Book 3: Chapter 14: The Western Road
After their short break, during which Lifen slept almost non-stop, Sen had pushed hard for a few more days. Then, he started noticing the bodies. He didn’t point them out to Lifen because there was no benefit to that, but he’d formed a working theory about what was happening. He hoped that he was right. If he was, he’d be able to put away a vague, gnawing guilt that had been working on him since they’d decided to leave instead of going back to find Lo Meifeng. Unfortunately, he might also be wrong, which meant that he didn’t dare make it any easier to find them. Instead, he focused more on making sure that he found good places that were well off the road to set up camp. He took his time setting up the best formations he could to hide them.
While the repetition with the formations could prove tedious, Sen became increasingly adept with them. He even started having insights into how to make them better. He’d have to have a long discussion with Uncle Kho about formation theory when they next saw each other. While it had never been a particular focus of his education, Sen started working with offensive formations as well. He was almost certain that all those corpses meant that there were people searching for them. While he had a lot of faith in his obscuring formations, he didn’t see a good reason not to hedge his bets. If anyone managed to breach the obscuring formation, they’d get to enjoy a face full of fire and lightning.
He and Lifen also spent more time than necessary studying Sen’s map. While they poured over the map, and Sen started taking notes on the actual distances between locations he’d been, there weren’t really that many choices. The continent was vast, but poorly connected by a frustratingly small number of roads. Beyond those roads were the wilds, more often than not, and every so often there would be cities. Sen and Lifen were slowly, but surely, approaching the minor city of Heavens Virtue. Sen had no idea why it was named that, and his teachers had all shrugged at the question. Master Feng and Auntie Caihong had both been there in recent years and neither recalled anything particularly divine about the place.
“Try not to put too much stock in the names of cities,” Master Feng had said. “They tend to fall into two categories. Either they describe something specific about the city, like an event or a natural feature, or they reference something so obscure that even the people who live there don’t know why it’s called that. You can drive yourself half-mad trying to figure it out.”
Once they got to the city, though, there were only three things to do. They could stay for a while, which both of them agreed was a monumentally stupid plan. So, that was out. They could follow the road south, which was a possibility. Or they could take the road west toward the inner continent. Lifen was curious about everything, so she didn’t have a strong opinion one way or the other. Sen was increasingly convinced that they should go west.
“What’s to the west?” Lifen asked when told her as much.
“Nothing specific,” he admitted, “but I’ve been traveling south ever since Tide’s Rest. It’s not much of a deception, but there’s a chance they’ll assume I’ve got a particular destination in the south somewhere. They may work harder to look for us on the road south. If we go west, we might throw them off a little.”
It was thin reasoning, but Lifen was content enough to go along with it. She seemed agreeable to just about anything that might throw off pursuit even a little bit. So, they made that their plan. The closer they got to Heaven’s Virtue, though, the more cautious Sen became. There was more traffic on the road, both in the evenings and at night. That made it more difficult for them to cover ground quickly. There were also more villages and small towns. While Sen wasn’t especially worried about those, where there were people, there were dogs. While most dogs seemed like Sen, it didn’t stop them from barking up a storm when Sen and Lifen passed by in the night. It wouldn’t take many stories of a pair traveling at night to tip off the demonic cultivators. Even with all of those obstacles, they did eventually find themselves looking at the walls of Heavens Virtue from a distance in the dawn light.
“We should wait until there’s more traffic from the villages and then join them,” said Sen.
Lifen caught right on. “We’ll be less suspicious if we blend in with them.”
“Exactly. It’s certainly less suspicious than wandering around outside the walls at night. We’ll get onto the western road and then find somewhere to camp.”
“We should think about stopping in one of these villages and finding a market. I don’t know how big that storage ring of yours is, but I don’t want to run out of food on the road.”
Sen didn’t think it would be a problem, but he nodded. Stocking up now made sense. While there had been a fair number of villages and towns all the way down the coast so far, he didn’t know that would hold true on the western road. Even if he thought he could probably scavenge enough fruit and hunt enough meat, that took time. With no better strategy to hand, staying on the move was the best defense they had. Plus, strangers would draw less attention in villages this close to the city. With a tentative plan in place, they found a sheltered spot off the road that let them watch the traffic coming and going. At first, it was just a lone farmer with an ox-driven cart every now and then. Once true morning broke, though, they saw more farmers and, eventually, a caravan rolled by. Once the caravan had gone by and there was a little distance, Sen pulled Lifen with him onto the road. They kept up a fast walk until they were nearing the back of the caravan. The caravan guards eyed them, but seemed to relax when they realized that the two young travelers didn’t mean to get too close. Just close enough that everyone might enjoy a little mutual defense if bandits or a spirit beast showed up.
The caravan eventually passed through a village and stopped to do a little light trading. Sen and Lifen took advantage of the added confusion the caravanners caused to do some basic shopping for food items. Sen was careful not to spend too much money at any one place. Better to leave the sellers with a hazy recollection of a boy buying enough for two or three meals than a clear memory of a young man who bought out their entire stock. It slowed things down a bit, but Sen managed to accumulate enough food in his storage ring to keep them going for a few weeks. By then, the traffic toward the city was heavy enough that it didn’t take any real effort to blend in. They just became two more bodies drifting toward the city for their own reasons.
Sen gave serious consideration to bypassing the city entirely and just walking around the outside of the wall, but he worried that would make them too conspicuous. So, they endured the long wait at the gate, the obligatory bribe to the guards, and then walked into the city. Sen had his hiding skill working as hard as possible to avoid any interest from unfriendly cultivators, but he worried about Lifen. He had started having her practice again once he’d slowed their pace, but she was nowhere near ready to face off against another cultivator. If it was just trading pointers, then she would no doubt survive with nothing injured but her pride. Unfortunately, there was no way to know that was how it would go until after everything was all but finished.
Sen felt himself tense several times when he felt a spiritual sense wash over their general vicinity, but no one bothered them. Either the sects were more restrained in this city, or the cultivators weren’t interested in bothering someone who was only a qi condensing cultivator. It was a minor bit of good fortune, but Sen was happy to take it. They didn’t linger in the city, only stopping at one market that was literally on the way to the western gate. It let Sen grab a few things that hadn’t been available in the village, like sesame oil, and a few spices. Lifen bought a few things, but Sen didn’t pry into what she’d gotten. He suspected it was a few small luxuries, and he could hardly begrudge her those. Luxury of any kind was scarce when traveling between the cities.
The passage out of the city was even less eventful than the passage into the city had been. The guards were almost wholly uninterested in people who were leaving the city of their own free will. Those people were fundamentally not the guards’ problem. The road west was almost identical to the road they had been traveling on to the south. Sen didn’t know exactly what was beneath, but the surface was made of stone blocks that looked to have been sealed together somehow. When he’d pushed his senses down into the earth a few times, he had sensed layers of other things, such as crushed stone and what felt like tamped earth. He couldn’t pretend to understand their construction, but they did seem to make for durable roads. He had yet to see any serious damage to any of the surface stones beyond some basic weathering. Even if they were fewer and farther between than he might have preferred, he was grateful that the roads existed at all. They made travel faster and easier.
As the miles between them and the city grew, Sen relaxed a bit. He wasn’t certain that they managed to avoid detection, but he hadn’t seen anything that gave him pause. Almost at the very moment that he was going to let out a relieved breath, someone stepped out from the trees and gave them a considering look.
“It looks like I won that bet,” said Lo Meifeng.
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