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

Qian Shanyi reeled back the rope she used to descend into Wang Yonghao’s Inner World, and wrapped it around her waist. She had only tied it around the gazebo column a mere day ago, but it felt like ages. The knot on the rope was hard as stone, tightened to the limit after holding her weight many times that she had climbed in and out of the world fragment.

Wang Yonghao stood next to her, looking around without a care in the world.

She prepared for the trip as well as she could, which was not very. With Wang Yonghao awake and conscious, there was no need to overload herself with tools that could be retrieved directly from the Inner World, but she still carried the fly whisk, her sword, and a small axe. Several spears, additional ropes, and everything else she could think of was arranged on the ground near the center of the Inner World, easy to grab in an emergency.

She didn’t want to waste the time to bring the poisoned earth out of the inner world, but they did throw out the remaining bear entrails before they had a chance to stink up the place, by making a makeshift lift out of a rope and one of the largest pots they took from the kitchens.

Once the rope was drawn fully out of his Inner World, the entrance shrunk into a dot and vanished. All it took was a thought from Wang Yonghao to do it, and she wondered what would happen if it closed on someone’s hand. Probably nothing good.

She tied off the rope on her waist, picked up a new pair of stilts, and nodded to Wang Yonghao.

“Shall we go?” she said, and walked down the hill. He quietly followed after her, walking on air, clouds of dragonflies under his feet shedding enough light that she didn’t bother making her own hair glow.

They got to the edge of the slime, and Qian Shanyi got on top of her stilts. Wang Yonghao got ahead of her, and walked backwards in front of her, with his hands folded behind his back. She ignored him.

“Why don’t you fly?” he asked, “You said you could, before.”

Qian Shanyi had already anticipated this question. If she was going to cooperate with Wang Yonghao closely, he was inevitably going to notice that she didn’t do anything befitting of an old cultivation monster. This ruse would have to break eventually, but for now, she had ways to stall by relying on layers of implications.

For example, she didn’t actually say that she could fly - she only said she could reach him in the air, but she wasn’t about to correct his misconception.

“My cultivation law is special, and I am doing recuperative training,” she replied dismissively. “I don’t use spiritual energy unless I absolutely have to.”

“You know, I could have just carried you,” he noted.

“It’s a good idea,” she nodded, “it would make it much easier for me to reach your neck, if I needed to wring it.”

After a long day of exploring the sect, removing the toxic fog, getting almost killed by the bear and then butchering it for food, she was quite tired, and knew that she would fall asleep as soon as her head touched the ground. The short nap she took while suffering from the poison helped, and the aches her newly re-broken shin sent up her leg kept her awake, but she still felt exhausted.

She considered sending Wang Yonghao out of the secret realm alone and just going to sleep, but the idea rankled her. If she didn’t walk through the sect gatehouse on her own two feet, wouldn’t it mean that in some sense, she had lost the fight to the bear?

As they passed by the fallen tree, she stopped, and headed off the road, looking around for the lost spear. Wang Yonghao followed after her curiously.

“What are you looking for?” he asked.

“I lost a spear here when I wrestled with the bear,” she said, sweeping some slime aside with a wave of a fly whisk, “it would be a waste to leave it behind.”

“Why would you wrestle a bear?” he said, coming closer.

“We had a spirited debate about who was going to be the food and who the chef,” she said, “It lost and got sent into your Inner World. Now do you want to help me look or not?”

Working together, they soon found it, lying not far away from the tree crown. Wang Yonghao threw it into his Inner World, and they continued on, through the gatehouse with broken doors and out into the cavern beyond the sect. She saw the bear tracks in the dirt and dust on the ground, leading towards a depression on the side of the cave - perhaps her flood of poison disturbed its sleep, and that was why it was so angry.

She was the first to scramble up to the ledge where the cave opened up into the wider world, and sat down on the warm stone ground. The warm, humid wind made her long hair flutter softly amid the rays of daylight, casting long, wriggling shadows on the walls of the cave behind her, as if a bestial octopus had crawled up from the Netherworld.

The cave was set into the wall of a cliff, and opened up into the forest of towering black trees. They looked similar to the pines that grew near the Golden Rabbit Bay, with long clean trunks and a wide crown of green casting shade onto the ground below, but much taller, and with smooth, pitch black bark that shone slightly at the edges. With a start, she realized it must have simply been so smooth it was reflecting sunlight.

The ground was covered in thick red moss and tall reedy grass, blackened in a wide circle where the poison fog spilled out of the cave. Thankfully, it had long dissipated by now.

She could see where a hidden road had been cut into the forest in the past, narrow tracks left behind by carts barely visible among the vegetation. Songs of birds and insects filled her ears, almost deafening after the muffled environment of the sect caverns.

She filled her lungs with the fresh air, and smiled. She was finally out.

Wang Yonghao came over and sat down next to her.

“I like forests,” he said, “they are nice and quiet. Very few people can find you here.”

She glanced at him. “Speaking from experience?”

“Yeah,” he said, “I spend a lot of time in between cities, running away from this sect or that. Forests are some of the best places to be - no eyes to report you, no ears to hear you moving around. Unless a sect hires a spirit chaser, tracking someone through a forest is very hard.”

She frowned at his mention of sects. She didn’t have the energy to think of it before, but her sect - Luminous Lotus Pavilion - must have already noticed she had disappeared, and had surely heard about the incident at the Northern Sky Salmon. Without her dead body, the only assumption - not entirely inaccurate - must have been that she was kidnapped, or ran away. Her teacher was sure to worry.

She didn’t feel a great sense of obligation towards her sect. She joined it for a simple reason - it was one of the few sects near the Golden Rabbit Bay to accept novice female cultivators from a family of commoners without binding them by lines of marriage. The sect had only given her a fraction of the resources she needed, and in return, she did her best to dawdle in her assigned duties, and spent as much of her time on personal cultivation as she could. The only person there she was truly grateful to was her teacher, Elder Striding Phoenix, who gave her plenty of helpful advice, even though he obviously did not practice her cultivation law. She was sure that legally, she was still tied to the sect, but morally, she felt that she had kept her tab clean.

She decided that when they would reach civilization, she would write to Elder Striding Phoenix and tell him she was going away. He deserved that much.

Of course, she wouldn’t tell him about Wang Yonghao. The sect would be only too happy to help him with his luck problems - but in doing so, they would completely sideline her. She was not about to hand over her unique opportunity to someone else - instead, she would bite into it with all her teeth and never let go.

Well, this was something to worry about later.

“If you have spent so much time in forests, does that mean you know how to forage?” she asked.

He laughed awkwardly. “I kept meaning to ask someone to teach me, but never got around to it. Just…kept having other things interrupt me, I guess.”

She snorted in response. Of course he hadn’t. She took out the jade slate from her clothes, and activated it with her spiritual energy, going straight to the chapter on cooking.

“Fortunately for us, I happen to have a manual on foraging with me,” she sighed, slapping her other hand on her knee, and getting up, “Come on, let’s follow this road. I’ve never been much of a forager, but if we are lucky, I may be able to get us some herbs and forest vegetables, so that we won’t be forced to eat only unseasoned bear meat for weeks.”

“You want us to travel together?” he looked at her weirdly, “Can’t you just give me this manual or something?”

“How could I trust someone who did not even clean up their treasury with a precious manual?” she asked rhetorically, “Chances are, you will manage to lose it.”

She was not about to let the jade slate out of her hands. It contained her cultivation law, and if Wang Yonghao flipped through it and realized that was what she was practicing, her ruse of being a wizened old master would go up in flames.

“Well, it’s just…” he laughed strangely again, “With my luck, strange things tend to happen when I walk on the road. You fed me and helped find the sect exit, so I guess I owe you a warning.”

“I am sure it will be fine,” she said, walking off towards the forest. “Let’s go.”

As the suns made their march across the sky, they slowly made their way through the forest. It seemed peaceful, filled with sounds of nature, almost unnaturally idyllic in a way that begged her to relax, pushing on her mind, tired after a long day of clearing out the sect and fighting for her life. The bear encounter was still fresh in her mind, so she kept a hand on her sword, treading carefully, and trying to make out movement in between the trunks of reflective trees.

Wang Yonghao walked several paces away from her, humming along while swinging at small flowers poking their way through the moss with a tree branch. She did not stop him: if another bear came, he would make for a perfect distraction away from her.

The road was their best bet for finding civilization, but it disappeared entirely as they headed deeper into the forest. She supposed that was to be expected: it wouldn’t do for a sect to leave any obvious trails that could be followed back to their secret realm. Wang Yonghao tried walking on air to try and see above the forest, but the edge of the world was hanging low here, barely above the tree crowns, and he could not see very far.

After some pushing (and more than a few insults), she managed to get him to admit that he could find a way out of the forest. He closed his eyes, threw his branch into the air, and pointed in the direction where it fell. Apparently, his luck let him directly divine a “good” direction for him to head in, but given that he didn’t like where it kept leading him, he didn’t use this method very often.

She managed to hold her tongue after seeing this “method”. At least he seemed to focus on his surroundings more afterwards.

Their attempts at foraging were going badly, mostly due to her own inexperience - they managed to find a lonely oak tree and collect some acorns, but that was all. To cope with the disappointment, they took the time to cut the tree down and put it inside of Wang Yonghao’s Inner World - she had many uses in mind for the wood. The entrance portal of the world fragment made easy work of the trunk and the long branches, shearing them easily as it closed - though they still needed to move the trees around, since it could only open horizontally, and could not intersect solid objects.

Right now, Qian Shanyi was staring at a plant, flipping between two pages on her jade slate. It was about fifty centimeters tall, with a narrow stalk and cream-colored flowers growing in pointed clusters. She scratched her head, and turned to Wang Yonghao, showing him her jade slate. The forest was quiet around them.

“Does this look like the same plant to you?”

Wang Yonghao looked at the picture, and nodded.

“Looks like it,” he said, “What is it?”

“It’s either wild garlic, which would go great together with our meat, or it’s death camas,” she said.

“And what’s that?”

She raised an eyebrow at him. “What do you think ‘death camas’ does?”

“Fair enough.”

She looked at the pair of pictures again. They honestly looked completely indistinguishable to her. The manual said the plants smelled differently, but that was of no help at all when she didn’t know the smell of the right one. On top of that, the evening had fallen, and she needed to light up her hair to see clearly.

She sighed, and got up. Best not risk it.

As she turned towards Wang Yonghao, something put her on edge, and her hand dropped on her sword. She spun around, looking for a threat, but only saw the same quiet dark forest, reflective tree trunks, and the ground covered in red moss and reedy grass.

Eerily quiet. Mere minutes before, birds were singing, but now all she could hear was the rustle of wind in the reeds. Even the insects went silent.

She put her back against a tree, looking around for any hint of movement, and drew her sword out, extinguishing her hair and strengthening her spiritual shield at the same time. Wang Yonghao looked at her curiously.

“What are you doing?” he asked her, not even bothering to lower his voice.

“Why are the birds quiet?” she hissed at him, “Something is wrong.”

“The birds?” he looked around, and to his credit, immediately went for his sword.

Suddenly, he yelped as something yanked him by the legs, making him sink down to his waist into the moss. He helplessly tugged at his sword, but it was stuck in its sheath.

Qian Shanyi pushed herself off the tree to help him, but something caught her by the throat, and she was jerked back. She clawed at her windpipe, and felt a cord of something thick and cold, pressing against her spiritual energy shield. If she didn’t bring it up in time, she would have been strangled already.

A vine?

She pushed more spiritual energy into her spiritual energy shield, expanding it around her body to push the vine away. Her spiritual energy reserves, already depleted by the many hours of holding her broken shin together, dropped further, but she managed to get her sword underneath the vine. The angle was awkward, but with the push of her shoulder she managed to slice through, and tumbled forwards, using her momentum to instantly spring back to her feet.

She saw a bundle of wriggling vines enveloping the tree trunk she was leaning against. In the middle of the bundle, there was a large flower, its petals black in the dim evening light of the forest. Something white glistened in the middle of it, and as it crawled around the tree trunk to face her, she realized it was a maw full of teeth.

Spiritual energy flowed from the vine she sliced, but the rest of the flower was almost entirely blank. Even now that she knew where to sense, it was very easy to miss it.

A burst of light and a deafening cry of a goose came from behind her, illuminating the forest for a brief moment. The petals of the flower in front of her started to glow blood red, and behind the tree, she could see more patches of red, crawling closer.

She glanced at Wang Yonghao out of the corner of her eye, and saw him getting out of the hole in the moss, shaking the remains of a similar flower from his feet.

“Maneating flowers…” he sighed, “Just what I need.”

She didn’t have time to respond as the flower leaped at her, its hungry maw opening wide.