"Alright, you can stay right here with Cai and near the rest of the girls," Chin said while guiding both Fey and Mei to their destination.

"If you don't like your house, you're welcome to build a new one in its place, just talk to Mei about it before you do."

Fey Lin nodded.

"Thank you," she said.

That felt indescribably strange. It felt like thanking a dish or a shoe. She had never in her life thanked someone of the first rank. In fact, she had never had something be done for her by someone of the first rank. They seemed so far removed from her, so cut off from her world that she saw them more as… things rather than people.

That disgusted her.

She knew what it felt like, being treated as an object instead of a person. She wasn't blind to the irony of it all, but it felt so strange.

People couldn't understand it, but she could imagine a mortal. Fully. She could create a person in her head that had all the complexities and abilities of a mortal soul.

She could think up his entire being. To her, he was nothing more than a complicated thought.

So it was strange when she found herself being stuffed full of mortal food at their dinner table that night. The lady seemed eager to feed and Mei Shan ate with the mortals, so Fey Lin did the same.

She hadn't eaten in a millennium.

Fey Lin swallowed and ate as much as the woman offered and she offered quite a bit.

Food was a strange thing in a cultivators world. Past immortality, it was a waste of time, an unnecessary habit of an inadequate body. And that was it should have been now, nothing more than mere waste.

But for some reason, the food tasted pretty decent. An immortal chef had cooked this and the meat she was served came straight from some qi beast. But even that wouldn't have been enough to make her eat. There was something more here.

And it came from that woman, Medin. Her dao was expressing itself. She was a mortal, a person of the first rank and yet here she was daring to use her dao on a demigod. There should have been some insult in that. It certainly would have resulted in death within the courts of Ah-Marin.

But here, it was merely an aid. It was an old woman using her desire of hearth and home to help calm a troubled soul.

Fey Lin Fo ate and bathed in the warmth of the place.

Daos like that were a rare one.

"What of the courts themselves?" Mei Shan asked.

They sat together in a corner on two small chairs.

"The interactions between sects aren't all that common, but they do happen and they are important. Every one thousand years, all the great sects meet at one of the sect's main residences. Each sect sends a representative and they all bring news and trade with one another. Though passive trades happen, this meeting is when relationships are forged and alliances are made. There's even a banquet and an auction."

Fey Lin's sentence hung there, finished but not completely expressed. Her tone was calm and she looked entirely composed. The only thing that implied that there was more to that sentence was her cadance.

"I was to be sold there, this year I think. I didn't know till I broke out but my contacts notified me that they had purchased a device to… tame me. And for the right price, any sect could have bought me."

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She sipped her cup of tea. If there was a God-King listening to this conversation, they would have seen Fey Lin's aura. They would have seen the calmness of it, the pitch burning of wrath it held.

"The Eternal Darkness Sect?" Mei Shan asked, equally unperturbed.

"Yes."

"Are they a demonic path sect?"

"No. There are no major demonic sects within the realm. Though the sects do contain demonic cultivators."

"Oh? Are there any righteous paths?"

"No, just orthodox. There is a firm balance amongst the sects. It has been ten million years since that last culling and we-- they expect it to be another fifty before the next one."

Mei Shan had no response to that.

Cullings were common within realms. Immortals lived forever, and while there were practices to cut down their numbers, eventually some of them would reach the highest rank achievable within the realm.

And then they would sit there, at the top of the food chain, desiring nothing more than that small and comfortable spot. But after some time, there were too many chickens for the coop. To many cultivators trying to reach the coveted ninth rank, and too many ninth ranks trying to reach the tenth. The qi within the realm would dissipate and thin and a certain amount of the population would have to be forcefully expelled or warred against.

It was a cycle of death fuelled by the need to cultivate.

Fey Lin had known it. At one time, she had sought that coveted position of demigod. A ninth rank being, able to choose and control her life. That was what had pushed her to this level.

She believed she would be free at the ninth rank.

That was until they all turned on her. All the ninth ranks within her sect united and bound her within that ball of chain.

Just when she thought she had found freedom, she had instead found her chains.

"Would you like more tea, dear?"

Medin was next to her, holding a steaming hot pot filled with roots and leaves. Medin held it on a small platter and grabbed the handle with a large piece of cloth.

"Mei here says you're a new cultivator and this tea right here is Mister Bill's favorite blend, you know."

"Mister Bill? Bill Terrance, the cultivator?"

"Who else? He always says he loves this specific blend, says it warms his soul. Why don't you try it?

Fey Lin held out her now empty cup and Medin poured the tea gently. It was boiling hot but that couldn't hurt Fey Lin. She gulped down the tea so fast that it looked like she breathed it in.

And nothing changed.

Fey Lin swallowed the tea and stared down at the empty cup.

"You're drinking it too fast," a voice said.

It was Bill Terrance.

He walked up to Medin and gave her a slight bow, holding out his own cup.

Medin just nodded and poured, keeping one hand on the kettle's lid so that the whole pot wouldn't go spilling over.

"Thank you Miss Medin."

"I'll go make some more. Just let me know if you need it!" The large woman said.

"Tea is about flavor and ritual. You have to drink it the right way to bring out its best taste."

The cultivator swirled the tea in a cup and infused his own qi into the drink. It bubbled and grew and became something more than tea.

"Tea is just flavored water, you see. The water is the substance but what you're really there for is the taste."

He sipped the drink.

"If you enhance the drink it can be refreshing," he whispered.

"But… that's just an expulsion of qi. To infuse the water with your own qi wastes some of that qi in the process."

"It's worth it for a good cup of tea," the man replied.

Fey Lin Fo took her cup to Medin, who gave her a surprised face and then poured her some tea with a smile. She did what the demigod had done. She pushed her qi into the tea and mimicked the man.

She swished the tea, focusing on the process of infusing it with her own qi. Qi was lost and concentration was wasted. In her hand was a cup of tea containing qi of the eight rank. The laws were simple, the makeup of the qi was simple, but the qi itself was at the eighth-rank.

She took a sip and the mortal flavors shined. Her qi enhanced the flavor, that was the thing Bill had focused on. And while the flavor was a thing to be observed, it was not a cohesive concept like daos or laws.

It was flavor, a concept of tea but a concept that was hard to enhance.

What she had done was make the flavor more real, as real as she was. She had taken a mortal thing and made it all that stronger. If she poured this into the ocean, it would make the sea taste like tea.

She smelled it and took a sip.

It was imperfect. Notes of sourness had turned into wails and the hidden taste of leaves had come out and into the open. But the taste, for all its flaws, was all consuming. It was sweet and woody with a mixture of herbs and honey blossoming in her mouth.

This would never be served by an immortal chef.

She took another sip.

But there was something strange about it. It contained a bit of the person that had made it. It was Medin's recipe and that warm nature of hers was also in there. She was actively letting a mortal affect her, enhancing an old lady's will and letting it influence her own.

A mortal's creation enhanced by her divine self.

"It's good," Fey Lin Fo said with a smile. "Thank you, Miss Medin. It's delightful."

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