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Chapter 5

When light broke across the deep plum sky, Liu Ying woke to smoking embers. He rubbed the few hours of sleep from his eyes and blearily watched Chen Yun hoist the bamboo basket onto his shoulders, which only looked to contain a few bare necessities. The cultivator looked down at his disheveled form for a moment before motioning at him to follow.

For a moment, I thought I’d dreamt that entire interaction… Eh, it’s as good an opportunity as any. Maybe my luck is starting to turn up.

The two made their way out of the clearing in the woods after Liu Ying sauntered over to a nearby creek to splash water onto his face, where they found a dark-haired ox in the middle of a grass breakfast. There was a small wooden cart attached to it with nothing inside. When they approached, the ox watched them with a bored expression on its face as Chen Yun patted its head lightly, and then proceeded to snort a few pieces of grass at his face.

For an incense time or so, not a word was spoken between them except for Liu Ying providing a general direction that Duan Baozhai had taken off towards. Liu Ying had difficulty operating early in the morning and Chen Yun seemed to pick up on that fact rather quickly. He sat at the front of the cart beside him, head lolling forward sleepily while Chen Yun steered the reins with a sharp, alert look in his eyes. It was only once the cart’s wheel hit a rock quite hard in the path that Liu Ying stirred from his half-slumber and looked around.

Chen Yun had fished something from the bamboo basket on his back and tossed it beside him onto his lap. It was a large peach and several bayberries wrapped up in a bound cloth.

“Aren’t you having any?” Liu Ying asked, popping one of the berries into his mouth.

“I ate before you woke up.”

“These are nearly out of season. Where did you find them so perfectly ripe?”

Chen Yun glanced at him out of the corner of his eye before responding, “They’re still in season further north.”

“Ah, yes.” That’s a lie. I just came from further north. “The northern Ludong region has a fickle climate and it can really disrupt the harvest season.”

In what seemed like an attempt to steer the conversation in a different direction, Chen Yun hurriedly asked, “I assume you’ve worked on farms and harvesting?”

“Somewhat.”

“What other work have you done?”

Liu Ying pretended to ponder on an answer while he bit into the succulent peach, eyes rolling towards the sky. “Mostly pleasure houses and brothels.”

The cart came to a sudden stop with a crass tug of Chen Yun’s wrist, and Liu Ying nearly toppled out of it. He turned to stare wide-eyed at the cultivator, who was mirroring his expression, but with a deep flush of red to his face.

“What? Why?!” Chen Yun demanded in a strangled tone.

Liu Ying felt bad for teasing him, but his reaction was above and beyond what he had expected, and it would have been highly humorous if he hadn’t just lost all of the sweet berries that had rolled out of his lap with the sudden stop.

“It was a joke,” he deadpanned.

It took a moment for the realization to sink in, but when it did, Chen Yun turned his face back towards the road, a look of deep embarrassment marring his handsome features. He got the ox to get back to trotting without another word.

He lied straight to my face and I can’t make a harmless joke? Despite his looks, I can already tell he’s infuriating to be around.

“Don’t look so sour,” Liu Ying said, even though he was also frowning, “Is humor not allowed in your sect?”

“It wasn’t funny.”

It hadn’t been the first time that Liu Ying’s idea of humor was taken badly. People often took his words at face value or found him to be mean or crass – even people who knew him well, like Han Chuanli or Xu Qiang. He’d long become immune to the irritable responses he’d received, but he never managed to fluster someone quite like he had just done to Chen Yun. It was a little jarring. What warranted such a strong reaction from someone he had met just hours ago? Unless he was from a sect similar to the one Liu Ying had grown up in, where excess and desire were not permitted? But those types of sects were mostly concentrated in the deep south, where gods following nihilistic cultivation paths were worshiped. Ludong as a whole firmly worshiped Zhou Hui, who followed a path of preservation.

If Liu Ying had asked, it was very likely that Chen Yun would be too agitated to give him a straight answer, so he decided to save it for another time.

“We’re heading west, so there should be a fork in the road up ahead,” Liu Ying said after a while.

“Hm. She may have strayed towards the rightmost path. It follows the creek up into a little merchant town. The left path is quite tumultuous and deserted, with no access to water and is a longer distance away from the next village.” Chen Yun’s tone was low and slightly distracted, but at least his face had gone back to its normal color.

“It makes sense for normal mortals to choose the path of less resistance, yes. But Duan Baozhai spent most of her youth in a demonic sect. She may be elderly, but if she still has her spiritual reserves intact, she can make the trip if it means that there’s less of a chance she’ll be caught.”

“A merchant town could hide her presence better with a larger population of travelers, don’t you think? I don’t see a benefit she’d have from taking the left path.”

“And if I were on the run, I wouldn’t take the right path. Not only is the village further away, but gossip is less likely to reach the rural farmers that keep their heads down rather than prattling merchants,” Liu Ying pointed out, “Not only that, but I have reason to believe that Duan Baozhai might be going to see her son.”

“Her son?” Chen Yun echoed.

Liu Ying relayed everything that had happened during his time spent with the vengeful woman and what he had managed to discover once the situation had come to a boil.

Chen Yun tutted once he was done. “A sickened spirit, from the beginning. But what makes you believe she’d headed to see him?”

“A final goodbye, maybe. With the Gods of Wind and Earth involved, she must understand it’s only a matter of time before justice is knocking on her door. I happen to think it’s the only reason she ran from Ludong in the first place. Considering he’s the son of rural folk, I want to assume he’d feel more at ease moving to a village where there’s work he knows how to do. And plausibly, it’s the only real lead we have…”

“Well,” Chen Yun mumbled, glancing over at him, “I did bring you for a reason. We’ll take the left path, then.”

“Do I get an advance on my payment if I’m right?”

“No, her arrest needs to happen before you’re paid in full.”

“So I need to depend on your detainment skills before I ever see the other side of that gold coin? Is that fair considering that I had no way of measuring said skills before I agreed to this? I fear an annulment is in order,” Liu Ying jested.

“I could stop the cart and show you right now, if you insist.”

Chen Yun’s response caught him off guard. It was said in just as much jest, but it still left him feeling a bit flustered, especially when Liu Ying saw the familiar barely-there smile tugging at his lips.

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“That… won’t be necessary.”

“Then I fear the annulment has been overturned.”

Liu Ying felt a smile rise to his face, although it felt almost foreign to him now. He hid it by turning his head to pretend he was analyzing their surroundings of just trees and a dirt road.

When was the last time he engaged in friendly banter with someone? Maybe with Xu Qiang? But that banter was never friendly – it often ended in offensive cursing and challenges to a duel that Han Chuanli so desperately had to throw himself in the middle of lest they caused havoc in the Heavenly Realm. Or perhaps it was with a fellow erudite goddess, Chang Xia. They often debated as a way to practice their logic, but Chang Xia was otherwise normally too busy to waste any free time. It had to have been Zhou Hui, then. Zhou Hui was never particularly easy to bait into a back-and-forth repartee, but when he did choose to engage him, it excited Liu Ying so much that he ended up dissolving into a bout of laughter before the conversation could progress very far.

The memory, the far gone echo of his own carefree laughter in his ears, made Liu Ying suddenly feel sullen, the nostalgic smile slipping from his face.

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When they finally reached the fork in the road, Chen Yun directed the cart towards the left and headed down a long, winding and narrow road that reached into the horizon in slopes.

About an incense time of the way, when Liu Ying was nearly falling asleep again, Chen Yun had spied a distraught figure sitting by the side of the road with an even smaller wooden cart with several crates inside. Before Liu Ying could advise against it, the cultivator was already stopping and calling out to the man sitting with his head in his hands. The man lifted his head and blubbered, “An old bitch stole my mule while I was pissing behind the tree!”

Liu Ying had his hand hidden in his sleeve, fingers curled around the hilt of the dagger – just in case – as he watched Chen Yun climb down from the cart and help the man tie his cart to theirs with a stretch of rope. He then told him to board the cart and to provide directions to his home, and that they would take him there.

Chen Yun has no sense of danger, it seems. I’ve seen so many bandits disguised as helpless commoners on the side of the road that I wouldn’t stop for even a second. He probably truly does belong to a preservation sect.

The man seemed grateful, at least, and held onto the edge of the cart with weathered hands. The charitable experience of being offered a ride home after having his mule stolen was enough to make him launch into a never-ending series of unfortunate events that he proclaimed was the summary to his life. He wagged his finger towards the sky and said that he’d been born under an unlucky star and went on to detail everything that had happened that led him to where he was right then. Liu Ying had nodded off five or six times between the beginning and end of his tirade, while Chen Yun remained engaged and focused on both the road and listening to what seemed like a storybook tale.

Upon shaking himself from a short-lived slumber for the sixth time, Liu Ying suddenly thought of something and interrupted the unlucky man, “Truly abhorrent. I pray the remainder of your path is filled with many lucky stars. However, you mentioned someone stole your mule – an old bitch, more specifically. Can you tell us more about that?”

“Like I said, I was pissing behind a tree, and before I knew it, I looked and saw my old boy being swept away by the likes of what could have been my grandmother. She rode him into the distance until I could no longer see them, probably heading toward Qingshan. Is that what the elderly are doing nowadays? Committing crimes? Is the harvest that bad?”

Liu Ying and Chen Yun exchanged a look.

They had to take quite the detour to take the man back to his house, cutting through several patches of tall grass and up a hill.

Immensely grateful for their help, the man invited them inside to let their ox rest while they had a meal. Chen Yun looked on rather helplessly as Liu Ying assisted with peeling, chopping and boiling the taro while a gathering of random vegetables from the man’s garden were also diced up and set to cook, the savory aroma filling the small cabin.

Liu Ying had learned to cook the essentials when he was a mortal and had to feed himself after his shizun’s passing, but Chen Yun didn’t seem to know the first thing about what he was doing by the stove. “A fire and a fish, that’s where my expertise lies,” he mumbled, hands on his hips and overlooking the pot bubbling over the fire.

“You have a wife to cook for you, then,” the man inferred, his hearing sharp even from across the room, where he madly and sloppily diced green onions, “Mine left me and ran off into the night while I was snoring like a newborn baby! She said I was impossible to be around. See, I tell you boys, my life has just been one misfortune after the other… Thank your lucky stars, because I don’t have a single one!”

Chen Yun frowned but didn’t respond, instead asking Liu Ying, “How do you know when it’s ready?”

Liu Ying popped a piece from the boiling water with a pair of chopsticks and waved it around slightly until the steam billowing from the taro lessened. He held it in front of Chen Yun’s lips expectantly, who blinked at him as though he had just transformed into a wild hare.

“Do you think it’s going to hop into your gullet itself?” Liu Ying said impatiently.

Chen Yun’s throat bobbed and for a moment, it actually looked as though he was going to part his lips, but he quickly reached up and yanked the taro from the chopsticks, stuffing it into his mouth.

Liu Ying fought the urge to laugh. “You know it’s ready when you can poke a chopstick through it. But always try a piece to make sure before you pull them all out.”

Chen Yun made a strange face and said, “Tastes bland.”

“Hm… yes, we didn’t cook with seasoning where I grew up,” Liu Ying said, feeling suddenly embarrassed, “Add whatever you like to it, I suppose.”

“And where the hell was that?” the man demanded, “I’ve never seen someone willingly eat bland taro. Except when I was living under a bridge that one time…”

“The south. A sect that didn’t allow abundance,” Liu Ying replied simply.

The man whistled and made a sound of disbelief, while Chen Yun looked at him with a raised brow that didn’t seem surprised at all.

“I thought you said you weren’t a cultivator, Xiao Fan.”

“I’m not.”

Chen Yun nodded slowly, obviously not believing him, but Liu Ying just shrugged it off and served the prepared taro into a bowl.

The three of them sat and ate while the man went off on another tangent about the time he lived under a bridge. Liu Ying felt the food quickly dissolve in his throat and fill his spiritual reserves little by little, which was more than welcome now that he had a constant disguise to keep up. Not being able to be alone and just sit with himself instead of Xiao Fan was tiring, but also liberating, in a sense. The upkeep was a strain on his energy, of course. But putting Liu Ying away, into the back of his mind and shutting all of the doors and windows on him was something that felt like having a bleeding injury yet being able to close his eyes and just not feel it.

All he had to do was be Xiao Fan, whoever that was. A disheveled young man working the docks. Working the harvest season, sleeping in inns or on forest floors. Sitting in shrines and looking at the handmade statues of the most revered and respected martial gods that blessed the mortal land, pretending he was just a lowly worshiper. Playing weiqi with the old men in merchant towns and winning every single game until they exalted him like he was a mortal god of their own.

Liu Ying pushed his bowl away, suddenly feeling overwhelmed, and apologized for the rudeness, but he could no longer eat.

The man waved off his apology and told him to wrap up what remained to take for the road. Once they were back outside, Liu Ying stuffed the food into the bamboo basket that Chen Yun carried on his back, and caressed the fur on the ox’s head as he watched the cultivator untie their carts from each other.

“Was something amiss?” Chen Yun suddenly asked, tossing the rope aside.

“No,” Liu Ying replied shortly. He avoided his unconvinced gaze and boarded the cart, grabbing onto the reins. “May I?”

“Have you ever driven oxen before?”

“Of course. I take goods between villages all the time. It wasn’t an easy thing to learn, though. After all, oxen can be quite, uh, bull-headed. But we now know that Duan Baozhai was headed for Qingshan, and things should go smoothly from here.”

“Turns out you were right after all,” said Chen Yun, climbing up into the cart with a sigh.

“Imagine what I would have won if it had been a wager.”

He gripped the reins between his hands and started down the slope of the hill, wheels creaking.

“You wouldn’t have had anything to put down on a wager table besides the clothes on your back,” Chen Yun smirked, leaning back and crossing his arms over his chest.

“Hm… I’d probably put down this dagger that I was stabbed with.” Liu Ying fished it out from his sash, “The handle looks intricate. Might have been worth something if the carvings weren’t worn down.”

Chen Yun took it from him and looked it over in his hands. “... Do you understand why you were stabbed with it?”

“Huh? Jielong pried it out of my hand and –”

“The carvings are symbolic, most likely used when Duan Baozhai was still living with the demonic sect. As you said, they often made their own talismans. Down here at the very bottom, there are fresher carved characters that say, ‘Bite and be bitten.’ It’s a weapon and a curse.”

Ah… No wonder.

“I really…” Liu Ying took a deep breath, “I really hate being outsmarted by someone with deteriorating mental faculties.”

Chen Yun looked like he was fighting an amused smile, and distracted himself by asking, “How is your hand, by the way?”

“It’s fine, Chen Yun.”

“If you cut the cloth to wrap the wound using this dagger, I wouldn’t be surprised if the healing bittercress I gave you isn’t properly working. We’ll have to pull off the side to rest for the night soon, anyway. I’ll clean and rewrap it for you.”

Nervousness began to pool inside of Liu Ying’s chest. He hadn’t checked the state of his hand since he initially wrapped it, and while it was still sore and painful, the wound was most likely healing at a faster rate than what was to be expected, even considering the variables. There was a gaping hole through his palm just last night – would healing bittercress mend that so soon?