Traveling for the rest of the day, Shuixing, Daisy, Sofiane, and Zhidao were close enough to Tianzhou City that, by the time they bedded down in an abandoned shack near the edge of a seaside cliff, they could see the glow of the city’s lights on the horizon.

After they had gotten settled inside the shack and eaten a few of Daisy’s salmon croquettes for dinner, Sofiane gasped.

“Uh, guys? The Use-Ranking number…”

Zhidao fluttered about the shack. “Hmm? What happened?”

Shuixing and Daisy grimaced simultaneously. They didn’t need to scroll down to find out the change. The total number of Heroes had gone from 190 to 189. Shuixing flicked all the way down and was relieved to find both Natsuko and Pechorin still on the list. This relief was followed by overwhelming discomfort at the knowledge of what Natsuko had probably done.

There was a pregnant silence for a moment as Sofiane, Daisy, and Shuixing all non-verbally agreed that talking about their suspicions in front of Zhidao was a bad idea.

“A Hero is gone. Like, gone gone,” Daisy said. “Bought the farm.”

“Oh…” Zhidao said. “That’s unfortunate. Who was it?”

None of them knew. No one checked that far down the list. Sofiane’s interest started at #49 and above and Daisy and Shuixing almost never looked at the master list.

“#188 or #187 by the way the rankings have changed,” Shuixing deduced. “But I don’t know who that would have been.”

Other than someone she personally knew, she realized with dread.

“Must have been a dimension-jumping accident. Haven’t had one of those in a while!” Zhidao said.

“Must’ve been,” Sofiane said, treating the subject with fake nonchalance and rolling over in his bedroll to read a novel.

The presence of Zhidao killed the possibility of talking about what might have happened with Natsuko, Pechorin, and the NH-killer, so the three of them tucked in for the night without saying much.

As she lay in her sleeping roll with silvery moonlight coming in through the rickety wooden walls, Shuixing felt a swell of emotion. Her theater of memory unspooled phantom films of her near past.

She saw herself traveling through Tianzhou’s hills and mountains and rolling buckwheat fields and many, many abandoned temples, bringing her back to what was probably the best time of her life. Their team of four was the strongest in Po-Lin and they had just been the first to overcome the dragon Völsunga, paving the way for the Yishang to de-Mist the region of Tianzhou.

Anything felt possible back then. They worked hard, constantly training and dungeon-delving and questing, and their work paid off. Shuixing, Natsuko, Pechorin, and Hemiola, all felt as though they had a real purpose in the world. That they were liberating an orderly world from the clutches of Entropy.

Shuixing stopped herself when she realized she was sipping from the past the way Natsuko did from a bottle.

In the dark, she looked to where Daisy had rolled over in her sleep facing Shuixing only a few feet away. Daisy’s face was soft and unburdened, her blonde ringlets shining like the halos over Zhidao’s head. She looked like a top tier Hero, through and through. Even more than Sofiane.

Natsuko used to look like that when she slept, Shuixing thought.

Sofiane’s loud snoring knocked her out of the nostalgic headspace. She looked over to him, sprawled starfish-style across his bedroll wearing his blanket like a toga with his sleep mask halfway off. It was then she realized Zhidao was gone.

Shrugging off her blanket, Shuixing slipped into her shoes and walked out into grass billowing in the harsh ocean wind rolling off the water. A lone, dainty pine tree leaned over the edge of the cliff as though staring into the seafoam. The moonlight turned everything a lustrous black-and-white.

“Zhidao?” she called out to the fox-fairy.

Maybe it was the cold, or maybe it was the abrupt mental shift from her half-dreamed nostalgia, but Shuixing suddenly felt uncomfortable. Exposed, even.

She did a loop of the grassy cliff up to the tree and turned around. There was nothing but a few solitary trees and the abandoned shack she’d come from, but she couldn’t shake the feeling of something else being there. Something she couldn’t see.

Shuixing didn’t like that. Less so while there was a person or people running around with her knowledge of how to force dimension-jump. She wished Natsuko was here.

“Hey!”

Shuixing screamed and wildly flailed her rod in the direction of her auditory assailant.

“I don’t think that’s gonna accomplish much,” Zhidao said as Shuixing’s rod made several close passes to his black-button nose.

“Ahh! O-Oh, Zhidao. I, um, came out looking for you,” Shuixing said. She blushed a little as Sofiane and Daisy both came bounding out of the abandoned shack from the noise.

“Shui, y’alright honey?” Daisy asked.

“I-I’m fine. I just got startled by Zhidao is all.”

Sofiane rolled his eyes and went back inside, flipping his sleep mask back over his face.

“Congratulations on finding me!” the fox said. “Erm… why were you looking?”

“Well, you um… I saw that you weren’t there, a-and I wondered where you went.”

“Aw, that’s sweet,” Zhidao said, floating his cloud up towards Shuixing and nuzzling his face into her stomach. “I was just out here looking at the clouds. Ancient shapeshifting fairies like me get wistful too, you know.”

“Right. Apologies for disturbing you all,” Shuixing said with a small bow.

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“S’Alright. M’gonna go back to bed now though,” Daisy said, rubbing her eyes.

Still embarrassed about waking the others up, Shuixing followed after Daisy with Zhidao tagging along. Once everyone was inside, she turned around to shut the door. Before shutting it, she looked up at the sky.

There weren’t many clouds out that evening.

The next morning, Shuixing found Sofiane sprawled in a different, yet equally chaotic arrangement of limbs next to her. She let him have his beauty sleep and went outside.

In the cold morning air, Daisy was tending to the fire underneath the cooking pot.

“Good morning,” Shuixing said.

“Mornin’!” Daisy said cheerfully.

“Are you cooking breakfast for us this morning?”

“Depends, do you like the taste of either burnt rubber or chicken sashimi?”

“Not particularly…”

“Might want to cook something yourself then,” Daisy said with a wink.

“Surely your cooking is not that bad?”

“Did you know you can give people the Poisoned status just with turkey drumsticks?”

Shuixing blinked. “You can?”

“Yeah, ask my party!” Daisy laughed at that. Shuixing wasn’t sure how it was possible to be that bad at cooking.

“It’s just timing, right? You assemble your ingredients, toss them together, and you pull the dish out at the right time. That’s all there is to it,” Shuixing said.

This gave her yet another bout of existential discomfort, wondering why that was all it took to put together a complex dish. It felt like there ought to have been more steps. But then again, she fired magical bubbles from her rod, so it wasn’t as though absolutely everything needed to be broken down into physics. Some things could stay magical. Like cooking.

“Do you want me to help teach you?” Shuixing asked.

Daisy chuckled sourly. “You wouldn’t be the first person who’s tried, but if you’re up for the challenge, I’d give it another whirl.”

Shuixing laid out the ingredients on a towel and let Daisy pick which ones called to her. Shui gave her four tries before Daisy managed to pick a selection of ingredients that weren't completely inedible like fish, mayonnaise, pineapple, and peas. They settled on peanut butter, noodles, and soy sauce.

“Alright, so, being that it is a noodle dish, how long should we expect it to cook: Short, medium, or long?”

Daisy’s face puckered as she contemplated. “L—” She saw Shuixing’s face. “Short. Definitely short.”

“Right! So, what do you think would go in first?”

“Peanut butter! Wait…” Daisy squinted, eyes darting between the bottle of Shikijiman soy sauce, Imperian peanut butter, and Tianzhounese noodles. “Soy sauce…”

“Erm, the noodles, actually.”

“Drat! That was my back-up choice.”

Daisy picked up a big clump of noodles, enough for eight or more, and dropped it in the cooking pot which, by the magical nature of these things, was already boiling water. Feeling like it was the one thing she had a handle on, Daisy set herself to stirring the pot incessantly.

“I take it you usually don’t do the cooking in your regular team?” Shuixing asked, sitting cross-legged on the ground with her robes tucked under her.

“No, that’s usually Boulanger,” she replied.

For how disconnected Shuixing was from the Use-Ranking competition and the frontlines of the fight against the Entropic Axis, that was still a name she knew. It was hard not to at least be dimly aware of the current Use-Rank #1.

“I had no idea he was a good chef,” Shuixing said.

Daisy laughed. “He wasn’t at the start, but he’s got a drive like a buffed-up workhorse. Whenever there weren’t any dungeons to bop through, he’d practice his cooking, just so he had something to get better at. Pretty soon he got really good.”

That sounded like someone else Shuixing knew, down to the same exact reasoning.

“You’re talking about Boulanger?” Zhidao asked, floating down from where he had apparently been laying on the roof sunbathing.

“Yup!” Daisy said. “Best cook I’ve ever met.”

Shuixing, feeling oddly possessive, wanted to see a cook-off between him and Natsuko now. Her money was on Natsu. But something else was more critical. “Umm… Daisy…”

“Yeah? Oh no! Not again!”

She pulled the pot she’d been mindlessly boiling off into a peanut-noodle reduction away from the flame. She poured the slop out onto a plate where a few embers continued to glow in the middle of a dark brown sludge with, of all things, a fish’s skull sticking out of it.

“Wha—? How— when did you put fish bones in this dish!?” Shuixing asked.

“I don’t know! I didn’t think I did!” Daisy said.

The two of them plus Zhidao gazed at the vaguely fecal-looking glob of char on the plate for a minute or so, trying to figure out how it had happened.

“D-D’ya wanna try it?” Daisy asked.

Shuixing swallowed hard to keep herself from having to cast Ablutions to avoid hurling. “L-Let’s wait for Sofiane. And maybe dump that in the ocean…”

Once they dumped most of the contents, the stench got so bad it triggered Shuixing’s Desperation Art and they were able to clean the pot up like it was new and put it back over the fire just in time for Sofiane.

He gave a big stretch and a yawn wearing a purple velvet robe and fuzzy slippers.

“Aggghhhhh. Num. Num. Num. What’s for breakfast?” Sofiane got a look at their faces. “Something I make. Got it.”

It was a welcome relief to Shuixing’s nostrils when they were flushed out by the smell of sizzling butter. Sofiane’s cooking expertise was limited to baking and Cascadian cuisine, but with some goose eggs, butter, cheese curds, and birch syrup, he whipped them all up some sweet-and-savory Cascadian omelettes.

Having the food on her stomach made Shuixing realize how much of her discomfort had been due to something as basic as needing food and water on her stomach. She still felt anxious to get to Tianzhou and deal with the stolen papers, and about finding out what happened from Natsuko and Pechorin, but the anxieties felt manageable now.

By around midday, they crested the final hill and Tianzhou City came into sight. Gleaming white-and-red pagodas rose out of both sides of the Bo River delta connected by a warren of sky bridges and pavilions.

The largest of these bridges, almost a quarter-mile long with multiple towers and stairs for access, ran over the city’s massive port, into the Bay of Sapphires, and out to the Cerulean Tower, a Babylonic off-shore building that functioned as a combination of lighthouse, stock exchange, customs office, and headquarters for the Grand Chairman, the elected ruler of Tianzhou.

Once more, gazing out at the glittering towers of commerce and pleasure, marvels of architecture and engineering that should’ve taken centuries to build, Shuixing had the mildly distressing thought that this didn’t fit with her understanding of the world. All of this had been here when the Yishang had de-Misted Tianzhou, so what was it like before that?

The thought was going to give her a migraine on top of all her other stresses, so Shuixing let it drop.

It had been at least two years since she’d been to Tianzhou City last, but she didn’t remember it being so loud and bustling. There seemed to be twice as many Non-Heroes on the streets, and she even noticed a few Heroes running around, several trying to sneak discreet looks at Daisy.

“Why are there so many people in Tianzhou?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Usually the city is just Non-Heroes and new Heroes sprinting through questlines,” Sofiane said.

“It’s probably because of the Grand Annual Card Tournament!” Zhidao said, surfing over the crowd on his nimbus cloud. All three of them stopped.

Sofiane squinted at the fox. “The what now?”