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

Making rope ended up being more complicated than Qian Shanyi expected.

Three Obediences Four Virtues was of no help here: it simply said that the fibers could make decent ropes, and left it at that. Instead, she had to closely study the structure of the ropes from one of the wine crates with the secret divine art of destructive analysis.

The rope was composed out of yarns - bundles of fibers - that were bound together into strands, and those finally composed the rope. The fibers themselves overlapped within the yarns, held together by friction, and allowed the rope to be much longer than any individual fiber. Every layer of the structure was twisted, with the fibers and strands twisted leftward while yarns and the overall rope were twisted rightwards, probably to keep the rope from untangling.

Figuring that she might as well kill two demon beasts with a single flying sword, she opened up Three Obediences Four Virtues to the sewing chapter, found the description of thread control techniques, and started practicing her first proper external spiritual energy manipulation technique.

Spiritual energy manipulation techniques could be split into two categories: internal, and external. Internal techniques manipulated spiritual energy within the body of a cultivator, moving it around their meridians, strengthening their spiritual shield, or increasing the strength and durability of their limbs. Most of these techniques were unstructured, relying on the body itself to help stabilize the spiritual energy and guide it where it needed to go, and were no more deserving of being called a “technique” than taking a single step of being called a “martial art”. The way she had been holding her broken leg together was an example of such an unstructured technique, and every cultivator learned them simply as a matter of course.

If spiritual energy was to be used outside of the body, this support had to come from somewhere else. Talismans and artifacts could be used for this purpose, but their expense and rigid design greatly limited their use - to achieve true flexibility, a cultivator had to learn to construct the support structure on the fly out of the spiritual energy itself, casting it into shape much like a smith melted down metal to make some pots.

The simplest example of this process were the techniques to project swordlight, like that of the Honk of the Solar Goose. First, spiritual energy would be collected on the surface of the sword, and then, with the slash, this razor-sharp “envelope” of spiritual energy would fly towards an enemy.

Thread control technique Qian Shanyi was practicing was quite a bit more complex than a basic swordlight technique. For one, it required her to shape two separate spiritual energy envelopes in parallel: one around her target thread, and one around the thread she would use to control its movements. For another, threads weren’t solid objects like a sword: they were elastic and porous, making it much harder to collect spiritual energy on their surface. It certainly didn’t help that she had relatively little experience manipulating spiritual energy outside of her body.

After trying and failing to get the technique to work for a full hour, she gave up. She would spend more time practicing in the future, but for now, she needed another solution.

She headed over to their large table. It was time to build a lathe.

The lathe didn’t so much get built as it put itself together - all she had to do was pick the most natural solution to every individual problem.

The basic principle behind a lathe was to spin a piece of wood around an axis while cutting into it with a knife, shaping it into smooth and round parts. This presented two concrete engineering challenges: affixing a piece of wood to an axis, and making it spin.

To solve the first problem, she took a spear from the treasury, then drilled holes through a series of planks a hair narrower than the width of the spear shaft. After pushing the weapon through the holes, she hammered the planks tightly to the surface of the table, fixing the spear in place. Then, she built the same structure on the other side of the table, aligning the spearheads to face each other so they would form an axis. Any piece of wood jammed in between the spearheads would be secured, free to rotate as much as need be.

At first, her mind was filled with overcomplicated designs for how to make the wood spin, but in the end she cut it down to the bare basics. She took a long oak branch, planted it into the ground on the other side of the table, and tied one of her silk ropes to its end. In front of the lathe, she dropped a plank on the ground that would serve as a pedal, tied the other end of the rope to it, and wrapped the rope around the wood stuck between the spearheads. By pushing down on the pedal, the rope would be pulled down, making the wood spin. The branch on the other end kept the rope taut, flexed, and brought it back up when she released her foot. All she had to do now was get into a rhythm and start cutting.

She pressed her sword against the edge of the table, carefully guiding it into the wood on the lathe. It was time to cut some axles.

She curiously approached the hole where Wang Yonghao was digging down into the dirt. It was time for lunch, and she would have expected him to come out already, but he was still working, earth quietly flying out of the hole. When she said it would take a week for the stones, that was a pure bluff: after only a couple hours, he had already dug a hole as deep as his height, and at that rate she figured he’d be done in only a couple days.

“Are you hungry?” she asked him, squatting near the edge of the hole, “I need to know if I should cook a portion for you.”

“Yeah, and then you’d poison it,” he said, not raising his head. She blinked.

“Poison it?” she repeated slowly, “I have no reason to harm you.”

“Maybe you’d do it as a joke,” he said.

“That isn’t a joke,” she frowned, ”that would be a disgrace to my skill as a chef.”

He didn’t respond and kept digging.

“You seem…frustrated?” she asked uncertainly.

He finally put the shovel down and looked at her.

“You tricked me!” he shouted, throwing his hands up in the air, “You pretended like you didn’t know how to play shatranj, and then you made me lose this stupid bet!”

“You knew what you were getting into.”

“No I didn’t! I thought you didn’t know how to play!”

“You thought I didn’t know how to play, yet you accepted the gamble?“ she asked, blinking twice, “Doesn’t that mean you are mad because you were trying to trick me? You can’t claim your soul is as pure as jade if you reach into another’s pocket with your free hand.”

It was a common principle: one of the best types of marks were the people who thought they were conning you.

Confronted with his own irrationality, he scowled at her.

“How was I supposed to know why you wanted to gamble?” he asked, “You old monsters have all sorts of deviances!”

“You could have tried to convince me not to do it, or at least to reduce the stakes,” she said, “you didn’t do that, did you? When you thought it was in your favor, an unfair gamble was fine; it’s only when you lose that it becomes an issue.”

He ignored her and went back to digging. She sighed: it seems she had pushed him a bit too far. Ideally, she wanted to keep him in a constant state of bewilderment, annoyance and confusion: that way, he wouldn’t notice any inconsistencies between the image of an old monster she was projecting and what she actually could do. This ruse could not be sustained long-term, but for now, even though she wasn’t acutely worried for her safety, the fact remained that she was quite vulnerable while she was changing her cultivation law, recovering from her broken bones and being stuck away from civilization. Coming clean about her real power would put her in a vulnerable position she would rather avoid.

If he started to truly stew in his frustration, there was no telling how he would react. She doubted he would attack her, but it was entirely possible he would try to run away, leaving her stranded in the wilderness - from his perspective, she would be perfectly capable of fending for herself. No matter how entertaining it was, or how irrational his frustrations were, it was time to pull back a bit and mend relations.

“I’ve never explained to you why we need those stones, did I?” she sighed.

“Does it matter?”

“I think it does,” she said, “I assume you’d be happier about this if you knew I wanted to make a bath.”

“We already had a bath yesterday.”

“Do you always travel near a river?” she raised her eyebrow, “I want a permanent bath, much like in a bathhouse. So that one could take it whenever they want and wherever they are. Did you not mention you never know if you would have to sleep on the street? I figured you would appreciate this.”

That finally got him to raise his head and look at her. She smiled pleasantly.

“You said it was for the trenches,” he said, narrowing his eyes suspiciously.

“Those are related,” she said, getting up, “come on, I’ll show you.”

She led him over to the closest fire trench.

“Look here,” she said, ”The high temperature desiccates the ground, making the trenches collapse. Right now, I put the fire and water nodes together to keep their temperatures close to normality, but this isn’t a good solution - the trench walls still turn to sand, only slower. They are already nearing the point where they’d need maintenance, which is just in time, because we’ll be rebuilding them from scratch. Once we line them with stones, the problem of desiccation would be in the past.”

“And the baths?” he asked.

“I am getting to that,” she responded, “with the trenches secure, we could move the fire and water nodes away from one another, and then we will have a lot of heat to work with. Be it dried meat or a warm bath, anything would be possible. We’ll use the stones to line the bath as well - you don’t want to swim in a mud hole in the ground, do you? I already have a design in mind.”

She turned back towards him. He was still scowling.

“You could have told me all this right from the start!” he accused her.

“And miss seeing your anguish?” she blinked, “Never.”

The scowl grew wider, and she couldn’t hold her laughter back.

“You asshole!” he ceded through his teeth.

“Oh, permit this old cultivator her eccentricities,” she waved him off.

“I thought you were different from all the other old monsters because you weren’t trying to make me cultivate, but you are like all the rest!”, he continued.

“Did the others trick you at shatranj too?”

“Shatanj is not the point!” He stabbed his pointer finger at her, “You just want to bully me for your own amusement!”

“And?” She asked, smugly folding her hands on her chest.

His face grew as red as a sunset. Perhaps she shouldn’t have done that, but she couldn’t have simply let an opening like that lie.

“Alright, alright, before you try to bite my throat out, I promise to cut down on the bullying,” she chuckled, raising her hands in an apologetic gesture, “I got my fill with the shatranj game in any case. How about this: from this point on, I would not trick you for longer than an hour whenever you are personally affected?”

“Are you going to apologize?”

What good would that do?

“Sure, I apologize for my horrendous behavior,” she said. The color slowly started to recede from his face, and she headed towards their cooking station, “I assume you must want to eat? I did promise I would cook for two months.”

He grumbled, but followed along. Now she would need to find something else to amuse herself with…

After lunch, she got him to play Shatranj again. At first he resisted, slandering her good name by saying she would “cheat” again - as if she would ever be caught cheating by him - but when she said they could play without any bets, he cautiously agreed on a couple matches.

Without the psychological pressure, the outcome of these games was never in doubt: even though she was a fast learner, Wang Yonghao’s experience eclipsed hers by miles. When he won the first time, he rubbed it in her face, and she accepted it readily: the fool didn’t know he was simply playing into her hands by improving his own mood. But after the second loss in a row, he started to frown, and when he put her king in checkmate for the third time, he sighed and looked straight at her.

“Are you losing on purpose?” he said.

“I am playing to the best of my abilities,” she replied honestly.

“Yeah, right. You play like a novice, but I know you can do better than this.”

“Perhaps I am just a novice?” she asked innocently.

“You are lying again!” He folded his arms on his chest. “No way you are a novice. You won against me three times in a row.”

“If you don’t think I am a novice, then why would I play worse deliberately?”

“I don’t know.” He narrowed his eyes at her. “to lure me into another bet?”

“Would I do that to you?”

“Yes. Definitely,” the brat nodded his head.

“Oh fine,” she scoffed, “I am not luring you into another bet. Happy now?”

“You could just be lying again.”

“When did I ever lie to you?” She raised her eyebrows, “I’ve been nothing but a picture of perfect sincerity.”

“Are you joking?” he boggled at her, “You lied just now! You said you are a novice!”

“I don’t believe I ever said that, no.”

“Yes you did!”

“I asked you wherever you thought I was a novice. I didn’t say I was one.”

“Oh that’s the exact same thing,” he scoffed.

“How is it the same thing? One is a statement of fact, and the other one is an open question.”

“A question that’s a lie!”

“A question is hardly a lie, it is just a question,” she said,

“Yes it is!”

“How could it be a lie? I am not making a statement, I am asking you what you think.”

“That…doesn’t matter?” He said, “It’s still a deception. If you ate the last pastry from the kitchens, and then shrugged when I asked you if you knew who ate the last pastry, that would also be a lie, even though you didn’t even say anything. What matters is wherever you are trying to get the other person to believe a false thing.”

She frowned. That his thinking was so clean on this subject was troubling, as it would make it much harder to run rhetorical circles around him. Perhaps it was to be expected, if he had to regularly deal with old cultivators.

“Wait,” he frowned, “you did this during the game too. Do you say you don’t lie because you didn’t say anything that was strictly speaking false?”

“Well yes, quite obviously.” She tucked an errant strand of hair behind her ear. “What else could I mean?”

“That’s so wrong,” he said, “so you just lie and pretend that you didn’t?”

“I very rarely lie,” she said, “and I don’t think I have ever lied to you.”

“Yes you did! You’ve been deceptive every time you opened your mouth!”

“Semantics,” she rolled her eyes, “Anything can be deceptive to someone. Perhaps if I say that I have stabbed a bear to death, you would assume I have a stinger like a bee, for you have never seen a steel weapon in your life. Would you claim I was lying then?”

“That’s absurd,” he said, “Obviously everyone assumes some common knowledge all the time. You don’t have trouble recognising deception, you are just playing with words.”

“Maybe so.”

“Then why do you want to lie?”

“I don’t, unless I need to.”

“Oh fine,” he scowled, “why do you want to be deceptive?”

“Because it amuses me?”

“But if it’s just about you,” he said, “and I end up believing false things anyways, why not outright lie? It’s not like I would be able to tell.”

That brought her up short, and she took a while to answer.

“It’s something of a game, I suppose,” she said, “if the other person pays attention and is clever enough, they could figure out what I truly said, and respond in kind. Otherwise, they will be tricked.”

“Games need two players,” he said, “a game with one person is not a game at all, it is bullying.”

She raised an eyebrow at him, and couldn’t help but laugh. He narrowed his eyes at her.

“Are you saying I am bullying you by winning and losing at shatranj?” she asked, “At least when you complained of me tricking you it made sense. Stop fooling around and set up the new game, junior.”

After shatranj ran to a natural end, she went back to engineering.

She finished cutting an axle for her rope-making machine, and then made a wide disk - a wheel - to fit on top of it. Making the axle hole wide enough for it to spin freely but not so wide as to wobble took careful cutting in several steps, but her lathe served its job admirably.

She attached the axle to a small wood table, then quickly made a spool and attached it to the wheel on top of a second axle. Then, she took a bundle of fibers, fixed it to the spool by jamming it into a cut on the side, and pulled on the soon-to-be yarn to keep it taut.

The biggest problem she had when spinning the rope by hand was that it took far too much time. With the wheel, she could quickly spin it with a single foot and easily control the twist of the fibers by counting the number of wheel turns. Once a yarn was properly twisted together, she took out a peg fixing the spool in place, and wound a bit of yarn onto it. In her hands, she held the other end of the yarn, carefully adding more fibers into it to keep increasing its length. It took her some experimentation to settle on a number of twists that would keep the yarn from kinking, but once she did, it was all about keeping the number of wheel spins per meter of thread consistent.

Once she had some thirty meters of yarn wound onto the spool, she took the spool off, cut the yarn into three parts, and started winding it into a strand using the same process. The strand got cut into three parts as well, and in the end, she ended up with three meters of solid rope, about as thick as her finger. She went over to Wang Yonghao, who was strengthening the walls of his hole with wooden planks.

“Come on up,” she said, “I need you to fly up and hold this rope.”

She gave him one end of the rope, held the other, and did her best to tear it by yanking on it with her entire weight. The rope held fast, and she considered the test a success.

A much better test would have been to load the rope up until it broke, but she didn’t want to waste the time to build a testing rig. In the end, as long as these ropes could hold a person, it was enough.

The rest of her day was spent spinning, spinning and spinning hundreds of meters of rope. After a while, the movement of the wheel and the weaving of fibers into the yarn became so automatic that she started practicing thread control techniques at the same time just to keep her brain occupied.

She worked late, many hours after the clock told her it was bedtime, silently cursing Yonghao for distracting her with shatranj and herself for being baited, and for leaving him to dig when he could have been making more rope. She was far too arrogant, thinking she could finish the work alone and go to sleep on time, and by the time she realized her time estimates were off it was already too late to build a second spinning wheel to get him to help, as it wouldn’t save that much time.

Her eyes were drooping by the end, but she had pushed through and managed to braid two separate long ropes and weave them into a pair of hammocks. She and Wang Yonghao hung them up in between a pair of tall wooden tripods, and she finally climbed into what she could call an actual bed.

She sighed in content, feeling her tense back properly relax in the soft embrace of a hammock.

“Well, fellow cultivator Wang, what do you prefer?” she said, feeling her eyelids slowly close beneath the robe covering her eyes, “Deception that grants you a bed, or sleeping on cold hard ground?”

“Lying didn’t make this bed.”

“Is that so?” she sighed, “I suppose we’ll never know.”

For the first time in weeks, she drifted off into calm, quiet sleep, unbroken by the aches in her back.