After getting off a taxi half an hour later, the two arrived at an inconspicuous building. It looked like your standard walled home in suburban Japan, which probably looked like your standard home in the suburbs of every other industrialized country with the addition of a stone wall surrounding the premises. A nameplate usually hung near the gates to the walls, but on this house, it was replaced with a sign that read, “Anti-Arrogant Young Master Association.”

Riku pushed open the gates and pulled out a key from who-knows-where. He walked up to the door and inserted the key into the lock, twisting it. Pushing open the door, he motioned at Chiaki to follow him. 

Once she entered, Riku locked the door behind them. Chiaki made to take off her shoes, but he patted her shoulder and said, “Leave your shoes on. We can teleport from here.”
Riku then grabbed her arm and pulled out yet another key. He slammed it into the wall, and to Chiaki’s surprise, it sank in. She touched the beige wall; it was solid. 

And with a twist to the key, Chiaki saw the familiar genkan of the Shinosaki ancestral home. 

She couldn’t conceal her shock, while Riku was nonchalant.

He asked, “Hey, can you give me the blank posters and markers?”

Since he had no storage ring, Chiaki had put all the drawing materials into hers. 

Still in a daze, she silently handed over the requested items.

Riku made another request, “Oh, also, can you put up the completed posters?”

“Oh sure…” she replied, “Wait.” Remembering what was drawn on those posters, Chiaki snapped out of her reverie and shot Riku an incredulous look. “Hell no. I am not going to put porn all over the house.”

He pleaded, “Oh, come on. We’ve come all this way, and you’re stopping now?”

“Yep.” Her reply was curt.

Riku frowned. “You’re crushing on the elder Kurei sister, right? I can get you two to go out on a date if you help me with this.”

She became visibly excited. “Wait, hold on, seriously!? Why didn’t you tell me you could do that earlier?”
He shrugged. He seemed to be shrugging a lot today. “I did. You just didn’t believe me.”
Her mood instantly dampened. “Right, right. There’s no way that the student council vice president would know you.”

“Well, what’s more believable: me making a portal into Rakuyo or me knowing your school’s vice prez?” Riku once again gesticulated his indifference through a shrug.

Her face lit up again. “True! Okay, I’ll do the best job of putting the posters up! I guarantee that people will see panties no matter what angle they look at the house from! I’m the world’s best porn poster! You can count on me!”

Riku chuckled as he watched Chiaki speed off outside.

Taking off his shoes, he quickly walked to his room, smugly laughing when he passed by the living room, just loud enough so that the person inside could hear. His laugh only grew louder once he imagined the grimace that his grandmother’s face would have. 

"I'm back!" he gloated, happy as a buzzing bee.

 

*

 

Barely an hour passed when Chiaki came barging into Riku’s room, bearing the worst of bad news.

“What?” Riku said, irritatedly. Her loud interruption had caused his hand to slip and a poster to be ruined. There was only three hours left until daybreak, and he was pressed for time, having only completed a bit over a hundred posters.

Chiaki sighed. “Grandma came and ripped all eighty or so posters I put out. Now she’s standing outside to guard the premises.”

His shock scared all of his annoyance out of his system. His eyes opened wide, and his voice eclipsed into a yell. “What!?”

His grandmother was literally at the strongest point a mortal human being could possibly be, a fifty farts cultivator, and she seemed to be hell-bent on stopping them from winning.

It was hopeless. Even if he managed to double his drawing speed, he only bought 350 poster sheets. And even if he somehow got another fifty posters, his grandmother would move to rip them up as soon as he posted them.

“Let’s give up. We can’t fight her.” Chiaki sounded defeated.

Riku only laughed. “Good, good, good. Who said we can’t fight her?”
Chiaki shot a doubtful glance at him. “I did.”

Suddenly, the aura of a peak 10th stage Severing Mortality (fifty farts) cultivator poured out of Riku’s body. She felt the spiritual pressure that a higher-level cultivator would naturally impose on her course through her veins, and an instinctive fear embraced her. She was frozen in place, unable to move, unable to think.

And in a deep and slow voice, fully enunciating every word, Riku spoke, “Well, think again.”

Hearing no response, Riku then realized that the subconscious suppression he was emitting didn’t allow her to “think again” or even think much at all. He retracted his oppressive presence. 

Once a certain little kettle frog regained thought, her first emotion was confusion. She rubbed her eyes and spoke in her native language, “The fuck?”

Riku snorted. “If she wants to use her cultivation, then so shall I!”

Chiaki quickly verified that the aura Riku was letting out actually was equal to his grandmother’s. She then checked again before running downstairs and out the building to take a look at Kikue. 

Kikue was standing outside the door laughing, “Given up yet? Are you coming down to ask about the date of the wedding?”

Chiaki did not reply. She just measured the aura of the elderly woman. It was indeed the same. In fact, Riku’s aura seemed to be slightly stronger.

Utterly stupefied, she rushed back into the house and up the stairs. Panting, she slammed Riku’s door open once again. “You’re sixteen, right? We were born on the same day, right?”

He nodded. “What about it?”

“How the fucking fuck did you— the student prez is only a year older than us and has a cultivation of first grade Nascent Soul (thirty-one farts). She’s considered the number one cultivation genius since the advent of modern cultivation! What the hell!” 

Riku shrugged for the nth time today. “What can I say? I’m just more talented than her.”

“But you literally watch anime all day? Since when have you cultivated!?”

He sent the “¯\_(ツ)_/¯” emote physically. “It’s not like I want to cultivate, you know? But when I breathe, my body just, you know, does it for me. Look.”

Riku ignited some of the spiritual energy, or qi, around him. And indeed, as he breathed, she could see a large amount of energy washing into his body, speeding around his meridians, veins for qi, and entering his dantian, the storage organ for qi, within the span of a second. 

Chiaki felt her common sense turning over and committing suicide. For most people, cultivation consisted of meditating and doing breathing techniques for several hours to complete a single rotation of spiritual energy around the meridians and into the dantian. It took a lot of focus and even a slight disturbance could ruin the previous hours of hard work. Chiaki was actually quite talented and could complete a rotation in a bit more than half an hour.

But here was a deviant who did not have to meditate or be in deep focus whatsoever. He just breathed in, and by the time he breathed out, his cultivation would increase.

“Fucking hell,” Chiaki muttered. But in the next moment, she realized something, and her common sense rose from the dead to fight back.

In a louder voice, she asked, “Okay, so why do you have a darkened forehead and dark bags under your eyes? That’s a clear indication of the impurities from using pills to cultivate! Why would you need pills if your talent is as high as you say it is!”

She found a logical flaw in Riku’s story: while pills could increase cultivation much faster than without, using too many would leave toxic residue in one’s body. Hence, it was better to refrain if one had the talent. And Riku clearly had the talent! So, why would Riku have the signs of pill overdosing if he was as good at cultivation as he claimed? There was clearly something wrong here!

Riku repeated his favorite action: shrugging. “Well, the dark bags under my eyes are from staying up all night to watch anime every day.”

Given the current time, Chiaki would likely have the same bags under her eyes by morning. Even so, she pressed on. “Maybe that’s true, but what about your darkened forehead? Nobody’s forehead becomes black if they’re sleep deprived!”

“Oh, my forehead,” Riku put his hand onto his head and grabbed the darkened patch of “skin,” peeling it off. “It’s supposed to be good for your skin.”

Riku’s appearance changed slightly after he took the forehead mask off, but Chiaki was too stunned to notice. And after a second, he put it back on, and his looks reverted to normal.

“Alright, now that you have no more questions, let’s go back outside. I’ll beat off Grandma, and we can figure things out from there. Not too hard to understand, right? Let’s go, let's go.”

Riku made to head off, but Chiaki stopped him. 

“Wait, wait, I still have a shit ton of questions to ask!”

He sighed. “One more. That’s it. We’re kinda pressed for time here.”

She thought for a moment then asked, “Why do you hide your cultivation? Is it so that the clan has a hidden trump card?”

It was perhaps a tradition of cultivation families to maintain secret weapons—the nuclear bombings at the end of the second World War would likely have been much less effective had the Japanese been prepared for them. Following this logic, having a few aces up one’s sleeve was never a bad idea.
But, Riku just gave her a weird look. “Of course not. I hide my cultivation so that my parents give me more time to watch anime! Just imagine how many responsibilities they’d push on me if they knew!” He paused before adding, “Remember to keep this an absolute secret. Tell nobody. If you do, the world might even be destroyed… Hah. Anyways, let’s go.”

Chiaki wanted to say something, but Riku shushed her.

And so, with a conflicted expression on her face, she quietly followed him out.