Earth.
The battered pickup kicked up clouds of dust along the highway.
It raced onward, then pulled to a steady stop beside a little wooden cabin at the edge of the Azure Coastline.
Olifia jumped out.
"You two know how to live. You even found yourselves a place with a view like this."
She looked around as she spoke.
"What, should we have gone off and died?" Li Bai said.
He sat in the yard before the cabin, brush in hand. Its tip moved like dragons and snakes as he wrote at a furious pace.
A Gourd sat on the tea table beside him.
It had been full of wine. Half was gone, and half remained.
"Mostly, it's a shame you're stuck here keeping him company."
Olifia spoke.
Li Bai's brush paused. Then he burst out laughing. "An Ancient God who can enter Earth without signing a Contract, and you can't even kick him out—are you getting nervous too?"
"He's an Earthling," Olifia said with a sigh. "Heaven knows how he became an Ancient God. Even my Contract can't drive him away."
"Isn't that nice? I remember when the agreement was reached, plenty of people asked him to go up to Heaven and help. They made it sound so lovely," Li Bai said.
Olifia's expression darkened further.
Since Xu Yuan's return, the various factions had gradually discovered that he had the body of an Ancient God.
—And that the Contract could not expel him.
If Li Bai had not threatened to stop granting godhood to anyone—and to deny those already divine any further rise in Divine Office—the factions might really have brought out their ancestral treasures to try their hand against Xu Yuan.
—Or found some way to subdue him.
Xu Yuan had been shrewd about it.
Since coming back,