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

"Are you completely fucking insane?"

To Wang Yonghao's credit, he didn't shout. In fact, he spoke quite calmly, though his face was contorted in a grimace of such sheer bafflement that it almost seemed more incensed. They had descended into his inner world before speaking further, and perhaps the pause had helped calm him down.

They gathered around their large table, where Qian Shanyi had kept their copy of the regional map pinned to the surface with little needles. It helped to plan where to head next, what towns to avoid.

"Look, just hear me out," Qian Shanyi said, raising her hands defensively.

"You want me," Wang Yonghao continued, barreling past her words. "To ride on this -" he gestured towards the pamphlet with a grimace. "This - whatever this is, this elongated flamewheel wagon?"

"I do."

Wang Yonghao pinched his nose, exhaling so sharply that it would have sent the pamphlet sliding all the way across their table, if Qian Shanyi didn't stab her nail through the corner. "Shanyi, if I ride on it, it will explode."

"It's not going to explode," Qian Shanyi said, rolling her eyes at him.

Wang Yonghao grimaced again, gesturing towards the edge of the world fragment, as if they could see the wagon contraption flying just outside their little island. "I've never seen anything like that thing before," he said, his tone slowly starting to rise. "It's probably an experiment by some refiner! How in Netherworld's name would you know what it is going to do - what it even can do?"

"I have no more of an idea than you do," Qian Shanyi said casually, picking the pamphlet up off the table. Her nail had left a slight cut in the paper, right across a narrow band of white, glimmering ink a few millimeters from the edge of the paper. She ran her fingers over it. "But I am almost certain that it's not going to explode."

Wang Yonghao's grimace immediately turned into a scowl. "Almost."

Qian Shanyi's eyes moved down to the map, which now had a small cut as well. A small frown flickered across her face. She felt an odd mix of frustration and excitement, like a cat ready to pounce at a rat but held back by its collar. Still, taking it out on the paper was no excuse.

"Look here," Qian Shanyi said, turning the pamphlet to face Wang Yonghao. She tapped a small symbol of a hammer in a circle, stamped in the corner in the same metallic ink. "See this symbol? See this border, how it glimmers? The sect might be the ones who bring the expertise, but the ministry of public works is clearly involved."

"So?"

"So the ministry isn't stupid," Qian Shanyi continued, pursing her lips. She folded up the pamphlet, lest she ruin it any further and gestured with it towards Wang Yonghao's face. "If they are letting the sect advertise this thing, let alone letting civilians ride it, then it must be safe enough. It's not going to suddenly explode." She tapped the folded paper against the table, before putting it away into her robes. "It's no wonder, really. All forms of travel are their domain. If this thing can get us into the Solar Whirligig, then they have a responsibility to keep it secure."

"Okay," Wang Yonghao said, clearly not agreeing in the slightest. "So it'll do something else then. Fly off into the sky, maybe. Or break the void and send us all into the Netherworld."

"I won't say that the idea is entirely without its risks, but you are being irrational," Qian Shanyi said, deciding to take a mildly more diplomatic track. "Think about it like this: you had only learned of this path just now. Your luck would not have had the time to set up a trap for you, and however long it takes us to get to Sparkling Sulfurium - that's all the time it will have. Many of the most dangerous possibilities simply cannot materialise out of thin air."

She was simplifying, skipping over a lot of caveats. If her theory for how his luck worked was correct, if his luck didn't simply set up traps on every possible path they could take, if, if, if…

The biggest one by far was the involvement of the ever-hypothetical Sleepless Night Sect. If they could predict where Wang Yonghao went before even his luck could, then they could build a trap here quite easily. But of course that would be true no matter where they went, so it was somewhat pointless to worry.

Wang Yonghao scowled at her, tapping the table in between them with a finger. "Oh come on, that's more than enough time for something important to crack or splinter!" he said, "So that the whole thing could explode in my face -"

Qian Shanyi threw her hands up in the air. "Nothing is going to explode!"

"Uh huh."

"Fine." Qian Shanyi scowled, leaning over, closer to Wang Yonghao. "Consider the alternative. If we take the long way around, we'll waste a good month, maybe even a month and a half. Average it out, I'm expecting your luck to throw five to six coincidences our way. What guarantee do you have that the next ship we take won't have a refiner on it? One that will carry some deadly experiment with them?"

Wang Yonghao stared at her silently, his arms crossed for a full minute. "I guess I don't," he finally admitted.

"That's right." Qian Shanyi snorted dismissively. "Sure, this thing may be novel and unusual. Maybe it's a bit more likely to give us grief. Is it six times as likely? I don't think so."

"You don't think so?" Wang Yonghao mirrored her voice mockingly. "They are calling for cultivators to come to the Solar Whirligig, aren't they? There's going to be a lot of them there, of all sorts. This is a pressure point, Shanyi, of course it can be six times as dangerous."

"Will we not pass by any other points if we take the long way?" Qian Shanyi said, giving Wang Yonghao a challenging nod. "No matter how many maps I consult, how many almanacs I read, I cannot account for everything. The risk is already there. It's foolish to pretend otherwise."

She ran a hand through her hair, tossing it back over her shoulder. It helped cool her head slightly, and so when she slammed her fist against the table, it was simply to better emphasise her point, not because she was mad. "There are only two indisputable facts before us," she said. "One: we only have four months to work with, until Jian Wei will expect us back! Two: the faster we get to Solar Whirligig, the less time your luck will have to set up some deadly coincidence once we arrive. Do you really want to give it another month and a half more to work with? Do you really want to cut our plans down to the last minute, with no safety margin? Taking this path is the obvious choice!"

Wang Yonghao crossed his arms on his chest and stepped away from the table, pacing around. She could see the argument worming its way through his mind, his forehead creasing more with every second. But they were not alone, and even if she forgot about Lingui Mei in her focus on winning the argument, Wang Yonghao clearly didn't. He turned to her, where she was brushing Yihao's fur down on the grass.

"What do you think?" Wang Yonghao said.

Linghui Mei looked up, then shrugged. "With so many cultivators… I would never have gone close to such a place," she said. "But with you, it is safe. Still. What if someone there informs Fang Jiugui of you?"

"He shouldn't even know it exists," Qian Shanyi said, making a dismissive gesture. "We are far from the Golden Rabbit Bay, and he had retired a long time ago, long before this project would have started. Even if some of his past colleagues would be involved - which I frankly doubt - I would wear makeup and use a pseudonym. They should have nothing to report."

"And me?" Wang Yonghao asked. "I don't have a pseudonym seal."

Qian Shanyi nodded. He couldn't pretend to be an ordinary person, either, not when surrounded by other cultivators. "I think your seals should be ready in time," she said, leaning over the map, and tracing her finger around the edge of the desert until she found the Sparkling Sulfurium. "We'll need another… two, maybe three days just to get there. For a project of this importance, I am willing to bet that they would have a voidbird on hand, and then Wang Tingting is only a short message away. If not that - we'll pass through several large towns on the way there. And perhaps we wouldn't even need the seals."

Qian Shanyi raised her eyes, meeting Wang Yonghao's and Linghui Mei's, one after the other. "So, are there any other objections?"

Of course they had other objections. It took Qian Shanyi a good hour to argue her two compatriots into agreeing with her plan, but in the end, agree they did. She left Linghui Mei within the world fragment to train and accompanied Wang Yonghao on the road - until the night fell and they stopped in a forest groove, to wait until the morning, when they could head to a nearby town and book another ship.

But within the world fragment, the night stretched long. Long enough to make progress on Qian Shanyi's many projects.

"So this is the ooze sword?" Qian Shanyi asked Wang Yonghao, hefting a long glass cylinder, topped off with a tightly screwed-on cap. It was a meter and a half long, one of the longest they had. The aforementioned sword barely fit inside.

It looked more like a piece of driftwood than a real weapon, blackened and spongy on the back of the blade and the guard, and far more solid where it tapered down to the edge - which looked incongruously sharp, sharper than a simple piece of wood had any right being.

It was also covered in pale-green slime, so much of it that it filled the bottle halfway up. The slime had a texture to it: almost perfectly transparent at the edges, and turning darker deeper in, shot-through with bright purple veins. It seemed to anchor to the sword, even as it sloshed around, coming out of the hundreds of small holes that pitted the sword's faces.

Wang Yonghao nodded. "Yep. I don't think it was this full of ooze when I put it in, though."

"Might be the blade is producing more, might be the ooze itself is growing," Qian Shanyi muttered. She knocked against the glass with her knuckles, and the ooze sloshed hungrily towards her hand, splashing against the wall of the bottle. "This type of glass doesn't block spiritual energy. If it feeds on it, then you might as well have left it in a bowl full of delicious rice. Should have picked a different bottle."

"Sorry."

"Mmm. Please consult the inventory list next time, but at least it's contained," Qian Shanyi said, pursing her lips, before turning to look Wang Yonghao in the eyes. "Did fire work against this thing?"

"Yeah. I burned it off - I wasn't going to touch it otherwise - but…" Wang Yonghao trailed off.

Qian Shanyi nodded, looking back at the bottle. "It must have been left alive in some of these holes," she said. "No idea how we'd clean it to the point where it could be sold off. Bake the entire thing, perhaps?"

"I think we should just toss it and be done with it," Wang Yonghao muttered, circling around her to take a closer look at the bottle from the other side. Despite his attitude, Qian Shanyi could see that he was still curious, yet trying to hide it.

"Cowardice. Where is your spirit of experimentation?"

"The same place as your caution."

Qian Shanyi snorted. "You said it turned things to stone?"

"Yeah."

"I want to see it," Qian Shanyi said, handing the bottle to Wang Yonghao. "Hold the bottle."

Wang Yonghao accepted it, but looked back at her warily, holding the glass bottle far away from his body. "And do… what?"

"We'll need to switch the cap to one with a valve," Qian Shanyi said, eyeing their collection of glassware until she found just that, and grabbed it off the ground. "This means we'll have to open it, and I worry about losing my fingers."

Wang Yonghao squinted at her suspiciously. "What about my fingers?"

"Less valuable."

"No they aren't!"

"I meant less valuable to me," Qian Shanyi said, bending down to pick up her second target - a short black tube with a pair of caps on its ends.

"You -" Wang Yonghao scowled. "Your face is less valuable!"

Qian Shanyi laughed. He was far too easy to play with. "You have your luck, you'll be fine," she said, offering the new cap to Wang Yonghao and shaking the tube in her other hand. "And if it lunges for you, I'll burn it with the torch."

The glassblowing torch was a neat little device, built out of a fire-type treasure, that could produce a steady stream of flame when supplied with spirit stones. With the dense spiritual energy of Wang Yonghao's inner world, the latter was entirely unnecessary, and Qian Shanyi had already ripped the converter out of the back a long time ago. As soon as she flipped open the caps, a narrow blade of fire whoosed out of one end of the tube, and she adjusted its width with a little slider, making it shorter, easier to maneuver.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

"You'll be fine, she says," Wang Yonghao muttered angrily, cursing under his breath. "How am I supposed to hold it and the bottle and the other cap? You think I have a third hand?"

"Fine," Qian Shanyi said, rolling her eyes. "I'll hold the new cap and the torch, and you hold the bottle. Just shift the old cap a bit once you unscrew it, don't move it away - I don't want to give this ooze a clear path to jump out."

Wang Yonghao cursed some more, but nodded. They kneeled down on the ground in front of each other, pushing the back of the bottle into the ground to keep it steady.

"Three… two…" Qian Shanyi counted down, once Wang Yonghao had unscrewed the cap. "One… Shift it!"

Wang Yonghao shifted the cap by less than a centimeter, and the ooze inside immediately leapt up, slamming the handle of the sword directly into the cap. Wang Yonghao jerked back in fear, almost losing his grip on the bottle - and opening up a yet larger opening, one the ooze started to pour through on its way to freedom.

"Hold the damn bottle steady!" Qian Shanyi cursed, hurriedly bringing her glassblowing torch to bear on the ooze. As soon as the fire touched its surface, the ooze shrank back, bubbling and popping like an overheated pot. It retreated all the way to the back of the bottle, and Qian Shanyi quickly screwed the new cap on before it dared to escape yet again.

Then she burned a two meter wide circle of grass where they stood, just in case some small fraction of it had already managed to escape to freedom. The old cap had followed suit, the flame instantly cleansing it of any residue, the glass glowing faintly red once she was finished. She left it there to cool.

"I told you you'd be fine," Qian Shanyi said once she was finished, then checked herself just in case a drop had landed on her - but she was clean. Spiritual energy made a cultivator's body resistant to external changes, but this was clearly a powerful ooze.

Wang Yonghao was doing much the same check of his own body and clothes, his lips split in a disgusted grimace. "Next time, you will be holding the yucky demon beast."

"So you agree that we should gather more yucky demon beasts?" Qian Shanyi immediately replied, smirking back at him.

"Not in a million years."

Qian Shanyi chuckled. "We'll discuss it later," she said. "Let me grab some more glassware."

Together, they quickly assembled a small stand, making the ooze bottle hang over a wide tray, valve pointed down. Qian Shanyi put a small clump of dirt right below it and carefully opened the valve, watching the pale green ooze slowly drip out of it, until a single drop fell down.

The glassware they had was thankfully alchemically neutral, and it did not react to the ooze in the slightest - but when it came to other materials, the reaction was almost instant. With a slight hiss, half of the clump of earth had turned to stone, the ooze vanishing in the transformation. Qian Shanyi poked it carefully with a glass stick, pulling the earth away from the stone - but the rock did not react to anything, nor did it seem to contain any unusual spiritual energy.

To all appearances, it was merely a rock, pale white with flakes of blackness.

"Do you know much about rocks?" Qian Shanyi said, finally daring to pick the rock up with her fingers. It felt cool to the touch, the surface rough, shaped the same as the original clump of dirt - though she noticed that it expanded ever so slightly. "It looks like granite to me."

"Not really," Wang Yonghao said, leaning closer.

"Neither do I," Qian Shanyi said, tossing the rock above her hand, before catching it in mid air. "Maybe it's not even granite, who knows. Can you cut it open for me?"

Wang Yonghao shrugged, and with a single wave of his blade and the honk of the solar goose technique, the rock fell into two halves. Its center looked no different from the outside - the same flaky pale white, though the surface of the cut was perfectly smooth.

"Well, if that's really granite, it'll be good for sealing up holes," Qian Shanyi finally concluded, tossing the rock back onto the glass tray. "This ooze might end up being very useful, actually. I wanted to make some flower planters, and waterproofing them was going to be a pain."

Wang Yonghao gave her an incredulous look, and she smirked at him. "See Yonghao? There's a use for everything."

"Except my fingers," he muttered angrily.

Qian Shanyi nodded. "Except your fingers," she agreed. "Those are disposable."

Deciding to be extra careful, Qian Shanyi left the granite rock in a sealed glass flask for a full day - lest it start to crumble away, or turn back into the ooze, even if she didn't see how that could be possible. She had plenty to work on with her bean winnower, in any case.

After replacing the woolen string with her hair, the sieve had worked beautifully - at least when it came to the chaff sticking to the sieve itself. After only a couple minutes of shaking, she ran into the next problem - some of the chaff was just as big as the beans themselves, and so no amount of sieving could ever separate it away.

She needed a different approach.

All the testing she did made her open their drying cabinet time and time again to get a new batch of beans, and every time, she was blasted in the face with a wave of hot air. It gave her an idea - if she already had a source of wind, then why not use it?

It took only a couple hours of working with wood to build a wide L-shaped pipe, one they could attach on top of their drying cabinet. Both ends of it were covered with dense hair meshes, with a slit right next to one end - one that she could push her existing sieve through, filled with beans that needed winnowing, or a flat piece of wood to block the airflow entirely.

Once the pipe was in place, and the mesh with the beans was pushed inside, the air blew right past the beans, picking up the chaff, and carrying it up and away. Twin meshes kept it from blowing back into the chiclotron, or all over the world fragment, and she could even shake the sieve a bit to speed the process up. Though the sieve could only fit so many beans at once, and changing the loads was time-consuming, it was still easily ten, or maybe even fifty times faster than trying to pick the chaff out of the beans by hand.

There was much she thought she could still improve - the throughput of the winnower, the ease with which the sieves could be exchanged, and so on. Wang Yonghao helped her attach the pipe the first time, and in the future, she wanted a ladder. Needing to rely on his air walking technique was incredibly inconvenient.

Still, it worked, and that was all that mattered. The leftover chaff went directly into the paleworm farm, and the insects seemed happy to receive another snack.

By the time they called it a night, twenty five kilograms of beans had been fully dried, shelled, winnowed and stored away, now entirely safe from any pests or rot. Their first harvest, grown entirely within the world fragment, well on its way to being done and dusted.

Once Qian Shanyi woke up, she went back to the ooze bottle, to see if anything had changed. But the rock had stayed a rock, and so it was time to make some rock basins for the lotus planters.

Qian Shanyi and Linghui Mei had gathered a lot of seeds and saplings from their stay in the forest, ones they wanted to transplant into the world fragment. But the trouble was that the plants came from a swamp, and their world fragment was, thankfully, not one. Many of them could only grow in water. Others needed the cold, or the shade, or presence of other plants, or far higher humidity than they could provide. Only a few of them could be simply planted down in the grass and left to grow on their own, like their bean farm.

The plants themselves were useful enough - for example, an extract of Purple Mirrorshade Lotus was a well-known cure for headaches - but aside from a single lucky find of a Bone-Dust Karalark, any medicine they could make would be significantly weaker than the standard pills they could already buy from any good alchemist. There was a benefit in having an independent source, of course, but only a minor one.

No, Qian Shanyi wasn't doing it for the Purple Mirrorshade Lotus. She was doing it for the lotuses of far greater rarity.

Wang Yonghao's luck presented him with many opportunities, but it was already clear to her that how much he got out of them was down to his own actions. It was almost certain that eventually he would come across some plant that could, if consumed, greatly boost his cultivation. In fact, he told Qian Shanyi that this had already happened many times before. If, instead of simply consuming such a plant, they managed to transplant it into his inner world - if they managed to cultivate it, in other words - then they could acquire a source of almost infinite wealth, one that would be entirely independent from the predilections of Wang Yonghao's luck.

Some of the largest sects in the entire empire had been built on their resource monopolies. Qian Shanyi would be damned if she would let such an opportunity slip through her fingers.

But if she was to grab it by the throat - then she needed to have experience with growing and processing all varieties of plants. After all, she had no idea what kind of plant they might run into. But a lotus was a good bet.

Some have called lotuses the kings of all spiritual plants - for so many of their varieties had unique, outstanding properties that other plants only struggled to emulate. There was a reason why one graced the flag of the Thirteen-Leaved Lotus Empire.

And so if Qian Shanyi wanted to take a step on that golden-paved road - then she needed to make some lotus planters.

Despite its attractive name, Sparkling Sulfurium did anything but sparkle. The town seemed small and frankly quite gloomy, and the smell of the nearby sulfur mines did not serve to improve the atmosphere. Qian Shanyi even started to wonder why the Steel Torrent Sect would establish one end of their experimental line here - perhaps this wagon contraption really could explode, and they did not want to put it next to any large cities.

Then again, perhaps they simply made their money by trading in sulfur with the Solar Whirligig, and planned to expand the line later, once they worked out all the kinks. Both explanations were certainly possible.

The line itself was visible from a mile away: twin rails of steel straight as a ruler, striking out into the rocky plateaus. They lead to the edge of this small town, to an assortment of warehouses and supply depots, and a blocky building with a sign hanging above the doors, proclaiming it to be the fourth sandpiercer line. The sign was painted, and the front of the building was quite clean - but Qian Shanyi could not help but think that widespread advertising might have been a little premature.

Wang Yonghao and Linghui Mei stayed outside, content to let Qian Shanyi handle things. Inside, the blocky building turned out to be a little more spacious than it appeared from the outside, with an open platform above the rails and small seats alongside one of the walls. The strange wagon invention had been absent; but there were signs pointing the way, and Qian Shanyi quickly made her way to a small office, tucked away into one corner of the platform.

When she pushed the door open, she came face to face with a cultivator seated behind a solid wooden desk, busy working on some documents. His skin was of an unusually dark, rich brown, and a closely-cropped beard framed his face in just the right way, contrasting admirably with his sky-blue robes, candle symbols running all along his sleeves. Sleeves that hinted at some very muscled physique underneath.

Sixth rank of cooperation, here? Hmm. Very… interesting.

"Honorable cultivator… Zhang?" Qian Shanyi said, glancing down to a small plaque at the front of the desk. She smiled, and gave him a bow, just a little deeper than necessary. "I do apologise for interrupting your work, but is this where I can purchase tickets to the Solar Whirligig?"

"It is," Zhang Xiaogang said, putting down his writing brush. "And who do I have the pleasure of speaking to?"

He spoke with an accent, but very cleanly, and his voice felt almost musical in how it resounded around the small, private, almost intimate office -

Oh get yourself together. You are swooning and you don't even know a thing about the man. He might be a complete droll.

With all the seal business, Qian Shanyi hadn't had sex in almost two months. It was getting to be intolerable, much worse than back in the forest, or after Wang Yonghao left her - at least back then her mind was far too preoccupied with worries for her life and safety.

He is sixth rank, and in the peak refinement stage. That's far more than nothing, Qian Shanyi thought, feeling obligated to argue against herself. He is interesting.

"You may call me Xing Qiaoli, of the Sky Void Island Temple sect," Qian Shanyi said, managing to push her libido back down. Now wasn't the time. "Me and two other disciples would like to take the Steel Torrent Sect up on their travel offer, if that is possible?"

Zhang Xiaogang nodded and set his brush aside, folding his hands politely in front of his chest. "What is your purpose of travel?"

"I am afraid that it is private," Qian Shanyi said, walking a bit further into the room and closing the door behind her.

Zhang Xiaogang nodded, leaning back in his chair. "Fellow cultivator Xing, my question isn't idle," he said. "The tensions in the province are high, and the approval of the ministry of cooperation is required for any expedited travel into the province." He tapped himself against the chest, and Qian Shanyi did her best not to stare. "My approval."

"I wasn't informed I would be speaking to an imperator, fellow cultivator Zhang," she said, glancing around the room, just to give herself something else to look at. There really wasn't much personal to be seen - just writing supplies, cupboards full of documents, and a small charcoal drawing of the mountains decorating one of the walls.

"You aren't," Zhang Xiaogang rebuffed her flatly. "Yet my approval is still required, at least as long as you don't want to cross the desert on foot. We wish to avoid any… unnecessary stress and conflict."

Qian Shanyi nodded, meeting the man's eyes again. "I see. Our goals are archeological. One of the Jade Heavenly Peaks is of great interest to us - I believe one that is already being explored. We seek no conflict, of course."

Zhang Xiaogang nodded, leaning forwards again. "Have any of you previously visited the province? We prefer for all visitors to have a certain level of knowledge, so as to avoid misunderstandings."

"My partner had, once. We have no connections there, at least as far as we know. Nor enemies."

"And I presume that neither of you speaks Maliyad?"

"I do not," Qian Shanyi said, inclining her head a fraction. "My partner and my disciple do some, but barely enough to order a bowl of noodles."

Zhang Xiaogang frowned slightly, as if she said something strange. "You won't find a lot of noodles in Solar Whirligig," he said, tapping a finger against his cheek.

To say that they could order a bowl of noodles was honestly a bit of an exaggeration. Wang Yonghao only learned a few dozen words when he visited, and Linghui Mei had never learned the language at all, but managed to piece something together from the memories of a few travelers that once visited the province, and mostly from the other languages she knew, ones close to their native language.

Admittedly, Linghui Mei seemed to have a talent with the languages - she was already getting better at imperial sign language than Qian Shanyi, even despite Qian Shanyi's many years of practice at memorisation techniques. The memories she took might have been vague, but some skill still seemed to translate.

Linghui Mei also mentioned that it would be no problem at all for her to pick up the entire language once they arrived. She only spoke of it once or twice in passing, and Qian Shanyi had chosen not to pursue that particular idea any further. After months together, she was growing more and more confident that Jiuweihu feeding really did no permanent damage, at least in moderation - but to let Linghui Mei feed on innocent civilians simply to pick up a language still seemed like a step too far.

"Fellow cultivator Xing, ordinarily, I would find your request to be somewhat hasty," Zhang Xiaogang said, pulling her out of her thoughts. "We already have some others awaiting approval for their travel, and until I can be certain that they could avoid the… cultural tensions, dispel the misconceptions they tend to have when they arrive, sending them to the province would be irresponsible. Arriving as you are, you would be jumping the queue."

Reading between the lines, the ministry of cooperation didn't want some ignorant fools coming into the recently annexed province and causing trouble for no reason, lest it grow into discontent and make them splinter off again. Perhaps they could not legally stop anyone from traveling on foot - but when it came to other forms of travel, they could certainly put up some roadblocks.

"Of course, fellow cultivator Zhang," Qian Shanyi said, raising an eyebrow with a light smile. "I've read Pillar, Lure, Perfection. I understand the hesitation entirely."

He said ordinarily. She didn't want to push him, but it seemed as if there was still a way forward here. The mention of the book seemed to please him, at least.

"You've mentioned that one of your disciples had already been in the province," Zhang Xiaogang continued. "The next sandpiercer is only expected to arrive in two days, so how about you join me and my sister for dinner today? We could discuss it further. Make sure that you would find your expedition worthwhile before you spend money on tickets you may not even want. And if it is as you say, and I can be certain at least one of you understands the circumstances - then perhaps an exception could be made."

Oh.

"It would be my pleasure, fellow cultivator Zhang," Qian Shanyi said, trying not to think of what else she could do with the man in two days. "I hope that we can fulfill your expectations."

Now all she needed was to make sure Wang Yonghao could pose as a humble, innocent traveler, as peaceful as a mouse - and they could have their tickets. Wang Yonghao, who seemed to offend half the people he met through his mere presence.

It was still morning. She had a whole day to make him shape up. And after all - it was only a single dinner.

How bad could it possibly get?