time today.

There is a complicated expression on her face, like she’s feeling too many things at once to properly emote them all.

“It was really just a thing to you, wasn’t it?” she asks. “You took my mind and… bent it to your will. You made me obey an order without even needing to give it. And it was just a thing you did.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I know it had a profound effect on you and I didn’t mean to make light of that, I simply—”

“Don’t apologize,” Xiuying cuts me off, sounding almost offended that I feel the need to do so. “You don’t have anything to apologize for. You…” she struggles to find the words. “You showed me a truth about myself that I would never have realized on my own.”

I’m curious about what this truth is, but she doesn’t share and I don’t ask.

“Don’t apologize,” Xiuying says again. “Even without the forced advancement, I would thank you for what you did. So, never apologize.”

I nod, accepting her words.

With that done, Xiuying returns the spear to its place, then she looks around for a moment before pulling out a long, straight sword from a different rack.

She eyes it intently, then eyes me, then eyes the sword again, and, with an expression that clearly says ‘meh, how bad can it be?’, she hands it to me hilt first.

“Try this,” she says.

It’s a little offensive to be honest, I mean, it’s a wooden sword, for God’s sake. Plus, Xian Qigang used a sword, so how bad could I possibly be at it?

Intent on proving myself to not be completely useless with the weapon, I take the sword, testing it out with a few experimental swings and—crash!—accidentally knocking down a rack of spears in the process.

I wilt under the stares of the two women present, then silently hand the practice weapon back to Xiuying.

“I guess enlightenment didn’t give you any martial talent,” she notes as she takes the sword and returns it.

We try several more weapons after that, mostly still spears and swords, but of different kinds.

“Why do I even have all these practice weapons?” I ask after I prove to be as untalented with the sixth weapon, a massive sword bigger than I am, as I have with all the rest. “I clearly have no skill with any of these.”

“Not with all of them, no,” Meng Yi concurs.

“Implying that he has any skill at all in the first place,” Xiuying quips, and Meng Yi shoots her an unamused look.

Xiuying looks unimpressed.

“What?” she asks. “Am I wrong?”

Meng Yi ignores her, turning to me instead.

“Perhaps, it might be best, Young Master, if you forgo weaponry entirely,” she suggests. “You have great reflexes and fast hands, perhaps you should lean into that.”

“And fight with his fists like some barbarian?” Xiuying asks, amused. “I’m sure his family will love that.”

“Don’t worry,” Meng Yi says, “they’ll understand; seeing as he was trained by one.”

Xiuying scowls at her. “Fuck you,” she says, adding a gesture with her hand that is different from the one I’m familiar with, but that I imagine means the same thing.

“No thanks,” Meng Yi replies. “You’re pretty enough, but if I was going to be with a woman it would be one with actual breasts.”

Xiuying draws back, just barely refraining from covering her flat chest with an arm.

“Will you leave my breasts alone?” she says.

“How can I bother them at all?” Meng Yi asks. “There’s nothing there.”

Xiuying splutters. “Yes, there is. Not all of us have those giant things you call breasts.”

“These—” Meng Yi points at her chest “—are normal-sized breasts. They only look giant to you because yours are mosquito bites.”

“So, if we did the no weapons thing, how would we go about it?” I ask quickly, hoping to get us back on track.

Because at this rate I might actually laugh out loud, and then I’d be screwed.

Xiuying stares hard at Meng Yi for several seconds, looking like she really doesn’t want to let the mosquito bite comment go, but eventually, she acquiesces and turns to me.

“What techniques does your method have?” she asks.

I blink at her cluelessly, then turn to Meng Yi for an explanation.

“Cultivation techniques are like cultivation methods, only less,” she explains. “When you learn them, they weave themselves into your cultivation, strengthening it and using its power in turn to strengthen themselves.

“Sage rank methods and above come with techniques of their own, and while I’m not well versed on their intricacies, I suspect that that’s how you sent Ratface and his cronies to their knees when we went out into town.”

I remember the event she’s talking about, and I also remember that I’d heard something, words. I think.

I hadn’t thought much about it then, but I think it had something to do with weight?

—❈—

The Emperor stood before all he had built and watched the enemy come to steal it for themselves.

He could burn them, he knew. But he wouldn’t.

He did not want them destroyed. He wanted them to learn.

‘Heavy is the crown,’ he intoned. ‘Now feel its weight.’

—❈—

The vision ends to reveal two women watching me carefully.

“Cultivation vision?” Xiuying asks.

I nod. “Yeah.”

“I remember when I used to get those,” she says. “Hunted enough deer to last me three lifetimes.”

“You hunted deer?” I can’t help but ask.

Xiuying shrugs, a little uncomfortably, I notice. “My method’s the Path of the Ascending Tiger,” she says. “Hard to be a tiger without hunting deer.”

Fair enough.

“What’s your method?” she asks.

“The Path of The Sun Emperor,” I say.

Xiuying tsks. “Lucky bastard,” she mutters good-naturedly.

I smile at her. “Yeah, my visions are all about growing plants and dominating my enemies,” I say.

My little joke draws a reaction of surprise from the women that I hadn’t thought was warranted.

They look at each other, then at me.

“You get cultivation visions about growing plants?” Meng Yi asks.

“Yes?” I answer carefully. “What does that mean?”

“It means you must have saved an entire kingdom of kind grandmothers in a past life, because heaven is just blowing your dick at this point,” Xiuying says.

“To be less crass,” Meng Yi says, “it means that your method has a healing technique. Or, at least, has great synergy for them.”

“Synergy?” I ask. “You need synergy between your method and a technique you learn?”

“Of course,” Xiuying says. “You can’t exactly learn something like the ‘Leaf in the Wind’ movement technique when you cultivate the ‘Path of the Unyielding Mountain’ method. Their very concepts are contradictory.”

Huh, I see. That’s good to know.

“What techniques do you have?” I ask her, and she laughs in that way that adults do when a child asks a naïve question.

“The Empire doesn’t give techniques to soldiers manning nameless outposts in the middle of nowhere,” she says.

Ah. So, it’s that kind of thing.

I wonder why they sent her out here though.

She looks strong enough. Wouldn’t it be smart to put such people in positions where they can be useful?

Then again, who the hell am I kidding? When there’s an entire generation (or two, considering cultivator lifespans) of Young Masters and Mistresses to give those positions to, what are the odds that someone like her would even warrant consideration?

“Come,” Xiuying says after a moment, we’ve done enough talking.” And with that she leads the way out onto the training ground.