Luxire Worse
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Dao of Fuck Off Chapter 7: Promotion Politics
🕑 Added 2024-07-31 22:00:05 +0000 UTCSang Lee stood across from me, glaring at me with malice as our brethren packed in around the arena. After all, if we were going to risk losing a disciple, the sect wanted to make sure as many could learn from the exchange as feasible.
“Any last words, thief?” He shouted as he drew his sword.
“Nope, but which eyebrow do you want to keep?” I laughed, twirling mine. Honestly, he should be thanking me for being used to prevent his marriage.
Yang Jingji would have eaten him alive. She told him that she was accepting my -nonexistent- courting explicitly to provoke him into getting his ass beat by me. In fact, she’d quite directly requested over dinner that I break him as a cultivator, a noble, and as a man.
Charming woman. A tad overconfident in my prowess, given the nearly full Tier of raw power gap between myself and Sang, but charming.
He shifted to a ready stance as I decided to remove his right eyebrow, then Elder Qian, the formal witness for the duel, called out the start signal.
Deliberately not maintaining a stable foundation in a combat stance has terribly few advantages, objectively speaking. One of them is the ability to fall over at will. Which is amazingly useful when one’s opponent is highly trained in blade thrust attacks.
Swinging my own blade in a deliberately sloppy leading weight fashion as his now-flaming sword pierced through the air above me, I managed to nick his thigh. Not enough to impact the mechanics of the fight, but as the flaming blade twisted to slice down at me, I could see his anger at my scoring first blood.
And that anger helped immensely in blinding him to my blade’s swing continuing up and around to intercept his and letting me throw myself back from him before I reached the ground.
A second advantage of fighting without a working relationship with the ground is that I’ve had to master the art of being ready to defend and strike from the weirdest positions. Such as twisting in midair to dodge the already-pursuing Sang’s thrust and set my legs wrapping around his arm.
To my immense surprise he failed to get out of my grasp. So I cinched my legs in a deeply uncomfortable position and threw myself backwards to wrench his arm and balance with my whole body weight.
Impacting the ground popped his shoulder and my ankle out of place and spoiled my aim with my blade, causing me to stab his ass instead of my requested target.
Then I took a second to evaluate our position, me half-sitting on his ribs with my legs tangled under his dislocated arm, and I looked down at him.
“Do you have an answer, or are we almost done?” I asked darkly as I wrenched my blade free.
Terror filled his face as he realized that I had the mobility to simply kill him. “Yield! I yield!”
“Good. And as victor, my satisfaction.” I held his head down, right side up, and ignored his screaming and swearing as I very carefully carved off the flesh of his right eyebrow.
“There, now you are leeward faced.” I announced my pun that didn’t actually translate at all. “Be smarter and develop a personality.”
Then I slid my legs out from under him and stepped back, eyes on him the entire time it took for the medics to cart him off. Then I rolled my ankle back into place, bowed to Elder Qian, and walked out of the arena hiding the limp that would probably take me days to repair properly. Especially in front of cultivators, presenting the image of overwhelming strength was of vital importance to deterring attempts on one’s life.
“Well fought, little Guang!” Elder Tong’s voice announced him after a few short paces past the exit, and the tension in it betrayed that he very much did not want to have this conversation.
“Disciple greets Elder Tong.” I bowed as though he hadn’t sent assassins after me. A trivial feat, really, given how little I cared about him or his family. “I had a bit of luck, that is all.”
“Be that as it may, you still capitalized on it well.” his manipulation technique slid off my thoughts harmlessly. “I’ve been tasked with bringing you to meet with the Elders regarding our decision”
“Am I appropriately dressed, or shall I take a moment to don something with less blood on it?” I asked as if I didn’t know the answer. It was just fun to watch his face darken in a scowl for a fraction of a second.
“Don’t tarry any, I’ll meet you back here.”
“Elder need not worry on that matter.” I smiled and performed a quick-swap inventory switch that I’d spent several hours practicing with my new ring. “Disciple would not dare ask for a moment if he required two.”
For all he held no place in my eye beyond a hazard to be mindful of, he recognized the display as something that only the most vain of nobility bothered mastering, and I saw his esteem for me drop several notches. “Very well, this way, then.”
Sweet heavens it was going to be satisfying if I got to kill him with a talisman from my ring using the same fundamental trick.
Putting my sense of poetry aside, I followed him into the inner territory of the sect and to the Masters pavilion, the seat of sect politics. Glancing around, I was struck by the weight of the fact that one sect could comfortably have nearly twenty Elders. Most sects tore themselves apart if they had more than ten, according to my informants.
The fact that more than half of them wanted me to just die was an afterthought.
I bowed, as they expected. Not announcing myself because I had not been acknowledged. Not showing agitation, as though I agreed that this was the natural order.
“You’ve made something of a name for yourself, Outer Disciple Guang.” a Sang Elder levelled an insult by addressing me without formal acknowledgement. “What do you have to say for yourself?”
“Nothing of import, Honorable Elder Sang.” I spoke while maintaining my bow, subtly calling out her insult by remaining ‘unacknowledged’. “The results of my actions speak sufficiently loudly for themselves.”
Indignant shifting of cloth reached my ears, as though the shortsighted Elders couldn’t believe that I would dare stand behind the damage to their positions.
“You offer no defense for the disarray you set several of the noble families into these past weeks!?”
“I would never dare offer a defense for the actions of Elder Ho Quan. To do so would be tantamount to declaring that I know her will despite not even sharing her name.”
Spiritual pressure filled with malice pressed upon me from several directions, setting my panic instincts into overdrive. Thankfully still within my ability to handle, but confirming that my emotions could grow large enough to match my Identity Core’s limits.
“Would the honorable sect Elders prefer that I posture and claim to be able to manipulate my seniors?” I asked with false calm. “Disciple’s understanding of honoring noble Face may be lacking on this matter, and I beg indulgence. What claim could I make that does not offend in this matter?”
The malice intensified as they registered that by blaming me for their own indiscretions, they’d accidentally claimed me to be their superior.
My hands were becoming clammy under the pressure and I was starting to sweat when a new voice spoke up. “Sang! Tong! Ho! Have you no need for Face in your old age?”
The pressure lifted with startled abruptness. “I come to inspect a proposed candidate for acceptance as an Inner Disciple for myself, and I find this? So soon after you argued that the sect is blossoming with internal cohesion!”
“Apologies, Sect Master.” Sang’s voice answered. “I seem to have forgotten myself after watching my nephew’s defeat.”
What the hell is the Sect Master doing here? All of what he wants of me depends on him not looking like he’s protecting me!
A sinking dread started to grow in my gut as answers started providing themselves in the back of my mind. All of them boiling down to the conclusion ‘I’m out of time’.
“Oh, is this the same Guang that your nephew challenged?” The Sect Master asked casually as he moved to his reserved seat.
“It is indeed.” Tong answered. “I escorted him from his match myself.”
“Ah, that makes sense then. A moment’s loss of composure can be excused so shortly after an event such as that.” he deliberately gave Sang a measure of Face while conspicuously leaving Ho and Tong offended. “Say, Disciple Guang. Why scar young Sang’s face so grievously?”
“Disciple greets Sect Master.” I answered formality first, before continuing “I had an honor duel levelled at me for actions that, to my understanding, were no less than four parties removed from a thoughtless comment of mine. It seemed appropriate, if I am to be held accountable for actions so far removed from my power, to deter frivolous thoughts of demanding duels with a living example of the consequences.”
“Hmm. That sounds prudent to me.” he invited the Elders to voice their thoughts on the matter with a pause.
“It may be my closeness to the matter speaking.” Elder Sang opened. “But when a ‘thoughtless comment’ sets house against house and ruins multiple marriage arrangements, seeking to avoid the consequences of one’s words stinks of cowardice to me, not prudence.”
“If it were the careless words that created the division, I would agree.” another Elder answered. “But Guang does have a point that the divisiveness began after someone else’s actions overstepped prudence. Holding him accountable for a particularly poor reaction to his words seems to me to be a way of encouraging ourselves to be reckless instead of cultivating our own prudence.”
“Have you watched this man’s behavior?” Sang asked in exasperation. “He manipulates reactions for causes from the grandiose to the trivial. Your own family is quibbling with your Founder’s wisdom because he penned a forty page manual twenty years ago! He probably spent the past two decades manipulating the Ho family through Ho Yin so that they would respond poorly!”
“Even if I believed him capable of that, it remains true that better composure on the Ho’s part would have prevented all of your complaint, and your own family being level-headed at the outset would have spared you much of your loss of Face this past month.”
I listened to the Elders bicker and felt the gnawing pit in my gut grow as I realized how badly I’d misjudged the hidden politics embedded in their relations to each other. These weren’t ‘xianxia dipshits’ and ‘cultivators who understood teamwork.’
The ones trying to defend me were literally flouting the one major cohesiveness principle that Face culture understood -throwing the upstart under the bus to calm things down. And as near as I could figure, they were doing it because they expected me to return the favor if they were ever in the wrong in someone else’s eye, standing permitting.
I was absolutely out of time to figure out how to ditch the sect.
“As fascinating as it is to dissect the events of the past month, I propose that we return to the matter at hand.” a silken voice undercut the rising tension, thankfully giving Sect Elder Ho Kiang the last word, not one of my ‘defenders’. “Personally, I find his foresight in deterring others from wasting their lives more pertinent than whether he deserves the blame for the recent events.”
Damn it. Even with the backhanded delivery, that’ll still antagonize them more.
“Though I disagree with Elder Raka that the matter of blame is immaterial, I do feel we ought to sort the matter separately.” Someone else added. “Unless we’d like to ask Guang to weigh in on the matter of his own punishment?”
Derisive laughter indicated that the matter was agreed, and the Sect Master nodded. “Very well. What brought young Guang into consideration in the first place?”
“In addition to the actions confirmed to be deliberate that were mentioned a few moments ago, the fact that he broke through to the Qi Condensation stage just seven weeks ago.” Tong supplied. He was doing a marvelous job of acting like he was a neutral party, despite having been caught menacing me.
The Sect Master raised an eyebrow, deliberately looked me up and down, and looked back to Tong. “I see. And in those seven weeks, he’s formed a Soul Core?”
“During the second, yes. While out on a beast subjugation.”
“Hmm..”
As he lapsed into considering silence, I had to wonder who he thought he was fooling, even with every appearance being that he was only just hearing about me for the first time, I wasn’t fooled, and I couldn’t imagine any of the Elders were either.
“What are the marks against him, then?”
“Flagrant disregard for traditions of the sect, refusal to put his betters in his Eye, conspiracy to destabilize the foundations of the noble houses, and the incitement of former servants to continue his efforts.” Raka’s calm, smooth voice answered before someone else could.
“Indeed? What have you to say about these matters, Guang?”
I put aside the momentarily useless schemes to escape the sect and put on an easy smile. “Each tradition I hold disdain for is one that causes weakness in the sect, whether directly or through sabotaging the growth of disciples and masters alike. The foundations that I’m accused of destabilizing are simply suffering a bit of adjustment difficulty. Two generations of considering the matter will reveal that my actions are instead to strengthen them the same way those same actions have strengthened the sect.”
If any of the Elders had thought to weaponize affront, I’d be dead on my feet as even the Sect Master balked that I’d answer so bluntly.
“And of course I exhort my peers to consider at all times whether their behavior will weaken or strengthen the sect. If they think only of their own strength and Face, they shall create division and lead the sect to ruin.”
I could almost hear echoes of flesh stinging flesh in the indignant silence after my retort. All of my enemies in the room knew I’d just insulted them more elegantly than they could forgive, and by the looks on their faces, several of my ‘allies’ had caught that they were included.
And the insult was deliberately phrased in such a way that to announce their offense would be tantamount to admitting I’m right.
The silence extended for unticked seconds and I stood and bore it with the same smile that I’d wear listening to lectures or eating a meal with. Giving them all the impression that I thought nothing amiss of declaring obsessive self-fixation to be an obvious defect in their worldview.
“Well,” the Sect Master spoke gingerly, “That is certainly a more earnest position than most would take.”
I inclined my head as though it weren’t obvious to me how many more assassins I’d be fending off, nor how much more dedicated the efforts would be.
“Do you expect to receive the promotion to Inner Disciple, with that... indelicate position?”
“My only expectation is that the Honorable Elders who have served the sect well for these past centuries will continue to act in the best interests of the sect.” I answered calmly, with a bow of performative respect. “It is not my position to expect upon the details of those actions.”
The only thing I could see keeping my head attached to my shoulders was the fact that nobody was ready for the schism war to start right now by removing it, which is a far less worrisome position than it sounds like.
After all, for all that young masters were prone to flying off whatever handle they happened to spot, old masters survived to get old by having their ducks in order before indulging in such a takeoff.
Which meant that precisely none of the Elders would risk raising a blade where the rest could see. Poetically making here, surrounded by old monsters that I couldn’t hope to resist who wanted to water their gardens with my blood, one of the safest places I’d been in the past year.
“Well.” the Sect Master finally broke the silence after more than a minute. “I’m satisfied regarding his devotion to the sect, at least.”
“Indeed.” Tong echoed, “His common-born tact leaves something to be desired, but that can be accounted for with appropriate tutelage. So I’m satisfied that he’ll not mar our reputation overmuch.”
“I’m satisfied at his strength and his composure.” Elder Yang Shisu weighed in for the first time in the discussion. “Even if his methods in combat are unsightly, he wields them expertly for one so young.”
I almost missed the Ho Elder shooting the Yang Elder a complicated look before he smirked. “Unsightly or no, his victories do speak for themselves, I agree.”
Following the realization expressions around the council, I groaned internally. Of course the Ho trying to regain some Face for his family would assume the Yang were using me to free them from a disadvantageous marriage.
In fairness, it made more sense than the truth, but still, Yang Jingji was abundantly clear with me that we were not even loosely allied.
Then again, maybe ‘useful tool’ meant more to the Yang than to others. It was an oddly specific thing to call one’s co-conspirator.
Noncommital sounds of approval and frustration emanated from most of the rest of the assembled Elders, until finally the Sect Master spoke up. “Then it seems to be settled. Guang is now accepted as an Inner Disciple. Appoint someone to get him settled and to teach him manners that won’t get his head torn off in less dignified company. Guang, you are dismissed.”
I bowed respectfully and started to step backwards when Raka’s voice interrupted. “A moment, before you go, young Guang.”
I chose to commit the technical faux pas of breaking my bow to the Sect Master to turn and respectfully address him “Of course, Honored Elder.”
“During our preliminary discussions, it was brought to my attention that you have a respectable talent for Talisman Arts. I’ve been looking for a suitable apprentice for my own techniques, and I can teach you proper manners like few others in the sect could. What are your thoughts on this?”
I grinned inwardly as tendrils of subtle power slid off my thoughts without purchase. I truly owed Tong a genuine gratitude over provoking my paranoia and causing me to anneal my new mind with the foundation of defense from these sorts of attacks.
“I am deeply honored to receive such a lofty consideration, Honored Elder. It is more than I dare claim to have earned with my meager skill. I deeply regret that I cannot accept an apprenticeship, on account of already being apprenticed to Master Smith Ho Yin.”
“What!?” Ho Kiang shouted. “She wouldn’t dare!”
“While I understand your surprise, Elder Ho,” I spoke calmly. “I politely beseech you to not malign my Master thusly.”
I knew, deep in my heart, that my love for seeing a noble almost physically choke on being told off about their manners was going to get me killed or worse some day. But sweet heavens was it going to be worth it the entire way to that grave.
Raka chose to cut off any further amusement I might provoke, saying “I see. A pity, then, but I trust you have good reason for your choices. That was all.”
I bowed and stepped out of the chamber. Turning around, I saw Master Smith Ho standing nonchalantly nearby.
“Congratulations on your promotion, Guang.” she smirked. “Now it’s time to get to work.”
“Gladly, Master.” I smiled easily and followed her to the smithy.
Other than the odd calmness of the replacement of her usual antagonizing demeanor with a redoubling of her exacting expectations, the afternoon of laboring was fairly uneventful. She did, in fact, expect me to have an unreasonable mastery of the techniques I was physically capable of using from her gift, and thanks to the same overstudy advantage I’d already demonstrated with my first blade, I was able to elicit her approving scowl of irritation despite her newfound tolerance for me.
Seven hours of deliciously taxing labor after insulting the sect Elders, she allowed me to leave with a very patient senior brother Hulang to move my belongings from my outer hills hut to a vacant mountain top in the intensely ki-rich inner sect territory. Some light probing confirmed that I was among an incredibly small number of non-noble individuals to ever get accepted as an Inner disciple, and almost alone in being accepted without the explicit backing of an Elder.
Hulang himself admitted to feeling that I should have been executed instead of promoted, but chose to believe that the Elders knew what they were doing and that my life in the inner sect would be brutal and short. Not least of which, on account of the higher expectations he was almost eager to tell me of.
Where outer disciples were largely left to their own devices regarding how and how much they would contribute to the sect, with the implicit threat of being devoured by their peers if they slacked off, inner disciples were expected to reliably contribute more than all but the most dedicated outer disciples, and for those contributions to align with demands of the sect, usually as decided by one’s Elder backing.
Not having a given Elder to tell me what I was expected to contribute, Hulang looked forward to me falling behind and eliciting censure, even moreso when I inevitably faced another Inner disciple and was laid up long enough for it to be inexcusable.
I thanked him for the dutiful warning, as is my habit, and then set about organizing my belongings in the small house I was given to dwell in.
Well, small by sect standards. It was larger than my childhood house by at least twice again. In fact, it was almost as large as a small American house, despite feeling larger with it being empty.
I was drinking in the subtle ‘homey’ essence of the place to more easily allow my cultivation to account for it and to assist in attuning it to myself when master Ho knocked at the door.
“Ah, Master Ho. Welcome, the tea is almost ready.” I greeted her aggravated visage calmly.
She looked for a moment like she would strike me down before sighing and stepping inside. “I trust we can doff the formalities, then?”
“Certainly.” I smiled. “My obfuscation technique may be simple, but I’ve yet to find someone who can hear through it.”
“Knowing I might still be your enemy?”
“Fearing to trust someone just because they’ve tried, however passionately, to kill me would leave me a sad, shortlived wreck of a man.” I chuckled. “Honestly, with my life, that’s the part that insinuated interest more than anything.”
Her humorless flat glare fell on me with a weight. “Do not even joke about that or I’ll charge you with the cultivation arts Raka gave me for you.”
“That was in poor taste, I admit.” I accepted her rebuke. “But no, I have no irrational fear of you. Only that which your strength earns deliberately.”
“Good.” she took a deep, steadying breath. “I have a delicate issue I require help with, and you, being a professional blasphemer, are the best lead I’ve got.”
My mental alarms all went off like crazy, and I started sorting them out to deactivate them appropriately as I poured the tea. “I’ll gladly lend what aid I reasonably can, With complete secrecy, of course.”
Another long minute passed as she gathered herself. “I know what my bottleneck is. I’ve known since I attained Silver Core. But I know that solving it would cripple me. Not to mention the disgrace upon the family and the sect that I’d become afterward.”
I waited patiently for her to expound on that, very much hoping that it was going to be a more complex answer than the one she almost obviously feared.
“I’m possessed of a rare physiology.” she finally continued. “Not something heaven defying or even all that impressive. My father was elated anyway and contracted a sealmaster to embed a protection into my flesh, to guard me against some opportunistic rival family exploiting its traits.
“The seal is my bottleneck. It was never meant to stay attached this long, and its structure is limiting my ability to refine Qi. I can’t increase the density any further than I’m stuck at without the seal mistaking it as a foreign attack and paralyzing me.”
I nodded that I was following. “The seal’s release mechanism is marriage, then?”
“Yes.” she sneered at her own answer. “And I can’t stand the idea.”
“I presume the matter fell on deaf ears when you presented it to your father?” The man had always struck me as particularly narrow-minded, even for a cultivator.
“He and the rest of the family insist that I’m exaggerating.”
I nodded in sympathy. “Disassembling the seal is risky, and would be spitting in your family’s Face. Marrying someone, no matter the compatibility, would be a betrayal of yourself. And leaving it unresolved will limit your growth and cause an early death.”
“Exactly.” she slumped. “You’re the first insufferable bastard to show any sort of understanding.”
I grinned at the compliment and stood to retrieve the main course of the dinner, Bitter Melon Salad. “How much do you know about the seal?”
“As much as I can without understanding a word of it. The sealmasters I spoke with all assure me that there’s no safe way to trip it up, on account of it being a ‘robust’ mechanism.”
“How complete does the designated husband have to be?” I asked after a moment of consideration.
Her mouth hung open with a bite waiting as she stared at me. “What?”
“If the key to the seal is a binding marriage, that means part of the binding runs through the husband. No cultivator worthy of you would tolerate a full-soul weave, as that has too many exploitation options, so your father wouldn’t have been stupid enough to commission one that required it. So which parts of the soul need to be present for the marriage that deactivates the seal?”
“Middle dantian. Father was feeling sentimental, and wanted my eventual husband to have to genuinely feel for me.”
“Then the answer is simple, no? You just need to form a second heart dantian, and bind yourself to yourself.”
“What? No, first, making a new dantian?”
“Well yes. I suppose you could just extract one from an enemy in the upcoming war and use that, but that would require a number of demonic techniques to even attempt. But given that the dantian are energy reserves and interface points, it would be far more efficient to craft a second one, say, in the null resonance phase between the sternum and the lungs for security. Weave secondary meridians so that it fills with your own qi and emotional resonances. Externalize it for a simple, private ceremony, and then either incorporate it as a permanent fixture or gradually merge it with your natural one if that makes more sense for your path.”
Her bafflement narrowed to a scowl, though not one aimed wholly at me. “You propose that I attempt a self-alteration that even the Silver Spire fools would declare impossible.”
“Indeed. Far be it from me to declare them incompetent buffoons, but I am confident that you’ve mastered the fine control of your qi required for it. I’ve seen your steel work.”
“Working steel and working one’s own qi are wholly different matters, Guang.”
“Are they? I hadn’t noticed.” I ventured a flippant grin.
Her glare narrowed in calculation. “Your steel shaping. You extend your sense of self into the steel so that you can use your own cultivation arts on it. And you account for the differences by moulding your out-facing edge to match the steel.” Her eyes widened as she reached the conclusion that she needed.
“Thank you, Guang. That insight will serve me well.”
“Apprentice is overjoyed to be of service, Master Ho.”
The salad tasted much better as the conversation turned to the more mundane concerns of the planned war with Red Fist and the unplanned schism war, and our role in outfitting the Yellow Fang for both.
Comments
Luxire Worse
Yeah. Funny thing (for me, at least) was the way I sat down to write it and went 'Oh, this is exactly what dual cultivation would be introduced with. How the hell is Guang going to skip that?' Legitimately didn't even know where I was going with it until I got there, then spent three days going over my setting notes to make sure it worked.
Xodarap4
I've always found this self-love conversation a hilarious thing
