As the woman led me off through the back-alleys of Rushing Rivers, I replayed in my head what had just transpired. The rapey bastard in black had shouted and then lunged toward me, and in that instant there had been a glint of something… metal? Something metal and blood-streaked had jutted through his chest. He'd been stabbed clean through from behind. Then I'd hurled him bodily to the bricks and pushed the sword the rest of the way through, like something out of a way-too-graphic graphic novel.

Only this wasn't a manga. It had actually happened.

"I promised the guard I wouldn't cause trouble," I murmured.

"Well… trouble found you," the woman said. She was dressed in dark tones - forest green and earth brown, an unassuming tunic, breeches, and leg wrapping that wouldn't have looked out of place on a petty merchant. But they made for ease of motion and blending into the shadows, too. Her sword was now sheathed, but just a few moments before, I'd watched her leap up to retrieve it from the roof. A vertical leap that would have destroyed a world record done with the ease of retrieving a glass from the high cabinet.

"Where are we going?"

"Somewhere safe… well… as safe as anywhere is in this city." She reached back to urge me along, but had second thoughts when she spotted my gore-glommed hands. "Ugh. We'll go out to the river first. When I give the signal, follow me, okay? I'm going to sprint…"

She crouched near the alleyway's exit, taking in the sweep of the bustling riverside street, and then looked back to nod at me. I barely had time to process the gesture when she took off, accelerating like a racecar across the street and toward the water before anybody had a chance to even react. I didn't want to lose her in this unfamiliar town, so I took off after her, surprising myself with the sheer speed of my sprint. The woman was faster than me, but not by much. I didn't have any trouble following her across the avenue, between two market stalls, and beneath a wooden balcony built out over the river shallows.

"What was that?" somebody back on the street shouted.

"What do you think? Bloody cultivators is what," somebody else replied.

"Not very considerate…"

"Well, they don't have to be, do they? One law for them and one for the rest of us. Peh!"

I took a moment to catch my breath, more from the excitement and emotional fallout than from actually being winded. I crouched next to the woman in the shade beneath the balcony, both of us up past our waists in the river's water, smooth stones and slippery mud shifting underfoot.

"I'll show you to our camp as soon as you get most of the blood out," she said quietly. Above us, waiters paced about the balcony, each footfall a little thunk as diners clicked their chopsticks and engaged in idle conversation.

I began to scrub at my skin with a river rock. "Thanks, by the way," I whispered. "I'm not sure I needed the help, but I don't want to think of what would have happened if I did…"

"I don't have to think - I've seen it. The Dark Riders of Ieyasu take what they want and destroy what they cannot take, be it people or riches." She spat into the river. "It is a black mark upon the emperor that he allows such things in the places the sects don't deem worthy of their protection."

That was the second time I'd heard that phrase, sects, used in that particular, idiosyncratic way. I took it to mean a group of like-minded cultivators rather than a religious group, as the word's connotation suggested on Earth. In a place where martial arts and mysticism were deeply interwoven, I guess the difference was a lot less apparent. I just nodded, not wanting myself to appear as hopelessly clueless as I actually was.

"We all have to do our part," I said, squeezing the gore from my hair. The water that dribbled out was the color of cherry Kool-Aid.

The woman nodded. "Well said, sister. I am Iron Ichika."

"Lee Lynn," I said. I held out my hand for a shake, but I guess they didn't do that in the empire. Ichika shot me an odd expression before handing me an ivory comb. I accepted it gratefully - a comb was even better than a handshake. "How do I look?"

Ichika examined me for a moment, her amber eyes taking everything in. She picked a missed fleck of bone from the soaked fabric of my dress. "Marginally acceptable," she said. I got the feeling that any praise from her was hard-won. She plucked the comb back from me and stuffed it somewhere under her tunic. "Now, Lynn… I am not a turtle, content to bathe and laze all day, and I suspect that you aren't either, so let us proceed."

Still soaking wet, we waded out from the balcony and out onto the street. People stared - two soaking-wet women trudging along, leaving little spreading pools with each footstep. Still… it was a lot better than being covered with some asshole's insides. I almost felt clean, even, having exfoliated every inch of exposed skin with a river rock. I imagine I'd have scraped myself up pretty badly with an actual rock as a scrubber back on Earth, but now my skin was a lot more resilient.

We continued down the river and across over a viaduct connecting the shores. People bustled about, carrying wares or occasionally stopping in the middle of the road to congregate and talk. Horses and oxen carted bushels of produce and other goods, everybody going about their day under pleasant skies. As a cart pulling caged hens trundled past, a rooster perched near one of the stalls crowed and everybody chuckled. The crowd quieted noticeably when a dark-clad rider appeared near the head of the bridge. I tensed and very nearly bolted, but Ichika grabbed my upper arm and coaxed me along.

"Give no cause for notice, Lynn, and he will pass," she whispered.

"But…"

"But if not, we shall deal with it… but only then. Patience, sister."

I swallowed my anxiety and nodded, and the man trotted right by, sparing the two of us no more than a passing glance. I let out a long breath, and soon enough we were across and free to disappear into the backstreets of the opposite shore.

Ten minutes later, and it was evening. The sun slowly sank over the rustling maple trees, their red leaves black in the gauzy light. Iron Ichika let me past the buildings and into a large open area haphazardly strewn with at least fifty tents and canvas awnings. Wanderers and vagrants gathered around open fire, sharing food and conversation. My stomach growled, and I realized for the first time since my encounter with the rapey cultivator that I'd discarded my fried rice back in that gore-splattered alleyway. Oh well.

"Home sweet home," Ichika stated. "For the time being." With a gesture, she indicated a small circle of five tents erected and upkept with military precision with a carefully-erected fire pit piled in the little courtyard between them. "I'll introduce you to the boys."

--------

Iron Ichika lived with three men in the little area of Rushing River reserved for itinerant housing. It would have been outright scandalous in a place like the empire, an unmarried woman staying with three men of questionable occupation, but nobody really cared what happened in the tent city - plus, she had her own tent. I imagine that mitigated things a lot, since she wasn't actually sleeping with anybody…

Not that it was anybody's damn business, but people in small towns have ways of making private affairs their business. I should know. My condo association in La Mancha Beach wouldn't even let me change the color of my balcony railings from terracotta to salmon!

But I digress. Ichika lived in a little tent city with three men, all of them cultivators - real cultivators and not the fake kind who took a pill, joined the army, came back home a quarter century later, joined a crime squad, dressed in all-black, and terrorized the everyday citizenry with their superior strength and martial prowess. They weren't that kind. I didn't bother to tell them that I wasn't a real cultivator, either, because it frankly wasn't any of their business.

After borrowing some dry clothes from her surprisingly expansive wardrobe, I wandered out to the fire pit, the fire casting a warm glow in the ebbing light. One of Ichika's friends, Ken, sat pensively in front of the fire pit with a big iron pot of something savory bubbling away and at least two dozen kabobs of basted veggies slowly turning. Ken was probably the first fully European-looking guy I'd seen throughout my several days in this world. I'd seen more people with green hair than I'd seen approaching blond.

"So what brings you to lovely Rushing Rivers?" Ken asked - he told me that everybody called him 'The Rainbow Phoenix', and he even had little feathers of many colors woven into his sandy hair, but I could tell from Ichika's eye roll that nobody actually called him that. It seemed a bit pretentious to me. Iron Ichika… that's a good, solid handle for a rugged, independent cultivator. Ken, the Rainbow Phoenix? Not so solid, unless you've got incredible powers to back it up.

"I got into trouble in Emerald Vale. I got into a fight with my uncle, who works for the local crime boss, and things didn't go so well when I beat him up. Black-blade Feng and his guys tried to beat me up and chased me out of town. I thought I'd try my luck down here, but it looks like… yeah. I guess Rushing Rivers has the same thing going on. What's the deal with those guys?"

"The Dark Riders of Ieyasu? They're basically bandits, only they live like lords, taxing a levy on all the trade in these parts. There are a dozen little towns in the unaffiliated borderlands around the Heaven's Abyss mountains that the sects won't protect because the qi is so diffuse. Ieyasu left the army with a bunch of his thugs about a decade ago and took up residence in Divine Respite to the west of here… most of them are pill cultivators, but Ieyasu and his lieutenants are the real deal. We do what we can, but it would be a very bad idea to challenge him directly - the man is in the core-forging stage and could probably beat all of us single-handedly a few times over."

"Why doesn't the emperor do anything about it? This is part of the empire, right?"

Ken barked a bitter laugh. "As long as the emperor gets his tax and his conscripts, do you really think he cares? That's why the four of us are out here - it's illegal to be an unaffiliated cultivator, but nobody really cares out here in the peripheral provinces. After all, what's a cultivator when there's no dominant variety of qi to cultivate? At least here, we've got a little from the river, and the moon and the sun are strong enough for the few who can cultivate that…"

"I have literally no idea what any of that means," I said. I reached across the fire and helped myself to one of the veggie kabobs he'd laid across the flat stones of the fire circle to keep warm.

"Uh… Ichika said you were a cultivator…" he regarded me suspiciously, his eyes blue squinting into mine. "You feel like a cultivator…"

"Yeah, maybe, but that doesn't mean I know crap about what I'm doing. Let's just say I managed to collect a bunch of qi into my, uh, dantian and now…"

Ken chuckled. "You can't just 'collect' qi into your dantian. What variety of qi? What coalescence technique? How is it purified? If you collected, oh… moon and earth qi… in the same dantian, you'd immediately suffer from a deviation…"

"Which is bad?" I asked. At some point, I was going to need to buy a stick of charcoal and some paper, because I really needed to take notes about this stuff.

"Very bad." Ken rolled his eyes. "Just my karma to find a self-taught genius out here in the borderlands. I came out here to get away from sect nonsense…"

"Look, bro," I huffed. "I didn't ask for your help. You're the one asking the questions. I'm not going to turn help away, because lord knows I need it. But Ichika said you guys were cool, and if you're going to rock an attitude, I'll go elsewhere."

Ken tasted from the pot he had simmering over the fire and added a handful of chopped garlic, stirring with a little wooden ladle. He frowned but didn't say anything.

"Don't mind him," Ichika said. She sauntered out from her tent in what looked like a kimono, the silk cherry blossom pink, the hem sleek and black, intricate floral patterns printed or sewn into the fabric. Needless to say, I was immediately jealous. "Of course we'll help you. I've always wanted a disciple!"

"Don't even joke about that," Ken said.

Ichika shrugged. "If joking about sect business is what does me in and not running a made man through with Red Harvest…" she patted her sword's sheath - I doubted she was ever out of arm reach of the thing… "why, I'll let Yang destroy my cultivation and you shall show me the proper path, Rainbow Phoenix." She smiled coyly and settled in next to me, claiming a kabob and neatly plucking a sauce-dripping shallot from the stick. Somehow, her lithe fingers remained completely clean.

"You shouldn't joke about that, either," he said, but there was a hint of a smile in his eyes. "Okay, fine. We can train her… but if she turns into a demonic aberration, I'm blaming you."

Ichika tittered - a surprisingly demure giggle from a woman who'd matter-of-factly skewered a man when she thought I was in mortal peril. "Now who's joking?" She sampled some of the contents of the bubbling pot. "Just about done. Stew's on if you want a snack before dinner! Come and see what I found skulking about the alleyways! Another little kitty!"

--------

Iron Ichika actually did have a few 'little kitties' that she looked after, four or five cats of various breeds that rushed out to greet her with mews and leg rubs whenever she returned to the tents. It wasn't clear to me whether they were her permanent pets or just strays that had latched onto her during her time in the city. To feed the things, she would simply wander out under cover of night to an unguarded stretch of river, wade into the water, and reach in with lightning-fast fists, grabbing fish right out of the water. This was also the source of most of her group's meat during their time in the city since money was tight.

"We can do what we want when nobody's looking," she said, beckoning me to wade out with her. "Now we stay still for a bit until the fish forget we're here. A bit like the townsfolk, yes? When the mortals are around, we need to be careful - we don’t want rumors getting out that we're cultivators since word will eventually reach one of Ieyasu's people and we'll need to leave town. Ok… that's long enough. I want you to catch us a fish."

"Me?" I yelped. I'd never gone fishing in my life.

Ichika nodded. "Just spot a fish, plunge your hand into the water as fast as you can, grab, and pull it up. Got it? I need to see how fast you are."

I nodded uncertainly and psyched myself up. I could do this. Ichika's cats needed to eat, and it was better that they ate fish than go hunting poor mice and lizards in Rushing Rivers's filthy alleyways. The fish's death would be quick and painless. It was fine. I was fine with this. Definitely fine. I spotted a glimpse of movement barely visible in the moonlight, a lithe, foot-long fish inching forward in the river's murky water.

I readied myself, took a deep breath, and plunged my hand into the water. Intellectually, I knew that I was a lot faster than I'd been before. From my point of view, though, everything else was a lot slower. I didn't really notice it when I was going about day-to-day activities… but when I really pushed myself, it was as if time suddenly stretched into slow motion.

My hand shot down, water shooting up into the air, bubbles cavitating around my fist. The only parts of my arm that were wet were my knuckles all the way until I was near the two foot mark. Force rippled in the water, and the fish started to turn, its body warping into a little u-shape as it prepared for a great stroke of its tailfin. Then my hand was around its body and hauling it out of the water, the fish writhing wildly to get free.

"Well do-" Ichika started.

"Eww! It's slimy! Why didn't you tell me it would be slimy? Oh god!" I made to throw the fish back into the river, but Ichika put her hands over my own and gently claimed the struggling creature.

"Well… at least you're fast," she said. She tossed the fish into a water-filled pot designated for the cats - apparently, they were much more eager to eat if the fish were still alive and flopping around when they got served. A second pot was designated for human food - I don't think any of my fish went in there, because I had no idea which species of fish to look for. "Okay, do one or two more and we'll have enough for the, uh… what did you call them?"

"Furbabies," I said. "You're positive this is part of training?"

Ichika nodded definitively. "Physical and emotional. Now get food for my furbabies, martial sister!"

We returned from our stint with two pots full of still-living fish - one for the furbabies (mostly caught by me) and one for us humans (mostly Ichika's). Ichika plucked the fish out one at a time and gave each a poke in the head with a needle to destroy part of the brain. This, apparently, killed the fish instantly while the body kept flopping around for a few minutes afterward - enough for the cats to feel like they'd caught live prey while they went to town.

For the fish meant for human consumption, it was Ken's job to prepare them. His approach was a bit less nuanced - he grabbed a fish, chopped its head off with a machete-looking knife, tossed the head into the still-bubbling stew, gutted the fish with a series of practiced cuts, and laid the fresh filets over the fire.

"Nothing beats fresh fish," he hummed happily.

"I can think of a few things that might," I said. A spinach and banana power smoothie came to mind. "You guys don't have smoothies here, do you?"

"Smooth what?"

"Didn't think so," I grumbled. Still… I had to admit the fish smelled pretty good when Ken started basting it with his sweet soy glaze. Smelling the fish, the other two members of Ichika's group wandered out from their tents - Big Shilei, who was… well… big, and Monkey Yang, who looked more like a scrappy pirate in need of a sideburns trim than a monkey.

"So what's the big deal with the new girl? What stage?" Yang asked absently. He ladled himself some stew and perched himself on the nearby sitting log - and, sitting like that, with his knees drawn up near his chest, he did look a bit like a monkey.

"Very late body refinement stage," Ichika said. "Very untrained."

"How does one get to late second stage without any training?" Shilei asked, claiming a whole fish for himself, plucking it right off the grill without any indication of discomfort. "You some kind of martial genius?"

"Do you think she's a martial genius?" Ken asked skeptically.

"Only the heavens know," the big man replied equanimously. "Wouldn't I have to be a martial genius to know for sure? I may be decent, but a genius I am not."

"Yeah… well that makes four of us," Ken concluded.

Yang nodded pensively. "The Iron Flower and I are gonna see if she's got anything for our act after chow, and then we'll see how she cultivates. It might turn up something interesting."

"Iron Flower?" I asked.

Ichika shot Yang an angry look. "It's an old nickname - one that I don't embrace anymore," she said quickly. "You need not worry yourself with it…"

Well… now I was definitely interested.

--------

After a late dinner, Ichika and Yang took me aside and told me a bit about the scheme the four cultivators had going on - namely, that the four of them were posing as traveling performers. It was useful for moving from town to town without anybody really asking you why and a way to get easy money, if not very much of it. They had a whole rotation of small plays that they could perform, and the presence of a second woman in their troupe opened up a lot of options.

"Always thought it would be a hoot to do Tragedy of the Jade Mausoleum," Yang said, running his finger down the tiny print of a time-worn scroll. "But I'm not gonna be picky…"

"Well I hope somebody can teach me my lines, because I can't read… whatever this is…"

"You can't read Yu characters?" Yang asked skeptically. "Didn't ya ever go to literature school?"

"Not as such… look, it's a long story."

"Another time, then," he shrugged. With a slightly-disappointed sigh, he rolled the scroll and stowed it in his pack. "Truth told, us lot only perform plays once or twice a week. The rest of the time, it's… you know, acrobatics, fire throwing, dancing, things like that. As long as we ain't too obvious about being cultivators, nobody complains. If you didn't go to literature school, I don't suppose you know any calisthenics, either?"

I scoffed at him. "Of course I can do calisthenics. This body is super flexible, too!"

"This body?" Ichika asked.

"I mean my body," I clarified. "You know, since I got body refinement or whatever you call it. Here - look!"

Without further ado, I bent over and did a tripod headstand, with my legs rising straight up and my elbows and head serving as the 'feet' of the tripod. Then I spread my legs into an inverted split, my thighs perfectly parallel to the ground. And, only then, after a little adjustment and determining that the ground was in good shape for it, I gradually spread my arms out until I was doing an unassisted headstand. Then, slowly, my hips rocked back, my legs extended forward and down, and my feet planted into the soft sand of the ground. My hips and spine slowly straightened until I was standing in a horse stance. Then I leapt into a 540 and landed en pointe and facing the two of them.

"Uh…" Yang said, flushing a bit. He scratched at his sideburns. I suppose my little yoga demonstration could have been considered a bit suggestive, given the viewpoint he'd had… but I was wearing Ichika's loose pants, which weren't all that tight in the butt. Pretty tight by empire standards, I guess, but looser than half of my jeans.

"You aren't supposed to use your cultivation," Ichika told me, shooting Yang a dirty look at the same time.

"Oh, I could do that before I was a cultivator," I stated. "Yoga is kind of my thing… do you have yoga here? It's sort of like super advanced calisthenics. Want to see more?"

Yang nodded. Ichika elbowed him and smiled tersely. "Perhaps we should discuss what is and isn't appropriate to demonstrate for audiences here… but, yes, I think we can work you in after that's been cleared. Cleared by me. Not Monkey."

"I didn't do anything wrong!" Yang insisted. She elbowed him again.

"Do you think you can put together a five- or ten-minute act that children will like?"

I nodded - I'd participated in a pilot program for areas schools, after all. It had only lasted three years and ended up getting canceled due to budget cuts, but twice a week I'd taught fourth- and fifth-graders in the Beazly Cliffs area after-school yoga. I'd just have to do it in loose pants here, apparently. "Five minutes is kind of short, though. Hey, I bet parents would pay us to keep their kids occupied. I could lead them through a whole beginner's routine!"

"That's…" Yang frowned. "That's actually not a bad idea. They definitely won't suspect us of being cultivators if you're playin' nanny to a few dozen local children, and parents probably would pay for that…"

"It's called day care," I said sagely. Yang and Ichika could only shrug.

"Now… let's see your cultivation."

I'd known this was coming. I'd known this was coming, and I was still a little worried because Granny P had been quite clear that I was a weird case. I wasn't a fake 'pill cultivator', but I wasn't a real cultivator, either. I wasn't even clear on what cultivation was, except it involved harnessing the energies of the universe and bending them to your will. Possibly to make you immortal or a god or something… honestly, it sounded insane, but I'd already experienced some pretty crazy shit.

I took a deep breath and tried to still my thrumming heart. "So… cultivation. Yeah," I said. "That's when you collect qi in your dantian, which is your soul thing… right?"

"There's so much wrong with that, I don't even know where to start," Yang said. "Cultivation… it's a philosophy. It's-"

"She's basically right, though, for the body refinement and qi refinement stages, which is what we're all in," Ichika said. "You draw in qi, cycle it, and try to keep it in your dantian… which, if I had to explain it to a five-year-old, is your 'soul thing'. During the refinement stage, where I am, you begin to take your attuned qi and its allies and refine them into your personal energy…"

"And qi is the energy that the world makes?"

"Again, if I had to explain it to a five-year-old, yes. Qi is the firmament that creation exists upon, the bedrock of reality that the universe resonates with, and through our own attunement within the universe, we can align ourselves with the qi, first to attune ourselves to the universe, as in the body refinement stage, and then to harmonize the universe about you with yourself."

"I'm guessing you had somebody to teach you all that?" I said.

Ichika blushed a bit. "I… had access to a library and read thereof," she said. "Enough about me, and enough philosophy. Please let me see your technique so I can gauge how close you are to the qi refinement stage…"

"Just to warn you, I'm not very good at cultivation…"

"That's fine," Ichika said, slightly annoyed.

"Okay. And maybe don't look at me while I'm doing it? I'm going to be super self-conscious if you stare at me the whole time…"

Ichka shared a look with Yang, both of them getting suspicious, which wasn't good. "We will be able to sense your qi from outside the tent if you wish to sit inside. Now please, Lynn, if you would. Sometime before the dawn."

"Right. I'm just going inside then. Cool cool…"

"What's the temperature got to do with it?" Yang whispered.

"It is an expression, taken to mean one is not hot-tempered," Ichika replied - I'd explained the euphemism to her earlier.

"Ah. Neat. I think I like it. So if I was to remain calm in a tense situation, I would be cool."

"Yes, that's exactly right. Or…"

I gradually filtered out their conversation as I sank into meditation. My heart rate was still elevated from the anxiety of being observed - and of maybe being found wanting. But I'd meditated under worse. I wasn't sitting in the middle of an orchard with Black-blade Feng out there somewhere looking to skewer me. I mean, he probably still wanted to skewer me, but I bet he went back to Emerald Vale, if he'd even left it.

I identified my errant train of thought and tamped it down. I stilled my thoughts, calmed my heart, noted how the air, hot in my lungs, gradually cooled as my pulse slowed. I noted Ichika and Monkey Yang's conversation outside without listening in. Heard the breeze on the canvas of the tent, heard crickets thrumming their chorus from the river grass, and frogs singing from the reeds, and the gentle murmur of the river not too distant. Then I turned my awareness inward.

More quickly than ever, my inner light swept into view, completely shrouded in a tapestry of little fibers. There was a pattern to the colors, an odd and repetitive banding, wherein certain colors never touched… and yet those colors seemed to attract one another. Despite the density of the weave, it was under tension, as if it wished to fray itself, to spread out into the universe, and yet the very opposing forces kept the whole thing in place, like a suspension bridge held in place by gravity itself.

I resonated my light, paying attention to the nearby fibers as they responded. These were qi, obviously - different flavors of qi, each with its own likes and dislikes. And nearby, just outside the tent, were two notable distortions. Ichika and Yang each making their own distortions in the world around them.

It reminded me of an episode of Cosmos that one of my friends made me watch, and that I ended up enjoying a lot more than I thought I would. In the episode, NDT talked about how every mass, even people, distort space with their own gravity field, and that's why things are attracted - the source of the distortion biases movement in that direction so reliably that it's a force of nature. I guess souls and qi were a lot like that only, instead of mass, it was peoples' souls and the soul of the universe bending space around themselves.

It made a whole lot of sense.

The brown qi from the earth didn't like the silvery qi from the moon and the ephemeral, glittering qi from the stars. The qi of the frogs and the insects meshed so seamlessly with the qi from the river that I had to really concentrate to differentiate them. And the water qi really didn't like the cherry-red qi radiating out from the cooking fire. As I drew them both in, the harmony of my inner light adjusting ever-so-slightly to single them both out, the fire and water began to push back against one another, eventually settling on diametrically opposite sides of a band and twisting around.

Very neat! I could see how, in forming a sort of helix, they kept the overall 'charge' of my soul braid neutral while staying as far away from one another as possible, and how they drew preferentially toward certain other colors in the panoply to minimize the repulsions. In other words, I could make the qi I was building around my soul self-stabilizing as long as I had lots of variety. It was a good thing that just about every thread anywhere nearby wanted to join up.

There were so many!

Uh… wow… that was a lot more than there were before. It was getting pretty crowded.

"What's happening? What in the heavens is she doing?"

"Don't touch her, idiot! She's experiencing a breakthrough!"

"What? My five-year-old nephew can explain what qi is better than her!"

"Yeah, well I doubt your nephew can somehow draw in every bit of errant qi for a hundred feet!"

"How is that possible?"

"How should I know, Yangutan? I only recently broke through to qi refinement."

I was only vaguely aware of the argument now taking place inside of Ichika's tent less than a yard from where I sat. No, I was too busy trying to figure out what to do with all the qi. A thread of silvery moon qi intersected with a sturdy brown earth and the two annihilated one another in a painful jolt. Fire and water overlapped, creating another jolt. Ow!

In my attempt to stop them, I drew the qi farther apart, but the qi resisted me. I pulled harder, my teeth grinding like the San Andreas fault as I put ever bit of willpower I had into keeping the qi from self-destructing in a thermonuclear tangle. And then I remembered a bit more from that episode of Cosmos, how gravity wasn't really like ball bearings deforming an elastic sheet because they extended out in every direction of space and time.

Well… why couldn't qi be the same way? The threads spun out and away and yet remained under my control, forming layers of a sphere like the layers of an onion. Well… almost a sphere. The sphere dipped in along the axis of my inner light like a deformed donut…

I think the shape is called a torus? Like the astrological sign, but pronounced just a little differently in English.

The qi… my qi arranged itself in a series of slowly-cycling spherish toruses… tori(?) around my inner light - and, for the first time since I started collecting threads of qi like my Grandma Lee collected quilts, the threads parted. I could see my unadulterated, uncovered inner light. And it was bright, certainly brighter than it had been before, fed by a dynamo of slowly-cycling qi. The whole system stabilized, my little qi emergency temporarily dealt with.

"Well… that was weird," I said, my eyes fluttering open. "I told you I'm not really good at cultivating…"

"Are you okay?" Ichika rushed to my side. "Lynn… what in the heavens was that? Why didn't you tell me you were so close to a breakthrough!"

"And what even was that?" Yang asked. "I'm pretty sure I felt you pulling in moon qi and earth qi, which shouldn't even be possible…"

"Not to mention fire and water," Ichika said. "Which, again, shouldn't be possible. Those types of qi annihilate one another - yin and yang canceling out. You can't cultivate with energies in opposition. Except…"

"Apparently you can," Yang finished for her. "Where'd you say you learned your cultivation technique again?"

"Uh… a guided meditation app called Inner Light?" I said. "Look… is it really that big of a deal? It's not that hard, really-"

Big Shilei chose that moment to burst into the tent. "Hey, folks, we've got to make ourselves scarce for a while. Something just drove the local qi so crazy even the mortals felt it, and if I had to guess, the Dark Riders will want to check up on it."

Yang sighed. "I guess we'd better pack camp. Lynn… we're gonna discuss this more later, and you're gonna tell us exactly where you learned to do that."

Just wonderful. I couldn't help but sigh - I'd screwed up cultivation so badly that we'd brought attention on ourselves. As soon as things calmed down, I'd just have to fess up and admit the embarrassing truth: unlike them, I wasn't a real cultivator.