And Yan Wushi, leaving seclusion, thinks that this is the most interesting thing he's seen in years.

...Lots of things are the most interesting thing he's seen in years because he was in seclusion and seclusion, by definition, doesn't have many interesting things to look at. The most interesting thing he has seen in a period of several years which ended as soon as he entered seclusion a decade ago.

But regardless. The reclusive sect leader of Xuandu Mountain, the finest Daoist sect in the world, is losing a fight and falling into an enormous black portal the likes of which Yan Wushi has never seen before in his eight-hundred-years-and-change. It's interesting.

Hehuan Sect has been getting on well enough without him for ten years and can probably handle a little while longer. Yan Wushi jumps in. 

They both land in a grove of trees!

It's a very nice grove, with sunlight filtering down through the trees and no particular horrible monsters visible at short range. The trees and grass and weeds don't look very familiar, though.

Shen Qiao does not notice this for two reasons! First of all, he's unconscious, and second of all he's blind. 

Well, that's no fun at all. His new toy has to be aware of being played with!

Yan Wushi hops on his sword and flies up to see if there are any cities around here that might have taverns and doctors from whom he can purchase medicine. 

As he rises he sees the landscape below spread out like a map, and so can pinpoint villages and cities on it with supernatural ease.

... Mostly what he pinpoints is that the grove, while a very nice grove, is on the edge of a really big forest; there are not, as it happens, any cities near him in the sense in which China has cities, except a long way off. There are some nearby tiny villages, and a bit past that some small villages, and if he searches he can find towns with a few thousand, and if he goes off thataway towards the really big lake he can find a slightly larger number of thousands on its edge, and then that one alllll the way over there might be a provincial capital, if the province was rural and underpopulated?

The portal seems to have taken him to the barbarian realms? Yan Wushi has never been to the barbarian realms before.

Yan Wushi decides that the best chance of a tavern and a doctor is going to be in a town. He flies back down, throws Shen Qiao over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, and flies off to the nearest town. 

The nearest town is a fairly nice place north of the big river, up against the forest. All the buildings are made of wood from the forest's trees, and there's a carpet of large farms and ranches stretching off south of it. There's none of the elaborate walls or precise geometric layout of a Chinese city, not even the thinnest palisade or vaguest vision into four quarters, just a fading into the wood one way and a fading into the farms the other. The largest buildings might be temples or government centers? Or they might not.

Well, yes, he did expect that this was full of barbarians. 

He lands and then looks around for something that appears to indicate that it's a tavern or other place where one can exchange money for food or shelter. 

Yup! There's buildings with hand-painted wooden signs that look like they're probably taverns - nearby ones include a pig roasting on a spit, a helm above a keg, and a sword above a tankard all advertise themselves. (There's also a stag's-head one that might also be a tavern or might be something else.)

People (barbarians - they don't look Chinese at all) respond with significant shock to his arrival! Not, like, huge amounts, there's not the everyone-kneels-or-prostrates-themselves that you might get if they knew who he was, but they make room for him and seem impressed with the way he has a flying sword and everything.

He goes to the one with a sword above a tankard, reasoning that this would appeal to cultivators.

He looks for someone who looks like the person in charge here. 

It's a homey little place. There's a couple of people inside eating, dishes with a lot of meat and also fresh-baked bread, and drinking beer; it looks like it'd be more full in the evenings. The person in charge looks most likely to be the barman, a middle-aged barbarian with a scar on his chin and an implicit aura of relaxed calm.

...barbarians don't speak Chinese, do they. 

He opens his qiankun bag and dumps a mildly absurd amount of gold on the counter, then sees if they have an interpreter hidden in the back or if he's going to have to ask for a room through mime. 

Ah, a Tian adventurer without a Tongues active!

He says something in a language Yan Wushi doesn't know and sends a girl (his daughter? possibly? Barbarians all look pretty similar) off to go get someone or something.

He's not taking any of the gold yet.

Well, then, he will patiently wait until the daughter or whatever comes back. It's not that he objects to communicating through mime. (Yan Wushi feels strongly that humiliation is a thing that happens to people who are not Yan Wushi and ideally at the hands of Yan Wushi.) But he wants the entire building if he can get it and that seems a bit hard to communicate without words. 

Right! Someone will come back, a man in the same sort of rugged tunic and coat and trousers as the other barbarians and a golden bow-and-arrow pin on his cloak. He will, with open hands and exaggerated care to show it's harmless, do some kind of magical thing to the bartender, and then make moves towards doing it to Yan Wushi?

Yan Wushi nods agreeably in the way of a man who is absolutely confident that, if the cultivation technique happened to be one he did not like, he could defend himself and then murder everyone in this room in the next two minutes. 

He pokes Yan Wushi and says things, and Yan Wushi then speaks Taldane!

"Is your friend all right?" is the first thing the bartender says.

"WHOA. That's cool. --He lost a fight very badly. I haven't gotten a chance to look at him and fix him up. I'd like to rent this tavern for a week. If that's not enough gold I can give you more."

"More than enough," says the bartender, frowning. "Stick around, Odd. Is it [technical-term-similar-to-qi-drain*] or did he just take a beating?"

(*: "Negative levels.")

"I'm not sure. I caught the last three rounds of the fight, just enough to see him falling into the portal that led us here. --Also, there was a portal that dropped us here, I don't know if that's a known thing."

"Huh. Neither'd I. Well, we can check -"

He'll pour the unconscious Shen Qiao a shot, and, with the care of a moderately experienced bartender of Cayden Cailean, put it to his lips, and attempt to get him to swallow it, aided by a solid slap on the back!*

(*: Cure Light Wounds.)

Shen Qiao blearily resurfaces to consciousness. 

It is very rude to ask a cultivator who isn't a member of your sect about their techniques. Knowledge is power; most fights are won by knowing one more thing than your opponent does; the difference between renown and honor and an ignoble death is often a single scroll. 

"That's an interesting cultivation technique. What medicine was in the alcohol?" 

Yan Wushi is a rude person. 

Not waiting for the bartender to answer, Yan Wushi touches Shen Qiao's acupoints. "Ouch. Negative levels down to a commoner. Nasty, nasty fight. It looks like your cultivation technique took care of all the actual damage but it's going to be a while before he can do much."

He laughs. "Nothing that's not in every bottle - a drink's good for the shock, after a long battle. The cultivation-technique-subtype-[untranslatable]* was a Cure Light. Odd, anything you can do for him?"

The more taciturn man shakes his head. "Nothing rest won't."

(*: "Spell.")

Following the ascetic practices of his sect, Shen Qiao has never, in his life, had a sip of alcohol.

Normally, Shen Qiao's golden core would simply purify his system of the alcohol, as it would any other poison. But Shen Qiao has only perhaps one percent of his normal qi, and his golden core is busy dealing with other poisons anyway. 

In short, Shen Qiao is drunk. 

He starts giggling. "I can't see anything!"

"You've had a bad fight," the bartender says. "Just sit back and try to breathe." He'll try to get Shen Qiao more comfortable.

Yan Wushi has a technique which allows him to move his hand without creating wind. He uses it at this very moment to almost slap Shen Qiao in the face, stopping only a hair from his cheek. 

Shen Qiao doesn't notice.

"He's blind," Yan Wushi says to the bartender. "I assume this is new."

Switching to Chinese for Shen Qiao: "you weren't blind the whole time, right?"

"No! I've never been blind before!"

He giggles like this is the funniest thing that has ever happened to him. 

"It's new."

"Shit," says the bartender. "You have it prepared -"

Odd shakes his head.

"Can you tell your pal we can fix it in the morning, and that you've already paid?"

"Yes," Yan Wushi says, completely truthfully.

And then he realizes that (1) any lies to Shen Qiao about whether his blindness is going to be cured are going to be proven false in the morning (2) literally nothing he can come up with in the way of horrible implied payments, etc., is funnier than Drunk Shen Qiao.

Feeling rather put out that he had such a good setup for a technical truth and then had to tell the actual truth anyway, he says to Shen Qiao, "they have good medicine, they'll fix it in the morning."

"I don't know who you are but you're really nice," Shen Qiao says. "All of you are very nice."

"Right. We should get your friend some water -" he has a mug of water to attempt to provide him, clean from a Create Water cantrip - "and to bed - Odd, do you have another Share Language -"

Odd shakes his head.

"Right. The Share Language on you'll go away after a day, an hour after dawn after he's got his spells I can ask Odd to come by and fix your friend's eyes and put the spell back up, you've already more than paid -" (though possibly not by quite as much as he thinks, gold's more valuable in China than around Lake Encarthan).

Yan Wushi is torn by a horrible dilemma. 

On one hand, there's a drunk Daoist. 

On the other hand, morning spells???? He has so many questions?????

"I'll take Shen Qiao to bed," Yan Wushi says, "and then if you don't mind answering my questions I'd like to figure out where I... am."

He nods. "No problem at all. And for your question - this is Marten's Rest, in Free Nirmathas, on the continent of Avistan." He quirks an eyebrow. "See you when you come down, so you can know what that means."

Yan Wushi takes Shen Qiao's hand. In Chinese: "come along, a-Qiao, it's time for bed."

Shen Qiao comes along willingly. 

All right, what do the accommodations look like?

Crude but functional! It's just a couple rooms above the tavern, but they have two beds each; the mattress and pillows are stuffed with straw but thick, the blankets are wool but there's enough of them, and sheets haven't made it up to Nirmathas yet. The floors are wood and the windows have wooden shutters but not glass panes and the lights come from the windows. There's a generous supply of candles, but "candles" are indeed the highest-tech option.

He shoves the beds together, helps Shen Qiao take off his outer robes and get into bed, and taps a couple acupoints so that Shen Qiao will Go The Fuck To Sleep.

Then he goes back downstairs and bows.

"I don't think I got a chance to introduce myself," he says. "I'm Yan Wushi, Sect Leader of Hehuan Sect. I am the third or fourth best adventurer in"-- okay, 'the civilized world' seems a bit rude to the barbarians and 'jianghu' doesn't even seem to be a word in this language, technically the empire has disintegrated but whatever-- "the Empire, depending on whether Ruyan Kehui is having a bad day, not including people whose rankings are unknown because they've been meditating on a mountaintop for the past four hundred years."

This seems appropriate from an adventurer from really far away, which is, indeed how the bartender was already conceptualizing it! He'll also bow, less smoothly. "Right. I'm Juanne, this is the Sword and Tankard, I run the place; I was an adventurer for a few years after the war, figured Cayden Cailean's fighters were always talking about how they'd retire and start a bar and someone should actually do it, so he gave me a cleric circle. This empire your group's in might be over in Tian Xia? I met someone from there once, looked sort of like you."

"Tian Xia also sounds like it's Chinese," Yan Wushi says, pronouncing it with the correct tones, "it means 'under the Heavens.' I don't know who Cayden Cailean is or what a cleric circle is."

"It's what people from here call the area where people who speak what you call Chinese live," he says. "- Huh. Cayden Cailean's god of adventure, parties, and drink. Cleric circles - won't that translate anywhere? The gifts the gods give us."

"The god situation in Tian Xia is that normal people pray for rain or success in battle or a lucky marriage for their children or failure for their enemies, and then the gods arrange for that to happen via coincidence, visions, incarnating and dealing with it personally, literally just rearranging the rain clouds, and so on. They don't grant standardized miracles to priests, though this does seem like a better system. How do you make merits for Cayden Cailean?"

" - Huh. The gods can do that, but they mostly pick clerics over here. Cayden Cailean wants -" he gestures "- come back the evening and you'll see. Drink and enjoy yourself and do the right thing whatever the stakes, and make Molthune and Cheliax and all their lot screw themselves!"

(One of the people eating raises his tankard with a "HEAR HEAR!" and drinks.)

Yan Wushi has some broad disagreements with Cayden Cailean-- he doesn't drink or do the right thing-- but Cayden Cailean definitely seems to be in the least annoying ten percent of deities. 

"What are Molthune and Cheliax up to?"

"Cheliax worships Asmodeus, who's the god of lawyers and tax collectors and writing rules that sound fine and then screwing you with them. Pushing people around. We and Molthune kicked them out - ten, fifteen years back? and then Molthune started doing the same thing to us, so we kicked them out, too, but every few years they try again."

"Fuckers," Yan Wushi says agreeably. 

Yan Wushi is not per se against taxes. He has, in his time, put down any number of tax rebellions for various emperors he was advising. If Yan Wushi wants something you have, he can have it, because he can beat you up; if you don't like this situation, you should cultivate until you can beat Yan Wushi up and take his shit instead.

But this Asmodeus fellow sounds annoying, like the most snivelling Confucian ministers going on about the duty of the gentleman to the peasants and how actually it is best for everyone if the ministers get to have fine robes and wine and concubines and not to have to do any heavy lifting. Yan Wushi can't stand people who are too weak to admit that they have what they have because no one could stop them from taking it. An emperor is a bandit who stays put, and it's in his interest to make sure that the peasants are richer so that he can steal more. That's all. 

He tosses the bartender another gold coin. "A cup of whatever you think I wouldn't have had before?"

Which can be provided!

(It's quite good. Must just be that people who get into Cayden Cailean tend to be good at brewing. Can't possibly go the other way around.)

Yan Wushi sips his drink and prioritizes his questions. 

Most important things first: "Anything that needs killing around here?"

"Nothing at your level, probably," he is here estimating from the flying and the amount of gold in the bag of holding. "There's wolves that need hunting and goblins and trogs raiding off the hills, but I don't think anyone can pay you for those half as much as you pay for your drinks. I can ask around, though; might be something the next town over."

"If it's interesting they don't have to pay me, I have enough money."

Yan Wushi considers asking about hiring a boy, but then decides that orgasms last a minute but trolling Shen Qiao lasts for a lifetime. (Specifically, Shen Qiao's lifetime.)

So instead he says, "a-Qiao might benefit from something that-- isn't so hard to fight, once he's recovered a bit. The fight with Kunye was nasty. I'm worried about him."

"Well, there's always wolves going after sheep, and raiders from the hills. I can ask around, see about pointing him at whatever needs training. Matters to the people he helps, even if it's not as much fun for him."

"... But I doubt there's anything interesting for you, unless someone's seen a dragon or Deadeye's Haunt has gone real bad."

"I'm mostly interested in taking care of him," Yan Wushi says, all sincerity. "What's a Deadeye's Haunt?"

"Massacre site near the border. It was a temple of Erastil - old deadeye, god of hunters and farmers. Back in the war some druids had set up there, healing whoever came by, and there were a good many of our boys were resting there. Molthune killed everyone, healer or soldier or anyone who just got stuck there, burned the place to the ground. It's been full of resentful corpses* ever since. They tried their army, we tried the militias, adventurers have tried what adventurers try - however many they put to rest, there's always more next year."

(*: This term just translates, oddly enough.)

Yan Wushi thinks wistfully about raising an undead army. Over the course of his eight hundred years, he's learned that raising an enormous undead army to terrorize the countryside almost never helps, which is really surprising, because naively you'd expect it to be a solution to any number of problems. But one of the privileges of age is being nostalgic about a young man's folly, and Yan Wushi indulges himself in a daydream of an endless and ever-replenishing corpse supply with which to terrify the peasantry. 

The barbarian lands clearly have different forms of cultivation than China does. Yan Wushi guesses that they don't have much demonic cultivation, and this problem might be trivial for him to solve. He'll go over, take a look, see what he can do. If it's interesting he'll fix it, and if it's boring he'll use it for sparring practice. 

Speaking of unusual forms of cultivation--

"How do you ask a god to give you a circle?"

"Depends on the god. Cayden Cailean, I just got drunk and decided to start the bar, and the next morning when I prayed I got spells. You find a god that fits you and pray and thinking about how you'll do things that god wants done?"

He bows. "Thank you. I'll go take my rest."

"Welcome. Come down this evening if you like, it'll be more fun then."

Yan Wushi goes upstairs, prostrates himself, and thinks loudly I would like to be able to perform interesting new kinds of magic. Any god who is interested should give me the ability to perform interesting new kinds of magic, and then I will loyally advance Their interests as I understand Them. When I understand the magic, I'll probably want to stop, unless Their interests are in line with mine, but I hope it can be an amicable parting. As you can see from my history with emperors I always wrap up ongoing projects before leaving. 

Well, if Yan Wushi weren't Chaotic Evil, Nethys would probably have a deal for him. 

Yan Wushi tries again. 

Yan Wushi is fundamentally an unambitious person. This is an odd thing to say about the fourth most powerful person in the jianghu, but it's true.

Some people want to become powerful to get their revenge on those who hurt them, or to show off how much more powerful they are than everyone else, or to cause the world to be a better place by their lights. Yan Wushi likes cultivating: he likes meditation, he likes drills, he likes studying ancient texts, he likes fighting. He likes teaching, at least if his students are bright enough to be interesting. He likes challenges; he likes being good at things; he really likes getting better at things. And if you get better at things for long enough, it turns out you are one of the most powerful people in the world. 

He wants the god-magic because he wants something else to learn to be good at. He doesn't much care what the god wants him to use it for. He's open to any deity, really, as long as there are interesting challenges with which he can become better. 

Yeah, Irori can't hear him from all the way over in Lawful Neutral. 

Yan Wushi did not get where he was today by giving up that easily. He is immortal. He is capable of inedia. He can and will sit here prostrate for the next fifty years until somegod gives him magic powers. 

To the extent that Yan Wushi has any ambition at all, it is to be safe. He's not paranoid. He's not unable to ever feel truly safe, like an emperor who barely eats because so much of each dish goes to the poison tasters. Yan Wushi is extraordinarily powerful and has traded it in for an extraordinary level of safety. It doesn't take much time to do the necessary politics to keep Hehuan Sect powerful enough that no one messes with them. Sometimes people offend him and he has to do a horrific revenge involving mind-control cannibalism and so on, but he hardly ever has to do it anymore. The nice thing about mind-control cannibalism revenge is that once it's on the table people hardly ever offend you and you don't have to interrupt your cultivation to do it much. 

It's just... he knows that the only person who really truly has Yan Wushi's best interests at heart is Yan Wushi. He likes having money, likes fine wine and pretty boys and good poetry, likes cultivation, and (yes) likes getting to fuck with people without those people being able to do anything about it. He especially likes not being the victim of any mind-control cannibalism revenges himself. And the way to do that is to be strong enough that no one can hurt you even if they want to.

Some non-demonic cultivators have occasionally proposed to Yan Wushi, in various words, that if he wanted other people not to do mind-control cannibalism revenges to him, he could not do that to other people. Yan Wushi thinks this is a dumb argument. Most people who feel inclined to do mind-control cannibalism revenge will do it whether Yan Wushi does it or not; to the limited extent his behavior has any effect on it, it probably decreases the likelihood by making him so terrifying that no one wants to take revenge on him. 

Yan Wushi is very frustrating to argue philosophy with. 

...well, hello. 

What an interesting traveler from another world. 

Norgorber wants to give Yan Wushi a circle for the same reason he wants to give a circle to anyone else: because he wants to see what the fuck they'd do with it. 

But not a cleric circle, no, not for this one...

In an extraordinarily disconcerting experience, Yan Wushi has two new cultivation techniques and a set of instructions dropped into his brain. 

One of the cultivation techniques is a sense that isn't on by default but that he can use at will. Most of the objects he tries it on don't shine to this sense; Shen Qiao shines very brightly to it. 

The other cultivation technique is that he can call upon his new god, name unknown, to smite people who shine to this new sense. Presumably they are people his god doesn't like very much. 

The instructions are:

Innocence is ignorance, and ignorance is weakness. I will seek to shed my own ignorance, and encourage ignorance in my enemies.

I do not accept credit, nor do I take blame. I work always in the shadows. 

A fair fight is not worth fighting. I will take every advantage I can. No tool is beneath me.

Cold eyes, cold heart. My enemies can expect no mercy from me.

Everyone is expendable, and I will sacrifice them all as necessary.

Each life I take shapes the future to my lord’s desires.

Lame.

Yan Wushi wanted the translation spell. Instead, he got "detect people my god doesn't like" and "ask my god for help murdering people my god doesn't like." Literally nothing of help to Yan Wushi's god-unrelated goals. Besides, Yan Wushi was excellent at murdering people without assistance and to be honest he considers this kind of insulting. 

Maybe it's a probationary period and he will get cooler powers in the future? 

At least the instructions are convenient. It's all stuff Yan Wushi would totally be doing anyway. 

Shen Qiao makes a pained noise in his sleep. 

Hm. Yan Wushi should do some medicine, he thinks.

He takes Shen Qiao's pulse and examines his acupoints. None of the injuries in the fight should have phased Shen Qiao-- he is well past the point of cultivation where he can shove his intestines back in his stomach and keep going. And to the extent that the injuries were hurting him, the bartender's unorthodox cultivation method seemed to have fixed him up.

No, the problem is that Shen Qiao has been poisoned-- probably well before the fight. The poison has left Shen Qiao's golden core at-- Yan Wushi judges expertly-- about one percent of the strength it should be. And because the very thing that removes the poison from Shen Qiao's body has been destroyed, Shen Qiao is going to take a long time to recover. Months, maybe years. 

What's more, Xuandu Mountain is a secluded Daoist monastery. The cultivator Shen Qiao was fighting, Yan Wushi knew, would have been the only outsider allowed up-- and then only the moment the fight was about to begin. The only person who could have possibly poisoned Shen Qiao was someone at Xuandu Monastery itself.

...Fascinating. 

Yan Wushi is very pleased with himself for jumping in the portal.

He prepares a list of ingredients for medicine and takes them downstairs. "Which of these do you have?" he asks the bartender.

Once the brief translation difficulties are sorted out, the bartender will go over the list.

... "I don't know half of this stuff," he says. "I've can get you pear brandy" (which is totally not what "autumn pear syrup" translates to) "- and I've tasted ginger, but I don't know if there's any in town. I'll guess half a dozen households have wolfsbane or willow bark, and for the rest I can run it over to a druid?"

"What's a druid?"

Yan Wushi is going to use his new power on the bartender. (The one about whether his god likes the bartender. Not the murder one.)

His god does NOT like the bartender.

"Like a cleric, but they worship -" he gestures at the forest outside the town. "The world. They know about plants and animals, more than any alchemist."

Well, fuck off, deity, Yan Wushi likes the bartender fine. 

Maybe he should have held out for druidry. 

"I'd appreciate it if you could do that."

"No problem." He'll send a runner over. (In his head he is keeping track of Yan Wushi's tab, which remains spectacularly negative.)

Yep! That's what being rich is for! Dropping enormous amounts of gold on people and then getting whatever you want without having to interact with the economy!

Abadar senses a great disturbance in the force. 

Until the runner returns with the medicine, Yan Wushi hangs around the bar eavesdropping and using his new technique people to find out if his god dislikes them. 

His god has opinions on almost nobody, actually. It's pretty much just Shen Qiao and the bartender he dislikes.

The news is a mix of local gossip (about the hunting, the weather, who's sleeping with whom, what the local idiots have gotten up to) and slightly less local gossip; people are worrying if the war will heat up again, if hobgoblins will come raiding, if Cheliax might come back...

After a minute or two, the druid (a druid?) will arrive in person with what is even in a different world a healer's satchel! She's recognizably not human, with pale blue skin, dark blue hair, webbed hands and feet, and fin-like ears. Nobody gives her a second look, and his god has no opinion on her.

Yan Wushi has seen monsters before. 

He bows. "Good morning, ma'am."

"Good morning," she says with a smile. "Trying to heal your friend?"

"My lover, yes. Do you happen to have any of the things I requested? The plant life seems very different here."

She'll nod at that and then open up her satchel and get to work explaining what they are and do! Some of the things he's describing, it looks like she has, but only a minority. (She does not, say, have ginger.) Others, she might be able to offer substitutes if he can describe what his are for?

He can enthusiastically describe what they are for!

...It quickly becomes apparent that Yan Wushi expects bodies to work substantially differently than human bodies in fact do. He seems to believe that positive energy circulates through channels called "meridians." Positive energy is divided into "yin energy" and "yang energy," which have different purposes that seem obvious to Yan Wushi. Various organs store and concentrate positive energy into different forms, which sustains life.  

???????????????

"Positive energy is the stuff of your soul that animates your body," she says, "and negative energy causes decay, but positive energy does not have 'types', and it is not processed by the organs, it simply maintains the functioning of the vital force." She is extremely confused.

"Of course it does," Yan Wushi says. He catches her wrist and feeds her energy. "See, this is yang, and this is yin."

... Can she tell the difference? Do they feel like natural things to her?

They feel different. Yang feels... sunnier? More active?

"I can feel it." That is neat. "Let me show you -" she'll cast Virtue on him use a friendly cultivation technique to give him more positive energy. Is it aspected at all?

Yan Wushi is very very good at cultivation, and so he manages to catch the instant where the positive energy is neither yin nor yang, before his body converts it into both. "--that is neither yin nor yang, which based on my understanding of the world ought to be impossible."

"The world is huge and wonderful," he says, smiling. She loves it so much. Everything is always bigger than she could have imagined.

"Can I take your wrist and take a look?" Yan Wushi asked.

"You can," she says, and extends it.

Yan Wushi is used to the subtle interplays of yin and yang in a human body, the meridians and channels that make a body function well.

The druid... is not that. She's solid positive energy without complexity, like a blade of grass-- though even a blade of grass is differentiated into yin and yang, and requires both the yang of the sun and the yin of the water to thrive. 

"This is super weird," he says, "I assume you can't detect positive energy? I can toss up an illusion, I have a bunch of teaching talismans in my bag."

"There is life in everything, and one hardly needs senses to detect negative energy," she says, "but I cannot tell with spells any more than an ordinary gardener can tell by looking at a plant, and so saying if it is alive or dead or undead."

"Okay, here, I'll show you." He pulls out a piece of paper with strange writing on it and flicks it in a way that, somehow, causes it to be on fire. This process causes an illusion to appear: a human form, made of hundreds if not thousands of of white and black lines of various sizes and shades, flowing smoothly, collecting in hundreds of pools, some barely visible and some the size of a copper coin. The pelvis is taken up by a blindingly shiny gray sphere that appears to power the entire system. 

"This is me. And-- watch while I do this, it's neat--" He does the same thing with a second piece of paper. The pelvis-sphere flares, and a surge of white and black energy swirls up one of the lines to the palm of the form. 

The second illusion is, comparatively, a crude drawing of a person filled in uniformly with gray. "This is you."

"Amazing." This druid thinks that the world is unbelievably cool, a thing she has thought for a very long time. "And this is true even of commoners, in Tian Xia?"

"Commoners look more like--" He tosses up a third illusion. The commoner has the same meridians as Yan Wushi, but the energy flows more sluggishly and the lines are smaller and less vivid. There is no sphere in the commoner's pelvis. Some of the pools are blocked and energy is collecting there; others are too small. It jerks every thirty seconds as it returns to baseline. "There aren't any commoners from Tian Xia here so I just looped the last commoner I checked."

She nods. "I don't know if there's anyone in Avistan like that." She pauses. "But for now, your lover needs help," and she can describe what some of the herbs they both recognize do to a human body? Do they sound similar?

About ninety percent of them seem to do the same thing, but the occasional "that raises the heart rate" "no, it treats earaches" raises some serious questions about the other ninety percent.

Yyyeah, the druid's not happy with this. "I have not accidentally poisoned anyone with potions of restoration yet," she says with a frown, "but I have also not treated anyone from Tian Xia."

"I mean in the worst case scenario I can just sit with my hand on his wrist and channel positive energy until he's better, but that is going to take forever."

She nods sympathetically. "A full Restoration spell might do it," she says, "but I can only cast Lesser Restoration, and it might take diamond dust or only work partially if his health is too disrupted."

"Do you have books? I can pay you or let you use me for magical experiments as you prefer." He thinks. "You should probably use me for magical experiments regardless."

"- Oh no," she says, "my teachers taught me everything I know. You need wizards to have books, and they'll be in one of the big cities, Tamran or Kanorate or somewhere like that."

"Hrmph," Yan Wushi says. "He seems stable right now, maybe I'll go run to a city and get one-- oh, I guess I can't read, unless the spell does reading."

"Share Language will let you read books," she confirms, "though it will only last for a day."

Yan Wushi reconsiders. He probably wants to be here when Shen Qiao wakes up to fuck with him maintain his elaborate edifice of lies ensure Shen Qiao has a familiar face to see when he wakes up.

"Are you busy? Do you want to come upstairs and compare notes about Tian Xia and Nirmathas while I feed Shen Qiao positive energy?"

"I can spare the time," she'll admit, because she is REALLY CURIOUS ABOUT TIAN XIA. Also she wants to see how his weird supernatural abilities work.

Then he goes up the stairs and sits next to the still-unconscious Shen Qiao and puts his fingers on Shen Qiao's wrist and starts feeding him qi. 

Shen Qiao makes an unhappy noise and adjusts a bit.

She'll watch intently with Detect Magic, to try to learn about this wonderful new part of the world, right in front of her eyes!

It looks exactly like a channel!

That just keeps going and going and going and going...

O_O

She concentrates on the spell, leaning over to see as best she can without getting in his way. How is he doing that?

It seems to be coming from inside his body.

... And she doesn't have the skill at spellcraft to tell more than that, apparently.

Does he look like he's concentrating and shouldn't be disturbed?

Nope! He looks like this is trivial. 

(In fact, the only thing that makes it more difficult than scratching his nose is avoiding feeding Shen Qiao enough energy that he wakes up with the druid in the room.)

"So how common are the techniques you are using in Tian Xia?"

"Everyone can do it if they've reached the Foundation Establishment stage."

Blink blink blink. "That didn't translate?"