Book 3: Chapter 32: Resources Taken and Good Words |
Shui was halfway through her seventh revision of the auction house plan of conquering and domination when the window behind her, in the office she made for herself within the warehouse’s second floor, creaked open.
More like shrieked to announce an intruder.
Shui jumped out of her seat and nearly swung her hammer at the intruder only to freeze when she recognized the Qi associated with said intruder. She watched as the window simply opened, a leg swung over the sill, and a body followed with casual grace. The man landed before her like he had been doing said window slinking for a very long time with how professional he made it look.
Zhong Da landed on the warehouse floor without a sound.
His single arm adjusted the borrowed blade at his hip while his prosthetic, the Arm of the White Feathered Swan, caught the lamplight and threw pale reflections across the ceiling. He straightened his robes, brushed dust from his shoulder, and surveyed the room with a practised sweep cataloguing exits, threats, structural weaknesses, and the emotional state of every occupant within a single heartbeat.
His eyes found Shui.
Shui's face split into a grin so wide it threatened to bisect her skull. "Senior Zhong Da!"
She launched from Fao Wen's chair and crossed the room in two bounds. She slammed into him with a hug that would have shattered a lesser man's spine. Zhong Da absorbed the impact with a grunt and a half-step backward, his single hand finding the top of her head and holding it there for a moment before gently prying her off his midsection.
"Senior Zhong Da, you came to visit! Did you see the banner? Long Ti stitched it himself! It looks like a mushroom but it's actually a hammer and I think it's beautiful and everyone agrees because nobody has said otherwise and—"
Shui's grin held just as bright, beaming, stretched from ear to ear, and incandescent with the radiance of a girl who had done nothing wrong ever in her entire life and certainly not in the past week. "Just a couple!"
"Yeah?"
Shui nodded again and her grin intensified.
Her eyes crinkled into crescents and her cheeks bunched and her entire face committed to the performance of innocence with dedication.
Zhong Da stared at her. The stare lasted a few seconds as his eyebrows rose ever so slightly.
The few seconds was all it took for that innocent smile to waver as her cheeks started hurting her.
"Let me see them."
The grin cracked a hairline fracture running from the left corner of her mouth to somewhere behind her eyes where the panic lived. Her hands drifted toward the silk pouch at her hip, then stopped, then drifted again, then stopped again, performing a small dance of indecision that her body executed without consulting her brain.
"W-What for, Senior Zhong Da?" Her voice climbed half an octave as she took a few steps back to protect the pouch. "They're just a couple of Qi Stones that aren't really valuable and I was going to use them for a very important and noble purpose that serves the Hu Clan's interests and Ancestor's happiness and the betterment of all living things on this planet and also cake—"
Zhong Da's eyebrow rose. A single, devastating arch that communicated more scepticism than a thousand-word rebuttal could have achieved.
Shui's fight crumbled without another moment. She pulled the pouch free and held it out.
Zhong Da took it. His fingers closed around the silk and the Qi within pulsed against his palm. His expression didn't change, but his grip tightened by a fraction and the muscles along his arm flexed a few time. He opened the pouch, looked inside, closed it, looked at Shui, looked at the pouch again, closed his eye for a few seconds, opened them, and then tucked the pouch into his robes with the careful deliberation of a man handling something that could destabilise the geopolitical landscape of an entire continent if it fell into the wrong hands.
Which it very nearly had.
By the hands of a twelve-year-old girl who wanted to bake a cake.
"Take these instead." Zhong Da produced a different bag from within his robes. This one was a lot heavier and clinking with the unmistakable sound of Qi Stones that were still absurdly valuable by any normal standard but existed in a category that wouldn't cause the fabric of civilisation to unravel upon their public display.
He held it out to her.
Shui took the bag and stared at it. Then she stared at the empty space at her hip where the silk pouch had been.
Then she stared at Zhong Da's robes where her Qi Stones now resided, separated from her by a single layer of fabric and the immovable wall of a man who had survived bureaucratic buildings, Demonic Cultivators, the loss of an arm, the death of his progenitor, and the daily terror of serving a being he believed could unmake reality with a disappointed glance.
Her lower lip trembled.
"B-But those were mine," she whispered. "Ancestor gave them to me specifically and they were special and I was going to use them to buy the best ingredients in the whole city and make the greatest cake ever created and Ancestor was going to taste it and smile and be proud and—"
"These will buy you absolutely anything you would dream of," Zhong Da said. His voice carried no room for negotiation, appeal, reconsideration, or any of the dozen rhetorical strategies she had deployed against Long Ti, the old beggar, nine gang leaders, and roughly one thousand seven hundred armed cultivators over the past week. "And they won't cause total havoc and start a war of entire sects, clans, battle halls, demons and righteous cultivators, and even bring down a few Ancestors from said clans to boot."
Shui's lip trembled harder and eyes glistened.
The red miasma that usually curled around her ankles like affectionate snakes had retreated entirely, pulled so tight against her core that not a wisp escaped. She looked small in a way that had nothing to do with her physical size and everything to do with the specific devastation of a child who had been told that her most prized possession was actually a weapon of mass economic destruction.
She clutched the replacement bag to her chest and sniffled.
Zhong Da watched her for a moment before he finally sighed. The borrowed blade at his hip shifted as his weight redistributed and his single hand rose from his side.He patted her head. "You've done a fine job, Lady Shui, with these mongrels. Cleaned the streets up right and proper."
Shui's sniffling stopped mid-sniffle.
Her eyes, still glistening, went wide. The red rims that had been forming around them froze in place, caught between the momentum of tears and the sudden, violent arrival of something far more powerful than grief.
"R-Really?"
“Yeah. You’ve done good so far.” Zhong Da nodded. His hand lifted from her head and returned to his side.
He turned toward the window and vanished just as quickly as he arrived.
Vanishing into the air instead of jumping out.
Shui watched him go with her mouth hanging open and the replacement bag of Qi Stones pressed against her chest like a stuffed animal she'd been given to replace a favourite toy. Her eyes tracked his movement until he was finally gone and then for a bit longer to make sure he wasn’t about to come back and scare her again.
It took a moment before she was one hundred percent confident that she stood alone in the office.
The maps lay spread across the desk. The cake sketches sat in their pile. The half-eaten meat bun from Long Ti had been replaced by a fresh one that she would force herself to eat later because the old man's feelings mattered even if his cooking didn't. The pale red banner with its crooked mushroom-hammer hung on the wall behind her, catching the breeze from the open window.
She looked down at the replacement bag in her hands and opened it. Hesitating for a moment before she finally looked inside–
Her eyes went round.
The Qi Stones within were not the volcanic, reality-warping, continent-destabilising treasures her Ancestor had given her.
They were smaller and carried a pulse that was steady rather than overwhelming sensation she got from the others. But there were dozens of them packed tight against each other in neat rows, each one radiating enough concentrated energy to make a low level cultivator weep with gratitude and enough combined value to buy out every high-tier ingredient in the auction house's catalogue a few times over without triggering a single alarm, investigation, enforcement action, or cremation chute.
Zhong Da had thought of everything.
Shui closed the bag and pressed it against her chest again. The glistening in her eyes had shifted from the threat of tears to something brighter and fiercer.
Her lip stopped trembling and her chin rose ever so slightly.
The red miasma crept back around her ankles in slow, lazy curls.
"Long Ti!" she shouted toward the door. "Change of plans! We don't need the full battle formation anymore!"
Footsteps scrambled in the hallway. The door cracked open and Long Ti's face appeared in the gap, eyes wide, ledger clutched to his chest, expression cycling through its usual repertoire of dread, confusion, terror, and the resigned acceptance of a man whose life had become a series of sudden pivots dictated by a child with the strategic flexibility of a hurricane.
"W-What changed, Lady Shui?"
Shui held up the replacement bag and shook it. The Qi Stones clinked together with a sound that was pleasant, manageable, and would not summon imperial death squads.
"Senior Zhong Da came."
Long Ti's face went through six more expressions before settling on something that might have been relief if relief could be experienced by a man who had forgotten what the absence of terror felt like.
"He said I did a fine job, Long Ti." Her voice was quiet and nearly reverent. "He said I cleaned the streets up right and proper."
Long Ti blinked at her and his grip on the ledger loosened by a fraction.
For a brief moment, he had the kind smile of a loving grandfather who had seen his granddaughter happy.
Shui's grin returned. Not the manic, ear-splitting, soul-crushing grin of the Red Demon that had conquered nine gangs in a few days. Something smaller, warmer, and infinitely more dangerous because it belonged to a girl who had just discovered that doing good things earned praise from people she loved and that discovery was going to fuel every decision she made from this moment forward with unstoppable momentum.
"Tell Fao Wen to stand down the full mobilisation. We're going to the auction house with a small escort. Twenty people, tops. Clean robes, no weapons visible, and nobody threatens anyone unless I say so." She paused and tapped her chin. "Actually, make it thirty. And tell Shen Mei to have her people watch the exits from a distance. Just in case."
Long Ti scribbled furiously.
"And Long Ti?"
"Yes, Lady Shui?"
"Find me the best bakery we can use in the area. Not the mortal ones. I need to make a cake that doesn't taste like mud and sadness."
"At once, Lady Shui." He disappeared into the hallway.
Shui sat back down in Fao Wen's chair. Her feet didn't reach the ground. She swung them twice, clutched the bag of replacement Qi Stones to her chest, and stared at the open window where the afternoon light poured through unobstructed.
The breeze carried the distant sound of her forces standing down from battle stations. Weapons being sheathed, formations dissolving, half the criminals sounding upset but not loud enough to alert the Red Demon, and the other, wiser, half exhaling collectively as the word spread that the Red Demon had changed her mind and the auction house assault had been downgraded from a full-scale military operation to a shopping trip with bodyguards.
Shui hummed to herself and pulled the maps closer.
Mr. Mo Mo pulsed at her back with his titanic presence always there to support her every decision.
Senior Zhong Da said she'd done a fine job.
That was enough fuel to light the world on fire.
I have work to do and a cake to bake and I have to make Ancestor proud too. I’m the busiest bee in the whole city!