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

Qian Shanyi poked her head out of the entrance portal to Wang Yonghao’s Inner World, but only saw pitch darkness. Cool humid air felt pleasant on her face, worsened by a slight acrid and musty scent. She concentrated on her spiritual energy sense: the air was filled with earth-type spiritual energy, and she could roughly make out some kind of building around herself. Her position was extremely precarious, hanging as she was by her hands from the spear stuck across the portal, doing her best to minimize her own movements to avoid dislodging it and plummeting back into the world fragment beneath her.

Wang Yonghao said that he didn’t see any demon beasts in this secret realm, but it paid to be careful. She slowly circulated the Crushing Glance of the Neverworld Eyes through her body, making her hair glow golden. Dim light spread around her, and she could see that the portal opened in the middle of a dilapidated gazebo. She waited for a while, but everything was quiet. Slowly, she moved over to one side of the portal, hooked a leg over the edge, and climbed out. She picked up her rope spear, and looked around.

The gazebo stood on top of a small hill. Its wooden columns were damp and molding, supporting a partially collapsed roof, and she could see an oily, green sheen covering everything from the floor to the ceiling. She felt its disgusting, slimy texture beneath the soles of her naked feet, like a slathering of rotting fish fat. What she wouldn’t give for a pair of sandals, but hers were no doubt left behind in the Northern Sky Salmon.

The columns of the gazebo were built on top of stone foundation blocks, and she quickly untied the rope from her spear and tied it around one of them. She yanked on it several times to make sure it was secure, and threw the now useless spear back into the world fragment.

Her exit secured, she walked out of the gazebo and looked over the rest of the hill.

The light from her hair didn’t spread very far. There was a paved path leading down the side of the hill, surrounded by flower beds filled with death. As she followed it, she quickly reached the banks of thick, viscous green fog, surrounding the hill like a wide sea of poison. The path headed further into it.

Wang Yonghao mentioned this fog before. He thought the exit to the secret realm might be inside, but said he didn’t feel like going into it, and Qian Shanyi found herself agreeing. Even if she discounted his luck, it looked positively malignant.

In theory, the fly whisk she’d carried up with her could scatter the fog. But just like slapping the surface of water, it could also send some of the fog back at her - she wasn’t about to try unless she had no other option.

She had walked around the edge of the fog, circling the top of the hill, before her feet started to itch. At first she ignored it, but as time went on, it got worse and worse. She looked at her feet: the skin on them was slowly getting redder.

Perhaps this green slime was more than simply disgusting.

She rushed over to the world fragment’s portal, and quickly slid down the rope. As she did so, she circulated Crushing Glance of the Neverworld Eyes, and applied a bright red powder to her feet. Once down, she quickly rubbed the poisonous slime onto the grass; the powder would mark where it was, and she would clean up the contamination later.

Qian Shanyi made sure to wash her itching feet off, then started thinking. At this point, boots were not a question of comfort, but medical necessity.

She threw a glance at where Wang Yonghao was drooling on the grass, high on the demon beast omelett. The bastard probably didn’t even notice, if he was walking on air all the time.

She walked over to him and checked his boots. They were cotton: the slime would seep right through them. She’d need to find something else.

Sighing, she took a spiritwood log out of her chiclotron, grabbed an axe, and split it in half. With a couple more swings, she had a pair of reasonably flat planks, about as big as her feet. She cut notches into the sides of the planks, and channels into the bottom of the soles, and used a piece of rope from the wine crates to turn them into a pair of primitive sandals. They wouldn’t be comfortable, but at least her feet would be safe.

Ten minutes later, she realized she was stuck.

The hill was surrounded by fog on all sides. This meant that the only way out of it was through the fog, no matter how dangerous it would be.

The fog itself was clearly a byproduct of the earth-type spiritual energy in the air, and Qian Shanyi had an inkling as to where it came from: a faulty spirit vein.

From what Wang Yonghao told her, this place housed the ruins of some ancient sect. When a sect was considering where to establish itself, two questions were of paramount importance: one of secrecy and of the availability of spiritual energy. World fragments would generally solve both of these issues, but their rarity meant that most sects had to satisfy themselves with lesser options. One of the best among them was to build a secret realm on top of a spirit vein.

Spirit veins or dragon lines were mysterious pathways which would direct the flow of spiritual energy through the world, radically increasing its concentration in the immediate vicinity. Their locations and strengths were hard to predict, but should one be found, it would provide a perfect foundation for a secret realm.

The term “secret realm” was a more broad term than the “world fragment”, as it could also refer to any deliberately constructed cultivation environment that happened to be secret. Even a simple cave could be called a “secret realm” if it happened to be filled with high quality spiritual energy. She suspected that these ruins were built in one such cave.

Most spiritual veins were aligned with one of the major types of spiritual energy, though pure spiritual veins also existed. In rare cases, spiritual veins would suddenly become aligned with a minor type of spiritual energy, often to disastrous consequences.

There were hundreds of different “minor types” of spiritual energy, with each being a subtype of a particular major type. Every minor type would behave in largely the same way as its parent major type when it came to the cycles of feng shui or being re-polarised by heavenly materials and earthly treasures, but their other properties could differ greatly. For example, earth-type spiritual energy was safe to handle, but its poison subtype was lethal to unprepared cultivators.

If the spiritual vein of this sect suddenly changed from earth-type to the poison subtype, it might have been flooded with poison gas before the inhabitants could react, killing everyone present in the sect at the time.

Unfortunately, this realization didn’t help her solve her immediate problems in any way.

With her way blocked by the fog, the only thing left to her was to test the fly whisk. By tinkering with it, she quickly figured out how to use it: a burst of air would emanate from the front of the whisk when she channeled her spiritual energy into it.

To test how the fog would respond to her blasts she blasted it with the whisk, and immediately ran back to the top of the hill. Her suspicions were confirmed: the blast of pressure would displace the air in front of the whisk, forcing the air to the sides of the whisk to be drawn in to replace it. This would push the fog in front of her backwards, but the fog from the sides would immediately flood in and force her to retreat. She couldn’t push her way through the fog in this crude way.

She ground her teeth. There had to be a way out of here. She would not be forced to rely on Wang Yonghao to make her exit.

Without a good plan, she settled for trying to gather more information.

Her singular source of light was the glow produced by the Crushing Glance of the Neverworld Eyes, but it was dim, and so she could not see very far into the fog. She could increase the brightness of her hair by pushing more spiritual energy into the technique, but it was not designed to be overloaded in this way, and the losses involved in this process would quickly grow to overwhelm her reserves.

Since she couldn’t make one bright light source, she settled for making many dim ones. The dilapidated flower beds on the hill were surrounded by rows of pebbles for drainage, and so Qian Shanyi started to put a glowing sheen on these pebbles and then chuck them into the fog. By tracing the path of the glowing stones and seeing where they landed, she could slowly trace out the boundaries of her surroundings.

To help orient herself, she arbitrarily picked one direction and called it north. She quickly figured out that to the east of her, some twenty meters away, there was a cavern wall, while to the north there was a stream or a pool or water, and what she could only assume to be a bridge. She was slowly covering the area to the west of her, when instead of the clack of stone on stone, or the almost silent thud of stone sinking into the poison sludge, she heard an echoing dull thud, and saw a flash of brown before the stone ricocheted away.

That meant only one thing: Wood.

She smirked. Wood meant building, and building meant something else above the deadly fog, if she could only figure out how to get over there.

With another fifty throws, she covered the building in enough pebbles to make out what was in front of her. It was a small, two-storey construction, set up a good thirty meters away from her against the wall of the cavern. There was a pair of small windows on its side, though she couldn’t make out what was beyond them. Still, it was a start.

She went back down into the world fragment, and cut off two more ropes from her shrinking spool of Silvered Devil Moth Silk. She tied one of them to her trusty spear, with its other end tied to a support block of the gazebo, and with a practiced throw, pitched it through the window of the wooden structure. As she pulled it back carefully it lodged itself against the open window, and after pulling the rope taught, she re-tied it tightly around the stone support block. Now, she had a rope line directly to this wooden structure.

Of course, she wasn’t going to immediately climb over. First, she had to make sure that the rope would actually hold her weight. She yanked on it a couple times, and then slowly sat on top of the rope, gradually putting more of her weight onto it.

With a crack, the wall of the wooden structure gave out, and the spear flew out of the window. Qian Shanyi sighed, and started reeling it back in.

Another pitch later, and she had drawn a rope line to a second window. She tested the rope, and this time, it seemed to hold.

She considered the situation. Just because the structure held for now didn’t mean that it wouldn’t give out when she was halfway across the rope. She could wait for Wang Yonghao to wake up: with his help, exploring this secret realm would be much safer.

But if she did that, then she would be sacrificing her negotiation position in the future. The more information she could gather without his help, the easier it would be to bluff, and the easier to convince him that trading with her was worthwhile. He seemed like a reasonable, if impulsive person, but she could not be one hundred percent sure of that - she would be sacrificing her long-term security in favor of a short-term feeling of safety.

And on top of that, she needed to do this herself. She had been a prisoner of that world fragment for a full week, not even knowing if it would be her grave. She could not, would not go back there to wait for longer if she still could cut a way out towards the clear skies with her own two hands.

Before climbing onto the rope to explore the sect, she decided to prepare a trap. Many types of demon beasts made their dens in spots with high concentrations of spiritual energy, and if she disturbed one, she would end up in danger. Wang Yonghao had gone through the sect before, but with his luck, they might have just happened to be asleep. If she had to retreat, she wanted to have extra options.

She quickly dug a hole wide enough to make a large animal fall in, and connected it to a small hole with a short trench. She put fire treasures into the larger hole, and turned it into a pit trap by covering it with a square of Silvered Devil Moth Silk borrowed from the chiclotron. The hole was far too wide for the silk to rest naturally, and she chopped off some wood from the gazebo to support it.

In the small hole, she put wood- and metal-type treasures, and then blocked off the connecting trench with a curtain of Silvered Devil Moth Silk. Earth-type spiritual energy from the air surged into the pile of metal treasures, and from there flowed into the wood ones, supercharging them. All she would need to do is yank the curtain away, and then the larger hole would immediately turn into a firestorm from the wood-type spiritual energy superheating the fire-type treasures inside.

That this would make the sect marginally safer by removing the poison spiritual energy from the air was a nice bonus.

She tied one end of her second rope to a support block of the gazebo, the other end to her belt, and started to carefully climb the taut rope line. The clouds of deadly poison glistened mere meters below her, and she did her best to put them out of her mind.

She was mere meters away from her target when she heard the cracks.

She leaped forwards, but this jerk of the rope was the final straw for the aging structure, and the wood finally gave out. She plummeted downwards: despite her forward momentum, she was going to fall far short of the window, and directly into the poison fog below.

Her right hand grabbed onto the rope tied to the spear, and pulled it back, sending the shaft into her hand. With a desperate twist of her body, she had just barely managed to ram the spear through the wall of the wooden building, and land her feet on top of the spear.

She swallowed. She was standing mere centimeters away from the fog. That was close.

With great care, she climbed up to the window, and pulled her spear behind herself. Once she crossed the windowsill, she breathed a sigh of relief.

The room she found herself in was long, carved deep into the cavern wall. The rot had touched everything inside, and she tread carefully on the wooden floor, wary of it giving out. A dozen skeletons were lined against the walls, lying down on top of squares of rot and slime that might have been bed mats back in the day: the poison must have hit them in their sleep. Cupboards next to the beds have been overturned, personal possessions spilling out.

In the center of the room, there was a series of thick columns supporting the ceiling, and she quickly tied the rope from her waist to one of them. Hopefully it would hold out better than the window.

There were two exits out of the room: staircase down into the poison fog below, and a door at the other end of the room leading into a rock tunnel. Qian Shanyi headed straight for it: there was nothing of value for her here.

Fortunately for her, the poison fog and the slime seemed to be largely confined to the large cavern, so the rest of the sect proved much safer to explore. Everything had been covered in a thick layer of dust, and once she got into the back areas of the sect, she could see the footprints of Wang Yonghao, before he started walking on air. She traced his path backwards, and found a room with a broken teleportation formation - at least that part of his story seemed to check out. The room itself was hidden behind a bookshelf, in a large room with a single wide empty bed: perhaps that of a sect elder.

The rooms she passed were covered in darkness and disarray. Back when the sect had been alive, they must have been well-lit, but the lighting formations on the walls had long ago run out of the necessary spirit stones.

The sect was quite hard to navigate, with the rooms and corridors twisting in on themselves and connecting in strange ways. Many times she found herself back in the wide cavern filled with poison fog, coming at it from strange directions. One passage even came out of its ceiling. She supposed that some of these passages were there to allow the spiritual energy or fresh air to freely circulate throughout the sect, while the purpose of others was hard to guess.

Not wanting to get lost, she marked her way by circulating the Crushing Glance of the Neverworld Eyes and leaving glowing arrows on the walls, pointing back to where she came from.

As she explored, she found more corpses. There seemed to be two types: ones closer to the large cavern, covered in the poisonous green sheen, either clearly caught in their sleep or simply collapsed in random passages, while the others were relatively clean aside from the dust. She found a pair of them in what used to be a storage room, their hands clutching weapons stabbed through each other’s chests. Another one was lying at the end of a long, crudely chiseled tunnel, clutching a pickaxe. In one room, she found a small group, each holding a knife and with a long gash across their necks.

It seemed that the initial flood of poison did not cover the entire sect, but the survivors did not fare that well. If only they knew about the hidden teleportation formation, they might have been able to get out.

Curiously enough, she didn’t find any treasures in the sect. She saw places where formations were torn out of walls, empty weapon storages, and even a structure she assumed was a more sophisticated version of her chiclotron, but it was completely empty of any materials. Someone must have looted this place long before Wang Yonghao came here.

The sect had its own library, split into different sections, clearly marked by symbols carved into the stone walls. The entire section on cultivation - kept in its own room, and clearly protected by powerful defensive formations back in the day - was picked completely clean, with not even a single scrap of paper left. The rest of the library did not fare much better - most of the books were completely destroyed by the dampness and rot, though she did find a set of poetry recorded on small clay tablets that had survived the ravages of time.

Way in the back, she found a couple book shelves marked as “Womanly studies”. She glanced through them, and almost missed the jade glint under the piles of rotten paper. Curiously, she came closer, and reached into the pile of wet and slimy paper.

She pulled out a jade slate about the size of her palm. It seemed to be hidden inside of a painted wooden cover, though it had long since rotted away to such a degree that no text could be distinguished. She broke off the wood, and looked at the jade slate itself. Her hand trembled when she saw two symbols on the very top edge of the slate: 陰 and 金 , yin and metal.

Surely not. I could not be so lucky.

She sat down in a corner of the library, leaning against the wall, and carefully channeled her spiritual energy into the slate. Its surface darkened, as characters slowly started to come through. The title started to fade in: there seemed to be three lines in total. The top line appeared first.

Notes on Spiritual Energy Cultivation by Tang Qunying.

Her heart thrummed in her chest. Was it really? Her eyes skipped to the next line in excitement.

Commentary on the Three Feminine Obediences and Four Feminine Virtues.

Her heart sank.

With personal notes on cooking, sewing, household management and conduct.

She closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the wall. It was useless. Maybe she should just go and walk straight into the poison fog right now.

“The one cultivation law I find…”, she groaned. “And it might as well be telling me to call my fucking husband.”