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

A single flower demon beast was of little danger to someone of their realm. The flowers tried to close in and entangle their prey, but were too weak to pierce directly through a solid spiritual energy shield. As long as one kept their distance, they could slice off the vines one by one until the core body could be destroyed.

The problem was that the flowers kept coming, and each one took many minutes to kill. On top of that, their vines could absorb spiritual energy on contact: it was a battle of attrition, and she was losing, even though she cut her spiritual energy usage to a minimum. Once she would fully run out, it would be all over.

Wang Yonghao fared better, but only just. Because he didn't need to spend spiritual energy all day to keep his leg in one piece, his reserves started out full, and he dipped into them with abandon. His attacks spread fire around the moss, and the Honk of the Solar Goose technique sent razor-sharp bursts of sword light slicing through the forest. It looked very dominating, but the flowers had an uncanny ability to dodge just before the attack connected, and would keep moving even with most of their bodies sliced apart. Compared to her conservative style, she wasn't sure who would falter first.

Qian Shanyi grit her teeth. Something needed to change.

“Let’s retreat,” she shouted, kicking away the flower next to her, and sprinting over to Wang Yonghao. She grabbed him from behind by the collar of his robes, and planted her good foot on his back, standing tall.

“Hey!” he protested, “Get off me!”

“Less whining, more running on air,” she curtly ordered, “I’ll keep your back safe.”

She wasn’t about to tell him she couldn’t fly, and she was definitely not letting herself be carried.

He went upwards, complaining loudly throughout. That put some distance between them and the flowers, but the plants gave chase, swinging from one branch to another at surprising speed. They needed a way to throw them off.

She racked her brain. How were they following them? Plants didn’t have eyes to see.

The birds went silent, she thought. They knew the flowers were coming. But how?

The flower beasts moved silently, and she doubted the birds could sense them any better than a pair of cultivators. This left two possibilities: either the birds heard some kind of concealed signal, or the flowers came out at the same time every night. Many animals would hunt at specific times of the day. If these flowers were doing the same, then it wasn’t out of the question for other animals to learn their schedule. That they all went quiet at once spoke to the threat on display.

“I think they can hear us,” she said to Wang Yonghao, “try to keep quiet, and run in a different direction - maybe it will throw them off.”

He immediately stopped complaining, and even his breathing slowed down. She smiled - the man could manage to think right when prompted. His footsteps on the fiery dragonflies were silent as they pivoted away from their path, but the flowers still kept on their trail. She frowned. Was she wrong?

No, she dismissed the thought, they probably have a spiritual sense.

All creatures needed to consume calories in order to stay alive. Spiritual creatures - cultivators, demon beasts like these flowers, ghosts, and many others - also needed to consume spiritual energy, or they would turn sick and die. Because of this, most demon beasts could innately sense spiritual energy, and right now, Qian Shanyi and Wang Yonghao must have looked like two bundles of tasty food.

“It didn’t work,” she said, breaking their silence, “they might be following our spiritual energy as well as the sound."

"So what then?" he said, "I can't keep flying without using spiritual energy."

"Let’s descend to the ground and continue on foot,” she said, eyeing the plants behind them. It was subtle, but she thought they were slowly closing in, as she could see flashes of red reflecting off the trees on their flanks.

“If we descend to the ground, they’d be on us in moments,” he grumbled, "especially if we suppress our spiritual energy."

Honestly, it was a great point. She looked around, searching for a solution.

“There. See that dense copse of trees?” she pointed over his shoulder, “run through it, and use that sword goose technique to slice the trees apart. The noise of them falling down should cover our retreat.”

Wang Yonghao headed towards the trees, and his sword danced in a tapestry of blinding light. In a single breath, every tree in the copse was sliced through by razor-sharp sword light, and collapsed to the ground with deafening cracks and groans as they ran past. They dropped to the ground, and started to walk away as quickly and quietly as they could while suppressing their spiritual energy by squeezing shut the 40 000 pores on their skin.

She glanced back, and saw that the collapsed trees were now positively covered in blood red flowers. They were searching around wildly, without any direction. She smiled - their distraction had worked.

She walked in front of Wang Yonghao and made a motion of a circle opening and widening with both hands. It took a minute, but eventually he figured out what she wanted, and opened his Inner World in front of them. She saw the flowers in the distance spin around and head in their direction, sensing the burst of spiritual energy, but by now it was too late.

She hopped on his back despite his protests, and they descended down into his Inner World, closing the entrance behind themselves. As he got down to the ground and she hopped off, he spun around and glared at her.

“Did you need to ride on my back?” he demanded.

“Like I said, I don’t use spiritual energy unless it’s absolutely necessary,” she replied lazily, turning away from him and heading towards her improvised bed.

"What do you mean unless it's necessary?!" he threw his hands in the air, “It was necessary - we were surrounded! You even said we should flee!”

“Hm. No, I don't think so,” she said, “You ran away just fine, didn’t you? Why would I need to use my legs to run when yours are still strong?”

"I am not a horse for you to ride on!" he ran in front of her, again meeting her gaze with a scowl.

She met his scowl with a smile.

"If you aren't a horse, why didn't you throw me off?" she asked, yawning lazily, and refilling the water clock that seemed to have ran out, "Besides, it was a good division of labor. You could concentrate on running, and I could watch the flowers. Or do you have a technique for growing eyes on the back of your head?"

"Well, no - " he began.

"Excellent," she clapped him on his shoulder, and moved past him, laying down on her bed. "Looks like we agree that from this point on, you'd do the running while I relax on your back. It is the most optimal arrangement."

"Hey, no way!" he shouted again, as she picked up a spare set of robes to cover her eyes for sleep. "We didn't agree to that at all! I am not letting you ride me again!"

She glanced up at him, and saw his face blushing from what he just said.

"Letting me?" She said, "You have to pay for that in most cities."

"Shut up," he said, blushing further.

“Tell you what," she said smugly, "morning outsmarts evening, and this here cultivator is tired. Let's talk about this tomorrow."

She covered her eyes, laid down, and was out like a blown out candle.

When she woke up, Wang Yonghao was still asleep down on the grass, having followed her example by tying a different set of robes around his head. The strange sphere that he brought into the world fragment was laying by his side - he must have been tinkering with it the night before.

By the clock, she slept for ten hours. She took her medicine, cooked up a large portion of bear ribs for breakfast, and started to catalog their food supplies.

Yesterday’s foraging went pretty badly, mostly due to her own lack of skill. The only thing they had to show for it was a small pile of acorns, as well as a broken up oak tree. The acorns had to be dried before they could be cooked, so she placed them all inside of an earth trench of the chiclotron, where the air temperature was a bit milder than in the adjacent fire trench.

In terms of calories, they were set for the next while. She didn’t have a set of scales to weigh the meat, but the bear must have been at least six hundred kilos, and according to the Three Obediences Four Virtues, meat was about a third of a mammal's body weight. Even if each of them ate two kilos a day, they should still last for a month and a half. Remaining egg omelet would add a couple days on top of that.

This was, of course, assuming that the meat didn’t go bad. For now, she stored it in the ice-cold water trenches of the chiclotron, but given how often she took it apart for her various projects, she would need to figure out a less fickle solution sooner or later.

Having gone through her food stores, she picked up her sword, and started cultivating. Her broken rib and leg made her wince in pain, but at this point, she was used to it. She wanted to adjust to her new cultivation law as soon as possible, especially if traveling with Wang Yonghao would mean she had to fight something new every other day.

She came out of her fight with the bear surprisingly whole. Besides her broken rib and leg, the rest of her body was pretty healthy, and now that she was eating her fill, she managed to keep practicing for two whole hours. At this rate, she felt that she would be back to peak shape by the end of the week.

She took a break after cultivation by relaxing on the grass and reading deeper into the Three Obediences Four Virtues, giving her tired muscles time to recuperate.

This time, she decided to read the chapter on household management. There was a lot of genuinely helpful advice, especially when it came to making containers, accounting, and conducting small repairs, as well as a fair amount about the basics of feng shui management when building a house - something that was currently useless to her, on account of living under the open sky.

Besides the general advice, there was a set of complementary techniques for keeping track of inventory. One of the techniques could create primitive talismans - “marks” - that could be attached to various items in a store room, with supplementary techniques for counting them based on type, or for locating particular types of marks in space. The marks themselves were crude, and could only last for about a month before running out of spiritual energy, but she could already tell it would be invaluable when running a large sect.

To make sure she wasn’t missing any other techniques, she quickly skimmed the other chapters. Cursing techniques seemed largely self-contained, and put a large strain on the body: she would only consider practicing them once she was in her peak condition. In the cooking chapter, she found two minor techniques for managing a kitchen - one for controlling the strength of fires by manipulating their access to air and one for measuring temperature - with the rest of the chapter focused on manipulating and transforming food. The advice and information seemed very comprehensive - she was sure that if she fully absorbed the lessons here, she could become a good immortal chef.

The sewing chapter, after discussing needle control, went into thread control techniques - they were clearly meant to be used together. Thread could be controlled by linking its movement to that of a second piece of thread held in her hands, either directly or by making it repeat a recorded movement on a trigger. The rest of the chapter was dedicated towards a variety of cutting, sewing and knitting patterns for shirts, robes, bags, and other common items.

Taken together, this cultivation manual held seven different spiritual energy manipulation techniques, as well as the base spiritual energy recirculation law, and a wealth of more general advice. Even though its focus was somewhat broad, in terms of the overall quality it could probably compare to some of the best cultivation manuals out there.

She pondered this fact as she laid on the grass. This cultivation law was very comprehensive - ordinarily, she couldn’t expect to simply find something like this lying around. Furthermore, it’s style was clashing with her own preferences. Was it her own luck at play, or Wang Yonghao’s luck in finding a good manager for his inner world?

It was said that a cultivator's luck was not transferable, but this was a simplification. In reality, luck would simply draw in events that would suit the goals of the cultivator in question - both conscious and subconscious. While luck could not be controlled directly, by focusing on specific goals, a cultivator could emphasize their effect. Direct, straightforward and immediate goals were easiest to affect by luck, while indirect, conceptual and distant ones were much harder. The goals of other people - even if those people were dear to the cultivator in question - had a much lower importance, and so luck would barely affect them.

Of course, this wasn’t to say that luck could not make other people benefit. For example, if a cultivator’s luck brought them over to join a sect, then the sect would also benefit from their joining. This was part of the reason why Qian Shanyi wanted to hug Wang Yonghao’s thigh and not let go - just by leaching off his treasures, her cultivation could increase by leaps and bounds. But this type of benefit was almost always indirect and incidental, especially because of the limitations of what luck could affect.

Luck had the strongest effect on the subconscious decisions of the cultivator themselves, and following that, on inanimate objects - for example, a lucky cultivator would find that their clothes would happen to tear less often, even though the strength of the fabric did not change in any way.

The scope of luck dropped significantly when affecting living beings, such as animals and demon beasts. It was fairly easy for a lucky cultivator to make a die roll to one side of the table more often than not, but much harder to make a chicken stroll to a particular side of the yard.

The hardest to affect were the decisions of other people, and especially other cultivators. This was not only because they were living beings, but also because their luck would clash with your own. If you were fighting another cultivator, then it may be beneficial to you if they happened to step in the path of your sword, but it would not be beneficial to them, and so the effects of luck on their decisions would tend to balance out. Similarly, when two cultivators gambled, then unless one of them was much luckier than the other, their rolls should be more or less fair. On the other hand, if two cultivators shared a goal, then their luck would tend to work together.

For her to find this jade slate, she had to end up in Wang Yonghao’s Inner World, and then he had to stumble into this destroyed sect. Did her own weak luck guide him on this path so that she could find it, or did his much stronger luck find her because she would make for a good manager of his Inner World? It would be an indirect goal mostly benefitting another person, but with how monstrous his luck was, perhaps it could actually happen.

She shook her head. It was pointless to wonder - wherever it was her luck, his luck, or just happenstance, all that mattered in the end was what she decided to do with the cards she was dealt. Luck was rarely a determining force, and the kinds of fools who relied on their luck to see them through danger were the first to end up in the graveyards.

If Wang Yonghao’s luck tried to lead her astray in service to his own goals, she would simply find a way to kill him. Dead men had no luck to speak of.

“Tang Qunying… Who were you?” she asked the air, playing around with the jade slate. Was she a part of that sect? Who hid this jade slate among the womanly books? Did she do it herself, to pass on her experiences?

Her thoughts were cut short by Wang Yonghao finally waking up.