Limitless Cultivation System: From Trash to Immortal

Chapter 142: A Young Master Doesn’t Mop

The Silent Peak had survived two years as a comfortable ruin. It did not survive Lian.

Xuan stepped onto his own veranda the next morning to find his home in open revolt against its own filth. Every window stood propped wide. Every rug he owned hung over the rail, being beaten to within an inch of its weave by a junior disciple who looked like he’d drawn the short straw of his entire life. The air reeked of vinegar and wet stone and the particular outrage of dust that had assumed itself permanent.

At the heart of it, holding a list, a damp cloth, and the unshakeable composure of a woman with a plan, stood Lian.

"You’re awake," she said, without turning. "Good. Don’t go in the east room, the floor’s still wet."

He spotted Wei Tianming, and the morning improved considerably.

The sect’s newest prodigy, a young man who days ago had detonated a heaven-tier sword root in this very compound and nearly cooked himself doing it, was on his hands and knees in the corridor, scouring a flagstone with a brush the size of his palm. His sleeves were shoved past the elbow. His face belonged to a man re-examining every decision that had led him to this corridor.

"Young master." Wei looked up with the desperate hope of a prisoner spotting a magistrate. "Tell her. Tell her I have training. Important training. I awakened a rare root last week, I should be refining it, not on my knees scouring your floors." He flicked the brush at the bucket beside him, slinging suds across the stone.

Lian didn’t glance over. "You’ll refine it faster for knowing how to put your back into something. And you missed a corner."

Wei stared at the corner as though it had betrayed him personally, and bent back to it.

[ He owes you a life debt and you’re spending it on chores. ] Mira, delighted. [ Best return on investment you’ve ever made. ]

Xuan crouched beside him on his way past. "How’s the root?"

"Sword-aligned and furious," Wei muttered. "Like me."

"Aim it at the corner." Lian mentioned.

He rose, and found Lian already watching him, as if she’d read exactly where his hands were thinking of going.

"Put me to work," he said. "You’re three bodies short for a job this size, and I’ve got two arms going spare."

Lian regarded him the way a tutor regards a pupil who’s offered a wrong answer with tremendous confidence. "Absolutely not. A young master does not scour his own floors the week a Frostmoon heir rides in to look him over. If it got back that the heir of Skyedge was found on his knees with a rag while his maid supervised, I’d never live down the shame, and you’d live it down even less."

She turned him by the shoulder and pointed him at his own rooms. "You have one job, and this isn’t it. Go find clothes. Good ones. Something with no burn mark and no training tear in it, and if you own nothing that fits that description, we’ve got two days to repair it and we’re already behind."

[ She’s right. ] Mira, insufferably reasonable. [ Try to keep it in your head that you’re a young master now, Xuan. The boy the laundry rotation used to mock a year ago is gone. You don’t carry your own water anymore. It’s deeply unfair, and you should enjoy every second of it. ]

’A year ago I’d have killed for someone to hand me a mop. Now I’m banned from one.’

[ Growth. ]

So he was exiled to his own bedroom to wage war on his wardrobe, which turned out to be a humiliation all its own.

Ethan, in his first life, had owned exactly one suit, worn it to a single funeral and two interviews, and considered the question of formalwear permanently closed.

Lin Xuan’s closet was a foreign country with its own legal code. Layers that went beneath other layers. Sashes whose knots apparently signified things. A formal outer robe in Skyedge grey that he was reasonably certain had cost more than his entire Earth education.

[ Not that one. ] Mira, who had appointed herself wardrobe consultant without a vote. [ The grey with the silver edging is heir-formal. The black is funeral-formal. Greet your future father-in-law in the black and he’ll read it as a statement about the engagement. ]

’How do you even know this?’

[ I know everything that could get you killed or embarrassed. Dress codes fall squarely under embarrassed. ]

He pulled the grey one off its peg, and as he did, Mira’s voice slid a notch off the comedy.

[ Speaking of things in motion. Han Ying’s nearly there. He cleared the last of the foothills overnight, and by my count he reaches Blood Fang’s outer wards before tomorrow’s done. The same window your guests ride in through. ]

Xuan stood there with a thousand-tael robe in his hands and an enemy fortress a day from cracking open behind his eyes, and the full ridiculousness of his life caught up with him all at once.

’Choosing robes and casing a stronghold. Same afternoon.’

[ The job keeps adding duties. ] Mira said. [ Wear the red and black one. ]

By dusk, the impossible had been done. The Silent Peak gleamed.

The rugs lay back down and dustless. The flagstones threw the lamplight straight back up. Wei Tianming had folded onto the veranda steps with the boneless finality of a man who scrubbed his way toward enlightenment and found nothing waiting there but more floor, and Lian was pressing a bowl of something restorative into his hands while wearing, against all expectation, a faintly satisfied look.

She crossed to Xuan after, ran an eye over the grey robe, and flicked an invisible speck from his shoulder. "You’ll do." Whatever else lived under the words, she kept off her face. "Don’t slouch when she arrives."

Xuan stood in the doorway in the grey and silver, feeling like a fraud in good cloth, and looked past the lit east approach to the dark road below, where a Frostmoon banner would crest the rise by tomorrow’s end.

[ Rest while you can. ] Mira, quiet now. [ Tomorrow you do both at once. You greet the woman who might become your wife with one face, and you walk into the Blood Fang sect with the other. ] A beat. [ Han Ying reaches their gate near midday. Su Qingyue reaches yours by dusk. You’re going to be living two lives tomorrow, Xuan, and you can’t drop either one of them. ]

He looked at the robe, and at the lanterns climbing the hill into the dark, and let out a long breath.

’Then I’d better not drop them.’