Dark eyes watched the starless sky. Sunk deep in a head too big for the thin neck that carried it, those eyes were like looking down a well on a moonless night. An endless deepness that went on and on. The only light that came from those eyes was the reflection of a fire built to combat the chill that swept in as night fell. It had come too late for this boy with massive ears and chipped teeth revealed between cracked lips that had greyed in the cold.


    The boy was propped up in a corner where the backside of two buildings and the walled street intersected oddly. Part of his body was huddled in a sinkhole that had opened, this one just large enough to fit him.


    The boy died from exposure. Sometime last night, if Liao Hua was reading the corpse correctly. She had been taught in the arts of death, both inflicting it and understanding it. If she had misinterpreted the ultimate cause of death, she would string herself up by the toes and save her grandmother the time of punishing a failed student.


    His blue fingers had been gnawed upon, revealing flesh and bird-thin bones. Dead rats gorged fat on the boy’s corpse were strewn about. Hua had wasted some Qi and a knife she plucked off another corpse to deal with them. This was the first time she had bothered to handle the voracious rats, twitchy vultures or thick clouds of insects buzzing about. Far too many bodies to be feasible.


    Hua had retrieved over a hundred bodies by now and saved two or three times that number. Cultivation allowed her to be far more efficient at this than any mortal. Pragmatism ensured she never wasted more time than was necessary on any mortal.


    Which made her examination of a dead boy more curious.


    Painfully skinny like any mortal boy existing in poverty. Ribs so exposed that they could have been the bridges of a yangqin; stretch some wire across his torso and you could play him like an instrument. The sores reminded her of illustrations of a leopard, dark bruises against skin yellowed from malnutrition. A distended abdomen gave the vaguest impression that he’d eaten a large meal but was more likely one of the endless mortal diseases—liver disease, she expected, given how yellow his flesh was where it wasn’t frostbitten blue, bruised purple, or gnawed red by the rats.


    He’d died ignobly and would have remained unremarked for one curious property: There was Qi in the boy’s body.


    Qi enough that he should have been snapped up. The Imperial Guard would have paid handsomely for a boy who could cultivate so quickly. Any of the merchant families would have adopted him as an heir or a second son at worst. I can name five Liao girls your age to have married you, Hua thought, bringing his hand up and sensing through his spiritual channels. So why did we never find you?


    His dantain was malformed and small, but he had a dantian. Everyone, technically, had a central receptacle in which internal alchemy might occur known as the dantian. The process by which external Essence, Jing, could be absorbed and purified, becoming the qi that infused the body. Body Tempering opened that dantian to the external world. Allowed the very act of Cultivation to occur. If it was done right.


    The process of preparing the dantian for Qi required effort, care, and great knowledge. There was a reason so many people just like Liu Xin would never manipulate Qi even if they were powerful martial artists. The techniques were guarded by the Clans and even if they weren’t, one needed to Temper their body with an appropriate method for the eventual type of qi they would handle.


    The process was expensive, time-intensive, and gated by carefully guarded secrets, the kind Liao Hua would kill to protect.


    This dead boy had gone beyond that and opened a meridian. Reached a level of Cultivation that was notable. She had cousins who would barely advance past that point. Her twin sisters were older, given more resources, and they weren’t going to use Qi for years yet.


    I didn’t unlock a meridian this early.


    Somehow, some way, this malnourished and likely illiterate boy, had surpassed Liao Hua in cultivation. Impossible. Unthinkable. And yet, true.


    She had known there were great talents in the world and assumed she was one of the greatest, perhaps even the first amongst equals.


    It was all luck in the end. Hua could rejoice in the circumstances of her birth that placed her in a wealthy Cultivation Clan. She was lucky to be as talented as she was. Lucky to have the right tutors. Lucky to not have been overlooked for combat and sent to the priesthood. She’d taken advantage of these things, worked herself to the bone, and risen to great heights, but luck couldn’t be discounted.


    A flash of lightning illuminated the world and, for a moment, Hua saw the glory the boy could have achieved. As the bone-shaking rumble of lightning washed over her, she acknowledged the life that would never be.


    This boy, blessed with truly monstrous talent, had simply been unlucky to go unnoticed.


    “Young Mistress.”


    “Hm,” she said, looking over her shoulder to Liu Xin.


    “A work team requires the assistance of a Cultivator.”


    You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.


    Hua shook her head. The boy was dead and his potential would remain as just that, potential. She sent a spike of Qi to his dantian and pierced it. It was easy since he didn’t have any Qi actively protecting him, what with the issue of being dead. Against a living Cultivator, it was nearly impossible to do so, unless one was supremely talented.


    The boy’s Qi would leak out and dissipate over the next few hours. There wouldn’t be a mass of Qi for any creatures to consume and possibly awaken from.


    No Gu, no Jiangshi, no ghosts and no demons.


    Just a forgotten boy.


    “Lead on,” she told Liu Xin.


    Liu Xin was proving himself an invaluable treasure. The simple act of filtering whatever nonsense that mortals thought was important was a great boon for Hua who would rather dunk her head in muddy water than listen. Maybe that was why she always saw wealthy merchants and nobility walking around with attendants. The clan elders certainly had someone at their beck and call all the time.


    If they hadn’t been spies for the Elders, she may very well have allowed a mortal attendant for more than trivial tasks. And if nothing else, she knew with certainty the Elders didn’t employ the man. Weiji’s disgust at a Jurchen hadn’t been feigned. Others carried the same bias. Hua, personally, couldn’t be bothered to expend any energy on a mortal tribe she didn’t encounter often.


    “Did you guard the Doubting Antiquity School or were you a member?” she asked. They were being followed by the two scholars who were Liu Xin’s enemies. Hua was pretty sure she’d given them a task. Maybe. They tended to blend in with the other mortals.


    “Both. Meetings were easier with me. Messages safer to pass along. I could go places other scribes could not.”


    “How does one become a Doubter and how does that become a profession?”


    “How does anyone? With a hint of curiosity and an interest in the past. Our true past. For example, not everyone can be descended from the Yellow Emperor even if many claim it. He simply didn’t have that many children.”


    “The Dragon Throne might disagree.”


    He smiled with all the sincerity of a wolf about to pounce. “This lowly scholar would never doubt the unbroken genealogy of the great Yongtai Emperor to the Yellow Emperor who has three seemingly immortal ancestors in very recent generations, because otherwise the family line would not fit. Just as one would not find it convenient to name oneself Huangdi to remind us that all Emperors are, in truth, the Yellow Emperor. Such would be treason, and the Lady Liao would not allow such seditious thought in her vicinity.”


    A man unafraid to die might be useful. He might also stab her in the back the moment it became convenient. Which would be entertaining depending on the method.


    Behind her, one of the two scholars coughed violently. His partner slapped him on the back.


    “Fucking smoke.”


    “You think we can still get that Liu bastard out of the picture,” the dumber of the two scholars asked.


    “Shut the fuck up, you bastard of three fathers,” he said, still coughing. “Silver hair makes for crimson smiles and right now, she fucking likes him. Don’t get us all killed for no reason.”


    “But she’s barely even watching him. The moment she goes back to doing fancy things, we’ll be good to go.”


    “Why are you so eager to die? A Cultivator looks at a person or a thing, and you get between them, best be prepared to die slow. No, I’m leaving Liu Xin the fuck alone. He can keep all the shit he stole. The client might not even be alive at this point and even if she was, she can fuck with the Liao Clan alone. Fuck, the boss man got killed just to make a point and that’s not even talking about the guy whose head she ripped off or the one she stomped.”


    So, her new attendant was also a thief. Historian, fighter, and thief. A strange combination.


    There was an undercurrent she was missing, a piece of context she didn’t have. Two different groups of scholars literally trying to kill each other, something stolen in the middle, and genuine skill in martial arts. If the circumstances were different, she would have enjoyed watching their drama on a stage. If it was a scathing comedy, they would have had a wandering Cultivator show up and help the scoundrel Liu Xin mistaking him for someone righteous, and then walk through a series of increasingly demonic events that the Cultivator misconstrued for righteousness. Or they might go to the more classic tale of a court drama. She never really liked those, though. The simple answer always seemed to be to just punish both parties for causing problems in the first place.


    “So, what do we do?”


    “We shut the fuck up, make ourselves useful, and vanish the moment she forgets we exist.”


    Well, they were right about that. Hua only sometimes remembered they existed, usually when they walked in front of her, and usually only when Liu Xin made pointed remarks about them.


    She nearly forgot about them by the time Liu Xin led her to their destination.


    The areas east of the Residential District had suffered. Collapsed walls. Roads that had become trenches and buildings that had fallen into those trenches. Water had collected in the trenches. It ran thick with blood and rubble.


    She was led to the work crew and immediately understood their issue.


    A landslide had swept away the road. Well, swept away was wrong. It had simply covered the hill, the road and everything downhill with rock. That wasn’t the issue. Mortals had hands. They could dig.


    The problem was the giant boulder.


    It was three, maybe four times as tall as Hua, and she was one of the tallest people in the group. It felt solid all the way through when she rapped her knuckles on it which explained why they hadn’t just dragged it out of the hole it had made.


    Easy enough to solve.


    Liao Hua squared her stance and inhaled deeply. She held that breath and felt the Qi gathered in her dantian rotate. She released it and set it to flow. It was difficult as she hadn’t gathered enough to fully saturate her spiritual channels, and that would only occur once all twelve meridians were unlocked. Sparks arced across the back of her hands as she focused on channelling her Qi.


    Zhen, the Thunder Trigram. Two parts yin, one party yang. The teachings of her clan and Liao Hua was a dutiful daughter.


    When her palm struck the boulder, it shook with the force of thunder. Thunder Palm, that is what some called it. Little more than a toy she’d made to hopefully match her betters. Cracks radiated outward where her palm struck.


    She flowed through another step, her Qi moved by the motion of her arms and core, the way she twisted her hips, and sent her palm forward. Lightning sparking between her fingers. Thunder reverberated once more. The cracks deepened, widened. The boulder resembled a peeled orange before it was fully exposed.


    With one final assault, the third thunderous blow completely shattered what remained. Great chunks of stone were flung about. They hit the foolish mortals who hadn’t thought to move away, but none of the chunks were any bigger than an arm.


    Now the road was cleared. Mortals would have to fill in the hole but luckily, they had an appropriate quantity of stone to do so.


    And as she looked at the sky, The Great Net of Heaven collapsed.