We got our marching orders from Deputy Li shortly thereafter. We were heading to the next largest cell. There could have been many operating independently in the city, each one a threat known only to a handler. Of course he wanted to go to cut off the head, but we all thought that would not end well.

  “There’s a body of knowledge that everyone in the Red Fang knows,” Xiran said. “They call it the sacred text, but it’s just a path manual.”

  She paused for several seconds; the silence filling the regally appointed hotel room.

  “It also details what to do if someone is burned or cut off from the rest. They would do that now. First, they would cut ties to their old identity and then they would go dark for a period. The sect would then reform itself later.”

  “If that is so, they we need to strike now while they don’t expect it,” I said. “They started this war.”

  “We can’t be certain they’re all dead unless Joe sees everyone or they’re all tested,” Lee said. “And you need a nascent soul cultivator to test someone’s pathway.”

  “There are how many cultivators at that level here in the capital, a few thousand?” I said.

  “About four thousand,” the elder kang said. “By the last count.”

  “Four thousand?” Lee said, her mouth wide open. Had I ever seen her shocked before? I tried remembering when she had last been shocked.

  The large hotel room had several beds that all looked like they were big enough to hold a poly power throuple with room for more. I took a second to find my way into one bed and sit on the side.

  I didn’t have a context. Or rather I did, but it was that the Moon clan had several fourth realm cultivators and one fifth realm one. There was just the Western Jewel branch. For a people that dedicated their entire life to cultivation, that was unfathomable. If just a medium to large amount of this effort thousand were in the Red Fang, it would be problematic.

  “I feel like we are at the point where this is a statistic that doesn’t help us,” I said. “Like it would be great if this helped us in any way, but it’s not like the government can mobilize the entire population. That would be maddening.”

  There was a long moment of silence.

  Moon Fei raised a hand.

  “If this one may, don’t fourth realm cultivators customarily adhere themselves to the clan or a higher authority? Isn’t is custom that binds them to a... Higher powered cultivator?”

  I blinked several times, content to let that one go by.

  “So, wouldn’t they all be sworn to someone? And most clans and sects swear allegiance to the empire?” He said, gathering steam.

  He was cooking.

  “If that’s true, then a higher power has sworn the most nascent souls to it?” Fei said.

  The Mandarin had asked me to be one of his deputies. My understanding of the leader of Weston Jewel was that I was supposed to help in case the walls broke or spirit beasts decided humans looked delicious that day. If there was a genuine emergency, a true emergency, then I would definitely help.

  But without a proper reason to, I just would not be spending my time there waiting for a command.

  He couldn’t just call me up or something. He would have to put out an order, send runners and all that. Honestly, if the walls broke? I wouldn’t notice for a long time. That part scared me a little. One minute I would be there, the next minute I’ll be fighting beasts of about my level in the middle of a packed block.

  We had to think about their counter attack.

  “Most Nascent Souls are sworn to a higher power,” the elder Kang said. “It’s about control. I’m sworn to do my duties for the empire. If Egiya grew enough, she would have to swear an oath to someone else. They would probably make her swear an oath to me, or at least heavily imply that I need her to sign one.”

  “I don’t know that I would just sign any old oath,” Egiya said.

  He stared blankly at her.

  “They would make it mandatory. You wouldn’t have a choice in the matter.”

  She shuddered. That right there, that was the power of the state. But the state shouldn’t make the people afraid of it. This state should be afraid of the people. This was how the people on top kept an even cool head.

  The emperor feared nobody.

  That was a feature, not a bug. He was just too powerful for most mortal concerns. If he wasn’t, he wouldn’t be the emperor.

  “So what, we mobilize the masses on this hunt? Deputize every nascent soul cultivator to test everyone around them?” Egiya said.

  “That is one way, mistress,” Moon Fei said. “This one-our jaunt wasn’t quite helpful.”

  We all turned to Moon Fei and Xiran.

  She coughed. Gone were the bags under her eyes.

  “My family is gone. Someone sold their villa. I asked around, and no one had even heard of them,” she said. “People who knew me growing up greeted me like a stranger.”

  The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Did someone intimidate them into forgetting the voice? Or was this even possible? They had to have been gaslighting here, right?

  “It’s true,” Moon Fei said. “We spoke to several people that she had visited many times and built a rapport with. There was nothing there for her.”

  “I don’t know what they did. They look at me and it’s like they don’t see me,” she said. “The neighborhood kids that I grew up with? They don’t even recognize me.”

  “This one went and asked them if there was something going on, but none of them really knew her. That seems hard to fake,” Moon Fei said. I just kind of let that one sit for a while. The red Fang sack had done so much against us that now that they were trying to erase her identity, I felt it was almost poetic justice. She could now pretend to be someone who knew and not pretend to be the person who she was. I was almost happy that this had happened. Who would be able to even do something like this?

  I still remembered her. It was going to have to be a devious path that they used, or there were a lot of traumatic brain injuries.

  Memory loss is definitely not a joke, especially when it concerns someone’s actual life very confusingly. They wanted to talk about how the house was under New Management and the owners were not there, but it definitely wasn’t the same staff. Yes, of course she had a staff. The valet at the door didn’t even recognize her. It wasn’t even the same group of people and she had only been gone for what, 6 weeks at most? Whoever had done this clean up thorough job in a very short time. I was thinking that there was something else a foot here because it seemed so widespread. But I wasn’t there. I could only go off with what they were telling me. And if they were telling me that this was going to be a really weird problem that they didn’t have a solution to, I was going to throw my hands up in the air and tell them we’ll have to table this for later.

  Thankfully, Lee told them instead of me.

  “This is very interesting, but I don’t think we have the bandwidth to explore this right now. But we need to find any more pockets of the red Fang here in the capital before we move on to our next location. If we have a next location to go to.”

  Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

  It was looking more and more like every single place that we could find them reliably was burned. I didn’t want to give up, as this had been a special mandate of bullshit from heaven, but we were at a dead end.

  “Xiran?” I said from my comfortable perch on the side of the bed closest to the discussion. “Is there anyplace else that we should check?”

  It took a long time to get her face in order. I wasn’t someone who was going to tell somebody to rush something, but the whole reason we were here was because she had helped us identify one nest of demonic cultivators and we were really hoping that she would be able to identify a second one. But if a few of them from the first nest had escaped and alerted the other ones, then it was a kind of moot point.

  That we’d waited six weeks to come back and do this was also weighing on me. We had needed that time, but now I felt like we should have been at the grindstone the whole time. Chances were that we would not have survived that. I didn’t feel bad about not doing it, but if I had the resources? You know I would. If I had the resources of the state? I will be there. But I didn’t have the resource to the state. I just had my resources on my team and maybe some help from the blue ropes. And even their best help wasn’t that much. Was it time for us to go back to Western Jewel? Or is it time for us to head to a different city? I couldn’t decide.

  But I didn’t have to decide. I could ask questions and have them decide. The person who I wanted to ask this question to was the man that received the award before me. He had similarly disappeared during my fight. I’d expected to have to duel him before I let out on some manly landscaping. He would put up a good fight, but he was definitely a higher level of me and I would lose that fight.

  I’m not saying I have to be nihilistic, but a man of two realms above me? I might as well be trying to win an argument with my ex-wife. It would never happen. I just needed to get a few jabs in before things went sideways so that I feel good.

  Otherwise, this was going to turn to a big fucking problem.

  I identified as a big fucking problem.

  If I had to burn this damn capital down! To regain my sense of balance in the world and keep my calm? You’re damn sure that I would do the same thing that I did in Western Jewel. I would burn this shit to the ground.

  I’d leave them seeing a Johnny Cash song about rebuilding their city from ruins, if I could.

  Maps of the city were brought out to try to jogger memory. Thankfully, the elder king had several in stock. It made me realize he had so much more going on that I had even thought about. He had some sort of dimensional storage thing worked out. Using this formulation, he could put things into a bag of hold of pouch of holding. Holding that was effectively the most magical thing I’d seen in a dog’s age. I was going to ask him some questions, but first call Kelly. We all watched as the girls who once been a part of the demonic sect showed us every single red Fang hideout she’d ever seen.

  “And finally, there’s this one that’s just on the border with the untamed lands, but it’s at least close to the airship Depot down there,” she said.

  Of the five spots she showed us we hadn’t visited yet, this one was the one that excited me the most. If I was staging for something, I would want to be close to the airship Depot. But I wanted a bit of a consensus.

  “It’s not like we can just jump through a portal and get there immediately. We need to run over there or walk over there or take...” I said.

  “We could make a rift in the way and head over,” the elder kang said. “I can open up a passageway for a short while.”

  Everything stopped. It was like the record scratched and all eyes were on him.

  All at once, everyone except for me began talking over each other, asking questions. His daughter was yelling about how he needed to teach her that immediately and he was telling her it was for more advanced cultivators. Then Lee was yelling about how she wasn’t a dance cultivator and she needed to learn that technique immediately and things sort of spiraled.

  When you’re a group this big, a brand new divisive issue might become a problem. That the man who was probably going to hang out with us for a little could teleport place with his pathway intrigued me. I’m not even going to tell you I was disinterested.

  I was full on ready to pay this man anything to teach me that technique. To save the time on the two-day trip to get here? I would take that in a heartbeat.

  “Settle down,” I said. “Let him cook.”

  “There are limitations like you have to have been to one spot before, but I’ve been there. I can take you there now.”

  And just like that, we were preparing to jump through a portal to another place. I did not believe it, but that’s what was going on and I was excited to be thinking about portals for once in my life. If he could hold a torso size portal open, we could jump through it head first and then on the other side land gracefully. He could only make it so big, which meant that you couldn’t just walk into it nicely. You even had to fly poor jump through it. In fact, he recommended doing a tuck jump, which is where you jump up and tuck your knees to your chest. Chest. Made it hard to land on the other side, but it got you there. It was about a 3-ft wide circle, maybe four. The other option was for him to put the opening by the ground so you could just crawl in. I chose that option as I was a man who didn’t want to have my extremities cut off at the apertures of the formation. True to form, my girlfriend decided to go through first, but that was on her. I was in no rush. I just wanted to get there.

  Once all of us were across, he threw himself through.

  We were going to let Fei stay there, but He was far too excited to play with the portal. If the man knew what he was doing, we could all be back in Western Jewel by the end of the day.

  That sounded amazing. It sounded like I was about to be getting to work from home and not have to spend two days on an air shift to get to any other place. It turned out Mister Kang had been all over the Empire and thus could connect us later to a bunch of the spots that he’d been through. But our priority right now was to root out any remaining cultivators in this city before we hop to any others. And then we might call him the blue rose to actually do their jobs. That we had a handler that was sitting outside of our hotel room while we jumped through this little portal meant we had to deliberate on if we were going to take the guy or not.

  I reluctantly made him come. If only to prove that, I was definitely a team player.

  I was a team player, after all. And we were all going to get through this together.

  I looked once again at Xiran.

  “This is where they would go?”

  In the back of my mind, I was thinking about how she would be an excellent double agent now that she showed our little group. I was also thinking about how she knew I would utterly crush her if she did something so stupid as to decide she was on the other side again. It wasn’t even a question of my mind. She had joined the game and decided she wanted to get out. I wanted to help her, but I wasn’t going to be a pushover. If anything, I was going to treat her like she wanted to be treated. She was an important member of the team who was about to get her clock cleaned if she didn’t put out some bread.

  It wasn’t my fault that her parents had failed her. It wasn’t my fault that society had failed her.

  I wasn’t going to fail her.

  I wasn’t going to fail any of them. What I was going to do was get her to do exactly what I needed her to do. It was the same thing with Egiya and Xueyie.

  They were in the game now.

  We needed to move.

  “If you wouldn’t mind opening a portal to our next location?”

  ---

  We stepped through to a tea shop nearby the airship Depot. Moon Xiru would have had a coronary. Just seeing tea delivered directly to the consumer without a complicated network of masters. Making a taste maker pick an influencer getting in their chop felt so strange to me.

  I wasn’t going to question the highly unionized positions that resembled nothing less than a cartel ever. That was a kind of crazy talk that got you put into a strange place for a long time. I didn’t want to be in a strange place for a long time. I wanted to be in a happy place for a short time. In fact, I want to be back with my kids, kicking it and talking about awkward teenage problems. Just thinking about seeing Rachel and Courtney again. Drew a smile onto my face as the girls followed me through the portal.

  The big difference between Western Jewel and the capital was that the capital sprawled out. Even though it was a capital city, it looked more like a suburb. Yes, sure. It had neat lines and everything and it was a beautiful place to live and work and such. But also they had built up Western Jewel like it was on top of itself and everything was two or three stories because that’s just how it had to be. They could only make the walls so big while leaving room for cultivators.

  But here? They had room. They had room to stretch, and they had room to breathe. And they let it happen. A building that would have been a two-story walk-up or three-story mixed-use building here was just a two-story tea house that had a good view of the air shipping business.

  I took up a spot with the team, trying to direct traffic around.

  Groups of men carrying things in rickshaws being loaded onto transports right around me. Again, in the culture where everyone was strong as fuck, there was no need to have a car. And the only reason that someone had a hand truck was because something was big and awkward to carry. They could carry it for sure, but they didn’t want the awkwardness. They just wanted the efficiency.

  I just wanted some tea and to slow down and enjoy my time.

  But the world did not want that.

  We have Xiran the room to wander around and we followed her in discreet groups, each only a block from another. Lee was with her.

  I was in the central block with Moon Fei, just us guys.

  Egiya and her father were in the back.

  I felt like it should strike me as odd how quickly he’d adapted to this situation. He had come from something to join us. It wasn’t like every single cultivator you met was a spy thriller reader or some sort of John Grisham. He was just a normal everyday guy who just cared about his daughter and sent her stuff all the time, but just wasn’t able to be present because of his job. True, she was an adult now, but wouldn’t you want to be closer to your cool little daughter who ran the ink shop that you created when you were a youngster? I would want that. I would want that for him as well.

  But I had my bone to pick with him about abandoning his family and I felt like we would come through a partner journey together where we would both have to wrestle with what it meant to be an African father. He left his daughter, knowing what was going to happen. I did not leave my daughters willingly and every day I still ached.

  We passed by what had to be a wholesale Market. Everyone there had a large cart with them to remove goods.

  Wall to wall wooden carts, fight, as far as I could see, dominated the thoroughfare.

  They were selling everything from wild animals to tea.