Chapter 37

Safron was a little nervous when everyone came to the big house to see them off in the morning. It made her feel important that everyone wanted to put their hands on her head and say a small blessing, and she let Clover and Elder Pike do that without fuss, but then she got bored of the treatment and hid behind her father’s legs to keep the rest of them from bugging her.

The air was heavy with unspoken tension, which Safron could sense but not really understand. She knew that this was something to do with the itchiness she’d been sensing lately, since the trip to the city was announced immediately after she’d told her father about it. The coincidence was enough to make her nervous, afraid that maybe the itchiness, which she’d been mostly ignoring, was perhaps a bigger deal than she’d thought it was.

“Okay, sweetie, close your eyes, it’s time to travel,” her father said, and Safron obediently shut her eyes tight, knowing that when she opened them again she’d be many miles away.

Tan watched as his sister vanished into his father’s storage ring, and he shook his head. While it made sense—Safron was too small to make the journey to the city in a reasonable time frame under her own power, and the stasis of the storage ring was the easiest solution for everyone, including her—it still made him think of his kidnapping of Hoten. It was perhaps a little indignity, but Safron didn’t even realize what had happened aside from “daddy’s using his magic to move me.”

“Right,” Tren said, turning to the rest of his family. “I’m going to travel ahead. I’ll see you when you get there.”

He kissed his wife, then took a step and vanished, the Titan’s Walk technique carrying him miles in a single step.

“I wish I could do that,” Tan commented.

“You’ll be able to do something much like it one day, when you’re stronger,” his mother assured him. “Although it looks something more like this.”

Wensho blurred, her figure streaking out into the distance, traveling to the city. Tan sighed, turning to his friends and the spirit animals who had come to wish the family well.

“Well, I’m going to head out too,” He said.

“Good luck. We’ll be praying for your sister,” Elder Pike said, and the rest of the group echoed the sentiment.

“Yeah, thanks,” Tan said. Then he flew up into the air, taking off in the same direction that his mother and father had gone.

With the Shen family gone, the remaining members of the household exchanged nervous glance.

“Everything will be fine,” Won said confidently. “They’re, I mean, we know who they are. Bad things don’t happen to people like Safron. This is just a couple parents overreacting to a minor deal, I think.”

“I hope you’re right,” Clover said, scratching her nose in her human form. “I’ll be very sad if she doesn’t come home to give me my cuddles.”

The others exchanged nervous looks, worried that Clover had just given voice to their fears, then they collectively went back to their duties. Won, Ko, Pao and Tremble headed out to the fields to begin work, while the rest of the spirit animals changed back into their animal forms and returned to their business.

Many miles away, a certain merchant was once more subject to the whims of cultivators evicting him from his own compound. While he understood the appeal of borrowing his home for their business, and there was a certain prestige which came with it in the eyes of his peers, it was still frustrating to have a powerful man appear in his courtyard, demand to speak with him, and simply ‘request’ the use of his estate for a few days.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

Granted, he had known that this was coming. He was hosting eight elite healers who had arrived with a letter with the imperial seal requesting lodgings. He had put the two senior healers in his own guesthouse and arranged for the remaining six to stay in one of the best inns in the city.

Now, he watched as the cultivator made walked through his courtyard. While the cultivator was dressed in a fine robe of silk with the runes for “Grandmaster” emblazoned on it, he held in his hand a normal looking hoe and was scratching symbols in the dirt. The merchant knew better than to question his actions as he sent out the messengers to the healers in the city that the time had come.

With this task complete, he quietly took his wife and daughters and fled the city. While there shouldn’t be any danger to a simple healing, he wasn’t willing to take any chances. No, just as he had two years ago when the Zang family had commandeered his home, the merchant decided to make himself scarce.

He stopped by the plum trees on the way out, reaching up to test the ripeness of the fruit. He smiled. This was his aunt’s tree. It served as her grave marker. His family had come from the Yellow Phoenix Empire and taken this tradition with him. The merchant said a quiet prayer to his ancestors before he left.

“I know that the little girl who is to be healed is not your kin,” he said, “But I fear for my family should the cultivator’s wrath be invoked. Perhaps you could turn a benevolent eye upon the child and help the healers as they do their work. Guide their hands, make them steady, and if they doubt, show them the way forward.”

Satisfied, he stepped through the gate of his compound and vanished into the carriage with his family.

In the courtyard, a dozen or so ancestral spirits ate spirit plums and watched the hidden emperor prepare a divine-level formation. They turned to each other and discussed the situation and what it meant for their descendants.

“Do you think that the current patriarch is right to fear his wrath?” one ancestor asked.

“You felt it when he showed himself two years ago during the confrontation with the Zang family,” came the answer from another ancestor. “He could destroy this city with a casual gesture. We may be dead, but he could wipe our memory from existance. Not only is the patriarch right to fear him, but we are fools if we do not do the same.”

“He is here to heal his daughter,” the first ancestor said. “Should we help?”

“What would it cost us to do so?” another ancestor said. “There is not much we can do to affect the world of the living, but are we not meant to be benevolent protectors?”

“I do not think that it is our place,” came a detractor. “The girl has her own ancestors. Let them guide the healing.”

The first ancestor scratched his beard. “Let us send a message to the girl’s ancestors, then,” he said.

With this decision made, the ancestors expended just a fraction of their power to send a message through the veil of death into the afterlife.

Tren felt something resonate with his bloodline, and he turned to the trees where the ancestral spirits rested. He nodded at them, clenching one fist and putting it in the palm of the other hand, then bowing over the symbol of respect to the merchant’s ancestors. Then he picked up his hoe and continued to scratch out the symbols of the highest form of the Four Gates of Heaven Fate Defying Formation into the ground.

When he had finished, he began pounding stakes at various points throughout the merchant’s compound.

Wensho appeared a few moments later to help him. With her here to distract their daughter, Tren brought the little girl out of his storage ring. Safron giggled at the disorientation of suddenly being in a new place and, with her mother watching her, ran about to explore. Tren smiled, wishing that such innocence could last forever.

It wasn’t terribly long before the healers gathered. They took Safron and her mother into the compound to perform another examination of the girl. Tren put it out of his mind as best he could, continuing to work on setting up the formation that would, hopefully, see whatever treatment they decided upon to a successful fruition.

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