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It was finally time to address an old annoyance.

Lynguin, Fu and Xia all quickly settled into a quasi-constant stream of arguments and social interactions, mostly initiated by Xia who seemed to grow more interested in Lynguin’s pig form the more the pig girl refused to turn into it. That’s not to say Lynguin wasn’t the proud starter of a good chunk of them, as her inexplicable knowledge of human social dynamics didn’t really extend to finding her place in the human social order.

But then, it wasn’t like Jun ran a strict Confucian household or anything, so maybe she was just trying to find what being one of his concubines entailed.

Fu, all the while, revealed a certain sense of maturity that really made Jun glad he got her, as her presence kept any and all arguments from ever becoming any actual conflicts. The soft-spoken demure older woman got swept up by Xia’s and, yes, Lynguin’s excitement at times, but she was usually capable of reeling them back in.

Usually.

Sometimes Lynguin managed to get everyone out in the field.

“Alright, before anyone says that this is peasant work, know that peasants don’t grow miracles!” The human sow glared at the soldiers helping them pad down the seeds into the dirt.

Given her antipathy for the lower class, the rumbling of Jun’s guards at having to finish their punishment struct at her sense of self-worth as she seemed to delight in being the expert “Yellow Spirit Weed cultivator!”

Never mind that she wasn’t aware of the real name of the plant until Jun had informed her of it, she took to her role as if she had mastered it before anyone there had been born and directed others with the zeal of a taskmistress.

Bad work would be met with glares.

Slacking would be met with whines.

Disobedience would be met with pouts.

It was…incredibly hard to resist the urge to reach out and pet her head sometimes.

Luckily for Jun, in the week since he’d arrived with her, he could pull her off the field whenever she got too adorable back into the mansion to fuck her silly. Although, honestly, some of the bushes looked real good when he wanted to roll around with her sometimes…

So Lynguin and Jun’s harem were at least settling down with the new dynamics between the women, which started to solidify into something homey.

That day, however, Jun had his spear out and he was idly going through a few of the moves.

“Jun-eeeer!” Lynguin pouted from the field.

She had on a feminine tunic her size but drawn up to her knees. She still wore Jun’s clothes, of course, but she had been convinced that dirtying them would be uncomfortable. Thus, whenever she worked out here in the fields she put on dresses that the nearby villages had quickly resized for her.

She even wore sandals now.

“Yes, Lynguin?” Jun asked as he thrust from the pouncing form into the air. He wasn’t going through the sequences this time, or imagining an opponent.

He was just stabbing at the air, seeing how his body felt when he did so.

“When you said that you’d be practicing out here with us,” she short stack gestured at Fu and Xia, who were having fun making earth patties full of seeds and spreading them into the earth, “I’d thought you would do it like you do inside our home.”

“Is this not entertaining you?” Jun drily asked as he twirled his spear for a bit.

“You have your tunic on,” she grumbled, making Xia and Fu stop and leer at Jun.

“You have to show more of your torso, Young Master,” Xia whistled, “Let’s just say that it would encourage all of us to work harder.”

“You have a rather handsome body, Young Lord,” Fu added with a smile that she hid behind her hand.

“I want everyone to see what I get to have!” Lynguin put her hands on her hips.

“...I’ll think about it,” Jun sighed and ignored their cheers as he turned around and tried another thrust this time.

This one with a bit of Breathing.

It was sharp.

It was hard.

It almost made his spear jump out of his hands, the friction of the shaft almost being overcome thoroughly, and, yes, it was far better than what he was doing before he went out to Auspicious Fields.

He could sort of feel what MIGHT be Chi now. Even then it was…weird in ways that were hard to describe. It was still something he noticed more for its absence than for its effects. It was still impossible to differentiate between banal air and Chi, but when he had a lot of the latter he at least feel A presence. Fucking Xia brought him back to his effortless endurance and vitality, yes, but it didn’t make it any more obvious to him how it did so.

So he Breathed in a poor attempt at True Breathing, because that was all he could do.

Poor attempts.

It still made his body and spear, for one brief moment, fly out like an arrow before he stopped it from coming out of his grasp.

“Take off your tunic!” Xia whooped.

But it felt more like he was performing a magic spell than any true craft. Poor as his Breathing was, this shouldn’t have worked. Yet, poor as it was, his Faux Breathing WAS having an effect.

And that was pissing him off.

If he couldn’t rely on differences in performance to show him how to reach that memory of True Breathing, if doing it wrong still gave him results, what the hell was he supposed to do?

“Show us some skin!” Lynguin oinked beside Xia.

So Jun slowly circled his spear in his hand as he thought about things some more.

The more he tried to resolve this thorn, this ache, the more he felt like he got nowhere.

Maybe True Breathing was just a dream that he had? He was close to dying back then, so maybe he had been Breathing like he had done that one time without the euphoria of not drowning coloring his experience?

But even telling himself that didn’t stop him from feeling like he was doing it wrong.

“Young Master, um, get naked?” Fu, pushed on by her cohorts, tried to catcall him.

“What?” that completely broke Jun out of his train of thought and made him stare at her.

She flushed.

“Truly, older women are more daring,” Lynguin looked at her with surprise.

“Who is daring now?” Captain Jianjun chose that moment to march into the Yellow Spirit Weed fields, wearing nothing but his sword and an expensive tunic that announced his station.

“Ah, Guard Captain,” Lynguin nodded at him, “Will you be leading the men around the field again? With you with us, it would surely only take a few more days to completely lay down all the seeds.”

“Thank you kindly Miss Lynguin,” Jianjun shook his head, “But the men have to learn to work without me looking over their shoulders. This, too, is one of their duties, you understand.”

“I suppose,” Lynguin grumbled, “Fine then. To answer your other question, however, we were talking about how older ladies are more openly sensuous than younger women.”

“You girls are the ones who pushed Fu into this,” Jun, who had endured Xia’s and Lynguin’s prodding FAR more than he ever had Fu, said with disapproval.

“It’s not like she hates it,” Xia opined from the sidelines and Jun got to witness one of Fu’s few outbursts of violence as she slapped the younger woman’s back with her palm. It even made a soft, cushioned, sound.

That was a blow of fury if Jun had ever seen one.

“This Jianjun…wouldn’t know anything about that,” Jianjun carefully said, obviously not wanting to get involved in matters of Jun’s house.

“But the Guard Captain would?” Lynguin tilted her head in confusion, “You know, with the peasant widow of that backwater village that grew millet?”

Immediately Jianjun’s face went flat.

“I do not recall any such person or events happening,” he said with a robotic face.

“What happened in Auspicious Fields?” Xia curiously asked. DId Jun not tell her about Jianjun and the old lady? Huh, he guessed he hadn’t.

“Nothing happened in that forsaken village,” Jianjun, again, said in monotone.

“Its village chief took an interest in the Guard Captain,” Lynguin, not noticing Jianjun’s distress, said.

“Nothing happened with a nasty old woman.” Jianjun started sweating now.

“She was an old woman?” Xia gasped, looking at Jianjun, “I mean, such a reversal of the usual expectations, with a young man like the Guard Captain…”

She rubbed her chin as she went deep in thought.

“That’s hot,” she concluded.

“That old predatory old woman didn’t fondle and stick fingers up my ass!” Jianjun found himself shouting, making every man and servant in the field to turn his way.

Jun groaned into his hands.

“Ok, I think we are done with the questions,” Jun, who regretted not stopping this sooner, said, “Guard Captain, thank you for checking up on us, how about you go relax?”

“T-thank you, Young Master,” Jianjun breathed hard, “I will go do that.”

“Wait!” Xia said, making Jianjun look at her.

“Did it…feel good?” she ventured to ask.

Jianjun stared at her for all of 10 seconds before he turned around and silently marched off.

“I mean, it sounds hot,” Xia defensively said.

“Ok, new rule,” Jun announced, “You girls are NOT to ask Jianjun about what may or may not have happened between him and a certain widowed chief from Auspicious Fields, am I understood?”

“How come Xia got to ask questions but I don’t?” Lynguin whined.

---

Jun’s girls inadvertently bullying his Guard Captain aside, things were starting to settle down.

Even his men had stopped being leery of Jianjun.

Given the quality of his men, Jun knew it was only a matter of time until something stupid happened again, but for now, things were…fine.

Perhaps he had a rose-tinted memory of his second life, but this one was almost as good as the memories he longingly recalled when he was a starving old man. Jun should have been happy. And, honestly, he was!

But no matter what he did, try as he might, there was still that one persistent annoyance.

“Are you sure of this Young Master?” the oldest of his women asked, late at night.

They were standing by the lake of his mansion, the moon starting to wax again and showing a quarter face. This provided enough light to contrast the darkness of the river floor with its clear water, but they still had a lamp alight by the shore.

There was a pier of sorts here, a bunch of planks really, that allowed someone to peer over the water without getting their feet wet. It took all of a day for men from the nearby village to come and set this up for him.

Right now, his feet were halfway through his calves in the water as his ass lay on the pier and the soles of his feet on the floor of the lake shore.

“The water only gets really deep quite a bit away,” Jun assured her, “Besides, if something goes wrong, you’ll be here to help me.”

“That’s what I am afraid of,” Fu whispered as her knuckles tightly grasped a rope.

One that was tied around Jun’s waist.

“Dragging things across the water is easier than it seems,” Jun told her, “And I won’t be going far.”

“I-I don’t like this, Jun,” his oldest concubine confessed to him, “I don’t like you putting your life in danger.”

“Fu-er?” Jun smiled at her. His hand cupped his chin and he tilted her head so that he could look at her worried eyes, “With you with me it’s not in danger..”

“I believe in you.”

Perhaps Jun was being thoughtless, putting his life like this on Fu’s hands, but he didn’t think he had many alternatives. While, aside from not doing this at all and, well…it would be fine.

Honest.

If he had gotten Xia to do this, well, she was surprisingly strong for a woman her size. The problem was that, after seeing him almost drown once already, it felt a bit cruel to put her up to it. There was Lynguin now and she WAS more than strong enough to pull him out. The problem with his sow was that this wasn’t the sort of thing he wanted her to emulate, as he personally wasn’t too sure of what he or she would get out of it.

That left the most obedient of his girls, Fu.

“Ok, Jun-er,” she took a deep breath, “Ok,”

She might be the weakest of his concubines, being precisely as strong as a normal middle-aged woman, but Jun had tested what he was going to ask of her before, with sacks full of earth, and Fu had performed adequately.

It wasn’t like dragging a full man out of the water if you had a small wooden crane was particularly hard.

With precautions for his safety taken care of, Jun hopped off the shore pier and started wading into the water.

He only had a loincloth to cover his crotch and ass, so the water quickly covered his modesty as he walked until it was covering his chest. The rope slowly went through the ring hoops of the crane and pulled at Fu’s hands. He could feel how intently she was looking at him.

It was heartwarming.

It also made him feel like crap that he was putting her up to this but, augh, it had been months since he’d been at this with no good way of telling where he was going.

Trying to Breath True was like having a word at the tip of his mouth that was perpetually about to be said but never materialized. It was like a figure at the periphery of his eyes, forever flying away when he turned to look at it.

He’d been trying to breathe RIGHT and found himself always, always, failing.

He didn’t care about Cultivation. He could give a rat’s ass about immortality.

But this? This was frustrating.

“Ok, Fu,” he told her once the water reached his chin, “I will tug when I am ready.”

“Alright, Jun-er,” she swallowed and nodded, “Please.”

“Take care.”

Jun began to take a deep breath before going in, but then stopped himself. Instinctual actions like that had their place and time, but they would be defeating the purpose of this exercise.

So, with lungs only half full of air, he dipped in.

Without much fat to keep him afloat and two rocks grasped in his hands, he managed to simply kneel into the lake floor until he was sitting on it.

Jun didn’t know if the meditation pose of the saints and sages was necessary to Cultivate, if sitting cross-legged with his hands draped across them was necessary for this. Given that he needed the rocks in his hands to keep him under, however, this was a simple enough pose that simultaneously allowed him to take his mind off remaining under water.

So, underneath dark waves, with the moon shining from the surfaces and darkness enveloping him, Jun tried to get a feel for things.

Feeling the pressure of water about his ears, and all of his body submerged in the lake, was certainly a different experience. It stimulated only three of his senses, admittedly, since his sight wasn’t really affected by the clear water and he did not possess the ability to smell anything while inside it, but it certainly affected his remaining ones in interesting ways.

But still, even below the depths, he could not feel Chi.

As above, so below.

He concentrated on himself, felt his heart beat within his chest and the burn of the slowly dwindling air in his lungs. It was not really possible to feel his blood moving inside his body, but he was aware of every inch of his flesh. He could feel how the water moved about his skin and how its coldness seeped into his being.

His hair moved with the movement of the water of the lake, and the contact of man and the lake floor, of man and earth with water on the way, made a wondering part of his mind feel like clay.

But there were no miracles here. No wonders hidden in plain sight. Just the mundane ones that were free for any mortal to enjoy.

Perhaps there was even a lesson there, that there were enough banal mysteries for him to enjoy without having to seek those of heaven.

But of course, with the death of his second life, he’d discarded all sorts of useless moral standards.

Jun expelled all the air that his body had turned poisonous.

All of it.

He pressed with his diaphragm until not one bit of gas remained in his lungs.

And then.

He tried Breathing.

Human lungs were not, either by happenstance or design, meant to breathe water.

Even fish filtered the oxygen out of the water, rather than abusing atmospheric pressures to suck oxygen molecules to slip directly into their blood through alveoli. It was clearly demented, then, for Jun to expect any different.

But that was fine.

It wasn’t oxygen that Jun was after.

Resisting the urge to gag that he got was the hardest thing Jun ever did, even as he FORCED his lungs to suck in water as if they were air. Having had a bit of practice by this point, he greedily filled whatever inch of his body that he could with it despite his brain screaming at him to STOP!

His lungs hurt.

His diaphragm hurt.

Every single inch of his trachea and, for good measure, esophagus hurt.

But still, he Breathed in the water until he could no more.

And then managed to tug on his rope.

Perhaps he could have simply stuck his head into a barrel full of water and given himself a coughing fit like this. But that didn’t seem to be enough. Perhaps he could have simply taken a few steps into the lake and filled his lungs directly from the shore, but he knew so little about Chi that he wasn’t sure that such a tepid measure would reveal anything.

Perhaps there was a way to do this safely without taking this big of a risk.

But going to this extreme could he analyse things without doubt.

Because the fact that he could not breathe water was, point in fact, what would be helping him out.

So he filled his lungs to breaking.

Not just with water but, Yes!

YES.

He felt it!

The difference.

The painful horrible difference.

He felt it.

Chi.

“Jun!” Fu yelled and Jun opened his eyes. Had he blacked out?

She was in the middle of pounding his chest in the way that he had shown her and, ah, there we go.

He felt himself lurch up and throw the water up.

“Jun!” Fu gasped again, stopping her ministrations of his chest to cradle his head and place it on her knees, “Please tell me you are ok!”

“I-I am, augh,” Jun lurched again and threw up some more of the water, “I-I am-”

Jun stopped.

And took a long breath.

It was a deep breath.

A True Breath.

“-Fantastiiiiic,” Jun savored this fleeting moment of complete and utter control. He could feel every fiber of his being, from the tip his toes to the bruised and irritated chambers of his lungs soothe.

Oh, if impressions were everything, then Chi could honestly be described as PAIN, but the work it did as he went through his body was of the most wonderful kind.

This time he only briefly blacked out, not almost died like last time. The arrangements that he made with Fu had more than paid off, then.

In truth, he had not been after True Breathing. Not just yet, anyway. He had only meant to understand what he was doing.

He had not hoped to expect that another brush with drowning would allow him to experience this delightful unworldly Truth, so he shivered as a slow chuckle rolled from his lips.

“Just fine, Fu-er, just fine,” he couldn’t even stop himself from smirking.

This was certainly a rather steep price to pay for a single Breath. But after months of itching, getting to scratch this memory like this was perhaps worth it this once.

As it was, the outcome that he had hoped to get out of this? His attempt at breathing water? It had worked.

It wasn’t like anything that he had expected, but it had worked.

Which was good because, already, he was losing sight of True Breathing. Every subsequent Breath that he took was a pale imitation of the sole magnificent one, and only deteriorated until it was False.

But the memory of breathing water gave his True-ish Breathing substance.

His still fragile lungs ached again as Truth fell out of his grasp again.

But he could finally measure, taste, how much Chi was going into him.

He didn’t fill his lungs to bursting with air to soothe himself. He did not fill every single part of his being.

Because he no longer had to.

“I am fine, Fu-er,” Jun barked with laughter as he sat up, “Oh, I feel like shit, but I am so very fine.”

Short breath. Quick breath. Long breath.

They all held Chi.

He could feel the phantom difference.

Then he took a normal breath and almost fainted.

“H-help me up, Fu,” Jun bid her, and waves of dizziness hit him. Well, it would be weird if pushing himself like this didn’t have some consequences, Jun supposed.

“Oh, ok, let me shoulder you then, love,” Fu said and helped him walk back to his mansion.

All in all, it was hard to keep a sense of elation from filling him. A NEW annoyance took hold, because the price of Breathing True was drowning, but now that he had done it again and knew how to do it in the future, it was no longer something at the edge of his perception.

It was simply a luxury that he did not have many taels to pay.

And with that, he could finally relax into his quasi-married life.

The next day, of course, reminded him that the Heavens sometimes punished the conceited.

A letter arrived for him, one he couldn’t ignore.

A summons from his father.

The Yan Lord.