Dawn walks in from the living room, wearing a pair of very short denim shorts and a black bikini top, opens up the fridge, and pulls out a pitcher of lemonade to pour herself a glass. "Want some, Zo?"

Zoey looks up and blushes, then tears her eyes away as casually as she can manage, looking back down at her project. "S-sure, sis!"

Well, she'll pour a second glass then. She sets it next to Zoey, in reach but not where she'll accidentally bump it, then ruffles her hair.

Zoey reaches up with a free hand to bat at her sister's ruffling. "Daaawwwn," she whines.

She laughs. "Have fun, Zoey, and don't work too hard."

Then she heads back to the couch.

She steps up, take a deep centering breath, and raps her knuckles lightly on the door. She's got the foundation pills, the cash offer, and the pitch memorized well enough, even if she's never found it natural to stick to just that. There's nothing more she can do but take her chance. 

There's something... enchanting about having the winds of fortune at your back. It makes it a little easier to be brave. Besides, she's always been someone who likes reaching out where she can, and a pair of awakeners definitely sounds like quite the find. 

She's dressed in her formal robes - a sweeping yukata the white of freshly pressed snow, lined with the soft orange of the cracking dawn. A pearlescent sculpture of a fox dangles down from a pendant onto the valley of her breasts, shining all the colors of the rainbow and perhaps a few more besides. A polished slate grey ring shines gently on her left hand, a five tailed fox embossed with colorful metals - one tail each in red, yellow, white, blue and green. A silver-grey ribbon wraps around her waist, with an empty loop resting on her left thigh. Her soft brown hair spills down near the fullness of her back, swaying very slightly in an unseen wind, shining softly as the light catches the layers just right. Cerulean blue eyes sparkle with a welcoming warmth as she watches, her hands tucked gently behind her back. Her skin is a fine jade, and her muscle is supple and toned, gently nestled behind her curves.

"I'll get it, sis," Dawn calls, before walking over to the door and glancing out the peephole for a moment. She smiles in surprise and interest, and opens it. "Hi there! Pretty yukata you're wearing. What can I do ya for?"

Something seems... interesting, about this gorgeous stranger. Just a hunch, maybe, or just her being gay (including in a way she's trying not to think about), but she's curious.

She smiles warmly, and bows her head gently in acknowledgement. There's a little ethereal grace to her, especially when she moves, that makes her feel a little more than real. 

"I'd like to speak to you and your sister about an opportunity I have the privilege of offering to the two of you." 

Her affinity was... Fire, right? Her talents there have never been exceptional, but her Master has made sure that she has trained up the basics of all of the elements.

She pulls her hands out from behind her back, and slowly rubs them together, then spreading them apart, a wash of light wafting up from her palms. It feels like a summer's warmth, the kind rays of midday that peek through the clouds, and it very clearly isn't natural, for all that it feels a little familiar to something deep inside her. 

That was fire from nothing, she knows Zoey could build a device to do something like that, she can think of a way she could do it herself, but there's nothing visible that looks remotely like that kind of tool, and it would have to be close enough to her hands to be hard to hide. 

"You'd... better come inside."

She steps out of the way of the door, gesturing toward the couch and chairs, and calls toward the kitchen. "Zoey, important visitor!"

Dawn never interrupts her project time unless it's actually important. She finishes the connection she was soldering, which only takes a moment, then brushes her hands off and heads over to the living room. "Can we get you anything?

She ducks her head lightly, and follows her in. 

"I'd appreciate a glass of water, thank you." 

When Zoey's eye wander over her, there's a faint sense of something in her eyes, a little sense that something lurking inside her is appraising her, or catching a little more than she can consciously register. 

That's. An odd feeling. Something's really weird.

She goes and gets a glass of water, then comes out to the living room with her lemonade, handing the water to the guest before sitting down next to Dawn. 

"Can you do another demonstration, to catch Zoey up, and then tell us about your offer?"

She takes a seat, and gently sips the water, giving Zoey an appreciative little nod of thanks. 

"Of course." 

She takes a deep, slow breath in, and then breathes out. There's a faint feeling of sharpness in the air, a little slip of wire appears between her cupped hands. With a metronomic precision, her breath slides out and in. A little silvery spark slips along the edges of the wire as it unspools in her hand, growing a little into a curl of wire. 

"Hello. I'm Romana, of the Ancient Amber Aerie." 

She pauses, and nods to them.

"A pleasure to meet you both." 

"The... short version is that there's something of another layer to this world. It's possible to - with work, and care, and proper guidance and tools - to cultivate immortality, and gain immense magical powers through the study of cultivation. My seniors'divinations recently detected that the two of you have a lot of potential in those arts, and we wanted to give you an offer to train with us and learn with us, on your path to the peak, if you wish to pursue it." 

She pauses, and purses her lips. 

"There's no inherent disadvantage to being a cultivator, but there are a few things I should warn you about. There are some unscrupulous cultivators who will try to attack young talents, to take things from their bodies and to steal their treasures. There's... something of a masquerade on this world, too. There is a masquerade - not necessarily a formal and absolute one, but one nonetheless. Due to a rather frustrating law of heaven imposed by our forebearers, bad luck tends to come to cultivators who weigh in on mortal affairs heavily, and there are great powers, sects and schools who teach that that means that it's morally forbidden to help mortals with immortal medicine, or who will try to stop you to 'prevent your poor fortune from overspilling'. There are formations that can shelter people from those effects, for the most part and alternate realms where the rules don't apply, and they don't apply much to people with cultivation talent, but... I thought you should know. I know it gets under my skin sometimes, that I can't help people nearly as much as the simple math of what I can do might suggest, and I know some can't handle that tension." 

"As for the deal we are offering... I've got a full collection of foundation establishing resources right here. The clan will do the best we can to support your growth, offer you techniques for cultivation, and trades you wish to study, and access to our cultivation grounds and workshops. The only thing that we ask of you is that you make a faithful effort to learn and eventually pass on our teachings and that you're willing to pay out a percentage of what you gain from missions into closed realms." 

That wire wasn't there before, she could've used sleight of hand but her sleeves aren't close enough to her wrists to make that easy, and then the wire grew longer while both ends were in view, and there's no device that could've made the spark, she only has the one ring so even if that could've been one end what was the other???

She is tentatively convinced this may in fact be magic.

"I see why you called this important, sis."

"Yeah," she replies absently, frowning thoughtfully. To Romana, she asks, "How much time does a cultivator need to train, in an average week, if they're gonna get any good?"

Zoey nods firmly. "Yeah. And how do most cultivators pay for food and shelter and utilities?"

She hums lightly. 

"It depends a lot on your talent and the quality of your method and tools. Someone with a very average method and average talent would probably take half a dozen years working on it about as intensively as a university program to get to what I would consider a basic journeyman level of mastery. For me..." 

A little frown curls at the edges of her lips for a moment. 

"I'm a little good bit beyond that with an exceptionally wide foundation, have a few circumstances that slowed my progress at first, and it still only took me about 3 years to get to where I am on a program of study less intense but more comprehensive than that. It took me... maybe a year to get there myself? For you, if you just want to get your bodies refined and a foundational technique or two, I think you could be at that level within half a year of serious study, and maybe more like two years, if you want to do it more like a hobby. Maybe even sooner, if you have a fortuitous encounter or sudden stroke of enlightenment." 

She tilts her head a little. 

"A lot of cultivators get room and board from their schools. Sometimes early on in their careers in more isolated sects, students will just live like that, with only minimal other expenses reimbursed by their schools. But most cultivators get a stipend, a share of the profits from their training missions, or get their funds from the cultivation trades they perform. If you don't want anything too luxurious, I don't think it should be a problem for you to cover your rent from the incidental profits you get from training, and I can get you a spot in one of the Aerie's complexes to study in, if you'd prefer to board somewhere that might be safer from rogue cultivators, though I'd be happy to arrange at least basic protections for wherever you'd like to set up, and give you a referral to someone more expert than I if you want to purchase something more extensive." 

"Rogue cultivators sound like trouble. What's the risk like?"

She sips at her water lightly. 

"Usually it's not too bad, but something that you have to watch out for, especially in the early realms. There's some people who reject backers, and cultivate on their own. Usually, those people are just... people, though sometimes they develop cultivation techniques on their own with negative mental effects. The biggest problem are... cultivator bandits, essentially. Sometimes they'll swoop in and pillage hidden realms, or use heretical arts to call up malevolent spirits for their own advancement or whatever reasons. They aren't the most common in well settled places, and they often won't bother cultivators who are minding their own business under heavy wards or in places poorly suited for cultivations, but they're opportunists - if they see a chance to seize other people's prizes, they'll often take it. I'd say that if you wanted to go about this on your own, you should try to stay in big cities where you can and try to avoid keeping too many cultivation resources on you without setting something up to conceal it, but they're not so common as to be a constant threat around every corner, even for someone new to the world of the rivers and lakes." 

Dawn glances over at Zoey. Do they believe this girl?

Zoey glances at Romana's hands, then looks back, eyes hopeful. She definitely did something impossible.

The risks, though. 

But doesn't she want an adventure? Hasn't she been dreaming of one?

Okay, yeah, it would be an adventure.

They both nod, then turn to Romana.

"We'll try it."

"And if we can make it work for ourselves, we'll pack our things and take your offer of moving in at the Aerie."

"But um," Zoey asks, her cheeks turning a bit pink, "can we get rooms together, or next to each other?"

"Alright." 

She taps her fingers against the kitchen table. 

"There's a few things I can try? Probably the simplest thing would be to give you a martial cultivation technique and have you two try to practice it. The body purification effect should be relatively obvious, as should the way it can get a bit more out of your physicality than it should. I could walk you through a compatible basic elemental technique - those are pretty hard to do without having already gotten your cultivation started a little, but it has the upside that you won't necessarily have to deal with getting messy with impurities. Oh and... the standard method for transmitting cultivation techniques involves hypnotic manuals? They aren't mind control per se, but they're easier to visualize than ordinary text should be, and can facilitate a... guided experience that makes it easier to retain the lessons and focus on them. Avoiding that might be a bit of work, but it should be doable with a bit of patience..." 

She reaches her hand up to stroke behind her neck. 

"Do you have any thoughts there? Actually, I should probably ask if there's anything you're especially interested in learning in general. No reason not to start as you mean to go on." 

"Ooh if we can pick I wanna learn to make stuff, like maybe weapons or tools or something!" Zoey bounces in place a bit.

Zoey's just the cutest. Dawn gives her a partially-hidden sappy look for a moment.

Then she looks back at Romana. "Body purification effect, huh? Just how messy does it get?"

She represses a little chuckle under her breath herself, eyes hiding a little under her bangs. Zoey really does seem like a cutie. 

"Very. As in 'be ready to run off to a shower with two bottles of drain unclogger standing by' messy, if you push it hard enough." 

She turns to Zoey. 

"Proper crafting as a cultivator takes a bunch of prerequisite skills, but we can certainly help you down that path. The closest I can get you to starting directly on that would be doing something like the Uncoiling call - the wire generation technique I showed you earlier - or something like the rustless ripple, which works by loosely aligning it towards one of the five elements, and in that case, metal." 

"Sounds like that'd be convincing on its own. Also sounds like we should wear clothes we're ready to throw out anyway, and maybe practice on a tarp the first time."

"Oh there's elements? How do they work? Is it like the western elements or eastern or something else? Wait no you said metal that sounds like eastern but it could be something else too oh this is so cooooool!"

"It's a daoist thing - Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, Water. Them and yin and yang are sort of... the most fundamental elements backing the practice of cultivation and making up spiritual things. Everyone comes with an alignment within the five elements, and a balance of yin and yang, but for... call them 'aspects' like say, 'sword', 'saber' or 'sun', it's a bit more... subjective and blurry. Less - fundamental, in a way." 

She nods firmly. 

"Cultivation is cool." 

"Yeah, that sounds about right. As for what technique... Probably the best thing for that would be the fundament fist? I've got the opening of it memorized well enough to teach it without a manual and it shouldn't be particularly picky about getting it working. I could probably find something that would fit either one of you better, but it's traditional to learn at least a little of it anyways so..." 

She rolls her shoulders in a loose little shrug. 

"Got a place in mind to do it? You should probably do it one at a time - believe me, you do not want to be waiting in line when you've got the mess of a black day on you." 

Zoey looks over at Dawn. "Move the furniture?"

"Each get a chair?"

"Yeah!"

And they set to moving the two armchairs to the edges of the living room, then move the couch together, and then Dawn moves the coffee table while Zoey fetches a big tarp from the closet.

"I'll go first," Dawn says while Zoey's spreading out the tarp, "lemme just change into something I don't mind losing."

She heads back to her bedroom.

"You two really are two peas in a pod..." 

She stretches out a little, and gets up, taking her place opposite the spot they've set aside, waiting for her to get back. 

"Eheh, yeah," Zoey replies with a very faintly blushy grin.

Dawn's back a moment later in a sports bra that looks maybe a touch small and gym shorts that look like they've seen better days.

"Okay, so where do we start?"

Her eyes wander down her form - mostly in the respectful way you'd expect from a teacher examining the body of a student, but well... 

With a body like that, there's no helping indulging a little more than that. 

"You can do some stretches - that's a sensible enough place to start normally. But beyond that... You need to focus on the feeling of your heart and the vitality running beneath your skin. It's not just about the motions, it's about harmonizing your breath and your body with them. You should follow them, but what's most important is for you to watch as close as you can, take a breath and a heartbeat to blank your mind, remember the impression of the movement, and try to follow that, more than just a mechanical mimicry." 

She demonstrates a series of punches, a few series of jabs, the little way that she rolls her shoulders and sets her arms and presses. It doesn't look like anything special, just textbook clean blows at first, but there's an extra weighty woosh to her sleeves when she goes through the motion, a little extra rush to the extension of her arms, a gentle weight to the slowed down motions that makes it feel like she's following through with more than just the mass of her body. 

Dawn does what she can to steady herself, to clear her mind, and to recreate the feeling of Romana's movements more than just the motions themselves.

It takes her several tries to start getting it right.

Eventually she does, though, and something about her movements seem to have more weight to them, more heat, more intensity.

Zoey watches, rapt, eyes wide, cheeks flushed. She can see the moment when Dawn starts getting it, when she starts punching with more than just her arms, more than just her body.

It's not exactly simple. The fundament fist isn't just one thing - not a harmonization of yin and yang, not a conjugation of the five elements, not a harmony of the 3 qis. It takes a little bit of coaxing and adjusting, explaining the flow of it and how it should feel in her body, alongside a bit of help from her highlighting areas with that little trick of the light of hers to get it to work but eventually... It does.

It's something more basic than that, something that she can feel in the strain of her muscle and the flow of her skin, the way her hands start to whistle a little more, the way her body feels like she's been at it for hours and hours, yet feels primed and pumped and loose in a way that she never knew she could be. It's straining, feeling like this, blood pumping in her ears, sweat sliding along her skin, turning from what she's used to into something darker, oily and rank and ripe and rich in all the wrong ways. It coats her skin like tar, in little grimy greasy streaks slowly pouring out of every pore, the tarp quickly saturating with the almost muddy black grime as it pours off of her. 

A few minutes after it starts, she waves her hand softly, and reaches out her finger to boop her nose. 

"We should probably stop before it gets too bad. Off to the shower with you?"

"Oh! Lemme get you something to change into after, and an old pair of flip-flops to keep you from dripping on the way there, and a trash bag for those clothes!"

She dashes off. 

"Oh and..." 

She glances her eyes down to her ring, and smiles lightly. 

"I can give you a perfume to help with the smell - I don't think anything mortal would help with it, but at times like this, I don't think you'd mind something a little on the stronger side." 

"That'd be really nice, thanks. Something to put on after the shower, right? Maybe give it to Zo to set in the bathroom, I don't think I wanna touch anything while I've still got all this on me."

"Oh, a shower won't wash away most of mine, but it might be a smoother transition to wash off first." 

She smiles lightly, and ponders for a moment as she girls bustle about. 

There's a little flick of energy atop her hand, and an ornate little perfume bottle appears in her hand, only about as wide and long as her pointer finger. The perfume inside is mostly clear, though when it catches the light, there's a faint iridescence that makes it shine a pale pink. The cap is of a golden brown wood, carved with artful swooping lines and a gentle tracerie. 

As she gently places it in Zoey's hand, her smile gets a little slyer. 

"Here. I think she'll like this one." 

Zoey, who's just come back with clothes and a trash bag under an arm and a flip flop in each hand, drops the shoes in front of Dawn and blushes at the perfume being put in her hand.

Um.

She totally missed the conversation in her hurry but that was probably perfume for Dawn, and she was being told that Dawn would like it, right? Not that she'd like it on Dawn or that Dawn would like it on her? Romana hasn't totally clocked her massive crush on her sister. Right?

Romana was talking to Zoey. And the perfume was meant for Dawn. She just needs to keep that straight in her mind. Everything's fine.

Nobody's figured anything out.

"Thanks for grabbing all that, sis, and thanks for the perfume, Romana."

"No prob, Dawn!"

She dashes off to the bathroom and sets everything on the counter, clothes and perfume to one side, trash bag to the other.

While Dawn puts on the flip flops and heads for the bathroom more slowly, to give Zoey time to get out of the way and avoid getting any goop on her.

"You're welcome." 

She nods softly in acknowledgement, then wanders over back to the kitchen to grab herself another glass of water and let them work at it. 

Dawn very much appreciates getting clean. That stuff is awful.

And while Dawn's in the shower, Zoey heads over to Romana. "I think we're pretty convinced, though I kinda wanna try that initial training too before you go. Probably we'll need a day to pack, and I think we'll leave the furniture here at least, just as a backup for the first month in case we don't mesh well with your group."

She nods, and strokes her chin. 

"It really can be quite the adjustment to wander away from everything you've known, even if it's to something more exciting. It's nice to - have the chance to pop on by and have somewhere you know you can still settle back at." 

There's a decent chance even if they don't work out, they'll just fall in somewhere else in the hidden world, but there's something to said for a bit surety, still, and it's always hard to convey exactly how valueable real potentials are to people in that world to newcomers. It's the sort of thing that only really comes once you swim in those waters yourself, in her experience. Goddess knows it took her a while to trust that. 

"Oh. And... while we're waiting, can I get contacts for the two of you? There's some initiation details you'll probably want to look through and it'll be helpful to keep in touch. There's a few fancier ways to that through communication artifacts and all that, but those can be a little finnicky to set up, and there's nothing like a solution you've already got working, you know?" 

"Sure! Phone, Discord, terrible social media sites we avoid, email, something else?"

"Phone, email, discord should be plenty." 

She provides her phone number, her email (`romanareborn@gmail.com`) and her discord (romanaresplendent). 

Zoey does the same for herself and Dawn, and puts Romana's details in her phone. "Got it! What kinds of crafting skills are there, in the cultivation world?"

"It's not too unreasonably common for people to work out their own methods for crafting things once they get far enough down their own path, but for the most part, there's a handful of relatively standardized paths that people tend to stick to."

"Formations are a sort of application of a magical script and structure - it's relatively popular because it's very useful for setting up wards and cultivation grounds, and can in some situations be a good way to refine and make the most out of mastery of the elements. With a bit of adjusting and crosstraining, you can use it to enchant objects, not just lay down effects on the ground." 

"Talismans are relatively closely related to Formations - they rely a bit more on the more opaque spiritual side, and are much better for a lot of applications when you need something temporary or explosive, or you don't want to have to have an expert adjusting everything on the fly for each application site. It's sort of like... writing formations in a different language's different poetic forms, compared to it? Probably the ones that you'll see most often are preservation talismans, and combat talismans used for offense, defense and escape, though there's a lot more things you can do with them if you're willing to think outside the box a little." 

"Alchemy is one of the more respected trades, and one that's a bit more of a conventional path for those who want to opt out of combat. It's a mix of a sort of esoteric chemistry, material based ritual magic, and study of herbal lore. Alchemy tends to be good at giving fast benefits - fast, immediate healing, fast bumps in your cultivation - though those can be a lot slower on net then they look, because of the way they can require adapting to and because of the way that it can use up the reserves in your body and spirit, even if they're perfectly pure. It's also helpful if you need your body - spiritual or otherwise - adjusted in general." 

"There's a broad group I'll call... 'enchanters'. They can follow esoteric methods to refine the quality of the equipment they produce, nurture their spirituality, and change the properties of materials to make them workable or function in odd, often context dependent ways. There are weavers who can make cultivator soft body armor, bladesmiths that can make legendary swords that can cut selectively and enhance sword techniques... Joyous Jade has her own specific practice that makes a certain kind of guardian golem, golems that can fight and function almost like a proper cultivator." 

"Beyond that... I personally do a bit of spiritual gardening - you can improve the quality of spiritual herbs with work and careful cultivation, and make fussy ones thrive in environments they otherwise wouldn't be able to. And there's certain people who work on specialist techniques relating to particular odd arts. There's a special art to creating spiritual manuscripts that can most effectively communicate cultivation techniques, people who work on materials processing for spiritual materials before they even get to a smith, doctors who can perform biophysical manipulations in ways that alchemy scarcely can think of accomplishing, and a number of techniques that let people generate or enhance objects... That's not even to mention spiritual chefs and beast tamers... There's a lot you can do, if you put your mind to it." 

"That's really cool." She nods thoughtfully. "I think, just by the sound of it, I'd probably want to go with enchanting, probably some kind of weaponsmith-type thing? I really think weapons are just the coolest thing, and I've been pursuing a mechanical and electrical engineering double major at uni because there's not much need for weapons in the modern world — well, the mortal world, I guess — but I'd love to figure out something that let me get any use out off those skills too. I like working with metal, and fiddly tinkering stuff, and guns, and swords, and weird exotic blades that aren't well known, and everything."

She smiles, a little pleased sigh slipping under her breath. There's something so satisfying about seeing someone float forth towards their purpose...

"I'm pretty sure you have a metal affinity in there, and generally the best use for that in crafting is working with metals, or making certain kinds of especially precise enchantments. Formations can sometimes really benefit from a - concrete engineering approach, too. Might be worth it for you to sketch out some things that you'd like to be able to make and see about how you'd go about doing that? My own path in the trades came out of something of a whirlwind tour around the possibilities, with a bit of a consideration for inheriting my master's legacies as much as I can. So I've got a bit of a scattered foundation in formations, gardening, cultivation technique theory, and even a bit of alchemy."

She rubs the back of her neck. 

"For me, weapons have always just been... a small extension to yourself, that you want to adapt to, to feel comfortable with your span slipping beyond your skin, and something to - let fall away? There's a certain majesty to a well-crafted one, or one that can make a strike decisive, or execute a plan definitively, though. It's... a certain - preprepared mastery in the motion and form, a certainty of correctness and a cleaness of a certain kill. It's a strange art, but one I think I can bring myself to appreciate."

"Ooh? I always did wanna take up blacksmitthing at some point." She bounces in place a little. "Only didn't because I thought it wouldn't get much use these days. Guess I was wrong, in the best way!"

Wiggle wiggle. "I totally should start sketching swords and daggers again. Haven't done that in a while, been more focused on robotics, but it's so cool. I definitely don't think I wanna opt out of combat, not if there's something that really needs to be fought. Rather just do both, fight when I need to and make better weapons the rest of the time. What sorts of things can't you do with cultivator weaponsmithing? Can you interweave formations or talismans into a weapon? What do cultivators use for ranged attacks? Does anyone make weapons that do both? What sorts of things are there to fight? I know you mentioned bandits."

"There's not too much that is impossible qua impossible. Mostly it's a matter of if you have the right set of skills, and if your cultivation has advanced far enough to be able to put in enough and the right kind of power. It becomes vastly harder to make a flying weapon below the inborn realm, but it's pretty trivial once you're there. It's usually pretty impractical to make them useful when you aren't 'wielding' them, and it's pretty easy to get stuck in an impossible position if you have an effect in mind and the elements of the materials or the other effects you have working aren't... harmonious with it." 

"It's possible to integrate a talisman into a weapon, but not usually very practical. Talismans generally disintegrate after a certain level of strain or even just after activation - which isn't very practical on most weapons. You'll sometimes see people do the naruto thing of attaching talismans to throwing knives or other projectiles, but it doesn't tie in very directly to conventional weapon crafting most of the time. The materials you want for it are pretty different, too, though talismans can of course be fine weapons in and of themselves."

"You can put a formation on a weapon, but there's a lot of extra limitations on how much power you can get out of it unless you're talking about a fixed siege weapon or something like that. Usually, the best way to go about doing that is to have a supplemental formation for improving control and efficiency of what the materials already encourage, or adding in little convenience features." 

"There's a lot of things! Probably what you'll see the most is weapon energies, followed by elemental attacks and archaic weapons. I've got a whole screed memorized about why cultivators tend not to use guns I can get into, if you'd like, but..."

She rubs the back of her neck softly. 

"As for short and long ranged weapons... Generally it's just a matter of using your methods right - it's not too hard to project say, saber qi out to a decent range if you have a suitable art. I've seen a few bow masters that use bows that can serve as staves or spears up close, and certainly it's pretty orthodox for spears and knives to be designed to be thrown as well as used at shorter ranges. And of course, once you put a spirit in it or slap a powerful enough enchantment on it, you can do most whatever you'd like, there."

"There's a lot of hidden realms out there, if you look for them. A lot of them have pretty finnicky conditions - only people of a certain realm can enter, and only for so long, lest they collapse. And even a lot of them that don't have certain spiritual resources that are best cultivated within a relatively undisturbed ecosystem, so a lot of seniors stake them out and do regular harvests or trials. Those can involve culling beast populations, or dealing with territorial or corrupted ones. Under the right circumstances, they can break and leave the inhabitants rampaging, and no one wants that." 

...Now how does she put this without making it sound too silly. 

"Hidden realms have sort of... seeped into the culture of cultivators? It ended up being something of a status symbol, to have the finest opportunities and the most bountiful of cultivation grounds with the fiercest trials. So sometimes people... manufacture them. Sufficiently senior seniors are often expected to make some sort of... trial ground, to show off their wealth and the greatness of the resources they've collected, and to when they die, leave it as an inheritance to their clan or those who follow a sufficiently similar path, or simply those who meet their standards. Sometimes it'll just be more beasts and hostile environments, but they also often design trials that emulate more human opponents or that are designed with a mind towards requiring a specific trick to defeat an enemy that should be beyond you, as a way to... 'advertise' their arts. And of course, there's tournaments and such things - people are always eager to compete, and that's hardly less true, here."