Reach Heaven Via Feng Shui Engineering, Drug Trade And Tax Evasion

Qian Shanyi picked up a small axe and went out searching for bookshelves to cannibalize. Toxic sludge in most of the cavern was at least a foot thick, and if she wanted to pass through it, she would need stilts.

There were two parts to a basic stilt: a long plank supporting the weight, and a short footrest, which she attached together by slotting it into a hole through the longer plank. She did her best to pick out good pieces, but everything in this place had some amount of rot. Since she couldn’t rely on the sturdiness of the wood, she made four separate pairs of stilts, and brought them all over to the gazebo.

Sure enough, three stilts broke while she was learning to walk, but after an hour she had figured out how to move around at a good speed. The other five weathered the tests, but she had no way to know if their structural flaws were simply concealing themselves.

Before setting off, she checked over her pit trap near the gazebo. She was probably just being paranoid. If there were any demon beasts left alive in the poison fog, they would have surely heard her moving around during the last day, and came over to investigate.

With her trap prepared, she armed herself with anything she could think of - she wasn’t about to track back across a field of toxic sludge if she needed another tool.

On her hip, she had her sword, and a small axe that would be more convenient for chopping through walls of decaying wood. Three replacement stilts were carried on her back in a crude sling fashioned from one of her Silvered Devil Moth Silk ropes, and in her right hand, she carried the longest spear she had, to poke ahead of where she walked and check for gaps and holes. Fly whisk was tied to her forearm with a short cut of rope - it took more focus to channel her spiritual energy into it than through the pores on her palm, but she wanted to keep her hands free.

She checked herself over another time before setting off. There were other things she considered bringing, but ultimately, her greatest defense against any threat was to run away, and the more things she carried, the slower she would move.

Finally, she sighed, and got on her stilts. There was no point in delaying the inevitable.

She slowly trod across the sea of poison towards her freedom, following the paved path down the hill. It was framed by trees - dead and rotting, but most of them still standing tall. Poison fog pooled in recesses and gaps of terrain, forcing her to take the long trek around. Her stilts clacked quietly against the paved road beneath the thick green sludge, her movements too slow to make the sludge slurp.

The cavern was split in half by a stream of water, with a broad bridge over it. Back in the past it must have flowed freely, but the water was stagnant now, glistening on top of the sludge that sank down to the bottom of the stream. At the far back end of the cavern, the road headed downwards as the cave narrowed down.

As she headed down, her eyes opened in excitement. She could faintly see the fog in the distance, shining green - which meant there was light. And light meant an exit.

The passage narrowed down to the width of a horse carriage before widening again into a smaller cavern, most of it still flooded with the poisonous fog. Fortunately for her, there was a wooden walkway built into the side wall, slippery and covered in slime. She tested her every step with her spear, securing her footing as much as she could - if it broke, she would fall into the clouds of death below her.

The walkway led to a brick wall built across the entire width of the cavern. Down below, in the poisonous fog, the wall was broken up by a wide open gate, dim light flooding through it. This must have been where the fog spilled out of the sect, pushed out by the air she created.

At the end of the walkway there was a short set of stairs, leading up to a closed door. With great difficulty, Qian Shanyi managed to inch her way up and pull the door open, and stepped aside, waiting patiently for the flow of poisonous fog out of the door to stop.

The room inside was narrow, and almost completely clean of the slime. There were some boxes inside, a table with a pair of cups, and a single bed in the back, much better preserved than anything in the center of the sect. Opposite to the door she came in, there was a second door, leading to the other side of the wall.

She opened it, and blinked her eyes. The cavern on the other side opened up, the paved road heading out through the gates, out of the poison fog and up towards a ledge at the far end of the cavern. Beyond the ledge, she could see the blue sky. The walkway led around the side, heading in the same direction, completely free of the slime.

Qian Shanyi put her stilts up against the wall in the gateway house, and stepped out onto the walkway, her heart trembling with excitement. She could smell the forest beyond. Finally, freedom!

As she headed towards the open skies, she almost missed the bear.

It bounded up towards the walkway, deceptively quiet on its giant paws, and she only noticed it when it was a short thirty meters away. It was large, at least as long as she was tall, and reaching up to her shoulders in height. Her eyes widened, and she fled back towards the gatehouse as fast as she could.

She burst into the gatehouse, slamming the door behind herself. In a flurry of motion, she kicked the table to slide in front of the door and jammed one of her stilts against the opposite wall to keep it closed. This barricade would not hold for long, but it would buy her precious seconds as she could already hear the walkway behind her cracking under the bear’s weight.

She jumped on her stilts and leaped out of the other door. As she came down on the walkway, one of the planks underneath her gave out, and the stilt went right through, jammed completely in between the walkway planks. Behind her, she heard the bear slam into the door, and the crack of her barricade splintering. The animal was still eerily silent, its huffing barely audible above the blood thumping in her ears.

Qian Shanyi left the jammed stilt alone, yanked one of her last two spare stilts off her back and started running down the walkway as fast as she could.

She heard the bear burst through the door and out of the gatehouse by the time she reached the end of the walkway, not daring to look back. In her mind, she counted the seconds before the bear would be onto her. Suddenly, she heard the sound of wood splintering behind her, and a loud thud as something heavy fell on the ground. This time, the bear roared: the walkway must have splintered under it. If she was lucky, the poison fog would kill it.

Oh, who was she kidding?

Heavy thuds and the slick sounds of the bear slicing through the toxic sludge behind her confirmed her thoughts. She was up in the large cavern by now, but she could already tell she wouldn’t make it to the gazebo hill in time. She needed another way out.

She moved off the path and towards one of the dead trees. With a powerful leap, she flew up and grabbed one of the branches, pulling herself up on top of the trunk. The tree groaned under her, but held.

She finally turned around. She couldn’t see the bear in the darkness, but she could hear it huffing as it was coming closer.

Her stilts were left behind in the toxic sludge below, mere meters away from the trunk, so she was now stuck here. She’d need to figure out a way to reach them, once the bear succumbed to the poison. As she puzzled over this problem, she took her last stilt off her back, not wanting it to get in her way. At least she should be out of the bear’s reach here.

The bear bounded up to the tree and leaped onto the trunk, starting to climb. The tree groaned under its weight.

“Leave me alone, you bastard!”, she shouted at it in a panic, spinning her spear in her hands, “Can you not seek death on your own lonesome?”

She thrust her spear straight at its head, drawing blood. The bear roared again, batting the weapon aside with its claws. They were evenly matched: she had little experience with the spear, but the bear was stuck, unable to climb with just one paw.

The tree finally cracked in half under their collective weight, sending her and the bear down into the sludge below. She barely managed to put her legs under herself, keeping most of her body from being dunked into the sludge. It came all the way up to her knees, feeling cold on her ankles. Her spear was wrenched out of her hands by the sudden fall, lost somewhere in the sludge.

“I will make you into soup, you oversized squirrel!”, she roared, unsheathing her sword. The bear responded in kind, getting up from the sludge.

Instead of trying to debate it, she raised her arm and channeled her spiritual energy into the fly whisk, sending a blast of air into the sludge just in front of the bear. The air hit the sludge, sending a splatter of it into the bear’s muzzle and eyes. She spun around and ran towards the bridge, toxic sludge burning on her ankles. The bear roared behind her, giving chase.

This time, she managed to get all the way to the bridge before the bear was on her, its jaws dripping with drool and death. She dodged to the side - one of its eyes was still covered by the sludge, and the acrid smell must have covered her scent. Her long hair was glowing and whipping all over the place, further disorienting the animal.

She was doing fine, scoring cuts on the animal’s paws and snout, when she felt the back of her foot hit the bridge railing. She had nowhere left to dodge.

She blasted air into the sludge in between them again, sending more liquid into the bear’s muzzle, but it was too late. The bear swung blindly, and she only barely managed to bring up her sword in time to block.

Weakened as she was by hunger, injury, poison and the change of her cultivation law, she couldn’t manage to fully resist the powerful blow. Her sword was pushed up against her body, and her spiritual shield shattered, the impact sending her flying down the bridge, skipping through the sludge like a stone over water.

As she hit the ground, she came down badly on her already broken leg. Barely healed, the fracture sheared again, and she screamed in pain. Fighting against the darkness creeping at the edges of her vision, she pulled her leg back together, and slowly got back up on her shaking legs. She felt a shooting pain every time she drew a breath: a broken rib or three, no doubt. By some miracle, she kept a grip on her sword.

The bear was huffing somewhere on the bridge, trying to clear its eyes off the sludge again. After she got her bearings, she realized the hit sent her closer to the gazebo hill, and she limped over, fighting through the pain. By the time she heard the bear bounding up the hill she had already reached her trap, and set it into an active state by pulling the curtain of Silvered Devil Moth Silk out. She stepped to the other side of the large hole and stood her ground.

“Now lie down and accept your fate,” she spit through her clenched teeth, as the bear’s front paws came down on the trap’s cover. Its weight broke straight through the wooden planks, and it plummeted head-first into the hole. Dense fire-type spiritual energy in the hole burst out in a pillar of fire, a rush of air covering up the bear’s panicked roars.

Qian Shanyi turned around and started limping towards the entrance to the Inner World, not waiting for the bear to die. She was covered head to toe in poison, and needed to wash it off immediately.

She reached the Inner World’s entrance when she heard the bear moving again. Fur on the front of its body was charred black, and it was a lot slower now, but it was still alive.

Qian Shanyi scowled at it, and grabbed the rope she used to descend into the Inner World. She waited until the bear was within the gazebo itself before leaping inside, baiting it to follow.

She came into the Inner World with some speed, sliding a good distance down the rope, using her velocity to swing away from the entrance portal. The bear leaped in after her, unable to see through the opaque entrance portal, and plummeted down through the thirty meters of empty air. It hit the ground with a crack, leaving a small pit behind.

Somehow, it was still not dead, and trying to get back up on its paws. Qian Shanyi swung on her rope, leaped off, and plunged her sword in its neck in one smooth motion, severing its spinal cord.

The bear dropped to the ground and drew its last breath. She stomped down on its head and yanked her sword out.

At least now she had something to eat for dinner.

She quickly stripped down and started putting together a bath from Igneocopper bricks and Blue Tear Stones. After the bear’s hit, she was covered head to toe in the sludge, and her skin all across her body was rapidly growing redder from the poison. She could only hope that it lost enough potency that she would survive in the end.

While the water was accumulating in one of the old trenches, she went over to the desiccated ground left behind from a fire node. Dust bath was not as good as washing herself with water, but it was faster, and she was working against time.

She got the shakes halfway through her bath, but simply grit her teeth through it. Her body felt weak and feverish, and the last thing she managed to do was throw some Ice Crystal Bars on top of the bear corpse so that the meat would not spoil. Then, she dropped down on the grass, waiting for her body to fight off the poison it had already absorbed.

At some point, she lost consciousness. She didn’t know how long she was out: she forgot to refill her water clock while she was cleaning the sect of poison, and it was completely empty by now.

This was her third time losing consciousness in this world fragment, and she was worrying it was becoming a habit.

Her body still felt weak, but already better than after her bath. It seemed that her short trip through the toxic sludge came a hair short of killing her.

Her stomach grumbled, and she fought through her weakness, making herself move. It took her a good five minutes to slowly get up on her shaking legs, but she wasn’t about to give up: it was time to cook a proper meal.

With how weak she was, she wasn’t about to try and butcher the enormous bear. Instead, she took an axe from the treasury, and simply chopped off its hind leg.

She dragged the leg over to the old ditch she used as a bath, to wash off the toxic sludge that still covered it. Having cleaned the leg, she constructed a stove out of Igneocopper bricks, put her pan shield on top, and consulted her jade slate for advice on how to cook the leg. There were two things she wanted to know - how to check the meat for poison, and how to cut the leg apart to preserve as much of the meat as possible. Fortunately for her, the bear didn’t have a great quantity of spiritual energy in its body, so at least she didn’t need to worry about that.

To think that a mere animal could bring her this close to dying.

There were helpful diagrams on how to skin and butcher animals of many different body types on her jade slate, and she followed the instructions easily. But the question of wherever the meat was ruined by the toxic sludge proved to be much more complex.

The basic problem was that there was no such thing as poison. “Poison” was simply any substance that would be detrimental to your body - but what was detrimental would depend on many different factors, such as your current condition, specifics of your cultivation, amount and location of your injuries, and so on. For example, if your body had too little yin spiritual energy, then an increase in your yin spiritual energy would be good, but if it already had too much, then it would be quite bad.

Human bodies were incredibly complex, and cultivator bodies even more so. In general, it was not possible to determine how an unknown substance would affect your body before eating it - at best, you could make an educated guess.

She did find a simple technique that could take a sample of a known substance, and then identify how much of it was in an ingredient, with many limitations. She compared the sludge (which she knew was poisonous) to her skin (which she knew contained poison, since she still felt weak), and to Wang Yonghao (who was still asleep, and presumably wasn’t poisoned). Then, she compared it to the meat in the bear leg.

Based on the comparison, she thought that if she were to cut off the top layer of the meat, she should be fine - the rest of the leg had less poison than her own muscles. She supposed that when the bear died, its blood stopped circulating the poison through its body, preserving most of the muscular tissue. This was not a sure bet: the meat might have already reacted with the poison, alchemically transforming into a different substance entirely, but she felt safe enough to risk it.

Soon enough, the unthawed bear shoulder steaks were happily sizzling on her pan. She watched them hawkishly, referring back to her jade slate for how best to control the heat. She added some spirit wine into the pan: bear fat served admirably in place of oil, but the liquid should make it easier to cook. Her hunger rose up again, and she couldn’t help salivating at the sight of the browning meat.

When the steaks looked done to her eyes, she carefully cut them apart into small chunks, and tried one of them with a dagger. The meat was tough, unsalted, and prepared without any spices except for the wine. On top of that, she took the meat off the fire too soon, and the center ended up undercooked. It was, objectively, about as badly prepared as it could be.

It was the best damn meat she had ever eaten in her entire life.

She properly ate her fill for the first time in a week, and rested down on the grass, waiting for the strength to come back into her limbs, her eyes half closed in euphoria. A couple hours later, she heard Wang Yonghao stir. It seems that the smell of meat in the air had finally woken him up.