Northwards was not a particularly strong set of directions to follow anyone, which she realized after what felt to be hours of mind numbing walking through coarse reeds and heavy thick bladed grasses that tossed up their seeds if she so much as blinked in their direction. North covered a lot of ground. North meant half of the entire cursed area. North meant she was northwards of 'frustrated' and just south of 'furious'.

Ji Ying kicked another rock and watched it sail in the air before it plopped unceremoniously into the river. She walked faster, reaching its muddy bank and peering in to find where the rock she had just kicked went. In the clear water a blandly beautiful face stared back at her with a surly expression. Beyond her reflection she could see crumbled bits of statuary sitting in the bed of the river below.

"Hey Chunky," she looked over at the ragged form of Li Chunning who looked like he just wanted to go to sleep. "You having trouble over there?"

"Yes," he answered with a wheeze.

"Well try walking faster then, maybe your legs will loosen up more," she suggested.

"Thank you for the advice."

"You're welcome!" She peered ahead. Further up the river she could see a huge lumpen figure laying on the ground. Tattered wings were stretched awkwardly behind it. As she got closer she could see the large serpentine body and head. But what was more pronounced was the squirming black carpet of flies and other insects that were wriggling in the neck stump where the head only barely clung to by a piece of flesh about as long and wide as her finger. The ground beneath was a dried mixture of dirt and blood and smelled foul enough that she wrinkled her nose and covered it with her sleeve while backing away from the corpse. She looked away from it and on the ground near it she saw two spaces of flattened grass stained with dried blood. One was much smaller than the other.

She glanced back at the dried bloodied mud, then at the two imprints. "Hey Li, look at this."

"What?" He was still a few steps behind, pale and sweating as he finally caught up and looked at the ground. "...Hm..."

Ji Ying crossed her arms as her brain worked through its thoughts. She knew that Rui Yifu was capable of arrays and portals with water, it was not an entirely uncommon skill among land-walking fish people. Could he have also used blood too? "Li, maybe Bo and Zhu'er came here?"

"Maybe," he said, shrugging.

"What do you mean 'maybe'?"

He shrugged again, looking away. "I just said maybe, that's all."

Ji Ying snorted and decided he was not going to be much help. She peered outwards, following the expansive ribbon of the river as it sliced north through a seemingly endless field of tall grass. "Well come on," she said as she began walking along the bank. The river's pace was relatively sedate, enough so that she felt it probably might have been pleasant to float down on a summer day. Once this was all over she decided she would get a boat somehow and bring it to the river to go down. She glanced over her shoulder to see Li Chunning again walking quite a few feet behind her. "Are you really just going to be slow the entire time? I'll just walk on without you!" She threatened.

"You can try, I don't think you'll succeed," Li Chunning replied glumly.

"Then walk faster!" Ji Ying demanded, "you know, Bo and Zhu'er could be in a lot of trouble right now." She reached to her little moonstone necklace, thumbing it casually but there really was a little bit of worry in her mind. She did not think Bo was competent enough to piss right much less take care of a child, but she also knew returning a dead child to the thing would not make him likely to uphold his end of the deal.

Just so long as she got her freedom, that was all she cared about.

"I don't want to walk."

She was taken out from her thoughts by Li Chunning speaking and looked back over at him. "Run instead then?"

"I don't want to run either."

"Then just stand there," she snapped as she grew irritated with him. Why were people so difficult?

"I can't."

She stopped, turned on her heel, and crossed her arms to glare down at him. "What do you mean you can't? Why are you always so evasive and short worded with me?"

He was still walking, coming closer to her step by sluggish step. "I'm not doing this," he said. "I can't control my feet. You walk and I walk."

Ji Ying blinked with nothing immediately coming to mind. How was she supposed to respond to that? He could not do what she said, but he still had to follow her? "Then why are you moving so slowly then?" Was all she could come up with after a few minutes.

"I'm trying to not walk," he answered curtly.

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She stared at him with her mouth agape, again having nothing to really respond to that with. She remembered being ordered and having no choice but to follow it yet hearing a human say he's experiencing something similar was bewildering to her. It was almost like they were experiencing the same thing, except she reminded herself that Li Chunning had the benefit of having always been able to move as he wanted before and now he was just in an unlucky state. What did it have to do with her? Why did he even need to come along? All he was doing was being a drag and depressing to her.

She turned around and began walking again.

Now that she knew that he was incapable of not following her, but was also trying to slow his own step, hearing the sound of his steps in the distance was beginning to irritate her. The way they shuffled and dragged, the rustling grass under his leaden feet He was just making things difficult for no reason besides pettiness, she fumed. They walked through an area with much less grass, where the shapes of foundations for buildings could almost be seen in the earth. There was some dried blood in the area as well but no sight of where it came from. It made Ji Ying a little uneasy and she walked faster.

There was a figure up ahead, hunched over and busily working away at something. The tall grass was returning, threatening to swallow them all up. But Ji Ying pressed on, reaching for her bow and an arrow from her hip quiver as she approached.

The figure was a man. He was wearing patched clothes and his hair was tied back with a strap of rotten looking fabric, and it looked like he had not shaved for days while simultaneously making sure to roast himself in the sun. Ji Ying sniffed a bit and thought he looked like a farmer, kind of like Bo. Around him were numerous strange ragged corpses, wearing equally strange rusting armor and fabric. The man was busily chopping them apart with a thick arm length blade which seemed to be the only well maintained thing on him.

An animal hissed near her boot and dashed off past the man, who looked up from his butchery as Ji Ying was about to step back.

"Don't try hiding, I heard you two walking towards me," he said in a dry and amused voice.

Ji Ying did not look behind herself to check how far Li Chunning was but just from the distant footfalls she could tell he was still quite a bit away from her. "We don't want anything from you," she said, "we're just passing by."

"To where?"

"None of your business."

The man chuckled, "I could probably point you in the right direction if you told me. I've been here for quite a long time."

Ji Ying's brain clicked through a few thoughts. She did not know where she was supposed to go besides 'north'. She did not know how to ask directions to find people who were actively moving farther and farther away. But then she came upon something, "have you see anyone go by?"

The man shook his head, "no. I was tracking my quarry and found a bunch of lost soldiers-" he pointed at the bodies he was reducing to limbs and torsos, "standing around. I came close and found there were a bunch of talismans on the ground they were looking at. I've seen pilgrims with them before," he reached down and pulled a wooden disc from the ground, tossing it to Ji Ying. She held it, brushing away the gunk that had become stuck to it and her eyes widened. Bo had certainly come through the area, and that meant Zhu'er did too! "These guys here? You see, they get troublesome if you don't cut them up into pieces. They recover pretty fast if you don't."

"Huh?" She looked back at the man. "Lost soldiers, what?"

The man snorted, "are you new here, young lady? This entire cursed area's full of soldiers from all over. Most of them look like this-" he pointed at the withered bodiless head close to his feet. Its eyes, Ji Ying saw, were still moving. "Some of them are still much more put together though, either because they've got a strong or stupidly stubborn soul or they're just more recent arrivals. Like some young men I came across a few days ago. They said they came from a monster hunting army called Zhang’s Banners. Now they're all cooped up in an abandoned temple since all their brethren wouldn't die properly. The things here aren't like burning down villages because there's a ghost in them." He chuckled, then his amusement faltered a little.

Ji Ying felt something twist in her guts. Something had happened which caused Bo to drop the talismans. Was Zhu'er okay? But giving it some more thought the tension in her stomach relieved a little. This at least meant they were going the right direction! "Alright, avoid anyone in armor right?"

"Well, I didn't quite say that. Lost soldiers aren't exactly the only things around," the man said. "Like I said earlier, I came here originally tracking my quarry. She's a clever one, alright. Most tigers are."

Ji Ying warily glanced around. The area did not look like a good place for a tiger to be slouching around, with the yellowing grass and patchy fields.

"Oh no, young miss, you don't need to be worried. She only eats men," the tiger hunter said.

"Ah, good," she sighed, Li Chunning finally walked up to her side. "Thanks for the advice sir."

"Of course, just keep an eye out for your friend's sake there. He's not looking too good." The man gestured at Li, then went back to chopping up the bodies around his feet.

"He's fine," she said, grabbing Li Chunning's arm tightly and dragging him along with her. "He's just being dramatic." She added, glaring at Li Chunning as she hauled what was for all intents and purposes a sack of vegetables with legs after herself. He was walking faster now but his face had grown pale and still, small white new roots had started growing over his left eye. She looked away from him and forged on ahead, dragging, dragging, dragging him as his legs went back to being slow. His body felt heavier, and she could feel its stiffness. Finally she stopped walking as they came across a bend in the river.

The bend was marked with a dazzling array of wildflowers and small strange hummingbirds that flitted about, their feathers as pale as the moon. Small bugs crawled around on the ground and the river's slow flow had become absolutely sluggish. She released Li Chunning and he fell to his knees with a hard 'thump'. "What is it now?" She asked him. "Why are you being difficult again? What's wrong with you?"

Li Chunning said nothing, but she could see his lips were moving.

"What is it? Speak louder!" She crouched down to be eye level with him. The roots in one eye had erupted over his eyelid, slowly crawling downwards like ravenous thin worms towards his mouth as he continued to move his lips. Now she could hear a faint sound coming from them. She leaned closer, turning her head to try catching the whispered words. All she heard was nonsense about being surrounded by dust, and she pulled away in frustration, standing back up.

Li Chunning was not there anymore, she realized.

She was alone.

She swallowed a lump in her throat and huffed, kicking another rock into the water. "Fine, I can do this myself." She scowled, trying to smother the gnawing feeling in her heart as she walked away from Li Chunning's muttering body.