Qiao'er lifted the window curtain and gazed at the ancient fortress-city in the distance.
The walls coiled away like a dragon, an old dragon asleep with dried blood mottling its scales, guarding the capital of the Great Song in silence. Every brick had weathered wind and frost, worn into blotched patterns by the chisel of years.
"Sister Qiao'er, why do you look so weighed down?"
Li Fei laid a hand over the back of Qiao'er's, her face full of concern.
"It's only that coming home makes me timid."
Qiao'er steadied herself and slipped back into her usual composure, still as an old well.
"Ah, Lin'an is your hometown after all." Li Fei smiled brightly. "Once we're inside the walls, you'll have to recommend me some good food, Sister Qiao'er."
"Squirrel mandarin fish..." Qiao'er answered without thinking, hazy memories drifting up.
When she was small she had another name — Zhang Qiaoqiao, given to her by her father, Zhang Zhicheng.
Zhang Zhicheng had been a poor scholar of common talent, sitting the imperial examinations year after year and failing year after year.
He never gave up. Even after he married, he spent his days running a small business with his wife and his nights reading by lamplight, brush never idle — Qiao'er's nearsightedness had probably been inherited from him in the womb.
The year Qiao'er was born, Zhang Zhicheng suddenly seemed to break through some inner barrier. He passed, his name on the golden roll, and won himself an official post.
In office he showed unexpected skill and capability. Within three years he had a small frontier town running like clockwork — and with a patron's recommendation, Zhang Zhicheng was recalled to Lin'an and given a seat at the very center of the Great Song's power.
The steadiness he had ground out of his years in the marketplace served him well. Once he stood at court, he handled matters without a single leak, and in the space of two short years he quietly pushed through several new policies. The Song Emperor had once praised him: "A great vessel, late completed."
A pity he backed the wrong faction. The year Qiao'er turned five, the heads of the Zhang men rolled, and the women of the household were sent to the Imperial Entertainment Bureau.
Qiao'er still remembered that just before the disaster fell, her father had taken her once more to the little restaurant they always went to, and they had eaten squirrel mandarin fish, sweet and sour on the tongue. His face had blurred in her memory by now — only that gaze of his, tired, deep, and utterly at peace, remained vivid to this day.
"All right, then. Fish it is."
Li Fei nodded happily — and then a female ghost poked her head through the door curtain.
Without a word Li Fei snatched up her gear and leapt from the carriage. Following the ghost's drifting, footless shadow, she ran down a beast with bristling fur, a wolf's head on a man's body. She raised her hand and flame roared skyward. The wolf sprite became a torch sprite, howling for a good while before it stopped moving.
The trip from Luyuan County to Lin'an had taken a full week. Li Fei refused to take the official roads where demons were scarce, driving straight ahead instead, even swinging deliberately through districts where monsters swarmed thickest, harvesting merit in an endless stream.
She and Lilith had even ambushed demon kings and ghost kings several times, stacking every buff to the limit before slipping in, and nothing they met lasted a single exchange — a shame that Innate-tier demons were alert, cunning, and endlessly resourceful. After several attempts they had killed only one demon king; the rest fled without a trace.
The merit earned went onto Li Fei's account, of course. Spoils were split fifty-fifty.
Seven days on, her level sat one step short of 28, and her Wealth Points had broken the six-hundred-thousand mark.
If she hadn't been afraid of missing the Song Emperor's birthday banquet, Li Fei would have happily taken Lilith roaming the world sword in hand, the two of them a pair of lady outlaws.
With Lin'an close now, Li Fei stopped chasing experience. She waited while the female ghosts drove the tall horses she'd bought the day before up to the carriage and buckled the harness, then sealed the ghosts back into the gourd, vaulted onto a saddle, cracked her whip in a flourish, and called out clear and bright:
"Sisters — move out, for Lin'an!"
A beautiful man whose sex was impossible to guess sat playing the zither beside a pond. Black hair, red lips, a crimson robe of gorgeous, poisonous color that set off his flawless porcelain skin.
"Master. The enchantress has arrived."
A man in a python robe dropped to one knee to report.
The beauty in red went on stroking the strings without lifting his head, and asked, unhurried:
"Is this enchantress who could drag Hero Nie out of retirement truly lovelier than the Empress?"
His voice was soft, sweet, cloying, and sent an unaccountable chill down the spine — poison wrapped in honey, a snake coiled in a bed of blossoms.
"Yes, Master," the subordinate said without hesitation.
"And compared to me?"
"..."
The subordinate did not dare lie, so he kept his mouth shut.
"Interesting. I'd rather like to see just how beautiful this enchantress is."
Lu Qianfan raised his head, petal lips ravishing, and the subordinate — a man with a wife and daughter — nearly stood at attention. He dropped his gaze at once, not daring to look again at this exquisite, lethal master.
A colleague from the Demon Suppression Bureau had once failed to control himself and reacted. The consequence was that he would never be capable of reacting again for the rest of his life.
"Master, that enchantress has conspired with Nie Yunyi. She means to reach for your position — the sheer gall of it."
The subordinate kept his head down as he asked for orders: "She's just outside the city at this moment. Shall we—"
"No hurry. Let's play with her a while."
Lu Qianfan smiled sweetly.
In an unremarkable little restaurant, four women were eating in a private room.
Chicken too dry. Fail.
Have to devein the shrimp myself. Fail.
Cabbage hasn't absorbed any flavor. Fail.
Red-braised pork too fatty. Fail.
— And how does this chili-fried pork have more pork than chili? Failure among failures.
Li Fei handed out her private bad reviews, though her hands never slowed. She buried a glistening slice of pork belly in white rice and shoveled a mouthful in, oil and fragrance flooding her mouth.
She'd survived hard years, whatever else was true. Li Fei ate rare delicacies with gusto, and she could eat plain home cooking with just as much relish. Besides, the cook here wasn't exactly brilliant, but the food could just about be called tasty — worth maybe a 3.5 on a certain review app?
With a heaping bowl of rice in her stomach, Li Fei looked over at Qiao'er with a smile and laid a piece of fish glazed in sweet-and-sour sauce in her bowl — the squirrel mandarin fish was the one dish in this place worth a good review.
Lilith's expression froze; she nearly snapped her chopsticks.
True, that night she had thrown Li Fei out of the room when the woman tried to play model, but mother and daughter didn't hold grudges overnight. At first light the next day Li Fei had clung to her as if nothing had happened at all, and the two of them were as close as ever — cuddling, bickering, like friends, like sisters.
But Lilith understood that none of this was what she wanted. In the radiance of Miss Stepmother's smile, the seed inside her kept sprouting, its tender green leaves brushing against the walls of her stepdaughter's heart until it itched.
When would the Forbidden flower bloom?
Lilith resisted it. She was also waiting for it.
Then an empty bowl was pushed in front of her.
"Get me some rice."
The wicked stepmother put her stepdaughter to work without the slightest twinge of guilt.
"Don't you have hands?" Lilith grumbled, but she set down her own bowl and chopsticks and waited on her pampered Miss Stepmother anyway.
Watching it happen, Qiao'er found the fish in her mouth distinctly more sour than before.
If she had her way, Qiao'er would rather Li Fei served Lilith the food and let her fetch the rice.
As for Wang Yutong, face the color of gilt paper, she had done nothing all meal but drink soup and pick at plain rice, using the faces of the other three women at the table as her side dish. The soundproofing in certain rooms of the pocket villa was excellent, and a week of it had left Wang Yutong nearly reduced by Eva to something like a wild sprite, staring blankly and stupidly whenever she saw a beautiful woman.
Which was proof enough that in certain respects, Eva had already surpassed her teacher.
Naturally, Li Fei, determined to set a good example for her daughter, hadn't been idle either. The pattern on her abdomen had broken past the 1,111 mark, and she'd worked in most of the Kun Division's female ghosts.
Progress was a little slow, but there was no helping it. This wasn't Loxibrook. In stretches where powerful demons prowled Li Fei didn't dare squander a scrap of energy, and even in low-risk zones she held back — otherwise the entire Kun Division would have been broken in more than once over by now.
The last piece of rice cake went into her mouth, and the four of them walked out of the private room and downstairs together to settle the bill at the counter.
When Li Fei appeared in the restaurant's main hall, the noisy little room went silent for a moment. Then came the steady clatter of bowls and chopsticks hitting the floor as the diners stared, unable to drag their eyes off her.
Li Fei had long since gotten used to the chaos her looks caused. Far from flustered, she tossed a wink at a delicate-featured young woman — a living calamity in the flesh, or the demon-consort laughing again and again beneath the beacon towers at the furious lords she'd summoned with false smoke, bewitching every living thing without shame and delighting in it.
"Honored guests, that comes to six qian of silver..."
The waiter wiped the drool from his lips with a filthy sleeve and came over bowing and scraping.
A fair enough price, considering two Transcendents had ordered a table piled with dishes — though Li Fei, who knew Qiao'er's history, couldn't quite work out why. Qiao'er's father had counted as a ranking official of sorts; how had he ended up eating in a place like this?
No telling whether he really had lived clean on nothing but his salary, or whether he'd been putting on a performance the way a certain Miss Philanthropist did.
If it was the former, Li Fei could say she admired him. But... for that pittance of a government wage, to be hard-headed enough to denounce the Nine Thousand Years and drag his whole family down with him — was it really worth it?
Qiao'er drew out her purse and took the tally book to pay.
Miss Top Courtesan might have diverted charitable funds, dodged taxes, embezzled public assets, swallowed the estates of the heirless, traded power for sex with the Magic Academy's dean and a whole roster of lady CEOs, and mooched off Lady Zhihua for potions that would bankrupt a Middle Sequence Transcendent... but she was a good girl who kept public and private accounts strictly separate.
They might call each other sisters, but that didn't stop her from employing Qiao'er as her personal assistant, with a fixed monthly wage, bonuses issued according to mood, and day-to-day expenses fronted by Qiao'er and reimbursed by Li Fei afterward. Somewhere along the way she had gone from a rookie in public relations who had to mooch every single meal to being the one bankrolling other people.
"Shopkeeper, haven't you made a mistake here?"
Li Fei could easily afford a meal, but Qiao'er still carried out her duties as life assistant to the letter. She swept her eyes over the bill and her brows drew together. "We only ordered one squirrel mandarin fish. You've written down two."
The waiter smiled apologetically over and over. "Honored guest, I've waited tables here for years, and I've never gotten an order wrong. You ordered two plates of fish."
"We truly ordered only one. If you don't believe me, go up and look in the room — surely it hasn't been cleared yet?" Qiao'er shook her head slowly.
"Right away. Please wait a moment, honored guest."
The waiter went off upstairs, but Qiao'er's brows stayed knit. Something felt wrong.
— The Demon Suppression Bureau moves fast.
Beside her, Li Fei's eyes were smiling. She had already guessed how this would end.
Before long the waiter came back down with another hand behind him, each of them carrying a plate. On each lay the picked-clean bones of a fish.
"Take a look, honored guest. Two plates of squirrel mandarin fish, carried down from your own table. No mistake this time, is there?"
The waiter's voice had climbed several notches, drawing the eyes of everyone in the room.
"..."
Seeing the plate that had appeared from nowhere, Qiao'er understood they'd been set up. She turned to Li Fei, asking with her eyes whether they should simply pay and be done, or argue the thing out to the end.
"One plate is one plate. We ordered one, we'll pay for one," Li Fei said, unhurried.
"Hey now, honored guest, why be so unreasonable? The bones you left are right here, the tally book has it down plain as day, and I carried both plates into your room with my own two hands—"
The waiter's voice rose louder and louder, until even passersby outside stopped in the doorway, craning their necks to watch.
"Fugui, is that how you speak to guests?"
Seeing the commotion grow, a white-haired man past sixty hurried over and scolded the waiter. "These guests are well-presented, anyone can see they're no ordinary people. Why would they cheat our little shop out of one plate of fish? You must have miscounted."
"Shopkeeper, I'm wronged! The evidence is sitting right here." Fugui thrust the two plates of bones under the old shopkeeper's nose, the picture of injured innocence. "I've worked here all these years — would I make something up out of thin air?"
"Enough. Not another word."
The old shopkeeper waved a hand, cutting Fugui off.
He glanced at the four lovely women, then back at his indignant waiter, and his face filled with difficulty. After a moment's thought he sighed.
"Let's call it one plate. I'll cover the difference myself. Redo the tally."
Qiao'er bit her lip, staring hard at the old shopkeeper.
She had been a precocious child with an extraordinary memory, and she still remembered that when her father used to bring her to this shop, this very man had been the one behind the counter.
Back then his hair was only half white, and every time her father came he would gift them a small dish of cured pork he'd salted himself, which her father praised without end. He often gave her fruit and pastries too, his face all kindness.
Sometimes her father and the old shopkeeper would share a couple of cups of wine, and the shopkeeper always said her father was a good official.
Now the old shopkeeper no longer recognized Qiao'er. And Qiao'er found she no longer recognized him either.
"Outrageous."
A cold snort cut through the room.
A square-faced man slapped his table and stood, his face full of righteousness, carrying the air of a man who would not bend.
"You girls are handsome enough to look at, but who would have thought your hearts were so crooked — daring to spout such barefaced lies in front of a room full of witnesses!"
The square-faced man's expression was severe as he lectured Li Fei and the others without a shred of courtesy. "What sort of upbringing did your elders give you?"
"My lord, this... it's only one plate of fish. We're merchants, and harmony is what we value—"
The old shopkeeper stepped forward, uncomfortable, trying to smooth it over.
"One plate of fish is a small thing. The collapse of human conscience is a large one."
The square-faced man's words landed like stones. "Since taking office I have upheld one word above all: fairness. I have never once stooped to opportunism."
"One is one and two is two. Eat two plates of fish, and you pay for two plates of fish!"
"If I let you wrangle and bluster your way out of a fish today, tomorrow you'll be framing the innocent. Where does that road end? I dare not even imagine it!"
"Waiter. Speak up. How many plates of fish did they eat?"
"My lord, they clearly ordered two plates, but they only mean to pay for one!" Fugui answered at once, loud and clear. "Our little shop does honest business and never plays crooked tricks. We beg your honor to see justice done for us!"
"Good. Very good."
The square-faced man nodded, his tone easing slightly. "Have no fear, shopkeeper. Whatever backing these women may have, so long as I stand here, justice will be upheld for you."
"His lordship is wise!"
Fugui cheered loudly. The old shopkeeper sighed again, threw a helpless glance at his guests, and lowered his head in silence.
The square-faced man turned his eyes back to Li Fei, his face hardening as he demanded:
"Will you pay at once, or will you accompany me to the magistrate's court?"
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