Master Broke His Vows, and My 3,000 Years of Foodie Cultivation Can No Longer Be Hidden!

My Honored Master brought a woman back from the Mortal World.

In front of the whole sect, he said she would be his Dao Companion.

I teared up, and quietly put away two big bowls of rice.

I was delighted! Absolutely delighted!

Three thousand years. This old iron tree had gone and blossomed.

Our whole Tianyan Sect could finally stop being single!

Chapter One

“Lin Yuan! What do you think you’re doing in front of the Sect Lord, you useless thing! Have you no shame!”

The roar cut me off mid-bite, third bowl.

I looked up into a pair of eyes that were practically spitting fire.

My Eldest Senior Brother, Mo Chen.

A try-hard. Also Honored Master’s most loyal simp.

He stood on the raised platform, one finger pointed straight at my nose, face twisted in righteous fury.

As if I had not been eating rice, but digging up his ancestors.

What’s all the noise? Can’t you see I’m moved? Honored Master is finally bearing fruit. This is celebration rice.

I ignored him and scraped the last of the rice out of my bowl. I even licked the bottom.

Delicious.

Spirit grain. Nice chew.

A deathly silence fell over the training grounds.

Five hundred-odd bachelor brothers swung their gazes between me, Honored Master up on the platform, the pretty mortal woman beside him whose name none of us had learned yet, and the furiously red-faced Mo Chen, who looked one breath away from leaping down and strangling me on the spot.

The mood was, well. Awkward.

Honored Master Xuan Lingzi, living legend of the cultivation world, currently had a face darker than the bottom of a cooking pot.

Today was supposed to be his glorious homecoming. No — his glorious return with a beauty on his arm, ready to bask in attention and blessings.

Who would have thought that the moment he finished announcing he was done being single, I would bury my head in my bowl.

The scene looked as if I had not eaten in eight hundred years.

“Wicked creature!” Honored Master’s voice had ice shards in it. “This Venerable One announces a matter of such importance, and all you can think about is your belly. You have dragged the face of my Tianyan Sect through the mud!”

Our face?

I laughed, inside. Nothing came out.

Three thousand years ago some screw came loose in your head and you laid down the rule that whoever stops being single first is the dog, and five hundred-odd of us have kept you company as bachelors for three thousand years. Is that not a loss of face?

And now you bring a woman home yourself. The magistrate may burn down houses, but the common folk can’t even light a candle? I can’t have two bowls of rice to celebrate? Where’s the logic?

Of course I did not dare say any of it.

I was just an utterly unremarkable chowhound. I had joined the sect three thousand years ago, and I was still lingering in Qi Refining.

I set down my bowl and looked up at him, all innocence. “Honored Master, I… I was just so happy for you! You’re finally starting a family. I—I’m glad! When I’m glad, I, well. I eat.”

I delivered it with such sincerity that I even squeezed out two crocodile tears.

The brothers around me looked at me with pity in their eyes.

Look at him. The most useless piece of trash in the whole Tianyan Sect. Lin Yuan.

Good for nothing but eating.

The mortal woman beside Honored Master — our future Martial Mother, Su Qingyan — could not hold it in, and burst out laughing.

Her laugh was a spring breeze on the face. A hundred flowers, opening.

Honored Master’s expression softened at once. It even went a little doting.

He cleared his throat, ready to let it drop.

Mo Chen was having none of it.

“Honored Master! The sect rules cannot be set aside! Lin Yuan has shown contempt for the Sect Lord and disregarded the sect rules. He must be severely punished!” Deep bow. Earnest words.

Here it comes. The self-cultivation of a simp.

I grumbled, inwardly.

Honored Master lapped it up, as expected. He pondered a moment, then fixed me with his majestic gaze.

“Lin Yuan. Three thousand years in this sect, not a hair’s breadth of progress in your Cultivation Base, idling about all day long, and now disgracing yourself at the Grand Ceremony. This Venerable One punishes you… to a month of self-reflection at the Sword Graveyard. Without any food!”

The crowd erupted.

The Sword Graveyard!

Forbidden ground of the Tianyan Sect, where the swords of generations of departed Founding Masters lay buried in the earth, and where the sword qi they left behind had gone feral and would tear a careless man to shreds before he had taken three steps.

And worst of all — no food!

To me, that was worse than death.

Everyone was certain I was done for.

Mo Chen’s mouth had already curled into a cruel little smile.

But none of them knew.

I, Lin Yuan, was not in Qi Refining at all.

And the so-called Sword Graveyard was no hell to me.

It was the heaven of the all-you-can-eat buffet.

Chapter Two

The Sword Graveyard lay at the deepest end of the back mountain, where the Tianyan Sect’s ground gave out.

Grey fog hung over it all year round, and ancient swords stood thrust into the earth at every angle, every one of them eaten through with rust.

Each one leaked its own Sword Intent, some faint as a whisper, some not faint in the slightest.

To an ordinary disciple those intents were knives that could cut a man’s Meridians open and grind his Soul to powder.

To me, they were salt and pepper. Chili oil. Cumin. A whole spice rack, and then some.

I drew a deep breath.

Mm. Today the air tasted of five-spice.

Ahh. That’s the stuff.

I found a rock flat enough to sit on, brushed the worst of the rust dust off it with my sleeve, sat down, closed my eyes, and began my “self-reflection.”

Three thousand years ago I had transmigrated into this world and become a nobody disciple of the Tianyan Sect.

I came with one lousy cheat: the Big Eater Ascension System.

The name says it all. Eat, and get stronger.

Eat spirit grain, and your Cultivation Base rises.

Eat the flesh of Demonic Beasts, and the body hardens.

Eat Spirit Herbs and immortal medicine, comprehend the Laws.

And the finest “ingredient” in this world was the most insubstantial of all. The Dao.

The leftover Sword Intents here, for instance. The Laws of the Sword Dao.

They were the crystallized life’s work of generations of Founding Masters, every drop of it earned with blood and decades.

Poison, to anyone else. To me, a delicacy beyond price.

I opened my mouth and pulled.

A wisp of Sword Intent from the outermost edge, nearly faded away, came into my mouth like a strand of noodle.

“Belch~”

A bit thin. Clear broth, no salt in it.

Still. An appetizer is an appetizer.

I smacked my lips and walked deeper.

The further in I went, the richer the Sword Intent, and the more it went to your head.

After about a quarter hour’s walk, I came to a broken sword.

The Intent coming off that blade was fierce enough to make your eyes water. It carried a domineering air, the kind that never once looked back.

Oh? Hegemon’s Sword Intent? Now that’s a hard dish. Spicy enough for me.

I sat down cross-legged, faced the broken blade, and opened my mouth again.

“Slurp—”

The fierce Intent slid down my throat into my belly like a swallow of strong liquor, and every pore in my body opened up.

A thread of pure energy unfurled in my Dantian, and my Cultivation Base crept up another notch.

To everyone else, of course, my Cultivation Base would always read “Qi Refining.”

That was because the System had long since turned my Dantian into a bottomless pit. Every scrap of energy was converted and stored somewhere no one could see.

Unless I chose otherwise, even an Immortal Emperor could stand in front of me and see nothing but a Mortal, and walk away satisfied that he had measured me correctly.

That was the whole foundation of my confidence in lying flat in this sect for three thousand years.

As long as Honored Master’s “single dog” rule held, I would play along with it.

I got stronger by eating. Cultivating? Hard work? What were those?

I was just reaching for my next “dish” when a small voice came from somewhere nearby.

“Excuse me… is anyone there?”

I frowned.

Who is it now? Interrupting a man at mealtime. Have people no manners?

I opened my eyes. A woman in a pale yellow dress was edging her way along the outer rim of the Sword Graveyard, one careful step at a time.

Her?

Our future Martial Mother. Su Qingyan.

What was a Mortal doing in here? Looking to die?

She had not spotted me. She kept walking in step by step, and the line she was taking pointed straight at a black longsword that gave off a thick stench of death.

That blade’s Intent was cold and vicious. A viper lying in wait.

Tch. Trouble.

Trouble, I had no use for. But if I stood by and watched our future Martial Mother die in front of me, Honored Master would lose his mind, and he would probably tear my kitchen down.

That, I could not allow.

I sighed, bent down, and picked up a pebble.

Su Qingyan was one step from entering that black sword’s reach when I flicked it.

The pebble flew without a sound and struck the hilt of a longsword planted at her feet.

“Ding—”

A clean, bright note, like a spoon tapped on a bowl.

The struck sword rang out, a clear metallic cry, and a soft arc of sword qi flew off it and curled around Su Qingyan’s ankle, tugging her gently backwards.

She stumbled and fell.

And the exact spot where her foot would have landed was sliced by a black line of sword qi, silent as a shadow, which cut a waist-high boulder clean in two.

The cut was smooth as a mirror.

Su Qingyan went white. She stared at the split stone and could not get a word out for a long while.

I dusted off my hands. Credit taken in silence.

Right. Saved her. Back to dinner.

I closed my eyes and was just about to go back to slurping my Hegemon’s Sword Intent.

The voice came again.

“Was… was that you? Did you save me?”

Chapter Three

I opened my eyes. Su Qingyan was already standing in front of me.

Her big eyes were full of shock, confusion, and a thread of curiosity.

She was staring at me hard.

What are you looking at? Never seen a handsome man eat?

I looked back at her with no expression and gave her two words. “Not me.”

“But…” She pointed at the place where she had fallen. “Something pulled me back just now. If it hadn’t…”

She did not dare finish the thought. Her little face went whiter still.

“Oh,” I said, flat as a board. “That was the Founding Masters answering from beyond. They saw how pretty you are and couldn’t bear to watch you die.”

Su Qingyan choked on that one. Her cheeks went a little pink.

“You— how can you talk to people like that?” She sounded cross, but there was more confusion in it than anger. “This place is dangerous. Why are you here?”

“Self-reflection.” I kept it short.

“Self-reflection?” She blinked. “Because… because you ate at the ceremony?”

I nodded.

Something like an apology crossed her eyes. “I’m sorry. It’s my fault. If Honored Master hadn’t brought me back…”

“Not your fault.” I cut her off, and meant it. “If you hadn’t come, I was afraid Honored Master would have gone and achieved Ascension on us. Who knows how long that stupid rule would have dragged on then.”

Su Qingyan: “…”

The joke went straight over her head.

“Anyway. This place is dangerous. You’re a Mortal. You shouldn’t be here.” I shooed her with the back of my hand, fly-style. “Go on. Off you go. Don’t interrupt me.”

“Interrupt your… self-reflection?” Her expression went stranger still.

She looked at me, sitting cross-legged and perfectly at ease in the middle of ten thousand sword intents, no pain on my face at all. More like… enjoying it?

A Qi Refining disciple, this relaxed in the Sword Graveyard?

She was a Mortal, but she had stayed at Honored Master’s side and heard plenty about the cultivation world.

This did not make sense.

“Who are you, really?” she asked, unable to hold it in.

Your future freeloading disciple, Martial Mother.

I said it inside. Out loud I said: “Lin Yuan. Tianyan Sect chowhound.”

Then I stopped paying her any attention, shut my eyes, and went back to my buffet.

A cold, vicious wisp of Sword Intent came into my mouth.

Mm. Mint. Wakes you right up.

Su Qingyan stood beside me for a long while.

She looked like she was trying to read some answer off me.

No such luck. Apart from my stomach giving the occasional rumble, I was utterly unremarkable.

She left, eventually, questions and all.

At the very edge of the Sword Graveyard she turned to look back, and caught me in the middle of a satisfied burp.

Her face. It was a picture.

The days after that were peaceful.

Every day I “ate” my way through one flavour of Sword Intent after another, and my Cultivation Base climbed fast.

On the surface, still Qi Refining.

Mo Chen never came looking for trouble again.

In his view, presumably, I had been shredded by sword qi long ago and scattered over half the back mountain.

Then one day I was working on a purple longsword that carried the Intent of thunder. It tasted something like popping candy, crackling and snapping on my tongue.

A commotion broke out at the mouth of the Sword Graveyard.

“Senior Brother, over here! I saw Miss Su walk this way a few days ago with my own eyes!”

“Hmph. A Mortal, daring to wander into forbidden ground. It has to be that trash Lin Yuan’s doing.”

Mo Chen’s voice.

You again. Can’t a man even eat in peace?

I frowned and stopped “feeding.”

Then Mo Chen came charging in with a handful of his lackeys.

They stopped dead when they saw me, alive and well.

“You… you’re not dead?” Mo Chen’s eyes were about to pop out of his skull.

“Thanks to you. Still breathing.” I patted the dust off my backside and got up, lazy as you like.

Mo Chen’s face went so dark it looked wet enough to drip.

He could not accept it. A Qi Refining piece of trash, hopping about in the Sword Graveyard like it was a public park and he had come to feed the ducks?

“Playing tricks!” He gave a cold huff. “Lin Yuan. Answer me. Did you put Miss Su up to coming here a few days ago? A man already awaiting punishment, colluding with an outsider, plotting who knows what — what’s the penalty for that?”

That was a big hat to put on a man.

“First. I didn’t put her up to anything. Second. She’s our future Martial Mother, not an outsider. Third.” I looked at him and smiled. “What are you supposed to be, that you get to interrogate anyone?”

“You!” Mo Chen was shaking with rage.

“How dare you, Lin Yuan! Showing disrespect to our Eldest Senior Brother!” A lackey jumped out from behind him.

“Seize him! Take him back to Precepts Hall. I’ll question him myself!” Mo Chen swept his arm.

The lackeys came at me all together.

They were all Foundation Establishment, and more than enough for one “Qi Refining” nobody who looked like he had never lifted anything heavier than a rice bowl.

Perfect. Just finished eating. Time to stretch.

I stood where I was and did not move.

The closest lackey’s hand was nearly on my collar.

And I gave a small, gentle… burp.

“Burp—”

A burp with purple lightning in it.

A thunderous tide of Sword Intent came pouring out of me with it.

The lackeys who had been lunging at me were struck as if by lightning. Their hair stood straight up, their whole bodies convulsed, and they flew backwards, foam spilling from their mouths.

Dead silence again, across the whole Sword Graveyard.

Mo Chen stared at me, then at his twitching brothers on the ground.

“You… you…” He pointed at me, and could not finish a sentence.

I dug a finger in my ear and looked at him with great innocence. “Sorry. Ate a bit just now. Indigestion.”

Chapter Four

Mo Chen’s face went green, then white, then green again.

He stared at me with his eyes fixed and unblinking, and everything in them was shock, suspicion, and a bitterness he could not swallow.

“You… you hid your cultivation?” You lot don’t—you can’t just— He squeezed the words out through his teeth.

“Hiding what? Hide one’s cultivation, is that what you’re accusing me of?” I spread both hands and let my face go completely blank. “I’m Qi Refining. That was one burp. Maybe the sword qi in this Sword Graveyard is just… a lively sort of sword qi?”

Like hell it was a burp.

That was written on Mo Chen’s face plainly enough for anyone to read.

But he had no proof.

He had watched me burp once, and then watched his Foundation Establishment junior brothers drop.

The whole thing was too strange.

Could the Founding Masters really have answered a prayer?

Yes. Yes he did. Aren’t you furious?

I looked at that constipated face of his and felt my heart bloom like a spring field after rain.

“You just wait!” Mo Chen lost his nerve before the threat had finished landing.

He flung the threat over his shoulder, gathered up the lackeys who were still twitching on the ground, and slunk off with what little dignity he had left.

The Sword Graveyard was quiet at last.

I stretched until my spine cracked in three places and went looking for a comfortable spot to take an afternoon nap.

I had barely lain down when somebody walked in at the entrance to the Sword Graveyard.

Su Qingyan.

She had changed into a pale blue dress today, and she was carrying a food box in one hand.

“I… I heard from the others that Eldest Senior Brother took you away,” she said, and let out a breath when she saw I was in one piece. “I was worried, so I came to look.”

“And…” She held the box out to me, cheeks a little pink. “I brought you something to eat. They punished you by taking your food away. You must be starving.”

I looked at the box. Then I looked at her.

This Miss Su is all right. She’s really all right.

I opened it. Inside were several small dishes, arranged with care, and two bowls of plain white rice.

The smell hit me before the lid was fully off.

“Thank you.” I picked up the chopsticks and said it properly.

I had already eaten enough, by the only measure that mattered to me. But real food was something I had never once turned down.

I went through it like a wind scattering cloud, and in no time the dishes were empty.

Su Qingyan sat across from me, watching me eat in silence, a small smile at the corner of her mouth.

“Slow down. Nobody’s going to fight you for it.”

“You don’t understand,” I said, swallowing the last mouthful and looking at her with full seriousness. “A chowhound does not chow down to fill a hole. A chowhound chow-downs because every single grain of rice in the bowl deserves respect.”

That made her laugh.

“Lin Yuan, are you… really only Qi Refining?” she asked once the laughing had died down, and the question came out of nowhere.

“Of course.” I did not even have to think about it.

“Then…” She pointed at the scorched black furrow out on the ground, the one my little “burp” had carved. “Then what is that?”

“Told you already. Indigestion.” My face did not move.

Su Qingyan rolled her eyes at me. She plainly did not believe a word of it.

“Master Xuan Lingzi… he wasn’t always like this,” she said, and her voice went somewhere quiet and far away.

“Oh? What was he like before?” Now I was interested.

“He told me once that he had a junior sister he loved very much. There was an accident, later, and she fell. After that he became… twisted about it. He decided that love was a stone on the road of cultivation, and that anyone who stumbled on it deserved the fall.”

Well, well. So it’s a broken heart.

I understood the whole thing at once.

No wonder he made a rule that stupid. Can’t have it himself, so nobody else gets to have it either. That is a single dog’s way of taking revenge on the whole world.

“And you?” I looked at her. “Do you want to be his Dao Companion? An old man a few thousand years old?”

Su Qingyan’s face went red all at once.

“What are you talking about! Master has been… he’s been very good to me. Like an elder.”

“An elder?” I laughed. “What elder wants to be your Dao partner?”

Su Qingyan had no answer for that. She lowered her head.

“I… he rescued me from bandits. I had no home to go back to. Master said he could give me one.” Her voice was very small.

“So you gave him yourself to pay for it?”

“I didn’t!” She looked up, and her eyes had gone red at the rims. “I just… I didn’t know what else to do.”

A mortal girl, dropped into the world of cultivators, with nothing in her hands but her own face and her own gratitude. She truly had not been given many choices.

“All right, don’t cry.” My head was starting to ache. “You’ve got a long road ahead of you. Don’t be in such a hurry to marry yourself off. Especially not to an old man old enough to be your ancestor’s ancestor.”

The words were barely out of my mouth when a cold voice cracked across the sky above the Sword Graveyard like a whip on stone.

“Lin Yuan! You have some nerve! Slandering this Venerable One behind his back!”

Master Xuan Lingzi was already there, standing in the air above the sword mounds. I had not heard him come.

His face was like still water, and his eyes were like knives, and both were fixed on me and Su Qingyan together.

Beside him stood Mo Chen, enjoying himself enormously.

Oh, I’m dead. Caught talking trash about a man to his own face.

My stomach dropped.

This was going to be a very large problem.

Chapter Five

Master’s pressure came down on the Sword Graveyard like Mount Tai set on a plate, and every wisp of sword qi in the place froze where it was.

Su Qingyan went white and shook where she stood.

I felt nothing much at all, beyond a mild irritation.

Eavesdropping on people’s conversations. No class whatsoever.

“Master.” I got up and made my bow, neither cringing nor stiff. “Your disciple was merely discussing philosophy with Miss Su.”

“Philosophy?” Xuan Lingzi gave a cold laugh, and his gaze dropped to the empty food box at my feet. “You discuss philosophy in a forbidden ground? And the restrictions this Venerable One set on you mean so little that you treat them as wind past your ear?”

“Master, please calm your anger!” Su Qingyan dropped to her knees at once. “This has nothing to do with Lin Yuan. I… I came on my own. I brought the food. If there is punishment, punish me.”

“Qingyan, get up.” Xuan Lingzi’s tone softened by an absurd degree in the space of one breath, and I had to work not to visibly shudder. “This is not your affair. It is this wicked creature, with his glib tongue, who has been leading you astray.”

That said, his eyes went cold again.

“Lin Yuan. Contempt for the sect rules. A secret meeting with a mortal woman. Slander against your elder. Do you know your crime?”

Mo Chen was already there to fan the flame. “Honored Master, this Lin Yuan has a crooked heart and has been corrected again and again without effect. In this disciple’s view, his cultivation should be destroyed and he should be expelled from the sect, as a warning to the rest!”

Destroy my cultivation? What exactly is there left to destroy in a Qi Refining cultivation? Can we skip ahead to the expulsion? Thank you kindly!

I came very close to giving Mo Chen a thumbs up.

“Master,” I said, with an expression of the deepest horror, “your disciple knows he was wrong. But your disciple has not the slightest improper thought toward Miss Su. I only saw a girl alone in the sect, and felt for her, and said a few words too many.”

“As for slandering you…” I paused, and glanced at him carefully. “Your disciple only felt that Master is brilliant and mighty, a genius born once in ten thousand years, and should not be trapped by the small affections of ordinary men. It is bad for your cultivation, is all.”

I delivered the whole speech with tremendous sincerity and tremendous loyalty.

Xuan Lingzi’s face did ease, somewhat.

You can pierce anything with a needle. You cannot pierce flattery.

Especially flattery that arrives by the back road.

“Hmph. A glib tongue!” He said it, but the killing intent had gone out of his eyes.

“Honored Master, the Sect Tournament is in three days,” Mo Chen said, and his eyes had begun to turn. “Perhaps… we should let Lin Yuan enter.”

“Let him enter? He’s Qi Refining. Is he going up there to make a spectacle of himself?” Some disciple at the back muttered it, not quite quietly enough.

Mo Chen smiled his cold smile. “The tournament exists to examine the results of our disciples’ training. Lin Yuan joined the sect three thousand years ago. It is time he went up and displayed his ’results.’ If he can place in the top hundred, it will prove that he has repented and applied himself, and his earlier offenses may be dealt with leniently. If he cannot…”

He did not finish, but he did not need to.

If he could not, then the new debt and the old would be settled together.

Of the five hundred disciples of the Tianyan Sect, the top hundred were at least Foundation Establishment of the late stage.

Sending a “Qi Refining” disciple to fight for a place in the top hundred was asking for my death, plain and simple.

This little bastard is rotten clean through.

Everyone expected me to refuse. Or to kneel and beg.

Xuan Lingzi watched me with interest, waiting to see what I would do.

I straightened my back instead and answered loud enough for the whole Sword Graveyard to hear. “Good! Your disciple accepts! Your disciple will train hard and do well in the tournament, and will not lose face for Master!”

I agreed so readily that everyone froze.

Mo Chen froze too, and then a grin spread across his face that was not pleasant to look at.

The road to heaven is open and you will not walk it; the gate to hell is shut and you insist on squeezing through. Trash. Let’s see how I kill you at the tournament.

That was what I read in his eyes.

I only found it funny.

The tournament? Good timing. I have taken in too many hard dishes lately and my stomach is starting to complain. I could use the exercise.

“Good, that’s spirit!” Xuan Lingzi clapped his hands and laughed, apparently well satisfied with my “ambition.”

“Since that is settled, you need not stay in the Sword Graveyard this month. Go back to your own Cave Residence and prepare properly.”

He swept one wide sleeve, and he and Su Qingyan and Mo Chen and the others turned into a streak of light and vanished.

As they left, Su Qingyan looked back at me once, and her eyes were full of worry.

I grinned at her and showed her a mouthful of white teeth.

Don’t worry, Martial Mother. Watch me go bring you back a championship.

Chapter Six

The Sect Tournament was held in the largest training grounds the Tianyan Sect had.

A sea of people and drums and gongs loud enough to split the sky.

None of which had anything to do with me.

I was crouched in a temporary kitchen in the corner, helping Chef Wang test his dishes.

“Lin Yuan, try this. The red-braised lion’s head meatballs just came off the fire. How is it?” Chef Wang looked at me as other men look at a beautiful woman.

I picked one up with my chopsticks and put the whole of it in my mouth.

“Mmm…” I savored it carefully. “Fat but not greasy. It comes apart the moment it touches the tongue. Only the sauce is a shade too salty. Half a spoon less salt next time.”

“Right you are!” Chef Wang took the advice at once and wrote it down in his little notebook.

Chef Wang ran the sect’s kitchens. He was also the only friend I had in the sect.

Because I was the only one who could taste the smallest difference in his cooking.

“Group Nine! Lin Yuan against Li Tieniu!”

The referee’s shout came down from the raised platform.

“That’s you.” Chef Wang dug an elbow into my ribs.

“What’s the hurry? Let me finish this soup.” I lifted a bowl of winter melon and pork rib broth and drank it straight down, three long swallows and then a fourth for the road.

“Burp~”

That hit the spot.

I strolled over to Ring Nine at my own pace.

On the ring, a man eight chi tall and built like an ox was waiting for me with the particular impatience of someone who has been waiting a while.

His name was Li Tieniu. Foundation Establishment, Middle Stage. That Mountain-Splitting Axe of his had a name in the sect and the name was earned.

“So you’re the trash who does nothing but chow down?” Li Tieniu asked, his voice coming up out of his chest, his eyes full of contempt.

“This One. At your service.” I answered with great politeness.

“Hmph. Dawdling. Get up here and die, and don’t waste Your Daddy’s time for the next match.”

I climbed the steps of the ring and gave him a smile.

The crowd below burst out laughing.

“Hahaha, this trash has the nerve to step into a ring?”

“I heard he made a bet with the Eldest Senior Brother. If he can’t make the top hundred, his cultivation base gets destroyed and he gets thrown out of the sect!”

“Then he’s finished. Senior Brother Li Tieniu doesn’t do mercy.”

The referee saw me settle into my place and asked the question he had asked four hundred times that morning. “Ready?”

Li Tieniu raised his Mountain-Splitting Axe.

I nodded.

“Begin!”

The word had barely left the referee’s mouth before Li Tieniu roared and came at me, the axe up over his head.

He looked as though he meant to split me in two.

So fast. So fierce.

Pity. His lower body is unstable. His right foot lands a tenth of a second behind his left. He is full of openings.

I stood where I was and did not move.

To everyone watching, I had been frightened out of my wits.

The smile on Li Tieniu’s face was not a nice one.

His axe had come down level with my head.

And I… put out a foot and tripped him.

“Thud!”

Li Tieniu, a man of two hundred-odd jin, went over my foot exactly and completely, and landed face down on the boards in the posture of a dog that has just discovered something terrible about the ground.

His Mountain-Splitting Axe tore loose from his hand with the momentum and went up in a beautiful arc, and came down off the far side of the ring with a clang that could be heard from the kitchens.

The whole grounds went dead silent.

Every face in the crowd stared, mouth open and eyes wide.

Li Tieniu lay there on his face for a long while, working out what had happened.

I walked over and nudged him with the toe of my shoe. “Hey. We still fighting?”

Li Tieniu’s head came up, and there was nothing on his face but disbelief.

He tried to get up. He had hit the boards hard enough to knock out two front teeth, and for the moment his arms and legs would not answer him.

“I… I yield.” It came out mushy, through the gap where the teeth had been.

The referee stood frozen for a good while before he remembered himself and struck the gong.

“First match. Lin Yuan wins!”

I walked down off the ring into a hall of shocked faces.

Boring. Not half the challenge of Chef Wang’s meatballs.

I shook my head and wandered back to the kitchen.

“Right. Which soup am I on next?”

Chapter Seven

I won the next several matches with enormous good luck.

My second opponent came down sick the moment he stepped up — ate something bad, emptied himself out entirely, and yielded before the referee had finished speaking.

My third opponent drew his weapon, and the weapon broke in his hand, and he was so angry about it that he forfeited on the spot.

My fourth opponent came at me with everything he had, stepped on a banana peel somebody had dropped on the boards, went straight over on his back and slid off the ring and lost.

Who threw a banana peel on a tournament floor? Have you people no sense of civic duty?

I stood on the ring with an innocent face on.

There had been a change in how the whole training grounds looked at me.

It had started at contempt. Then it had gone to shock. Now it had settled into something much stranger.

“This Lin Yuan… is he carrying a koi spirit or something?”

“This luck could Defy Heaven!”

“I’m starting to doubt my whole life. I cultivated bitterly for several hundred years, and he steps on a banana peel and does better than me?”

Up on the raised platform, Mo Chen’s face had gone as black as the bottom of a pot.

His fists were clenched so tight that his nails had nearly gone through the skin of his palms.

The death trap he had built so carefully, match by match and round by round, had come apart one piece at a time in the most ridiculous manner available to anybody.

He felt as though his intelligence had been taken out and rubbed back and forth across the floor.

“Master, this Lin Yuan is far too strange. This disciple suspects he is using some kind of demonic art!” Mo Chen poured his poison into Xuan Lingzi’s ear.

Xuan Lingzi’s brows were drawn together. He had not understood it either.

With his cultivation base, he could see plainly enough that every one of my wins had been full of coincidence.

But too much coincidence stops being coincidence.

“Keep watching.” Two words. He offered nothing after them.

On the other side, Su Qingyan was watching me, and there was a light in her eyes that had not been there before.

She did not believe in luck.

She believed only this: that the man who had pulled sword qi out of the air to save her in the Sword Graveyard, and then eaten the food she brought him without turning a hair, was not a simple piece of trash.

He was playing with the whole Tianyan Sect, and he was doing it in a way that nobody in the sect had the smallest chance of reading.

Soon enough I came to the match that would decide whether I made the top hundred.

My opponent was Zhang Hao, tenth place in the last Sect Tournament.

Peak Foundation Establishment. One pair of hands trained in the Wave-Crashing Palm, whose force came on and on and did not stop.

“Lin Yuan, your luck has run out!” Zhang Hao stood across from me, and his eyes were as sharp as a hawk’s.

“I’m not going to give you the openings those other pieces of trash gave you.”

“Oh.” I nodded. “Then could you be quick about it? I’ve got soup waiting.”

Zhang Hao: “……”

My tone, which could not have cared less, made him furious.

“Die, then!”

He roared and threw both palms out, and the force of them turned to a crashing tide and came for me in a wall.

The whole ring disappeared under blue palm shadows.

Somebody down in the crowd gasped, and then all of them did.

“That’s the highest level of the Wave-Crashing Palm — palms like waves!”

“Senior Brother Zhang Hao has actually trained his Wave-Crashing Palm to this degree!”

“Lin Yuan’s finished. There’s no luck in the world that can save him from this!”

What I did was stand exactly where I was in the face of that mountain of a wave.

Good palm wind. Very cooling.

The force was almost on me when I moved.

Dodging was not on the menu. Taking it head-on was not, either.

I simply raised a hand, put out one finger, and gave that wall of palm shadows a light touch.

As one would touch a soap bubble.

“Pop~”

A small sound.

That wall of palm shadows, enough to split stone tablets, scattered into nothing.

As though it had never been there at all.

Zhang Hao froze.

The crowd froze.

On the raised platform, Mo Chen and Xuan Lingzi froze.

Not one face down there had moved out of the shape it had been in when the blow came apart, and the whole world seemed to have been pressed on pause.

“You… what demonic art is that?” Zhang Hao’s voice shook.

“It’s not a demonic art.” I pulled my finger back and explained it to him with complete seriousness. “I found the weakest point in your palm force, and I used my fingernail to poke a hole in it.”

I was telling him the truth.

To my eyes, that palm force of his, which looked so perfect, was full of thousands of small openings.

I had picked one at random and given it a poke.

But to everyone who heard it, it was nothing but humiliation, served up plain.

“I don’t believe it!” Zhang Hao roared it and came at me again.

“Crashing Waves!”

He had gone to the thing he kept at the bottom of the box.

I sighed.

Why won’t he believe me? He’s forcing me to actually do something.

My patience was wearing out.

I could not even be bothered to use a finger this time.

I just… blew at him as he came.

“Whoo——”

A light breeze went across the ring.

Zhang Hao, a peak Foundation Establishment expert, took it as if a twelfth-grade typhoon had hit him square in the chest. The whole of him went backwards off his feet, out of the training grounds entirely, and vanished over the horizon.

All that was left was an echo, growing fainter and fainter.

“I’ll be back…”

The whole grounds went dead quiet.

If what had come before was shock, this was something closer to terror.

One breath, and a peak Foundation Establishment cultivator blown out of the sky?

What in the hell kind of Qi Refining is that?

Since when does your family’s Qi Refining do things like that?

On the ring, I looked around at all of them.

Every person my eyes landed on dropped their head without meaning to, and not one of them would look back at me.

I scratched the back of my head, and my face was a picture of innocence.

I really did just want my soup. You people and your Realm-tier assumptions.

Chapter Eight

I won.

I got into the top hundred of the Sect Tournament in a manner that nobody had planned for and nobody could explain.

Tianyan Sect boiled over from one end to the other because of me.

Every kind of rumor about me went up at once, and the wilder the rumor the faster it traveled.

Some said I was an ancient power granted Rebirth, playing games among ordinary people for the amusement of it.

Others held that I had stumbled onto a peerless stroke of fortune and climbed to the sky in a single step.

And there were those who said I was a bastard son that Honored Master had kept hidden away for three thousand years, and that this tournament had been arranged for no other reason than to put me up on a stage.

That one’s plausible. I should ask Master later whether it comes with an extra bowl at dinner.

I paid no attention to any of it.

The moment the tournament ended, I ran back to the kitchen.

Chef Wang was waiting for me in a state of high excitement.

“Lin Yuan, you brat! You had that hidden the whole time!” He drove a fist into my chest, and his eyes were full of light.

“Hidden what? It was luck.” I grinned and picked up a bowl of lotus seed soup that had already gone lukewarm, which was exactly how I liked it in that weather.

“Luck my foot! One breath and Zhang Hao’s out past the horizon — and you call that luck?” Chef Wang was plainly not convinced.

I did not try to explain it again. I just drank my soup.

That evening, Su Qingyan came again.

With the same food box.

“Congratulations.” She set the box down on the stone table and looked at me with a smile all over her face.

“The same to you, the same to you.” I opened it. Braised pork knuckle, my favorite, and she had got the skin right.

“You knew all along that you could win. Didn’t you?” She was serving my rice as she said it.

“I didn’t.” It came out around a mouthful of knuckle, which did nothing for the clarity of it. “I only knew that if I didn’t win today, I would miss dinner.”

Su Qingyan choked on that for a second, and then laughed.

She seemed to have got used to the particular way my mind worked.

“Why… do you hide your strength?” That was the question that mattered, and she had been circling it all evening.

My jaw stopped moving for half a beat.

I looked up at her, at those clear eyes.

In the moonlight her face had a layer of something laid over it, a pale clean light that had nothing to do with the moon.

“Because there is a very stupid dog, and he made a very stupid rule.” That one I said mildly.

Su Qingyan’s body gave a small shiver.

She knew who I meant. She knew which rule I meant.

“You… want to break it?”

“No.” I shook my head, and the answer came out quick and clean.

“What?” Now it was her turn not to understand.

“I only want to eat my meals in peace.” I looked at her and said it one word at a time. “And anybody who dares to get between me and my meals, I will beat until his own mother could not recognize him.”

“Man, god, or rule.”

My tone was flat enough that another man might have taken it for indifference, but when Su Qingyan looked into my eyes she saw a mountain of corpses and a sea of blood behind them.

It was a will terrible enough to make heaven and earth shake in their places.

And all at once she understood.

Lin Yuan was not hiding his strength.

He simply could not be bothered to lift a hand.

To him the Tianyan Sect, and beyond it the cultivation world entire, every elder and every sect and every mountain that had ever put a name to itself, was probably nothing more than a game to pass the time.

And eating was the only serious business he had.

“Then… Master, he…” Su Qingyan’s voice had gone a little dry.

“Him?” I gave a cold laugh. “He’d better not come and bother me. Otherwise I don’t mind getting a different Master.”

Su Qingyan drew a sharp breath at that.

A different Master.

Said as easily as another man might say he would change his robe.

And then the night sky above our heads turned bright as day.

A terrible pressure came down out of it and lay over Tianyan Sect from the front gate to the back mountain.

Master Xuan Lingzi hung in the air above us, looking down at my little courtyard with a face the color of iron.

His gaze went through the roof as though the roof were not there, and found me, and found Su Qingyan.

“Lin Yuan! Su Qingyan! The middle of the night, one man and one woman, alone in one room! What kind of behavior is this!”

His voice came like Heavenly Lightning rolling across the sky, and it went off beside the ear of every person in the sect at the same volume.

Again? Is a man not allowed to finish his dinner?

I put the last piece of knuckle in my mouth and stood up, out of patience.

“Master, we were running lines.”

Xuan Lingzi: “???”

Chapter Nine

“Running lines for what?” Xuan Lingzi had plainly not caught up with the wiring in my head.

“For Me and My Master, of course,” I said, and lied with a completely straight face. “Miss Su plays your Dao Companion. I play a useless disciple who is loyal to the bone and trains like a madman in secret so that he can persuade Master to stop drowning in beauty and get back to his cultivation.”

“Tonight’s scene is the night before the useless disciple who has never amounted to anything masters his art at last and is ready to show his Master exactly what he can do, and Miss Su comes to him to cheer him on and to encourage him to confess his feelings to Master bravely.”

I delivered the whole thing with rises and falls in it, and it would have moved a stone.

Su Qingyan stood beside me and listened to all of it with her mouth open, and then nodded very cooperatively anyway.

Xuan Lingzi: “……”

Behind him, Mo Chen was shaking from head to foot with rage.

“Ridiculous! Master, do not listen to a word of his quibbling! Every word out of his mouth is an attempt to smear the good name of Your Sect Lord and of Miss Su, and he knows perfectly well what he is doing!”

“Oh?” I raised an eyebrow and looked at Mo Chen. “Eldest Senior Brother, what are you getting so worked up about? Unless… you want to play a part in this as well?”

“You—!” Mo Chen had nothing to answer with.

“That’s enough. Every one of you shut up! Let this Venerable One think!” That was Xuan Lingzi blowing at last.

He felt his head was being stirred into a muddle.

He stared at me, his eyes full of scrutiny and doubt.

“Lin Yuan. Your performance in the ring today was not normal, and it was not the performance of a man in the Qi Refining stage. Tell me. What is your cultivation base, really?”

There it was. The knife out of the sleeve at last.

“Replying to Master, your disciple really is Qi Refining.” My face was a picture of sincerity.

“Horse shit!” Xuan Lingzi swore, which he almost never did. “Qi Refining blows a peak Foundation Establishment cultivator out of the sky with one breath? Do you take this Venerable One for a three-year-old?”

“Your disciple would not dare.” I lowered my head. “Perhaps… your disciple is unusually gifted. Strong lungs.”

“Good. Good, so your strength is a little greater than most!” Xuan Lingzi laughed out of sheer fury. “Tomorrow is the final of the Sect Tournament, and your opponent is Mo Chen!”

“This Venerable One would like to see exactly how strong your lungs are!”

“This Venerable One will set the barrier over your ring and Mo Chen’s with his own hands, and the two of you will fight until one of you is dead and the other has stopped moving.”

The words landed, and the sect went still.

Until one of them is dead.

Master was truly angry now.

On Mo Chen’s face there spread a grin of pure delight and pure malice.

He had waited far too long for this day.

“Your disciple obeys!” He knelt in midair, and his voice rang out.

Everyone looked at me, waiting for terror and despair on my face.

I only yawned.

“Oh. Understood.”

I answered him without any particular feeling. “Master, if there is nothing else, your disciple would like to go to sleep now? There is a match early tomorrow, and a man needs his strength for it.”

And then I actually turned around and started back inside to bed.

My attitude finished what my mouth had started, and Xuan Lingzi went white with rage.

“Wicked creature! You have a death wish!”

He brought one palm down, and with it came a huge handprint of Spiritual Energy carrying the kind of force that ends worlds, pressing down out of the night straight at my little courtyard.

That palm was enough to level the entire back mountain.

He was not trying to teach me a lesson. He was trying to kill me.

Su Qingyan screamed.

I did not even bother to turn my head.

So annoying. Can a man not go to bed?

I waved a hand back at it, with no more care than that.

As one waves off a fly.

Then came the thing that nobody in that sect would ever forget.

That handprint of Spiritual Energy, the one that was enough to destroy the heavens and the earth and everything standing between them, stopped dead three inches above the roof of my little courtyard.

And then, like a balloon that has been pricked, it went out without a sound.

Without a trace. Without ever having been.

I had not touched it, from beginning to end.

In the night sky, Xuan Lingzi took the blow as though lightning had struck him. Blood burst from his mouth, and he swayed where he hung.

It was as though he had seen some unnameable monster.

“You… what… what are you?”

Chapter Ten

A deathly silence came down over the whole Tianyan Sect.

Every disciple stood with his head tipped back, none of them moving and none of them speaking, all of them staring blankly up at that unbelievable thing in the night sky, and not one of them could make his eyes accept what they were looking at.

Their Master, Xuan Lingzi, who was as strong as a god is strong, had been struck by a disciple everyone in the sect called trash, struck with one flick of the hand and left coughing blood. Had the world gone mad?

Had the world gone mad?

The delight on Mo Chen’s face had set where it stood, still wet, and what came up under it was a fear with no bottom and no sides to it.

His lips moved, and would not put a whole sentence together, and every time he got close to one his throat closed on it.

Su Qingyan had a hand over her mouth, and her eyes were full of a shock she had no words for.

She had always known I was strong, and had never once considered that I might be as strong as this.

I turned around and looked at Xuan Lingzi, bloodless where he hung in the air, and I sighed, and put my hands in my sleeves.

“I told you. I only want to eat my meals in peace, and sleep, and have a bowl of soup now and then.”

“Why do you people always have to push me?”

My voice was not loud at all, and yet it reached every ear in that courtyard clearly and at the same volume.

“You… you’re not Qi Refining…” Xuan Lingzi had a hand pressed to his chest, and the words came out hard.

“Of course I’m Qi Refining.” I said it as though it were the most obvious thing in the world.

“Only it’s Qi Refining for three thousand years.”

The words were barely out of my mouth when something burst out of me, all at once and without any warning at all, a pressure so far past anything the sect had a word for that the words they did have simply stopped coming to mind.

Spiritual Energy, that was not. Spiritual Power, that was not, and it was not any one of the kinds of force the cultivation world had ever got round to naming.

Older than any of that, it was, and deeper, and higher, and nearer the root.

As though The Heavenly Dao itself had come down to stand in the courtyard.

Three thousand Daos manifested behind me.

The Laws of the Sword Dao. The Dao of Lightning. The Dao of Fire. The Dao of Space. The Dao of Time.

Each one of them burned with such a light that any Tribulation Transcendence cultivator in the world would have gone out of his mind for one glance at it.

And now those three thousand Daos hung around me in a ring like the gentlest of pets, tame as a cat asleep on a warm stone, bowing, kneeling, each one in its own place and none of them daring to move.

I, Lin Yuan, made my body the furnace and took the Ten Thousand Daos for my food.

For three thousand years I had eaten every technique the world had in it.

In my dantian there was no Golden Core, and no Nascent Soul.

There was only a chaos, and in the chaos a stomach, chewing, slow.

“This… this is… the Ten Thousand Daos Bowing as One!”

A Grand Elder who had lived more than a thousand years cried it out in a voice that did not sound like his own, and then his legs gave way under him and he went down on his knees in the dust without ever once looking away from me.

And then it ran through the sect like dominoes going over.

Every elder, every disciple, lost the argument with his own body and went down on his knees at once, and the sound of it going through the courtyard was like one sheet of cloth ripped end to end.

It was absolute suppression coming down from a higher order of life.

It was mortals prostrating themselves before a god out of pure instinct.

In the whole Tianyan Sect only three people had not gone down.

Me, Su Qingyan, and Xuan Lingzi, swaying on his feet.

Su Qingyan could stand because I was holding her up.

Xuan Lingzi could stand because the pride of a Sect Lord would not let him do anything else.

“And now,” I said, looking at him with something that was almost a smile, “do you still think I’m Qi Refining?”

There was no color left in Xuan Lingzi’s face at all.

He looked at the three thousand Daos turning slowly behind me, and there was nothing left in his eyes at all but despair, and regret, and the beginnings of an understanding he would rather not have had.

He understood at last what manner of thing he had chosen to pick a fight with, and how little of it there had ever been any use in fighting.

“I…” He opened his mouth, and nothing came out of it.

I stopped paying attention to him. My gaze went to Mo Chen.

That Eldest Senior Brother, who a quarter of an hour earlier had been shouting that he and I would fight until one of us was dead, had collapsed on the ground, soiled himself, and stank.

“You. Come here.” I crooked a finger at him.

Mo Chen shook from head to foot, crawled over on his hands and knees to kneel in front of me, and knocked his head against the stones over and over.

“Lin… Grandmaster Lin! No! Grandfather Lin! I was wrong! I did not know what I was looking at! I am not a man! I am a fart! You are large-minded and generous, so treat me as a fart and let me go!”

“You’re too loud.” I frowned.

I lifted a foot and set it, lightly, on the top of his head.

“The finals tomorrow. Still on?” I asked.

“No no no! Not on! I yield! You can have my life if you want it!” Mo Chen wept and screamed it.

“Boring.”

I shook my head, and put a little weight into the foot.

“Bang!”

A muffled sound.

Mo Chen’s head burst open like a watermelon.

Red and white spattered across the ground.

I took my foot back and did not look at what I had done, as though I had only stepped on an ant.

Then I raised my head, and carried my gaze over every head in that courtyard until it came to rest on the face of Xuan Lingzi.

“And now it’s your turn.”

“Master, that rule of yours — whoever stops being single first is the dog — does it still stand?”

Chapter Eleven

My question went into Xuan Lingzi’s chest like the sharpest knife in the sect, and it went in at the one place where there was no armor at all, and it stayed there.

His eyes, when they came up to mine, were past complication and past anything with a name.

There was fear in them. Regret. A thing that would not accept what had happened. And something else, faint, that might have been relief.

“It does not stand.”

He gave a wretched laugh, and it aged him a thousand years on the spot.

“From today, the Tianyan Sect has no such rule.”

He said it, and then, in front of everyone, he bent the back he had kept straight for three thousand years, an inch at a time, and brought it down toward me.

“Disciple Xuan Lingzi greets… Martial Uncle.”

That bow drained the color out of the mountains and put out the sun and the moon together.

Every disciple and elder left alive was struck entirely stupid.

Master… had called the chowhound trash… Martial Uncle?

Whose generation reckoning was this supposed to be?

Martial Uncle? I’ve got no nephew your size.

That one I kept behind my teeth.

I could feel that the bow was honest.

He was not bowing to my strength. He was bowing to the Dao that stood behind me.

The one who arrives first is the elder.

On the road toward the great Dao, I was a very long way ahead of him.

His bow was a bow to the Dao.

“Get up.” I let the words drop without any heat in them at all. “Seeing as you have played along with me for three thousand years without ever once asking me why, we will call today even.”

“Thank you… Martial Uncle.” Xuan Lingzi straightened, and his face was still not entirely in this world.

“But,” I said, and turned the subject over, “the death penalty can be waived. The living one cannot.”

Xuan Lingzi’s body went rigid inside those robes, and his hands closed on nothing at all.

“That single-dog rule of yours cost my sect five hundred-odd good men three thousand years of bachelorhood, and the youth that went with it, and the Marriage Destiny that never got a chance to arrive. How many of them are going grey at the temples for nothing?”

“I sentence you to go down the mountain yourself, starting today, and find every one of those five hundred-odd nephews of mine a proper match. It has to be a match in both directions, and it has to be between families of equal standing. Miss one, and I will hold you responsible.”

“What?” Xuan Lingzi was struck dumb.

Him? The living legend of the cultivation world? Playing matchmaker?

That was worse than a killing.

“What? You don’t want to?” I narrowed my eyes.

“I do! Your disciple does!” Xuan Lingzi jerked, and bowed and scraped in a hurry.

What was face, set against a life?

I nodded, satisfied, and let my eyes travel out across the grounds, from face to face, as a man reads a page.

The senior brothers still on their knees were stunned, and then broke into a heaven-shaking cheer.

“Grand Martial Uncle is mighty!”

“Thank you, Grand Martial Uncle, for ending our single days!”

“You’re the father that gave me a second life!”

And for a while the whole Tianyan Sect was drowned in the joy of what was coming to them.

I waved a hand for quiet.

“All right, stop howling. If you train, go and train. If you want a partner, go and find one, and don’t come back without a name.”

“Oh, and one more thing,” I said, remembering, and pointed two fingers at Su Qingyan without any particular ceremony. “Her. She’s under my protection from now on. You treat her well. If I hear you’ve bullied her, or made her do one single thing she didn’t want to do…”

I left it there. The threat did not need finishing.

Xuan Lingzi waved both hands in a hurry. “I wouldn’t dare, I wouldn’t dare. From now on your disciple will treat Miss Su as an honored guest, and will not show her one grain of disrespect.”

Su Qingyan’s face went as red as an apple.

She looked at me, and there was a light in her eyes that had a name, and the name was worship.

Done. Clocking off.

I clapped my hands together and felt a great cleanness of spirit come over me.

And then my stomach, right on cue, made itself heard.

“Grrr——”

I turned and started toward the kitchen.

“Chef Wang! My midnight meal! The lotus seed soup! Is it still hot?”

My voice went out into the quiet night, and it carried a long, long way.

Chapter Twelve

The next morning I was woken up by a noise.

I pushed the door open and found my little courtyard packed with people.

All of them senior brothers of the sect.

Every one of them carrying something.

There was thousand-year ginseng in the pile. There was ten-thousand-year lingzhi. There were Heavenly Treasures of every kind, laid out by men who had gone to the trouble of finding them, and a good many of which I could not have named.

“This is your disciple’s small offering, Grand Martial Uncle. Please accept it!”

“Look at this Blood Dragon Grass of mine, Grand Martial Uncle. Would it buy me a wife?”

“Grand Martial Uncle, I do not want a wife at all. Can I trade this whole pile for one breath of yours? The kind that blows a grown man clean out of the sky?”

……

I felt as though my head had swelled to twice its size.

Had these bachelors lost their minds?

“Get out!” I roared. “Every last one of you!”

The whole courtyard went quiet at once.

“Take your things with you! This is not a vegetable market!”

“Anybody who brings me one more piece of junk like this to bother me with, I will have Master find him a Dao Companion of eight hundred jin first, and I will tell him to make it a fair match!”

At that, the lot of them scattered like startled birds.

The world was quiet again.

I stretched, and was just about to go to the kitchen to find something to eat.

Xuan Lingzi arrived.

Su Qingyan came behind him.

Today’s Xuan Lingzi looked a good deal more himself. There was still fear at the back of his eyes, but the ruin of the night before was gone out of him.

“Martial Uncle.” He offered me a storage ring with both hands.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“All the sect’s treasures from three thousand years. And… the wealth Mo Chen squeezed out of the common people over the years. Your disciple has brought it all to you.”

I glanced inside. The mountain of treasure piled up in that ring nearly blinded me.

This simp is richer than I thought.

I did not stand on ceremony with him. I took it.

“There is one other thing,” Xuan Lingzi said, and hesitated before he went on. “Your disciple would like… to ask Martial Uncle to take over as Sect Lord of the Tianyan Sect.”

“No.” I answered before he had finished.

“Does being Sect Lord come with meals?”

“Er… it does.”

“Are they as good as Chef Wang’s?”

“…No.”

“Then there’s your answer.” I waved a hand at him. “Being Sect Lord is far too much trouble for the money, and the money is not even money. You keep it. All I want is top priority in the kitchen, and nobody standing over my shoulder while I eat.”

Xuan Lingzi: “……”

He looked as though he wanted to say something else, and I looked at him until he decided not to.

“All right, if there’s nothing else, go and find my nephews some partners. Don’t stand there taking up the ground like a fence post.”

Xuan Lingzi looked as though he had been granted a great pardon, and pulled Su Qingyan to go.

“Wait.” I called them back.

I walked up to Su Qingyan, reached into the storage ring, took out a jade pendant that was one clear green from end to end with no cloud in it anywhere, and held it out to her.

“Take this. It will keep you young, and no illness will get near you.”

That pendant was a single thread of the Dao of Life, gathered up and set into the jade by my own hand, and to a mortal it was a thing beyond price.

Su Qingyan looked at the pendant, and then at me, and did not take it.

“I… I can’t take something that valuable.”

“Take it.” I pressed it into her hand. “Call it… payment for the food.”

Su Qingyan closed her fingers around the pendant and held it tight.

“Thank you, Lin Yuan.” She raised her head, looked at me, and said it seriously.

“Any time.” I smiled.

Xuan Lingzi left with Su Qingyan.

He really did go and play matchmaker for every disciple in the sect.

They say the Tianyan Sect later became the most famous matchmaking mecca in the whole cultivation world.

That, of course, is all a story for another time.

Right now, I was sitting on the roof of the kitchen with a bowl of fish soup that Chef Wang had just made, watching the sun go down at the edge of the sky.

The salted fish years were over. Three thousand of them.

The days ahead, it seemed… would not be much different.

Except that at mealtimes, I might need to set out a few more bowls and chopsticks.

Because there are always one or two who cannot see what is in front of them, and who want to come and find out what the fist of this Lord of the Ten Thousand Daos actually tastes like.

Ah. Why does being a chowhound have to be so hard?

I finished the last of the soup and gave a belch of complete contentment.

Life was still good.