I am the Heroine’s Master?

AN: Posting this chapter early due to some medical / family issues on my end. I likely won't have time to check or post anything later today. I'll also be making a separate feedback post now that Book 1 is finished.

Thanks for reading!

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The Imperial Capital of the great Xiang Empire was a place of wonder.

In all the continent, there was not one city that came close to matching it in size or splendor. Whether they were wandering cultivators from the distant frontier passes or pampered scions of the wealthiest noble houses, all had the same stunned, almost reverent reaction upon seeing it for the first time: wonder, hunger, and something perilously close to worship. Not worship for the living rulers who sat upon the Celestial Throne - no one was quite that naïve - but for the immense, crushing weight of the past that hung over the city like an unseen sky. The capital was ancient even by the standards of empires, and it rested on foundations that predated the Xiang dynasty by an age that scholars had long since stopped trying to measure.

For the Imperial Capital was one of the last surviving remnants of the world that had existed before the Shattering.

Or rather, it sat atop the ruins of one.

In shape, the city was a circle, an impossibly vast ring of civilization pressed into the earth. Massive walls of pale stone enclosed it, their surfaces smooth and sheer as though quarried from a single mountain and polished by a hand the size of a small god. The walls rose so high that clouds gathered along their upper battlements, and so thick that entire fortresses had been hollowed out within them across the centuries, like burrows carved into the body of something that had died long ago and simply never fallen. Travelers approaching from the open plains would catch sight of those walls days before they reached the gates, a thin white line stretched across the horizon like the rim of the world itself, a promise that the world did, in fact, have edges, even if this particular edge was manmade.

Two monumental avenues divided the city within. One ran north to south, the other east to west, and where they crossed stood the ancient heart of the capital. These were not streets in any ordinary sense. They were vast engineered corridors of stone and spiritwork, wide enough to swallow entire towns whole. Armies marched their full breadth without bunching. Merchant caravans numbered in the thousands and moved like slow rivers along their length, barely a ripple in the flow. In places the avenues broadened into plazas large enough to host entire festivals, while elsewhere they passed beneath layered arches and colossal gates that had stood unchanged since before the empire drew its first breath.

These two great arteries divided the city into four equal quadrants.

Each quadrant was its own world.

Within them lay administrative regions so large that any other nation would have simply called them cities and been done with it. Each region contained hundreds of districts, and every district was itself a small city: endless seas of houses and courtyards, markets stretching street after street after street, schools, temples, gardens, granaries, hospitals, spirit halls, training grounds, canals, and reservoirs. Entire populations were born, lived, married, and died within the boundaries of a single district and never found occasion to leave it. The districts were designed to be self-sufficient. Most exceeded the specification.

A few hundred districts made a division. Close to a thousand divisions filled a quadrant. Counted together, the capital ceased to resemble a city at all and became something closer to a continent made of stone, tile, and living humanity.

The Imperial Capital was said to span a hundred thousand li.

Most people believed that was a lie.

It was clearly much larger.

Scholars debated the true figure endlessly, but the honest answer was that no one had ever measured the full breadth of the city in a single survey. The outer districts faded through layer after layer of walls, canals, and further districts without number, until the idea of a final boundary became almost theoretical. Even maps of the capital were incomplete things, assembled from fragments compiled by different administrations across different centuries, full of contradictions and polite omissions.

For cultivators, the scale was not an abstraction. It was a painful reality.

A Foundation Establishment cultivator could cross an ordinary city in minutes. Here that speed meant almost nothing. Flying from one division to the next was a long and exhausting journey even without stopping to rest. Crossing an entire quadrant required planning, and supplies, and a certain stubborn refusal to admit how long it was taking. The view from above never changed, or seemed never to change. Rooftops blurred into districts, districts into divisions, divisions into stretches of civilization that continued past the horizon and continued beyond that. Many young cultivators made such journeys once in their lives to prove they could. Most turned back at the halfway mark.

Not because they were lost. Navigation formations marked the skies above the major avenues with admirable clarity. They turned back because the city kept going and gave no sign of intending to stop.

The standing joke among long-distance travelers was that it was easier to reach the Great Wall in the far north, or to sail to the Thousand Shattered Islands in the southern seas, than to cross from one side of the capital to the other. The joke had the uncomfortable quality of being true.

Core Formation cultivators could cross entire quadrants, but even they rarely did so casually. Such journeys were undertaken when great families relocated, when sects moved their branches, when officials were reassigned to distant ministries. Crossing from one quadrant to another meant leaving behind a familiar world and entering one that might as well have been a different country, with different dialects, different markets, different sects and noble houses ruling over different territories. Only Nascent Soul cultivators moved freely through the full breadth of the capital.

Even they rarely bothered.

The truth of the Imperial Capital was simple: no matter how powerful you became, the city remained vast enough that it could never truly be known. Whole divisions lay quiet and ancient, built atop ruins from before the Shattering, and every generation uncovered something new buried beneath the foundations; formations, relics, tunnels, the quiet evidence of civilizations that had lived and vanished and left their bones for future empires to build upon. The Xiang dynasty ruled the capital, and it was often said that this single city held more power, more people, and more buried secrets than the entirety of the territory the empire claimed beyond its walls. Provinces could rebel. Borders could shift. Dynasties could rise and collapse in the outer world. The capital endured with the quiet gravity of something that had already outlived everything once before.

Little wonder that the rulers of the empire rarely troubled themselves to leave it.

Or, in truth, to leave its heart.

At the exact center of the city, where the two great avenues crossed and the four quadrants converged, a palace rose that dwarfed everything for miles around. It was the residence of the Immortal known simply as the Emperor – the Six-Eared General, founder of the Xiang dynasty – and it had served as the seat of imperial governance for longer than most nations had existed. If the city was great, the palace was grand. If the city was powerful, the palace was something close to divine. If the city was the empire, then the palace was its true capital, and the city surrounding it was merely the palace's outermost courtyard.

Like the city beneath it, the palace had not been built by the Xiang. It was a relic from the age before the Shattering, a structure whose origins had been swallowed by the same cataclysm that had broken the world and scattered the remnants of the old civilizations across the continent. The emperors of Xiang had merely claimed it, inheriting a throne that had already been ancient when their ancestors were still wandering cultivators with no fixed home.

In form, the palace was a vast wooden fortress rising in tiered layers, each tier a perfect square, each successive level resting atop the one beneath it like a mountain carved into terraces. From a distance it read almost simply, a geometric stack of timber walls and sweeping tiled roofs, but that simplicity only threw its impossible scale into sharper relief. The lowest tier alone stretched a thousand li from one wall to the next. Its lacquered beams were the color of deep red earth. Its sweeping roofs curved outward in great arcs at their edges, reaching toward the sky as though reluctant to acknowledge that they could not quite touch it. Vast gates of dark wood and bronze stood at the cardinal directions, each large enough for entire armies to march through without slowing, fronted by courtyards of white stone so broad that the opposite wall was barely visible on overcast days.

Yet what visitors saw upon passing those gates was only the surface. The palace was not merely large. It was a spatial realm.

Its interior had been folded through ancient formations and dimensional techniques that no living cultivator now fully understood. Corridors extended far beyond the distances the outer walls should have permitted. Courtyards opened into landscapes where entire forests grew beneath artificial skies. Rivers ran through valleys carved within pocket realms, their waters feeding lakes where spirit beasts drifted through morning mist. The palace contained mountains. It contained seas. Within its lowest tier alone lay territories larger than the capital that ringed it, divided into administrative regions maintained by imperial officials and ancient bureaucracies that had persisted since before the dynasty's founding.

Above that first tier rose the second, and above the second the third, each level smaller than the one below yet still so vast that the mind resisted the arithmetic of it. At a certain height the upper tiers vanished into the clouds. Legends claimed there were thirty-three layers in total. Others insisted there were more. No one living could say with any certainty, and the palace offered no clarification.

The uppermost layers were reserved for the Emperor, his closest kin, and the ancient powers that served the throne. Some said the highest tiers were not merely spatial expansions but entire worlds folded inward upon themselves, domains where the laws of reality answered to the formations that sustained them rather than the other way around. Whether those tales were accurate or simply the exaggerations of frightened officials who had spent too long imagining what lay above them, no one outside the imperial household could say.

What was certain: the Imperial Capital was already so vast that a person could spend their entire life within it and never see more than a fragment of its whole. The palace at its center was larger still. A world contained within another world, rising endlessly upward while stretching infinitely inward, a structure so immense and so removed from ordinary life that it might as well have been a separate realm.

Somewhere beyond the clouds, at a height that rendered the city below into a faint geometry of rooftops and canals, sat the throne of the Six-Eared General.

None of which had anything to do with Cai Jian.

He was one of the many guards stationed at one of the countless Dragon Gates carved into the outer walls of the city. Unlike the Xuanwu Gates below, which swallowed the endless streams of merchants, travelers, and pilgrims arriving on foot or by caravan, the Dragon Gates were reserved for those who flew. Set high into the pale stone ramparts themselves, their enormous archways allowed cultivators to enter and depart through the air without descending into the mortal crush below.

There were thousands of such gates along the walls' vast circumference.

Cai Jian was assigned to Dragon Gate Number Two Hundred and Thirty-Eight.

On this day, as on every day before it, he stood at his post in polished armor, spine straight, gaze steady, and inspected the cultivators who passed through the archway into the greatest city in the world. The work was simple enough. Incoming cultivators slowed as they approached, presented their tokens or travel seals, endured a brief sweep from the formation arrays set into the arch, and continued on their way into the sky lanes of the capital. Some descended toward the districts below. Others stayed high, vanishing into the distant haze where towers and floating platforms dotted the upper air.

Cai Jian watched them all with the same practiced calm.

He had obtained this post years ago when he finally broke through into the Foundation Establishment realm. For a cultivator without powerful backing, it had been considered a fortunate appointment. The pay was steady, the duties stable, and the position placed him inside the administrative structure of the capital rather than leaving him to drift through the outer districts like so many other unaffiliated cultivators of his realm, making their living on odd jobs and hoping for opportunities that never quite materialized.

If, someday, he managed to break through the bottleneck of the final stage and advance into Core Formation, his prospects would improve considerably. Core Formation cultivators rarely stood guard at gates. They became supervisors, inspectors, administrators of formations, commanders of patrol units: the sort of officials who spent their days seated comfortably while others did the standing.

Foundation Establishment cultivators like Cai Jian remained the ones who worked.

Still, it was a respectable life. As for the Nascent Soul realm, the thought scarcely entered his mind at all.

The Imperial Capital held the greatest concentration of Nascent Soul cultivators on the entire continent. In many of the city's divisions there was at least one such figure presiding over sect branches, noble estates, or imperial offices. Their presence was so common within the capital that stories of their movements occasionally filtered down even to the ordinary districts. Yet for someone like Cai Jian, the realm of Nascent Soul did not feel distant in the way a difficult mountain peak might feel distant. It felt nonexistent. It was not a dream deferred. It was simply something that belonged to other people entirely.

Other people, such as the woman currently speaking with his supervisor.

The Imperial Examination had begun, and the capital was overflowing with cultivators who had traveled from every province of the empire to test their talent and fortune. The sky lanes were crowded. The gates were busier than usual. The standing order from above was simple: process arrivals quickly and avoid unnecessary delays.

Yet this particular Fairy had approached the gate and politely asked for guidance, and that single act had proven sufficient to draw Xu Chuanli from his customary position of dignified uselessness.

Moments earlier, the man had been reclining in the shade of the gate pavilion with his hookah, producing fragrant clouds of smoke with the languid satisfaction of someone who had long since made peace with doing as little as possible. The hookah was a recent affectation that Cai Jian found faintly baffling; in the last few years, half the city seemed to have acquired a pipe of some description, jade pipes, lacquered pipes, pipes carved from bone, small hookahs shaped like crouching animals. Entire markets had appeared to supply the trend. Cai Jian had never understood it, but Xu Chuanli had embraced the habit with the fervor of a man who had been searching his whole life for something to do with his hands.

Now Xu Chuanli stood upright for the first time all afternoon, smiling broadly as he answered the woman's questions with exaggerated enthusiasm and a volume of voice intended for an audience larger than was currently present.

The beauty speaking with him was an early Core Formation cultivator. Cai Jian was not foolish enough to entertain real hopes regarding someone like her, but the sight still stirred something restless in his chest. With enough luck, and enough time, he might one day break through to that august realm as well. He had already passed a hundred years of age; if he did not attempt that final push toward Core Formation now, then when would he?

And when that day came, his life would change. Gate guards like him were Foundation Establishment cultivators. Supervisors were Core Formation. The position might not be glamorous, but it was stable. When he advanced, he too could move into the shaded pavilion, review tokens from a comfortable seat, and allow younger guards to handle the tedious parts of the job.

Cai Jian allowed himself another quick glance toward the beauty before immediately looking away again. He was not the only one. His fellow guard, Wan De, was also stealing furtive looks from the corner of his eye. Both of them watched as Xu Chuanli laughed loudly at something the woman had said, his voice booming across the gate platform.

Xu Chuanli was the Core Formation cultivator assigned to oversee Dragon Gate Number Two Hundred and Thirty-Eight. In practice that meant he spent most of his time locked inside his comfortable office, smoking his hookah and doing as little work as possible. Cai Jian had endured the arrangement for decades. Xu Chuanli was not a man who inspired respect. His face looked more suited to hauling rocks in a quarry than holding an official post, and his broad, heavy body suggested a kitchen helper who ate more leftovers than he carried. Yet the heavens had their own sense of humor, and so Cai Jian and the other guards had been serving under him for years.

Today, however, the man looked almost respectable.

Mostly because he was standing beside the woman.

Cai Jian generally scoffed when people described someone as a "jade beauty," but in this case the words felt almost accurate. She was the sort of woman the word "jade beauty" had been coined to describe and then spent centuries failing to adequately capture. Her hair fell down her back in a smooth dark cascade that caught the afternoon light like still water. Violet eyes that held an easy warmth when they moved. Pale, flawless skin. A face that managed to be delicate without being fragile; the kind of face that made Xu Chuanli's loud jokes seem genuinely amusing instead of the social chore they were.

When she laughed, her teeth flashed white and perfectly even, which was, Cai Jian noted with the eye of a man who had spent years stationed at a gate and learned to notice such details, not nothing. In certain districts of the capital, married women dyed their teeth black as a mark of status and custom. It was far from universal, but it was common enough that the absence meant something, or at least permitted speculation.

And if she had come to the capital for the Imperial Examination…

Cai Jian allowed the thought to bloom for one indulgent moment before crushing it firmly underfoot.

Still, he could not help watching her. Madam Jinjing at Dragon Gate Three Hundred and Four was beautiful as well, but she treated every cultivator beneath Core Formation as though they were a minor inconvenience she was nobly enduring. Anyone who looked at her too long received a cold glare and the distinct impression they had committed a social offense whose name they would never learn. This woman was different. She seemed not just beautiful but genuinely pleasant, which was the rarer quality of the two, in Cai Jian's experience.

Lost in these thoughts, he did not immediately notice the second arrival.

The newcomer had stopped a short distance away and was waiting. Several moments passed. Then came a polite, soft clearing of the throat.

Cai Jian did not react.

A second throat-clearing followed, louder.

Still nothing.

The third attempt had acquired a strained, unmistakable edge: an ahem that was barely disguising itself as anything other than an expression of irritation, and that finally snapped Cai Jian back to himself.

He jerked upright at once, face coloring. The visitor wore hooded travel robes that concealed most of his features, but the aura was clear: Core Formation. Cai Jian straightened quickly and clasped his hands in greeting, the earlier distraction evaporating. Whatever embarrassment he felt, he could not afford to show disrespect to someone of that realm.

"Well met, Fellow Daoist," the visitor said with perfect politeness. In fact, the politeness was almost excessive. A Core Formation cultivator addressing a Foundation Establishment gate guard with that degree of ceremony was unusual; most people of that realm simply said what they needed and expected the logistics to arrange themselves.

"My name is Mo Jian. I have come to take the Imperial Examination for Core Formation cultivators. Would you be so kind as to direct me to the nearest examination hall where I might register?"

The request itself was not unusual. What was unusual was the timing. Today was the day of the examination. Plenty of cultivators from distant provinces arrived late, since travel across the empire was expensive, and those who could not afford multiple journeys often delayed registration until the last possible moment, but arriving on the day itself was cutting the matter very close indeed.

Cai Jian felt his lip curl ever so slightly before he forced the expression away.

This was probably some provincial cultivator, someone who had stumbled into Core Formation through luck or a fortunate inheritance of resources, and who had now come to the capital hoping to secure a respectable post. If he passed the examination, he might obtain a minor administrative position or a supervisory role somewhere within the sprawling bureaucracy of the capital. For many cultivators from the outer provinces, that was the dream. Stable income, access to the capital's resources, and a life secured beneath the umbrella of imperial authority.

The jade beauty speaking with Xu Chuanli had asked the very same question earlier, but that was different. She was beautiful and charming. Naturally, allowances could be made.

Cai Jian let his gaze settle briefly on the man before him. By contrast, this Mo Jian was thoroughly unremarkable.

His black hair was cut short and neatly kept, though a small bald patch had begun to suggest itself at the crown of his head. His brown eyes were the kind that Cai Jian could find duplicated a hundred times in any crowded district market. He was tall and fair-skinned, but even those qualities failed to leave any particular impression. There was nothing distinctive about his face, nothing that would anchor him in memory once he had walked away. He was the sort of man who could pass through a crowd without anyone ever noticing he had been there.

There was, however, a certain hollowness to him. His robes hung a little loosely, as though he had once been broader in the shoulders and had recently grown thinner. The lines of his frame hinted at someone who had lost weight not through careful cultivation, but through exhaustion or long travel. Only his eyes contradicted the impression of ordinariness. They were quiet and sharp, moving with quick, careful attention across the gate, the formation arrays carved into the archway, the two guards at their posts, and the distant figure of Xu Chuanli laughing energetically beside the beautiful examinee. The sweep took only a moment. Then they returned, with perfect courtesy, to Cai Jian.

Cai Jian opened his mouth, ready to bow, return the greeting, and answer the question.

Then a thought occurred to him. Why should he?

Normally he would have done so without hesitation. It was his duty, after all. Yet had not Xu Chuanli, the lazy toad, chosen today of all days to emerge from his comfortable hole and personally assist that fairy?

Cai Jian allowed himself another quick glance in that direction and felt a flicker of irritation flare in his chest. Xu Chuanli was leaning even closer now, laughing loudly at something the beauty had said, his round face glowing with shameless enthusiasm.

Hmph. A toad trying to swallow swan meat. How disgusting. And now there was – Cai Jian gave Mo Jian another quick appraisal and made his decision – a warthog hoping to join the banquet. Well then, why not let Xu Chuanli deal with him too? If the man wished to monopolize the fairy, he could suffer the consequences.

Cai Jian felt a thin, petty satisfaction stir in his chest.

He cupped his hands respectfully, his expression the very image of dutiful obedience. Somewhere in the back of his mind he acknowledged that if either of the Core Formation cultivators present could actually read his thoughts, he would spend the next week recovering from whatever punishment they administered. The beauty might show mercy. She seemed kind. Xu Chuanli certainly would not.

"Senior," he said humbly, "Lord Xu Chuanli of this gate is already explaining the examination procedures to another visitor. His knowledge far exceeds that of this lowly guard. If Senior would be so gracious as to ask him, you will surely receive far better guidance than I could provide."

Ha, Cai Jian thought. As if that fat Chuanli knows anything I don't.

Mo Jian blinked. He turned properly for the first time, looking toward the pair still conversing near the pavilion. Something in his expression shifted, a faint, satisfied recognition. He nodded once, as though confirming something he had half-expected.

"Ah. I thought so," he said quietly. "My companion is already speaking with him. It seems the matter is being handled."

He let out a small, relieved hum. "I was a little concerned we might be late, but Bai Ning appears to have everything under control."

Cai Jian froze. For a moment he could not move. His mind had gone perfectly still, in the way a body goes still when it has received unexpected news and needs time to process its implications. His mouth opened without permission, and when he spoke the voice that came out sounded hoarse and strangely distant, as though it belonged to someone else.

"…Your companion?" he croaked.

The words slipped out before his survival instincts could slam his mouth shut.

Mo Jian looked at him with mild puzzlement. "Yes," he said. "Bai Ning and I traveled to the capital together to participate in the Imperial Examination." A slight pause. The polite tone acquired a subtle, precise edge. "Why? Is something wrong?" The polite tone carried his meaning very clearly, as though there had better not be anything wrong.

But Cai Jian barely heard it. Inside his head, something fragile was collapsing.

All the little fantasies he had constructed only moments earlier were crumbling like sandcastles before a rising tide. Walking beside the beauty through the capital's streets, guiding her to the examination halls. Laughing together along the way. Seeking her out afterward, perhaps congratulating her if she succeeded or consoling her if she failed. Taking her to Old Man Mei's stall for steamed buns while the evening lanterns lit the sky-

Every one of those imagined moments shattered and drifted away like dust in the wind.

A deep and sudden bitterness rose in his chest. The Heavens, it seemed, were truly cruel.

"Your companion?" he repeated, this time with a sharpness he did not bother to hide.

Strictly speaking, he had no right to address a Core Formation cultivator in such a tone. Under normal circumstances he would never have dared, but he had just suffered a devastating blow. He felt entitled.

"Yes," Mo Jian said slowly, his confusion growing.

"Your companion," Cai Jian echoed again, trying and utterly failing to picture a world in which this painfully ordinary, slightly hollow-shouldered man could plausibly have arrived at the capital in the company of the luminous creature currently charming Xu Chuanli into incoherence ten paces away. The mental image alone gave him a throbbing headache.

Mo Jian understood. His expression flattened. He gave Cai Jian the long, tired look of a man who had encountered this specific variety of misunderstanding more times than he could count, and who had arrived at a reckoning with the universe about it long ago.

"Yes," he said, with a degree of emphasis that suggested this was the last time he intended to say it. "We are traveling together."

Cai Jian stared at him.

For several long seconds he simply stood there, trying to reconcile two images that refused to fit together in his mind. On one side was Bai Ning, a woman who looked as though she had stepped out of a painting hung in the halls of the Immortal Palace. On the other stood this man, Mo Jian, who looked as though he could disappear into a crowd of street vendors without anyone noticing.

The contrast was so jarring that Cai Jian almost suspected he had misheard. Surely the man meant acquaintance, or perhaps fellow traveler? Or maybe they had only arrived together and he was speaking loosely. But actual companion? No. That word sat in Cai Jian's mind like a stone in his shoe.

His gaze flicked between Mo Jian and the distant Bai Ning again, as though the sight might change if he looked hard enough. Xu Chuanli was still speaking animatedly, gesturing with one thick arm while Bai Ning listened with a gentle smile that seemed to illuminate the entire gate platform.

Beside Cai Jian, Wan De had also gone very still. His fellow guard had clearly heard everything and was dealing with his own private reckoning.

Mo Jian, meanwhile, now seemed faintly annoyed by their reaction. Before Cai Jian could decide what to say next, and whether it was acceptable to curse the Heavens for giving such a beauty such questionable judgment, Mo Jian took matters into his own hands.

He raised a hand and called out across the gate. "Bai Ning. Here."

Bai Ning turned. Her gaze settled on Mo Jian, and then she smiled.

It was not the polite, distant smile she had been offering Xu Chuanli, the one she used with unconscious precision the way a lantern uses its flame, providing light in whatever direction it was pointed. This one was warmer, brighter, and touched with genuine pleasure. The change transformed her face so completely that Cai Jian felt his breath catch and his heart stumble in his chest.

Truly, a goddess descended upon the mortal plane.

"Mo Jian," she said. The name was spoken simply, yet it carried the ease of long familiarity, the shorthand of people who had spent enough time together that a word did the work of a sentence, and a sentence did the work of a conversation. Cai Jian heard it and felt the last of his afternoon's small, private hopes depart without ceremony.

Mo Jian nodded in acknowledgment and began walking toward the pavilion where she stood.

Cai Jian watched him go. For one brief, dangerous moment he wondered what would happen if he simply took his spear and skewered the man where he stood. Well, apart from his own immediate and extremely thorough disembowelment. The thought lingered anyway. The sour knot in his chest had not loosened, and his wounded pride stubbornly resisted letting the moment pass with dignity. Yet the instincts drilled into him over more than a century of cultivation were louder than his bitterness. Antagonizing a Core Formation cultivator was an excellent way to shorten one's life expectancy, and Cai Jian had survived this long precisely because he knew when to keep his mouth shut.

So, reluctantly, he did.

Still, as Mo Jian approached the pavilion and Bai Ning greeted him with that same bright, familiar smile, Cai Jian made a quiet vow to himself. If, as now seemed certain, Xu Chuanli shortly discovered that the woman he had spent the last quarter-hour wooing was spoken for and decided to pass the task of escorting the two examinees to the nearest examination hall onto his subordinates – which was exactly the kind of gracious gesture Xu Chuanli was capable of, particularly when it inconvenienced someone else – then Cai Jian would ensure certain… minor arrangements were made along the way.

Mo Jian, for instance, would find himself seated in the worst available position inside the examination hall. Not merely inconvenient. The worst. A narrow, drafty corner seat where the light was poor, the view miserable, and the formations the weakest. Bai Ning, on the other hand, would of course receive the very best accommodations. Somewhere comfortable, and preferably near one of the polished bronze mirrors that were sometimes placed along the hall walls. There she could sit in perfect comfort and occasionally glance at her own reflection, long enough, Cai Jian hoped, to realize that she was wasting her time traveling with someone like him.

Unlike right now.

Right now she leaned in close to greet Mo Jian with obvious delight, even as Xu Chuanli looked like a man who had bitten into something he had expected to be sweet and found it otherwise. The supervisor recovered quickly – forced enthusiasm was one of his better skills – and greeted Mo Jian with a booming laugh and a loud slap on the back that Mo Jian absorbed with the patient expression of a man accustomed to it. Within moments all three of them were talking together as they drifted a short distance inward from the gate, moving out of the archway into the long stretch of broad road that ran between the gate and the distant city proper.

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That stretch of road was not short. The walls of the Imperial Capital were so vast that it took hours on foot to cross from one side of the wall to the other and reach the city in earnest. By the standards of what lay ahead, the space near the gate was a quiet anteroom.

Bai Ning gazed around with wide-eyed wonder, turning slowly as she took in the towering battlements and distant structures rising beyond them.

"How do they even feed that many people in the city?" she asked, responding to something Xu Chuanli had just said.

The supervisor laughed and moved to rest an arm casually across her shoulders with the practiced confidence of a man who had done this before and expected it to work. Bai Ning slipped aside so smoothly it looked accidental, as if she had merely shifted her footing while continuing to look around. Xu Chuanli's arm closed on empty air, and he stumbled half a step before catching himself. His voice raised slightly when he resumed speaking, to cover the moment.

"Never fear, Fairy Bai Ning," he declared quickly. "There are farms and granaries throughout the city, along with vast forests, lakes, and waterways deep inside the city. The capital produces enough to feed every soul within it, and that is before we even consider the Imperial Palace." His tone swelled with pride halfway through, as though he personally oversaw the city's survival. "Even if the entire world vanished tomorrow," he finished grandly, "the Imperial Capital would remain, untouched, whole, and resolute."

"Incredible," Bai Ning murmured.

She shook her head slowly, still staring out at the distant skyline. "I mean, I heard some of it from you," she added, glancing toward Mo Jian, "but the scale defies explanation."

Mo Jian nodded mutely. He had read about the Imperial Capital in the book, of course, but reading about it was one thing, and seeing it with his own eyes was quite another entirely. He had thought himself reasonably prepared. He had been wrong. No amount of words on a page had prepared him for this.

Xu Chuanli pressed on. "The examination for Core Formation cultivators spans three days," he said, addressing Bai Ning rather than Mo Jian. "Once today's portion is behind you, why not come back here afterward? This Xu Chuanli would be honored to show you the capital properly. As a gate supervisor, I know a great many important people." He spread his hands with easy generosity. "We could make an outing of it."

Mo Jian had been reduced entirely to background detail as Xu Chuanli spoke.

Bai Ning brightened immediately. "Of course, that would be wonderful," she said, her voice carrying the warm, uncomplicated enthusiasm of someone who had either not noticed the implication or had chosen not to. "Mo Jian and I are new here, so a friendly face would be very welcome. Once we've finished today's exam and found somewhere to stay, we'll come find you for that tour."

The supervisor could not quite conceal the way his expression shifted as his gaze moved briefly, involuntarily, toward Mo Jian.

"Yes," he said. "The two of you. Of course."

The of course sounded as though it had personally wronged him.

"Well," Xu Chuanli continued, rallying, "I won't keep you any longer. But do be careful of swindlers and conmen, Fairy. They're extremely common in this part of the city." The look he aimed at Mo Jian with this last sentence made his meaning entirely clear.

Mo Jian, who had grown accustomed to this sort of thing during the eight months he had spent traveling toward the capital, did not know whether to laugh or cry. It was not even the insinuation that he and Bai Ning were together that bothered him anymore. It was far easier to let people assume whatever they wished than to waste time correcting each and every stranger they met. No, what grated was the look itself, the particular expression of a man who believes he is righteously defending something from a threat. As though Mo Jian had committed some transgression against good taste by existing in proximity to an attractive woman, and the decent citizens of the capital were entitled to register their displeasure.

Beautiful women accompanying male cultivators was an entirely ordinary sight, for heaven's sake. It happened everywhere, every day. So why was he always singled out, despite being innocent of any wrongdoing? The exhaustion weighing on him was only half from travel. The other half came from enduring this sort of ridiculous situation over and over again.

Bai Ning, pretending not to notice any of it, though she was almost certainly enjoying the situation immensely, waved a hand lightly.

"Of course. Many thanks for the warning, Fellow Daoist," she said sweetly. "As someone from the Thousand Shattered Islands, this is my first time visiting such a grand place. I will certainly take your words to heart." She practically fluttered her eyelashes at Xu Chuanli.

Mo Jian had to summon herculean effort not to roll his eyes. He knew she was having fun teasing him, but still… was this really necessary?

Xu Chuanli paused in the middle of turning away. Something she had said had caught on something in his mind.

"The Thousand Shattered Islands?" he repeated. "That collection of rocks at the southernmost edge of the empire? Nothing beyond them but the Trackless Sea?" He looked at Bai Ning again, his expression recalibrating from charmed to calculating in the way a merchant's face moves when he discovers that something he dismissed as common carries an unexpected value. "How... interesting. I don't think I've ever met someone from so remote a region at the heart of the empire before."

Bai Ning nodded with uncomplicated enthusiasm. "Yes, indeed. Mo Jian and I are both from there. We came to the capital for an important matter, and to sit the Imperial Examination as well."

She delivered this without the slightest suggestion that she had taken offense at having her homeland described as a collection of rocks. Mo Jian approved. A gate supervisor was not worth the energy.

More than that, he approved of how she had slipped that information into the conversation. It was exactly the sort of thing he himself had been doing ever since leaving the islands behind. At every stop along their journey north, Mo Jian had made sure that people knew exactly who he was and where he was going. Even in places where he might easily have passed through unnoticed, he had taken care to loudly and obnoxiously mention that he was traveling to the capital for an important purpose.

Mo Jian was not naïve enough to believe that no one was keeping track of the gui in his possession. True, the noble families and the major powers of the Empire had made no move to seize it, leaving the matter to the Thousand Shattered Islands to resolve among themselves. That restraint was largely because the Emperor had implicitly allowed the local powers to handle the situation.

But would that restraint last forever? What if some wandering Nascent Soul cultivator, having heard the rumors, decided that meeting an Immortal was worth the risk? Or worse, what if one of the regional nobles decided to simply take it? What could he do then? Mo Jian was confident that he could deal with a few Nascent Soul cultivators on his own, but that was another problem in itself. Also, if someone truly intended to seize the gui, they might come in significant numbers, and numbers had a way of changing the calculus of battles.

So he had settled on a different strategy: he would be loud, obvious, and impossible to ignore. The fact that he was traveling to the capital to present the gui to the Emperor would become common knowledge. Anyone considering stealing it would have to wonder whether doing so might provoke the Emperor's displeasure. After all, the Emperor had permitted the local situation to develop without interfering. But what would he think of someone who intervened now, when the gui was already en route to his palace?

What would he think of a faction that swooped in under the pretense of rescuing Mo Jian from a rival's attempt to steal it? The situation could spiral in any number of directions. Uncertainty of that kind was a deterrent, and deterrents, Mo Jian had found, were more reliable than swords. And so far, the strategy had worked. They had traveled thousands of miles without being attacked or harassed, though Mo Jian could not say how much of that was due to his strategy and how much to other factors.

There was a second purpose to it, too. Since the moment they had entered the capital, possibly before, Mo Jian assumed they were being watched. Bai Ning as well. Somewhere in the vast architecture of the palace's intelligence, someone had already noted their arrival and was already asking the obvious question: why had they not proceeded directly to the imperial presence? Why, instead, were they inquiring about the Imperial Examination?

Good, Mo Jian wanted that question asked.

He was not interested in a brief audience where he handed over the gui, received a token acknowledgment, and was shown the door. Such a meeting would happen under conditions entirely of the Emperor's choosing, surrounded by court protocols and layers of etiquette designed to limit what could be said and by whom. If he wanted to share what he knew of the future, if he wanted to lay out the shape of what was coming and make a case for the Emperor's support, and to do that without being soul searched or dissected as an interesting anomaly, he needed a different kind of audience. One he arrived at with standing of his own.

For that, he needed to pass the Imperial Examination first.

One step in a long plan. Step one out of a dozen that would take them, inevitably and by deliberate design, to the heart of the capital's politics.

Here he came.

The Imperial Court had better be ready.

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