Xian Weiju turned back to Meng Yi. “Where are you?” she asked.

  —?—

  “I’m at Young Master Qigang’s manor, in Silver Springs,” Meng Yi said.

  The Young Mistress turned to the man behind her again, and though she said nothing, the man understood her desire.

  Something like a compass, though significantly more complicated, appeared in his hand.

  He activated it with a pulse of qi, and quite possibly the most detailed map Meng Yi had ever seen in her life appeared over it, so real looking that Meng Yi wondered if it was some sort of solid construct made of qi.

  The man fiddled with his compass-like device, strange, vaguely familiar symbols appearing and vanishing quickly in the air alongside his map.

  Meng Yi understood none of it.

  After a few moments, the man looked up at Xian Weiju and said, “It’s eight hours away at our top speed, Young Mistress.”

  The expression of irritation returned to Xian Weiju’s face. “We’ll go ahead then, prepare what we need. And tell those loathsome slobs at the Suppression Division that if we get there before them I’ll have their heads.”

  “Yes, Young Mistress,” the man bowed, before quickly snapping out orders to people that Meng Yi couldn’t see.

  Whatever brought her here, and however it worked, there was a clear limit to its power, because Meng Yi could only perceive in a small radius around herself.

  Young Mistress Xian Weiju she could see and hear without issue, but a few steps past her and the world began to dim. Past the man still giving orders behind the Young Mistress, everything turned black. Not even her qi sense could pierce through. Like the world suddenly ceased to exist beyond that point.

  It was eerie and discomforting, but Meng Yi forced herself to ignore it and focus.

  A proper manager is never rattled.

  Done with his orders, the man approached Xian Weiju silently, and it took Meng Yi a moment to realise that she couldn’t sense him.

  To her qi sense, there was no man where her eyes told her that there clearly was, and now that she thought about it, she realised that the only time she’d sensed qi from him was when he activated his strange map device.

  That is an assassin, Meng Yi realised with some horror. Xian Weiju has a personal assassin.

  “Why would she burden me with this?” Xian Weiju asked the man, in that way that people do when they don’t really want an answer from you and are simply giving voice to their thoughts. “I have no ties to the Suppression Division, and yet she’s tied me to this. Now if that idiot gets himself killed, I would have failed.”

  In lieu of answering, the man gestured with a glance at Meng Yi, and Xian Weiju turned to her with an expression of surprise, clearly having forgotten that Meng Yi was still there.

  Annoyed, the Young Mistress waved an angry hand, and Meng Yi felt her soul launched back to her body at the same furious speeds she’d been summoned.

  As the awareness of her physical senses rushed back in, Meng Yi’s world swirled with intense vertigo, and she hurled the little food in her stomach out onto the ground.

  “Shit. Are you okay?” Xiuying’s voice her from what could either a few steps or half a li away and Meng Yi groaned, feeling awful.

  “Do I look okay?” she asked, voice a weak squeak.

  “Compose yourself, Manager Meng,” Pan Cai said with zero sympathy.

  “Compose herself?” Xiuying asked angrily, turning on the older, significantly more powerful, cultivator. “Look what that thing did to her. I thought you said it was safe. This doesn’t fucking look safe.”

  Forcing her breathing back under control and her spinning head to settle through sheer will alone, Meng Yi straightened, wiping her mouth on her sleeve and doing her best to compose herself.

  “My apologies, Senior Pan,” she said, bowing. “The… experience simply took me by surprise.”

  “You must make yourself comfortable with the unfamiliar,” Pan Cai said. “Latched on to the Young Master as you are, there will be much of it in your future.”

  Meng Yi glanced at the woman sharply, the words coming as a surprise. If someone had told her that there would come a day when Pan Cai gave her advice, and a good one too, well, she wouldn’t have waited for that day that was for sure.

  “Thank you for your wisdom.” Meng Yi bowed again, just a tiny bit deeper than she needed to, knowing the woman would catch and hopefully appreciate the gesture of respect.

  Pan Cai dipped her head back in acknowledgement. Good. Qigang’s life—and hers, by extension—were about to change significantly in the coming weeks, and Meng Yi suspected that they would need all the allies they could get going forward.

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  She may be a peasant nobody from the backwater, but she wasn’t ignorant enough to be unaware of the oftentimes messy nature of cultivator politics.

  Even Qigang knew it. It was why he avoided contacting his family. For all the good that did them in the end.

  “Who summoned you?” Pan Cai asked, and Meng Yi realised that she had failed to share with them the information she’d received from Young Mistress Weiju.

  “Young Mistress Weiju did. She needed information,” Meng Yi said.

  “Is she coming?” Xiuying asked.

  Meng Yi nodded. “Her—” she couldn’t exactly say personal assassin, could she? “—aide said they were eight hours away at their top speed, so she decided they would come ahead of the rest. I’m not sure what she meant.”

  “A movement technique,” Pan Cai explained. “With her cultivation, it won’t take long before she arrives.”

  “And what about the Suppression Division, is she with them?” Xiuying asked.

  “No,” Meng Yi said. “But she warned them that she would have their heads if she arrived before they did.”

  Xiuying chuckled. “That will light a fire in their asses for sure,” she said.

  “Senior Pan, do you have a more precise idea of when they might arrive?” Meng asked.

  “No,” Pan Cai said, “but I would advise you to expect the Young Mistress within the hour.”

  One hour. She could work with that. Her eyes easily found the storm of Wild Qi in the distance, its rage restrained by a man who impressed her more and more with every passing day.

  ‘Not much longer, Qigang. Not much longer.’

  “He’ll be fine,” Xiuying said, convincing herself as much as Meng Yi.

  “I know,” she said with confidence that ended at her throat.

  Eager for a change of topic, she gave Xiuying a onceover. The woman looked halfdead on her feet.

  “You need rest,” she said. “I’ll have one of the servants prepare a room for you.”

  “I need rest,” Xiuying scoffed, looking pointedly at Meng Yi’s messy state.

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  “You look like you lost a fight against a tiger,” Xiuying said.

  She only looked that way because she’d been tortured, but she suspected mentioning that wouldn’t help her argument of being fine. As a matter of fact, just thinking about it was making her want to sit in a quiet room with a hot cup of honey tea, which was definitely something she didn’t have the time for right now.

  “I’ll clean up,” she said, “but I have work to do.”

  “What work?”

  “Young Master Xian has family coming to visit. I need to prepare for them,” she said. “And you need rest.” She turned to address Pan Cai. “Should I prepare one for you as well?”

  The older cultivator hadn’t once taken a room in the manor the twice that she’d come to visit, but courtesy demanded that Meng Yi ask every time.

  Pan Cai dipped her head. “Yes. Thank you.”

  Meng Yi bowed back, trying to not let her surprise show.

  To Xiuying, she said, “Come on.”

  At the manor’s entrance gathered the servants, scared and confused. And why wouldn’t they be? They could all see the Wild Qi lighting up the sky. They could all feel it. And unlike her, they neither knew what had caused it, nor that steps were being taken even now, to manage it.

  Meng Yi stopped before them.

  They all watched her, desperate for news, and hopeful that it would be good.

  “We have found the creature that took Dai Lim and Yahui among others,” she said. “It was a vile beast, mad and corrupted with Wild Qi, but it is dead.” She took great pleasure in saying the words. “Our own Young Master, Xian Qigang, slew it with his bare hands, and then he burnt its corpse to ashes.

  “But that—” she pointed at the storm in the distance “—that is the beast’s last assault on us. A final attempt to destroy us. But we will stop it. Even now Young Master Xian is there risking everything to hold it back, to slow it down and give the Suppression Division time to get here and eradicate it. We can’t help him with that.” And wasn’t that a hard pill to swallow. “What we can do is prepare his home for when he returns triumphant.”

  She saw it in their eyes. The fear wasn’t gone, but there was real hope there now. There was faith. She would take it.

  —?—

  Almost an hour later there was nothing for her to do.

  She’d handed out a dozen orders, seen to Xiuying and Pan Cai, sent out letters to Captain Quan and everyone else she could think of that was important enough to keep abreast of current events, cleaned up herself, changed, checked in on every last one of the servants on their tasks, even made herself tea.

  In the end however, she’d had to accept it; until Young Mistress Weiju, or the Suppression Division, arrived, there was nothing for her to do.

  Unable, or perhaps simply unwilling to sit still though, she took her teacup and wandered the halls of the manor.

  As is inevitable when walking through the halls, Meng Yi came upon a portrait of Xian Qigang.

  Meng Yi stopped before the larger-than-life portrait and stared.

  The eyes were wrong. As was the smile. Even the posture was off, the chin tilted too high, the stance too proud.

  This wasn’t Qigang. Not her Qigang. This was the man who had held her and… her fist clenched with the memory, and the alien feel of own hand jarred her. She lifted it up and stared at it.

  The hand looked like it had always looked. Well, no, not quite, it had changed in recent years. It used to be harder, rougher, the hands of a girl used to heavy work, but she hadn’t done heavy work in some time. Not physically at least.

  Between that and the better soaps, better creams, better food and, most of all, cultivation, her hands were soft now. Delicate. While being ironically stronger than ever before.

  Meng Yi did not hate the way her hands looked before she became a cultivator, but she had definitely not bemoaned the change. She’d welcomed it. In fact, she’d loved it. Perhaps it was vain, but seeing old scars fade away, seeing her complexion lighten, her breasts fill up, buttocks firm. It had been nice. She’d loved it.

  She looked at her hand again, the middle finger missing.

  The wound where the finger was severed looked several weeks old, practically healed, but if she looked close enough, she could still them. The teeth marks.

  Meng Yi’s gaze returned to the portrait, and when she met its eyes she drew back as if burned.

  Her hands shook. Her breath heavy.

  She scowled. “Fuck you,” she said, not to the portrait, but to the man in it. The dead man in it.

  Qigang, her Qigang, had wanted to take down all the portraits when he’d first awoken. He’d said he didn’t ‘want this jerk’s face looking down at everyone’. She’d talked him out of it. Said it would be too out of character for a narcissist like him, Celestial Plum or not.

  If only she’d known then what she knew now.

  To think he’d actually found a Celestial Plum. A divine ranked one and tainted by Wild Qi no less. What were the odds of that?

  If she didn’t know the story to be true, she would call it false.

  A servant came running up to her then. “Manager Meng,” the young woman exclaimed, “there’s a ship in the sky.”

  “What?”

  Following the girl’s direction, Meng Yi rushed to a window, and there, she saw it, a ship, larger even than the manor she stood in, grinding to a halt as it hung in the sky some li away.

  “Who are they?” the girl, Ma Yi asked, and while Meng Yi wasn’t sure, she had a very good guess.

  “Help,” she said.