The afternoon sun spilled over the crumbling dragon-head eaves of the Xiao Family estate. In a secluded weed-choked courtyard behind the kitchens, a place no one of importance had visited in decades, Xiao Yun was hunched over a cauldron vigorously stirring a sludgy grey mixture in a large clay pot with a stick, his brow furrowed in concentration. It had been two weeks since he’d asked Wang Jun to find a way to convince his father, but his product wasn’t ready as of yet. This small courtyard had become his secret lab to conduct alchemy, i.e. a place where he could practice making soap without being disturbed.

  A plume of acrid smoke rose from a nearby fire pit, carrying the unholy scent of burnt wood and something vaguely greasy. He looked less like a cultivator or an alchemist and more like a goblin brewing a very questionable stew. To any unlikely passerby it looked like he was brewing the world’s most pathetic poison.

  He’d gathered a bunch of clay pots filled with various ingredients necessary to make soap, like rendered animal fat, wood ash from various kinds of trees and scented flower oils. His main goal right now was the extraction of lye.

  A shadow fell over him. “Still playing in the mud little Yun?”

  Startled by the sudden disturbance, Xiao Yun jumped, sloshing some of the grey liquid onto his sleeve. He yelped and frantically wiped it off. "Xiao Lian! Don't sneak up on a man while he's…uh… performing advanced alchemy.”

  Xiao Lian stood there, arms crossed over her formidable chest. Her training robes were worn but clean, her muscular frame was a testament to a life of grueling discipline. The scar that bisected her eyebrow and sliced down her cheek gave her a perpetually severe expression but today, her eyes held less of their usual storm and more of a tentative calm and a bit of hesitation. She had been visiting him like this every other day for the past two weeks. She had finally managed to overcome the awkwardness stemming from recent “incident” at Xiao Yun’s courtyard.

  Xiao Lian arched her unscarred eyebrow. "Alchemy? It smells like a wet dog died in a bonfire."

  "The path to creation is often paved with unpleasant odors." Xiao Yun replied sagely, adopting a pose he thought looked profound. In reality, this sagely young master was trying to remember a YouTube video about making soap from scratch. Lye extracted from wood ash was the key. And lye was caustic. Very, very caustic, which meant that he had to be extra careful. His low cultivation meant that he was only tiny bit sturdier than the average mortal after all.

  His first few attempts at creation were failures. One batch was too weak, resulting in a greasy, uncongealed mess. Another was too strong, creating a brittle and harsh substance that would likely burn the skin off a rhinoceros. His hands became calloused and raw from the work.

  Xiao Lian stood there silently, watching him work for a little while. Knowing the reason she was here once more, Xiao Yun piped up.

  "Alright," he said, setting his stirring stick down. "Pull up a rock. Let's talk." To him this wasn't some mystical 'heart demon' consultation. This was her clearly suffering from severe PTSD and survivor's guilt. He'd had a colleague back on Earth who went through something similar after a bad car accident. Therapy had helped. He, alas, was not a therapist but he had taken some basic classes and binged enough psychology-adjacent content online to fake it. Combined with his personal experiences of overcoming trauma, he’d decided to give it a try to help Xiao Lian resolve her own trauma. "Let's... unpack this."

  For two weeks, this became their ritual. Xiao Lian would arrive in the late afternoon and as Xiao Yun toiled over his strange project, she would talk. She spoke of her childhood rivalry with other disciples, of the pressure to uphold the family name, of the disappointed looks in the elders and her parents’ eyes, of the fear and adrenaline of that final fateful battle. She spoke of the pressure to perform, to succeed, unknowingly exerted over her by the clan and her parents.

  After her failure to break through, the sheer magnitude of disappointment she had for herself, and the burden of wasting the expensive Foundation Establishment pill had almost crushed her. Xiao Lian had also talked about how she had isolated herself and refused clan support, mainly because she felt like a complete failure and a burden. And Xiao Yun listened, occasionally prodding with a simple, insightful question that untangled the knots of her memory. He was like a patient physician treating a chronic illness not by using a miraculous elixir but with steady consistent care.

  Xiao Lian would reveal some of her most private memories, her most painful and traumatizing experiences, but the conversation would eventually turn to her most traumatic memory, Hua Xing’s betrayal and Su Yi’s sacrifice.

  Xiao Yun would listen, nodding while carefully straining lye through a cloth. "And how did that make you feel?" he’d ask, a phrase so alien in this world of stoic cultivators that it stunned her into silence.

  "I felt... the shock of the blow that was struck by a close friend. The weakness of my response."

  "No, before that," Xiao Yun pressed, testing the lye's concentration with a chicken feather. "When she pushed you to the beasts path. Were you angry? Confused?"

  Xiao Lian would try to reexamine her feelings the best she can and answer honestly. This had become a weird routine for her, yet she couldn’t deny that it had a calming effect on her emotions. She even spoke in depth about how her heart demon would manifest.

  “Each time I think a breakthrough is close, I see Hua Xing’s face. Smirking at me with disdain and hatred in her eyes, saying how foolish I was for blindly trusting her. Then I would see Su Yi speaking to me. Blaming me for her death, for being too weak to save her, for being too arrogant to even venture that deep and causing my best friend’s death…” Speaking up to this point, her voice began to tremble. “…That I might as well have killed her with my own hands.”

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  "Okay, but was it fair?" Xiao Yun asked, his brow furrowed in concentration as he slowly poured the lye into the melted fat. "That she got to make that choice for you? That she took away your chance to fight by her side, to live or die on your own terms?"

  The question struck Xiao Lian like a physical blow. Fairness? No one had ever asked that. In all her guilt and grief, she had never once felt the sharp sting of indignation on her own behalf. She had mourned Su Yi as a savior, not as a partner who had made a unilateral decision.

  “Sure, you made a mistake trusting Hua Xing being overconfident in your abilities, but her betrayal is not a reflection of weakness on your character, it’s a reflection of her twisted nature. As for Su Yi, her sacrifice and death were a combination of factors that involved choices made both by her and Hua Xing. Hua Xing, being jealous and manipulative, tried to get rid of you because your light overshadowed hers and Su Yi being a good friend and a good person, chose to sacrifice her life to preserve yours. Neither of them gave you a choice in the matter.”

  Saying so Xiao Yun stopped what he was doing and spoke in a comforting tone. “You shouldn’t let her memory be tainted by guilt. You should be glad that you ever met someone who cared for you enough to willingly sacrifice her life for yours. Not everyone is that lucky.”

  Xiao Yun started stirring the pot again. “What do you think Su Yi would say if she could see you now?”

  The question caught her off guard. “She would… I don’t know. She would be disappointed.”

  “Why?” Xiao Yun asked, resuming his steady stirring. “Because you’re alive? Because you survived the ordeal where many others died? Because her sacrifice secured your life and future? A future you’ve now spent a decade frozen in, shackled to a past you couldn’t change. Did she sacrifice herself so you could punish yourself for her choice?”

  The logic was simple, almost insultingly so. Yet, no one had ever framed it that way. Cultivators spoke of karma, destiny and the Dao. They didn’t speak of survivor’s guilt or the psychological weight of loss of a loved one. Xiao Yun was speaking a different language, one that resonated with the woman beneath the warrior. A faint tremor ran through her, a tiny crack in the icy prison around her heart. She could feel the weight on her shoulders weakening bit by bit. The past weeks were filled with conversations like this, Xiao Lian would open up to him about her troubles more and more, and he would do his best to help her process them.

  Xiao Yun, for his part, was playing a role he knew well from his past life. He wasn't a therapist, but as a 29-year-old office drone, he’d mediated enough disputes and listened to enough personal woes to understand the palliative power of being heard. He had dealt with plenty of mental struggles of his own and made decent headway in overcoming them bit by bit back on earth, so he had some personal experience in overcoming trauma. Just the act of sharing your troubles with someone who actually listened had an unbelievably strong effect in calming your emotional turmoil.

  Currently his true focus however, was in the vats. He was chasing a memory from Earth. In a world where cleanliness was a luxury and disease was often attributed to curses or imbalances in Qi, a simple mass-producible cleaning agent could be revolutionary.

  When he wasn’t with Xiao Lian or tending to his fires, he was buried deep within the Xiao Family’s Library Pagoda, studying whatever he could find. Luckly there wasn’t anything that precious in the library so access to various floors wasn’t restricted.

  After countless failures, mixtures that refused to solidify, bars that crumbled into dust, batches that were caustic enough to burn skin, he finally succeeded. One evening after carefully controlling the temperature and perfecting the ratio of lye to fat the murky liquid in his vat began to thicken and saponify. He poured it into a shallow wooden frame and let it cure for two days. On the morning of the third day, he cut it into rough, uneven blocks. It was an ugly mottled brown and smelled faintly of woodsmoke and lard but when he took a piece to the nearby water barrel and worked it between his hands, it produced a rich creamy lather. The feeling of the suds, the clean scent that clung to his skin afterward, it was a triumph more profound than any minor cultivation breakthrough in his eyes.

  That afternoon a familiar portly figure waddled into his secluded workspace, fanning himself dramatically with a small fan. “Heavens Yun, what is that smell? It’s like a tannery caught fire next to a slaughterhouse.”

  “It’s the smell of our future fortune Fatty.” Xiao Yun said, grinning as he tossed a block of the crude soap to Wang Jun.

  Wang Jun caught it with surprising dexterity. He sniffed it, his nose wrinkling. “This is it? This lumpy turd is going to make us rich?”

  “Don’t smell it, use it.” Xiao Yun instructed, pointing to another water barrel.

  Skeptical but intrigued, Wang Jun approached the barrel. He scrubbed his hands, his eyes widening as the lather built up. He rinsed them and brought them to his face, a look of utter astonishment dawning. “By the Jade Emperor’s hairpin… they feel… clean. Not just wet, but actually clean. The grime is completely gone!”

  Wang Jun’s mind that was clouded by drinking and general degeneracy, was still sharp when it came to business. “The brothels would pay a fortune for this. The noble ladies, the restaurants… brother, this is incredible! We could sell this everywhere!” His excitement quickly soured. “But… my father. He’ll never go for it. He’s already grooming my second brother to take over the main shops. To him, I’m just an eyesore, and you…” he trailed off, the implication clear. “Every time I tried to talk to him he kicked me out, thinking I was going to ask for a bigger allowance.”

  “Your father won’t listen to us.” Xiao Yun agreed, his expression calm and calculating. “So we won’t talk to him. We create a demand he can’t ignore. Your role my friend, is not to convince your father. It's to get this into the right hands. Do it quietly. A few samples to the head maid of the City Lord’s mansion. A ‘gift’ to the madam of the most exclusive pleasure pavilion. We don’t sell it. We create a rumor, a craving for the ‘miracle cleansing block from a mysterious master.’ When the nobles start asking for it by name, your father will have no choice but to find the source. And who will be there, ready to supply it? His brilliant, underestimated third son.”

  A slow, wolfish grin spread across Fatty Wang’s face. He was tired of living in his brothers’ shadows. This was his chance to prove he had inherited the family’s mercantile genius. “You handle the production, Yun. Leave the whispers and the scheming to me.”

  Just as Wang Jun departed, his mind already spinning with plots, Xiao Lian arrived for her usual visit. She paused, noticing the quiet confidence radiating from her cousin and the neat stack of brown blocks.

  “You’ve succeeded in your alchemy.” she stated. It wasn’t a question.

  “A small step.” Xiao Yun said. He picked up one of the cleaner, more well-formed blocks and offered it to her. “For you. It’s not complete for now, I need to add some essential oils for fragrance, but it should get the job done.”

  Xiao Lian took it. She looked from the rough soap in her hand to her cousin’s ash-stained face. Since her therapy had started, crushing weight on her soul had begun to lift. The image of Su Yi was still there, but it was no longer an accuser. It was becoming a memory, sad but bearable. She felt the Qi within her that had been stagnant for a long time, stir with an unfamiliar warmth.

  She hadn’t overcome her heart demon, not yet. But for the first time, she believed she actually could. Her path forward was slowly clearing. While Xiao Lian was experiencing cleansing of the soul, Fallen Star City was about to experience a different kind of cleansing.