We had a demon cultivator problem here. We still do.

  We rooted it out once, but they were like upscale hipster bars that offered a twenty dollar burger without fries included.

  Which is to say, everywhere.

  That about something up I said. I was speaking to the smiling buddha that was the patriarch of the tower's sect. There I was, disappointed that he didn't have a burger for me, visiting his home. He could have at least held a barbecue in my honor.

  A large man, he had a perpetual smile on his face as I explained the situation with the Mandarin. He only paused to laugh at my newest protege showing up to ladle out soup under the nose of the most powerful man in the city.

  "You had the former demonic cultivator girl serving next to him? You are as bold as my daughter has always claimed."

  I nodded.

  "She has been a great help. Both of them have," I said.

  "She says such great things about you and Lorenzo."

  "We try. After her cousin passed, well that was unimaginable but..."

  "You did her right."

  He gave me a look. "You know we haven't promised her hand to anyone-"

  I held out my hand. "I have a girlfriend. I don't need a harem."

  "But surely," he said, his smile not extending to his eyes. "She has many cousins you could consider."

  "Did Min out you up to this? Because of so, good job."

  He shrugged. "Just keep your options open. A fifth realm cultivator can get it."

  Okay now I knew that my sidekick had infiltrated his confidence with buzzwords. Just like everyone else in my orbit.

  "We've got dark days ahead of us." His demeanor shifted and I could see sadness flash past his face.

  I didn't disagree. "With your help, they won't be so bad."

  "You know I've been talking to my daughter about what she's been doing and they got me to thinking about how you're trying to do so much with so little."

  I let him sit there with his thoughts. He was going to have to figure this one out not me.

  "I think that we can do a lot of good together"

  We've been through so much so quickly that it was hard to recall what it was like before. Things seemed so simple and easy. Now we were reliant on big shipments of food from places that hadn't been destroyed by demonic cultivators.

  "Some plays are only for the performers. Some plays are for an audience. I would not stop to differentiate the two but you play for us all. She sees that in you. That's why she believes you and that's why she stuck around."

  "You think that I'm putting on a performance here?"

  "I've been told that you are good at something called improv?"

  "Yes, and?"

  He smiled.

  I don't think that doing improv is going to save this city. I don't think anyone is going to be healed by it. If anything it will re-traumatize them and then they'll have to pay a different therapist to express just what they've been through.

  "That is well." He shrugged.

  We both wanted to heal the community and get this behind us but it wasn't like you could just snap your fingers and get from here to there. No we had to take our time and talk it out and make sure that everybody felt that we had gotten past this and we build and do everything that the community needed to do.

  After all what was the community if they couldn't keep its people safe, well fed and not liable to be hit by demonic cultivators. I mean in all fairness, it's minor. Cultivators are a ridiculous lot to have to deal with. I'd only gotten one out. But if I could get some more out? You know I would. I just didn't know that I was going to have a chance to do so.

  The first step in fixing your burning house was to get out. We'd all gotten out and though many died in the attack, it was not still burning. The next step was to call the fire department and deal with it. And that was something that my people had done. And now, we got into the tedious boring rebuilding part where I was so happy that no one was trying to kill me everyday. Just that morning. I doubt somebody with their dreams and they were optimistic about the future. I had to double-check and after looking into it I cracked a smile. I mean I smile a lot but I feel like I had resting dad face a lot.

  I wasn't mad at the government. I was just disappointed.

  ---

  I was doing as much as I could. I was going to have to accept that I physically needed sleep even if I could not longer stay productive. The less time that I had to spend on the problem, the more I had to work on the things that only I could really impact.

  When I had to move something or pause to stop someone with post-traumatic stress, I felt like I should be doing something else. Working on instinct didn’t suit me well for that long. I felt like I needed to come up on the net and get some help for myself, every time I raised my hand to help, I got a hug. So at least there was that.

  I would always take an offered hug.

  My new family here was really doing the most. The first sign that we could let this thing handle itself was when a brand-new business popped up across the street, in a building that hadn’t existed before. It turns out that there were marble and wood shaping cultivators, and they were going ham on my block. Perhaps it was the proximity to the soup kitchen, or the fact that thousands of people felt safe where we were.

  The first thing that the wood cultivators fixed was the bridges. Each relatively square district in the city had at least four wide bridges. Previously they were all arched numbers with a lot of marble and lovely brass work. Now they were functional and served the need of the people that need being the ability to cross these canals.

  Just because there were a lot of cultivators here didn't mean that they could all fly like I could. In fact, it was only a small few that could go back and forth. My ability to stack piles of wood, hug it and then fly it across. The canal had become one of my cheap parlor tricks that got everyone to look. Because of this, my reconstruction efforts had began to look like I was building floating Bridges. It was one such bridge upon which I finally finished most of the major through Affairs.

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  Every single Island now had a way onto and off of it. In addition, the ones that were broken remained to be seen as to if they were going to be fully cleared or not or bored in the exact same spot. Due to the fact that so many buildings have been destroyed, the property damage around some of the bridges had impeded on their reconstruction.

  A lot of that was outside of my scope of influence. True, my district loved me but the rest of them were still working through their own issues. And this was a culture that had people living in 2 or three-story tenements in close proximity and very strictly planned out areas.

  I was a big fan of urban housing that made sense. I liked walkable commutes. So when the moon clan brought up the abandoned lot next to the red Fang, I of course asked them to let me use it. It would pair down my commute and it would be a new Bachelor crash pad for me and potentially for my girlfriend.

  The fact that it was just down the road from resting bitch lace, was something I could deal with. I was used to my ex-wife being close to me in her business dealings. After all, she probably wouldn't be here if she hadn't had been in the same 10 block radius where most of the people that had been summoned here had come from.

  So when she came by to take a look at my new apartment, you could say that I was a bit shocked

  "Maxine, how the heck are you doing"? I asked

  She arrived in a qi pao. Now I had a long staying relationship with this woman. Before there was all the vitriol, there was a lot of love. And I could definitely see that she had been working out based on how the garment fit her. I could also see that she was wearing her products. Specifically the one that accentuates.

  "I'm just checking to make sure that you're all right," she said. "I feel like we need to have a talk."

  I didn't really want to talk to her. But you can't just say that to your ex-wife. Especially when you guys have a rich history between the two of you and you've both been plucked out of your own world and placed into a new one. Yeah true. I was dating Laura at the time right before I got summoned here but it wasn't like I was going to just welcome Maxine back into the fold.

  I sat down on my newly installed custom rock bench. It had taken the builders a day to set up the first and second floors of this building and I knew that they had given me a bench so that I could sit out front and enjoy myself. They definitely didn't do it so that the people that were eating from the soup kitchen next door could sit on it even though two of them were at that exact moment.

  They were still enough space for both of us.

  "Do you want to talk about the girls?" I said.

  "I feel like we need to."

  "What do you think we can do about them?"

  "We can't go back and bring them here. And here... we'll find them. I know that."

  "It's just I miss. I miss them. I miss us. I would get do anything for a macaroni drawing right now."

  "Or an invite to a dance recital or something."

  "Heck, if they wanted to go to a chess tournament I would be sitting there cheering them on every single step of the way."

  "What do you think? They think? They probably think that we're dead."

  "I wouldn't go so far as to say that they think that we're dead."

  "What's worse? Them thinking that we left them on purpose?"

  "What other conclusions could there possibly be? If we've been kidnapped then the police will be searching for us. I mean they would still search for us but..." She trailed off.

  "I think you need to talk to somebody. And if you want we can do couples counseling or I could just take you to Lorenzo but I don't think that I'm the right person for you to talk this about. Look Maxine. I love you and I'm not going to say the other part of that but we had something real. We created a wonderful family and it took me months to get to this part where I'm okay with leaving Rachel and Courtney back on Earth."

  "Everything I've done so far has been to try and get back home to them," she said. "It's the reason I took the job that got us in hot water with each other. They promised me power. I made sure that I had that written out of contract."

  "You signed a contract with the demonic sect?"

  "Their non-disclosure agreement was airtight," she said.

  I started giving her a little slow clap.

  "Oh stop that," she said smirking. "Any other girl in my position would do that."

  "Yeah, any other woman operated from her own world and taken to a place where everyone is powerful and yet they have no idea of the concept of a sports bra."

  "I never said I wouldn't take advantage of the situation."

  "How's the business going by the way?"

  "It's actually going pretty good. We had to kind of educate people on what lingerie was but now that a few people know it? The word of mouth is spreading and let's just say that not your Harem but the girls that you surround yourself with are my biggest boosters."

  "They all consider you their bestie, which I mean that's fine."

  "Your spirit side piece is always over in my place asking me questions about your memories and I don't know what to say to it."

  "You can just tell min the truth. She knows what Earth is like."

  "And that's the other thing," Maxine said gesturing vaguely upstairs. "There is a way back apparently. If you are on a certain path, they can go back and forth. I don't know how it looks like on the other side but something the Red Fang said stuck with me"

  The hair on the back of my neck prickled.

  "They told me about how they sent sleeper agents out."

  All the sudden I wanted nothing more than for her to finish telling me everything she was about to say. I leaned in like I was trying to smell her.

  She was taking it back in my sudden interest. In the back of my mind I could feel Min stirring from her nap upstairs.

  "Go on," I said.

  "They send lower rank cultivators over to try and pinpoint an area where they can draw people like us in."

  I began to break out in a sweat. Full body chills took me from head to toe. "Are you saying that you know the way back?"

  Maxine smiled. " This is not some trick. Joe. They really have a way of getting back there."

  I nervously ran my fingers through my hair. "There has to be a catch doesn't there? There must be a catch."

  "There is always a catch. It takes a ridiculous amount of energy to send someone back there. Like a whole sixth realm cultivators entire core, drained of its energy."

  I flopped back against my seat. It took me almost six months to get this far and from everything I was reading, it would take me another couple of years to get to the next realm.

  So there was a catch. And that was a doozy of a catch.

  Even with as smart as Maxine was and her being as driven as possible, she had only gotten to the fourth realm. It was only due to the fact that I had absorbed so much dream Aura during the battle that I had crested past the threshold to the fifth realm.

  Yes it was a whole level of power greater but it was also just my picking the right path at the exact right time to get there. My core felt like it was going to take several large-scale battles of that same type just to get the same amount of energy to fill it up and that was before I got more into my path and represented virtue of whatever it was that the Dao wanted me to do.

  "Maxine, even if I devoted like everything I had to advancing to the sixth realm, I don't know that I would be able to get it anytime within the next year or two. And that would be about the time that the girls are graduated from high school. Unless... time flows, differently between the two worlds?

  "The timeline is the same. That part, at least I can tell you for sure. I just don't know if they're going to be staying with your parents or my parents. How? Who am I kidding? I'm guessing that they're staying with your parents."

  It makes sense. What is your plan then get one of us to the sixth realm and then we empty our sole core to open a portal back to the other realm and get back with the girls?"

  "God I miss them," she said.

  "I miss them everyday."

  Her face flash annoyance. Clearly she was feeling her feelings right then I know I was. "If you figure out a way to get back home, you know I want to come with you."

  I nodded. "I know. I want you to be with the girls too."

  "Truce?"

  "Truce."

  "I think that Lee's going to have a problem if you leave. Maybe Min as well."

  I stood up. "If I'm going, I'm bringing Lee with me. That is if she'll have me. Min can figure out her own path."

  "That's so sweet of you. Maybe we'll figure out a way to increase trade between the two worlds or something."

  I didn't know where she was going with this. But having her as an ally was much better than having her as the big bad antagonist in my life. I just needed to deal with the emperor's requests and get back to it.

  "Fortunately or unfortunately, I've got to deal with whatever the imperial Governor asked me to do for the time being. I would love to have your help dealing with our issues. Sounds like once everything is good here that we're going to be doing a little bit of a tour of some areas that the emperor thinks have been influenced by the demonic cultivators."

  I still don't understand how the emperor can't detect these guys himself. "He might be really smart but he didn't know what ultraviolet light is. Additionally, based on my last trip to the court, people were just hiding under his nose. You know there's a machine they have that can test if you have them on cultivation? But they don't really bring it out unless they have a strong suspicion and then you just killed on the spot."