In the age of social media, news gets around crazy fast. You hear about who's sleeping with (or cheating on) who practically before the parties in question are out of bed. One weird thing happens in your life, and it's on blast by that evening already. Like… if I'd just disappeared back home when I wound up here, my name had probably blown up on social media, already blipped on national news, and was already on its way to being forgotten by everybody but the fifty or sixty people closest to me. In a pre-modern society, things move a lot more slowly…

Or so I would have thought.

After leaving Granny P's, I wandered in a generally northwest direction… staying well away from Lee Dan's house, because I wasn't insane… trying to brainstorm on what to do next.

I wanted to get home, obviously, before my condo dues and utilities were overdue, and my parents had to be worried sick. Maybe I could do some research on magical astral projection - maybe there was a library I could have used if I could read the local language, which I couldn't. The system I saw in sporadic use consisted of logogrammatic characters like the ones used in eastern Asia, but they weren't the ones I'd encountered in Chinese school as a child. You might get whatever they used in Emerald Vale if you took early Han writing and let it diverge over two millennia - there were similarities, but even somebody literate in Chinese probably wouldn't be able to read it. For that matter, the language was tonal, but I doubt anybody on Earth would be able to understand a word. I was homeless, illiterate, and quite possibly haunted. Wonderful.

My stomach grumbled. I was also hungry… again.

Granny P had said that my new body probably couldn't get sick off of regular things, so foraging was always an option - if I was willing to go back into the woods and possibly encounter another spirit. Maybe one that would try to take over my body instead of stuffing my soul-thing full of that qi stuff. No thank you!

I was passing near the marketplace. Maybe I could get some more food at the Xus' stall and then worry about what I was going to do. Maybe I could travel south and find another town where Lin's psychopathic uncle didn't live. Or maybe his ragefest at the market yesterday got him sent to jail. Or, better yet, executed. Maybe it wouldn't even be a problem. Figuring that, one way or another, the Xus would probably know, and figuring the chances were pretty low that Lee Dan showed up at the teeny tiny window where I stopped by? It was worth a go. The odds were basically zero.

I spotted the Xus' cart from afar - being taller than almost everybody was pretty handy. Back in Cali, I was just barely shorter than the average guy and taller than most girls. But here in the magic cultivator empire? If I had to guess, the average woman was maybe five feet tall and the men were half a foot taller. Technically, for all I knew, they were all average height and I would qualify for the WNBA, but since I looked pretty much like my Earth self, I assume I was the same size as before. I waved at Xu Bo from over the crowd, and the stall-owner's mouth dropped open.

"Hi! Do you guys need any help today? Sorry if I'm kind of late. Say, do you know what happened to Lee Dan after what happened yesterday?" I pushed through the crowd queueing up for dumplings, dipping my head under the canvas awning to take a look inside the stall. I winced when I spotted the cast iron steamer pot that Dan had bowled into when he was trying to grab me. It had a long crack down the middle that had been daubed over with quick-fired clay. I didn't imagine big iron pots were cheap in medieval times.

"L-Lin?" Fen gasped. "What happened to you?"

"So it's true… she was blessed by a spirit beast," Bo mumbled, rubbing at the little silver pendant around his neck.

I could only conclude the spirit-blessing phenomenon was a lot more common than I'd assumed. "Uh… yes. That's strangely specific, but yes. Granny P thinks I got blessed by a spirit. I'm not really sure - it happened out in the bamboo last night. In any case, I'm genuinely sorry about your pot…"

Fen waved my apology aside. "That wasn't your fault, of course! The spirits wouldn't bless such a person! As for your uncle, the marketplace guards took Lee Dan away and we haven't seen from him since. Word is he was taken to Black-blade Feng's estate on the eastern hill…"

"And Black-blade Feng is?"

"He runs, ah…" Bo looked around nervously. "He runs 'security' for the eastbound trade caravans. Your uncle works for him…"

"So he got in trouble with his boss? Why wouldn't they just arrest him?"

"Lin…" Fen gestured, her voice dropping near to a whisper. "The guards can't just arrest Black-blade's men. It would be… unwise…"

"Ah…" Community politics, then. As somebody who once tried to push a beach cleanup through the La Mancha Beach Parks and Recreational Authority, I was well aware of how slippery local politics could be. At least it sounded like Lee Dan was being detained, even if it wasn't by the city guard. "Well… I hope that you'll let me help with the dumplings today for the same deal as before?" I put on my sunny smile - if it was good enough for my Lao Lao Rita, it was good enough for anybody.

Bo and Fen shared a look. "Black-blade," he hissed.

"Spirit blessing," Fen hissed back.

Bo sighed the sigh of the truly defeated and managed a weak smile. "Of course, Lin. We would be honored to have you-"

It was at that moment that a familiar bearded figure decided to barge in and ruin my dumpling side hustle yet again. "You!" Lee Dan shouted.

I sighed and turned to face the man as he stormed down the marketplace and toward Xu's 5th Generation Dumplings for the second time in two days. Shoppers and vendors alike scattered in his wake and he pushed through like the SS Raging Asshole parting the seas. The guards sidled in, but they were too skittish to apprehend the man and made do with forming a 'safety' perimeter between the crowd and us - and by 'us', I mean Lee Dan, myself, the poor Xus, and their distressed dumpling stall.

"Can we please not do this?" I said. Already, my eyes flitted to and fro, assessing possible routes of retreat. I spotted at least three doable ones that I could manage without having to climb anything steep or spiky, but I stayed put for the moment, not wanting to provoke the bull, so to speak. The marketplace was utterly quiet, but for the braying of a distant donkey. The breeze whipped through the canvas awnings and the late morning sun beat down.

"You stole my pill, you thieving bitch! You owe me for it - one hundred thousand yao!" Wow - granny wasn't kidding. This asshole wanted a million dumplings worth of money for the non-existent pill that I, by definition, couldn't have stolen.

"So she did steal a pill," somebody in the crowd whispered.

Her friend nodded. "I heard from Pun Baozhai that a spirit beast helped her steal it!"

"I heard that she defeated the spirit beast," the man next to them butted in.

The first woman snorted. "Simple Lin? Defeat a spirit beast? Maybe a spirit dung beetle!"

For the record, dung beetles play an essential part of the ecosystem. They may not be intelligent and sensitive creatures like pigs, and almost certainly wouldn't make good dumpling filling, but I’m sure they have their good traits.

I knew I had to nip these crazy rumors in the bud before they got even worse, like a 2 am political tweetstorm spiraling out of control. I squared my shoulders and turned toward Lee Dan. "There was no pill! Where would I have gotten it? You know you didn't have a pill just as well as I do."

"Oh? Hahaha!" Dan laughed about the most forced laugh I've ever heard, spittle flying from his mouth, a good fraction of that lodging in his beard like whitecaps on the Pacific. "Then how do you explain your sudden womanly developments? Haha!"

Ah yes, the good old 'perving out on your teenage niece' maneuver. Always super classy. Despite my better judgment, I took a step toward him, fists clenched. "Nobody really knows for sure… but it wasn’t a fucking pill! And even if it had been, it wasn't yours! You do not own me, Dan. You're not my friend or my boss. You're not even my uncle!"

"Simple Lin just disowned herself!" somebody whispered in the crowd. "How disgraceful!"

"I think it's quite brave… in a doomed and very foolish sort of way," another onlooker replied.

"Look…" I turned to the press of marketgoers - as capably as the guards were enforcing the perimeter around us, the people of the marketplace were intent on pressing right up to that perimeter for a good gawk at the Lee family drama. "I'm very sorry for ruining your lunch hour, everybody. There's no pill and no crazy story. Just angry Lee Dan. I'll go now and none of you ever have to see me again, okay?" Slowly, I backed away toward Sighted Exit #1, my eyes glued to the pulsing vein in Lee Dan's forehead. "See? I'm leaving?"

Dan barked out another forced laugh. "What makes you think I'll let you leave?" He stalked over to a group of marketplace guards, who suddenly looked like they wanted to be literally anywhere but policing the marketplace. Dan snatched one of their iron truncheons and stormed back forward, stopping half-way between me and the dumpling stall. "Kowtow and swear you'll serve me until you've paid back what you've stolen from me and I won't beat your accomplices. Don't think I didn't notice how you were suddenly so friendly with the dumpling merchants. I would be a fool to believe in such coincidences!" He barked out another laugh… honestly, the man had, by a wide margin, the angriest, fakest laughs I've ever heard.

Now… threatening me was one thing. I'd already established that I could run away from Dan, and I was willing to bet I was even faster now with my longer, more muscular legs. But if I yeeted out of Emerald Vale and Dan was convinced I was partner in crime with the Xus, things wouldn't go well for them. They were good people, even Bo, and I couldn't let Dan do that. The only problem was he was clearly a trained soldier, armed with a weapon, and significantly larger and stronger than me, even after my unexpected transformation. I didn't want to fight him… but what choice did I have?

Oh well. It was a good run, but maybe my life in this world wasn't meant to be…

But maybe, if I tricked him… if I lured him into pursuing me under one of the archways, I could…

Nope. It was too late for shenanigans. Lee Dan charged me with a shout, truncheon held back and poised to swing. He darted forward and swung down, and… he was so slow. Dodging the truncheon was like dodging the wiffleball bat swing of an uncoordinated toddler. I leaned back, feet planted and hips forward as my upper body flowed back and out of range like a leaf on the wind. Not deterred in the slightest, he brought the truncheon back around, and I ducked right past it, sliding to the side.

My breath swelled, cool in my lungs. My heartbeat thrummed in my ears. The world around me seemed to slow, each and every movement somehow telegraphed - not just Dan's motions, but the entire world around me. I felt his weight shift as he pivoted on his back leg. Two hands on the truncheon grip, he swung it like a baseball bat. I backed just out of range and watched the truncheon's tip slide past my face.

Some bit of the current action reminded me of the cardio kickboxing class I'd taken for two years before I really got into yoga, and I stepped in, stomping on Dan's foot before going to knee him in the groin. Dan managed to pivot his leg so I only hit his thigh. Despite the poor angle of my strike, I felt and heard something snap. As his leg buckled, my fist flew out, and suddenly the world roared back. Something quite nearby slapped like the sound of a baseball bat hitting a side of beef. Then came the sound of tumbling dice. My fist was suddenly wet. Somebody dropped a sack of something… no, that sack was Dan bonelessly dropping to the paving stones…

The sound of dice on a hard surface had been his teeth rattling against those same stones. One of his canines was stuck in a glob of blood neatly perched on my second knuckle.

"Fucking gross!" I yelped, flinging it off with a flick of my wrist.

It took a moment for me to realize what had just occurred. I think it took everybody a moment… well, not Dan. It would be a while before he realized anything, because I really clocked him when I broke his face. He was still breathing, though - he took in the deep, slow gasps of somebody well and truly knocked the fuck out.

"Simple Lin just beat Lee Dan!" somebody shouted. The crowd erupted into cheers, and only then did the guards let them past the perimeter, people streaming in by the dozens to congratulate me and spit on Dan…

So that just happened.

--------

The guards eventually dragged Lee Dan away and the activity in the marketplace returned to something like normal. I kept on expecting that the guards would approach me to get a statement or something like that, but I guess they weren't exactly police officers and due process hadn't been invented yet. Oh well… when in Emerald Vale…

After my little stunt with breaking Lee Dan's jaw and knocking out half the teeth on the right side of his mouth (how's that for just desserts?), the Xus were only too happy to take me on. I happily ate my dumpling tithe, probably a hundred dumplings over the course of a few hours, but I considered that a bargain for the Xus, because everybody wanted to crowd in to gawk at the girl who'd decked Lee Dan.

"Our little cultivator making dumplings from my family recipe!" Xu Bo proudly declared.

I flashed my sunny smile, my hands working on autopilot to fold perfect little dumplings to go in the steamer. Obviously, I didn’t know a thing about the dumpling filling - those were secret family recipes, five generations old. Anybody with a little practice and decent attention to detail could make and steam dumplings, but it was the novelty of having a towering, silver-eyed cultivator who dispensed street justice also dispensing the dumplings that brought the people in.

I wasn't even a cultivator, not really. If I understood Phuong Fu correctly, you needed to have some sort of specialized technique to become a superpowered martial artist. Where a cultivator could continue to grow in strength as they gathered power, guys like Lee Dan were like Captain America getting super soldier serum (in magic pill form) and I was like Shazam! getting the blessings of a powerful magical being. We might have crazy martial arts superpowers, but we hadn't come across them through blood, sweat, and tears and so we didn't have the tools to advance in them…

Even so, as far as I could tell, superhumans of any stripe were quite rare, with those like Lee Dan being in the vast majority. What that meant for me was that I was trending pretty hard in the Emerald Vale marketplace. And that meant I could be an influencer, something I was at least a little familiar with.

"So… I have this great idea," I said. I transferred a stack of steamer boxes to sit over the patched pot. Xu Fen regarded me carefully, but at least she was paying attention. "If I went around the marketplace offering free samples to people…"

The chubby dumpling vendor put her hands on her hips and tutted. "Honestly, Lin! You should stick to your martial adventures, because you don't know a thing about business!" She pantomimed a knife hand strike so awkwardly that she'd have probably broken her wrist in two places if she actually tried to hit anybody with it. "How can we possibly make money by giving dumplings away? As the saying goes, talk does not cook rice!"

"It's a capital investment! A person who never knows about Xu's 5th Generation Dumplings will never be a customer. You need to advertise! All of the nearby stalls are already copying our… your buy-ten-get-one gimmick, so we'll need something else to separate ourselves. Your dumplings really are the best, right?"

"Of course," Bo said, offended that there was even a question about it.

"Well… have you ever heard, uh…" I wasn't the best with proverbs, but I'd probably heard a thousand of them from my lao lao. "Patience is a bitter plant, but its fruit is sweet!"

"That is a very wise and venerable saying," Fen reluctantly agreed. "How can people know that our dumplings are the best if they've never even tried them?"

"The smell should be enough," Bo said simply. "You may be blessed by the spirits, Lin, but that doesn't make up for five generations of dumpling expertise! I'm content to feed the bottomless pit in your belly, but no more nonsense about free food!"

"Fine," I grumbled - it was their loss.

I happily wiled away the afternoon making dumplings and answering questions from locals about what had transpired. It was amazing how quickly rumors spread and mutated in a small town. Some of the customers had heard that I'd been training in a secret cultivation technique and was only pretending to be crippled before announcing myself to the world and defeating my uncle. Others heard that I'd ridden into the market on a great yak spirit beast and gored Lee Dan. Yet others heard that I wielded magical bamboo to capture Lee Dan and denounce him. Truly wild stuff, but I was happy to correct their misconceptions with the truth, namely:

"Sorry, I have no idea what happened to me. Yes, I did punch Lee Dan. Yes, you really get a free dumpling when you buy ten - any kind you want, even pork belly." The pork belly dumplings were the most popular of the lot.

In my mind, I told myself that I was basically doing PR for the Xus in an unpaid internship with perks (namely, lots of dumplings) and that I'd eventually get promoted to being paid in actual coins. With Lee Dan out of the way, I could take as long as I needed to figure things out - maybe Fu would teach me to read the local language? I didn't really have any material needs beyond food and could meditate in any number of public locations at night. Yes, I could take my time and figure out how to live my best life, whether it was here or finding my way back home…

"I wonder what's going on over there?" Fen said.

I poked my head out of the stall and looked southward down the market square in the direction she was pointing. All I could see was commotion - people scurrying to get out of the way of something. Then four black-clad men on horses rode down the marketplace without any care as to who or what was in front of them. A fruit vendor was a bit too slow and wound up losing his haul, dozens of melons scattering to the pavement as a horse clipped his wagon, many of them bursting or getting trampled underhoof. Four black-clad warriors riding toward us.

"It's B-Black-blade Feng!" Bo gasped. Fen grabbed the stall's money till and deftly stashed it under a pile of steamer boxes.

"Do you think they're here for me?" I whispered.

The lead horseman unsheathed his blade - sure enough, the blade was a uniform, glossy black like the whole thing had been fashioned from obsidian. He pointed it at me. "You! Girl!"

I cringed. "Yes?"

He snorted in disdain. "Has no one taught you to respect your betters? You have the honor of speaking to Black-blade Feng, cur!"

I looked at the other three riders, thinking that one of them must be Feng, because why in the world would the man refer to himself in the third person like that? I guess it's one of those martial cultivator things, because he was Black-blade. "Um… you?"

"Feh! Just you see where childish barbs will get you, girl! You have stolen from one of my men, needlessly attacked him for all to see, and now you add insult with your impudence! Kowtow and swear your servitude to me, and I may consider sparing your life."

I looked to Fen and then Bo, neither of whom dared to look up. "Is this guy serious?" Yes, it seemed he was serious. Why did these fake cultivator guys have a hardon for kowtowing and swearing servitude? Was it a kink thing or were they just raised to be assholes? Neither would have surprised me. I glanced up at Black-blade and stepped out from the stall. "Yeah… nah. I don't negotiate with assholes."

I could practically see the marketplace guards wince at their pronouncement, and for good cause. With a roar, Black-blade leapt from his horse and, as he shot toward me, sword drawn, I couldn't help but note that he was much faster than Lee Dan.