After speaking with them a bit more, I learned that the goat was a hybrid spirit beast. Apparently, the Ji family had paid a beast tamer to bring over a male Granite Goat to impregnate several of the female goats, including this one. She was just the first to give birth.

  The kids actually had quartz like stone in their hooves and small bits of flint on their backs, resulting in this breed having more qi than the average animal at their level, as their hooves could act similar to impregnated granite. Once they were grown up, the kids would even grow curved horns made of granite, what the goats were named after. Granite Goats were goat spirit beasts with a natural Earth spirit root, and could learn to incorporate stone and sand into their bodies. Some could even be trained to use weak cultivator techniques, though that usually only happened at level three and above.

  Granite goats usually only reached that point after at least a decade of life, which few ever reached in the wild. While most spirit beasts would gain human-like intelligence at level four, or sometimes level three for those with ‘legendary’ bloodlines, these goats didn’t have such a bloodline and never reached level four on their own, so they were never more intelligent than a chimpanzee without human help.

  These children of that male goat, which was caught and tamed on a mountain around 500 li from here, would only be 5/8 Granite goat, the mother also having a granite goat grandfather, so they would gain qi even more slowly, and would likely never get past level 2. That was more than enough for a beast of burden like a riding animal or one to pull a cart or plow, as they would then have the intelligence of an average dog, a bit ahead of a normal non-spirit goat.

  After learning this, I decided that I’d wasted enough time, even if it had been productive, and said goodbye. I went to the main house, where a different servant showed me to the Ambassador’s assigned room. Apparently Ji Wan had introduced him to the head of the branch family here and he would be in negotiations with them for the next several days. When Johnson returned to the room he informed me that I wouldn’t need to protect him while he was in the mansion, and that I could wander the city during the day to ‘look for things I might like’. I knew that this was code for ‘look for people from Earth’, but that he couldn’t say that, so I nodded. I would ask a few questions while doing some shopping, playing the tourist, so it was unlikely that I would raise suspicion even if the sects were listening to me speak.

  That night we were invited to eat with the head of the family. I was considered a servant, so I had to wait until the others were finished and having a discussion before I could eat some of what wasn’t served to the Ambassador and important members of the clan. I did get to meet several of the family guards and minor family members, though. Much like in the outer city at the fort, I tried to gather information from the others at the table. I talked to several cousins, nephews, second cousins, and more distant relations of the family head and elders. Several of them were cultivators, and wanted to spar with me so that we could learn from each other. I agreed and, after eating, I followed them out to the family training field.

  The first person I fought was Ji Chan, a water cultivator in the middle of the second level. Sending someone so far below me in cultivation as my first opponent could mean that they were weary of me and wanted to test me, or it could mean that they didn’t think an independent cultivator could handle a member of their family because their techniques were so much better than what most independent cultivators could acquire. Either way he would serve as a good warm-up.

  The man was equipped with a spear and, after we bowed to each other, he came at me quickly. I knocked his spear to the side and jumped at him, swinging heavily, only to have him nimbly bend out of the way. We exchanged several blows, but every time he bent at weird angles to dodge. I knew that it was very likely that he was practicing some sort of water based martial arts.

  I knew that this technique was essentially a hard counter to my Fire technique, which focused on overwhelming power. While every swing of my sword would be devastating to him if it landed, his movements insured that he never received more than a glancing blow. He would even have been able to pull this off if his skill was inferior to mine, though it wasn’t, truly demonstrating that water overcame fire.

  My only other style was based on metal, with precise attacks, though I wasn’t as good with it. This would only feed his technique, forcing him to display his full skill while rapidly improving, but it was the only chance I had to beat him. I swung at him wipe a side swipe, which he countered by bending backwards, only to adjust the angle at the sword and stab at him. He quickly added a back step, but the change in style managed to penetrate his defenses, leaving a small wound on his chest.

  I launched several more attacks, mostly stabs, but with an occasional draw cut or slash mixed in, but he managed to dodge every attack, only barely doing so in some cases. I knew that after this match he would greatly improve his skill, but I was determined to still win. Wasn’t the point of the sparring session to improve each other’s skill?

  I aimed to slash at his chest, and when he twisted to dodge I leaned forward, igniting my sword and doubling the power of my swing. The attack was barely dodged, his momentum carrying him out of the way, but the flame leapt off of the blade and scorched him enough to throw off his balance. I turned my sword in a loop and, while he was backwards, still recovering from the previous attack, slammed the side of the blade into his back, twisting my wrist at the last minute so that he received a bruise instead of spinal damage.

  He flew forward by about three meters and face planted into the stone floor. I quickly stored my sword and ran over to him, rolling him over to his back. His cousin, an alchemist, got there just as I flipped him over, and saw the several broken bones on his face and the blood that was pouring out of his nose. We both pulled out medical kits at the same time, and he waved his hand over his cousin’s face. “I hate having to set bone.” the cousin said, as I heard a popping sound as his cheeks were returned to their previous location. Thankfully the man was unconscious, or he would be screaming in pain. “Wood roots are horrible for bones.” he said, finishing with the nose.

  “They aren’t bad for blood, though.” I said, handing him a bone pill and blood pill from his kit.

  He nodded, and put the two pills in the man’s mouth, rubbing his throat so he would swallow. After a few minutes the man woke up, spitting up a bit of blood. “Ouch.” he said, as his cousin helped him get up. The level two pills in the kit were obviously far stronger than the level one pills I had been using. While his bones were still broken, they had connected to each other well to be semi functional. “What kind of move was that?” he asked me.

  “Fire.” I said sarcastically. “I just swung my sword in a loop to preserve momentum, so I was able to take advantage of the distraction from my previous fire attack.”

  He nodded. “Never heard of someone doing that.” People on this world tended towards flashier moves, relying on their improved speed from cultivation or martial arts training to move fast enough to compensate for the slower nature of flashy moves, but I had made sure to practice the more reliable arts which were influenced by Earth, even using a French sword technique which used elements of native fire techniques rather than a purely native technique.

  The others seemed impressed at my skill, and once the man was taken to the side of the field where he could meditate on fully absorbing and enhancing the medicinal effects of the pills a different man at the peak of level two came onto the field, drawing a flint saber. This man had a Fire root like me, though his secondary root was Earth, meaning that my fire would feed his style. After hitting his rock-steady defense a few times, only to cause him to solidify his defense, I saw a small crack and switched to a stab from my metal style. I managed to crack but not destroy his defense, and he quickly switched to a flaming blade style to overcome me. For the next thirty moves we both constantly switched between our styles, him trying to counter my fire with Earth and me trying to counter his Earth with Metal, until he managed to land a strong blow on the side of my blade, knocking it from my hand due to his greater muscle refinement.

  He smiled and ran at me with a flaming saber, screaming, and I coated my hands in metal qi, adjusting my stance to try and take him on in hand to hand combat. He swung and I managed to slightly dodge, then jabbed a finger into his wrist. I was by no means an expert in acupressure, but I had studied biology enough in college, as technique creation required a good understanding of how the body worked, that I knew where many pressure points were. With a quick injection of metal qi his hand seized up and he screamed in pain, dropping his sword. I knew I only had a few seconds before he defeated my qi and recovered, so I tried stabbing my fingers into a few more locations, but he managed to counter me, sometimes by using the arm whose hand was still hurting. Without hitting a sensitive area, the pain from the qi I injected was comparable to a thorn instead of dagger, and he was strong willed enough to ignore it.

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  After we exchanged another ten moves without weapons, I jumped backwards with a burst of fire under my feet and did a few backflips to lower my momentum before stopping twenty meters from him. As we both caught our breaths, we stared at each other. We both saw our weapons nearby and pointed at them, sending qi into them. The weapons both flew at the other person, and when his spinning saber got to me I barely managed to dodge by bending backwards. My sword, however, flew directly at him and, possibly due to his concentration on his own weapon, stabbed into his shoulder.

  “I yield.” he said, pushing beside the sword blade with his other side’s hand to slow the bleeding. His cousin ran over to check the wound and pulled the sword out, and blood started squirting from the wound. I must have hit a vein. He injected a bit of qi into the wound, his cousin withdrawing his own from the area to make sure that they didn’t clash, and the bleeding almost completely stopped. The doctor pulled out a needle and silk thread, and in less than a minute had stitched the wound. He then gave the man a blood, skin, muscle, and tendon pill.

  “You going to be okay?” I asked him. “That looked pretty serious. I hope I didn’t cause any long term damage.”

  “No, it’s fine. The pills should fix any damage within a day or two. And if it leaves a scar, well, I’ll break through to level three soon, so the restructuring can fix the scars.”

  The Restructuring, sometimes called Rebirth, was a phenomenon which occurrs when one advances to level 3. As most of the cells in the body need to die and be replaced multiple times to fully adapt to the pure liquid qi of level 3, any damages or disease will be purged from the body. While genetic disorders can return after that, cells which have mutated to not express defective genes will tend to survive better than those that carry the genetic issues, so even most genetic disorders will disappear. This occurs dozens of times as you cultivate through level three, as your body repairs every issue it can, and eventually leaves you with what many people call an Ideal Body, leaving you primed for the massive amount of qi that comes from growing a core, as every cell, nerve, and blood vessel in your body can now allow your qi to flow through it with very little resistance. Hopefully I would go through this soon, before returning to Earth.

  “That should fix the issue.” I said, and the man nodded, then headed over to the side of the field where he started meditating on the effects of the medicine he had just been given.

  One more person came forward after that, the physician. While he wasn’t a combat specialist, was only early level two, and therefore couldn’t fight as well as the others, he needed to have a basic competency with combat, as he was often required to go into the vast wild areas between cities, and sometimes even enter Hidden Realms, in order to find rare medicinal ingredients.

  Hidden Realms were a strange phenomenon which, despite being known about publicly for over five thousand years, was still poorly understood. There were certain locations which would occasionally have portals open, which would sometimes limit who could enter. The portal would then remain in that place for a set amount of time which was different depending on the Hidden Realm, allowing people to enter and gather materials or test themselves for prizes. While there have been attempts to remain in Hidden Realms after the portal closed, or even to anchor the ends so that the portal remains past its deadline, this always resulted in the people inside being permanently lost and never delayed the portal’s closing by more than a few hours.

  There were generally five types of Hidden Realms, Eternal Night, Eternal Day, Disk World, Cave, and Void. Eternal Night realms only have a moon or Dark moon in the sky, a moon which can only be seen because it has a bright disk around it, letting it stand out from the celestial darkness. Eternal Day realms always have a sun in the sky, though it may occasionally be eclipsed by celestial disks. Disk Worlds have defined boundaries surrounding a flat plane, but have a steady night and day cycle. These worlds generally have the same plants and animals that normal World Realms, like Earth and Ilarya, though are entirely or almost entirely covered in spirit versions of those things. Some people believe that Disk Worlds are the reason that most World Realms share the same lifeforms, as anyone going there will naturally bring back life from there. Cave realms are all under ground, so the animals and plants tend to be underground varieties. They are mostly liked for their sources of various spirit rich minerals and crystals. They average three times denser qi than World Realms, likely because it can’t leak into the celestial realm, and the animals there also usually Demons instead of standard spirit beasts, as they can survive with less nutrition by absorbing qi from the air. Finally Void Realms have nothing. There is no ground, usually no air, and the only materials are often just large rocks. These can only be explored by level four and above cultivators, as lower level cultivators would be killed by the environment.

  One day I hoped to travel to one of each type, just to see what they were like, but so far no one had found any of these portals on Earth. If I wanted to visit one I would have to join a group going through one on this world.

  The physician drew his weapon, a wooden pole, and I readied my sword. As soon as the match started he swung at me and I blocked with my sword. The pole, however, bent slightly, causing me to only graze the edge of his pole and hitting my arm. I yelped in pain and almost instinctively loosened my grip, and he executed a 360 degree swing, aiming to hit me on the other side. Again I tried to parry, but the pole hit me again, again not being where it should have been. Every block I made hit the wrong location on his weapon and every block he made hit my sword at a point I wasn’t anticipating. After another five moves, with me getting more aggressive each time and only barely managing to parry the blows, I knew I had to change styles.

  I quickly switched to a metal style and focused on the accuracy of my blows. With Metal overcoming Wood, by focusing on the precision in the metal style I was able to see though how he bent his pole in just the right way to at least partially get around my defenses every time. I used several precise swings and stabs to block him far more easily and when he swung for my head I put the point of the sword exactly where it needed to be to stick in the end of his pole, between two layers of the grain which went down the pole. With a twist his pole developed a massive crack down the center and when he paused for a split second in surprise I released a powerful Fire style swing which caused the now weakened pole to break apart.

  “I surrender.” the physician said before I could swing again. He knew that without a weapon he wouldn’t be able to put up much of a fight and decided to avoid injury. “That was a branch from a level two spirit tree. You must be really strong if you can shatter it like that.”

  I nodded, accepting the compliment, and put my sword away. “Thanks for the spar, guys.” I said, “But it’s getting late and I need to meditate on everything that happened in the fight before working on my foundation so I can break through soon.”

  One of them got a mischievous look on his face. “If you want to improve your cultivation a bit, I know the perfect place we can go.” The others looked at him knowingly, but I was confused. “Butterfly House.” he concluded.

  I looked more confused and the physician explained it to me. “It’s a brothel in town these guys like to visit. High end. All of the girls there cost at least a stone per visit. But they are all at least level two cultivators and have been trained in duel cultivation, so they like to pretend its for training.”

  “It is training.” said the second guy I fought.

  “And you have a wife and concubine if you were just interested in that.” countered the physician and the man waved his hand dismissively. The Physician sighed. “Fine, just don’t come running to me the next time things get too wild and you end up with your qi flowing down the wrong minor channel. I swear, your guys are the sole reason I know an acupuncture technique specializing in genitalia.”

  The fire man ignored his cousin and came over to me. “Don’t listen to him. Come with us. I guarantee they’ll have a woman you’ll like.”

  I put up my hands and as if to put a barrier between myself and the uncomfortable conversation. “I don’t think I want to. I’ve got to meditate on those fights, plus I have a dao partner, and she won’t like it if I did that.”

  “Seriously?” The big man asked. “Is she part of the Unity sect or something? Who begrudges their partner additional training opportunities?” The Unity Sect was a philosophical group that believed that one deep connection to a dual cultivation partner was much better than any number of shallow such relationships.

  I was about to say something when the physician spoke up. “What would it matter if she was? That’s between the two of them. Just because you need me to brew aphrodisiacs to perform doesn’t give you the right to inflict that on him.” He sighed and waved goodbye and six of the men left the compound. “Just ignore him.” said the physician. “I’m Ji Xo by the way.”

  “Li Kev.” I said. “Well, I’d better be getting back to my room. Lots of meditation to do.”

  “Sure.” Xo said. “Maybe tomorrow we can go out for a drink instead?”

  “Yeah, sounds like a plan.” I said and headed back to my room.