In the upper floors of the Von Hoedorff family manor, the young duke sat behind his desk, his back turned to the door as he looked out through one of the windows built into the titan’s eye sockets, thinking on the state of his domain. He was overjoyed over the great prosperity brought in by opening his domain to the World of Martial Arts, effectively subsuming the stable grey markets of neighboring, now occupied states.

However, something gnawed at him, a burning question demanding an answer. The Occupationists - a faction within the dukedom’s upper political echelons - demanded that the domain be integrated into the greater Pateirian dominion as a vassal state, and that the so-called “Land of Lingering Smoke'' be “conquered” or at the bare minimum extremely tightly controlled, citing that it was a seedbed for dangerous subversive elements… And yet, Lady Karmesin held a differing opinion, despite her self-admitted affiliation with the Pateirian Empire. As if the world itself sensed his thoughts, the doors of his writing-room opened at that very moment, and by the sound of her footsteps he knew that it was her - her left foot sounded like solid stone.

“Lady Karmesin, what fortuitous timing!” he exclaimed, turning around in his chair to be met with that familiar, crimson-cloaked figure. “I would ask a question of you.”

Karmesin insisted on entirely obfuscating her identity by wearing a crimson robe down to the ground and a three-horned, voice-distorting mask, even in private settings. Von Hoedorff was one of the few people who did not find it strange in the slightest, feeling compassion for the woman for what must’ve been truly grizzly disfiguring mutations, just the same as many of his own relatives suffered. Such was the lot of nobility - one had to pay the price in suffering, if one wished to surpass the limits of man.

She approached and seated herself, then tilted her head to the side, tacitly gesturing for him to continue speaking. A long curtain of gleaming, jet-black hair slipped out from under her hood. Von Hoedorff took a few moments to form the sentence in his head, as he at times found it difficult to express himself without stumbling over his own words. He also, at times, heard voices from nowhere, which he chalked up to a spiritual medium in his ancestry whose powers had been partially passed down to him. The duke’s sudden mood swings were a little harder to explain.

“Why, pray tell, does your stance on the Land of Lingering Smoke differ so from the Occupationist faction?” he asked.

“It is simply much easier to deal with them in the open than to play a losing game of cat and mouse,” she answered instantly, crossing her legs under the robe. “To think a state apparatus, no matter how efficient, could conquer the Land of Lingering Smoke is… As foolish as insisting that one could pluck the sun from the heavens with a pair of chopsticks. Our Bureau of State Security has convinced many that there is no such thing as a Land of Lingering Smoke in the heartland, but in truth, Pateiria’s underworld is nearly as large as the public-facing side of the empire’s society, it is simply the nature of things.”

“I firmly believe in the philosophy of Dualism, that all things have two sides - just as humans are at once sages and buffoons, philosophers and degenerates, diplomats and war-dogs, so too do human societies possess their own underbellies. The governing power can only learn to live with it, try to manage it. At best, one can hope to rip out by the roots the truly despicable aspects of such an underbelly, and even then independent, and therefore unreliable third parties are often necessary.”

“Ah, I see…” the duke lied in an effort to appear smarter than he was, rubbing the scaly scruff of his chin.

Karmesin took full control of the conversation, leaning back in her seat and stating, “If my answer is satisfactory, then I would move on to the reason I’ve come to you today rather than sending a messenger.”

“I- Of course, of course,” the duke snapped out of his moment of self-indulgent faux-contemplation, waving his hand halfheartedly.

“It seems those who took your Red Locust Bandits contract have neither returned, nor reported in by aetherwave. I would strongly recommend deploying the Dragon Knights to ensure the bandits do not run rampant, and more importantly, to rescue any survivors from the original party,” explained Lady Karmesin.

Aghast at the suggestion, the good duke gasped in disbelief, arguing: “But… The Dragon Knights have a parade tomorrow! And- and and- Captain Adalbert is set to defend his title as the champion of Scarlet Silk Road tonight! I can’t possibly drag my knights away from such vital matters of state!”

“Perhaps send more independent contractors and have militiamen drawn from the Duma School support them?” Karmesin suggested, knowing full well that arguing against the duke on matters of fancy using logic was as foolish as trying to pluck the sun from the heavens with a pair of chopsticks. He was an archetypal descendant of the so-called “Heroic Families”, inbred mutant degenerates born from the Divine Emperor’s genial, half-millennium disinformation campaign regarding the true nature of cultivation. In truth, families that pursued dead-end methods of this sort were not uncommon even within the heartlands, but it was a price the Emperor was willing to pay for stamping out would-be usurpers before they could even arise. It was fortunate, then, that the vast majority of these so-called “cultivators” had wiped eachother out in the War of Fog, leaving mostly those unable to fight, or those with just barely enough intellect to somehow keep their little kingdoms of dirt out of the mess.

Von Hoedorff was dim, narcissistic, schizophrenic, and unfortunately, the legitimate ruler of his demesne. If Karmesin wanted to wrest control of the city-state, she first had to figure out whether the tales of the manner in which the Von Hoedorff family’s primacy had been secured were true: tales of a sleeping dragon beneath the manor that would wake and wreak untold destruction, should the rightful ruler’s life be severed by a would-be usurper’s hand, and if so, she would have to puppet the duke while she worked on defusing that particular dead man’s switch. All that would come in time - for now, she had to get rid of those braindead mutant war-dogs that thought themselves war heroes whilst robbing innocent, economically vital merchants, and what was more disgusting still, engaging in the slave trade.

It didn’t matter that slavery was very much legal under Pateirian law, because this wasn’t Pateiria, and Karmesin frankly didn’t care for the legality of such degenerate practices. Her past self had tolerated them, but that woman was long dead, and as far as she was concerned, a dominion reliant on slave labor was just begging for revolt.

“Speaking of Adalbert, I take it he’s still working on his investigation into the slave trade,” she prodded the duke, trying to wring at least something useful out of the manchild.

“I- Yes, yes of course! Why, just yesterday he swore on his life that he had a lead. He wouldn’t lie, I’d have to have him killed otherwise!” insisted Von Hoedorff with the certainty of a very, very naive child.

Karmesin had to suppress a deep sigh. Instead, she reiterated what she had already told the buffoon, trying for the reliable seduction approach out of desperation. Even just her voice and the implication of a chance at ending up in bed with her had worked before, it would work again. She just had to invent a bold enough lie and tell it confidently enough.

“Alberich. Listen,” she began, the use of the duke’s first name finally managing to center his fruit fly-like attention span onto Karmesin’s eyes and voice. “I’m sure you wish to know why I must wear these heavy robes and this inconvenient mask. You see, I must hide my appearance with these suffocating robes because a great slaver warlord once took a fancy to me, and had me kidnapped from my family’s ancestral home. After suffering in captivity for years, I took him unawares and cut off his manhood in his sleep before escaping through the window. He’s been searching for me ever since.”

The duke listened to every word without so much as a glimmer of doubt in his eye. Karmesin could scarcely suppress the urge to laugh, as the tale she had spun was nearly directly lifted from a fantasy novel detailing the life of an escaped slave.

After a brief pause, she finally got to the point: “Get those slavers out of my- er, your city, and I shall no longer have a reason to conceal myself like this.”

Despite having reptilian eyes and gleaming scales in place of a beard, he certainly didn’t have the cunning of a dragon. She was beginning to think that the founder of Arches, Gustav Von Hoedorff, had in truth gotten a little too chummy with one of his pet drakes, and desperately tried to cover it up. It certainly explained how the bloodline degenerated so consistently rather than erratically mutating like the other families that practiced dead-ends like Azoth Stone Cultivation.

Von Hoedorff’s countenance hardened as he obviously tried to make himself look as manly as possible, even artificially deepening his voice when he spoke: “Very well. I shall see to it personally that the scum of slavery is driven from my demesne.”

The moon rose above the Town of Arches… And its underworld came alive.

Barely-concealed speakeasies and brothels opened their doors, merchants with compact, mobile carts peddled their wares, and the ever-popular sport of organized one-on-one violence thrived yet again in an ancient, open-air amphitheater. Many lights shone into the heavens, the raucous sounds of merriment and trade carried into the night.

Two figures cut through the crowds in the street so aptly named Scarlet Silk Road - two women, walking hand-in-hand, both long-haired and tall, both magnets for attention by the mere virtue of their presence. Peddlers, merchants, criers alike did all in their power to get the two women’s attention, each and every one failing to snag anything beyond an offhanded glance.

“Those eyes… By the Dead Ones, those eyes…” thought Nestor, the fat, normally boisterous proprietor of a grilling stand as he quietly turned over a sausage. He was old, old enough to have dodged the draft, and more importantly, old enough to know what a real cultivator felt like. Old enough to know that getting their attention was like praying for interesting times - nothing but trouble.

“All these idiots blinded by bloody money, stickin’ their hands inta guillotines ‘cause there’s gelt in the headsman’s basket…” he thought, fighting himself to not look at those two, even if he knew it was a pointless struggle. Before he had managed to tear his gaze away from the tall one’s implausibly shapely rear, enveloped in equally implausibly fitting trousers doubtlessly wrought of magicked self-shaping fabric, Nestor had already taken in the gist of both women’s appearances… And burned the damn sausage.

Even as he grumbled to himself and scraped the char off of it in hopes of selling it to a customer too drunk to notice, those women remained seared into his mind’s eye... But he could sense them. And he knew to stay well away.

It was a hunch he had developed in his time, a gut feeling by which he could always determine a real-deal, hundred-man-killer cultivator from a wannabe. It wasn’t the way they looked - not the build, the clothes, the weapons, the eerily-glowing eyes, no. The higher-ranking Dragon Knights had all that and more, doubly so the knight-captain, Adalbert Von Wickten, but it was the felt presence that made a cultivator.

Cultivators brought with them prosperity and death in equal measure.

As far as Nestor’s experiences with cultivators went, they were temperamental, violent, and narcissistic - every last one of them. Such was his experience with what few cultivators he’d seen, or worse yet, met in person, each and every one of them the descendant of a “Heroic Family”, and each about as unstable and downright mental as the last.

…And now the tall one had turned around, and the two had begun walking straight towards his stand.