There is a heavy silence all around Naoe, only the sound of water splashing and the scrubbing of cloth could be heard. She looks left and then looks right.

She sees kids she recognises everywhere, whether they be the eleven others she'd spent more than a year with or the other street rats that she'd had the displeasure of encountering back in Ornthar. All around them there are men and women in white clothes, a bucket and towel in hand. Over a hundred of them, cleaning them.

Because apparently street rats couldn't be trusted to properly wash themselves. Unfortunately for her, they are right.

"Stay still, child"

Naoe squints as the elderly woman that the cultivator had spoken to, Hashi, uses the water soaked towel to wash her face. It smells nice, Naoe notes, just goes to show how rich cultivators are, to be able to use perfume for cleaning.

"There we go" Hashi says as she moves the towel away from Naoe's face "Quite the charming face you had hidden behind all that mud, girl" the elderly woman smiles, accentuating the wrinkles on her face

Naoe doesn't immediately reply, not trusting herself not to bite back with a snide remark. In many ways, the servant of a cultivator can be as terrifying as the cultivator themselves. She still remembers Kaito's words towards her when they were both locked away in that dungeon.

"What happened to Kaito?" Naoe asks in a faint voice.

"Hmm? She speaks!" Hashi calls out in a joking manner "I do not believe that I know who this Kaito fellow is, though, you will have to be more specific."

"He's the long haired boy the cultivator took away," Naoe clarifies.

"Oh? That cultivator has a name you know." The elderly woman's voice rises in a threatening manner that makes Naoe freeze in horror. At least until Hashi laughs again. "Do not worry girl, I won't do anything to you. But it would be best if you remembered the name of the Mistress, Rinako Suzuki. As for the boy she took along…"

The woman appears lost in thought for a moment, the silence returning. She dunks the cloth in the bucket, taking it out and wringing away the excess water.

"...I believe that he was a cultivator. It's only natural for the Mistress to be interested in him"

Naoe feels her heart stop. From the side she hears Yuto choke out a sound, mirroring her shock. Hashi is mildly amused by their reactions. "Why, was he a friend of yours?"

Naoe doesn't reply, instead thinking back on the first time the two of them had met. How Kaito had ripped the ropes binding his arms with pure physical strength, how he'd used his fingers to pinch a copper coin into the shape of a key. All of that done despite his somewhat weak looking body. He'd been well built for someone his age, but the guards and smiths of the city are adults after all –and they were incapable of performing such feats.

It's honestly a wonder how she hadn't managed to put 2 and 2 together up until this point.

Her mind roams back to his most used quote, one that she's heard him use hundreds of times up until now.

"You'll understand when we get there"

He knew where they were headed, of course he did, he'd told all of them as much. What she didn't understand is why that is information that will, by his own words, 'kill them just because they know of it'.

There is something that she doesn't know. Most of all, what would cultivators want with someone like her? She's not a living sacrifice to increase their power is she? She'd heard plenty of stories about how the guardian cultivator of Ornthar would occasionally empty the dungeons of the criminals captured.

What happened with those criminals, nobody knew. Some say that he devoured the criminals' souls to increase his power, others say that he enjoys torturing them, the action providing him with pleasure.

Dread wells up, she does not know what is about to come, the only thing she's aware of is that it won't be anything good. Her only hope is that they will be turned into servants, like the elderly woman currently cleaning her. But why would they pick some common urchins from the job, and then there's the fact that they spent four-hundred days on the road. Why not gather their servants from somewhere closer?

No, this is something else.

And if the silence of the other street rats is anything to go by, they know it as well. All of them can feel the pressure. The way they are treating them right now, it's like they're cleaning up the livestock before it gets butchered.

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Naoe recalls the words the two cultivators had exchanged not too long ago, especially those of the woman that had taken Kaito away.

"We're at war and he dares to send us some beggars he just plucked off the streets?"

"It's called cutting off the fat! If they die from that then they wouldn't have made it anyways."

Naoe can only steel her will. There is no running away now.

====================

Yuto PoV

'This is the end, huh?' Yuto could not help but remark in his mind. No wonder that Kaito didn't want to tell them where they were headed. Who would wish to know that they were headed to their deaths?

Yuto looks at the clothes that he'd been given. A black yukata, made from the smoothest material that he'd ever had the pleasure of touching. Is it silk? The chance is high. He examines his surroundings, everyone has a solemn expression adorning their face.

'So Kaito was a cultivator all along. That would explain some things about him, those otherworldly stories that he used to tell us. Aladdin, Finding Nemo' Yuto's expression once more twists in amusement. Kaito had obviously been winging those stories but even then the notion that someone would keep fish in a glass bowl just for the sake of keeping a fish, not meaning to eat it or to do anything with it –it had caused no small amount of joking and jeering in their caravan.

"Rich people things. Just wait until you find out what a Koi fish is" Kaito had said.

Unfortunately. It looks like he won't ever get the chance to learn what kind of fish that is. Yuto's smile fades.

He hears footsteps approaching. His head rising, Yuto sees the blue eyed cultivator, Rinako, he corrects himself. And following behind her is Kaito, an odd piece of paper stuck on his forehead. The long haired boy has no choice but to tilt his head to the side like some sort of a chicken to look in front of him, the piece of paper obscuring his vision.

'So he's still alive. That's good to know, maybe there's a chance for us as well… no, who am I kidding.' Yuto shakes his head, despair now fully taking him 'I'm not a cultivator am I?'

His whole life had been one filled with misery and regret. One misfortune followed after the other. His mother and father dying of disease, his bigger brother being beaten to death by a drunken gang member, that same gang later ending up kicking him out of the home that his parents had left him with.

The infection that he had gotten on his leg that one time he'd cut himself, an infection that had refused to heal for years on end, only having stopped being a problem a month before he was captured by the guards. And even then it had left behind a nasty scar.

Each day a blur of trying to survive.

Yet, Yuto didn't cry. Some of the few friends he'd made have had stories much worse than his, he was not in debt and he still had all four of his limbs. He never lost hope. In the darkness that surrounded him there was always the light of hope for a better future, at least he thought so at the time. Through a set of fortuitous encounters a smith had chosen to accept him as his new apprentice. All Yuto had to do was wait for a month more and he would have had a job to feed himself with.

And then the caravan happened.

The cultivator Rinako Suzuki is now in front of all of them, Kaito by her side. Yuto always used to think of cultivators as natural disasters… he still does. They're like plagues, storms or earthquakes. You cannot avoid them, they will always exist and around them calamity will always spread. You can only pray that you aren't the one caught up in the storm. You can only mitigate the damage.

She sweeps her eyes over everyone. Every place her gaze lands, a wave of pressure descends. When they inevitably land on Yuto, he feels his knees buckle.

"Prepare yourselves for death"

Her voice rings loud and clear for every single one of them to hear. Kaito flinches, Yuto does not even have time to feel shock before she continues

"You have come here to our great Verdant Sword sect as nothing more than mere beggars. Useless, rugged, unwashed, a home for diseases akin to rats. You are nothing but the dregs of human civilization."

There is a bright flash of light coming in from the outside, visible only because of the windows of the building. The ground shakes and aloud noise rumbles, one Yuto recognises as thunder. The noise is muted, like he's listening to it with his head under water.

"...However," Rinako continues "That will no longer be the case. For the few of you chosen ones, never again will you have to worry about food and shelter ever again…"

The rumbling intensifies. Yuto notices how all the servants in white clothes had left the place while he hadn't been looking. He tries to run but his legs don't even twitch. He is stuck to his spot, and by the looks of things, so are the others.

The quaking gets stronger, Yuto does not know what is going on. At one moment everything was calm and then the next one, when the cultivator had started her speech, all hell broke loose.

Shining lines flash all over the floorboards as the outside lightning intensifies greatly, the sound produced now many times stronger than before. Vaguely he notices that the cultivator never stopped her speech, but at this point his ears have begun to ring as if he'd been punched in the face. Her mouth moves but not a single word reaches him.

'I have one regret' Yuto thinks to himself 'That I didn't get to spend more time with everyone. The caravan ride was way too short. Yes, it got boring at times, yes there were times that I wanted to wring someone's neck out. But overall it was fun, probably the happiest days of my life. I did not have to worry about where I'd get my food from or where I'd sleep during the night. We just spent our time talking and enjoying ourselves. It really was too short.' He tries to make his peace amid this odd chaos, death had already been accepted as a possibility.

A ball of…something manifests in the cultivator's hand. Yuto's head jerks just enough for him to be able to lay his eyes on it. He cannot describe what he is seeing at this very moment in time.

The ball glows like the sun, illuminating the room, yet it's not just that. A heat seeping into Yuto's very existence when he gazes at the object, his bones start warming as if someone had taken them out to bake in the summer sun and then placed them back in again.

But that is nothing weird compared to the emotions that are oozing out of it. He does not know how but he can see them. When he gazes at the orb he can feel emotions worm their way into his head. Fear, happiness, anger, he can somehow feel all of them at once just by looking at it.

He closes his eyes and manages to look away. Yet, it does not help, he can still see it.

He feels something drop next to him. And when he opens his eyes again there is another drop. Someone had fallen, thankfully not anyone on Yuto's caravan but probably not for long.

The emotions get stronger and stronger.

Hunger. Ambition. Pure unbridled Greed.

They overtake him, the last thing Yuto sees before the light blinds him completely is Naoe, still standing with tears streaming down her eyes.

And soon after Yuto's vision is taken away, so is his mind. The emotions overwhelming him completely and not allowing him to think of anything else.

Light consumes him, the world a pure white.