"I… don’t know,” Yan Yun replied, turning her eyes away from her spirit. “If I’m supposed to follow grandfather’s word, then I would be betrothed to Lord Zhou’s son, and eventually married. Perhaps that is what I should be doing, instead of plotting these silly plans to somehow walk away from these talks and end them before anything more could happen,” Yan Yun said, clenching her fists.“Does Yan Yun hear herself? Leiyu had never taken her to be so weak. To be one to give up so easily in the face of a challenge.”“Perhaps I am weak. Perhaps it was all a facade and the mask is slipping now. The world shall see me as nothing but a liar, a failure and a deviant. Someone who let down her family,” Yan Yun spoke, her eyes meeting to look into Leiyu’s as heat seeped into her voice.“Leiyu thinks Yan Yun is a liar, yes,” Leiyu said and Yan Yun’s eyes widened in surprise. “Only a liar can call all the years of effort she’d put in a facade, and only a liar would utter the words that she did. So

The Qi from the herbs had lashed out towards this place, intense enough to almost burn it if I hadn’t cut off the link in time. I’d tried cultivating through both of my cores as I connected myself to my spirit anchor, yet the bloodroot had refused to show any reaction.That began almost an entire week of madness and Qi-water energy drink filled days where I ran over and over to the library and other places, trying to find a way to induce faster growth through the plant.I tried a lot of methods. From crushing up mushrooms and then disintegrating them with my Gu, and artificially aging them, before mixing in the soil to finding the manure of some exotic spirit cow from a farm on the sect, yet nothing had worked so far.“The things I do in the name of science,” I muttered out loud, shaking my head as I turned to look at Ren lounging in his pond, with his arms and legs stretched out from his shell to soak in the sun in a pose oddly reminiscent of superman. I was starting to suspect that

Three days had passed since the first leaf had sprouted from the bloodroot and I found each passing day agonizingly slow. I’d spent some more time reading even more into the bloodroot and how the little plant spirit worked, but even on the second floor of the library, there was surprisingly little information to be found on it.The plant had grown into a bulb poking from the ground like a little blob of green and red. From what I’d read, it’d blossom into a flower, taking the form of its desire based on my own blood. The mental image I had right now was of a miniature root man looking just like me and running around speaking its name.I chuckled at the thought, and Flee squeaked in reply. It’d been a while since Flee had stayed with me and she was being excessively clingy, refusing to stay away from me for even a while, and I ended up indulging her anyway. Heavens know I’d missed her too. I wondered if this was what parents felt like when they sent their kids to school.I also felt cu

“Ouch!” I exclaimed, mostly from the surprise rather than any real pain. I looked down at the little plant spirit suckling on my palm, with two thorn-like fangs peeking through as it drank my blood. Streaks of red began to develop on the white flower on its head. I felt a sense of satisfaction coming from Twilight as it… (she?) had its fill.“You’re a thorny little plant spirit, huh?” I said, receiving a ‘Chii~’ from the little plant as it looked up at me, eyes shimmering. I felt a strange understanding with the plant spirit from our bond, yet the words that came from the plant weren’t words, but more sensations than anything. I could feel Twilight soaking in information as she glanced around curiously. I wondered if her being able to understand me was due to the fact that I’d shared my vitality with her.“Can you talk?” I asked Twilight as she shook her head. I frowned when I received a jumble of thoughts. She couldn’t talk because… she was different? Different understanding? I stare

It took me a day to finally create a version of the fire Gu pill that was exploding in the way I wanted it to. My lack of control over Gu and the corrosive nature of the energy make handling it a far more challenging task than Qi. But after a couple more tries, I'd managed to make enough working pills for my plans.Asking Nyan to go to Liuxiang again, I'd realized that I could just tell the cat what I wanted to say to Liuxiang and it'd be able to communicate that with Liuxiang's spirit. I wasn't sure why, or how that worked but Nyan had plenty of mysteries and I had other important things to work on, so I left the mystery be.A pouch hung at my waist, filled with five different metal cylinders, carved with thin lines and formations, that carried my Qi and Gu drugnades. I walked through the hidden grove that had become the impromptu meet up spot for everything shady I got up to by now and searched for a suitable patch of open land to work with.Twilight chimed happily, her eyes wide as