Traveling through the rest of the day, by the time Shuixing, Daisy, Sofiane, and Zhidao City bedded down in an abandoned shack near the edge of a seaside cliff, they were close enough to see the glow of Tianzhou City’s lights on the horizon. They settled into the shack and were in the middle of dining on Daisy’s salmon croquettes when Sofiane let out a gasp.

  “Guys, the Use-Ranking!”

  Zhidao fluttered about the shack on his cloud. “Hmm? Did something happen?”

  Shuixing and Daisy grimaced. They didn’t need to scroll down the list of Heroes to realize what had happened: The total number had gone from 190 to 189. Shuixing scrolled down and was relieved to find both Natsuko and Pechorin still alive. This relief was followed by overwhelming unease about what Natsuko must have done. The room went silent as Sofiane, Daisy, and Shuixing all non-verbally agreed not to mention Natsuko’s involvement around Zhidao.

  “A Hero is gone. Like, gone gone,” Daisy said. “Bought the farm.”

  “Oh…” Zhidao said. “That’s unfortunate. Who was it?”

  None of them knew. Sofiane’s knowledge of and interest in the Use-Rankings started at #49 and above, and Daisy and Shuixing almost never checked the master list.

  “It was #188 or #187 by the way the rankings have changed,” Shuixing said. “But I don’t know who that would’ve been.”

  Other than someone she personally knew, Shuixing realized.

  “Must’ve been a dimension-jumping accident. Haven’t had one of those in a while!” Zhidao said.

  “Must be,” Sofiane said, treating the subject with fake nonchalance and rolling over in his bedroll to read a light novel.

  The presence of Zhidao killed the possibility of talking about what must have occurred between Natsuko, Pechorin, and the NH-killer, so the three tucked in for a long and anxious night. As Shuixing lay in her sleeping roll with silvery moonlight coming in through the rickety wooden walls, her theater of memory unspooled phantom films of her near past.

  She saw herself traveling through Tianzhou’s hills and mountains and rolling buckwheat fields and many, many abandoned temples, bringing her back to what was probably the best time of her life. Her team was the strongest in Po-Lin and the first to overcome the dragon V?lsunga, paving the way for the Yishang to de-Mist Tianzhou. Anything felt possible back then. They worked hard, training and dungeon-delving and questing, and their hard work paid off. Shuixing felt as though they had a purpose in the world, that they were liberating order from the clutches of Entropy.

  Shuixing shook her head, refusing to intoxicate herself on the memories of what had been. In the dark, she saw Daisy’s sleeping face a few feet away. It was soft and unburdened, her blonde ringlets shining like the halos over Zhidao’s head. Daisy looked like a top tier Hero, through and through. Once upon a time, she thought, Natsuko had looked like that too.

  Sofiane’s loud snoring startled her. She looked over to see him sprawled starfish-style across his bedroll wearing his blanket like a toga. It was then she realized Zhidao was gone. Shrugging off her blanket, Shuixing slipped into her shoes and walked out into a sea of grass billowing in the harsh wind rolling off the ocean. A lone pine leaned over the edge of the cliff as though staring into the sea. The moonlight turned everything a lustrous black-and-white.

  “Zhidao?” she called out to the Pengwu.

  Maybe it was the cold, or maybe it was the abrupt mental shift from her half-dreamed nostalgia, but Shuixing felt uncomfortable and exposed. She did a loop of the grassy cliff up and turned around, but there was nothing but a few solitary trees and the abandoned shack, yet she couldn’t shake the sense of something else being there. Something she couldn’t see.

  Shuixing didn’t like that. Even less so while there was a person running around with her knowledge of how to force dimension-jump. She wished Natsuko was here.

  “Hey!”

  Shuixing screamed and wildly flailed her rod in the direction of her auditory assailant.

  “I don’t think that’s gonna do much,” Zhidao said as Shuixing’s rod nearly bopped his black-button nose.

  “Ahh! O-Oh, Zhidao. I came out looking for you,” Shuixing said.

  She blushed as Sofiane and Daisy bounded out of the abandoned shack, looking for whatever had threatened Shuixing..

  “Shui, y’alright honey?” Daisy asked.

  “I-I’m fine. I just got startled by Zhidao is all.”

  Sofiane rolled his eyes and went back inside, flipping a sleep mask over his face.

  “Congratulations on finding me!” the fox said. “Erm… why were you looking?”

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  “Well, I- I saw you weren’t there, a-and I wondered where you went...”

  “Aw, that’s sweet,” Zhidao said, floating up towards Shuixing’s face and nuzzling her cheek. “I was just out here looking at the clouds. Ancient shapeshifting fairies like me get wistful too, you know.”

  “Right. M-My apologies,” Shuixing said with a small bow.

  “M’gonna go back to bed now,” Daisy said, yawning and rubbing her eyes.

  Still embarrassed about waking the others up, Shuixing followed Daisy with Zhidao tagging along. Once everyone was inside, she turned around to lock the door.

  The next morning, Shuixing found Sofiane sprawled in a different, yet equally chaotic arrangement of limbs next to her. She let him have his beauty sleep and went outside. In the cold morning air, Daisy was tending to the fire underneath the cooking pot.

  “Good morning,” Shuixing said.

  “Mornin’!” Daisy replied cheerfully.

  “Are you cooking breakfast this morning?”

  “Depends, do you like the taste of either burnt rubber or chicken sashimi?”

  “Not particularly…”

  “Might want to cook something yourself then,” Daisy said with a wink.

  “Surely your cooking isn’t that bad?”

  “Did you know you can give people the Poisoned status with turkey drumsticks?”

  “You can?”

  “Yeah, ask my party!” Daisy said with a laugh.

  Shuixing furrowed her brows. “It’s just timing, right? You assemble your ingredients, toss them together, and you pull the dish out at the right time. That’s all there is to it.”

  Just saying this caused Shuixing another bout of existential discomfort. Why did complex dishes not require more steps than that? But then again, she fired magical bubbles from her rod, so it wasn’t as though absolutely everything was explainable with physics. Some things could stay magical, like cooking.

  “Do you want me to teach you?” Shuixing asked.

  Daisy smiled bitterly. “You wouldn’t be the first to try, but if you’re up for the challenge, I’ll give it another whirl.”

  Shuixing laid out the ingredients on a towel and let Daisy pick which ones called to her. Shui gave her four tries before Daisy managed to pick a selection of ingredients that weren't completely inedible like fish, mayonnaise, pineapple, and peas. They settled on peanut butter, noodles, and soy sauce.

  “Since it’s a noodle dish, how long should we expect to cook: Short, medium, or long?” Shuixing asked.

  Daisy’s face puckered. “L—” She saw Shuixing wince. “—short.”

  “Right! So, what do you think would go in first?”

  “Peanut butter! Wait…” Daisy’s eyes darted between the bottle of Shikijiman soy sauce, Imperian peanut butter, and Tianzhounese noodles. “Soy sauce…”

  “Erm, the noodles, actually.”

  “Drat! That was my back-up choice.”

  Daisy picked up a big clump of noodles, enough for eight people, and dropped them in the cooking pot which, by its magical nature, was already boiling water. Feeling like it was the one thing she had a handle on, Daisy stirred the pot incessantly.

  “I take it you usually don’t do the cooking on your team?” Shuixing asked.

  “No, that’s usually Boulanger,” Daisy replied.

  For how disconnected Shuixing was from the Use-Ranking competition and the frontlines of the fight against the Entropic Axis, “Boulanger” was still a name she knew. It was hard not to at least be dimly aware of the current #1 Hero.

  “I had no idea he was a good chef,” Shuixing said.

  “He wasn’t at the start, but he’s got a drive like a movement speed-buffed workhorse. Whenever there aren’t any dungeons to clear he practices his cooking, just so he has something to get better at.”

  That sounded like someone else Shuixing knew, down to the same exact reasoning.

  “You’re talking about Boulanger?” Zhidao asked, floating down from where he had apparently been sunbathing on the roof.

  “Yup!” Daisy said. “Best cook I’ve ever met.”

  Shuixing, feeling oddly possessive, wanted to see a cook-off between him and Natsuko. Her money was on Natsu. But something else was more critical.

  “Umm… Daisy…”

  “Oh no! Not again!”

  Daisy pulled the pot she’d been mindlessly boiling off away from the flame. She poured the charred peanut-slop out onto a plate where a few embers glowed in the midst of dark brown sludge with, of all things, a fish skull protruding from it.

  “Wha—? How— when did you put fish bones in this dish!?” Shuixing asked.

  “I don’t know! I didn’t think I did!”

  The two of them plus Zhidao gazed at the fecal-looking glob for a minute or more, trying to figure out how it had happened.

  “D-D’ya wanna try it?” Daisy asked.

  Shuixing swallowed to keep herself from throwing up. “L-Let’s wait for Sofiane. And maybe dump this in the ocean…”

  Once they dumped the contents of the pot, the stench got so bad it triggered Shuixing’s Desperation Art. With the bubbles from it they were able to clean the pot up like it was new and put it back over the fire in time for Sofiane to wake up. He gave a big stretch and wandered out to the cooking fire wearing a purple velvet robe and fuzzy slippers.

  “Aggghhh. Num. Num. Num. What’s for breakfast?”

  Sofiane saw their expressions.

  “Whatever I make. Got it.”

  It was a welcome relief to Shuixing’s nostrils when they were flushed out by the smell of sizzling butter. Sofiane’s cooking expertise was limited to baking and Cascadian cuisine, but with some goose eggs, butter, cheese curds, and birch syrup, he whipped them all up some sweet-and-savory Cascadian omelettes. Once they were consumed, their party set off again.

  By around midday, they were cresting the final hill before Tianzhou City came into sight. Gleaming white-and-red pagodas rose over both banks of the Bo River which ran through the city. Its two halves were connected by a warren of sky bridges and pavilions.

  Over the bay rose an enormous offshore building which functioned as a combination of lighthouse, stock exchange, customs office, and headquarters for the Grand Chairman, the elected ruler of Tianzhou.

  Gazing at the glittering towers of commerce and pleasure, marvels of architecture and engineering that should’ve taken centuries to build, Shuixing had the mildly distressing thought that they didn’t fit with her understanding of the world. Had all of this really been here when the Yishang de-Misted Tianzhou? If so, what was it like before? The thought was starting to give her a migraine on top of all her other stresses, so Shuixing let it drop.

  It had been at least two years since Shuixing had last been to Tianzhou City, but she didn’t recall it being so loud and bustling. It felt like there were twice as many Non-Heroes on the streets and she even noticed more Heroes than usual running around an older region. Most were trying to sneak discreet looks at Daisy.

  “Why are there so many people in Tianzhou?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” replied Sofiane. “Usually, the city is just Non-Heroes and new Heroes sprinting through questlines.”

  “It’s probably because of the Grand Annual Card Tournament!” Zhidao said, surfing over the crowd on his nimbus cloud. All three of them stopped.

  Sofiane squinted at the fox. “The what?”

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