DC 77

Shameless was a word that people seemed to throw around a little too much, Feng Jiao thought to himself. He wasn’t sure if it was the way he was raised in this life or the perspective afforded to him from his previous life’s memories, but he hadn’t really felt shame for any of his actions. He believed that there was no shame in trying to get the best out of each and every situation, and had never minded being called shameless in the past as he’d never taken it to heart, until recently that is.

After their group had slept off the previous night’s battle, Feng Jiao had returned to Tan Sai’s mountain to collect his things. On the walk, he hadn’t really considered it much of a change. Sure, he’d miss the pond that he was meditating next to each night and the fresh air on the mountain top, but he could always visit those when they got the field’s shifting formation repaired.

It wasn’t until he told Tan Sai that he was moving out that he realised where his misstep was.

“You can’t just go live in a field with a bunch of boys! They could try to take advantage of you and, even if they didn’t, the rest of the disciples would certainly talk about it! Bai Fu, you know Feng Jiao more than me, step in here!”

Rather than continue lying, Feng Jiao told Tan Sai that he was a boy. He’d never intended to masquerade as a female in the first place. The sect had assumed that he was a female and, before he could really correct them, he’d realized the advantage that girls got in the lower positions in the sect. It wasn’t until one entered the outer sect that the gender inequality really petered out.

In a way, he understood. Girls awakened to their ability to interact with essence at a younger age than boys did. When combined with the fact that the earlier one made progress in their cultivation, the easier it was to make even more steps later in life, he wasn’t surprised or even offended that sects tended to treat girls better. It was even compounded upon further by the fact that many girls never went through their awakening ceremony, leading to a lesser amount of female cultivators than men. Still, he told Tan Sai the truth.

It actually went down better than he thought it would. She’d gone pale, cursed his name a few times, and called him shameless, which was an insult that he actually felt rang true for the first time. Lastly, she demanded he be off their mountain by the end of the night and never to visit before sunrise or after sunset without explicit permission again. Oh, and she wanted an even larger patch of land to grow herbs in their field.

Feng Jiao naturally agreed to her demands and even felt that he’d managed to maintain some semblance of their previous friendship. It likely helped that he’d only been there a week and had never tried to take advantage of her. Any longer and she would have felt more betrayed for sure and, all things considered, he came clean with her pretty quickly, even explaining his reasoning. As a hopeful cultivator, she understood the concept of seeking benefits, even if she wasn’t exactly pleased about it.

With his business settled, he collected seeds and seedlings from Tan Sai to plant in the field that his friends now had ownership of. He planned to sow them alongside the rice and grain mandated to be grown by the sect. Due to the way the sect policies worked, so long as they could actually match the quota, all of the surplus would be theirs and the land would belong to them so long as they remained in the sect and since the quota for that patch of land had been unable to be fulfilled for so long, it was at an all time low.

Feng Jiao mentally laughed at the so-called ‘Radiant Gardens’ association’s attempt to exploit his friends. Not only had they gotten a good patch of land suited to growing essence infused crops, the association wouldn’t even be able to reclaim the land. Doing what they’d done had already pushed at the boundaries of what would be acceptable.

“Big Brother Jiao! Welcome back!” Wuwei De was the first to greet Feng Jiao on his return. The plain looking boy had hitched his wagon to Feng Jiao’s caravan, so to speak, after being saved from the torment of a few girls previously. He’d even brought three of his bros with him, although only one of them stuck around after the battle.

Bowl-cut had been kidnapped at the start of the battle and Spiky had later betrayed his friends by tripping curly in an ill-advised attempt to escape, leading to himself falling into the beast’s hole out of sight. Both of the boys had survived, Xin Lee’s new contracted beast partner had a paralyzing bite. It’d frozen them both underground before continuing to hunt the rest of the boys, they were lucky in that sense.

Bowl-cut had been traumatised by the event and wandered off first thing in the morning without till anyone where they went. Spiky actually had skin thick enough to ask to stay with them, even after showing his true colors. Perhaps people were onto something with the shameless insult. They’d chased him off soon afterward, nobody had let him stay.

The curly haired guy, Ku Lee, was invited to stick around even though his battle contributions were a bit lack-luster. The fact that he’d even spoken up for Spiky after the guy tripped him has spoke words about his loyalty and character. Plus, Feng Jiao appreciated the way his actual name lined up to what he’d been mentally calling him.

“Curly, take these and refill the torches with them, light them until the smoke lightly. Also eat this and come to me every morning for another one.” Feng Jiao passed the boy the people-repellant for the torches as well as the antidote. The other reason he was pretty sure Tan Sai wasn’t going to hold a grudge was that she still supplied them with the herb-balls to burn and keep away intruders. Of course, she also just might want security for the herbs she planned on growing. Either way, the bridge wasn’t burned.

“Feng Jiao, give us a hand over here. We bought some good lumber from some of the other nominal boys. They even helped us make them into planks, thanks to Wuwei Dei.”  Jixiang Yun shouted over to Feng Jiao. Xin Lee was still sleeping off the night before, but the rest of the boys were doing their best to start setting up shelters on the periphery of the field, intending to occupy little-to-no farm land.

* * *

“I think we should make an association of our own.” The decrepit shack that collapsed during their battle had been stood back up and patched. The other buildings had been started, but there was only so much they could do in a single day so they were little-more than frames at this point. At the moment, they were all sitting in a circle on the dirty floor of their function shack. It was large enough that they’d all be able to sleep there, but there was little room for much more. Even the creature Xin Lee tamed, which they still hadn’t identified, was sleeping in a burrow it dug beside the house.

“What would we need to do that?” Xin Lee had finally woken up, but he was still exhausted. He agreed with Feng Lou, but knew it couldn’t be as easy as just declaring themselves an association.

“I’m not sure, I’m just saying that we should do it.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll find out for you,” Wuwei De spoke up,”I never really looked into it before because it didn’t seem like something I’d do, but if you guys want to do this I can definitely figure it out.”

“We’ll figure it out, for now let's go get some dinner while the Mess Hall is still open. We aren’t going to figure out anything on an empty stomach and the sun is about to set.” Feng Jiao, ever the hungry growing boy, had his mind set on what really mattered as far as he was concerned. “On that note, we should build a kitchen building or something for days where we want to make food but don’t want to take this hike. It’s going to be a while until we can afford to have the shifting formation repaired.”

As it turned out, getting the local shifting formation repaired was actually as simple as charging it. Unfortunately, they would need to either be rich or have their association well established before the sect would bother spending the resources on it. Both of them were long term goals, but Feng Jiao did not want to waste the time he could be spending cultivating and practising on walking back and forth for every meal.

The group finished eating without an incident before heading back toward their new homes in high spirit. The seeds that they’d sowed were already showing signs of germination and it hadn’t even been a full day, so as long as they could prevent any sabotage then the field would be as good as theirs.

Feng Jiao bid the others a good night and walked toward the center of the field, careful not to crush any budding seedlings underfoot. Once again, the area that looked almost barren in the daytime flourished with plant life as soon as the moon was apparent overhead. A large area of green in a circular shape appeared in his sight, dotted by star-shaped white flowers.

Feng Jiao sat in the center of the collection of wild garlic, in a seat-shaped divot that seemed to be designed just for him, and began his nightly cultivation of his wood dantian. He confirmed that he seemed to have much better results while cultivating there and, since he’d finished digesting the garlic-based cultivation technique and adding it to what he’d already compiled, he moved onto the handful of other wood-based cultivation techniques he’d stolen.

There was a very large amount of miscellaneous information left in the garlic-based technique for him to comb through, but he decided finishing his cultivation technique was the most important for the time being. Not knowing what happened to Aideen was bothering him more than he let on and he hoped the experience of condensing his first drop of Wood Qi would help to enlighten him for his attempt at the fire dantian. He could still feel her presence, which was comforting, but missed being able to communicate with her.

Without anything else he could do, he continued cultivating the night away with a mind full of to-do tasks for the short term.