v6c8: Bright and Early

The morning, as always, dawned bright and early.

However, this morning I had to deal with an issue related to our guests. It had been a surprise—I never expected something like this to happen, but really, I maybe should have seen this coming. So with a stone heart I looked upon it, focused completely on my current predicament. I steeled my spine, and with as much of a commanding presence I could muster I addressed the problem.

“Meimei, I have to get up,” I said seriously, my hands on her arm. It was locked across my chest, preventing me from getting up. I traced the arm back to the nest of blankets.

A single amethyst eye glared out at me from under the covers, while two smaller eyes looked up at me, Zhuye seemingly pleased by his new burrow. He gurgled happily.

“Nuuu,” Meimei whined maturely. “Don’t wanna deal with cultivators.”

I felt my composure start to crack, and I could barely keep from laughing at her petulant tone.

“Come on, they weren’t that bad, were they?” I cajoled. And to my surprise, yesterday hadn’t been that bad. Hells, it had actually been pretty enjoyable. Ge, Shou, Yukong, and Minyan had all been a lot more chill than I had been expecting.

Take Elder Ge, for example. He looked like one of those old xianxia Masters. His cultivation was so powerful that even suppressed I could feel it blazing inside his chest. He practically oozed mastery, a man who was approaching immortality. The kind of man who, in stories, was obsessed with honour and propriety. A man to be careful around, and watch one’s manners.

That lasted until the bath. This old monster, this man who could rend mountains and split the sky? He used his phenomenal cosmic power, gained through centuries of cultivation, to retaliate after getting smacked on the ass with a tree branch.

Elder Ge and Gramps had an entire wuxia sword fight with their sticks in the air, dancing off snowflakes, and executing techniques that had Big D watching with wide eyes at their mastery. It ended with both of them yelping and then smashing through the ice into the river.

The Elder of the Cloudy Sword Sect walked out and declared the entire experience ‘refreshing’. He walked past me back into the bath with a visible red welt on his ass, followed after by Gramps, bruised but still chortling.

Shou was a lot easier. Dude was a nerd, and I meant that in a good way. It was in his mannerisms, even after centuries of cultivating. He was a bit awkward, but his passion for plants was like a blazing star. Out of all of them, he had been the easiest to be with.

I had always got along with my people, even if I never really had looked the part. Most people in the Before didn’t expect the big, dumb-looking farmboy hockey guy to get into arguments about obscure science stuff.

With Shou it was even easier. Plants were awesome.

Elder Yukong was basically the same way, she just hid it a bit better. I could see the nerd eyes in her, though, as she talked to Elder Minyan about the sealing formation and spoke to our disciples.

The only one I didn’t particularly have a read on was Elder Minyan. Meimei said she had started to engage a bit more after they went to the baths. According to Meimei, she was less prickly than she first appeared and had even complimented what we had here.

Meimei grumbled at my statement.

“Admit it, you liked showing off a bit,” I continued.

The grumbling intensified.

“You kind of like Shou and Yukong, at least,” I said, and the grumbling reached a fever pitch before petering out.

“No, they aren’t that bad,” she finally conceded. It sounded almost painful for her to say it, but say it she did.

I chuckled at the grudging tone.

“Don’t worry. I don’t think they’ll be here long, anyway. They have a bunch of cultivator stuff to do, so we’ll host them for a couple of days, they’ll go about their business, and we’ll be back to normal.”

Meimei sighed. Her grip on my chest went slack.

“It’s hard. I hated them for what they did to you for a long time, you know?” she said, “I wish I could be more like you and just be comfortable around them.”

I took her hand and kissed the back of it.

“Honestly, I’m not,” I said. Meimei blinked at me, poking her head up out of the covers. “I’m still uncomfortable with them here, I just fake it. Being nice and laughing along is easy when it’s something that’ll help my family. And if they turn out to be good people I can get along with, well, then that’s when it stops being a mask and starts being real. We had a saying in the Other Place; Fake it till you make it.”

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Meimei looked into my eyes. “Being nice and laughing along is easy when it’s something that’ll help my family, huh?” she muttered, a little smile on her face.

Then her hand moved to the back of my head and she pulled me into a kiss.

“…let’s get ready for today,” she declared.

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Breakfast was our usual affair. We had been respectful of the cultivators yesterday by reducing the number of people, but today everybody was in our house for breakfast. Meanwhile, I stood at the entrance and waited for our guests.

They came in from the guest house… while Gramps and Minyan wandered in from his house.

The house had been part of the summer’s renovations—a place for the old man to stay if he wanted it, and if he didn’t, well, considering the number of visitors we got, somebody would use it.

I showed it to him after everything calmed down, and Gramps had immediately moved in… though that may have been because it was a bit sentimental. I had based the layout on the little house we had lived in in Crimson Crucible City.