The Office of Cultivation’s Department of Licensure was both familiar and utterly strange to Chang-li. He had never been there before, but he had spent so many hours of his life in similar places. Scribes hurried about carrying tablets and scrolls, pots of ink and brush cases, keeping their heads down and avoiding making eye contact with anyone who might interrupt them on their errands. Senior bureaucrats strolled more leisurely through the halls, their square hats dangling with tassels that indicated rank and years of service, codes that Chang-li could decipher thanks to his extensive training when he had been a junior government official himself. More important officials always had a retinue following them, as much a part of their office as the long silk robes that hung from their frames.

  The lobby of the building had a marble stone floor with alternating tiles of white and black. The walls were hung with tapestries, mostly landscapes interspersed with directories showing where to go. Chang-li approached the reception desk, unexpectedly nervous. One of the junior clerks looked up at him, frowning politely in the way clerks did when they were confronted by someone they suspected might be superior to themselves but weren't quite sure yet.

  "How can I help you, Cultivator?"

  Chang-li held out his worn license. "I need to have this brought up to date.” It was a thin red pamphlet, as befitted his indicating his marriage to a noble of the red rank. Inside were a few handfuls of sheets of parchment covered in ink and seals. Half of it was forgeries.

  The junior clerk took the license, opened it, and glanced at the pages. His eyes practically popped out of his head. "Is this genuine?” he asked, pointing.

  Chang-li craned his head. Ironically, the page the scribe was looking at was one of the authentic ones, not the forgeries. Then again, he would never have dared to forge claims as extravagant as the ones he truly had earned. He nodded. "Of course.”

  "You received a commendation by imperial decree?" The clerk was choking on his own words. He flipped over pages, clearly trying to regain his composure. "Ah, yes, I see here. You have reached the rank of Spiritual Refinement but had a field approval, not a full inspection. I'm certain we can have this brought up to date, if you would like to do so now.”

  "Actually," Chang-li interrupted, "that's out of date. I have reached, ah, Lux Embodiment."

  The clerk’s jaw dropped. The two others hurried over, their faces showing stunned amazement.

  "Honored Cultivator, forgive us. We must have misheard," one of the newcomers said. "Did you say Lux Embodiment?"

  Chang-li nodded. "Yes. Is that a problem?"

  "Uh, well..." The first clerk cleared his throat. "Uh, yes. As a matter of fact, your license here says you received a provisional rating for your Spiritual Refinement rank from the monks of Harupa, whoever they are. It seems their seal is in good order..." He had the air of a drowning man who had only just begun to realize that the shore was out of reach as he looked at the calendar on the wall behind him. "That was not two months ago."

  "It was," Chang-li agreed. The one favor the Harupans had done before violating the laws of hospitality by planning to steal his Lens from him. He and Joshi had been forced to fight their way out, but at least he’d gotten his license upgraded.

  "Do you have supplemental documentation, perhaps?" one of the clerks tried.

  Chang-li sighed. He leaned on the counter and lowered his voice. "Listen," he said, "if you look at the very first page of that record, you will see I began as a humble scribe. I know exactly what you are thinking right now: you do not have the forms to handle this situation, and you do not want to tell the very powerful cultivator that. Let's make it easy on all of us. You're going to need to tell your supervisor, and he'll need to tell his supervisor, and then eventually it will get to someone high enough ranked to handle this problem. So, while you are passing that word along... please give me a token for access to the Hall of Record Retention. I need to take a few notes about getting my sect paperwork in order."

  The clerks glanced at each other. They put their heads together and whispered. It was easily audible to Chang-li, but he knew how this was going to work out without bothering to listen. After a time, the clerks all separated. The first bowed very low. "Honorable Cultivator, would you permit us to take this license for examination?"

  Chang-li parted with it without a worry. The pages might be forgeries, but he himself was not, and the claims in them, along with the secondary documentation he had available, were more than enough to get him a hearing. He no longer feared being exposed as a fraud, because... he wasn’t one.

  The clerks presented him with a pass for the records room and disappeared off. Chang-li strolled down the halls until he found the Hall of Record Retention. This was the sort of place he had never been permitted to enter as a junior scribe. Senior scribes and ranked bureaucrats held dominion here. He presented his pass to the woman on duty outside the room and entered, then set to work.

  He had a lot to do. No one else in the sect seemed to realize they were about to run into a serious problem. After helping force Prism Eri to ascend far in the west, at the tower called Heart of Ice, Chang-li and his friends had accompanied Noren back to their own sect headquarters for some overdue training and recovery. They had spent the past six weeks there.

  Then Noren announced it was time they all went to the capital. There was business for all of them here. Noren was to present himself to the emperor as a Prism candidate. Joshi and Hiroko needed to make their union official, and an imperial prince or princess could only be married under the oversight of the Imperial Court in the capital.

  Chang-li had other things to worry about, things Noren had casually dropped into his lap shortly before they left. "While I stood trial, I took care of getting our sect name revived. We are once more on the books as a charter sect," Noren said airily.

  Chang-li had started to ask him what exactly a charter sect was. He had heard that term once or twice, but Noren waved it off. "We’ll get to that later. More importantly, our sect's growth has rather outpaced our record keeping. Since you used to be a scribe, I shall leave it to you to sort all of that out."

  "That wasn’t the sort of records I kept," Chang-li protested. "I haven’t the first idea what sort of records we need to keep."

  "But you will know where to go to find that information," Noren pointed out. "And unlike Joshi, or your lovely wife, you probably won’t burn the place down in frustration with the bureaucracy."

  Chang-li had accepted that this was true and started cataloging what they did have. He already knew it was going to be a massive task. Somehow, the sect that he, Min, and Joshi had invented as a cover had become... not just real. But enormous.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  There were now five disciples at the Peak of Spiritual Refinement, including, to Chang-li's amazement and delight, his own wife, Min. There were thirty at the Peak of Mental Refinement, and some eighty who had already reached Bodily Refinement.

  On top of that, there were several hundred more disciples just starting to train. Chang-li wasn’t entirely sure where they had all come from. Yes, many of them had once belonged to the Brotherhood of the Oaken Band, the fraternal organization Min’s grandfather ran back in Varden City. Those clever men and women had taken to cultivating like ducks to water, but not all of them were Oaken Band.

  He had been startled to meet the pool of eager applicants who’d made their way to the Morning Mist’s hidden fortress to ask for training. Several were former disciples of the Deepwater sect he and Joshi had run across during their journey to Morning Mist, as well as four of the nearby villagers. Two were women Joshi and Chang-li had accidentally rescued on their way to the fortress. They presented themselves, and their younger sisters, at the gates of the fortress, demanding to be allowed to enter and train.

  Chang-li had interviewed them personally and then ordered that they be admitted. The women were determined that no one would ever take advantage of their physical weaknesses again. By cultivating, they could make themselves far stronger than any casual bandit.

  Fortunately, the higher-ranked disciples all had licenses, thanks to Min’s other family connection. Her brother was now governor of Riceflower Province, and with the aid of Riceflower officials, who were grateful to Chang-li for helping save their city when Prism Eri had attacked it, all of their juniors had received at least provisional licenses. But a provisional license to cultivate didn’t exactly permit the bearer to reach multiple Peaks. It was going to take some work to get everyone officially approved.

  Chang-li didn’t even want to think how expensive the fines were going to be.

  He set to work in the Hall of Records Retention to learn just what sorts of licenses and records and forms he was going to need. By the time he’d spent an hour there, his head was spinning. He had a stack of notes as high as his knee, and he was ready for something, anything, else.

  When the cultivation officials approached him, bowing and scraping and addressing him as Master Wu, he smiled gratefully at them and returned the bow.

  “If you will come with us, we can begin the process of updating your license, Master Wu,” one of the two said. “I am Inspector Kai. This is Senior Scribe Dren. He will take care of filling all of the paperwork out on your behalf. So please come with me.”

  Chang-li followed them out a back door of the library, handing his papers to one of the staff members and asking to have arranged to have it delivered to the Morning Mist headquarters here in the capital, and followed the two men out a side door down what was clearly a private corridor not intended for public access. The walls were a starker white and the pictures along the way mostly involved cultivators being eaten by various animals. Some of the expressions of pain were quite evocative.

  The pair led him to an opulent office with a low teak desk and fresh rush mats covering the floor. A shelf full of scrolls lined one wall. Another had paper-covered windows that allowed light in but offered no view. He could hear the sound of water somewhere nearby and thought they might be outside of a garden plaza.

  The inspector took a seat behind the desk and gestured for Chang-li to sit across from him. Chang-li sank to the mat. The Senior Scribe positioned himself between them, seated at a tiny desk with a stack of forms in front of him. The scribe turned over a page, wetted a brush, and stood ready as if to take notes.

  A moment later, a young woman appeared carrying a teapot. She served them wordlessly, then withdrew.

  Chang-li and the inspector sipped their tea as the inspector looked over Chang-li's license for what he was certain was not the first time .

  “So, Master Wu,” Kai said at last. He cleared his throat. “Your path has been something out of the ordinary, I take it.”

  “It has,” Chang-li agreed.

  Kai shook his head in something like disbelief. “To rise so quickly from a mere scribe… and these commendations.” His finger reverently traced the seal of the Imperial Commendation. “We pulled the records. We see you have a second commendation to add.”

  “Yes, that's part of why I needed to get this updated,” Chang-li agreed. Word of the Imperial Commendations had come once they reached the capital. Senior Scribe Dren’s brush came down. He deftly inked a character on the page before him. Chang-li glanced at him before looking back to the inspector.

  “We shall help you as best we can, but you understand this is most irregular.” The inspector shook his head. “To miss two tiers is practically unheard of, and to go from Spiritual Refinement to Lux Embodiment within months…. Forgive me. It seems impossible.”

  Chang-li had been expecting this. He set his teacup down and placed his hands on the table. “I will be happy to perform any demonstrations required.”

  The scribe made several quick strokes on the form, though Chang-li wasn’t sure what he had said to trigger that reaction.

  “We're arranging for that,” the inspector said. “I just need to fill out a few forms while we have you here, and then I will send you along to those who can conduct proper testing.”

  He flipped the book back over, looked at the tattered red cover. “I should perhaps ask you if you intend to dissolve your marriage now that you have reached such illustrious heights.”

  Chang-li stared at the man. He must have misheard that. He rubbed his ears and then said, “Pardon me?”

  The scribe looked at him intently, brush poised.

  Kai made an expansive gesture with his hands. “It's clear to see here that your marriage was contracted when you were a mere Bodily Refinement cultivator. At the time, of course, a marriage to a red-ranked noble was probably as much as you could expect. But at Lux Embodiment, the world is open to you. It's not unknown for Lux Embodiment cultivators to marry blue or even indigo royalty.”

  Chang-li stared, blinking. After all the machinations that had seen him and Min married, all of the strings the imperial court placed on cultivators by marrying them off to descendants of the Emperor — This was insane. Yes, Min was a red noble, seven degrees removed from His Imperial Majesty, the lowest ranking in the gem court. But what did that matter?

  “No,” he said flatly, and restrained himself from growling. “I will not be dissolving my marriage.”

  The Inquisitor gave a shrug as the scribe wrote some down on the form. “I must warn you that with such achievements on your record, you will attract scrutiny from the gem court. They may take matters into their own hands.”

  Chang-li gripped the edge of the table. “Meaning what exactly?”

  “Only that they may feel red ranking is too low for a man of your talents. When the gem court honors a cultivator with a spouse, It is not for the cultivator to say yes or no.”

  There was a loud snap. Chang-li looked down at his hand. A chunk of the teak table had come off where he had applied pressure. He stared at it, then set it down. “I'm sorry about the table,” he mumbled. “I will not be marrying anyone else.”

  The inspector nodded. “Clever,” he said. “Your children, as unranked cultivators, will be eligible to marry back into the highest ranks of the Gem Court. It's always wise to look to the future. Children of a high-ranked cultivator like yourself will be destined for greatness from birth.”

  Chang-li let out a snarling breath. He was coldly furious, but he forced himself to cycle Purification of Mind and Soul just once, moving the lux around in his newly-expansive lux channel, feeling it calm his anger and soothe him.

  These odious little officials were just doing their jobs. When he had been a scribe, he had hated when cultivators threw their weight around to make his life more difficult. The questions were, no doubt, on their forms. They had to ask them.

  They didn't have to keep asking them, though. “No more questions about marriage,” he went on. He glared as the scribe made several marks on his form, flipped a page and made several more. Just how much of that form was about marriages, anyway?

  “Oh, I see here your wife is the sister of a provincial. Governor,” the inspector said as he flipped through papers. “Although it's Riceflower Province and their star is sinking fast, what with the lux distortions. I suppose that sort of connection does make your marriage more valuable than it seems at first.”

  Chang-li had heard that since the Prism murder incident, the Riceflower Tower was behaving strangely, with lux outbursts not quite strong enough to be considered a tower eruption but disruptive to weather patterns and crops. Noren had said something ominous at one point, that the tower was unbalanced and would likely either grow another floor, which Chang-li hadn’t been aware was possible, or would need to be partially destroyed, like the one at Golden Moon.

  “Moving on,” he said deliberately, and held the inspector’s gaze. “What next?”