In the end, Synthia never got to give the baron a piece of her mind, because as it turns out, he and his family all fled the mansion as soon as they heard a girl with a gigantic scar on her neck was escorting Synthia.

  Turns out her reputation preceded her a little too well.

  “They couldn’t have simply abandoned their duties because of you,” Synthia says incredulously as the carriage makes its way back to Ralth, “I was simply going to get the monthly update on our holdings!”

  “To be fair it is outside the Sentinel’s purview,” Ezra chimes, “he may well have thought you were there for an execution.”

  “But that’s ridiculous! What reason would I have to kill him and his kin?”

  Ezra shrugs, “don’t ask me how mortals think, that’s supposed to be your job.”

  Synthia groans.

  Very unladylike.

  “Oh, what am I to do now,” Synthia grumbles, “I can’t just find a replacement for the Kirk’s, and there isn’t even a war going so a general can distinguish themselves enough to become nobility”

  “Maybe they’ll come back?” Ezra queries.

  “If they do then I really will have them executed”

  Tantra, for her part, finds this both mortifying and hilarious.

  Her presence caused a baron to flee his own mansion, and didn't even put up a fight! Just gone. This’ll do wonders for her reputation, and she means that with as much sarcasm as she can muster, already she’s the kin-killer, what’ll she be now, the nobility's personal bogeyman?

  If Synthia wanted her standing to be elevated by having Tantra be subservient to her, then it seems to be working already, in all the wrong ways.

  “Maybe you could grant the territory to one of the Ralth nobles?” Tantra asks, “they have many children old enough for the position.”

  “It’ll be fathers decision in the end, but that’s probably what’ll happen,” Synthia sighs, “honestly, this was a disaster, the power balance will be out of balance all because of one coward!”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t bring her out to the country again, to avoid incidents like these,”

  “Thank you Ezra for your inspiring insight, unfortunately , I am in fact in possession of a brain” Synthia chides, “If you do that it’ll only cement her reputation as a feral dog.”

  “Isn’t that what you want?” Tantra raises a brow.

  “To a degree, but not to the point where people think I don’t have you under control!”

  Tantra takes offense to the idea of needing to be controlled but she does admit that if they're going with the image of her actually being dangerous, they’ll need people to think that she’s something to be tamed.

  Like a dog.

  That rankles her something fierce.

  “Well at least we know your idea works?” Tantra says.

  “Of course my idea works,” Synthia snaps.

  Tantra raises her hands in surrender and Synthia takes a centering breath to calm herself down.

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  “Apologies, that was undignified of me, the circumstances have made me…lose some of my inhibitions.”

  “It’s fine my lady, I took no offence.”

  “Good,” she sighs, “I don't need any more problems to deal with.

  -

  Qi deviation is rare.

  Many are the paths to immortality, so much lies beyond the streamlined formula of modern cultivation. Some are kept as secrets, reserved for the promising talents of the greater sects, or given as a reward for exemplary service to the empire. A lot are, to put it politely, absolutely useless.

  There there’s the paths that are dangerous

  The pursuit of the deviant paths is one of folly.

  Zon, ever wise swordsman that he is, has decided to embark on one of these paths.

  Core creation he calls it, such a simple name, yet it invalidates one of the greatest tenants of cultivation, that there can only be one core. Yet he always wondered, how is it that divine beasts create a core from nothing? Some even have multiple inhabiting the places that would normally house meridians, so it gave him an idea.

  What if he attached his soul directly to one of his meridians?

  He’s already passed the important parts of connection, he knows how to make the paths.

  He just has to make one of a more…ethereal quality.

  Half a decade it took for his efforts to bear fruit, finally making a stable connection between his core and the meridian of his left collar bone.

  A new pathway for the Qi generated to accumulate.

  It immediately exploded.

  Luckily he chose the meridian of his finger so he only needed a few years for it to regrow. The problem was repairing the broken meridian. An arduous process indeed, but it provided some much needed insight into his nascent idea.

  Meridians are rigid, and don’t have a way of expelling excess Qi, so when you attach it to the soul, it’ll simply be overwhelmed and combust. When the core is full with Qi they start to expel Qi into the environment.

  The method newly anchored cultivators use to combat this is to condense it into liquid Qi, which is fine, if slightly more difficult to control.

  But Zon’s core takes months to fill, the size of his soul not able to keep pace with the depth of his core.

  So he did something…interesting, he chipped pieces off his soul and used them to repair the meridian.

  The next time he connected it to his soul, it took just a few seconds longer before it exploded.

  So he repaired it again.

  Then it lasted over a minute.

  He repaired it again.

  More minutes.

  He kept on repairing it until it stopped exploding entirely and instead started to grow.

  Now he has two cores, one anchored and the other connected. It doesn’t add much to his Qi generation, but it does add to it.

  If he makes more he’ll get more sources of Qi, solving the greatest conundrum of older cultivators.

  Nothing could possibly go wrong.

  -

  A deafening crack echoes throughout the field, startling a bull from its grazing , it looks around and finding nothing but the humans a few meters away, it goes back to it’s grazing.

  “It’s not very accurate,” Koroth comments as he rubs his chin.

  “A simple solution can fix that my sultan,” Sara says enthusiastically, “the dragons lance may be underwhelming on its own, but when combined with dozens of its brothers it becomes an overwhelming piece of ballistics!”

  “I think I prefer the other one.”

  “The dragon's shit?”

  “We are not calling it that.”

  “To bad, I made it, I name it,”

  “Sara, you are a genius, but I will still execute you for insolence”

  “On second thought, you can name it anything you please my sultan”

  Koroth chuckles, oh the woes of dealing with eccentrics, if only they weren’t so competent, then he could behead them freely. But everyone has their uses, even mortals. When the fire lance fist saw the battlefield centuries ago, everyone saw it as something useless, but Sara? She came along and proposed to upgrade the conventionally useless weapon, and she actually delivered.

  He approved of her pet project because it seemed interesting.

  If she failed to produce anything with his gold then he could always just kill her.

  Now his country might be the furthest along in technological warfare.

  He just needs to come up with a name other than dragon’s shit, because that might kill his enemies with mirth rather than shrapnel, and he wants their deaths to be painful!

  It’s the principle of the thing.

  “Perhaps we could call it a qunbula.”

  Sara blinks, “after your uncle?”

  “Yes well, he did have quite the explosive personality.”

  how long do you want the chapters to be for the next book (epilogue chapters don't count)