At the very least, Jessica knew that her efforts could bear fruit. There was no telling if this new crop of ten would bear fruit, mind you, but they could.

Surveying the new students and the old, she was pleased that each of the new students appeared to be on a path that would pull them up faster.

“It could be an after effect of the divine beast. Making them all that much more resolute in their abilities,” She said.

“The divine beast could have drawn out latent abilities, perhaps some that would have never been activated without it.”

Grace stood by her, watching as well. She was on the verge of her advancement after only a month and with her, Jung, Ki No and Ah Le that would be her fourth cultivator to rise to Senior Disciple.

“Do you really think that?”

“No, but it sounds like something that a smart person would say. Something that An-Yong would say,” Grace smirked.

He was always trying to get her to buy into his theories, and that half of them were utter garbage didn’t discolor the rest. There were some diamonds in the rough, and Jessica was willing to put up with some trash for a chance at brilliance. His perpetual motion machine aside, it was his ability to understand the training aspect and speak it to the students that made her think.

“Junior Disciple Grace, I want to pick someone to be the head of training for the students. This would be a position for a core elder. I don’t want to rush the choice, but I am trying to see if…”

“It’s between me and An-Yong, isn’t it. He would be a fine choice.”

Jessica grunted. The last thing that she needed was a rivalry.

“You read me like a scroll. Either one of you would be appropriate. And until Hu advances to be in charge of the scouts and spies as a core elder I am stuck. Ki No and Ah Le both refused a leadership role, and I understand that. They want to keep doing what they are doing, and that is admirable. It would be worse for them to take on something that they weren’t ready for instead.”

Grace let the words linger on.

“But you think that this disciple would say no if you asked?” Grace was perplexed, “First of all, this one has enough responsibilities? But that one? Hu can have it.”

Threads of qi closed in around the cultivators as they absorbed the aura around them. Jessica usually thought of it like a contact high when she was around this much energy: she got a bit and it helped her feel more awake, without the munchies. Jessica hadn’t had the munchies in a while, and the food while good wasn’t something that she craved here.

“Grace, I need you to step it up as a leader. I want to hand you more responsibility. I want you to be a core elder. I can see that both of you are excellent at training the new students and I have no doubt that either of you would be a fine choice. This isn’t a binary choice, you know?”

“Binary?” Grace said, shuffling her feet.

“You know, yes or no? You can both win here. I know that I need help. You can share the responsibility.”

Normally, Grace brightened when Jessica asked for her, but today she glowed.

“This one wouldn’t dream to…”

“Grace. It’s me you’re talking about here. If anyone understands you? I got you. I’m all about putting the right people in the right positions. It’s part of the contract that I unwittingly signed when I was brought here.”

Grace blushed.

“Does that mean that you want me…?”

“As an elder yes.”

Goosebumps coated Graces skin, and Jessica wondered and not for the first time, if she was about to act out a scene from a Korean drama. At least the name fit.

Grace shot her a glance.

“Would the elder care to tell this one where you just went? The elder smiled about something.”

“You know, back where I come from, there are these drama series, and well the country that my parents are from, it’s called Korea and…”

Grace got even more confused looking.

“A drama series? Like one of the romance books?”

Grace’s face couldn’t turn any more red, and Jessica wondered if she could make the red even redder.

“Yes well, I would watch them with my mom, and sometimes my dad.”

“You would watch them? With your parents????”

“Well yeah, I mean they wanted to impart their culture to me, and looking back it wasn’t always the best storylines, but you know, you think about what you do with someone when you miss them and all of that. I really miss my family and you guys are great and all, but,” Jess got a little choked up.

“Sometimes you miss them. This one understands. All these new cultivators, they’re in for a shock. Even though they aren’t far from home, getting onto a path and cultivating will separate them from their family. When they return home, it’s going to be like all of their family stayed in the same place, even though they have already gone so far. That transition? It’s rough. Some people, they don’t change, and then some family members are threatened by one of their cultivator relatives and… it gets ugly.”

The two sat in companionable silence and Jessica wondered if she should hug Grace, but the moment passed too quickly and she clammed up.

“That really sucks,” she said, trying to think of something, anything to say.

“Oh, you’re thinking about my family aren’t you?” Grace said.

“I don’t mean to pry, but you make it sound like you had a personal experience with, uh…” Jessica was once again at a loss for words.

Grace smiled, and even mask returning to her face.

“Let’s just say that this one is able to make inferences and draw conclusions based on what she sees,” Grace said.

“Well I should hope so, Grace.”

Jessica caught herself. Were they on first name basis? Should she be so friendly with what amounted to one of her middle managers?

Screw an organization chart, you can’t measure family that way.

The small upturned lip quiver told Jessica all she needed to know. And why the heck was she so hot all of a sudden?

The sun was out as Jessica embraced her first designated elder.

“You’re going to make a great elder,” Jessica whispered into Graces ear, and the feeling of Graces arms squeezing her, brought her the tiniest amount of joy.

***

“You want the Sect to pick up and move?”

“Not to overstep, but is the Elder certain that is the correct thing to do?’

“Dispatch five of our fifth realm cultivators to see this threat!”

“We need proof, if we’re to move this. And who knows if the Cold Steel Sects so called scouts are even trustworthy?”

***

The voices of his fellow elders rand in his head. Fa Za had to think if his father had ever told him of any such problems dealing with Sect politics. It wasn’t such an east thing to convince elders to move. When one as faced with the potential to achieve immortality, one tended to think long and hard about ones choices. Immortals and potential immortals had a long term view of things that wasn’t too connected to the here and now.

Fa Za had already summoned each of his personal servants. He’d already gone without them for weeks, what was a little longer. If he could use what he had at his disposal without going into the Heaven’s Mountain Sect’s coffers, then all the better.

Men that had served his father for years, and for some decades were sent out to the nearby villages. The people had to be warned. The people needed to know, and his servants would tell them.

Fa Za sat alone, in his home tent, all of the comforts of his life within reach and he found himself once again turning the bottle over and over. He didn’t know what to do with his hands, he kept telling himself.

He’d gone to the elders, asking for help and, well they were still deliberating now. They had been deliberating on and off for two days. He hadn’t meant to snoop, but they knew his savant level nascent soul wouldn’t keep whatthey said from him. Unless they chose to work out their differences by writing one line at a time on a scroll, there was no way for him to miss their conversation.

They knew it, he knew it. Both sides pretended that they didn’t spy on everything that the other did, as well as on Fa Za, who often found himself on neither of the sides.

He didn’t care for their deliberations, but he still wondered which of the sides had figured out that he was ordering the potion, then sabotaged it, either knowing or not knowing that of course he would check.

Unless the apothecary had been an exceptionally good liar, and he hadn’t been so far as Fa Za knew, then he’d told the truth. Or a version of the truth at least. Because he wanted repeat customers, Fa Za reminded himself again and again as he looked at the potion.

Once one sent ones servants away, home life got a lot more boring for a Sect Elder.

Fa Za loved boring, but after his stint at the Cold Steel Sect, he wanted a little bit more from his day to day life and he found himself putting the potion back into his negative space, and pacing around.

He could select a disciple and train them, or give a class on cultivation. One of those genius cultivation classes that all of the students would love to hear. He could also go to the library and read many of the sacred texts, it was true that Cold Steel had precious few scrolls. He could have some more made, and with his own coin, perhaps that would impress his intended.

His arm went instinctively for his negative space. No, he’d just put the potion away. He needed a plan to figure out how to use it.

All was fair in love and war, wasn’t that one of the things that Elder Jessica had said offhandedly to him?

Fa Za smiled, and looked for a replacement spear. One of those wonderful flying ones from the upper treasure vault would do.

That would do perfectly, indeed.

***

“So what we have here, it the perfect storm. It’s a big problem, and it’s something that no one else is addressing, perhaps the Heaven’s Mountain school, but we can’t confirm until our emissaries get back, but it affects a lot of us.”

The few new cultivators that had not been afraid of Jess had sat around listening to her talk about why this problem was one that the school wanted to invest it’s time into. One cultivator level beast was a small problem. A slow moving giant rock beast, hundred of meters tall? That was a community problem, one that needed a group solution.

A hand stretched out, and Jessica nodded for the new student, one of the ten that has just joined to speak.

“What can we do? This one wants to punch the divine beast and grind it into rocks!” He said, doing his best attempt to look fierce.

“You ARE helping, simply by being here, we can help the refugees, and set up places for them to go.”

She could see his go through denial then bargaining and he was definitely not one for a poker face.

Jessica made a mental note to send him to the aunties to get his facial problems sorted out. Every auntie in the Sect had a game face like a tigermom at a piano recital. He would learn.

“Trust me when I tell you that by training here, you allow us to send more scouts out to survey the problem, and more junior disciples can head out and provide aid. That would be a great way to engage the school, as we only need very few of you to be here at once,” she said.

The initiate seemed to like that answer a bit better as he sat down. If he wasn’t up to it, then perhaps he would have to push himself to advance. He was already at the third level of qi gatherer, if the stripes on his belt were true.

Jessica looked for another hand. None were raised, so she started showing the initiates her design for a refugee camp outside of the Sect’s walls.

“The first thing we need to do, it to claim some more land, and start digging up the soil to begin cultivating enough food. We don’t know how many guests we’ll be having, or how long they’re staying but each person that comes our way- and let me be clear- each person that comes here, no matter for how long, they are our family.”

From the back of the small class, Jessica could see Grace smile, and when the one noticed the other, they broke off eye contact sheepishly. An-Yong nodded to Jessica as she gave him the breakdown of how large she wanted to expand was finally expressed in one of her handy dandy rock formations.

“This will mean that the Sect effectively doubles it’s area, which if great, but then we also want to build more barracks for others, as well as till triple the amount of soil.”

Jessica laughed as the cultivators all went slack jawed at An-Yongs demonstration of the process using qi. He showed them how in simply gathering qi, they could strengthentheir muscles, and then delicately use some of the hand toolsahead of them to dig rows for their fields.

He, and other third realm cultivators would be doing their usually work of picking up house sized boulders and placing them around to base the walls of the next outer sect area.

“Elder Jessica, if we are expanding the footprint of the Sect, we could expand it in every direction,” he said, once the group had ran off to go work the grounds immediately outside of the school.

“Show my what you mean,” she said, motioning to the rocks that had been the diagram of their plan.

An-Yong spread the wall that doubled the grounds out, encircling the main courtyard area with a larger one. The rocks, meant to represent boulders were more spread out.

Boulders were a rarity around the immediate area, thanks to the path of the exploding qi sandal, and Jessica wondered if they could replace the small amount that she’d been able to hustle in.

“We going to need some bigger boulders,” she said.