The manacles that bound Joshi at night were not his real problem.

The guards set around the slaves' compound to watch them were not his real problem.

The long journey down the mountain through forests filled with dangerous beasts, the town full of enemies who would be on the lookout for a man branded with a slave's mark on his hand, the hundreds of miles back to his own lands were not the real problem either.

No, the problem was that damned iron collar around his neck. It chafed him night and day, collecting sweat as he worked, rubbing raw places. Some of the other slaves tried to pad the inside of their collar with strips of linen torn from the edges of their shapeless grey tunics. Joshi had tried that in the first months of his slavery. It didn't work.

Some of them saved the puny amounts of fat from their meals, collected whatever herbs they could find near their compound to concoct healing salves to use on the wounds beneath the collar. Joshi had more knowledge of medicine than most from his time at the monastery as a boy. He could create a salve out of mere scraps, but it didn't help. Not when the collar would rub again the next day.

The worst of it was how the collar blocked him from cycling lux through his body. Most of the slaves didn't seem aware of that, but Joshi had been taught in the monastery how to use the little lux available to him to the greatest extent. He had seven different cycling patterns perfectly under his command. One was good for healing. Without the collar, he could have eased the pain from those lacerations in mere minutes of concentration and cycling.

But the collars were designed to keep slaves from gathering lux and cycling it, to prevent any chance they might have of cultivating. Because cultivating was the only way a man bearing a slave's brand would ever know freedom.

Well, the only way the emperor recognized anyway. There were lands beyond the emperor's grasp, though none of the other slaves seemed to believe that fact. Joshi knew it. He had been born in such a land, had spent his life there on the fringe of civilization. If only he had never left.

The emperor's armies, pushed the might of empire farther and farther out from the center every year, encroaching on his family's ancestral grazing lands, capturing their herds of cattle and goats, stealing their horses for imperial officers to ride, trying to make his people's way of life impossible so that they would settle down in villages along the border, become citizens, and help grow the undying emperor's lands even further. From the whispers and rumors Joshi had heard around camp in the past three years, the great General of the West's campaign against his people was not going according to plan. It was one of the few things that could bring a smile to his face in these dark days.

He lay on his thin cot mere inches away from the next sweating slave in the row of men packed into the tent and thought about his plight. He was the only slave to wear manacles at night, thanks to his previous escape attempts. They didn't need to bother. He would not try to escape again, not until he had a way to remove the damn collar.

Some of the guards carried keys, but not all of them, and not the ones who were in regular contact with the slaves. The masters were not that foolish. Should a slave's collar be removed due to some requirement of their labor, a guard would be summoned from elsewhere in the encampment to remove it. Joshi had not been given one of those tasks in a very long time.

The gong would sound soon. The slaves would rise for their simple morning meal of rice gruel, which would be the only food they were given until that night. If he was lucky, they would have a little rancid mutton stew, whatever the soldiers hadn't eaten the night before. In between would be hours and hours of back-breaking work.

For the last week, Joshi had been put on lumber duty every day. It was usually a task given to a man only one day in three, for it sapped strength like no other task here. He knew why. Since his survival in the tower, he had been marked for death. He had dared to survive where so many others had not, and that was an offense against the might of the Emperor.

They would extract every bit of work from his body, though, and that refusal to give him a clean death was why he refused to lie down and die. He would find a way to escape.

Joshi sat up, even as the other slaves snored and groaned in their sleep around him. He cupped his two hands together in line with his navel, closed his eyes, and began a cycling technique. It didn't matter that the lux wouldn't respond. Though the collar actively fought against his attempts, he moved through the motions anyway, starting with the simple technique the monks had taught him at age five, along with how to read, how to concoct medicine, and how to throw a punch.

But most of all, they had trained him for a future as a cultivator.

His father, the great Khan of the Darwur, had sought to have his youngest son, by the soft, civilized wife he'd captured on a raid against a soft, civilized city, educated in the ways of imperial cultivators. The monks had taught him seven different cycling techniques, as well as what to expect inside towers, how to get along with other cultivators, how to prepare for the Heavenly Climb. And when he was ready, when he had learned all he could, just as he was about to embark on his climb, it all came crashing down.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

It was Joshi's own stupidity that had gotten him into this mess. He remembered how, on his return to the clan, his father had declared that the monks had turned Joshi soft. At the time, Joshi had not deigned to reply, secure in the knowledge that his father was wrong. Now, with his hands calloused in ways that a horse's reins could never do, with his body scarred and broken from the harsh labor, he knew his father had been right. He had been soft.

No longer.

Joshi shifted from the simplest cultivation pattern to the next, imagining that he was cycling the lux through his body. He made it all the way to the seventh and most complicated cycling technique, the Way of Star's Light technique, before the gong sounded and his fellow slaves rose to begin another day.

But this day did not go as Joshi had expected. He was still eating breakfast when a pair of guards marched into the slaves' compound, pushing them all away from the communal kettle. These were not their customary guards. Joshi eyed them with curiosity, wondering what they were about. They moved through the crowd of slaves, looking the men over carefully.

"You. You. You." They were picking tall, strong men with a good bit of work left in their bodies.

Joshi straightened up a bit. He let his bowl fall from his hands. They came closer. He met their gaze as they looked him over.

"You.” They sent him to stand with the others. At last, they had eight slaves picked out. Joshi still didn't know why, but anything outside the ordinary presented a possibility of escape.

They were led away from the slaves' compound, toward the south gate of the encampment. Joshi held his tongue. A slave learned not to ask questions, especially not ones that were likely to be answered soon anyway.

Just outside the camp, he found a group of three dozen soldiers carrying packs with spears slung over their shoulders, a couple of minor officials, and a cultivator from the Soaring Heavens Sect. His eyes ran across the men, trying to assess what was going on.

To his surprise, he recognized one of the camp officials. It was the man he had escaped the tower alongside. Their eyes met. The scribe's jaw dropped, but he instantly recovered. So, he recognized Joshi and hadn't expected to see him here.

A few minutes later, a captain appeared to take command of this expedition. Joshi and the other slaves were given heavy packs to carry. He didn't ask what was in them, merely stooped and lifted it to his shoulders. They set off down the mountain.

Word trickled up as they went. They were going all the way down to Golden Moon City, there to help escort newly arrived nobles back up to the camp. Joshi shifted his pack and tried to get it comfortable. His collar chafed, but he felt a sense of satisfaction. There might be a chance somewhere on this trip, a chance for escape, if only he could get this damnable collar off of his neck.

**

Though Chang-li chafed at the delay, he accompanied the party all the way down to Golden Moon City. The road wound down the mountainside, passing along steep, rocky shelves before plunging into a thick forest of aspens and quaking willows, beech, birch, and conifers.

For the last two li of the journey, he found himself constantly looking off to both sides, trying to spy where the entrance to the tower might lie. Four tall, arching bridges crossed deep ravines, down which ran frothing water. Up one of these four, he was certain he would find the entrance he was looking for.

He could have slipped off into the forest and likely not been missed, but he held off. First, he wanted to establish his alibi. Inspector Ji'in believed he was going to be spending the next two weeks in Golden Moon City investigating the Quartermaster's records. That would give him time to find the entrance and assess just how dangerous the first floor was.

He would run his errands here in Golden Moon, sending Inspector Ji'in's rice wine back up the mountain with one of the porters, passing Min’s letters to their recipients, and mingling with the nobles. His hope was that enough nobles would be coming up the mountain to disguise his presence. In the chaos, he could slip off more easily. Besides, he still needed a few supplies.

Chang-li made a stop at the Inn of Five Stars, where he found the accommodations had all been taken by the incoming nobles. The inn was an uproar. Serving girls ran here and there, carrying buckets of hot water for noble ladies' baths. The tavern keeper seemed at his wit's end. When Chang-li slipped him Min’s parcel, he grabbed it, stuffed it under his counter without even looking, and turned back to bark at his table boy.

"And no," the innkeeper announced loudly to the captain at the head of the expedition, "there is no room for any of you here. The nobles and their servants have taken everything. Perhaps in the stables,” he relented. "I have room for five, if you don't scare the horses."

The soldier turned to Chang-li. "You and the free porters can have the stables. Let them know. I'll take the slaves and my own men to the guard barracks here in town."

Chang-li passed word along before ducking back out into the crowded evening streets of Golden Moon. The city folk were going about their evening routines. Small stalls lined the bustling streets, offering an array of different foods. Chang-li parted with a few of his copper marks for skewers of soy-and-honey lacquered chicken, then followed up with a ripe mango.

He went first to the wine shop, where he made arrangements for Master Ji’in's bottle, before visiting a supply store on the waterfront offering to equip sailors. There, he bought eight pounds of dried meat and fruit and a kind of hard bread made from barley that the proprietor said would keep for weeks. It wouldn't be very tasty, but it was easy to carry and would keep him alive inside the tower.

He purchased a heavy staff, good for leaning on during the climb back up the mountain as well as, perhaps, defense. He didn’t have the first clue how to use it, but it seemed easier to learn than a sword.

After that, he wandered the streets, enjoying a sense of freedom he hadn't known since passing his scribe exams and being assigned to the army. Tomorrow, the expedition would begin the return journey up the hill, and he would be there. But for tonight, there was no one and nothing who had expectations of him.

Chang-li watched a fire juggler performing in one of the city's fountain squares. He listened to song drifting out of the taverns and drinking establishments that lined the main road. When at last the moon had risen and the streets were nearly deserted, his feet returned him to the Inn of Five Stars, where he claimed an undisturbed corner of the stable as his own.

He slept with his head on his pack containing the cultivator journal that had set him off on this expedition.