Truth glared at the forest draping itself around the Great White Mountain. It looked fine. He didn’t trust a single splinter of it. The memories of Happori Village and the deep, multilayered defenses around it were firmly lodged in his memory.

Oh, happy thought- the magic storm must be playing absolute hell with their golems and talisman defenses. He couldn’t see the evidence of that from kilometers away, but it seemed almost certain. The happy thought was replaced by an unhappy one- what if the forest was outside the affected area?

Only one way to find out. He sighed, and trudged on. At roughly sixty kilometers an hour. Body cultivation remained fun. Although Truth did notice that his shoes lasted considerably longer if he ran barefoot. His skin held up better than the rubber.

The forests were nice. He guessed they were mostly pine with some other evergreens mixed in. Or whatever you called trees with narrow, needle-like leaves instead of wide, flat leaves. Fir? Oak? Truth had considered adding Trees to the pile of things to research, and had firmly decided against it. The pile was too big already. Adding anything else was just masochism.

He tried to remember anything relevant about the forest around Great White Mountain and drew a complete blank. They were always just backdrop on pictures. Apparently the nation’s founders descended on the mountain, and when the Founding King stood at the summit, rainbows appeared that covered the whole sky as a noble phoenix landed on his arm and paid him homage.

The king then swung his sword and split apart the clouds for ten thousand kilometers, jumped from the top of the volcano to the bottom in a single leap, ate an entire cow, memorized twenty books of poetry without even opening them and learned every language in the world as soon as he heard a single word spoken. He then got married to the phoenix and fathered forty flame haired sons and daughters by her, each of which was a heartbreaking beauty and the most thunderously powerful of mages. It was just possible that the stories had been exaggerated, but Hell, Truth had seen some weird shit. Maybe that actually happened.

The last king of Jeon… Truth struggled. He was sure he had heard something about him.

<>

Rough.

<>

Truth nodded. “Meh” summed up his feelings about it too.

Any insight on the forest?

<>

Thanks.

There were established trails in the forest. There were well traveled routes to the summit too. There used to be regular offerings made up there, then it just became a tourist destination. Did Starbrite lock down the entire mountain and forest?

There were some carriages on the road now. Most driving flat out, going dangerously fast on the mountain roads. So the storm couldn’t have spread too far, but news about it sure had. Or maybe there had been a lot of them, just scattered around.

Would the “Magic Collapse Deniers” call them normal storms? Or argue that the economic cost of doing anything about them was far greater than the losses they caused?

It wouldn’t do to overreact. They have a duty to look after the interests of the shareholders, after all. Whoever the “shareholders” might be. Presumably they were people immune to the collapse of magic. Otherwise one might think that doing something about it would be in the interest of the shareholders.

Truth exhaled the morbid thoughts and ran on. The villages were emptying out or digging in. There seemed to be considerably divided opinion on the right answer. In the short term, getting somewhere with more supplies and support made sense, but long term? The cities would be slaughterhouses.

Truth would be loading up on all the canned and dried food he could find, digging a deep, deep well, and making the most waterproof, weatherproof shack he could. Farming and hunting would come after most of the neighbors died off. They had left things a bit late, but better late than never.

Oh look, the morbidity came straight back. Maybe it had been lonely.

He laughed silently, watching the trees flicker past. He would need to stockpile cheap romance novels and the like. He would burgle a library before the rats got in, or people looking for kindling, or insulation. Hmm. How would he get it to Siphios? Even for him, it seemed like an awful long way to run. Grab a spell bird and hope it lasted the trip? He let himself drift into daydreams. It passed the time.

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Merkovah’s dead drop was in a village called Wieyon, about which he knew nothing. His road atlas had told him that it was directly across the border with the village of Minzu, and a short detour off the highway he was on. It made sense. There were only two main roads to Great White Mountain. This happened to be the most direct one if you were coming straight from Harban.

Truth ran into Minzu. There was no transition. Mountain wilderness became dense factory housing in the span of a single pace. It was surreal. He was blazing through a busy little town. The map labeled it as a village, but that was clearly wrong. There had to be ten thousand people living here.

He had time to try some food, right? Right. He would keep an eye out for street food. The town just… kept on going. It seemed that he had underestimated the size. All low rise, long running apartment buildings and big factories. There were grocery stores, drug stores and all that, but his main impression of Minzu was long apartment buildings and factories next to wide roads. A lot of gray. He mentally shrugged. Maybe there would be street food in Jeon.

He cut over to the bridge that crossed the river dividing Jeon from Onis. Guarded, of course. Heavily. Lots and lots of highly agitated conscripts waving needlers around. Lots of Sino border guards too, and they didn’t look any older or more experienced than their Jeon counterparts.

The Ulay River would barely rate as a tributary of the mighty river Fan, were they connected. This wasn't just Harban snobbery from Truth- it was never more than two hundred meters wide, and frequently narrowed to less than a hundred and forty. Plenty of watch towers, plenty of guards, but by Truth’s now intensely jaded standards, it might as well have been unguarded.

Truth nodded casually at the sloppy defenses. Then dropped into cover behind a supply warehouse and started surveilling the crossing with brutal intensity. He had been burned far too many times to assume that he was seeing everything there was. Two hours of obsessive staring later, he had identified some impressively sophisticated recording talismans and a decent array of signals equipment, but nothing particularly alarming.

There were a half dozen crossings between Minzu and Wieyon, many of them in sight of each other. And there were dozens of villages just like this dotting the Ulay, if not a hundred. This one bridge just didn’t rate that much attention.

He eased his way along the underside of the bridge anyway. It’s not like he couldn’t hang on just fine, and there were fewer recording talismans down there. Just in case.

One act of illegal immigration later, he was trotting through Wieyon. It was unsurprisingly similar to Minzu. The signs were in different languages, but that was about it. He had the sneaking suspicion that most of the border guards “forgot” to ask for passports or ID most of the time. It seemed like that kind of place.

A lot of people standing around in front of their houses, or rushing back and forth from the shops. Trying to hide their purchases. He might be out of luck on the street food. There were moving carriages, and lights and things, so clearly the storm had missed this place. This was fear buying, then. Justified fear, but still fear buying.

The dead drop was supposed to be an overturned flower pot in front of a yellow painted house at a certain intersection. The house was there. The flowerpot was not. Truth looked around. For what, he didn’t know. He didn’t want to hang around in Jeon. No reason he could put his finger on, just… he didn’t feel safe. So he spun on his heel and ran back across the border.

There was no sudden explosion of hidden police, or fast moving watchers, or anything to justify his paranoia. Still. He felt much safer here amongst strangers.

He traced the distance from where he was to the caldera of Great White Mountain in his road atlas. Interestingly, while there was a reasonably direct road on the Jeon side of the border, you basically had to loop around the whole mountain and come from the north to access it on the Onis side. No reason he could see for that, so it was probably down to the terrain being too rugged. The loop around turned a roughly hundred kilometer journey into a two hundred and fifty kilometer journey.

Hell with it. He had run cross country often enough. He would enjoy the novel experience of doing it while wearing pants.

“I wanted to be a talisman maintenance tech. I want that clearly established. And sure, NOW it looks like the job has a limited future, but in the short term, I’d never be short of work. But no. No, I get to be the guy who runs naked through forests.”

Truth was muttering. He didn’t expect anyone to answer him, and his expectation was met. In the face of mass indifference, he set off to find a place to sleep. It was still early, but it had been a tiring day.

He wandered the long row apartment buildings. Identical building after identical building. Nicer than the one he grew up in, by miles. Only about four stories tall, with a lot more light coming in. No visible evidence of gangs either. So that was nice. He would still prefer not to sleep on someone’s floor. Somewhere, there would be a hotel. He’d skip the luxury suite this time, and just find an empty room.

The room he wound up taking was utterly adequate. Not fancy. Not… exquisite or anything. Just clean, comfortable, and quiet. The whole hotel was pretty empty. It seemed that whatever travelers might have been staying there had all left. He was able to score more pre-cooked food from the local convenience stores, and it continued to be… fine. He had the nagging feeling it could be great, but the essential convenience store nature of what he was eating was dragging it down.

Truth lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. If the dead drop wasn’t ready for pickup tomorrow, he’d scout the sea of trees regardless, then come back in the evening. There was a feeling of pressure building up. Like a coming storm, or waiting for dad to come home. The peace was an illusion. The madness and pain he felt in his little tomb- that was real. That was life in an apocalypse. Hiding in your little hole, suffering, and glad you weren’t suffering worse.

He laughed at himself again. Turning morbid. He would be turning mean again, soon. He didn’t want that. He was the fool- a hero on a quest to save the damsel in distress. That he helped keep in distress, but he wouldn’t dwell on that. He closed his eyes, and remembered the warmth of watching Pitz with Etenesh and Jember. The sheer animal joy of letting his iron horse run through the deserts and mountains.

He remembered how sweet Etenesh tasted, and how warm she made him feel. It had been a bad day. He fell asleep smiling anyway.