There was a horrible association of evil with ignorance. The idea that being evil was some sort of intellectual fault, the concept that lacking empathy or good will somehow made a man intellectually disabled.

That was stupid, of course. Any decent man knew that evil leaked from the depths of humanity's soul, as did good. People tried to square it off, separate it, and say it was something else entirely when it was, in fact, a part of them.

It was the fault of people, Yai Mien thought. It was the trouble with them. If someone separated themselves from evil and refused to understand those who committed it, they would never see it coming.

She walked around Oasis Town with a metal blade and a golden brown uniform. The uniform was old and resembled a soldier's robe. It was buttoned up on the left side, from shoulder to lower thigh. It had four cut vents, one at the front of her legs and one at the back.

It had a collar, too. One that stood upright and covered the lower portion of her face. That, along with the metal cone hat almost made her face invisible. Her long hair flowed out from her head and followed her as she walked through the streets.

And that's what they were, streets.

"Come on, kid, we have one more place to check," mumbled the old man ahead of her.

He was her commanding officer, Captain Mitz Jha. He was a mortal man about the size of a large boy hitting puberty. And he was old, so he was always slouching just a bit, one hand on a cane and the other on his back.

He moaned when he went up a hill and leaned back when he went down one.

He had been the Town Watch Captain for about fifty years, and he was the last one on the job. Oasis Town had been fairly well managed for a place with only a few thousand people living in it.

If anyone had a problem, they could go to Chin about it, and if he found you guilty of something nasty, he was liable to kick you out with the next merchant caravan and keep you waiting in jail till they come as well.

There were the occasional theft and disputes; in fact, there was quite a lot of that, but Captain Jha could take care of those on his own in his younger years.

If there was too much trouble, he could always hire some young men to be part-time constables. But there was never enough crime in Oasis Town for that to be a viable career option. Chin would handle most of the major disputes, and if he couldn't figure out who was guilty, he'd go to that immortal and ask him for the right answer.

If you committed a crime in Oasis Town and if someone noticed and complained, it was only a matter of when you'd get caught not a matter of if.

That and the town's policy of never letting anyone go homeless or hungry reduced crime rates by quite a margin. For Captain Jha, that was about three disputes a day with enough time for a meal and a nap between each. And most of those he solved by giving both parties some tea and begging them to be reasonable.

But that wasn't working now.

Oasis Town was turning to Oasis City. The population was growing, soon to have fully doubled in permanent residents, and worst of all, they were all cultivators.

There were far fewer disputes over lost sheep leaving one flock and accidently joining another and more about thefts, damages, lies, conspiracies, politics, and all types of other things. And poor old man Jha couldn't take it.

That was why Yai had joined the force. She found, caught, and beat a lot of the cultivators who chose to start trouble in the small- well, growing village. A few feet away, some man and woman were arguing, there was something about money and prices not kept.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

They were both cultivators of the third rank and they seemed to be having a contest of insults. That was also common now. Mister Bill had banned violence formally, but duels of honor and insults were still allowed. Someone could beat you as long as they didn't inflict too much physical harm to your person physically.

But that only bruised the pride, and one could do so much more with words to the pride than with fists.

So, the insults had started.

"You fat, greedy, no-good pile of a man. I don't see how you walk with legs so thick, one must roll right over the other like a couple of chained-up barrels rolling down a hill."

"I've never seen such disgraceful makeup. You look like you robbed a beggar for the dirt on his face and the disease on his genitals and smeared them all over that illness of a skull."

"Just get away from me and walk slowly, lest you shake up the whole town with that pace."

"Maybe you'll fall in a mud pit and be all the cleaner for it then."

"You right bag of lard!"

"Stop breathing so hard before your stench breath technique takes us all out now!"

Yai walked over to the two cultivators. Unlike mortals, she knew cultivator techniques differed from person to person and changed the way their bodies functioned. It was an active process that would change the entirety of a person's inner being and sometimes the outer bits as well.

The large lady wasn't fat, she was muscular. She had a hefty amount of muscle built up and a decent amount of fat on top as a reserve. It was a part of her technique, Yai assumed.

Fat to energy reserves were a common method of cultivation, even in the higher realms. Though they would be able to convert the matter directly into energy without waste, this woman's technique had even a fraction of that efficiency.

And as for the man, he didn't smell as much as overwhelmed. He was a spice maker, and his specific mixes of herbs and qi made the flavor of the stuff leak out into the air. It was valuable stuff around here, herbs. Mixing them was no simple manner either, it was part alchemy and part technique. His clan probably wasn't a fighting one and relied on their culinary talents to contribute to whatever small time sect they came from.

"Enough," Yai spoke, projecting her aura onto the two before they could start up another round.

Both man and woman, and now terrified instigators, turned their heads towards her with a bow.

"Apologies, great master-"

"We did not mean to-"

"Just keep it down and deal peacefully or move on," Yai commented.

Both she and the old man walked forward. It was getting harder now, much harder. Yai had to walk with the old Jha because if she didn't, situations like this were liable to turn violent.

And prideful cultivators who were afraid of the immortal weren't able to restrain themselves when a mortal told them what to do. Just look at Chin, he was a cultivator now, and even then, he had to have Rin Wi or Mei Shan by his side for any negotiations.

People tucked away their pride, but they would bring it out when they thought no one was watching.

Jha nodded to Yai and walked on forward. She nodded back and smiled.

She respected the man, and not in the way an adult might respect a smart child. It wasn't that haughty, 'You did what you could, and for that, you should be proud,' respect.

No, it was real respect. The man was old, he was tired, and he was certainly overwhelmed, but he kept the law, as little as it was in this village.

"The duty of an officer is to keep the peace, little Mei. Sometimes that might mean whacking somebody with a spear's butt other times it might mean listening to two men call each other thieves for half an hour. And Heavens forbid, sometimes a man kills or beats his child and wife and gives them a leopard's skin of bruises. And sometimes you have to jail that man and feed him for half the year till the rainy season starts and ship him out of the village with the spear's head. But we keep the peace, lass; we walk around, and we keep the peace."

And while Yai wasn't the sentimental sort, she found those words to be quite touching.

She had often heard many philosophical rambles from powerful cultivators. The long talk of justice or the lack of it. Something about the strong protecting the weak or ruling them, that was always what they thought about.

As much as they tried to deny it, they were still human, and a piece of that humanity- the good piece- would sometimes yell at them and tell them that they were doing the wrong thing. And when that happened, when they felt some sort of guilt or found a hole in their dao about their actions, they would speak, using big words and complex ideas to plug up the leak in their ship of morality.

But that wasn't old Jha. He just had a job, and he would see to it.

"I think it's all hogwash," Old Jha had said. "I mean, it's not all that complicated, lass. You know good, you do good. Sometimes it's hard, and sometimes it is disgustingly grey, but most of the time it's black and white. I think if you're obsessed with the grey all the time, you're just staring into the darkness and trying to say you can see the light. Sometimes you don't know lass, but most of the time you do. And if you don't know then ask others and think about it. That's what the jails are for."

She walked behind the old man, keeping a steady pace and smiling lightly. She did like this job, she found. She liked it quite a lot.

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