There was an odd dichotomy before him, he was sure of it. It was almost engraved into his spirit, at this point, staff meetings bad, but this time it wasn't the principal who’d called them up for some utterly insipid and idiotic matter nobody actually cared about or ever would care about. Rather, it was Lexi, who’d arranged for them all to meet up at one of the cafe’s nearby the library before work. He’d be mad, but unlike Yuxan, he’d seen how Lexi spent pretty much all her time working ceaselessly to keep the library running every day. The amount of paperwork he’d seen on her desk whenever he had to stop by her office… the thought made him shiver in sympathy. Doing that all at only Shedding, he could scarcely imagine how annoying that must be.

  She really needed a secretary… though, if the way things were going was any indication, that wasn’t very likely.

  The sound of snow crunching underfoot terminated with the bright jingle of an opening door, gentle warmth flowing past him as he stepped into the small shop. It was a quaint little place— the walls decorated with various little papercuttings and posters, drywall and plaster bright and scuffed further by long years of use. A rich lighting brought it all together, neatly; an almost suffusing warmth tied every aspect from the caramel-wood tables to the hiss of steam, to the closeness of the entire space.

  “Mingtian! I’m glad you could make it!” Janus waved over at him from the table he’d colonized— a small one, tucked away in the corner next to a bench set out from the wall, beside the window. The first hints of morning light spilled into it, diffusely; caught on the tassels of hanging curtains and scattered through the glass of a single vase, bottle-green glass taking up the center of the table. The man himself was pressed up even further into the corner, where a bench had been built off the side of the wall and filled with all sorts of plush cushions. It looked… comfortable.

  Lexi had just taken one of the wooden seats, as dour-faced as ever. He couldn’t help but crack a smile at the contrast, waving back… a microcosm, there, of just what it was like working at the library. Picking his way over he grabbed one of the other chairs and sat at an angle to both of them, nodding each good morning.

  For a moment; silence. Then, Lexi sighed, tossing him a bit of paper. “Figure out what you’re going to order. If you keep it cheap enough, I’ll cover it with the discretionary funding.”

  Mingtian blinked. “You don’t have to. I’m perfectly capable of paying for myself.”

  “It’s called being generous.”

  He huffed with amusement, just rolling his eyes. “Fine.” If Yuxan had tried that, he’d have been sure he was poking at some greater purpose, some insidious and asinine plan to wrap his thorny presence only ever deeper into him… but with Lexi? He was all but certain she was being genuine. “Is their tea any good here?”

  “It’s a cafe. They serve coffee.” Which he’d never quite understood the prevalence of. Modernized as it was, East Saffron still showed plenty of influence from its past… which always made him wonder why coffee was so popular in the city. Perhaps it was a fad? He’d seen them come and go over the millenia… “but, yes, if you must, they have a good zhengshan xiaozhong. Not that everyone doesn’t, but… you know.” She waved her hand dismissively. “If you want to be lame.”

  He rolled his eyes in return. “Fine. I’ll get the coffee.” Far too… coffee like for his tastes, though come to think about it, his favorite drinks were all far worse. Solar plasma, concentrated dragons’ blood, so on, so forth… not a very typical palette. “So…” as he flipped through the menu, he continued— “what’s the point of this meeting?”

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  “I felt like having one.” He gave her a doubtful look, and Lexi glared right back, entirely unbothered by him in the slightest. “Obviously not. I wanted to talk about the… situation. And address some concerns that I have that might impact the library in the future.” They were forced to put their conversation on pause for a moment as the waiter wandered over to take their orders, but the moment he left, Lexi unfolded a slip of paper and placed it firmly onto the desk between them.

  It was… officious. That was what struck him— even to a mortal it’d be obvious, the paper a thick, fine thing, tanned slightly brown and pleasing to look at. The ink, a gleaming thing, still glistening in the light even though it had clearly long since dried. A seal— not a wax seal, but something embossed onto the bottom corner of the document— was detailed exceptionally finely.

  Mingtian was not merely mortal, though, and he could see… so much more. It was a document for cultivators, and they had made that obvious. The paper was a third-step material, and thus probably more valuable than their entire meal— and probably the table they were sitting on, too. The ink was similarly enriched, the qi in both bleeding a sense of officiousness out into the air. The seal… the seal was the most interesting of all of them, though maybe that was just his experience as a refiner speaking. Different parts of the seal— to an incredibly fine degree, fine enough that he couldn’t sense it all with his restrictions— had been either reduced to second step or refined further to the edge of fourth step.

  It was a very clever system. Without… whatever strange tool they’d done to make that— and it was certainly the result of some strange tool, of that he was relatively sure— one would need to be a master refiner to duplicate it. And master refiners probably had better things to do than run petty scams.

  “Oh. That’s not good.” He blinked at Janus’s words, then refocused on the paper itself— right, there was actual content there to read. It wasn’t from the sect— interestingly enough, with how flagrantly wasteful it was in material— but rather from the Mortal Government of the Administrative Division of The Saffron Isles and East Saffron, and the Greater East Saffron Metropolitan Area, which was a pretty officious way of just saying that it was from the mortal side of things.

  He had his doubts as to the ultimate veracity of that… but it wasn’t like mortal governments ever kept their grubby fingers out of Sect politics in the first place, so who was he to judge? It just felt… blatant. As blatant as the document’s actual contents; a steep cut in funding pretty much across the board, inked out by some poor low-level disciple and sent out to every institution of import in the entire city.

  All that went to say— so much for his dreams to extricate himself from Yuxan’s grasp. At this rate, he might need to take… drastic measures.

  He sighed, and Lexi copied him from across the table. “Troublesome, I know. I had a whole host of things slated for the next few years… to make a long story short, we’re not getting that new sorting machine. We’re probably not even going to get the updated versions of this year’s textbooks.”

  Janus groaned. “I’d really been looking forward to that thing…” Mintian hadn’t even known they’d been planning that. Though, now that he knew about it, he couldn’t help but be a little bit miffed— it would have been rather a bit convenient to have the sort of machine that could actually, properly sort returned books without just dumping them into random piles… “I take it this means that the rumors are… not entirely baseless, then?”

  Lexi was silent for a long moment, just looking down at her drink and, slowly, sipping, the pungent aroma of coffee swirling up into the air— a breath of steam, entangled in sunlight. Quietly… “I think,” she said softly— “that I can no longer assume otherwise.”

  None of them spoke after that.

  at least until the end of book one, which should not be for some months and several parts yet. I'll probably change the posting schedule so instead of posting at 6:00 AM, chapters will come out at noon, and see if that helps anything. After that, though... we'll see. I'll reassess then.

  I dearly appreciate consistency in posting from stories I follow, I decided that the daily updates would probably be nice for readers and help me keep on top of the story; however, I should probably ask how y'all feel . Any results from the poll probably won't take affect for a month or two anyways. Please take the time to respond if you can.

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