Chapter Text
That last year before the start of the plot was very, very busy! Mostly because, as it turns out, the world doesn’t care that it is the setting of a novel and shit keeps happening all the time!
The situation at hand was one example of that.
“Oh Xiao Dan, what are we going to do now?”, whined A-Shi, wringing her hands as I rubbed the bridge of my nose under my glasses, their weight suddenly unbearable.
Strictly, we didn’t have to do anything. We, ourselves, had done nothing wrong. Unfortunately, I was fond of two of the little troublemakers kneeling at our feet, and I supposed that A-Shi was too, and that she, probably, also cared about the other two, even though they were dressed in Xian Shu lilac; she had a lot of friends there.
And it was tempting, very tempting, to let them face the consequences of their actions on their own because they seemed very unrepentant (the Xian Shu pair) and sullen (Jinkui), with the exception of poor A-Qing, who looked like she might faint.
Who knows what my face was doing at that moment, but it prompted A-Shi to tug at my sleeve and say “Xiao Dan, please don’t be too hard on them”.
“Alright, this is what we are going to do,” I said after a moment, “you are going to write a proposal for this project and an essay about the reasons on why it should be approved. Then you are going to write all the appropriate requisitions for all the materials you stole. Then, with those materials you are going to rebuild the perfectly good loom you dismantled. And then, because this Shijie is nice, she is going to backdate all the paperwork and have Shifu to approve it—” I could see Jinkui filing that for future blackmail and I huffed. “I’m going to tell him you did everything by the book—as you should have done!— and that I forgot to bring the matter to him on time—usually I or Da-Shixiong screen those petitions ourselves, anyway. This wouldn’t have been such a big deal, but you little idiots decided to steal from the Sect! Why didn’t you thought to ask this Shijie or Shi-shimei?”
I looked down at them, arms crossed. All but Jinkui, including A-Shi, started squirming.
“Because Hong-shijie would ask what sort of books we wanted to print!” Poor A-Qing was the one to crack.
“Cao Qing, shut up!”
“B-but She-xiaojie! Hong-shijie is scary when she is mad!”
“Not a word more Cao Qing!”
“What sort of books you wanted to print?” I had to ask, if those little shits decided to make cultivation manuals, I would—
“Yellow books!” said Cao Qing. A-Shi spluttered next to me.
“Cao Qing!”
“Ilushtrwtdns” or something like that, continued poor A-Qing while Jinkui tried to smother her with her hands.
As they scuffled on the ground, I looked to the Xian Shu pair, who had been silent so far. The one on the left, sitting closer to my little walking problems, looked unbothered if not clueless—I would go so far as to say she was also amused and enjoying A-Qing and Jinkui’s antics. The one on the right was sitting all poise and good posture, all but radiating calm. She wore a half-veil over her face, but her ears were very red, so she was not as unaffected as she wanted to appear.
“Well,” I said to them, “I know how my shimei are, but who are you and what’s your role in all of this?”
The one with the veil did a perfect and graceful seated bow and her martial sister followed after a beat with an identical one.
“Greeting Hong-shijie. This one is called Liu Mingyan and her shimei is called Yin Shuimu.”
“Thanking Shijie for her aid!,” added Yin-shimei, cheerfully, and then: “Answering Shijie’s question! This one just wanted to build a printing press, but she also enjoyed making the illustrations and carving the wooden blocks alongside Cao-shijie! Liu-shijie wrote the books!”.
Liu-shimei's only reaction was that her ears got even redder. For her part, by this point, A-Shi had moved from tugging at my sleeve to clutching at my arm.
“Liu-shimei is Liu-shishu’s little sister,” she hissed at me, a bit desperately. “Please Xiao Dan don’t say anything. Just imagine the scandal!”
I had a sudden thought.
“A-Shi has seen those books, doesn’t she?” I raised an eyebrow. She blushed and also pouted.
“They are good,” she admitted, looking away.
“And how long has A-Shi known about the printing press?”
“I let them have some scraps! I told them they could have anything no-one was using! I just didn’t think they would steal an entire still working loom from Xian Shu.”
I bonked her lightly on the head with Yu Lu’s hilt.
“A-Shi is going to source the materials for the new loom herself.”
“But Xiao Dan~” She fluttered her eyelashes at me.
“No.”
“You are not fun!”
It was not, in fact, good erotica, probably because Liu-shimei was not yet 15, and I was pretty sure both Yin-shimei and A-Qing just copied illustrations from other books with very little understanding of what exactly was going on in them.
It was a very hypocritical thing on my part, since in my past life I had been reading smut when I was too young for it, straight up lying to get access to age restricted websites, but someone had to be the responsible adult, even if A-Shi was two years older than me, so I made them promise to avoid printing explicit sex (all, including A-Shi, blushed at the word, proving my point) for some years.
Shifu found the whole affair hilarious once I told him, and even gave them some money from his own pocket to buy paper and ink and get started.
*
After that, I got used to seeing a little purple among the yellow and to reminding Yinyin to go home before curfew. Yanyan was also around a lot, but she was a more filial child, so in the end Qi-shishu only grouched about loosing a prodigy and not two.
I enjoyed the irony a lot.
One day, while we unloaded a cart (I was supervising but I didn’t like to watch as others worked) I asked Yinyin why she choose to transfer to An Ding. She was huffing and puffing and very sweaty, but she also looked like she was having fun. “I like looms, but I don’t like weaving,” she said. “And I can dance here too”. Which, fair.
“We are building a windmill next!” chimed in A-Qing. She was tiny, so while she didn’t struggle with the weight, she struggled with the size if the sack of rice she carried. “It is going to be so fun!”
“And what is the windmill for?” I asked Jinkui, since she was usually the one to give a purpose to A-Qing’s ideas. She was about as tall as me, and I suspected she would still grow a bit more. She carried her sack easily over her shoulder.
But it was the three of them who answered in unison: “Bread!”
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I ignored the System's nonsense and reminded them to make their requisitions and to ask Fu-shixiong for permission this time, and then I started thinking about suppliers for the wheat.
*
Getting lost in the idyllic slice off life was tempting, you know. I could try to resign myself to the unavoidability of the plot like Shifu had done to keep his sanity, it would have been easy— but I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
I kept asking Shifu about his novel. He knew why I did it, but he humored me. He liked talking about his writing just like any other author, enjoyed the questions I had.
I thought about it like writing, too, the chain of act and consequence, retracing the path of the storm to the butterfly. What was Shen-shibo’s downfall?
It was not Luo Binghe. It had started back, way back at the Qiu’s and even a bit before that, and the only bit that had followed him from his unpublished backstory to appear in the text of PIDW was Qiu Haitang, the punishment to his one good deed.
I only knew the little bit that Shifu told me about Qiu Haitang, of course. There was no way for me to get to know her personally. I was a bit torn about what I knew, she had been naïve and ignorant, and innocent for it. She had been young, but as young as Shen-shibo had been. She had also lost a lot in a horrible way that did make her a victim, just like Shen-shibo had been. In the time since then she could have done some self-reflection, but as I investigated her current whereabouts, I found her just as naïve and ignorant, just now embittered, self-righteous.
She was actually a very good foil to Shen-shibo.
Everything about her was complicated, but I knew she didn’t deserve to be murdered on the side of the road for it.
Well, there wasn’t anything I could do about it now—ah, ok, there were some things I could try, but I didn’t actually like her that much, even if I felt bad for killing her, so the point stands.
I carried her body to a forested area, took her valuables to make it look like a mugging and buried her as properly as I could, which was a lot better than poor Shijie got! Then I called His Majesty for a ride. He left me in my room at an inn in a different town where I was on a mission with other disciples, and got a peck on his cheek as goodbye.
There was nothing to tie me or Shibo to the murder, I wasn’t dressed as a Cang Qiong disciple, I killed her with her own sword: it was as perfect as a crime could be.
I gave her money to the children begging on the street, and made a mental note to get someone to offer escort them to the Disciple Selection Test.
And it was done.
*
But my work never ended.
Currently, Qing Jing only had nine disciples, where the oldest was A-Ming and the youngest, little Ying’er. There also used to be two Shijie who had left to get married (unfortunately, not actually to one another) three years ago. The rest of its inhabitants were a couple of elders in seclusion and some hallmasters who were Shen-shibo’s own martial uncles; all his contemporaries had decided it was in their best interest to leave the Sect.
The only other Peak with even less members was the one dedicated to the divination arts, probably because on top of a spiritual root, their disciples needed innate talent for divination.
Anyways, that meant that there wasn’t actually too much paperwork being generated by Qing Jing, so Shen-shibo could get away without selecting a second in command and could do most of the administrative work himself. The rest of the work was done by me, because I was a pushover.
There wasn’t many perks to this part time job, since I was mostly paid in snacks prepared by my own Shifu, but I was allowed to wander Qing Jing at my leisure once the work was done.
I enjoyed those walks a lot. Qing Jing was very different to city-like An Ding, where even the gardens had a pragmatic purpose; it was, pardon the pun, a very calming place.
So that might be why the sound of crying in the distance alarmed me so much.
I ran towards the sound. I was preparing to find the scene of a training accident, but it was not that.
“Oh, A-Ming,” I said, in part because he looked rather pitiful, in part to announce my presence and don’t startle him.
I still startled him. He tried to dry his eyes quickly and winced when he touched the bruise on his cheek.
He was sitting on the ground, in the middle of a trail that went around the whole Peak. It was not actually the first time I encountered one of the Qing Jing boys running or, well, too exhausted to keep running on this trail. I crouched at his side and started bracing to help him to his feet, ignoring the spot where he had clearly thrown up before I arrived.
“Shi-shijie,” he hiccupped, “this one is f-fine.”
If he was calling me Shijie, he most definitely was not fine.
“Shijie is sure A-Ming means that, but please just humor her.” With my support he managed to stand up and I helped him sit down again some meters away under a tree, where he could lean against.
I actually carried some emergency camping supplies in a qiankun earring, in case His Majesty took me hunting unexpectedly (the other earring contained my trousseau and jewelry, in case I needed to sell them for money), so I was able to wrap him in a blanket and offer him some water to first rinse his mouth—he was a bit embarrassed to spit in my presence, so I turned away while he did so— and then to drink slowly. The whole process gave me time to observe his bruise. It was badly inflamed, to the point he couldn’t open his eye completely, and I feared his cheekbone was fractured.
“Thanking Hong-shimei for her aid,” he said once he was a bit more composed. “She may leave now, if she wishes. This one still has some laps to complete.”
“Ming-shixiong may be a bit rested now, but this one entreats him to let her examine his wound, for her own peace of mind.”
It probably hurt a lot, because he allowed it. I placed two fingers on the pulse at his wrist, like I was taught by Shifu (like he had learned to avoid going to Qian Cao Peak) and used a bit of my own qi to examine the energy flow around the wound site. It was not fractured, thankfully, but I couldn’t leave him like that in good conscience. He would refuse to go to Qian Cao, and I couldn’t encourage healing with my qi, like their disciples, so I decided to prepare him some medicinal tea.
“Is Ming-shixiong amenable to tell this one what happened?,” I asked while we waited the water to boil. I used the magic hot plate and kettle from my camping kit, the tea came from the mundane pouch at my waist, since one doesn’t keep first aid supplies in mustard seed space. I was expecting him to refuse to answer, but he surprised me.
“I—this one was reprimanded for backtalking,” he answered, his voice wavering a bit at the end.
“Ah,” I said. “Well, Ming-shixiong should listen to this one when she tells him there is no correct answer when told ‘shut up and explain yourself’, as this one imagines just happened.” He snorted in response, so I was probably right. “Shen-shibo is a bit heavy handed, when delivering punishment.”
“Shifu is just very strict and has high expectations for his disciples. He is not at fault if we fall short.”
No, my dude, he is just recreating behavior patterns from the adults from his own childhood and abusing you all as consequence.
And this is why you all are gonna jump in to bully Luo Binghe once he arrives to become the Peak’s scapegoat and why Shibo is gonna scalate.
“Let’s just drink the tea”, I said out loud.
The tea helped A-Ming, so he was able to continue running his laps. Before leaving, he thanked me again and bowed; I bowed back. I watched him run, until I lost sight of him in a bend of the trail, then I repacked my stuff and walked back to the Bamboo House.
*
“And who is Hong-shizhi to opine in how this Master disciplines his students?”
We were sitting at his receiving room. I had prepared the tea we were drinking. He had been bemused when I had returned from my walk, but now he was just irritated.
“This shizhi just believes that Shen-shibo was overly harsh on Ming-shixiong. He admitted he was in the wrong, but there was no lesson to learn in his punishment.”
“Ming Fang learned to respect his Master.” He was idly fanning himself, but I knew him well enough to know it was like the flickering tail of an angry cat.
“Ming-shixiong now knows to fear his Master.”
“And aren’t those the same thing?” He looked at me coldly over the fan and raised an eyebrow.
“Then, should this shizhi also fear Shen-shibo? Should she listen to those who warn her away? Is there truth in their gossip?” The fan snapped shut. He didn’t like that answer.
“Hong-shizhi should mind her words.”
“Oh, Is this shizhi being rude? Disrespectful? Is Shen-shibo going to hit this one—”
[HP: 290.662/352.129]
The clap of the backhand was deafeningly loud in the quiet of the Bamboo House. I had been goading him, but it still hurt.
“Should this shizhi also go run laps until collapsing?”
“Get out.” He stood up.
“No, no. This shizhi was just now a lot more disrespectful that Ming-shixiong probably was.”
“Get out.” He was looming over me, his arm still raised.
“This shizhi should be whipped for this level of disrespect”.
“Get. Out.” He said through clenched teeth. I noticed a drop of blood slide down the left side of his neck and red starting to pool in his right eye.
I may had miscalculated a bit.
“Shibo is qi deviating.” I climbed to my feet; he took a step back.
“Get out.”
“This Hong-shizhi is sorry. Please just let her help.” He collapsed and I took the chance to approach him again. I even managed to transfer him a bit of spiritual energy before he got the awareness to slap me again.
[HP: 284.897/352.129]
“Leave,” he hissed, and I finally obeyed.
It was fortuitous that I found A-Ming outside the Bamboo House. He stared at my matching bruise.
“A-Ming, call for Mu-shishu but be discrete. Shen-shibo suffered a qi deviation.”
Once he left to do that, I jumped on Yu Lu and cried all the way back home.
*
A-Ming was named head disciple.