The morning after our highly educational, extremely messy firm retreat at the Glass Lotus, I woke up feeling like a brand new man.
My Hollow Meridian was no longer hollow. It was firmly, aggressively patched with the combined, premium saliva and sweat of two high-tier dual-cultivation specialists. I felt a faint, steady hum of Qi circulating in my lower pelvis. The leaky bucket was secure, and I was ready to practice law.
I walked into the front of our cabbage-scented office. Lo Yu was already awake, sitting behind his oversized wine-barrel desk.
He wasn't reading legal scrolls. He was hunched over a glowing, jagged piece of green crystal, furiously adjusting a small copper dial on its side.
"Boss, what is that?" I asked, grabbing a broom to sweep away the scorched pine splinters Mr. Wiggles had left behind after his midnight sneeze.
"This, Junior Associate, is the future of our firm's logistics," Lo Yu rasped, his single visible eye gleaming with pure, unregulated greed. "I purchased it from a corrupt City Guard early this morning. It is a modified communication jade, tuned specifically to the emergency dispatch frequency of the Heavenly Peak Medical Guild."
I stopped sweeping. I stared at the crystal. "You bought a police scanner."
"I bought a lead generator," Lo Yu corrected smoothly. "We cannot wait for clients to come to us, He Lu. Sometimes, they are physically incapable of walking through our beaded curtain because their femurs are shattered in three places. We must go to them. We must be proactive."
Before I could argue the moral bankruptcy of ambulance chasing, the beaded curtain rattled.
Wandering down the cobblestone street and right into our shattered doorframe was the old, deeply wrinkled crone pushing her wooden tea cart. She wore her tattered grey robes completely open at the front, her massive, leathery assets sagging all the way down to her waistline.
"Hot milk tea..." the old woman croaked, her cataract-filled eyes staring blankly at the wall. "Freshly brewed... on god, no cap..."
Crackle. Hiss.
The green crystal on Lo Yu's desk suddenly flared to life. A panicked, tinny voice echoed from the stone.
"Dispatch, we have a Code Four. High-velocity aerial collision on the Avenue of Azure Clouds. A novice sword-rider just rear-ended a produce merchant. Multiple injuries reported. Send the healers!"
Lo Yu slammed his hand onto the desk. He leaped to his feet with the terrifying agility of a predator that just smelled blood.
"A vehicular accident!" Lo Yu bellowed, grabbing his walking stick and a stack of blank legal contracts. "Junior Associate! Grab the neck braces!"
"We don't sell medical supplies!" I yelled back, my Earth-realm lawyer instincts instantly taking over.
"Then break a chair and grab the splinters!" Lo Yu shrieked, sprinting toward the door, shoving past the confused milk tea crone. "We have to beat the healers to the crash site!"
"Head of Security! Transportation!" I roared.
Mr. Wiggles, the horse-sized Abyssal Hellhound, snapped awake. He shook his massive, pitch-black mane. The goat, which had been sleeping on his middle head, tumbled off with an annoyed bleat.
I leaped onto Mr. Wiggles' back, grabbing the thick fur near his left neck. Lo Yu scrambled up behind me.
"Watch the office, grandma!" I yelled to the crone as the hellhound blasted out of the alleyway and onto the main street.
Left entirely alone in the dusty, cabbage-scented office, the Milk Tea Crone slowly blinked her milky eyes. She hobbled over to the client stool, her waist-length assets swinging like grand-father clock pendulums, and sat down heavily right next to the rotting pine wall that separated the office from the dark alleyway.
She stared into space, a broken reincarnator lost in the digital sauce of a previous life.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
The sound came from the alleyway. Specifically, from the third uncovered glory hole on the wall, exactly waist-high.
"Hey," a gruff, muffled voice whispered from the other side of the wood. "The board outside said the Wall of Anonymous Enlightenment was closed for renovations. But I see the light on. The blind guy in? I got a coupon."
The Crone slowly turned her head. She looked at the hole.
Suddenly, a massive, aggressively veiny, Dick was thrust through the opening, wiggling expectantly in the empty air of the office.
"Come on," the voice outside hissed. "I've been holding onto the blue balls for a week. Do the thing."
The Crone stared at the glowing anomaly. Her toothless mouth slowly curled into a wide, broken grin.
"Hawk tuah," the Crone rasped, her voice sounding like grinding stones. "Spit on that thang... skibidi..."
She leaned forward and went to work.
Because she had absolutely no teeth, the resulting suction was an entirely frictionless, terrifyingly powerful vacuum of pure, unadulterated gum-work.
"Oh! Oh, Heavens!" the man in the alleyway gasped loudly, his knees audibly knocking against the wooden wall. "Yes! The legendary velvet grip! The absolute lack of enamel! The blind master has returned!"
The Crone kept bobbing her head, her milky eyes completely vacant, humming a muffled, off-key version of a TikTok trending audio.
"It's just like the old days!" the patron moaned, his voice cracking with pure nostalgic ecstasy. "The Ming Dynasty technique! I thought this establishment had lost its touch! Oh, Dao, I'm achieving a breakthrough! I'm reaching the peak!"
The man on the other side of the wall let out a shuddering, triumphant shout.
The Crone pulled back with a loud, wet pop.
She wiped her chin with the back of her sleeve, let out a wheezing, broken giggle, and nodded at the wooden wall.
"Bet," the Crone croaked. "No cap. W rizz."
"Here is a tip, Senior!" the exhausted, incredibly satisfied man whispered, sliding a mid-grade spirit stone through the hole. "I will tell the Outer Court the Enlightenment Wall is back in business!"
The Crone pocketed the stone, entirely unfazed, and went back to mindlessly stirring her vat of sour milk tea. The firm's passive income stream had officially been reactivated.
Meanwhile, halfway across Heavenly Peak City, Mr. Wiggles was clearing morning traffic like a demonic snowplow.
To part the sea of merchant carts, the hellhound instinctively activated his emergency protocols. His left head began to rhythmically spit bright, flashing bursts of red and blue hellfire into the sky. His right head tilted back and let out a piercing, high-pitched howl that sounded exactly like a modern ambulance siren.
"WEE-WOO-WEE-WOO-WEE-WOO!" the right head shrieked.
We arrived at the Avenue of Azure Clouds in exactly three minutes, beating the official medical palanquin by a mile.
The crash site was a disaster.
A young disciple wearing the green robes of the Spring Breeze Sect was embedded shoulder-deep into a brick wall. His luxury flying sword—a sleek, aerodynamic model painted cherry red—was snapped cleanly in half, smoking in the middle of the street.
And scattered across a fifty-foot radius was a devastating amount of shredded, ruined produce.
"My cabbages!" an old merchant wailed, falling to his knees in the middle of the street.
I slid off Mr. Wiggles before the hound even came to a complete stop. I sprinted directly past the crying cabbage merchant and made a beeline for the teenager stuck in the wall.
"Don't move!" I yelled, pulling a piece of splintered chair-wood from my robes and aggressively shoving it against the side of the kid's neck like a makeshift brace. "You are suffering from severe whiplash! You have sustained massive emotional and physical trauma!"
The kid groaned, peeling his face out of the brickwork. Blood trickled from his nose.
"I... I think I broke my collarbone," the kid whimpered. "Are you a healer?"
"Better," I whispered, shoving a glowing legal scroll inches from his bleeding face. "I am a Litigation Master. Have you or a loved one been injured in a flying sword accident? You may be entitled to massive financial compensation!"
"I just want a healing pill," the kid sobbed.
"You can buy a thousand healing pills after we sue the manufacturer!" Lo Yu barked, appearing next to me. He grabbed the kid's limp, bloody hand, slapped it against an inkpad, and aggressively stamped his thumbprint onto the retainer agreement. "You are now represented by the Lo & He Law Firm. Do not speak to the City Guards."
Suddenly, the official Heavenly Peak Medical Guild arrived. Three apothecaries in pristine white robes jumped off their floating cloud-disk, carrying glowing medical bandages.
"Make way! Medical emergency!" the lead healer shouted.
I immediately stepped in front of the healers, holding my hands up like a traffic cop.
"Halt!" I declared. "This is an active legal scene! My client is currently in a fragile state of litigation! Any unauthorized healing spells applied before I photograph his injuries will be considered tampering with evidence!"
While I stonewalled the paramedics, Lo Yu was already inspecting the wreckage of the flying sword in the street.
The cross-eyed goat trotted up to the smoking, cherry-red blade. It sniffed the hilt, opened its mouth, and took a massive, crunching bite out of the sword's spiritual exhaust manifold.
"Ah," Lo Yu rasped, his eye narrowing as he analyzed the bite marks. "Look at the alignment of the Qi-runes, Junior Associate. This is a Nimbus 3000 Pro. It's a luxury model. But the braking array... it is completely burnt out."
"I tried to stop!" the kid moaned from the wall. "I channeled Qi into the deceleration matrix, but the sword just kept accelerating! The brakes locked up!"
I spun around, a massive, predatory grin spreading across my face.
"Manufacturer defect," I whispered reverently. I looked at Lo Yu. We were thinking the exact same thing.
"Class-Action Product Liability," Lo Yu agreed, his missing-tooth smile gleaming. "Junior Associate, tell the healers they can patch him up. We don't need him anymore. We have a dealership to extort."