I was briefly held under close confinement until the Imperial guard people searched the premises and found the dead Chancellor and his cultivator guard slash stooge.
Once it became clear I wasn't a threat and was, in fact, the person they were coming to rescue, I was let go by the SWAT team who had been guarding the young master and Xiao Li. The three men and two women that comprised this attack force had the steely eyes of people who didn't fuck around.
I saw the same sort of eyes in really experienced infantry and special forces in my last life. My grandpa had an idiom to describe these sorts of people well, that they were "sudden death in both hands." They were all in the Foundation Establishment realm, as well, although I couldn't tell what stage.
"You're alive!" Xiao Li yelled, grinning and holding up my cat, who looked none too pleased. Finally, he dropped him, and Crow wandered up to me and allowed me to rub his head once before he wandered off to investigate the villa. I know the man was dead, but I still hoped he took a crap in the Chancellor's slippers. I'd noticed he had started acting a lot more cat-like; he even had a haughty attitude now.
The young Emperor took a look at me and smiled, "I'm glad to see you are alive, and hopefully, they didn't... hurt you, did they?" Even I was a bit amused. As far as the brat knew, I was a ringer that his brothel called in. I didn't expect him to care. He continued, "I have to apologise. I didn't realise that some of my enemies were aware of our chess lessons."
I realised that he was concerned that I had suffered some indignities and might be a bit worried he was responsible for it. I took that to mean that the Chancellor didn't have a good reputation with the ladies as a gentleman.
I tried to copy Liu Ruxue and caused a small fold-out fan to appear in my hand, covering half of my face. I then copied the best Hime-laugh that I had heard from watching anime in my past life.
I did it pretty well, almost being a shame that I didn't have the drill hair to go with it, "Ohohohoho, I appreciate your concern, and I assure you I have the exact same amount of virtue now as I did when they kidnapped me." This caused Xiao Li to visibly smirk, but the young Emperor looked very relieved. How cute.
I suppose he was indirectly responsible, but I didn't really blame him. I had tried using Invisibility to sneak out of the brothel, but I could have used Magic Aura on top of it. I was almost certain it was at least partially and possibly fully effective against a cultivator's spiritual sense now. I just didn't want to waste two spell slots at the time.
I wasn't the type of person who blamed others for what happened to me, except if they were the ones to actually do it. I resented it, in fact, as I felt it reduced my own agency. I could have even stayed in the Frolics, proverbially underneath the skirts of Fei Fei, but I decided against that, too. Still, I appreciated that he seemed to care, at least.
The young Emperor, whose name I still didn't know, kind of chuckled and said, "It appears we were a bit superfluous in the end, though. You even did me a favour in doing away with Chancellor Wang." His name was Wang? Will not make a dick joke. Will not make a dick joke—especially since I would be the only one to get it.
He seemed a little regretful and said, "I would have liked to ask him a couple of questions."
I perked up and hummed, "Well, if it's only a couple of questions, then I might be able to help you. There's no guarantee, though. Sometimes it is a bit finicky."
He raised an eyebrow, and the guard right behind him stared at me. The Emperor asked jokingly, "What, do you have his soul in your pocket?"
"Ahaha... no, of course not," I said with a smile. After all, I had already put his soul back in my dimensional storage. And I wasn't revealing my special athame to him. If it was confiscated, then I would be up the shit creek until I was at least as good a necromancer as Meril's mom was, "But I have a secret technique that can interpret and interrogate the residual memories located in the spirit which remains in an individual's corpse after they pass on."
"That... is a very interesting ability for a young lady that follows the Dao of Charm and Illusion," he said mildly.
I flipped the fan in front of my face again and giggled in an attempt to be coquettish from behind it, "Hehe. By the way, I didn't mean what I said when I said all that 'stupid Emperor' stuff a few days ago."
That caused him to grin, and he just said, "Hehe," just like I did, right back at me without any indication he wasn't going to have me forcibly shortened for the slight.
Finally, he said, "Actually, that would be a real help if you could do so. We need to go see the body, then?"
I nodded, and we walked together into the hallway where the Chancellor's desiccated corpse lay. I noticed the Emperor's personal bodyguard nudging him with a shoulder and indicating the body with a quiet, "Mmhmm."
While the young Emperor peered at the body closely, Xiao Li spared only a brief glance at the dead man before nodding. He then pulled out a small notebook, licked a finger, and flipped through two dozen or so pages before producing a charcoal pencil and making two thick solid lines on the paper, seemingly striking something through that he wrote in the past.
"Uh... miss Mei Wen, did you cast an illusion on him that he was a raisin so strong that his body tried to convert itself into one?" the Emperor asked very amusedly.
"Hehe," I deflected. I then got out the things necessary to cast Speak With The Dead as a ritual, as I was out of spell slots due to my aforementioned raisining of this gentleman. Wait, he said raisins. That meant that they had grapes around here somewhere. I would love to have grapes and maybe actual wine that wasn't 100-proof and mostly gross.
"Okay, after I cast the spell, you only get five questions. They can't be too obscure or indirect, either. Direct questions work best. If you only really need a couple of questions asked, feel free to use one of them on an answer you already know, but you know that I don't know for peace of mind that I'm not just casting an illusion on you and making up the answers," I explain to him.
He looked like he was about to discount this possibility but then nodded and said, "That's a good idea. I don't think you'd do that, but depending on what he says, I'll need to tell others, and it will make things ... easier."
I cast the spell and then hid behind my fan again. Sometimes, the spirit would refuse to answer a question if their murderer asked questions or was even recognisable, but they weren't exactly thinking. Just obscuring my face would make me impossible to recognise, though. I could force them to answer too, but it would waste a minimum of one, and occasionally two questions, to do it, so it was better just to stay out of the way.
Even I had to admit that Speak With the Dead was rather... cinematic. As the raisin-man floated up off the ground and opened his lifeless eyes, glowing green, the Emperor, bodyguard and Xiao Li looked a bit icked out, and even Xiao Li said, "Ew."
The first question was used to ask some verifying information, and it was something about his first wife. He was lucky; necromancers had already researched these types of spells, and these spirits could only answer questions they actually remembered. If he had asked his first wife's birthdate, he might have gotten an 'Uhh...' in response if he wasn't a particularly attentive husband.
His next question was pertinent, and it wasn't that I enjoyed eavesdropping, but I couldn't move away! Haha, actually, I loved eavesdropping! The Emperor asked, "Where did you hide the grand seal of the Exchequer?"
"...Yan'er's ... house ... hidden ... safe..." he said. Yan could be a fairly feminine name, as one of the meanings was "pretty jade," and that, combined with the diminutive, made me sure that this lady was either his daughter or mistress. Probably the latter, since the Imperial forces would be sure to detain and investigate all of his family.
Speaking of, I was a little curious about what the Emperor intended to do with the families of his defeated opponents. In a lot of ways, the sure knowledge of reincarnation made people a bit bloodthirsty with this sort of thing, I thought, and it wasn't uncommon in the histories I read for a strategy I'd call "pulling up the grass by its roots" to be utilised. I wouldn't be surprised if they were put to death. Cersei Lannister would fit right in here.
The only other interesting question was the last one, and he asked, "Who else were you conspiring with?"
There was a pause long enough that I thought the question was too broad and it wouldn't work, but then the corpse said, "...Abyssal ... Serpent ... Cult..." and then the spell ended, and the corpse flopped back down on the ground and closed its eyes.
This got a hiss from everyone present except Xiao Li and me. Xiao Li just frowned and muttered quietly, "Why do they always have sinister names? If I was going to start an evil sect, I'd call it the Sunlight Happiness Society. Nobody would suspect us until it was too late." He made a good point there, but I was a little worried my way of thinking had started contaminating him, as I would have said that.
The Emperor said, "I'll have to ask you to keep what you heard here to yourself. This sect is really just the catspaw of one of our neighbours when they want to do deniable things."
Ooh, interesting. I started imagining a Tom Clancy novel in my head, but in Magic Chinaland, where the cutouts... get cut out! *Swishswish*
I imagined sabres were involved. I shook my head, realising I was still a bit in an altered mental state and calmed down. At least I wasn't doing cartwheels anymore.
One of the cultivators dragged, by the ankle, the dead Foundation Establishment guy out of the room where I had been interned. I was a little disappointed I wasn't going to get his bones, but his skull had exploded along with his head, so I wouldn't be able to make a complete set skeleton anyway, and I did prefer not to mix and match, even if it was possible. It upset my sense of elegance to do it if there wasn't an emergency situation.
Plus, I'd have to dig out all of the shards of his skull from wherever they went so I could use Mend Bone over and over. Since they were no doubt covered in bits of brain and scattered across the entire room, I didn't think it was worth it even if these people would let me and not look at me like an insane person while I did it. I wanted a Foundation Establishment skeleton, but I didn't want one that badly.
The guard next to the Emperor nudged him again and said quietly, "...see, this Foundation Establishment cultivator saw how harmless she was, and it surprised him so much that his head exploded." The Emperor scowled at him, and I narrowed my eyes. I knew when I was being made fun of, but I didn't precisely know why.
Although, perhaps if this was the Emperor's regular bodyguard, he might have been lurking every time I met the young master, and I could see him, perhaps, calling me harmless or something along those lines. I smirked.
I bet that his bodyguard was probably one of his family members, too, or he knew him very well, at the very least, as they were dealing with each other in a very familiar fashion.
"Well, I am glad that you survived this unpleasantness," I said genuinely to the youngster.
He rubbed the back of his head, "Well, truthfully, I wasn't in any danger. My imperial mother has given me many protective treasures, and she's at the peak of the Golden Core realm, just waiting for the right time for her to transcend her tribulation and form her Nascent Soul. I suppose this was kind of a test for me. If things had gone poorly, she told me she would have just saved me, and we would have left to go somewhere else."
I stared at him, aghast. I was alright in thinking of him as a comrade when he was just some Emperor, but being the son of a peak Golden Core cultivator? Was it really alright that this bourgeois brat was here slumming amongst the rest of us workers?!
It also made me believe that this woman may have taken over this nation solely as a training ground for her son, which was extravagant beyond what I could even consider.
She was called the Dowager Empress, but nobody really knew anything about her husband, just like I didn't know about the identity of the young Emperor here. The histories of the nation were written in a way that implied that the current imperial family went back many, many generations, but perhaps they didn't. Or maybe she married the last Emperor and then bumped him off after he performed his stud duties.
I decided to be impertinent and ask, "Uh... is your mother from this part of the world, or did she just move here recently?"
He chuckled, "She was the youngest daughter of the previous Emperor's grandfather and left the nation instead of being married off or murdered by her siblings. She returned many years later when she had reached her current cultivation realm."
That she may have done away with at least some of her siblings, if they were still alive, went without saying. That experience also might explain why she only had one son, too, although that was just a guess on my part as the young master had a strong only-child energy.
I thought it would be insane to have multiple children and expect them to live some Battle Royale-style childhood where only the strongest survived to claim the throne, but that wasn't uncommon here. It wasn't even uncommon back on Earth a few hundred years ago, really.
The son of the Core Formation powerhouse was still busy nipping things and, I suspect, people in the bud, but he did detail one of his guards to escort us back to our rental home and even said he would have our place watched for our protection until we left in six weeks.
That didn't really please me, but we were already under their power here. The only way we were getting on that airship was if they let us at this point, but at least there was no talk of us remaining here or offers to join his Army or harem.
After we returned to the villa, Xiao Li told me his side of things. He noticed something was wrong when my butler-skellington tried to murder him the next day. He claimed that he knew something was wrong immediately since, no matter what, I was very religious about recasting the spells keeping him under control.
He did end up going to pay Fei Fei a visit, but they were all very polite to him. That didn't get him anywhere, but eventually, he had the idea that since I could detect the direction Crow was, then the reverse should also be the case.
He had to wait until Crow wandered back into the villa, and then he bullied the cat into finding me, eventually narrowing my location down to an area that was something akin to a gated residential community that he couldn't easily penetrate. That was where the little Emperor's men found him, as he was very suspicious and lurking about, and after that, it was Bob's your uncle.
"Thank you for tracking me down," I told him, a little .touched at his concern.
He chuckled, "Ah, no problem. Uhh... by the way, I may have... sort of... totally broken the skeleton."
I waved him off. I still had the other two skeletons, including one from the higher level seven cultivation guy. Plus, unless he went total Hulk Smash on him, I could fix him up again with a couple of hours of effort.
After stir-frying some thunderfowl meat, I grabbed Crow by the scruff and retreated into my bedroom. Crow had gotten a taste for souls, for some reason, and had often been bugging me about eating more. He didn't even eat them so much as act as a portal, but still, it wasn't as though I was an avenging angel. I'd get them when I got them; I wasn't about to go out and seek out evildoers to smite.
There were enough around that I felt pretty confident about settling this illegitimate debt eventually. I had already examined myself in depth again, and the familiar hooks that surrounded my soul and spirit from Oriella's magical contract were gone. I took that to mean that I had fulfilled the conditions, and there was no legitimate way I was on the hook for a number of souls equivalent to forty-five hundred karmic units. If Judge Wu had added a similar hook to my soul, it was at a level that I could not detect.
That reveal made me feel better about my situation, actually. I was just being bullied because he was stronger than me. I could actually accept that a lot better than the alternative, surprisingly. It made me want to get a notebook and start writing down names like Xiao Li did, though.
I pulled my athame out and fished out the soul of the Foundation level cultivator first and held it out in my glowing hands to Crow, who pounced at it and gobbled it up. However, almost instantly, he sneezed three times and threw the soul back up, and an automated message was delivered to me through our familiar bond.
It was telling me that this soul was only worth zero point one five units, which was below the cut-off of zero point five units, and therefore wasn't accepted. It reminded me that if I continued to submit unacceptable souls, I would be charged a fee for assessing them, and it advised me to thoroughly inspect the sin balance of a soul prior to submitting it.
I was shocked that Judge Wu didn't charge me this "fee" on a first infraction. It was listed as one unit per soul, so I guess my tentative plans to go find a huge battle and use Invisibility to collect as many mortal souls as I could and rapidly feed them to my cat was out of the question. I was hoping to make up my business in volume, sure in the cynical conclusion that the average person was at least a little bad.
I stopped to consider why there was a minimum at all. If I thought about it like a business, though, it was clear that there would be a fixed per-head cost in what was ultimately a private prison. I was sure that if prisons in my old life were paid on a sliding scale based on the crime, then they wouldn't want to house jaywalkers either—and this was before possible capacity issues. I didn't know if his private Hell had an upper capacity, but if it did, he would lose a lot of "revenue" if he filled it up with only mildly evil people.
Or would he? I didn't know if the time dilation worked in his favour or if that was only on the official Hell; perhaps it became somewhat difficult to fill up due to that factor, though.
I guess it didn't matter, though. I was only a bit surprised that the cultivator wasn't that much of an evildoer, but I suppose he was just a mercenary, then? Unlucky.
I had grabbed the free-floating soul again. My athame was a magical device, and while I was using it, my hands had a kind of spiritual heft, and I could hold souls, although they felt kind of like that slime toy that Nickolodeon sold and would drop on people's heads, so the soul could slip through your fingers if you weren't careful.
What to do with him? I thought about it for a short time and finally came to the conclusion that there was only one thing I could do: let him go, so I did. It wasn't that I didn't hold a grudge, but he was already dead. I wasn't about to go Sith Lord on his ass and keep his soul in my pocket until I could "level up" enough to torture him just for being my enemy.
Besides, I had no present way to identify the karmic balance of a soul, so it would be really easy to go too far, and then I would be committing sins myself. I wanted to try to stay in the straight and narrow with a positive balance in this weird fucking sin cosmology. If only to keep my options open.
I pulled out the Chancellor's soul, and Crow peered at it, suspicious, as the last one clearly didn't taste good to him. Finally, he shrugged and grabbed it with his paws. He didn't eat this one right away. For a moment, he rolled around with it, even bunny-kicking it with his back legs before finally swallowing it. He looked content this time.
I got the message that the soul was worth three hundred and ninety two units, and I hummed, a little conflicted. I had to admit, I was hopeful that this guy would be worth the whole balance, but sin was difficult to understand here.
I didn't know for sure, but I was pretty sure that killing people in war wasn't considered especially heinous; plus, it was a trickle-up economy.
If a superior ordered that a village of innocents be put to the sword, I thought that most of the sin would accumulate on the individual soldiers doing the murdering.
Like the Nuremberg trials, the excuse that 'I was following orders' wasn't an excuse. Then, it would trickle up, with some being deposited on every person in the chain of command until it landed on the one who issued the orders. That meant, paradoxically, that those highest up didn't actually accumulate a lot of sin, even for depraved activities they ordered their men to do, if there was a sufficient number of people in the chain to go along with it and become sinners, too.
Also, the karmic merits of nations worked the same way. Surprisingly, there actually was something akin to a basic level of healthcare provided to citizens here, as well as alms provided by the state to the truly indigent, a lot of which was intentionally directly paid for by the Imperial family—especially orphanages, children's clinics, and food provided to families with children. I think children were emphasised because children had yet to sin at all, themselves.
If helping evil people was a sin, then blanket charity would likely help a lot of slightly evil people if my cynical assumption about mankind was correct. That was a bit of a difficult conclusion to accept from my previous life. I had volunteered at homeless shelters and soup kitchens... would that be a net negative here in Magic Chinaland? No, I just didn't believe it.
In any event, this empire-wide charity was a pragmatic decision to attempt to balance out the evil that any head of state would have to do to stay in power.
Magic Chinaland Machiavelli would add a second clause to the famous line where he wrote that it was necessary for a prince wishing to hold his own to know how to do wrong. He'd add a caution to make sure to balance out the wrongs you did so you didn't go to Hell after you died.
I also suspected the more the people were satisfied and content with their government, the better the "dragon qi" of the place would be, but I didn't really know anything about that.
Well, almost four hundred was still nearly four hundred. It was better than one at a timing with a soul that was only worth point seven or one and a half.
I only needed something like ten more ridiculously stereotypical Jafar-like villains, and I would be square.
The loot I got was a bit underwhelming, while at the same time, I was totally stoked. I had been hoping for a flying treasure from the Foundation Establishment cultivator, like maybe a flying shuttle, if not an entire flying boat.
These vehicles could be shrunk down and put in your pocket, and then they'd expand to full size when you used them. I was also hoping for an earth-grade spirit tool. However, the cultivator was a bit destitute.
Still, he still had over a hundred middle-grade spirit stones, which was an incredible amount of wealth to me. He only had a peak-quality mortal-grade spirit tool, though, so he was using a tool from his Qi gathering days, or he just never got the money for a better one.
On the plus side, it was a sword. I think he sold my cursed sword or got rid of it. He might have been able to tell it was cursed, but this Green Bamboo Sword was better, anyway.
The Chancellor's smaller pouch, however, was more disappointing. I suppose he had reached the stage where he didn't carry his wealth upon his person, which made me a bit upset that the young Emperor and Xiao Li had "rescued" me so quickly. I had planned on looting the safehouse down to the bedrock, after all.
Still, there were about a dozen small pill bottles made out of jade that were designed to contain the medicinal power of alchemical pills. My Identify spell was a bit unreliable on alchemical products, so I would just ask Xiao Li to tell me what they were later. I was in no rush.
I hadn't slept in the past few days. I just used repeated castings of the third-level Enchantment spell Catnap to get rest in ten-minute increments. This was a tragedy because sleeping had always been one of my great joys. Dreaming was and always has been a hobby of mine, and it was a little sad that I needed less and less sleep as I have grown stronger. I didn't know what I would do if and when I didn't need to sleep at all anymore.
Still, for now, it wasn't an issue. The pep I had received from draining the Chancellor had finally worn off, so I stripped and climbed underneath the silk sheets in my bed, fell asleep quickly, and dreamed.
---xxxxxx---
Somewhat surprisingly, we had no more excitement for the rest of our time in the Qian empire. I smoothly stepped into the fourth stage of the Qi Gathering realm a few days after the rescue from my durance vile, and I had to admit that I was moving quickly up the stages, at least from what I could tell from other cultivators I talked to.
The young Emperor Hongli, who had finally told me his name, still called for me to play chess with him, but only once a week or so as he was still putting out fires.
Xiao Li went out on a small trip to nearby forests to hunt demonic beasts for three weeks after he found out how much the trip on the airship would cost, and I had the idea that he either didn't have enough spirit stones or would have been completely beggared if he had to pay the full fare.
Although I could cast Tiny Hut now, I declined to go on his hunting expedition if it involved staying out in the wilderness for so long, but I did lend him my two spatial pouches so he could bring back more game in exchange for a small share of the meat, which I would either cook myself or possibly pay one of the trainee immortal chefs in the Frolics to cook for me, then I could store it in my hammerspace. Spatial pouches didn't stop time, so my storage still had significant advantages.
My last chess game with Hongli came the day before the airship was supposed to arrive, and he had a complicated look on his face. He had reached the point where I very rarely won against him, and I had to admit that he was really gifted at the game, compared to me, who was merely really gifted at the game for a hobbyist.
"What's the reason that you cultivate?" Hongli asked randomly in the middle of the game.
I blinked. That was a complicated question, and if you included Merildwen's previous life of studying magic as cultivation, then the only answer I could give was that I fell into it randomly. However, I took his question to mean why I continued to proceed down the path, as I could settle down in a random village and live a peaceful life if I wanted to.
I didn't have any overarching goals of revenge like Xiao Li did. He finally told me that the main reason he cultivated was to "kill a certain man." He sounded totally like Sasuke-kun when he said that. It almost made me snort with laughter. Still, he had a reason to demonstrate to his family that he wasn't trash and also to kill the people behind his parents' deaths. As for me? I frowned.
I finally opened my mouth and said, "I have no real ambitions, young master. I am just unwilling to be a nobody, I suppose. I just want to live an exceptional life and be as free as possible."
He grinned, "I think you underestimate yourself, Wen. Wanting to be free from fetters of all kinds is one of the biggest ambitions of them all."
Was that true? I couldn't detect any falsehood to it, especially given this world. I looked down at my General sitting in the palace on the board. He would be captured soon, so I just forfeited. I decided to learn carving just so I could carve chess-like pieces for Xiangqi instead of these circular tiles with characters on them. I couldn't tip over my General in defeat if it was just a small tile on the board.
"I have one request," Hongli said seriously after accepting my forfeit.
I tilted my head to the side and asked, "What is it?"
"Can I rub your ears?" he asked.
My ears twitched, and I shook my head and said firmly, "No."
When I saw that he had a face full of unwillingness, I sighed and elaborated, "It's an erogenous zone."
That caused him to blush. I hoped I hadn't awoken an ear fetish in the young monarch. Still he sighed and nodded, "Very well. Perhaps we'll see each other again."
I frowned. The world was so large that I didn't see myself "going backwards" when there were still new parts to explore. He saw this on my face and waved a hand, saying, "Don't worry, I won't be Emperor forever."
I blinked. Wasn't that the idea, though, when you became Emperor?
"Ah. My mom has a specific cultivation method in mind for me, but for best results, I have to use a different one, one that highly involves Karma and the Dragon Qi of a nation, up until the peak of the Foundation Establishment realm. After I reach that level, I will abdicate and let one of my grand-nephews or grand-nieces take over," he said mildly.
I stared at him with a face that looked like I had taken a bite out of a lemon. I was right! This entire place was merely a training ground for him! Oh, I felt the sting of the lack of generational qi-wealth that this brat had at his fingertips. Did he even have a spatial pouch? I bet he had one of the legendary spatial rings, full to the brim from hand-me-down treasures his capitalist mom had given him! It was almost enough to make me join the Green Party on the spot!
"What? What?!" he asked.
I shook my head and said, "I was just overcome with envy for a moment, young master."
That caused him to grin, and I nodded, standing up, "Perhaps we'll meet again. I intend to settle down, at least for a little while, at the Silver Serenities Sword School, assuming they don't tell me to take a hike."
Hongli stood as well, "Until we meet again."
"Until we meet again," I agreed.