To say that a fortress-city is large is to say that the sky is rather wide. It is like saying that there are more than a few stars in the sky, or that a roaring inferno is a bit hot.

A fortress city is a thing of magnitudes.

Each and every Sect, even in the third ring, is known as a sect because of the fact that it is raised up on a plateau, its sect elders and patriarch working together to force from the earth a symbol of their authority and a fortification for them to wield against their foes. These pillars can be anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand feet tall, with those honored by the emperor throughout the Second Ring manifesting as peaks high enough to see clouds form around them, and, of course, the first ring itself reaches to the very stars above.

Fortress cities do not grow upwards. They grow out.

Raika smells it long before they see it. The scent of industry, of churning furnaces and roiling smelters alongside the sharp, nearly overwhelming flood of Qi that wafts out from the distant structures. They can’t see it yet, but even from here the sharp, alchemical-ozone tang and dust scent of Imperial arrays and Qi wash over her.

Raika, Jin, and Li Shu have been walking for a good while. Raika, of course, has taken the brunt of their luggage (she never did get a sending stone or a spatial ring from her visit to her old sect, damnit), carrying over her shoulder a platform of wood holding several bags of goods, supplies, cookware and camping equipment, but between their image and the fact that she is by far the physically strongest of the group, it makes the most sense. She looks much as she did during their time in Wayun village: loose brown robes of heavy canvas obscure most of her body, especially the area of her left arm, walking barefoot on the road and with her hair in long braids of bright red and gold. Li Shu has kept her healer’s robes, white and red spotless and defiant against the dust of the road, and is otherwise carrying only a small pouch and several hidden rolls of medical equipment in her robes and waistband.

Out of all of them, Jin is by far the most changed. He looks like a proper little lord, something Raika finds no end of entertainment in teasing him about. From the rag-clad urchin living out in the woods, without even village walls to keep out the beasts and the cold, he’s graduated into an improvised uniform, reminiscent of a young apprentice or page. His robes are a dull, grayish white, but they are clean and well maintained, and cost a decent couple silver coins to acquire. While he doesn’t look like anything special, his hair is wrapped into a tight black bun, his sandals are clean and properly made, and he carries over one shoulder a satchel, full of writing papers and the medicines that Li Shu can’t fit under her clothes and isn’t comfortable with Raika carrying.

Overall, they fit a rather specific image, one that Raika and Li Shu had to plan out properly.

Alright, mostly Li Shu.

But she helped. And she’s carrying all the heavy shit. It’s her right to claim some of the credit.

Despite claiming Taurus as her patron in the Hungering Roots sect, it’s one thing to wield an open secret for political weight and another to brandish it around like an idiot. To most of the Empire, she’s dead and gone, and to find out otherwise means exposing Taurus and his machinations. It’s the Empire, everyone has machinations, but it creates a weak point in his armor that she knows he doesn’t need. Having rivals going for the throat over the fact he either couldn’t keep a subject under his control, or actively defied protocol and Imperial Law to let her loose as a tool, isn’t something any of them need. It makes for a “patron” that she has quite a bit of leverage on, and one who is more willing to spend his authority keeping them out of trouble.

But there’s only so much authority that can be wielded with subtlety, and only so far that thread can stretch before it snaps.

Rather than directly accepting his patronage and using the weight of a Researcher’s title (Senior Researcher, now), they’ve elected to be a bit more subtle.

It’s not Raika’s strong suit, admittedly, but she is the one who made the plan and explained it to Li Shu and Jin. She’s just not very good at coming up with disguises.

Right now, Raika is playing the part of a servant to a traveling healer and her young assistant. Halfway invisible to Qi senses, she still passes for (and technically is) a cripple, unable to wield or touch Qi, never mind cultivate, but her size and strength she can’t (and won’t) compromise on. The middle ground? A useful but ultimately limited servant, ready and willing to defend her “master” and carry their luggage on the trip, as a traveling healer of the third ring, especially one so young, could reasonably be seen not being able to afford a spatial ring.

Li Shu, of course, takes the titular role in their little play. Jin’s role is easy: look stunned, come when called, and carry stuff. Considering how overwhelmed he is by the sheer amount of land they’ve passed by on their walk, nevermind the upcoming fortress city itself, it’s an easy role to fill.

Li Shu has doubts about herself.

She sighs audibly for the third time in as many minutes as they reach one of the final mile markers towards the next (and final) village.

“You’re overthinking it,” Raika says, her steps impossibly quiet for her size. It’s enough that Li Shu startles a bit, blushing slightly before looking back to Raika.

“I’m not! I was a healer for like six months. They’re not going to believe me.”

“You know the human body and how to treat cultivators, right?”

“Obviously, it’s-”

“And you’re not affiliated with a massive sect or old master, right?”

“You know it’s really annoying when-”

“And you’re only just at the edge of the Foundational realm, right?”

Li Shu gives out an exasperated sigh, rolling her eyes.

“Yes.”

“Great. Which means that for literally every reason we can name, your role isn’t even a lie. You are a healer from some nowhere part of the third ring, you’re not part of a sect, but you are far too skilled to stay in a village and want to expand your knowledge and cultivation. And what better place to do so, and ‘prove your loyalty’, then to pledge your service to a fortress city?”

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“All of that is very reasonable Raika, and still runs into the fact that I am still lying.”

Raika shrugs. “Lying is the easy part.”

“Not to cultivators! We can see sweat! Some people can see it from a mile away! Or read the anxiety in my aura or something! There’s as many ways to uncover a lie as there are stars in the sky, and a fortress city is going to have every one of them!”

“The trick is that you’re not lying about anything they care about.”

“I absolutely am! We’re trying to leave the third ring out into the fourth! Obviously that’s something they’ll want to know!”

“Is it? I doubt I could stop you from healing the wounded we meet, and it’s not like you don’t want to learn some of their stuff. Everyone has secrets. There are as many ways to be weird as there are grains of sand in the world, and the army won’t care about almost any of them. We’ll leave when we find an opportunity, sure, but so would most people eventually, especially a traveling healer.”

She sighs for the fourth time in as many minutes, and it takes Raika a genuine effort not to join in the act.

They’ve had this conversation at least six times in the last week of walking. Once a day, sometimes twice. She hasn’t kept count. In the end, it’s just anxiety- for all that Li Shu has the grit and madness to stare down impossible puzzles and find a way to make them fun and solvable, the only encounters with real power she’s had were the divine beast and She Who Stills The Water. She wasn’t in the arena proper for the final destruction of it, and didn’t spend almost a year and a half dealing with Imperial bureaucracy and powers. She’s nervous.

It is entirely, perfectly, eminently understandable.

She also keeps on sighing.

“Tell me this is going to work.”

“It… has a high chance to.”

Li Shu turns to glare at her.

Raika shrugs. “I’ve gotten pretty comfortable with the fact that literally every plan I’ve ever made has gone catastrophically wrong, weird, or frustrating at some crucial point. I’m at peace with not really feeling respected by the universe when it comes to plans.”

“That’s a weird way to say you’re bad at planning.”

“I’m great at planning. The universe just disagrees. And she’s an uppity enough cow that she disagrees with most plans.”

In the small moment of silence after, Jin pipes in quietly.

“I think it’s a pretty good plan.”

“See? Even the kid thinks it’s going to be fine.”

“Well I didn’t say-”

A feathered tendril baps him on the forehead before he can finish the sentence, leaving a bit of fluffy down on his face.

“Raika! You’re supposed to be teaching him, not bullying him.”

“I’m an excellent teacher. Right there, I just taught him not to say things that might get him whapped within whapping distance.”

Jin sneezes, hard enough that his whole body curls and the sound of it positively echoes across the mountain range, off to one side of the mountain road they’re walking on.

Raika snorts, especially at how badly Li Shu jumps.

“I still think that’s some kind of special physique trait,” she grumbles.

“Absolutely not,” Jin refutes with a glare. “There is no way that there’s a special physique for sneezing, and I am not being called one if there is.”

“Aw, I think it’s adorable.”

Raika treasures the glare that he shoots back at her.

Huffing, he stomps ahead of them, taking the lead on the road, much to Raika’s continued amusement. She’s nice enough not to tell him that though.

Li Shu sighs, again.

“You’re going to do fine,” Raika says.

“...yeah.”

“You are. You’re the best healer I know and probably the best in the third ring at your age. Nevermind all the other weird shit you’ve got going on, or how much of a mad genius you are. You’re the most competent scholar I’ve ever met, and you’re going to be telling the truth.”

“I know! I’m just… I’m nervous. Hao Nera and Qen Hou are off somewhere flirting and building their own little bandit empire, and I’m… ugh. I’m glad that I’m furthering my research, and there’s so much more to study, but I don’t want to mess this up, especially when you didn’t really need to bring me along.”

Raika laughs at that, the same feathered tentacle (now scaled) lightly patting Li Shu on the head. “Like I could have stopped you. And usually, you’re one of the most selflessly curious, delightfully mad and genuinely adventurous people I know. There’s no better place for you than helping me figure out what the hell I’m doing, or out in the fourth ring doing whatever the hell you want. Besides, you know I owe you my life at least two or three times now. If you need to, just think of it as me paying you back. Kind of.”

She finally gets a chuckle out of her friend at that. “You’re doing me a favor by having me help rebuild and theorize about your mess of a body?”

Raika grins, broad and toothy and sharp. “Come on. You know my body’s irresistible. It’s a gift stolen from the heavens that you get to so thoroughly study it.”

Li Shu giggles and rolls her eyes, casually poking a needle into Raika’s side. It doesn’t make it more than a millimeter past the outer layer, but it still tickles a bit.

“Truly you wound me severely, healer.”

Li Shu smiles, and the walk continues on a quieter, calmer note.

Right up until they reach the top of the incline on the road and see over it.

They didn’t take the main highway. Too much attention, too many eyes and arrays keeping an eye out, and while it would be faster in the long run, it would’ve cost them another two days to get to it in the first place. They took side trails and cuts through the woods and valleys to reach their little dirt road, carved into the side of a mountain range who knows how many thousands of years ago. It kept them above the treeline and away from most animals and lesser spirit beasts they might tempt, avoiding that danger also.

The ability to avoid danger evaporates ahead of them.

The horizon is steel and magic.

The highway, a broad and bright white path of paved marble that cuts through the wilds and the dangers of the world in perfect lines, ends at a massive gatehouse, its makeup a gunmetal grey and steel-gilded thing with the bright white and gold of Imperial carvings, reliefs, and banners highlighting it. It is a brutalist thing, towering over even the largest of trade caravans, and looks far more dangerous to try and break through than any mountain.

It is the smallest piece of the thing they see before them.

Behind the gatehouse, the fortress-city begins.

There are miles and miles of sprawling, labyrinthine mazes of towers and walls and defense structures before the city even comes into view. Most of them haven’t needed to be used in centuries, and make for housing for small communities and trading hot-spots that pop up and drift away with the seasons. In some sections, she can see the lights of inhabitants and smell cooking food and well-worn body odor that has saturated the spaces, living quarters for whole towns worth of people springing up in apartment blocks throughout the advanced maze. Its structure makes it look like the world has been carved in the shape of a brain ahead of them. A mind of steel and silver, jade and Imperial white and hints of gold making up the wrinkles and folds of that miles-wide defensive structure.

And on the edge of it, still miles and miles ahead, is the center of the city.

Past the maze-made civilization, past the winding trails and high defense towers and glimmering arrays and roiling mess of flying artifacts and traveling messages and communities building vertically or off of walls, there is the central tower of the Fortress City proper. Rather than the tall and precise plateaus of a sect, it grows like a mountain, like a thorn from out of the earth, a great and mighty mound of buildings and fortifications. It has walls on its walls, bastions on its bastions, layer after layer of fortifications spiraling out to eventually meet deep trenches filled with Qi and powerful weapons, and only after this, meeting the gatehouse into the civilian centers. Only from the civilian city-centers again is there a gatehouse at last connecting the whole back to the maze of defensive walls.

The world is remade into the shape of divine architecture and holy Empire. Even from miles away and downwind, she can smell and hear and feel and see millions of tiny ants that are people, their hearts beating in a thunderous, never-ending cacophony.

“I think the plan might be ok at best,” Jin says.