The night passed without incident.
The next morning, Ethan pushed open the door of his room, noted that Vivienne's bedroom door was firmly shut, and went to the courtyard. He found the Divine Beast, clipped a leash to its collar, and tied the other end to a stone post.
Then he opened the system inventory and started pulling out plants.
Three years of sign-in rewards, and the warehouse had filled up with divine medicines and spiritual treasures he had no particular use for. They were neither essential nor useless just accumulated. He might as well give them somewhere to grow.
By midmorning, the courtyard had been planted, breakfast had been made, and Ethan was crouching by the stone post with a dog bowl.
"Time to eat." He pulled a bag of Heaven-grade Immortal Beast Feed from the inventory, poured a portion into the bowl, and slid it across the flagstones.
...
Lord Dawnfire, Nation-Protecting Divine Beast of Goldmere, lifespan three hundred thousand years, veteran of the kingdom's founding war, once credited with personally turning the tide when the realm was on the brink of collapse was stared at the dog bowl.
He had endured a great many indignities since the incident that had severed his cultivation, forced the transformation, and stripped him of both speech and the ability to send mental transmissions. But dog food. Dog food.
He had half a mind to simply bite the blind man and be done with it.
Then the smell hit him.
Lord Dawnfire's nostrils opened. He used one paw to carefully lift a single piece from the bowl and tasted it.
The bloodlines of ten thousand spiritual beasts.
He went very still.
He tasted it again.
and a trace of divine beast flesh.
Lord Dawnfire's jaw dropped. He stared at the bowl for a long moment. Then he buried his face in it and did not come up for air.
Extraordinary. Absolutely extraordinary. The finest thing he had eaten in four hundred years. Divine beast dignity was, when weighed against this, a relatively abstract concept.
Creak.
Vivienne came out of her room looking like someone who had spent the night losing an argument with her own head. Her eyes were slightly unfocused. She was still in her sleeping robes.
The romantic phrases had continued their rotation through her mind until well past midnight.
A welcome surprise at first sight. A quiet warmth that only grows.
She was still working on finding the appropriate emotional category for them.
From the side room, Lily appeared fully dressed, hair flowing, already composed bowed quietly to Vivienne, and was about to move toward the kitchen when she noticed the stone table.
Breakfast was already on it.
Lily looked around the courtyard.
Something had happened to the courtyard overnight. Flowers and plants she had never seen before occupied every available space, throwing off faint traces of spiritual light, colors shifting subtly in the morning air, the whole arrangement looking less like a garden and more like the inventory of a legendary apothecary.
"Is that" Vivienne stopped. Her eyes had found the pond. "Is that the Nine Yang Scorching Heart Lotus?"
A flame-shaped bloom floated on the water, unmistakably itself.
"Void-Cleansing Sage's Hand," Lily said, her voice barely audible. She was turning slowly on the spot. "Soul-Root Orchid. Heavenwood Sapling" She blinked. Rubbed her eyes. Looked again. "Every single one of these is Heaven-grade."
Any one of them would have sparked a bidding war in the cultivation world outside these walls. Here, they were planted in neat rows between the stepping stones as though they were decorative herbs.
"Am I still asleep?" Lily asked, of no one.
Vivienne stood very still, looking at the lotus. This was, she thought, not the first time Ethan had quietly done something that she couldn't explain, and shown no interest in being credited for it.
She was forming an opinion about this. She wasn't entirely sure what the opinion was yet.
"AH—" Lily made a sound unlike her usual composure and pressed both hands over her mouth.
Vivienne turned.
Her vision swam for a moment.
Lord Dawnfirem, the Nation-Protecting Divine Beast of Goldmere, ancient guardian of the realm, bearer of the bloodlines of the Devourer and the Phoenix Ancestor was on a dog leash, attached to a stone post, licking out the inside of a dog bowl with focused enthusiasm.
He finished.
He looked up at Ethan.
His tail moved.
He pushed the empty bowl forward with his paw and made a small sound.
More.
Lord Dawnfire would like more.
"You've had enough. Portion control," Ethan said, with the authority of someone who had decided this was a settled matter.
Vivienne and Lily looked at each other.
"Master," Lily said, her voice strained with the effort of remaining calm, "you cannot feed Lord Dawnfire from a dog bowl."
"It's not a dish bowl," Ethan said reasonably. "It's a dog bowl. There's a difference. And the food is very nutritious."
Lily snatched the bowl, set it aside, produced a large cut of premium spirit-beast meat from her storage ring, and placed it carefully on a flat stone near the Divine Beast.
"Lord Dawnfire," she said, quietly. "Here. Proper food."
Lord Dawnfire glanced at the meat.
He looked back at the bag of Immortal Beast Feed.
He made his assessment.
Trash.
He turned his back to the spirit-beast meat, returned to Ethan's feet, and sat down. His tail moved in a measured, dignified way that was still somehow unmistakably wagging.
Just a little more. Lord Dawnfire is not asking for much.
"What did you give him?" Vivienne asked, the headache already forming. "He's not actually a dog. He's a Divine Beast with two Ancient bloodlines. Why is he behaving like"
"Like a dog?" Ethan offered.
"Yes."
"I haven't done anything unusual," Ethan said, which was entirely true from his perspective.
Vivienne pressed her fingers to her temple.
"Never mind," she said. "Fine. Where did all these spiritual herbs come from?"
Lily also looked over, waiting.
Ethan had prepared for this.
"A white-haired old man I met while traveling," he said. "Gave them to me. Very generous."
Lily blinked slowly.
"Master," she said, after a moment. "The sword scriptures were also given to you by a white-haired old man."
"Yes."
"The same old man?"
"Quite possibly."
"He gave you three years' worth of Heaven-grade spiritual herbs and a complete Sword Path treatise."
"He was a generous person," Ethan said.
Vivienne closed her eyes briefly.
The excuse is barely constructed. He knows I know it's barely constructed. He's not even trying to make it convincing.
She decided, as she often did with things she couldn't fully see the bottom of, to leave it alone. They were both keeping things from each other. That was understood on both sides.
Vivienne ate quickly and left she was playing the role of a senior academy scribe at the Royal Academies today, which apparently required her physical presence. Lily followed, mentioning she intended to look in on Chancellor Greymoor at the Ministry of Ceremony.
"The palace sent court robes yesterday," Lily said, pausing at the gate and pointing back toward Ethan's room. "Third-rank formal dress. Do you want them for today?"
Ethan considered. He was a new Official, first real day of proper duties, going to pay his respects to his nominal superior. Showing up in informal clothes would invite commentary he didn't need.
Rule one of laying low: be unremarkable. Be correct. Don't give anyone a reason to look at you twice.
"Yes," he said.
Lily came back inside and retrieved the robes.
She held them up, assessed them, and then very professionally began helping him change into them.
The court formal dress of a third-rank Official was considerably more involved than regular clothing. There were layers, and the layers had an order, and the order mattered. Lily, whose expertise was in swordsmanship rather than court dress etiquette, discovered this quickly.
Her hands were careful and precise in general. Near Ethan's collar, they accidentally made contact with the line of his shoulder, and Lily retracted both hands immediately as though the fabric had burned her.
"I can manage the rest," Ethan offered.
"I can do it," Lily said firmly, in the tone of someone who has decided this is a matter of professional responsibility and is not open to discussion.
The process continued.
Every time her fingertips accidentally made contact with anything that wasn't fabric which happened more often than the geometry of the situation should have allowed Lily withdrew, recalibrated, and started again. Her face had gone a sustained and architectural shade of pink.
When the outer layer finally came off and she was faced with the task of fitting the formal inner robe around someone who had, apparently, spent three years doing nothing except quietly building a physique that made the whole exercise significantly more difficult to focus through, Lily held the next garment in both hands and simply looked at it for a few seconds.
"Please wait," she said, with great composure. "I need to study the arrangement."
"Take your time," Ethan said.
The full process took just over an hour. By the end, both of them were tired in different ways. Ethan's back hurt. Lily had the expression of someone who had completed a trial and wasn't sure if she had passed.
She had also, at no point, looked directly at him.
They stood in the courtyard for a moment, recovering.
"Alright," Ethan said, picking up his cane. "Let's go pay Chancellor Greymoor a visit."
Lily's color had not quite returned to normal. She kept her eyes somewhere slightly above and to the left of Ethan's head.
"Yes," she said. "Of course."