Ever find yourself dealing with one of those tiny flies that just won’t go away, no matter how you try to avoid it, or wave it away…So you’re first to just sort of do the thing, and swat it out of existence, because you’re a…whatever you are…and it’s a fly, and the difference in scale between the two of you, is like the difference between a man and a mountain. Yeah, that’s sort of what my morning was like.

There were these space monsters, they looked like massive flatfish, with countless feathery-tongues instead of scales, and miniature stars for eyes. They’re harmless for the most part…Well, harmless for immortals. For mortals, they exude, a troublesome form of, radiation that turns folk into soup, and then use their feather-tongues to lick up the resulting mess off of the planet's surface. They’re a damn nuisance, is what they are, but they aren’t all that strong, so most immortals, or even just the will of a planet, can just sort of shoo them away.

Anyway, a bunch of these “soul-melter mega-flatfish”, showed up in Nine-Clover’s solar system. I don’t know what the immortals that are supposed to be directly responsible for Nine-Clover were doing, that they allowed these dangerous pests to get so close to the planet. Since I was there, and I had a fondness for Nine-Clover, I decided to deal with the creatures myself. First trying to shoo them away, and then swatting them out of existence when for some darn reason they ended up being overly persistent.

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No sooner had I finished dealing with those pesky mega-flatfish, that the good Cultivator Yang Ning came running out, sword in hand. Yeah, that guy’s still around. To his credit, he’s done a good job of not being an obvious pain in the ass. Yet, it “was” still a little annoying to have him hanging around, and I suspected that part of his good work in not getting on my nerves was him avoiding the line that would allow me to bluntly send him away.

“Senior!” said Yang Ning.

“Hm?” said I. Wondering what the guy wanted.

“Where are the space-beasts?” said Yang Ning.

“Oh…They’re dead,” I said. Frowning. Wondering if our good Yang Ning was blowing smoke, because it should have been clear that there were no more mega-flatfish in Nine-Clover’s sky.

“D-, Dead?” said Yang Ning. Seeming to deflate oddly enough. His genuine confusion made me confused in turn.

“Yeah…I mean. Do you see any up there, my dude?” I said.

“Ah…No…I just…Sorry, senior…” said Yang Ning.

Now I felt bad, because once I stopped being so grouchy, I realized that in Yang Ning’s mind creatures like the mega-flatfish didn’t just die. It was more probable for them to somehow be cloaking themselves, than for the creatures to somehow have died with little to no fanfare.

“Don’t worry about it, kiddo. I know you came out to help…I’m just in a bad mood after having swat down all those flies first thing in the morning…” I said.

“You…You mean you killed them, senior?”

“Well, who else was gonna kill them?… The incompetent immortal rulers of this world had already let them get this close…” I said. My brow furrowed as I once again began to wonder if the man was taking the piss.

“I…I see,” said Yang Ning.

I sighed, feeling a bit like I’m bullying some overly earnest kid, despite the fact that the old man is well, an old man…At least by, mortal standards. Having lived for multiple centuries. Then I heard myself say,

“Well, since you’re here anyway, do you want to spar or something?”

The wide-eyed, plainly ecstatic look on Yang Ning’s face made it hard to walk back that half-hearted offer, so that ended up being what I ended up doing for the next few days. It probably could have stopped at day one, but well, I wouldn’t have offered it if I'd had absolutely no desire to test the measure of this young/old good-natured punk. And yeah, by the end of it, I was actually kind of enjoying myself. Yet, at the very beginning, I was far from happy, because I’d already had to do some unplanned exercise. Now I was going to do even more unplanned exercise.

Funnily enough, the kid ended up having some serious chops. Which I guess shouldn’t have been that big a surprise. I mean, he “was” the elder of a major sect in the Nine-Clover world after all. However, in my defense, sometimes the public standard is actually distressingly low.