Qian Ling froze, and she felt Mu Min come to a complete stop behind her. Both women perched on the outstretched branch of the pine, but the tree barely trembled under their qi-controlled weight.
Though they were both radiantly beautiful — Qian Ling obviously more so than Mu Min, as the moon’s brightness shines so wonderfully against the dark of the night — they had contracted their qi into their body and moved with the silent grace of a cat’s shadow.
Nothing should be able to detect them.
Yet despite their stealth, the wandering cultivator who dared assault her junior now stood in the center of a crossroads, pointing directly at her.
Qian Ling’s heart ran cold.
She knew she was hidden, but he stared directly at her!
They followed him all day and well into the night without him ever indicating he saw them.
Until now.
Could it be a fluke?
The heavens were certainly capricious at times, but his aim seemed too accurate.
Then the stranger’s finger dropped to his waist. He paced around the crossroads, chuckling to himself with some amusement.
The moment of panic passed, and Qian Ling felt a rising blush in her cheeks. After stalking her prey, she’d felt like a little kid sneaking candies when he looked in her direction.
Mu Min leaned forward to whisper into Qian Ling’s ear.
“Is he daring us to attack?” she asked in a voice softer than mist.
Qian Ling opened her mouth to say something dismissive, but stopped. Mu Min could be correct. Had their enemy just called them out?
“What cultivation level do you think he is at?” Qian Ling asked.
“There’s no way he’s Foundation Establishment, Young Mistress,” Mu Min responded confidently. “From his pace, I estimate he is in the 5th stage of Qi Condensation. That would explain how he defeated Ren Feilong, but also how we’ve managed to follow him.”
Qian Ling nodded at the response. While she was in the 7th stage of Qi Condensation, Mu Min was in the 5th stage of the same realm. They were both twenty-seven and had a promising chance of breaking through to Foundation Establishment before their dantians calcified at thirty.
Their power was great when compared to mortals, or even fledgling cultivators of the Qi Condensation realm, such as her junior. Still, her power had limits. The spirit beasts in Twisted Pine Valley could well test them; in fact, she was counting on those same monsters making this wandering cultivator their prey.
It was annoying that they hadn’t yet done so.
“I agree with your assessment, Mu Min,” Qian Ling said. “But please don’t call me Young Mistress.”
Mu Min’s expression remained as placid as ever.
“I’m only being appropriately deferential, Young Mistress.”
Despite her rigid nature, Mu Min’s assessments were always accurate. Her sharp mind was part of why Qian Ling loved having her around.
The dark-haired cultivator was never wrong, but… she was guessing right now, since neither of them could directly feel the stranger’s cultivation.
It had vexed them all day.
Could he have lowered his qi to appear as less of a threat? It was possible, but that wouldn’t explain his speed. Why move at the speed of a mid-realm Qi Condensing cultivator when a more powerful movement technique could have him racing faster than they could follow? A Foundation Establishment cultivator could even power a flying sword, and if he moved through the sky, there was no chance they would have pursued him.
It was illogical.
Even if they aspired for immortality, cultivators almost always moved as fast as possible. All the wandering cultivators she’d encountered tended to flaunt their power rather than hide it.
Appearing weak in such a dangerous place made no sense.
No, she decided, there was no deception. He was simply another arrogant fool who would feed the spirit beasts in these pines. That would pay him back for harming her junior!
Still, Qian Ling detected no beasts with her spiritual senses and was about to ask Mu Min about it…
A sudden instinct made her stop on a branch and turn to face the way they’d come — back in the direction the stranger pointed.
Her qi empowered eyes could part the darkness as though it were daytime, and for a moment, she saw nothing but trees.
Had her instincts led her astray?
But no, she felt it again.
A faint, malevolent plucking on the fine strings of qi she trailed behind herself like threads of silk. Guiding Thread was a useful, if draining technique, that assisted in finding her way back and ensuring nobody snuck up —
One of her strings snapped.
Something powerful and angry burst through her lines of detection, and then she spotted movement.
Pale shapes blurred between the trees like flakes of snow.
Qian Ling’s heartbeat picked up beyond the calm pace she’d maintained the whole time they’d been running.
“Howling Spirit Monkey,” she hissed to Mu Min. “There’s a whole troop!”
“I’ll hide us!” Mu Min said, already drawing on her qi reserves.
And then, as though the distance mattered not, the spirit beasts were upon them, swinging down from the branches above with their fangs bared.
Six of them, with their red eyes blazing like coals against their white fur. Each of them four feet tall and moving with the speed of a spirit beast’s cultivation.
Qian Ling spun out her qi threads to fend off the monkeys. She sent out razor-sharp wires to hook around their limbs and drag them off balance, sending two crashing down to the forest floor.
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The other four dodged her technique.
Though the Howling Spirit Monkeys were only the equivalent of 1st Stage Qi Condensing, they were strong, fast, and nimble. Their hides were too tough for her threads to easily dismember, so she moved to the defensive, using her strings to draw the monkeys away from Mu Min while the dark-haired cultivator completed her technique.
Though she’d thrown some to the ground, most of the troop pursued her easily. The vertical environment of the tree branches favored the monkeys' acrobatic forms — or, it would have if Qian Ling hadn’t raced to spread one of her favorite techniques.
“Dew Catching Web!”
Spools of luminous qi spun a net between the branches, which caught the monkeys as they leaped for her. The thrashing weight in the net strained her dantian, and she drained her liquid qi to keep the spirit beasts in place.
They were stronger than she expected, and she couldn’t keep them contained for long without losing too much qi.
Darting forward, she sliced a monkey’s throat with the dagger she kept for close combat. Her qi-powered muscles pushed the blade through toughened hide, and blood fell to the forest floor. With quick, sure thrusts, she finished off the other monkeys she’d caught.
The last Howling Spirit Monkey struggled free, breaking the qi strands and flailing toward Qian Ling. She stepped back, avoiding savage claws that could easily pierce her skin.
The spirit beast was ferocious and stronger than the others -- but it was only the 3rd stage of Qi Condensation.
One-on-one, there was no contest.
Her blade slipped from the monkey’s eye as she gazed out into the dark forest. The pale blurs of more monkeys approached. She had come out of that fight intact, but her dantian was only half full. She was unharmed, but couldn’t afford to fall into a battle of attrition.
Before the distant troop could spot them, Qian Ling felt the familiar working of qi as Mu Min completed her technique.
“Lady Dancing in the Mists,” her friend whispered, her words guiding the qi.
Fingers of mist curled through the pines, not coming from any one direction, but spreading out to cover the whole area and hide the point of origin. The moment the approaching monkeys were cut off from sight, Qian Ling and Mu Min darted through the trees.
The mist swept over the crossroads as the women silently moved past the stranger still standing in the middle of the road.
“What of him?” Mu Min asked in a whisper as they leaped together from one branch to the next.
“He will either survive or he will be torn to shreds,” Qian Ling said with a cold smile. “Let the heavens decide his fate.”
###
I sneezed as a cold mist blew in through the pines. It surprised me a little, with how warm the evening had been until then, but I supposed I didn’t know the region very well. The obfuscating weather didn’t provide much assistance in picking out my path, and Cabbagy insisted on pretending to be in a drunken stupor — probably his head was full of hangover, and I didn’t envy him that.
Still, I’d been standing for a while now, and I felt a desire to move again. It wasn’t just my desire to make amends to Tan Lu; no, I felt something calling me. Some presence in the forest wished for me to move on, to find it, only… it wasn’t giving me any directions.
It was a little eerie, but I was finding that my threshold for unnerving had gotten pretty high.
Mist swaddled me, dampening any sounds and sights from the forest. Besides the few feet of road around me, there was nothing but the thick white curtain.
I indulged in a long, frustrated sigh.
“This sucks.”
“Tell me about it,” someone said.
“That you, Cabbagy?”
“Honk. Shoo. Honk. Shoo.”
“Not Cabbagy…” I murmured to myself as I looked around. “Is someone there?”
“Over here, actually.”
With my curiosity piqued, I walked in the direction of the voice and found a post lying on the ground. It was half-buried in the mossy loam, but I wasn’t sure if it had been like this for ages or if it was recently knocked over and covered in mud by a storm. Having only been on the surface for around a full day and night, I was reluctant to draw such conclusions.
Besides, it was rude to ask someone’s age.
I crouched down beside the post.
“You tired?” I asked.
“Me? Oh, no, nothing like that.”
“Taking a break from your job?”
“No, no, no.”
“Do you want a hand up?” I asked, feeling that it was only polite.
“I don’t want to be a bother.”
“Ok,” I said as I straightened myself up. “I’m going to get going, but it was nice to meet you, I suppose.”
I had only taken a few steps down one of the roads when…
“Wait!”
I stopped and walked back to the post.
“What’s the matter?”
“Well… ahem… um…”
“Come on, not all of us want to lie around all day, or night, I suppose.”
My remark seemed to silence the post for a moment, and as the mist drifted around me, I thought I heard something — almost like the wind shaking the trees, a sound reminiscent of applause…
But the afternoon wind died at the edge of the forest, and the air had been still by the time I reached the crossroads.
“You hear anything out there, Cabbagy?”
“Honk shoo, kid, that’s all I hear,” he said before going back to ignoring me.
I sighed again with even more frustration.
“Ok, both of you, I am actually going to walk away down that road right there unless one of you gives me something better to do.”
“Um!” the post shouted from down on the ground.
“What?”
“Could you please help me up!”
I rolled my eyes.
“Of course I can.”
It didn’t take long. With a bit of direction, I managed to place the post back into the ground where it once stood.
“Oh, thank you! Thank you so much!”
“It’s no problem.”
“It’s amazing, is what it is!”
“If you say so,” I said with a shake of my head. “Maybe you can tell me which way I should go?”
“Why of course! That’s the very thing I’m best at!”
The post’s enthusiasm was a bit much, but I figured the quicker I got done talking to it, the quicker I could get far away. I studied the signs hanging from the post, but they had all been broken off at some point, and I couldn’t find even a trace of directional information.
With a sigh, I re-engaged the post in conversation.
“I need to make my way to the Great Northern Mountain where the Azure Tiger Blossom grows.”
“Oh.”
“Do you know it?”
“No… no, I’m afraid I don’t know that mountain at all.”
I closed my eyes in silent frustration.
“That’s no problem,” I said. “Looks like I’ll be taking that road after all.”
I took a single step down the road when…
“Wait! Good, upright, handsome sir!”
“Yes?” I said, slightly bemused by the post’s attempted flattery. “What is it now?”
“Well… I certainly don’t know which road you should take to reach the Great Northern Mountain — and may the heavens strike me down if I knowingly send you in the wrong direction! — but if you let me speak with my roads, then I’m sure we’ll be able to figure out which way you should take.”
“Oh,” I said. “That actually sounds really helpful. Thank you.”
I presented the post with a bow that seemed to make it sort of bashful. It spluttered something about not being used to being so upright before it started whispering to the roads.
I decided not to eavesdrop on that more personal conversation — after all, the post was thrust in between the winding roads, and that seemed at least some kind of intimate.
The mist thickened and swirled around me, and as damp beads of condensation formed on my cheeks, Cabbagy stirred.
“Ah, that wine was foul, but this weather is lovely. There’s nothing we cabbages like more than a good misting.”
“Good to see you’re in a better mood,” I grumbled.
“Oh, so now you’re going to sulk?” he asked me.
I almost threw him away into the mists, but decided at least one of us needed to have a sane head on our shoulders.
“Nope,” I said with a cheery smile. “Just waiting for directions from that super annoying post. Actually, that’s not fair. The post is kind of growing on me.”
“I hope it’s not directions to an ass whooping,” Cabbagy said. “Because I could have helped you with that.”
“You better not try me,” I said as I tossed Cabbagy up and down. “I think I can throw you pretty damned far.”
Cabbagy sighed.
“No, kid, I was talking about the spirit beasts surrounding us.”
“The what?”
Before Cabbagy could explain, the mist lit up with baleful red eyes.
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