Work for a year, then cheat her way to the top.
Armed with that iron conviction, Li Fei forced herself up the next morning, splashed water on her face, pushed through a half-hour jog, then hurried to the restaurant to grab breakfast before heading out to solicit customers early.
Say what you would about Ms. Roslyn being a little tight with money — she wasn't a bad person at heart. She at least didn't skimp on the food. Whatever was served to customers was available to staff as well. Bread, at least, was truly free-for-all; though if anyone dared go back for a second helping of fried eggs, sausage, or milk… well. Good luck with that.
Li Fei tore a piece of bread and dropped it into her milk, letting it soak soft before scooping it up with a spoon. After a morning run, hungry as she was, this combo was every bit as satisfying as youtiao and soy milk back home. The only thing missing was a splash of soy sauce on the fried egg — soy sauce-glazed eggs were Li Fei's weakness, the kind she'd risk Ms. Roslyn's wrath for just to sneak a third one.
Eight-tenths full, Li Fei patted her stomach with mild regret, stood up, and threw herself into the workday — clearing tables, greeting customers, ushering people in for breakfast… all the way through until afternoon.
"Hey, Easterner. You work at this restaurant?"
A young man with golden hair and striking features had stopped outside on the street, appraising Li Fei with an air of satisfaction as he spoke.
"I'm so sorry, my Common Tongue isn't very good and I'm afraid I can't quite understand you… but would you perhaps be interested in dining with us? Our braised beef and potato stew is very well-reviewed…"
Li Fei kept her professional smile locked in place and recited the line on autopilot.
"Language Comprehension."
The blonde young man smiled with evident interest and suddenly began reciting a rapid, rhythmic incantation. A moment later, azure light began shimmering across Li Fei's body.
"I believe we can now hold a proper conversation," he said, a composed smile on his lips. "I don't believe I caught your name, lovely lady of the East."
Magic!
Li Fei, who had been fighting off a mild drowsiness, snapped to full alertness. She took a subtle half-step back. "I'm just a humble shop girl — there's no need for a distinguished mage of your standing to go to such trouble for someone like me…"
She could hear every word the blonde man said with perfect clarity, and to her own astonishment, found herself able to reply in fluent Common Tongue — despite having only a rudimentary grasp of it moments before.
But this was not the time to marvel at the wonders of magic. Li Fei's mind had already zeroed in on what mattered: a stranger had cast a spell on her without warning and was now asking her name. That meant he wanted something.
As a class beauty who had never lacked for admirers, Li Fei knew trouble when it was walking toward her.
"A trivial cantrip, nothing more," the blonde man said gently, cutting her off and repeating his question. "Your name. Tell me."
Any person with half a brain could tell that Li Fei had already signaled her refusal by changing the subject — but this man clearly had no intention of respecting that.
Back on Earth, Li Fei would have dropped a curt "none of your business" and walked away without a second glance. But here on the continent of Enlos, she didn't dare offend a mage who so obviously came from somewhere important.
So she lowered her head. The curtain of her hair hid the frustration and helplessness in her eyes as she answered honestly: "Li Fei."
"Kenneth Mettis."
The blonde man clearly had no intention of lingering over a penniless girl: "I expect you could use a better position. Something like a senior handmaiden to House Mettis."
It wasn't that Kenneth lacked manners — it was that years of experience had taught him that genuine effort was only warranted for women of Transcendent ability or noble birth. Common girls were another matter entirely.
He'd lost count of how many times this had played out: encounter an interesting girl while out and about, flash the Mettis name, demonstrate a little wealth or a little magic, and watch her fall into line without complaint. It had happened so many times that he'd long since run out of patience for them.
Li Fei: ?
So the mask just comes right off, does it? Is this how all mages on Enlos operate — just wave your name around and expect everyone to fall over themselves?
She didn't know how much weight the name "Mettis" actually carried, but between the retinue trailing behind Kenneth and the arrogance bleeding from his every gesture, this was clearly someone important. Someone she couldn't afford to provoke. Not yet.
Li Fei bit down hard on her back teeth. Inside, she was screaming: the worm turns, you pompous ass — don't you dare look down on a girl just because she's broke right now. Outside, she squeezed out a smile. "I'm sorry, I have no plans to change jobs…"
"You'll want this job."
Unexpectedly, Kenneth didn't press her. He just laughed — unconcerned — and turned to walk away.
One of the attendants trailing behind him stepped forward and held out a seal to Li Fei, looking her up and down with undisguised boldness. "Take the seal. Go to Mettis Manor. Someone there will arrange your position," he said, his tone thick with implication.
Li Fei had never been treated with such casual contempt in her life. Every instinct screamed at her to fling the seal directly at his face — but with the potential fallout of offending a mage in mind, she accepted it without expression.
Endure it. When this lady makes it big, you'll all regret the day.
The attendant quickly rejoined the group, muttered something to one of his colleagues, and the lot of them burst into a loud, brazen laugh — glancing back at Li Fei as they did.
"Mettis…"
The group gradually disappeared into the distance. Li Fei remained rooted to the spot. The smile had long since vanished from her face. Her fist was clenched tight around the seal.
She'd wanted to hurl some cutting parting words at their backs — but she held herself back. She knew that empty threats shouted at the air of someone already gone only made the person shouting them look more pathetic.
A year is too long. I need to find a way to gain EXP faster…
It took a while before Li Fei finally turned back toward the restaurant, expression grim — and only then noticed that her legs were trembling slightly.
Being marked by a powerful figure with malicious intent, a figure who wielded magic — with no strength to her name and no one to turn to for help — left the young girl with more than just indignation. Fear had crept in whether she liked it or not.
The street was still as lively as ever, bustling with passersby. Li Fei felt, inexplicably, more alone than she ever had before.
...
"Fei, you bought new clothes? Not bad, not bad — though personally I think the old skirt was cuter."
The following morning, Ms. Roslyn swayed her generously proportioned figure into the restaurant at a leisurely pace. Li Fei was at her usual post by the door, drumming up customers with her usual smile — but the eye-catching little skirt was nowhere to be seen. Those famously long legs were now fully concealed beneath a pair of trousers.
"Good morning, boss," Li Fei said with a smile, offering no further explanation.
Some days prior, Li Fei had observed that the fortress city of Loxibrook maintained a remarkably high standard of public order. The Crusader patrols and elven archers making constant rounds through the streets had given her a genuine sense of security.
Once she'd personally confirmed that no criminal organizations were extorting civilians or dragging women off the streets, Li Fei had gritted her teeth and bought herself a knee-length skirt — baring the legs her girlfriends back home had always been obsessed with. The effect on her street-soliciting success rate was immediate and dramatic. The one thing that puzzled her slightly was that the customers she brought in tended to be predominantly female.
Encouraged by the results, she'd even hemmed the skirt a little shorter, letting a good few centimeters of thigh show. The money came in faster too.
If this city had been populated exclusively by women, Li Fei would probably have been out there in a swimsuit by now.
But that was yesterday. Kenneth's appearance had forced her to rein it in — better not to attract more complications than she already had. She'd done some careful digging the previous night and gathered useful intelligence: any noble who had dared to throw their weight around in Loxibrook had been personally hanged from a lamppost outside City Hall by the city lord's adopted daughter — a girl of Eastern blood who went by the name Bai Mengtian, reputedly a once-in-four-millennia genius. The news had calmed Li Fei's nerves considerably.
Even the ancient, marquis-blooded House Mettis wouldn't dare openly challenge Loxibrook's laws. Bai Mengtian had strung up more than one duke already, after all.
Which meant the insufferably arrogant noble mage Kenneth Mettis couldn't push things too far. Perhaps she still had enough time to develop her strength before things came to a head…
"There's a bug in my soup!"
A commotion erupted inside the restaurant. Li Fei and Ms. Roslyn rushed in to find a man holding up a wriggling insect on his chopsticks, shouting and displaying it to the rest of the diners. Several people at his table were egging him on.
"Bullshit!"
Roslyn turned red with fury. "I eat here every single day myself, and the whole kitchen's been treated with the Alchemists' Guild cleaning reagent — how in the hell would there be bugs?"
She wasn't lying. Cleaning reagent was no mere dish soap from back on Earth — it was a mystical product, one that only alchemists could brew using specialized materials and techniques. Non-toxic, environmentally harmless, and effective at sterilizing and repelling insects.
"Then where did the bug come from? Stop making excuses."
"Sounds to me like you never used the cleaning reagent at all."
"…"
The troublemakers refused to back down, and the customers who had been about to walk in quietly turned around and left.
"Just you wait!"
Roslyn stormed out through gritted teeth, returned with an elven guard officer, and after a swift interrogation, the lie was exposed and the troublemakers hauled away in irons.
The disturbance — not small, not catastrophic — died down, but the restaurant went quiet afterward.
"Stop standing there gawking. Get out there and bring in customers," Roslyn snapped, still simmering.
"Right away."
The other staff didn't take it too much to heart, plastering on smiles and heading back out to call to passersby. Li Fei, however, felt a faint, creeping unease that she couldn't quite shake.
Noon.
The restaurant was bustling again. Every one of the dozen-odd tables was filled. The din of conversation rose and fell, and Roslyn was behind the counter tallying up the day's earnings, all smiles, the flesh at her sides quivering with each cheerful shake.
Then it happened again.
"Ow — my stomach!"
One of the customers suddenly doubled over, clutching their abdomen.
"Mine too! It must be the food — something's not clean!"
Several others at the same table quickly chimed in, demanding that the proprietress explain herself.
Diners at the neighboring table glanced over, and all at once found their braised tomato beef significantly less appetizing. Cutlery was set down quietly. Within moments, eating had stopped across the entire restaurant.
...
That evening, a drunk stumbled in, overturned a table, bellowed and caused a scene, and then vomited in full view of the room, flooding the air with a nauseating stench.
Li Fei witnessed all of it. The last flicker of wishful thinking inside her went cold and dark.
Kenneth's parting words from yesterday surfaced in her mind:
"You'll want this job."
For once, Roslyn didn't explode in anger.
She kept her face impassive, called in the elven constables to haul away the drunk, cleanly and swiftly comped every customer's bill with an apology to each one, saw them all out, and locked the door.
"It seems… someone has decided to make trouble for this little shop of ours."
With only her own people left inside, Roslyn stopped dancing around it. "Would anyone like to tell me what exactly is going on?"
"It's my fault."
Li Fei didn't hide it. "I quit."
"Everyone else, you can head back for the night."
Roslyn's brow furrowed. She dismissed the rest of the staff, then took Li Fei by the wrist and guided her into a nearby chair. "If you're in trouble, you can tell me. Don't let the size of this place fool you — I know a few people of standing in Loxibrook…"
"Someone from House Mettis wants me to come work for them as a handmaiden," Li Fei said, the corner of her mouth pulling upward. "A senior handmaiden."
Roslyn fell silent.
An old, established noble house. Not someone she could tangle with.
After a long pause, she began carefully: "I can take you to City Hall. They won't stand by and watch a noble family just—"
"There's no need."
Li Fei shook her head.
She had spent enough holidays working part-time jobs and going toe-to-toe with shady temp agencies to have some practical sense of how the world worked. No matter how law-abiding Loxibrook was, no one was going to mobilize official resources over a noble mage ruining the business of one roadside eatery.
Besides, Kenneth hadn't even needed to get his hands dirty. His servants had moved on their own initiative, pressuring her without a single direct order from him.
Roslyn stared at Li Fei for a long moment, then let out a slow sigh. She rose, went behind the counter, came back with ten silver coins in a cloth pouch, and pressed it firmly into Li Fei's hands:
"There's not much I can do for you."
Roslyn knew full well what being forced into service as a "senior handmaiden" meant. If it were her own daughter, she would burn everything she owned to the ground before yielding an inch.
But Li Fei was not her daughter.
"Thank you, boss. I won't forget what you've done for me," Li Fei said. She accepted the coin pouch without protest, gave a small shrug, and added: "Well then… I'll head back now?"
Ms. Roslyn truly was a good person. The weight in her expression was real, and so was the guilt lurking beneath it. Her lips moved — but the words that might have asked Li Fei to stay never came.
It was Li Fei who smiled, rose, and bid Ms. Roslyn a polite goodbye. The moment she pushed through the door and stepped outside, the smile vanished completely. What replaced it was an expression cold and hard as iron.
She returned to her little wooden cabin, took out every coin from the clay jar, and counted them one by one. When she raised her head again, the moonlight caught in her eyes — and there was nothing left in them but absolute resolve.
"It seems I don't have as much time as I thought."
Li Fei glanced out through the drafty window at the night sky — still early — then walked quickly toward the weapons shop, whose lights were still burning.
When she walked back out, of the twenty-four silver coins she'd entered with, almost nothing remained. But in her hands were a reasonably sturdy wooden shield and an iron blade sharper than any kitchen knife.
Sequence 9 was the threshold of the Transcendent path — a goal countless common people could see from a distance but never touch.
But Sequence 9 was not monolithic. There was a hierarchy of strength even among them.
On the continent of Enlos, it was not unheard of for a burly farmhand to brain the weakest Sequence 9 combat unit with a hoe — creatures like Moonlight Wolves or Skeletons were the bottom of the barrel.
And Li Fei had done her research early: just outside Loxibrook's walls lay a wolf den — a Moonlight Wolf colony.
Her original plan had been to stay calm, earn money, build herself up quietly, and one day descend on that den from a position of overwhelming power. Unfortunately, fate had other ideas. Kenneth Mettis — acting on nothing more than a passing whim — had backed her into a corner with no way out.
"Since time is not on my side, then let it be a gamble with everything on the line."
For reasons she couldn't quite explain, Li Fei didn't lose a single minute of sleep that night.
The next morning, Li Fei breathed in the cool, faintly crisp air, wrestled down the anxiety coiled in her chest, picked up her blade and shield, and walked out of the city alone.
____
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