I dodged the first and second slashes from Black-blade Feng's sword by the barest of margins. Then his three men were upon me and Feng restrained his hand to prevent injuring his own men. One of them, a man with a size and build similar to Lee Dan's but with only a stringy mustache and a scar running down his left cheek, grabbed me by the arm and jostled me to the side. Another thug reached for my other arm… they were moving in to restrain me so Feng could make a public spectacle of whatever it is he was about to do. Presumably, something with his eponymous black sword.

"Get off me!" I shouted. I jerked to the side and threw the first man off, tossing a grown-ass man who probably weighed twice what I did in his getup without much thought. He grunted and crashed into the fourth thug. Then I planted my feet and took a swing at Feng - I planned on doing to him what I'd done to Dan, and maybe then the who's who of Emerald Vale's assholes would finally leave me be.

Feng's eyes went wide, and he moved to block, but he was just a bit too late. My fist connected and… Feng grunted in pain. He turned back to me, eyes ablaze with fury, and spat blood from the little cut on his lip. The amount of damage I'd just caused was a lot closer to what I'd expect from a regular punch than the jaw-shattering hammer I'd thrown earlier.

With a snarl, he kicked out at my chest. I managed to bring my hands up just in time to intercept his boot. Even so, the force sent me shooting back, crashing through the dumpling stall's counter and into the recently-repaired cast-iron pot. It cracked under the force of my impact with the sound of a ringing gong, near-boiling water cascading down my shoulders and jagged metal digging into my back.

I rolled to my feet, expecting to have horrible burns and broken bones, but found my skin was merely flushed, like I'd just gotten out of a steam room, and only pride and the back of my dress were broken. As I wavered to my feet and assessed the damage I'd just caused, Feng took a step forward, smirking. He beckoned me toward him.

"Shall we trade more pointers, girl?" he said with a lightning-fast flick of his sword.

"I… I…" I didn't want to fight this man. I couldn't. He kicked like a mule and I wasn’t sure how many more lucky dodges I had in me. One solid swing from the sword and he'd quite possibly take my head off. "Uh-uh. Nope."

I'm not proud to admit it, but I took off, and Black-blade was so dumbfounded that I had a substantial head-start before anybody thought to chase after me. Bounding down the marketplace as fast as my legs could carry me - which was pretty fast - I got the hell out of dodge. I pushed through the crowd of onlookers and barely leapt in time to vault over the produce cart just past them. The goon pursuing me crashed right into the thing amid a flurry of splintering wood, cursing, and screaming. I heard the whinny of a horse somewhere behind me, so I took a right into a narrow alleyway where I didn't think they could follow.

"I think I see her!" somebody shouted in the distance. I sure hoped they didn't.

I turned left and right, seemingly at random, heart thrumming in my chest like a hummingbird as I sprinted down slick back-alleys and over fences. I leapt over the crest of a small hill and found myself sprinting along clay-tiled roofs and a long brick wall before setting down at street-level near the water clock. I looked behind me and heard only distant shouting.

"Yes, a tall girl in a brown dress!" one of them shouted from a street over.

I grabbed a yellow wool shawl from a nearby clothesline, wrapped it around my upper body, and continued onward. I'd find a way to pay the resident back later if I remembered the place. I peeked out into a thoroughfare and, seeing that the coast was clear, I took off southward at a dead sprint. I didn't stop until I was through Emerald Vale's south gate and well on my way to the peaceful orchards beyond the town. My hands trembled in anxiety, my ears picking out the random sounds of the countryside and interpreting them as Black-blade and his men pursuing me.

I jogged off road and hopped over an old stone wall, sitting behind it and forcing myself to meditate until I got my breathing under control. I was too distracted to do anything besides reining my fear in and remembering to breathe. At some point, a trio of horses thundered by, but I have no idea whether they were Black-blade's men.

Long minutes passed, and nobody but a few curious bugs discovered me. I let out a long breath of relief. So… that just happened.

I seemed to be safe, but I still waited for hours, waited until the sun sank behind the distant hills and the moon was half-way to its apex before I dared peek out from my spot to check for pursuers - or anybody, really - along the late evening road. The road was empty and I decided to put some distance between myself and Emerald Vale because, if I wasn't mistaken, I'd just made the shit list of one of the town's major crime bosses.

Hopefully, the next town I encountered would be a bit more reasonable…

And maybe, if I figured out this cultivation stuff, I could get strong enough to let Black-blade Feng and his goons know what I thought off them. Namely, that they sucked donkey balls and their faces really needed rearranging. Stretch goals.

--------

There was something intrinsically reassuring about strolling through the countryside by the moonlight. I'd always associated the country with the untamed wilderness but, now that I knew better, the two weren't remotely the same. Maybe they were in most of the United States, but not here in the empire. Where there had been something strange and wild about the lands to the north of town, even in the relatively sedate environ of the bamboo grove, the farmlands were, well, cultivated.

No, not cultivated in that way. Or the other way. Cultivated as in touched by civilization and brought to order.

I had no trouble seeing my way by moonlight. Maybe the moonlight was brighter, or maybe my eyes were better, but I had no trouble perceiving my surroundings or in making out countless stars in the sky above. If I wanted proof positive that I wasn't on Earth, here it was: the night sky and its multitudes.

There were more stars than I'd ever seen at once, hazy clusters the size of a quarter at the end of your outstretched arm; the blazing, bejeweled band of a galactic disc; and at least three nebulae smudging the sky in pink, indigo, and blue. And, among the stars, I could make out at least a dozen slowly-drifting points of light. Whether they were smaller moons of this planet, other planets, or some magical space crap I've never even heard of, I couldn't begin to guess.

"Hey! Watch it, lady!" a man said. I veered away at the last second to avoid crashing into his donkey as it clopped along the lonely nighttime road. I'd been so immersed in the stars above that I hadn't noticed the road in front of me. I probably could have spotted the donkey and cart from a mile away.

"Sorry!" I gave him a small bow, which is how I'd seen people apologize around here. "Um… sorry to bother you, but do you know how far the next town is?"

The man laughed. "Haven of River's Rush is about fifty li…"

"And a li is… how far?" I was pretty sure li were shorter than miles, but I wasn't sure by how much.

He laughed again and shook his head. "Good luck, sister." He clicked his tongue and his donkey started off again, leaving me once again to wander down the road.

I continued for another hour or so before, bored and tired, I wandered offroad and into a nearby orchard to rest - preferably by meditating if I could calm myself enough to pull it off. I sat beneath a plum tree, the pale moonlight filtering through dark leaves above, took a deep breath, and prepared to meditate…

And my stomach growled. Loudly.

"What the actual fuck?" I muttered. I'd eaten an insane number of dumplings earlier in the day, but I guess the fight (if you could call it that) and all the walking had burned some calories. Or maybe it was a cultivator thing… not that I was a real cultivator, but maybe my body needed more food.

As somebody who's worked as a life coach, personal trainer, and life coach to help people get healthy, I know more than most that the body can't always be relied upon to give us the right signals. When you're craving a double cheeseburger and half a pound of fries, you don't actually need that stuff, you've only been conditioned into desiring it. A big part of successful dieting is redirecting your desires into healthy patterns that you can maintain indefinitely. For all I knew, I'd inherited all kinds of bad food instincts from Lin's body… but I was inclined to err on the side of caution.

Taking a good look around, there was absolutely nobody around in the quiet nighttime orchard. Without even a hint of difficulty, I scaled the plum tree and helped myself to about a dozen fruits. I'd have liked to wash them off, but I doubt this world had glyphosate and other chemicals that could cause people problems - and even if they did, they probably wouldn't cause me in particular problems. Yay magic body.

"So good…" The plums I'd picked were perfectly ripe - sweet and succulent, juices streaking down my chin. I ate every last one of them in the span of about three minutes. I even crunched through a few plum seeds, which probably wasn't even possible without super teeth.

Then, finally sated, I actually got some decent meditation in, the proper kind with bands of energy slowly wrapping around my gradually-growing soul-braid. Then I lapsed into actual sleep for the first time in days and didn't awaken until just after dawn, when the orchard-tenders made their way out to begin the day's work.

"Hey, boss! There's a lady sleeping under the tree here!"

"Whuh?" I mumbled and rolled up to a sit. "Not asleep… meditating…" I lied.

My eyes flitted open to see a gangly woman wielding a fruit picker like a weapon. Before she could take a swing, a portly older man wandered up, scratching at his sideburns as he regarded me.

"Meditating, eh?" He nudged one of the plum pits on the ground with his boot. "Looks like you 'meditated' your way through about a dozen plums."

"Sorry… I was traveling late last night and got tired and hungry…" I smiled sheepishly. To punctuate the point, my stomach grumbled again.

I expected the guy (the foreman of the fruit pickers, I'd assume) to go apoplectic, but he just nodded. "You're a cultivator, right?"

"H-how did you know?"

He shrugged. "Not many of us mortals walk the roads alone at night. Even less got mirrors for eyes. Tell you what, mistress cultivator…"

"Lynn."

"Zhangwei. Tell you what, Mistress Lynn - I got some jobs around here that a cultivator would be real helpful for, and after that, I'll see that you get a proper lunch for your troubles. How does that strike you?"

"Oh! That would be great, Mister Zhangwei! Just show me where!"

Now… I've never been opposed to hard work. I'm a very hard worker - ask anybody! Well… maybe not Rhiannon. But ask most people! And I'm way into equality and everything. But I've always associated yard work as being dude work. Not gardening or composting, I guess. But the mowing and mulching and landscaping stuff. It turns out I was wrong - that stuff is cultivator work.

Zhangwei had me spending the morning breaking up large stones into rubble and ripping trunks out of the ground. He didn't expect me to do it with my bare hands, thank god. I got a big iron hammer for the rocks that looked like it weighed about eighty pounds, but that felt like about fifteen, and an oversized spade shovel for the trunks that chunked right through the roots. Then my 'assistant', a bored-looking kid named Yuzhi with a limp and a big straw hat, would expertly lash a rope around the trunk and I'd pull the thing right out of the ground, or he'd load the rock rubble into a wheelbarrow for somebody else to haul away. It was tiring work, but it was exhilarating that I could just break big rocks into bits with a few solid swings and pull trunks that weighed more than I did right out of the ground. My assistant thought it was pretty impressive, too.

"I'm gonna be a cultivator someday," Yuzhi said with certainty.

"Is that…" I glanced at his gimpy leg. "Will they let you become a cultivator with your leg like that?" Obviously, I was fine with it, but I gathered that mystical martial artists didn't really recruit people with physical deformities.

He shrugged. "It's not permanent." He rolled up his pant leg to reveal a deep purple bruise the size of my fist. "I kissed Lan Li and she didn't really like it."

"You should ask next time," I said coolly.

"I did! Then she said 'not on the lips, pervert!' and bloody kicked me!"

With a few swings, I crunched another rock into rubble before wiping my brow. "In that case, it might be time to find another kissing partner."

"She's the only one my age around here."

"That stinks."

Yuzhi's face lit up. "Maybe I could practice kissing with you, Mistress Lynn!"

I laughed. "Biiiig nope. But at least now you can't say you didn't shoot your shot with the lady cultivator. Is that all of the rocks?"

"I think so! Can I see how fast you can cart 'em back to the pile?"

"Yeah, why not?" With that, I raced off with Yuzhi limping far behind.

With the field work done, I spent an hour or so enjoying lunch with the orchard-workers, feasting on fruit, of course, along with egg fried rice and little crispy cakes with little strips of chicken in them. I think I ate three times as much as anybody there, including the larger men. Yuzhi watched me with a quiet fascination as I piled two cakes into a sandwich with rice in the middle and devoured the whole thing in about three bites. Afterward the foreman packed a small box of leftover rice for me and thanked me for the help.

"It's true what they say - cultivators are honorable folk, not like those thugs who used to be in the army," he grumbled.

I nodded. "I try to live my best life, Mister Zhangwei. Say… how far to the next town?"

"Not far, mistress. Rushing Rivers is maybe thirty-five li…"

"And a li is… how far, exactly?" I asked.

The foreman looked at me like I was an idiot but answered anyway: "You can walk a li on the open road in seven minutes… for you, maybe less."

I did the math - that meant about four hours of walking. Considering that I was now hosting a decent foodbaby, that didn't sound so bad. I grabbed a plum for the road, wished Yuzhi good luck in his romantic endeavors, and continued south toward Rushing Rivers.

--------

I arrived at the town in the late afternoon and feeling none the worse for the wear. Rushing Rivers was a mid-sized town, probably around the same size as Emerald Vale or just a bit bigger, perched across the confluence of three modest tributaries. Even from the distance, I could see a great waterwheel perched at the bottom of a sixty-foot waterfall, slowly churning amid the hazy mist of water.

Neat! That was the first sign of industry I'd seen beyond the sort of cottage businesses common in the ancient world. I didn't dare to hope that meant they had electricity, but at least it meant there was civilization here beyond dirty-faced fantasy novel crap. With a spring in my step, I approached the town gates and queued up behind a few merchants and their produce carts.

One of the guards inspected a melon cart with casual disinterest. "Seven wu," he said, and the merchant fished around her coin purse to fetch the money.

"Eight wu," he said for the next cart, and the merchant paid and trundled on through.

I was next. I stepped forward and made a show of patting down the pockets of my dress to show that I didn't have anything on me.

"What's in the box?" The guard pointed at the wax-paper box Mister Zhangwei had given me.

"Just some fried rice. I can eat it here…"

"No, that's fine," the guard said. "Two wu for just yourself."

"Ah," I said. I patted down my pockets again. "Is there, um… is there any way I can maybe borrow two wu?"

"From me? The guard doing tax assessment?"

"Yes? Kinda? Or maybe a discount for cultivators?" I smiled hopefully and pointed toward my silvery eyes.

He regarded me skeptically. "You're a cultivator? Then what sect are you in?"

"Ah. Well, I'm spiritual but not religious," I explained. "And maybe a little bit Buddhist, but mostly in the meditation and one with the universe way and not necessarily with the whole cycle of samsara thing. Really, I'm all about self-actualizing and self-empowerment as a way for me or anybody else to live their best life. So… does that answer your question?"

The guard just looked at me with slack-jawed astonishment, no doubt awed by my incredible response. "Not even a little bit," he said.

"Just put Cycle of the Empowered Buddha," the other guard said.

"Is that still a sect?"

He nodded. "They moved way out east. Come on, Wu, we've got a line forming."

"Yeah, fine," the first guard grumbled. "Just don't cause trouble."

"Of course not! Thank you and have a great day!"

With that, I slipped into Rushing Rivers, and I didn't even need to eat my fried rice.

If you ignored the fact that there was a sizable river flowing through the city, Rushing Rivers was a lot like Emerald Vale - a relatively small town encircled by stone walls, packed just enough to make the place feel cozy without quite feeling like a city. Most of the people were of modest means, but not starving, and the craftspeople and merchants did a brisk trade even as the sun sat low in the sky.

The two towns also had something in common: black-clad pseudo-cultivators riding through town like they owned the place. When I first spotted the guy at a distance, my eyes probably bugged out and I just about peed myself - I thought it was Black-blade Feng, that he or his goons had tracked me down to face his 'justice'… but it wasn't him. This guy was bald except for a little braid in the back and sported blue tattoos across half his face. None of Black-blade's men had looked like that.

Even so, I didn't want to draw the attention of potentially-psychotic former soldiers. From the way people made way for them, these guys were no good, and my general rule for toxic people is: avoid at all costs! I didn't need that kind of negativity in my life, especially now.

I ducked into a nearby alleyway and scurried off, hoping the guy hadn't taken notice of me or, if he had, that he didn't care. I skirted between brick buildings, the overlap of bamboo roofs blotting out the sky. The river was to my right and the axis of the town straight ahead. I thought I might go another block or so and then head back out toward the river - I wanted to see the water wheel up close. Maybe there would even be somewhere to meditate nearby. I made my way around a foul-smelling puddle, past feral cats and skittering lizards, and decided I'd gone far enough. Time to go back to the river. I hung a right… and found myself face-to-face with the bald, tattoo-faced cultivator.

He flashed a predatory grin. "I couldn't help but note you seemed worried about something, little cousin. Perhaps this martial brother can help?"

I'm not inclined to give creepy dudes who stalk me the benefit of the doubt… but it also doesn't pay to provoke them. The worst ones will get handsy or violent if they think they can get away with it. I returned my own smile with enough worry visible to let him know I definitely wasn’t into whatever game he was playing. "That's very kind, sir, but I'd just like to visit the water wheel and maybe look about town-"

"I insist. I know a more… pleasant environ where we can be alone. You wouldn't want to be rude to your host in his own town would you?"

He moved a step closer, his breath hot on my cheek. There was nobody but the two of us in the junction of the alleyways, nobody visible but for a tiny sliver of busy riverfront flashing in a little crack of sunlight behind the man. He was slightly taller than me and slim but muscled, the taut black fabric of his garb suggesting the lean but strong build of a sprinter. He reached for my chin to try to force me to meet his gaze, but I pulled away. He shifted forward again.

"Please… just let me pass. I don't want any trouble…"

"It's no trouble at all," the man grunted, his voice dropping close to a throaty growl. "My patience is wearing thin, and I tire of your indecision."

Was he really going to make me do this? I clenched my fists, ready to knock some sense into this asshole if I had to. A menacing aura slid off him like a choking smog - not as strong as Black-blade, but at least as strong as Dan. I could take him… probably. But then I might well have to flee from another town. When would it end? When would I be able to…

My decision was made for me. The man barked out a yell and lurched forward. I grabbed him, pivoting almost unconsciously to toss him to the ground. I really put my hips and shoulders into it and was rewarded when he hit the bricks with the crunch of bones against cracking stone, followed by a sizable and unexpected spray of blood… and then something shooting straight up out of the man's chest, ascending like a rocket before lodging into the bamboo of the overhang twenty feet up… it was a smallish sword. But I had more pressing concerns, such as why the man's chest had just exploded in a shower of gore and launched a fucking sword. And the fact that I was now absolutely coated in his blood and bits of various thoracic organs.

"Fucking…" I bent over and puked right on top of the still-burbling body… "gross…"

Suddenly, I realized there was another person - another living person in the alleyway with me. One who most certainly hadn't been there before when I'd taken a glimpse out to the waterfront beyond the alley. A slim woman in dark but nondescript clothes… and a silver-studded sheath currently missing its sword. She gaped in surprise, looking back and forth between the dead asshole and me, coated in his rapidly-ejected insides.

"I take it you're a cultivator, too," she said.

I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and shrugged. "I guess you could say that."

She nodded. "Then you should come with me," she said. "And maybe clean up a bit first."