Qian Shanyi watched Lan Yu copy the maps with fascination. It was pure cultivation, raw shaping of spiritual energy - something she had been missing with all this business of luck and heavens and almost dying or being sent back to her sect. Cultivating Three Obediences Four Virtues felt good, that much was true - but there was always that tint to it, of needing to do it for her own safety. But here, she could simply enjoy the spectacle for what it was - just like she did back in the Golder Rabbit Bay, when the occasion presented itself.
Lan Yu covered one of the tables with a wide sheet of white paper and stretched the map over it, smoothing it out with careful strokes of her fingers. The only light source left in the room was a single talisman lantern hanging just above the table, and her movements sent shadows dancing all across the room.
With a flick of her wrist, a small inkwell and brush fell into her palm from the sleeve of her robes, and Qian Shanyi felt spiritual energy spread out from the postmaster. It stretched over the map, and she heard the quiet crumple of paper as it lifted a single finger width into the air. The brush danced in Lan Yu’s fingers, slashing through a series of complex characters, and a single drop of ink flew out of the inkwell, vanishing underneath the map. Bending low, she saw it split up, stretch, and spread into a pattern, covering the entire white sheet in those areas where dark lines were projected from the map above by the incoming light.
With another flick of the wrist, the original map flew back into Lan Yu’s hands, leaving an identical copy to dry on the table.
A simple technique, applied for a complex purpose. Qian Shanyi wished she could have learned it from this one glance, but there was no chance of that - she had no way to observe the circulation of spiritual energy within Lan Yu’s body, and that was the most important part.
“That will be four silver yuan,“ Lan Yu told her once both maps were left out to dry, “Six if you also want a scroll case for them.”
“Quite expensive.” She sighed, taking out her gold pouch and counting out the coins, “But I suppose you need to pay for the craftsmanship.”
“I don’t set the prices,” Lan Yu said, taking the money, and giving her a strict look, “Don’t make me regret giving you a chance… Lan Yishan.”
She smiled, nodded, and settled down to wait for the ink to dry.
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Twenty minutes later, maps in a scroll case over her shoulder and a bag of supplies in hand, she made her way out of the town and up into the hills surrounding the canyon. She dropped her veil down, of course - there was no need to tempt fate by having yet another person recognise her.
Soon, she found a wide flat area to set herself up. It was time to triangulate.
The heavenly vow (and the corresponding narrow luck) let her know when she was looking in Wang Yonghao’s direction, but that, by itself, was not enough. She needed a much more precise measurement: not only a vague direction, but the exact angle she could use to draw lines on a map. For this, she needed to craft a dioptra: a tool for measuring angles between points on the landscape.
Dioptra itself was a simple device, merely an angle compass with a plank attached that could be used to sight down objects. The market did not sell them, for most people had no need for surveying tools, especially in a small town the size of Xiaohongshan. Fortunately, the materials were easy to find.
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The first step was making an angle compass: a piece of wood with regular angles marked out. She couldn’t find it at the market - the only alternative she saw was a geomantic compass that was far too expensive for her needs - but making one herself was not too difficult.
First, she used a length of thread ten meters long to trace out a wide circle around the small board that would be her compass. Then, she folded her thread in half four times in a row, and used it to mark out regular sectors on the traced circle. With a bit of mental math, she knew that each of them would represent about three point six degrees of arc length.
The rest was tedious work. She tied her thread to a pair of stakes to form a line between the center of the circle and its edge, and started to mirror the markings on the smaller board in the middle. Stick a stake into a point at the edge of a sector - run to the center of the circle - mark out the position of the thread against the board with a tiny brush, making sure to keep the thread straight and undisturbed - run back to the edge of the circle - move the stake one point over - repeat. It took her a good half an hour, in the end.
She could have done it faster by making a smaller circle - but the larger the circle, the smaller the angular errors would be, and since she only needed to do this once, she wanted the scale to be as accurate as possible.
With the angle compass complete, she hammered it into the stool for support, and quickly made the sighting plank - witht wo nails on each end to sight down the objects on the landscape, one nail to support it against the exact center of the angle compass, letting the plank swing around freely, and a final nail pointing to the angular markings on the side.
One might have thought that the only thing left was to take out her divination bottle and start measuring, but it was not quite so simple. The further away she faced from the “right” direction, the more the dice would tell her to turn back; but this change occurred quite slowly. At best, she could only narrow down Wang Yonghao’s direction to a thirty degree wide arc.
Instead, she needed to figure out where the boundaries of this “right” arc were. About fifteen degrees to the right from the center the bottle would begin to tell her to turn left, dice counts shifting until she was a full thirty degrees off, at which point they started to level off again. Results of each individual roll varied, and so she averaged them out, making three rolls for every individual direction, writing down the angles where the dice counts crossed certain boundaries. An average of these measurements for each side of the arc was bound to be its actual center.
Once she had that number, she got up off her knees, and spent five minutes stretching her tired neck and back. She felt stiff all over: if she ever rebuilt this dioptra, she would use a stool tall enough that she could actually stand next to it.
With the right angle in mind, she marked down her position on the map and drew a long line to the very edge of the paper, in the direction of Wang Yonghao.
Halfway done. Now she just needed to do it all over again, at a spot a couple miles away.
She packed up the stool and sighting plank into her bag, hefted it over her shoulder, and sprinted off, her breathing as regular as a clock. The bag shifted awkwardly on her back, hitting her in the shoulder and making her gait awkward, and it took her a couple minutes to find a good way to hold it stable.
As she ran, she sank into the flow, and let her thoughts run free. Last night was a low point for her, but the morning brought clarity with it, and she felt her worries begin to dissolve away. She had a way to find Yonghao. She had money for travel. She had even managed to convince Lan Yu to not report her - and if she knew anything about people, that was a solid conviction, not a fleeting one. And even though the vow still rested heavily in her mind, she already knew what she was going to do about it - the only thing remaining was to put her plans in motion.
Just like the skies were the darkest just before the dawn, her times of despair were surely about to end.
Halfway through her run, her spiritual energy had finally recovered enough for her to spin it into a self-sustaining loop, and she held it carefully, slowly pulling more and more spiritual energy out of the forest air. It only got easier from there, and she pushed herself to run faster, grinning as she hopped over roots and flew over small chasms, her bags feeling lighter with every minute. Even after almost a decade of cultivation, the joy of moving with the help of spiritual energy did not get any less exhilarating - she could only imagine how good surfing on a flying sword must be.
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She laughed, kicking off a tall tree and grabbing a tall rock outcropping, easily hefting herself over the edge. One more measurement. Just one more, and she’d know exactly where Yonghao was. Finally, it was all coming together.
The hills next to the town swiftly turned into a forest, but what she needed was an open area, one where she could sight local landmarks to determine her precise position, so it took her almost an hour to find a good clearing to set up. Thankfully, at least she no longer needed it to be flat.
Her heart beat faster as she did her measurements, and she had to force it to still, lest she make a mistake. When she was done, she brought out the map, her hands trembling with worry that somehow, it would all fall apart at the last second, and drew the second line.
The lines crossed, on a city a hundred and fifty kilometers away.
“Yes!” She cheered, leaping into the air, laughing maniacally.
It worked, it actually worked! Up until the last moment, she was sure it would somehow fail.
To celebrate, she pulled out her sword, spun a thread control technique around her silk rope, and swung from tree to tree, slicing off leaves and branches. If only she could actually fly, or circulate a more impressive technique - something like the Honk of the Solar Goose, one that could make blasts of sword light - but that too would come, in time.
Ten minutes later, and still grinning from ear to ear, she landed back down on the forest clearing, and took out the second map. It was time to plan her travel.
The map for flying sword navigation was accurate to the terrain - helpful for those flying through the sky, who had nothing else to navigate by except geographic landmarks - and thus also great for triangulation, but entirely useless for regular travel. A kilometer in the sky was always the same, no matter what was below your feet - but back down on the ground, going ten kilometers downstream would take perhaps an hour in a good boat, whereas ten kilometers across a mountain range could easily take several days. If you wanted to plan your travels, you needed a different map entirely - one that redrew the world in terms of times and routes, more of a graph of movement than a pictorial representation of terrain.
She quickly found the city in question, and after a bit rof calculation, she had her figure. Five days, assuming no delays. She would have to travel downsteam, and then upstream a different tributary.
She spent a week in this town, but Wang Yonghao was a mere five days away from her. Really, she was ahead of the curve.
“Well, Yonghao,” she whispered, getting up off the ground and pointing her sword in his direction, grinning maliciously, “shall we see wherever the mouse can truly escape the fox?”
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“What do you mean, you do not have a spot?” she asked, growing irritated, “I asked you yesterday, and we all but agreed on the job then and there. Now I am merely asking to be ferried downstream for a couple days. What changed?”
“I must apologize, honorable immortal Lan,” the older merchant bowed deeply, “but the traveler cabins have all been filled up since then.”
“I don’t need a cabin,” she sighed. This was the third time in a row she was getting the runaround, and it didn’t get any less baffling. “I can sleep on the deck itself if need be. I can cook and protect your vessel, for free - how do you not have a spot?”
“All the same,” - the merchant shrugged - “we don’t have any space.”
She closed her eyes, rubbing them in frustration, and then turned and walked away without saying goodbye. It was rude, but if the fucker wanted her to be polite, he shouldn’t have been lying straight to her face.
Yesterday, while she was seeking out rumors about Wu Lanhua, she also asked a fair few people wherever they could let her travel on their ship. Most agreed immediately, and in fact were asking if they could hire her on for a long term contract. Today, it was like all of them changed their minds overnight, and marked her out as an outcast.
What could have happened? Did she piss off someone important back at the party? But she barely even talked to anyone...
This setback could not even begin to dampen her incredible mood, but she needed to think, and so she paid for a small teapot of jasmine tea from a street vendor and settled down at one of the tables in front of his stall to relax. A couple other customers gave her elegant robes assessing looks, but made no comments, and her veiled hat hid her expression from sight. After the run into the forest and then back into town, the cheap tea smelled sweet, like a heavenly medicine.
Her cup paused on the way to her lips, as gears finally clicked in her head. She put it down without taking a sip, and cursed that emerald-dressed snake of a woman. That sent some more looks her way, but she ignored them - thankfully, she at least brought herself short of saying the name out loud.
Wu Lanhua must have sent a message to the other merchants in town in the morning, none of whom would want to pick a fight with the biggest magnate if they could avoid it. Back then, she wondered why she didn’t try to push her to stay during their breakfast, but this explained it - she was just stalling for time. It was probably also why she invited her to sleep overnight, and why she wasn’t worried about giving Qian Shanyi her seal, even though it gave up a measure of control.
Her goal was obvious - it made it harder for Qian Shanyi to leave town. There were two reasons why she might have decided to do this: a bad one, and an annoying one. Either way, she would have to go talk to the woman to find out what her intentions were.
She sighed, closed her eyes, and sipped from her tea cup. The tea really was nice, and there was no reason to waste it.
She’d go talk to her right away.
Just… not until her teapot was empty.
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“Ah, Yishan! What a fortunate meeting,” Wu Lanhua smiled, meeting her eyes. She found her in the middle of ordering around some sailors in the docks, loading up boxes onto a slender, long ship with sails that seemed like the wings of a perched bird, ready to set flight.
“Ah, honorable merchant Wu,” she responded in a flat tone, coming closer. The sailors quickly left the two of them alone. “Are you behind all ships in Xiaohongshan mysteriously barring me from boarding?”
“Barring you from boarding?” Wu Lanhua fluttered her eyelashes, “What a travesty. But where might you be headed?”
“Downstream,” she said, “I hope you realize you cannot prevent me from leaving? I will hitch a ride uninvited, if need be.”
“Whyever would I want to prevent you from leaving, Yishan?” Wu Lanhua shook her head. “I am saddened to see my friend leave us so soon, but I could hardly stop you. But if you are heading downstream, could I perhaps offer my own ship? It is the fastest in the city, and I just happened to head in the same direction.”
So it was the annoying reason: she wanted to control how she left, force them to travel together, perhaps to give her more time to persuade her to stay.
“Why this charade? You could have told me you intended to do this in the morning.” She shook her head.
“You didn’t even know where you were headed this morning,” Wu Lanhua pointed out, raising an eyebrow, “and besides, I would have thought you would ask me before the others.”
Qian Shanyi didn’t want to ask her exactly because she didn’t want her to know where she was headed.
She snorted, leaning in close to Wu Lanhua, the veil around her hat almost touching her face.
“Are you quite sure about what you said that night?” She whispered quietly, “Pushing me to travel with you, together on the same ship? Does this not look like courtship?”
Wu Lanhua did not even offer her the courtesy of blushing.
“Please, Yishan,” she said instead, “Liu Fakuang would be traveling with us, of course, for we have to settle some things before our wedding. I hope you can refrain from impropriety?”
Qian Shanyi pursed her lips. Traveling together with that karmist bastard… She doubted she could avoid a confrontation if they spent more time together. Hiding her contraband swords would be bad enough, but by far the greatest trouble would be in keeping her mouth shut about what she thought about him.
Wu Lanhua knew it, too - probably intended it to scare her off her chase after Wang Yonghao. How naive.
“Well, lead the way, honorable merchant Wu.” Qian Shanyi gave her a mocking bow, “Let us set off right away, on our small river journey.”