25. You Are No Noble Scion (Patreon)

EMPRESS

I'll admit to being a bit surprised when my new roommate turned out to be the very same crazy girl who'd challenged me within seconds of entering the outer sect. Not as surprised as she was, though. She yowled like a feral cat and dropped into a fighting stance.

"Whoa! Chill! I come in peace!" I shouted.

Her eyes flitted over to Lin's luminous form and, with some reluctance, Zileng rose out of her fighting stance and tossed her hair - not that there was much to toss. She had what I would normally classify as a boy's bowl cut, and it did not work with her robust frame and the plain sect robes, but I guess not everybody cared about looking fashionable.

They should, but they didn't.

"You aren't here for revenge?" she asked quizzically. She prowled out into the common room, sneering as she circled Lin's translucent form. Apparently, Lin's spiritual attacks had left a bad impression.

"Uh, no? I didn't even know you lived here - Hana and I are new residents across the way…"

"Hi." Hana waved awkwardly.

"Aaaanyway," I said, "we were about to go into town and thought we'd ask the other girls in our quad. I guess the invitation's still on, even though an apology would be nice…"

"I cultivate and I duel until the core disciples see it fit to promote me to join my brother," Zileng stated, sparing me a glance before shifting her attention back to Lin, fists clenched and ready for a surprise attack.

"Lin… would you mind?" I asked.

"I don't like her, either," Lin stated with a huff and dissolved into motes of light.

"Look… I'm sorry if Lin frightened you or whatever, but I don't control her. She's gonna be out when she wants to be out. So I hope we can all get along… if not, though, it's on you."

"I… will tolerate your spirit," Zileng huffed before turning back toward her room. "If that's all, I wish you good fortune in the town. My cultivation is… rigorous and difficult."

"Cultivation and duels is all you've been doing? That sounds kinda like burnout," I observed.

"I will not burn. My water qi would crush a fire attack with no issue," she boasted.

"No, burnout isn't a fire attack. It means you've overtrained and aren't in the right headspace, so you're seeing diminishing returns and every bit feels like a chore…"

"So it is a spiritual attack?" she asked cautiously, her eyebrows arching upward.

"A spiritual attack by yourself upon yourself…"

"The most insidious of all," she said.

"Exactly!"

"So, Sister Lynn, how does one conquer this spiritual burnout?"

I shrugged. "Normally, I'd suggest retail therapy, but I'm kinda broke at the moment. I'm hoping to rectify that soon, though. Basically, you just have to get your mind off of things and find something new to focus on for a while. Then you can refocus on what's giving you problems, address it from another viewpoint and maybe have a breakthrough."

Zileng's eyes went wide. "If it can overcome a bottleneck, then it is truly worth its weight in spirit jade…"

"Big mood," I replied. "Okay, well good luck with all that! Hana, Lin, and I are heading down into the city now."

"I accept."

"What?"

Zileng paced into her room and emerged carrying a small suede satchel with a little lotus flower emblazoned on the side. "I am not a coward, Sister Lynn. I will marshal my reserves and redirect my efforts. I will overcome my burnout in a pincer attack and destroy it. Come. I will show you the mortal city."

So… yeah. Zileng was a little intense.

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"The ghost city is abandoned because the mortals are weak cowards," Zileng said.

We strolled through the abandoned city, the gray stone buildings intact but empty. A small group of construction workers were busy rebuilding the collapsed wall of a building and another crew worked upon a nearby roof. It was odd, to say the least, that anybody was actively doing upkeep on what was ostensibly a ghost city, but I guess they had their reasons.

The sun beamed down yellow-white in the midmorning heat. Lin's gossamer outline was barely visible as we walked along the empty road. A few blocks distant, closer to the inhabited parts of the city, the buildings boasted rooftop gardens and fresh coats of paint and there was something approaching foot traffic, though there were no occupied businesses, residences, or administrative buildings.

With a sigh of contentment, I cycled in the robust ambient qi, buzzing my inner light to break the dense band of lake qi into numerous tiny fibers of generic water qi - something unique but seemingly-unimportant was lost in the transition. The big, dense bands of qi were terrible for my cultivation because they required equally-dense bands to counterbalance. Fortunately, the right resonance of my inner light could easily spread them apart, like a muscle being dissected into individual fibers.

"The qi here is even stronger than in the sect," I said.

"But, I am sure you have observed, less pure," Zileng said, "and therefore inferior."

I glanced in Hana's direction and shook my head - as far as I could tell, having a 'pure' source of qi was actually worsefor our one weird trick. With a pure source, after all, there was nothing to counterbalance the dominant qi with. Water and celestial qi would kind of work - there was a decent amount of celestial qi up in the outer sect - but fire qi was much better, and there was essentially noneup there. I was told that stove fires wouldn't even light, so everybody used solar-aspected heating plates to cook.

"Is impure qi harder to cultivate with?" I asked.

"For beginning cultivators - though, since like attracts like, it's no problem once you've developed your base. I'm surprised your old sect didn't teach you this, sister…"

"I was, uh… a rogue cultivator way out in the frontier. I didn't have much formal education. At all."

"Ah." Zileng nodded sagely. "That explains much. Well… then you may be unaware of the other danger of high levels of impure ambient qi - the tendency to attract spirits. Obviously, there are few untamed spirit beasts here within the empire's heartland, but there are the spirits of the dead. While exceedingly weak, at least initially, the tiny cores of non-cultivators can sublimate, and often do if a cultivator does not oversee the death rites. Over time, enough errant qi wraps around the primordial core that it ignites into an actual aberrant core, which is where ghosts come from. They possess a bare reflection of the deceased's psyche, as well as the random impulses of the aggregated qi. They are often confused, scared, or angry…"

"So this is a literal ghost city?" I asked.

"It would not be called the Ghost City otherwise," Zileng stated. "Do not worry - the ghosts are weak… mostly. They would be no problem for you or your… bonded companion."

"What about Hana?" Lin asked.

"She would be well-advised to stay clear at night."

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The ghost city wasn't especially large. It occupied about a quarter square mile of city - half a mile from the courtyard that lead up to the sect to the part of Lake Lhim City that was actively inhabited, and sandwiched in between the jutting form of the sect's mountain and the graduated shore of the lake itself, half a mile wide on average. Something definitely felt off about the place, though it could have been my imagination after being told about the ghosts.

Past that was the part of the city I was excited to see - an actual city… with actual retail! - and Zileng had to repeatedly remind me to be mindful of my decorum. Apparently, that was a big thing among cultivators.

"Why did you not buy the sect's robes?" she asked. "Did you not take your oath? Do you not want to be seen as one of us?"

I shrugged. "They're kinda drab - no offense, you do you, sister. I noticed in the sect's rulebook… Hana and I gave our copies a good read-through yesterday… I noticed that there's a pretty long list on what fabrics the robe can be made out of, what the cut has to be, and so on…"

"That clause is intended for nobles who wish to gird themselves in finer fabrics, ones that can be inlaid with enchantment arrays for protection, comfort, and self-repair. They are not for the likes of commoners like you and I, sect sister."

"Yeah, but it doesn't say it in the rules," I said.

"It is implied," Zileng stated.

"True or false - the core disciples are sticklers for the exact wording of the rules?"

"True, naturally," Zileng replied.

"Okay… so then they can't get me in trouble for it if-"

"They may be displeased."

I shrugged. "I can't control how they feel about my decisions and, frankly, what I do outside of sect business is none of theirs."

"I would advise you not to mention that in their presence."

"I'm not dumb," I replied with a roll of my eyes. "So I'm going to get some money, get some custom robes, and then maybe I'll feel proud about being a member of this sss… group." I still couldn't shake the feeling that being in a 'sect' was a creepy religious thing. "Then I won't feel like some dork walking around in mom jeans. Again, no offense. You do you. Is there a market near here?"

"There are several, Sister Lynn - I'll show you the one preferred by sect members."

I'd already caught glimpses of Lake Lhim City's marketplaces from the trundling wagon as we rolled into the city, but actually beingin the market was a different experience altogether. It was far larger than the marketplace in Emerald Vale, much larger than even the long riverway market in Rushing Rivers - and this was one of five markets in the city!

Needless to say, I was pleased. Needless to say, I needed money, not stupid sectcoins.

"So… is there anybody I need to ask if I want to set up, like, an area around here?"

Zileng shot me a confused look. "I’m afraid I do not know the rules mortals have implemented to determine such things. Why should I care?"

"Yes, that's a very good point. I'm sure they'll tell us if we're breaking any laws or whatever. Hana and Lin, can you help me find a decent amount of open space? Enough space for classes!"

"Yes, of course Mi- senior sister," Hana said.

"What kind of classes?" Lin asked.

"We'll figure it out once we find the space," I said. "The bigger the better."

Of course the space in the market was all accounted for - that was a prime commercial location, after all. However, Hana and Lin found a modest and mostly-empty courtyard a mere two blocks away. They bickered over who'd found it, as sisters are wont to do, but they both calmed visibly when I told them I was very pleased with the location. As any good entrepreneur will tell you, unless you're in the no-shit-scary-after-dark hood, any location within an easy walk of a commercial center is almost as good, as long as you can get foot traffic directed your way.

I paced up and down the courtyard, craning my neck around to see if I could identify anybody who might be in charge. It was an area about sixty by seventy feet, surrounded by close-pressed buildings on three sides and a modest road on the fourth, It was a perfect amount of space and a great spot.

I spotted an old woman exiting one of the buildings and eyeing us with veiled suspicion.

"Excuse me, miss!" I said, "Do you know if we can use this area?"

The woman froze in her tracks and managed a small, rigid bow. "Of course. Mistress cultivator may do as she wishes," she said.

"How did she know I was a cultivator?" I muttered.

"Probably your eyes," Hana said. "Also, Senior Sister Zileng is wearing sect robes."

"Ah, right. I forgot about that stuff. Welp. That sounded like permission to me. Okay, I need everybody to spread out and come back in, oh, ten minutes? Come back with at least three students!"

"We are unlikely to find our fellow disciples here at this time of day," Zileng stated.

"Oh!" I laughed at the misunderstanding, which seemed to offend the girl. "I didn't explain myself well. We're going to offer cultivator classes in calisthenics, combat, and meditation!"

"To the mortals?"

I nodded. "Who needs it more than they do? Two wu per person per hour! Children, adults, everybody welcome! Come on!"

I jogged back to the market, flashing my sunny smile - a friendly face never hurt for getting customers! I stopped by the barrel merchant's and took a look at the crowd - there had to be a few thousand people in the market alone. Even if I could only recruit one percent of them, that would still be a few dozen people - not bad for a starting lesson.

I tugged on the cooper's sleeve to get his attention. "Excuse me, sir, may I stand on one of your barrels?"

"Uh… yes, I suppose, miss…"

"Great!" I hopped up on a great oak cask and gave it a few light stomps with my feet. "Wow! That's a sturdy barrel!" I said - it never hurt to give your benefactors a little free publicity never hurt, either. "Attention, everybody! Do you want to learn from realcultivators? We're giving out lessons in the courtyard due south of here, only two wu an hour! Men, women, and children are all invited to attend?"

"Are you really a cultivator?" a little boy called up.

"Yes! And maybe you can be, too!" I did a flip off the barrel to demonstrate my qualifications - though I'm sure plenty of mortals could have managed the same thing. "Flexibility exercise! Fighting! Meditation! We're teaching it all for just two wu an hour!"

"Two wu? We could leave the kids there and have some time to ourselves," a woman whispered to, presumably, her husband. He nodded excitedly in response.

"Exactly!" I shouted. "But act now - attendance is limited to the first sixty-ish people until more slots open up!"

Thus, I found myself leading a pack of about thirty-five people down the modest road toward the courtyard. As I approached, I could see that I was about the last one to arrive, and there was already a small crowd there, with Lin and Hanna boasting about who had brought more customers.

"I got four!" Lin said.

"Well I got five!"

"Sorry, junior sister and spirit, but I, Chu Zileng, got eight - you will learn how as you progress in… is that Lynn?"

"I think I got thirty-five or thirty-six!" I shouted over the murmur of the crowd. "I don't think we can fit many more in the courtyard!"

"You said three people!" Lin shouted, drawing some gasps from the crowd - she was in about her most tangible form, but she still had a slight translucency and a shimmering aura about her. Most people probably just thought she was a cultivator - I certainly wouldn't have known what she was before Ichika explained it to me.

"I said at least three people - isn't thirty-five or thirty-six at least three?"

"I guess," she said with a roll of her eyes.

"Okay, everybody! Two wu up front, and then we'll get started with some warm-up stretches…"

And, just like that, my entrepreneurial debut in Lake Lhim City was off.

I ran the crowd through about eight minutes of warm-up stretches, noting whenever somebody from outside our group tried to sneak in and having Lin float over to them and request that they either pony up two wu or leave the lesson. Fortunatey, we had no trouble - people didn't want to argue with what was, ostensibly, a ghost of some kind.

Then we split our group up, with Zileng running basic combat drills with Hana assisting (she needed the practice) while Lin and I ran the younger kids, who made up almost half of our group, through fun relay drills. I would need to get my hands on some cheap trinkets in the future to give out to relay winners, but for now, the kids were just happy to receive praise from a ghost.

"Spiritual blessings upon the first place pair!" she gushed, and she made a glitter of solar qi with the wave of her hands.

It was a bit unfair that Lin could do techniques as easily as she breathed… actually, I don't think she even had to breathe… but celestial qi techniques came naturally to her. I guess it was a spirit thing. On the other hand, using anything technique-like tired her, and she had to retreat into my soul-palace to she had quickly established a qi affinity in a way that I hadn't.

My guess was that her 'core' was basically a point in soul-space while my inner light was a line. It took a lot less qi to wrap qi spheres around a single point than it did braids around a line, and she only ever had to work with ever-growing 'shells' of stabilized qi rather than the crazy recursive stuff that I did. But it also meant the only way for Lin to counter-balance earth qi with her celestial qi was to make pole-to-pole swirls around an entire sphere instead of just letting it form in natural helices along an axis. I wasn't sure whether she'd managed to do that yet.

"Um… Lynn?" Hana tapped my shoulder to get my attention.

I turned to see that a few worried-looking city guards had gathered along the street side of our courtyard. I signaled for Lin's attention. "Keep running the kids through the frog hop, and then go back and do the animal poses - I've got to take care of something."

She nodded uncertainly. "Are we in trouble?"

"I guess we'll find out," I said with a sigh. I put on my sunny smile and ambled over to the guards, noting as I approached that at least two of them had the little, prickly flare of qi that marked them as cultivators in the first stage, though I couldn't be sure whether they were real cultivators or pill-poppers. "Gentlemen, good morning!" I offered a quarter-bow, the kind you were supposed to give to social equals in informal circumstances where neither of you was playing host to the other…

Ichika and Hana had taught me how to bow. There were no fewer than twenty different styles of bowing, depending on absolute status, relative status, formality, and obeisance, though most people could get through life on just five or six…

"How can I help you on this fine spring morning?"

The head guard returned the same bow. "Madam, might I point out that your activities here are causing a disturbance? Might I ask whether you have permission to conduct lessons in this area?"

"I have permission from a resident of the nearby buildings, yes," I replied. "Is that satisfactory?"

"Do you have permission from the sect to operate in this area?"

"I am a member of the Starry Waters sect," I replied, showing him the little token Core Disciple Khando had given me. "As is Sect Sister Zileng, wearing our lovely sect robes, and Junior Sister Hana, the one staring at us like a koi fish. Lin, the glittering girl, is my spirit."

Lin wasn't mine, strictly speaking, but Ichika had told me that it was best to introduce her that way to avoid a public panic. And she was my spirit in the same sense that I was her human.

The guard sergeant considered that for a moment, tapping his heavy boot against the paving stones. "Very well," he said. "Please keep things orderly, madam. You will be held responsible for any damage done in the course of your exercises, and traffic along the road must remain unaffected. Do you agree?"

"Oh, absolutely!" I nodded vigorously. "This is basically public outreach, so we wouldn't want to cause a disturbance. In fact, I hadn't expected it to be so popular!"

"Everybody wants to be a cultivator these days," he said with a shrug. "I'd advise you not to get the kids' hopes up, though. They read these stories and think they can be like the heroes…"

"I thought the heroes were mostly nobles," I said - maybe that was just the stories that Ichika liked. Personally, I always liked a good yarn whether or not the main character was a lot like me, as long as they were likable.

"Yes, exactly - you get it, madam. Alright… it looks like everything's in order here. We'll go ahead and fine the gentleman for making a false report…"

"A false report?" I asked. "What did he report?"

"That there was fighting and shouting in the courtyard which, clearly, there is not…"

In the background, Zileng boomed out: "Are you tigers or are you mice? Let me hear your battle shout!"

"Haaaaaooooh!" her students shouted.

"…any actual fighting," the sergeant finished.

"I'll ask Sect Sister Zileng to keep things down, too…"

The guards marched off, and they didn't bother us any further. In fact, I spotted one of the same guards sneaking in a few hours later in civilian clothes to take part in the lessons.

I'd planned on stopping after two hours or so, but people kept on coming in as quickly as they left, so we always had a full courtyard, along with, I'm pretty sure, people in the nearby buildings looking out from their windows and balconies and following along. I couldn't really do anything to stop them, and I didn't really mind.

In another life, Zileng could have been a drill sergeant, and I can only hope she held back for Hana because she didn'thold back for me when I took a turn as her demonstration partner. Her fists were like granite, and she swung them with the fore of sledgehammers, and her bare feet might as well have been steel-toed boots. Probably steel-everything boots. But it was all worth it to see the smile she kept failing to hide behind her stern countenance. And I didn't even have to fake my sunny smile the way my mother had taught me to. It was all real.

We wound up practicing in the courtyard for over five hours, only stopping when Hana grew too sore and exhausted to continue and Lin could only manage to stay outside of my dantian half of the time before retreating to re-energize. After thanking and dismissing the last of our students, and assuring them we'd be repeating the performance at least several days a week, I hefted the clay vase we'd been storing our money in.

"Feels like a lot!" I enthused. "Want to divvy it up?"

"Are we not donating the proceeds to the sect?" Zileng asked.

I shrugged. "Yeah… nah. Maybe if they gave me bullshit sectcoins or whatever… contribution points… in exchange? But a self-respecting cultivator shouldn't work for free. You can do whatever you want with yours…"

The girl nodded, seemingly mollified. "Indeed."

It turns out we'd collected around seven hundred wu in five hours of lessons and demonstrations. We agreed to split the proceeds into six shares, with Zileng and I getting two shares as the senior teachers and Hana and Lin getting one share as our assistants. Of course, I kept Lin's share in the cute little purse… er… cultivator's satchel that I bought because anything she carried on her simply fell to the ground the moment she went full-spirit and returned to my dantian. But she could spend it however she wanted.

I was excited, because it was a lot of coins. But actually not all that much money - my share was twenty-three yao and change. Enough for over two hundred fifty dumplings at Xu's 5th Generation Dumplings, but not enough for a cute variation of the Starry Waters sect robes…

It was enough for a down-payment on some robes, though. I browsed the local tailors in the marketplace, settling on one who did excellent work with mixed fabrics, and paid a fifteen yao down payment with the agreement that I'd pay another thirty upon receipt in four or five days' time. I didn't expect it would be much trouble to get that kind of money, because we'd been at capacity for the entire time we'd been teaching.

A less experienced entrepreneur would say it was time to find a larger venue, but that wasn't the problem at all.

No, the problem was that I'd underestimated the price of what the market would bear. Tomorrow, we'd be charging our students fourwu per hour instead of two. There was no easy conversion between wu and, say, dollars, but if the average laborer made close to five yao - that is, fifty wu a day… it was probably less than a dollar to the wu.

"What do you think, Zileng? It looked like you were having a good time. Are you up for doing it again tomorrow?"

Zileng furrowed her brow in thought. "I believe I have more spiritual burnout to defeat, sister, so it would be prudent. Returning to the bare basics of what a beginning novice learns helps me realize what is lacking in my base and in my greater dao. And I do not believe the senior disciples will fault me if I use my portion of the proceeds to purchase aids to fortify my battle against the heavens."

"So that's a yes?"

"I suppose it is," she said, allowing herself a rare smile. "I apologize for challenging you on your first day, sister disciple. I can now see that you are no noble scion."

"Um… okay?"

"It was intended as a compliment."