As the caravan rolled into the final stop within the Dying Lands, there was a collective sigh of relief. Of the fifteen caravaners and the nine guards, fourteen caravaners and eight guards had successfully made the trip.
Sure enough, Eli and Ettie had been right. On the twelfth night of our journey, a pack of demonic beasts had attacked the camp. As planned, the night watch guards had raised an alarm, and everyone had woken up in time to form up into a defensive ring and do as we were told.
However, a smaller beast - one that looked like a strange cross between a hedgehog and a ferret - slipped past the guards undetected and attacked the inner circle group. Myself and another Earth Realm Cultivator that had been making the trip were enough to kill the thing quickly enough, but the damage was done. A few of the more nervous caravaners had reacted to a beast being among them by bolting away from the circle. Most were grabbed before they could get far away in their panic, but one of them had sprinted with surprising speed straight off into the darkness.
One of the guards gave chase after him as the battle was drawing to a close. Neither returned.
After a short, solemn discussion, it was decided it would be best to cut our losses, pick up camp, and be on our way in what early morning light had just begun to crest the horizon. The rest of the trip had been a quiet and tense affair, but as we moved on, the guards continued to do their job, and there were no further mishaps of note during the several following monster attacks.
We rolled into the town in the afternoon of day twenty-seven. Battered and bruised but mostly alive. The guards even seemed pleased with the survivor count. I wasn’t sure if two deaths was actually low or not, but given the guards seemed happy about it, I couldn’t do anything except consider myself lucky.
Once the caravan had settled and broken up in ‘Bastion’ - and I had laughed at the name’s unoriginality after Refuge - I took another two days to recover and relax. Bastion was similarly placed, though opposite of, Refuge, positioned a few kilometers beyond the edge of the Dying Lands and into the Blooming Wilds. It felt decidedly safe after the time in the Dying Lands, with the town pleasantly green with flora and simple but pretty water features throughout.
I said my goodbyes to Eli and Ettie, wishing them well on their travels. Apparently, they regularly guarded caravans going back and forth between Refuge and Bastion, and would likely be on the road with one once again within the day.
However, even after all was said and done here, I couldn’t get what they had said out of my head. I had seen what demonic Cultivators could do to children in person, or at least the aftermath of it, with Miss Vale when we had rescued Cierra. Emery had even mentioned in passing that it wasn’t the first time she had seen it.
Leaving whatever was out there to do as it pleased wasn’t something that set well with me. But I also knew I was in no position to fight a group of Cultivators, demonic or otherwise, that lived in the wild in a province whose average monsters were stronger than I was.
If I could at least ascend to the Sky Realm, I may have been able to just barely survive out there against the demonic beasts. Assuming the Cultivators out there were at least Sky Realm though, meant that until I was solidly into the Sky Realm and had at least some training with Domains, I would be marching to my death out there.
And all of that was the long winded way to say that I was upset that I couldn’t do anything about what was happening out here, but needed to keep my mind on the task at hand - finding a way to Flowing Dragon City.
As it turned out, that was actually very easy. Caravans traveled there regularly from almost everywhere, as it was a fairly large city that functioned as something of a trading outpost. The Four Dragon Peaks were absolutely rife with natural resources due to their high Qi concentrations, and Flowing Dragon City acted as the gate to access the mountain range.
So, I had a passage booked quite literally the day after I arrived and it left the day after that. With the two days I had to relax, I sampled food around town, took in the sights, and Cultivated near some of the larger water features, which were abundant with water Qi.
After leaving Bastion, the trip to Flowing Dragon City was actually quite lovely. The Blooming Wilds were so named for their thick, overgrown plant life that grew out of control at the base of the mountain range, creating an imposing jungle. The area was so large that it surrounded the entire range, and was fairly impenetrable for your average traveler.
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Thankfully, there were a good number of cleared and maintained roads and paths through the jungle. Altogether, as the caravan never left the path, the whole trip was smooth. We had a few guards with us, but they were once again Earth Realm Cultivators, as the natural threats here were not as dangerous as those in the Dying Lands. But more than that, any particularly dangerous creatures wouldn’t approach the roads. For whatever reason, they were only ever seen deep in the jungle and were left primarily undisturbed.
The trip from Bastion to Flowing Dragon City was nineteen days total. While traveling, gauging distance to the mountains had been quite tricky, as the canopy of the jungle prevented us from getting a clear view of the skyline and the mountains in the distance. However, a few times a day, the mountains would peek through a hole in the canopy, and they just continued to grow more and more imposing as we approached.
On day nineteen we finally arrived at the gates of the city. For having such a pleasant sounding name, the city itself was absolutely domineering. The walls surrounding the city that we could see from where we were had been crafted from stone. I couldn’t tell how thick they were from the outside, but their height was intimidating. And while they were crafted from stone, they had all been expertly crafted to be clean, smooth stone that had potentially been colored, as they were a strange blue-gray in color.
Clearly designed to be a stronghold if necessary, the walls were at least twenty-five meters tall. And that would have been a conservative estimate on the shortest parts - some towers and parapets were clearly built higher than that. The guard towers situated every so often along the wall were particularly noticeable, standing stark against the sky and mountains as a backdrop.
I supposed that walls had to be made at least that high when accounting for Cultivators, but it didn’t make them any less impressive looking.
And the gate we rode up to for entry was no less imposing.
Probably twenty-five meters tall and fifteen wide, the gate structure was a gorgeously ornate blue and silver double door. With one half swung open to allow in visitors during the day, I could see that the material was at least several meters thick. And while I wasn’t sure what material was used, it was certainly at least metallic in nature.
The city’s interior was less threatening, but no less impressive. What had surprised me most was how spacious everything had felt. Many of the large cities I had visited in my lifetime were densely packed, sprawling things with garbage and refuse littered in out of the way places.
This city, however, was impeccably clean, organized, and felt open. The roads were wide, there were sizable alleys - if not full sized roads - between most buildings. And there were plenty of walkways to accommodate people in addition to carts and the like.
The caravan traveled together to the city center. After moving a bit further into the trading district and to a stable for the animals, everyone dispersed into the city.
Not sure how to proceed from here, I spent the day wandering around. I found a place for lodging, though I wasn’t sure how long I would stay in the city.
I looked up past the rest of the buildings, and toward the mountain range just beyond the city’s southern walls, and the four peaks that stood hundred of meters taller than the rest. The Flowing Dragon Peak was the northernmost spire, the closest to the city, and likely the peak that I was best suited to climb. As an ice artist, I could likely not only ascend the water-aspected peak with relative ease, but even make use of my time on it to Cultivate.
But even with my Cultivation aiding me, the climb would be exhausting, and I knew I needed to prepare before trying to run up a mountain. I resolved to spend a few days in the city to get myself back into peak condition before leaving. Even if I didn’t feel particularly strained from my time on the road, I was sure that some fatigue must have built up, even if I couldn’t feel it.
With that decided, I figured I should eat my fill, relax, and then sleep however much I could before spending a few days being a tourist.
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It was my fifth day in the city. I had rested well. I had gathered everything I felt may come in handy during the mountainous trek and stashed it in my storage ring. I had even asked around about what to expect in climbing the mountains.
In doing so, I had learned that I needed a permit to travel on the mountains, which required me to pass a baseline assessment to be sure that I wouldn’t just die up there. And I did that too.
With everything settled, I was feeling confident that I was prepared to begin to climb a monster of a mountain.
And then on my way to the southern gate of the city to leave, I made the mistake of walking through the main thoroughfare. And past the food stalls. Between the shouts of sales and the smells of fresh food, I was lucky to make it most of the way toward the gate before breaking down.
Not fifty meters from my destination, I was stopped dead by the smell of freshly baked bread and some kind of fish soup. This far inland, I didn’t expect seafood to be common, and the sudden scent hit me like a ton of bricks. I had to stop for lunch before I left.
It was incredibly serendipitous that I did so. Ten minutes into savoring my meal and watching the innumerable crowd pass by, I thought that I had caught sight of a familiar face in the crowd. With the large number of people who wore their hair long, tied up or not, her shoulder length bob cut drew my gaze with no effort.
“Well how about that…?” I said to myself, as I popped the last bit of soup-soaked bread into my mouth. I had paid for the food when I received it, so there was no bill to settle. With a smile, I slipped into the crowd, following the back of Emery’s head.