“Something’s wrong. The skies should have flared crimson at least once by now!” Hissed a man wearing dark robes over blackened mail, glaring up at the skies as he rode a pony that had surprisingly good traction on the desert sands. As if it rode upon hard-packed dirt, barely leaving a hoofprint behind.

The slender man beside him, dressed in a loose-fitting changshan jacket perfectly suited for deflecting heat and catching any breeze, flashed a fatalistic smile. “All I see are a million brilliant stars flashing our fates overhead. Is it our fate to survive this night of such promise and peril, I wonder? Certainly not, if you’re so foolish as to turn around, thinking you have it within you to defeat whatever might have muffled your captain’s signal, assuming it was muffled at all.”

The burly man beside the baker froze in anxious thought.

“All that awaits is back there is death, soldier. Either that, or Tan Guan’s extreme displeasure that we didn’t follow his orders. Which come to think of it, only has one likely outcome,” declared an amused-looking Ye Pan, eyes twinkling oddly in the starlight. “Death behind us, or a city full of life and opportunities before us. Which path do you prefer, soldier?”

Ye Pan then pulled a fresh-baked loaf from seemingly nowhere, already split in half and filled with aromatic chutney. “I find a full belly helps with life’s more difficult conundrums. Come, eat with me while we make our way to Qianshi and see what fate has in store for us there.”

The burly JiangHu soldier clearly intended to be Ye Pan’s keeper furrowed his brow, before eventually dipping his head, hand reaching for the tainted sandwich the baker had prepared.

Starlight flashed upon razor-sharp steel.

To the baker’s credit, his cheeky grin didn’t even twitch when the doomed guard’s surly features were replaced by a fount of spurting blood

Ye Pan even managed a chuckle. “Ah, Alex. My favorite philosophizing Ruidian friend! I don’t suppose you’d care for a poisoned sandwich?”

Alex gazed impassively up at the baker smiling from his pony as warm crimson droplets spattered both of them including a suddenly distressed pair of winnying ponies. Ye Pan calmed his with an expert flick of his reini. Alex let the second bolt for the distant road, winding through the desert.

Ye Pan raised only a single brow when Alex calmly took the sandwich with the hand not holding the blood-spattered fangtian ji, and took a healthy bite.

He frowned thoughtfully. “It’s a soporific. And pretty damned tasty, too. You weren’t planning on killing him, then?”

The baker shrugged. “Why would I? He was just a man doing his job. When he woke up to find me missing, he would have been smart enough to hire on one of the caravans and flee this area for good.” He sighed down at the headless corpse. “Though I suppose now his retreat is all the more complete, having fled this life entirely.”

Alex frowned at the man smiling back at him so calmly. “Why did you do it?”

Ye Pan sighed, flashing Alex a sad smile. “Do you have any idea how many loafs I can bake with the grains I’ll be able to purchase for the next year, with a full spirit pearl’s worth of gold? Loafs I’ll be able to give for free to countless orphaned children, fallen women, and numerous other broken and forgotten souls doomed to live on life’s bitter edges… far too many finding life too burdensome to bother with at all.”

Alex blinked, gazing at the man in stunned disbelief. “Wait, you’re saying you sold us out so you could use the bounty to feed the poor?”

Ye Pan’s gentle smile hardened. “Let me ask you this, Alex. Is one woman’s arranged marriage worth a thousand mortals being able to fill their bellies with a daily meal for an entire year?”

Alex blinked, gazing at the baker for long, furious moments.

Forced to accept what his Soul Sight was telling him.

Far from the vile corruption that had plagued all of Tan Guan’s previous half-dozen lives… and the mix of light and darkness that radiated from most people’s souls… Ye Pan, however questionable and borderline vile some of his methods happened to be… had been a virtual saint for his last three incarnations.

Even if this one was definitely a mix.

Twisted as his path was, he believed his words. Despite the black threads of karma linking him to Alex and the caravan… to far off Qianshi, Alex sensed a thousand strands of gold.

“You’re not lying,” Alex was forced to concede, earning a bemused smile from the baker.

“You actually sense that truth? Remarkable.”

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Alex’s gaze hardened. “Arranging for multiple people’s cultivation to weaken and shatter is hardly the same thing as an arranged marriage.”

The baker conceded that with a nod. “You’re right. Fortunately, I had no truck in that bit of foul play.”

Alex blinked. “But you said...”

“Exactly what Tan Guan and his cutthroats wanted to hear,” the man said with a regretful shake of his head. “I sounded like the callous traitor they expected, and gave them the precise information they needed to capture you while leaving everyone else alone. An entire caravan I had drugged to assure they wouldn’t interfere, and thus spare their lives. As for your future in-laws...”

He smiled at Alex’s flinch. “They would have found a painfully thin street urchin destined for a full belly and a much happier life, slipping through bars and passing them this key.”

Alex’s eyes widened in bemused disbelief, yet recognizing by the spiritual energy signature what could only be a slave collar key.

He shook his head, glaring at the baker. “Why the fuck couldn’t you just be a corrupt asshole I could cut down without a lick of guilt?”

Ye Pan’s eyes twinkled in odd sympathy. “Because life is rarely that simple, Alex. Even the man you just cut down might have chosen the path of the caravan guard himself, after another six months of increasing distaste for Tan Guan’s corrupt path.”

“And you can actually sense that?”

Ye Pan shrugged. “Who can say?”

Alex’s eyes widened, suddenly understanding. “You’re a Fate cultivator!”

“And you’re a very perceptive Ruidian.” The man frowned. “But that’s not quite right… is it?”

“Did you know that Tan Guan wasn’t intent on capturing us… but slaughtering the entire caravan in a fit of bloodthirsty rage?”

Ye Pan flinched, lowering his head in actual shame. “No, Alex, I did not. Which shows what a fool I am, to think I could get the best of an infernal cultivator, whose very existence taints and corrupts both fate and destiny as they tear entire souls free of creation’s weave.”

Alex gazed at the man for long moments, clenching the haft of his fangtian ji in a frustrated grip, trying not to think about the man he had so casually killed after a savage, brutal night of fighting for his life.

“You were willing to sell out Ya Ling.”

The baker sighed, bowing his head. “That was the choice I made, yes.”

“Forcing her to be some lord’s second wife. And what about her freedom? The collar about her own neck?”

The baker’s look was strangely pitying. “Do you really think we chain our wives up in the cities, Alex? Do you truly think that, with her considerable powers, Ya Ling wouldn’t have been able to slip free of his cloying attentions and lose herself in the desert sands to start over wherever she wished, however she wished, assuming she didn’t choose to embrace a life of ease and comfort in the end?”

Alex clenched his jaw. Forced to accept that an arranged marriage, at least as painted by Ye Pan, was hardly the same thing as being chained up and enslaved. Though Alex was sure it couldn’t be that simple.

But was it really worth butchering the baker before him? A man who dared a twisted path for the sake of a thousand hungry souls?

On the one hand… it would solve a lot of problems. On the other… how often had he walked a darker path, knowing that the ends sometimes did justify the means? Because all he had to do was look at the headless corpse at his feet to know that he had no room to talk about ethical conflict resolution at all.

“The easiest move to make would be to tie up this final loose end.”

Ye Pan chuckled, eyes twinkling as he nodded. “True. And truly spoken like an experienced JiangHu operative.”

Alex winced. “And what happens to the thousand lost souls counting on your stall for, what, a free evening meal everyone knows not to speak of or ask for during the day when you do actual business to support yourself?”

Ye Pan gave a solemn nod. “That’s how I’ve had my shop set up for years, yes.”

Alex smirked. “And I’m guessing all your employees are former homeless urchins you gave a second chance at a better life to?”

“Of course. Three of them now have shops of their own. Two have named their firstborn sons Ye Pan as well.”

“Fuck. Why couldn’t you be as corrupt and evil as most of the bastards I put down?”

Ye Pan wisely said nothing.

Alex glared at the man. “I need a Cultivator’s Oath from you.”

The baker instantly bowed his head. “I swear upon my foundation and the fortunes of all those I would rescue that I will reveal no secrets shared with me by anyone I met, my personal suspicions, or anything exceptional I saw during the caravan ride we shared.”

Alex frowned. “What about Tan Guan?”

The baker gave an innocent shrug. “I’m sorry, I’m unaware of any recent gossip. I haven’t left my home in days, due to illness, which is why my second’s been running my shop in my steed.”

Alex glared at the man for long moments.

Then he turned around and went back the way he came.

Ye Pan gazed at the retreating Ruidian for long moments, the shakes only taking him when he thought he was alone.

Ye Pan shed actual tears as he buried the headless man who might have walked a better path, over time. He whispered a prayer to a god Alex had feared long forgotten, before retrieving the flustered second pony, removing all telltale markings and gear, then heading back to the trade road once more.

And those gestures as much as anything else were why a discretely hidden Alex let him live.