7. Back to Yiling

If anyone at all was looking for either the Yunmeng bastards or a stray set of runaways from the brothel, they would not see them in the four filial grandsons traveling with their elderly grandfather to return him to his ancestor’s home in Yiling for his final years, after a terrible flood in the south tragically killed the rest of the family and wiped out their rice farm.

The flood really happened, after all, and records of families in that region were not terribly exact due to how spread out all the rice farms were. Things which Jiang Yanli, now Meng Jiayi, knew well from her time helping with record keeping back at Lotus Pier.

The slow travel meant it took a week to return to Yiling. On the third day, she went back to wearing her own robes and putting her hair up in her familiar braided buns. It had been oddly liberating to run around as a boy, as weird as it was, and she was proud to have pulled it off so well. But they had seen not even a suggestion of pursuit, so she was glad to safely return to herself.

“You made a great boy, JieJie!” Ying’er assured her.

“It was fun!” She said, patting him on the head as he sat down with his kabob of roasted venison.

“It was weird,” A’Cheng grumbled. “Next time we’re dressing you up as a girl!”

Ying’er blinked thoughtfully at that for a moment before smiling brightly. “I would make a very pretty girl!”

A’Cheng looked at him in confusion, but Meng Yao and Lao Wang just laughed at both them.

As they traveled on, Wei Ying and A’Cheng made a tentative peace with Meng Yao by teaching him how to dress out field game for cooking. Yanli admired his determination, given that until that point he had probably never handled a single animal carcass in his life that wasn’t already butchered and ready to be cooked. He clearly found it distasteful, but he clearly understood that it was more about proving himself to the boys than anything.

The fact that he was Jin Guangshan’s bastard, therefore a half-brother to Yanli’s much-loathed former betrothed, had not inclined the boys to favor him at all. But the ice was thawing, she thought. (She tried not to think too much about how relieved Jin Zixuan probably was not to have her as a yoke around his neck anymore.)

She had bigger problems, as she assumed upon their return to Yiling that they would be recognized as the “former street kids.” When she expressed this out loud, Wei Ying shrugged and Lao Wang laughed at her.

“There is no one more invisible than the poor at your feet, young miss. I think I was one of two people who noticed that Wei Ying disappeared one day, despite him being underfoot for three years by that point. When he returned later with some Yunmeng Jiang disciples on a night hunt, no one recognized him at all!” He laughed.

Wei Ying nodded with a broad grin on his face. “Even the mean old dumpling lady had no idea who I was! She was so confused when I paid for twenty dumplings and only took one, but I was paying her for all the ones I stole out of her trash.”

“Stupid boy! They were already in the trash! Paying people back? Bah.” The words were harsh, but Lao Wang was also smiling.

He turned to Yanli. “Now, here we are with a whole wagon and an ox that we own, with money to spare: obviously we are upstanding, respectable people! Obviously that old crazy pickpocket Lao Wang probably got his throat slit in an alley somewhere at last.” He chuckled. “What would that have to do with this honored elderly patriarch of the Meng clan from the south, whose mother married out of Yiling two generations ago? Absolutely fucking nothing!” He cackled.

“Yes, YeYe,” Wei Ying said with an aggrieved sigh.

For a moment, the old man’s eyes looked extra watery at being called grandfather, but he rubbed his face with one of his gnarled, weathered hands and sighed heavily.

“They might think they recognize me, but more likely, they will assume Lao Wang was a distant cousin.”

“Mn,” Yanli said, considering his words. She tried for a moment to remember the poorest people of Lotus Cove, and felt ashamed that she was unable to recall most of them.

“But what will we do when we get to Yiling?” A’Cheng called back, always overly worried about everything. She hoped he grew out of it, and not into anxiety. Her mother used to goad his fears to make him work harder, and it had always struck Yanli as counterproductive. She decided she would take time to teach him some calming breathing exercises after they got settled.

“Eh, we have options. The old leather smith’s son died a couple of years ago, and the family never recovered. Moved west, I think. The siheyuan stinks of leather and its feng shui is wonky, not to mention it’s the last crafts house before the road to the Burial Mounds. It’s bad luck all the way around, so we can rent it cheap, with an option to buy if these boys manage to bring in enough money.”

“I will not live in an unlucky house!” A’Cheng announced with all the authority of an entitled sect heir. Yanli sighed.

“We live where we can pay rent, boy!” Lao Wang flapped a hand at him.

“You forget, young master, that we have four cultivators here,” Meng Yao said in that horribly polite way that he had. “We can fix whatever is wrong with the house.”

This took both A’Cheng and Wei Ying off guard. They looked at Yanli, who was herself surprised to be included in the count, even though it was technically accurate. She nodded.

“Meng Yao is correct. We are young but we are cultivators, and we can clear out the resentment and set up arrays to deflect what emanates the Burial Mounds. Lotus…our former home was built to align with the natural energies around it generations ago, so you never had to do that type of work. But architectural cultivation is important, and well within our abilities. We can’t rebuild the house, but there are many ways to fix the feng shui.”

They nodded at her authority.

Their deference, and Meng Yao’s comment, made her realize that of all of them, she was the senior cultivator of the group. Lao Wang could pose as a grandfather, but not a cultivator. While all three boys were already stronger than her in every way and were hardly untrained, they were years behind her in knowledge and experience across all subjects short of actual fighting.

Furthermore, to comply with her agreement with Meng Shi, she would have to incorporate the Six Arts into their education in order for them to become true gentlemen of the jianghu. At their ages and experience, she could handle furthering them along in everything but archery and horseback riding. Fortunately, both Wei Ying and A’Cheng were already good archers, and could teach A’Yao as long as they had bows and arrows to do it with.

Equestrian sport was a different problem. She was a fair rider herself, but the boys had barely started riding lessons before they left (were heartlessly thrown out like trash, she amended with an internal snarl of anger) and she did not consider herself competent enough to teach it, even if they could afford a horse one day. She put the matter aside for later with a sigh.

Hopefully, by the time her own skill sets were run out, they would be financially secure enough to hire tutors. She thought about it for a while as the wagon swayed down the road, passed occasionally by other travelers on horseback.

“YeYe, I have a question.”

It took a moment for Lao Wang to remember that he was supposed to be her grandfather. “Oh! Yes, my dear sweet precious granddaughter?”

Wei Ying looked up from his book and rolled his eyes.

“Do rogue cultivators ever travel through Yiling?”

This time Wei Ying looked up and paid attention.

“Often. Never stay long, but a few try the patience of the Burial Mounds sometimes.” He smacked his lips. “Wei Ying’s parents were the last ones to attempt it. Their deaths scared off most others for a long time.”

Wei Ying curled up into his book again.

“We may need some help with training the boys in a few years. Please keep your ears open for ones of good reputation.”

“Gonna have to pay them, though. Rogue cultivators won’t spit on you if you don’t pay.”

Meng Yao snorted out a laugh, then covered his mouth, looking away. A’Cheng, who had somehow migrated onto the back of the massive ox, glared at Lao Wang.

“Do rogue cultivators charge a lot?” She asked, realizing for the first time that she had absolutely no idea what cultivation was worth in terms of currency. That was something Yunmeng Jiang rarely charged for, even if people often gave them money or goods for clearing out a yao or settling fierce corpses.

“Depends. The worst ones charge the most, because they have to fight to get jobs. The best ones are more interested in the work, so usually don’t charge more than their expenses. But they all need to eat, so they all charge.”

“Would they charge more for teaching than for night hunting?”

He eyed her for a moment, and Wei Ying looked like he was on the edge of his seat, waiting for answers.

“Probably. That’s not something commoners would ask them to do, though. Sell them a few talismans, yeah. Teach them cultivation?” He snorted in derision. “But if you had enough money, well, they are fuckin’ human after all. Wave a few silver taels at them. Works on everybody.”

“That’s a lot of money,” Wei Ying said morosely.

“Damn sure is. Hard to come by that kind of coin honestly.”

She looked at Lao Wang, who had turned his attention to the fields passing by. “YeYe, I forbid you to do any pick-pocketing.”

He bounced his cane on the floor of the wagon. “Now look here, girl—”

“No,” she said loudly and firmly. Meng Yao swiped A’Cheng off the back of the ox and gave him the ox’s lead before heading back to walk next to the wagon, nearest to Yanli. Wei Ying put his book aside.

“No,” she repeated. “We are a respectable family now. You are our esteemed grandfather. You can curse and laugh and be rude to people, but you must not break the law and bring the authorities down on our house. I do not think anyone from the cultivation world is looking for us, specifically, but if we make ourselves known, there will be no place for us to hide anymore. A’Cheng and I are the bastard children of a notorious adulteress, Wei Ying is a sect defector who stole things on his way out, and Meng Yao is the son of a prostitute. One false step and we will all go down together.”

It seemed as if even the birds had stopped chirping at her declaration.

Lao Wang huffed and banged his cane on the floor again. No one spoke for a long time.

“As you say, SunNu. But show more respect for your elders,” Lao Wang—Meng YeYe—finally grumbled at her.

Wei Ying leaned into him, smiling again. “You just like her cooking.”

“Shut up, brat!” The old man snapped at him, but twisted a little to drape his bad arm over Wei Ying’s back. Meng Yao quietly returned to A’Cheng’s side, helping him crawl back up on the ox again while A’Cheng pestered him to explain what was going on.

Yanli let out a soft sigh of relief. Meng Yao looked back at her and smiled.