Granny P had given us a long list of ingredients…

I should clarify - she gave Ichika a long list of ingredients. My cultivation-enhanced memory was phenomenal and I was making real strides in learning Yu characters, but there were something like 2,000 essential characters that you needed to know to be reasonably literate, another 4,000 to be considered reasonably educated, plus another 10,000 or so just for shits and giggles, and finally the secret 'soul syllabaries' of a the imperial sects, which contained several hundred characters apiece and which practiced cultivators were supposed to know.

Hana didn't even know the secret characters, and Ichika knew only the ones pertaining to her local clan - apparently, her family had never thought she'd get very far in her cultivation. I bet they felt pretty stupid now!

Ichika had an ingredient list with notes on which were more important and which were more costly… unfortunately, some of the important ingredients were some of the more costly ones. Between the three of us, we had about eight yao, most of which belonged to Ken. That just wasn't going to cut it.

"Any ideas on what we could do for money?" I asked. "I could do more yoga daycare, like last time in Rushing Rivers. That worked pretty well last time, right?"

Ichika shot me a flat look, as if she still wasn't used to how insightful I could be. "Really, Lynn? Last time, the local Dark Riders took note of you and started a huge, bloody fight. And they didn't even have it in for you like the locals here do." She pointed to the roughspun cloak that Granny P had given me. "Keep that hood up, and if you see any dark riders…"

"Kick their ass," I said sternly.

"No. Run, Lynn. There are only three of us, one of whom is still significantly injured and one of whom has the fighting skills of a mid-level initiate at best. That one's you…"

I rolled my eyes. "Yeah, I got that. I meant kick their ass if there's only one of them. And there aren't any witnesses. Yeah."

"Maybe we should add lessons on how to spin a decent yarn on top of your training in the martial dao and basic literacy," Ken said flatly. "Perhaps Monkey could teach you…"

"Where is he, anyway?" I asked.

"Elsewhere," Ichika said - and it was clear that was all I was going to get at the moment.

As we entered the marketplace, things were just as I'd remembered them, right down to the mendicants begging along their little row outside the market proper. The sun was shining, the people were bustling, and the coins were clinking. I couldn’t help the grin that grew across my face.

I knew we were supposed to be at least a little bit incognito here, but I was sure it would be alright to say hello to the Xus, the couple who ran Xu's 5th Generation Dumplings. They were some of the first people I'd met in this world and some of the few who'd treated me well before discovering I was a cultivator…

Only, when I looked in the direction of their stall, there was some guy selling melons from the back of a half-broken cart. Actually, I think it was the guy who one of Black-blade Feng's goons upended chasing me across the marketplace. I guess it's good that he had a spot now, but I was more worried about my friends…

Well… Xu Fen was my friend. Her husband, Bo, it was more that he tolerated me. But I know I can come across a bit strong for people who just aren't ready for an affirming, positive-energy lifestyle, so that was pretty good!

"Hey, do you know where the Xus are?" I asked the melon man.

"The dumpling people?"

"No, they're regular people. But they sell dumplings. They have for five generations!"

The melon guy shrugged, squinting as he adjusted his straw hat to block the sunlight. I'd positioned myself against the sun so he wouldn't recognize me. "No idea, miss. Lord Feng wrecked their stall - absolutely wrecked it. Bamboo splinters everywhere, and what was left of their pots was barely worth melting for scrap. Banned them from the marketplace for conspiring with a thief…"

"I'm not a-" I calmed myself. "Do you know where they live?"

"Probably in the garden district with most of the merchants if they ain't been kicked out to the street. Dunno how they'll survive banned from the market."

Obviously, my number one priority was finding getting ingredients for Big Shilei's medicine and Ken's burn salve, but now I was worried about the Xus, too. What if they'd already been impoverished, all because they were friendly to me? That was a wrong I had to address…

But Granny P did say there was an herbalist's shack in the garden district worth visiting. Hmm…

I tracked Ichika down, waving to get her attention before remembering I was supposed to be inconspicuous. "Hey… I thought I might go to the nearby herbalist's to see what they've got."

"Why're you whispering? You just got the attention of half the marketplace," Ken said.

I glowered at him - I hadn't been that distracting - though I was wearing one of Granny P's dresses, which barely came past my knees due to our height difference. Women didn't really do less than full-length robes and dresses here, unless they were sex workers.

"It would be unwise for us to split up," Ichika said.

"You can come with, then," I said hopefully.

"No. Ken and I have negotiated trade of several desired herbs in exchange for services rendered…"

"It's a fucking fetch quest," Ken grumbled. "We're cultivators on a heavens-damned fetch quest."

"Thus, it should be easy…"

"Great!" I said. "So I'll meet you back here in an hour or so?"

"Better make it two," Ken said.

"Be safe, Lynn," Ichika said. She grabbed my wrist, her grip unexpectedly firm, and looked me in the eyes. "Be wise."

I nodded. "I'll just think to myself: what would Ichika do?"

"Well… considering that she recruited you and all," Ken said, "I'm not sure she's the authority on wisdom…"

"Oh, hush," Ichika said with a smirk. "Off you go, before I change my mind."

"Yes, mother," I said with a roll of my eyes. With a yelp, I dodged out of the way just in time to avoid a whack from her mercifully-sheathed Red Harvest.

--------

I jogged southeast through the city, running slow enough to remain unremarkable… running faster than a horse apparently marked you as a cultivator. I was kind of excited to see a new part of town. I'd never been to the garden district, though I had been to the big water clock just outside of it. That's where I'd spent most of my first night in the empire after leaving Granny P's care.

I passed the town's central district, where the mayor and most of Emerald Vale's bureaucrats did their business. Men in robes and flat-topped caps shuttled between buildings, waving scrolls of paper, some of them carrying abacuses or bags of supplies. You could list dozens of bad things about the empire, but a lack of organization and record-keeping were far from that list.

Beyond, on a hill overlooking the district, was a fine mansion with a big brassy gate walling it off from the rest of the city. If I had to guess, that's where Black-blade Feng lived. When last we'd fought, if you could even call it a fight, he'd been stronger and faster than me, but not by much. He'd been much better at fighting, even without using qi techniques (of which, if Big Shilei was correct, he probably knew several, having been a sergeant or junior lieutenant in the army).

But now, I was significantly stronger and faster than before. I was still early in the third realm, but I still felt a lot stronger than when I'd first entered the realm. I'd built, revised, and rebuilt my cultivation base many times, carefully threading and rethreading the qi into ever denser, ever more-elaborate braids as I mastered my ability to control and balance many tiny threads of qi simultaneously. According to Ichika, my aura felt like a very powerful cultivator restricting her aura rather than an unpracticed noob who'd just begun to understand cultivation.

Speaking of which, I always knew auras were real, but most people in Cali didn't believe me! It turns out the science was wrong on that, too. Suck it, science!

As I approached the water clock tower, I felt a prickling down my neck, as if I was being followed. Maybe by multiple people, even. I glanced over my shoulder, trying to be discreet about it. If there was anybody trailing me, they were being pretty casual about it. Nobody on the street so much as paused. Nobody stirred on the rooftops. Maybe it was my imagination?

I passed the water clock and started into the garden district - so named because they had bushes and flowerbeds arrayed along the streets, and most of the little, closely-spaced houses had little gardens in the front and numerous flowerpots dangling from the roof overhangs.

"Hey, do you know where the Xus live?" I asked a random passerby.

"Sorry," she shrugged.

I asked a few more people with similar results when I spotted the nervous shuffling of people away from the middle of the street, which usually meant one thing: a Dark Rider of Ieyasu was approaching. I sidled into a little gutter-lined alleyway between houses and crouched, wondering if this was why I'd felt like I was being watched for the past five minutes… I held my breath as the clop of horse hooves echoed along the stone street. I'd promised I'd run at the first sign of trouble, but I'd fight if I had to…

The rider plodded past and kept going. Out on the street, the sparse pedestrian traffic resumed, ladies chatting under parasols, men sauntering about with their broad-brimmed hats.

"Psst."

"Ah!" I spun around and grabbed a very surprised boy by the throat. His limbs thrashed as he tried in vain to get me to release my vice grip and, as he flailed, he tossed a… steamer basket into the air?

I caught the basket with my free hand and set the boy down, feeling a bit bad as he rubbed at the red fingermarks along his neck. "Uh… don't sneak up on people?"

"Ow! What's wrong with you, lady? Maybe I won't even offer you a free sample now…"

My eyebrows quirked up. "Go on…"

"Uh… d'you want a free sample?"

"A free sample of…"

I allowed him to open the bamboo steamer box still in my hand, the familiar aroma of chicken dumplings filling my nostrils. A thousand-watt grin spread across my face. "Take me to the shop!"

The boy scratched his head. "Well… that was easy."

I hummed happily, practically skipping as the boy led me to the Xus' place of business. Free samples! They'd finally tried my idea! I was a bit disappointed that they hadn't tried it until after I left town and after Black-blade Feng had destroyed their stall and banned them from the market. But it was better late than never.

--------

The Xus had a modest house about two blocks from Emerald Vale's eastern wall, a two-story building with the lacquered bamboo shingles, neat little azalea garden, and the hanging flowerpots that I can only assume were HOA-mandated. It was also very… busy. A line of a dozen people trailed out the door and groups of laborers and tradespeople crowded about a trio of little wooden tables with barely enough elbow room to eat. A neat hand-painted sign dangled from the first floor roof proclaiming…

Well, I couldn't read all of it, but I knew 'dumplings' and '5' well enough. I rushed forward, relieved that I wasn't responsible for the annihilation of five generations of dumpling expertise.

"Hey, wait!" the boy shouted, struggling to keep up.

"What?"

"I don't get paid if they don't know I referred you. Here!" He handed me a strip of paper.

"Oh, I don't have any money," I said with a shrug, accepting the receipt anyway.

"What?!" He threw a pair of chopsticks at me and stormed off, muttering about how I was wasting his time… which, I guess, was true. I'd have tipped him if I had a wu to my name.

The inside of the house had been completely repurposed into a dumpling restaurant - and the Xus had expanded into serving tea, too, since there weren't any other food or drink locations near theirs. One side of the interior held several benches crowded with chatty patrons, the middle held space for the customer line, and the left held the large, steam-filled kitchen with a big plank of wood balanced over a pair of big barrels to serve as an order counter.

Inside the kitchen, Bo shuttled back and forth between baskets while Fen relayed orders. A nimble teenaged girl whom I didn't recognize squeezed past the counter carrying a tray loaded with no fewer than ten plates piled high with eleven dumplings apiece, handing them to the milling customers.

"Wow! You guys are busy!" I called out.

Xu Fen turned to face me, her surprise quickly shifting to unfeigned delight. "Lee Lin! You're back!"

"Isn't Lee Lin that simple girl?" one of the patrons mumbled.

"I heard she got blessed by a spirit monkey and had Black-blade raging all over town trying to catch her," another said.

"Ah, yeah, that explains it," the first replied.

Xu Fen moved the makeshift counter to push through from the kitchen. She had to stand on her tiptoes to reach her arm around my shoulders, and even then she was an inch or two short. "Lin is our local genius cultivator! She's the one who thought up free samples!"

That elicited a substantial cheer from the sizable crowd inside. Porcelain tea cups and dumpling-skewered chopsticks raised in thanks for my brilliant idea. Even Bo shuffled away from the steamer, sweaty but happier than I'd ever seen him out at his stall.

"Sorry about getting your stall destroyed and about getting you banned from the marketplace," I said. "Don't worry, though, I've got a plan to-"

Bo waved my apology aside. "Do you think we ever had this kind of business out at the marketplace? Not even close! I wouldn't go back to toiling in the open air, around the smell of animals and garbage, if you paid me a hundred thousand yao!"

"Maybe two hundred thousand," Fen muttered.

"Yes, perhaps," Bo said seriously. "And my grandmother would be proud to know how many people have praised her pork belly dumpling recipe!"

"I thought they were five generations old…"

"The pork belly is only three generations old. The vegetable and chicken herb are the only ones that stretch back to great-great-grandfather Xu Pan." He shrugged at the admission.

"Oh! A little boy gave me this little slip of paper when he showed me where you were… I smelled the chicken herb in his steamer basket and just had to have some!" My shoulders sagged. "I don't have any money, though…"

"Lee Lin, you'll never pay for dumplings in my home," Fen stated, giving my shoulder a squeeze.

"Once per day," Bo said quickly.

"Yes, no more than once per day… would thirty chicken herb dumplings hit the spot?"

"You know," I laughed, "I think they just might!"

And do you know what? The fact that they weren't vegan didn't even cross my mind.

I enjoyed my dumplings and strangers bought me several cups of slightly-astringent green tea. The Xus were dumpling experts, not tea experts, but decent tea was good enough to pair with the best dumplings in town. The customers were eager to know about being a cultivator - the women, particularly, were curious to know about woman cultivators, since apparently there were way more men who challenged the heavens and in the cultivator stories, the women were always nobles.

"I didn't even know common women could be cultivators, miss," one of the patrons said.

"We can be anything we set our minds to," I told her sagely. "Though some stuff requires a good instructor. I mean… I wouldn't want to just build town walls or a water clock without lots of expert help and years of training. I guess cultivation is the same way."

"That makes sense. How many years have you been cultivating, if I may ask?"

Now… I was pretty sure 'about two weeks' wasn't going to be a satisfactory answer. But, when I thought about it, my meditation technique was one I'd honed over a decade. It took me five or six years before I could really visualize my inner light, and another two or three years before I saw anything like qi.

The qi on Earth must have been so anemic that it couldn't completely overwhelm the tiny inner thread of non-cultivator Lynn. So anemic that I'd only ever managed to cultivate a few meager threads once I'd learned how to 'play' my inner light like a thrumming cello string. So anemic that I'd developed eagle eyes, night vision, and a microscope when it came to visualizing qi while the cultivators here were in the third or fourth realm by the time they developed 20/20 vision. I'd been preparing to cultivate for years and I hadn't even known it.

"Uh… miss?" the woman nudged my shoulder.

"Oh, sorry! You asked how long? A decade," I said. "A decade and about two weeks."

--------

I stepped out into the golden glow of late morning with a full belly and a brain buzzing with positive emotions. It took a bit of a reboot, a bit of seeing the townsfolk going about their days as if I hadn't just experienced the catharsis of having my worry about the Xus put to rest, for me to remember why I was even supposed to be in the garden district… there was supposedly an herbalist in the area who might have some of the things we needed…

The problem was I'd only memorized about half of the list. Was it the most important half? I had no idea - it was the one third that I'd clearly overheard from Granny P and the one third I could actually read, minus a bit of overlap. And I had no idea where this herbalist actually was. And, in a district full of gardens and potted plants, finding the one house with the herb garden wouldn't be as easy as it would be in the slums or the affluent parts of town.

I turned on my heels to go ask the Xus where to find the local herbalist, only to hear a commotion from out on the street.

"I said tell me where this so-called cultivator is or I will break you, girl!" a man's voice barked.

"I'll never betray my mistress," a young woman replied. I blinked in surprise - that was Hana's voice!

"Your mistress?" The man laughed cruelly. "You're no cultivator, you fat whelp. You're not even fit to warm my bed."

"Ow… hey, ow! That hurts!" Hana groaned.

"Good! Remember it well, and perhaps my pointers will get through your thick skull!"

"My father's the mayor… well… not of here…"

I stepped forward into the street, people scurrying out of the way… and off to any bit of partial cover where they thought they might get a decent view of whatever was about to happen. "Hey, dickweed! Pick on somebody your own size!"

The Dark Rider turned to face me, a visibly frightened Hana pinned by the arms in front of him. "She is my own size, you uppity bitch… just in different dimensions…" he chuckled at his own body-shaming joke. Not cool, my dude. "And you'll soon learn that my manhood is not like a weed at all!"

"Implied rape. Awesome," I said. "Just when I didn't think you could get any more punchable. Let the girl go and we can go about this like semi-civilized people, alright?"

"I'm sorry, M-Miss Lynn," Hana wavered. "I… he overheard me asking that guy cowering over there where you'd gone to…"

"I knew and revealed nothing!" the guy cowering behind a broken rickshaw stated. "Please disregard this lowly mortal!"

"No matter," the Dark Rider said with a sneer. "I have you now. You will surrender yourself to me or I will s-"

The Dark Rider stopped mid-sentence, suddenly looking very confused and then very pale, as if he'd seen a ghost. With a whimper, Hana stumbled forward, splaying out against the paving stones with a little yelp of pain. I balled my fists and dropped into the fighting stance that Ken had recommended for an opponent with a knife - a low stance with one leg forward, ready for a rapid shift of weight, and one leg crouched underneath my body, ready for an explosive vertical leap.

It was a completely useless stance for a mortal who couldn't clear seven feet with a vertical leap - it would only get you stabbed in the face. But it was great for cultivators, since I could either shift to the side to avoid a straight lunge and then control the arm, or I could just leap over the fucker if he came forward with anything else. And if he didn't come forward at all, that meant he wasn't attacking me.

Mind you, I hadn't yet managed to successfully defend myself against knife attacks from any of my cultivator friends while going full speed, but I was willing to bet this guy was slower than them. I was ready…

And he was still standing there, a slightly-confused, slightly-pained expression on his face, like somebody who'd just farted and realized that the fart was a bit more. I think the medical term is a 'shart'. But at least he'd let Hana go. Sniffling, she hobbled away from us.

"Well? Are we fighting or what?" I said.

Then the guy collapsed, and I noticed that his whole back was completely soaked with blood. Almost immediately, it ran in rivulets between the paving stones. Monkey Yang wiped his favorite knife off on the guy's dark clothes and hopped to his feet, giving the body a good kick to make sure the fake cultivator was dead. He grabbed one of the guy's wrists and motioned for me to do likewise.

"Come on, then. If I haul this guy over my shoulder, there's no way I don't get blood all over my only change of clothes," he said.

"Were… were you following me?"

Monkey nodded nonchalantly and motioned for me to take the guy's wrist again, which I eventually did. "Yeah, I followed you - Ichi asked me to keep you safe, so I followed you. You and the mortal girl, who was also following you. Good thing I came, eh?"

"Ugh. I can't believe I'm touching a dead guy," I said. I looked up to the slowly-dispersing crowd, half of them still looking on as we dragged the body into a nearby alleyway. "Nobody tell anybody about this or… or I'm gonna be really pissed!"

"Yeah, that's gonna work," Monkey chuckled.

"I could have taken the guy," I said as we dragged him back - he wasn't heavy to us at all. It was more a question of bulk. "He was weak. Weaker than the guy I beat back in Rushing Rivers, and I'm stronger now. Is this far enough?"

"Yeah, it's far enough," Monkey said. Without a moment's hesitation, he lifted the body and stuffed it into a rain water barrel - but not before lifting the coin pouch off the guy. "Sure, probably you could have taken him, but why risk it? Somebody who holds a kid hostage doesn't deserve the honor of fair combat. Hmm… this guy had almost fifty yao on him. I bet that's enough for all of the herbs we need. Then we'll need to go to your granny's house and tell them-"

"Uh," Hana called down the alleyway. "Another Dark Rider guy is coming down the road."

"And that," Monkey Yang said, "is our cue to leave."

And so we did. But Black-blade would know we were around within the hour, if it even took that long. Things were about to get interesting.