C.L. Robison

25. You Are No Noble Scion

EMPRESS

I'll admit to being a bit surprised when my new roommate turned out to be the very same crazy girl who'd challenged me within seconds of entering the outer sect. Not as surprised as she was, though. She yowled like a feral cat and dropped into a fighting stance.

"Whoa! Chill! I come in peace!" I shouted.

Her eyes flitted over to Lin's luminous form and, with some reluctance, Zileng rose out of her fighting stance and tossed her hair - not that there was much to toss....

24. A Multilevel Marketing Scheme

EMPRESS

Tankano Ichika's introduction to the Starry Waters Sect was not an especially auspicious one. First off, the core disciple had marched up the stairs with no regard for poor young Hana, who was scarcely a third of the way through the first realm. While she was certainly more hale than she had been mere weeks before, she was still barely past the average moral. Not bad, considering where she'd started, but those were clearly fartoo many steps for her.

How did the se...

60. On Persistence (I)

Shadows

Success is the intersection of talent and persistence.
-Old Arkavian saying

Success has brothers and cousins aplenty, but failure is an orphan.
-Tactonius, from Pontifications

Nima tossed an armful of reeking 'darks' into the laundry water, her black hair plastered to her neck and cheeks, sweat blotting through her own clothes.

"I don't understand why you hate me so much," she grunted before turning the crank to drop the laundry into the...

59. The Society of Night (V)

Shadows

While I teamed up with Mailyn whenever we had pairs contests, that was only about half of them. The other half of the 'gambits' we did with the Society of Night involved outright theft. Our job on these nights was to break into establishments without damaging anything and to steal as much of value as possible - that's to say we were straightforward cat burglars. Each new Sneak paired with a more experienced sneak and each member of the pair took turns either acting as lookout or...

58. The Society of Night (IV)

Shadows

It was fortunate that our survival class had moved to the forested hills of Alhred Island, because otherwise I'd have been spending far too much time in the dark…

Twice a week, I acted as Philo's assistant in the garden, learning about all of the plants with alchemical and medical uses, as well as a little bit about how to help the plants grow. With the right combination of alchemy, artifice, and magecraft, you could get over a year's yield out of a plot in less than a m...

Ongoing Connectivity Issues + Lynn Before & After Pics

Hi, everybody!

I'm sorry if I've been uncommunicative lately - I was staying with my parents for a few weeks, and their place in the middle of nowhere has very spotty internet. Now I've returned home and found that my internet service shut off my old wireless router and sent the new one to the wrong address, so it may be a few days before I get that whole mess straightened out.

In the meanwhile, posts should continue mostly uninterrupted. I've discovered that the local university ...

Bonus Content: Map of EMPRESS

The following map is a tentative map of the environs of They Shall Call Me EMPRESS that I made using Wonderdraft. The early chapters take place in and around Emerald Vale, Rushing Rivers, and the southern tip of the Heaven's Abyss Mountains. Before too long, the story will be moving to Lake Lhim City well to the south.

57. The Society of Night (III)

Shadows

Before I proceed any further, perhaps I should explain a bit about the Perdita Free Collegium's 'Societies'. While our school has an official core curriculum and numerous electives, both of which can be quite 'hands-on', you will never become a Greycloak, let alone a Shadow, by classes alone. Instead, Sneaks and Greycloaks must join however many of the thirteen school-sanctioned Societies they wish to join. These cover the full gamut of topics, from the Paper Knights, who practi...

23. A Student's Duel

EMPRESS

Chu Zileng had been deprived of her twin brother, Zilong, for three long, intolerable months. There were times that she wanted to curse the boy and his damnable talent, but getting promoted to the Starry Waters's inner sect was always a forgone conclusion, and what they'd both strived for. Together.

It was rare enough that there were two talents in a family - even among cultivation legacies like theirs, the likelihood of a younger sibling having a talent for cultivation wa...

56. The Society of Night (I)

Shadows

I am dark, but darker still
is she whose bed I share;
my lady of the midnight will
gift me her hidden prayer.
-Alscius Calvioli, from Twelve Liaisons

Aldo became a Sneak a week after Mailyn and I did - eight days, to be exact, which meant that it was a Turnsday… an even day, on which we had our Basic Seamanship class, and so Rose Argent made good on her promise to bring Aldo to class. He arrived to fight, flail, and tie knots with his fellow Sneaks a...

22. The Wagon Rolled On

Empress

The wagon rolled on and on.

I guess the empire is pretty big, maybe even as big as the United States… maybe even bigger, like Russia or something… because it took forever to get from Emerald Vale to Lake Lhim City. The horses that drew our wagon along weren't very fast, which certainly didn't help.

At their usual plodding pace, the horses made eight or nine miles per hour, and we stopped twice each day for two hours so they could rest, meaning in the cou...

21. It's In the Tabloids a Lot

They Shall Call Me EMPRESS

Ken died.

No, Ken was murdered. Cold-blood Ieyasu fucking murdered him, shattered him into a thousand frozen pieces. He'd died, but his battle with the bastard had bought us precious seconds. He'd died and saved the three of us, buying enough time for the imperial inspector to arrive and arrest Ieyasu and his men.

He'd even clamped a nifty brass bracelet over Ieyasu's wrist, apparently some sort of magical qi-disturber for restricting a cultivator'...

2. The Mystery of the Old Barn Mushrooms

Tales From The Guild

"You haven't got your Class yet," Theresa Dyne stated.

"I have," Aly insisted. "I'm a ~Fighter~… you saw me do a Quick-Draw just last week. You yourself said I'm a lot better in practice the past few days, too."

"I don't know what I saw," the wisp insisted.

It was late afternoon and the two of them were alone on the guild's practice field, a clay tile field about half the size of a rugby pitch. Depending on what you were...

55. Sneaks (V)

Believe it or not, I've never been fond of combat. Competition? Definitely. And sparring, even very vigorous sparring? That can be great fun. But combat is, at its essence, the use of force against somebody who will cause you harm, often deadly harm, if you don't succeed. The only time that combat isn't terrifying is when you so thoroughly outclass your opponent that their odds of success are a mouse's cough in a gale. This is why we train.

Our Basic Combat class was held out in the dus...

20. Tempest of the Cold Heart

"Is this is bad as I think it is?" I whispered.

"Worse," Monkey Yang whispered back.

To date, I'd never come across a cultivator who was much stronger than me, cultivation-wise. When I'd first met Ichika, she was a few steps into the third realm while I was at the peak of body-refinement - that, apparently, made for a noticeable difference in power, but not the several-fold difference of a full realm. I could tell almost immediately that Cold-blood Ieyasu was stronger than any of ...

19. Dressed Like a Common Trollop

It was the damnedest thing that Ken had ever seen, and he'd seen quite a bit in his time.

Monkey's plan was simple enough - get the girls to lure the bastard in by dressing like prostitutes, and then give him the chance to surrender (as honor demanded) once he was entrapped. If he offered the slightest hesitation or resistance, they'd kill the poor bastard.

Ken didn't feel good about killing folks with no provocation, even the Dark Riders, who were pretty much a known quantity. Id...

18. Knock the Rest of the Teeth Right Out of His Face

Big Shilei wrinkled his nose in disgust. "This smells even worse than Lynn's 'truffle earth smoothie'."

"Hey, I put a lot of work into that! And your smoothies!" I huffed. With Granny's help, I'd spent the better part of three hours crouched over a foul-smelling cauldron while Granny P purified ingredients in her tiny qi furnace before passing them to me and telling me how to add them to the mixture. Most of the time, I could have guess just based on the qi rising off the stuff...

17. I Think the Medical Term is 'Shart'

Granny P had given us a long list of ingredients…

I should clarify - she gave Ichika a long list of ingredients. My cultivation-enhanced memory was phenomenal and I was making real strides in learning Yu characters, but there were something like 2,000 essential characters that you needed to know to be reasonably literate, another 4,000 to be considered reasonably educated, plus another 10,000 or so just for shits and giggles, and finally the secret 'soul syl...

54. Sneaks (IV)

I almost died in the Largotto for the second time, but I did not die. I should hope that much was obvious.

Here's a little-known fact about mantis-sharks: their barbed pedipalps are lined with little stingers capable of injecting an anesthetic and paralytic toxin (apparently also an aphrodisiac to other mantis-sharks). This is why mantis-sharks are considered among the deadliest open ocean predators despite there being other creatures many times their size - they recognize humans as pre...

53. Sneaks (III)

We met up with Rose and the students in our class at the little Collegium pier just south of the Step Wharf. It was a small pier, well-suited to rowboats and sandolos but barely able to manage the two small sloops that Rose had secured for our class. They were single-masted ships, perhaps seven meters long and two and a half wide with nothing to propel them but a headsail and a mainsail - Rose explained this to us as she demonstrated the two lashes we would be using for our exercises today. 2022-05-31 22:13:51 +0000 UTC View Post

52. Sneaks (II)

My resistance to being nicknamed 'princess' just about guaranteed that it was my nickname for my first few weeks as a Sneak. Princess Vix, they would call me, and I'd try to ignore it. When our bunk boss, Nafiah, heard folks calling me that, he would frown and tell them that they weren't being very nice. And that was about the extent of his intervention - in Nafiah's opinion, as long as a bunk member wasn't seriously injuring you, any rivalries or disputes between us could be settled amongst ...

51. Sneaks (I)

Novices of the Mysterium Thaumica spend their days in rigorous recitation and their evenings in devoted study. It is said the average student spends twelve hours a day in courses or study six days a week. Sneaks at the Perdita Free Collegium spend but four hours in class each day, much of which is spent in games and contests. However counterintuitive, the latter approach seems to be at least as effective.
-Signor Jovani Kronia, from the Discourse on Thaumaturgical Education

...

50. A Real Selenite Princess (IV)

"Vix… we had a deal," Mr. Hianchi said. His dark mustache quivered above his upper lip, and with more than a hint of annoyance, he tapped on the accruing pile of material for me to translate. "When customers contract this work, they expect timely results."

"Yes, Mr. Hianchi," I said demurely, but my eyes had a glower I couldn't hide. "You don't pay me for work that I don't do…"

"That's not the point, Vix. Our deal was that you were to keep doing translation work until the new ...

Sneak Peek - Unreleased Story

elow is the first chapter to a story that I started but never released or finished beyond the first volume. I may continue it in the future, especially if there's popular demand for it. It's my first attempt at a LitRPG story, and it was a lot of fun. Ultimately, I got distracted by other projects and wandered away from it. I'm releasing the first chapter for free, and more chapters will be available for $10 patrons. If the story proves popular, I'll eventually resume writing it and it will s...