Clothes at a certain point were hard to get right. Sure most mortals could get away with most any type of cloth hung loosely over them and not be considered indecent. Their bodies were not provocative as a standard.

  Cultivators increased the standard of decency in several ways.

  First was their perfect bodies, always having a provocative figure, whether set thin or thick, was always working against their attitudes. Nothing waisted, nothing useless was an easy way to appear alluring to people who most often were not. So to remove any fixation from mortals layers of unobtrusive robes or armor became common.

  Second was the other cultivator's perfect senses, when a hair out of place could being an opening to end a fight or an advantage to press hardly anyone had eyes less sharp than than the mortal limit. This meant that any fiber sowed, no matter how broad, nor how densely woven, struggled to hide features from cultivator eyes. Thus layers.

  Third were the forces at play. Simply put, whatever you wear is pressed to tightly against you that no matter how stubborn or ridged it will get stuck into all the little cracks and crevices that are so readily hidden away by polite society. The solution was more particularly ordered layers.

  Then the fourth, intimacy starved cultivators. With perfect standards, abrasive personalities and repulsive demeanor as a near constant there are few who find someone they are willing to bare themselves to. Thus the part that can never be purified away, the ambition to achieve the impossible will find, and get very stuck into the afore mentioned cracks and crevices so despised by mortals.

  Cultivators are subject to harsher standards by way of being 'better' than mortals, thus whenever moving at full force they risked indecent exposure to one another or chaffing against their armor, thus leaving openings for opponents.

  Chen Shi understood the sentiment of ignoring all of that and just wearing rest clothing but...

  As he stood in the courtyard just inward of the southeast inner disciple quarters, rubbing his too full feeling nose and worrying about the heat in his ears, he had to admit.

  Some irrational rules have their practical reasons.

  He was about to get on his way again when the northeast library exploded with half realized ideas and incomplete concepts.

  It all washed through the streets of the sect like a flood. Most disciples had learned to ignore it, the discarded or half formed ideas of people just reaching an informed epiphany. Indeed he would have too, if not for who had just ran by in nearly sheer pants.

  So he examined the pieces and parts floating by. Some of it was obvious, fire is not just flame but ash and smoke and heat. Some of it was nonsensical, we are here for a reason, the world is not inherently hostile, that sort of stuff. But Chen latched onto one single note underneath everything else.

  If there are several ways to do something than you can do that thing several ways at the same time.

  To most Heavens defying cultivators perfecting the one way to do anything, blasphemy. To Chen Shi, the commoner who's village was wiped out and who'd soared through the ranks on nothing but vengeance, a revelation.

  Nothing but turning that metal feathered bird to slag mattered to him. So the idea, nay the premonition, that doing something two ways at once meant improving twice wasn't three times the effect but four held irrevocable value.

  Suddenly every path he'd turned away from, every revelation dismissed became a new method, a new opportunity. If he could harmonize everything right...

  That bird would be dust before winter.

  He grinned, his nose no longer important as he made his way to his room, calmly. Not at all chuckling with unbridled malice, no.

  Such a display would be unsightly.

  ---

  Ni watched as what to anyone else was a wild soul slipped around inside his dantean.

  The fluffy lil arrow of a creature was happy to mark out and make plans by digging little trenches and holes in the field he'd enjoyed lounging on. Most who visited called his space underdeveloped or crude but it was daunting to see all the space he had to work with and it took a minor revelation to just leave it be.

  He was alone then, every stone hewn by hand, every log split by tools he made and made again. Now though, he had help.

  One soul passed down from his grand father to him, a panther in the shape of a man, wizened, old and having watched over many of his ancestors during their early rise. He was somewhere between a guide and a personal trainer, able to press lil Ni just enough to find his own flaws.

  Another was a warrior of another land, still of this world, who swore his soul to the Zanye name. He had unwittingly consigned himself to immortality and was passed around as the Zanye family struggled to find anyone willing to check up on his family, spread out and mildly prosperous mortals as they were.

  A few more lay dormant, stars behind clouds he had yet to reach or simply asleep somewhere in a box. Each a contingency, a plan to hatch if the need arose, a bank of expertise he could consult by contact. He'd been curious about blacksmiths in his youth and collected an inconceivable wealth of them without knowing what he was doing.

  Of the four currently awake, himself, his trainer, his guard and the fox, only the fox was moving.

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  Sleeping Storm and Hirugami Katago were sitting at a tea table, utterly shocked and frozen in place. Even some of the shrouded souls peeked out from their places to see what the commotion was.

  Eventually, after many painstaking holes and trenches made with the limbs of a fox, the soul sat next to where Ni had been contemplating. Rubbing the top of a forepaw on the bottom of its chin as it growled into a closed maw.

  "Feeling better now?" Ni asked it

  It made some noncommittal noises and started gesturing around as Sleeping Storm stood and stomped over, looking far less old than normal as his fur bristled.

  Before his mentor could open his mouth to get out a word the fox shfted, growing to rival a house in stature as it curled around Ni, keeping its tail wrapped over him as its forelegs became four legs and its coat shifted to crystals.

  Them the sky shifted to ashen clouds and the mountains behind became volcanos, from the sky rained flaming boulders of all kinds as the fox looked down at a panther who could do little more than bristle and become muscular.

  Sleeping Storm stared for a few seconds but ultimately deflated, letting the fox pop back into it's tiny form, the apocalypse behind it leaving barely a wisp of heat in its wake as the little creature bounced around and sniffed at the new person. Ni looked to the sky and saw his attentive guardians all turning back to sleep.

  Apparently whatever the fox truly was it wasn't a danger to him on purpose.

  "Enough! What did you do to him!" Sleeping Storm shouted after his patience wore out.

  The fox made its indecipherable noises and wagged its tail as it hopped toward one of its holes. The panther grumbled and followed after it as Ni went to sit back with Hirugami, maybe get some tea before rebuilding. Oddly the man didn't seem phased at all.

  "Nothing amiss to you?" he asked

  The old soul sighed and set down his cup, "Everything, but there's no point worrying about what we cannot change, whatever designs we are subject to we have to live with now." then he then looked up. "I'll miss the privacy of a roof"

  That made Ni laugh as he refilled their cups, "Here's to lessons learned and improvements made,"

  Hirugami offered a halfhearted toast before they drank.

  Ni want to grab the tools and Hirugami grabbed the ropes, in the distance Sleeping Storm rearranged the wreckage of their old home to the specifications of a fox whom none of them doubted could easily fit into the teapot.

  ---

  Elder Rho Zanye looked down at his grandson, four generations separated but still looked like he did in his own youth. He fondly remembered his formative years, taking advantage of his half way to hourglass figure and the various shenanigans and heists he was able to get up to just by wearing the wrong clothes. Rho still missed his friends from those days.

  Ni was laying on an examination table, partially stripped from Yu Ten's wardrobe intervention.

  It may have been a little inappropriate for Elder Rho to visit little Ni but no one else was calm enough or cared enough to come to the medical ward to check on him. The spirit doctors would turn away others for being too volatile, the turbulence could rip apart the cultivation of any other family line.

  Still, he couldn't help but wonder as he watched the boy's cultivation.

  Little Ni had been a hearth to his eyes before, a campfire in his early days. The first ruptures had been from others hurting him or taking advantage of his generosity. He'd patched himself admirably to others eyes, to the Zanye clan he'd left himself open still.

  There were always strange things he'd do or build or think about from his first gift. Mortal machines that could fly, carriages without beast or qi to pull on them, lamps burning gasses that killed miners able to light streets or workshops by.

  He wanted to share these things spread the ideas onto others, so that they could build them while he continued his familial duties.

  Now...

  The fire was gone, in its place was glass. And so far as Elder Rho could see his little Ni was setting out the cornerstones of a castle.

  Something changed in the boy and he had a feeling anyone who found themselves near him would end up behind those walls without even knowing it.

  "Hey, Elder Rho, how's the supply pavilion going?" croaked the boy in the bed.

  Rho held back a laugh and patted a hand on Ni's head.

  "you cannot be so casual about meeting your grandfather, or inquiring about inner sect business" he rebuked back in a whisper, leaning down to bump foreheads with the boy.

  "but i'm such a rising star, its important for me, besides, if you were the librarian i'd be asking for some books." Ni rasped back.

  "yes, what a shooting star you are, always rising, over and over again." That earned a giggle from the new spirit inside Ni, a vaguely gleeful cackle that sounded more like a child laughing at their harmless prank.

  Elder Rho lifted an eyebrow at the behavior but didn't say anything for now, instead he sat back and smiled out at the rest of the pavilion, where other disciples lay on their own tables and beds after receiving wounds or coming to their own destructive epiphanies. Ni arched his back and stretched his arms up, going so far as to pull he legs in before relaxing to lay flat.

  "These other disciples could learn a thing or two from your spirit." he announced, earning a few groans from the other beds or staff and a louder giggle from Ni.

  "Hehe, my first lesson for everyone is never hesitate to acknowledge your flaws, accept them, and the work of fixing or compensating for them, only then will you truly outgrow clothes." He put emphasis on that last word like it was something dirty and it made Rho laugh heartily.

  He stood, gave the boy a pat and headed out of the ward as he felt Ni recede back into his own, much larger now, inner world. Elder Rho Zanye followed servant Yu Ten to a room where the rest of the Zanye family waited in privacy.

  From the moment the door was opened he could tell tempers had run hot, though it seemed like the brawl had barely started before he arrived. He sighed and began arranging everyone in a less volatile pattern before delivering the news.

  "It does me well to see you all again for our semi annual 'Ni nearly died' gathering, I am happy to report 'nearly' is as nearly as it ever gets with out rambunctious boy, he awoke in good spirits not long ago and told some light jokes." Rho reported

  The reactions ranged from chuffs to acknowledge the joke to bristling, whipping tails, but at least all ears remained on him for the moment.

  "He is fine, he's remodeling his cabin style soul space into something far more grand, and hopefully long lasting, considering is first spirit has awoken now." He got into the meat of the issue and settled the worries of the more frayed nerves around him.

  "Where is his cultivation now and how long will it take for him to get to a comparable stage?" One of the more economically minded of the clan asked.

  "Are there any lasting scars? Will this impede his path at all?" Another of the martial variety asked.

  "Will he finally stop acting like such a slut now?" One of the matriarchs asked, quieting everyone else.

  Rho chuckled and looked through their ranks, everyone too interspersed to build up a row in support of opposition to any particular sentiment.

  "To answer you should visit him would be an exercise in frustration, we all know the advantage we carry as a clan, but the medical pavilion does not. I don't think he'll be back to a similar stage for some time yet, but the breadth of his new cultivation is so much bigger than any scars he might have accumulated that it is absurd. As always, se sets the pace of his own advancement, as does Sleeping Storm."

  "As for his behavior, it is as much enforced by his appearance as it is informed by the kind of person he wants to be, if anything he's going to get a lot worse before the tournament starts." Rho had to smile at the amount of groaning that caused.