Bo clutched both Zhu'er and Rui Yifu so tightly in his arms he thought he would crush them. He did not realize how much he missed the vinegar filled shark but Rui's return had somehow salved a painful cut on his heart. He moved his arm to move the wet hair from Rui Yifu's face, "you're back!" He wanted to cry. Rui Yifu's eyes were half lidded and then closed, and he could think of nothing else to say that would not make him break down into sobs. So he clutched them both in his arms even as he felt something curiously warm seeping into his clothes.

"He's bleeding," Tirunesh pointed at Rui Yifu.

"Ah!?" Bo pushed Rui Yifu slightly and found a deep bleeding wound on his chest and as he glanced at Rui Yifu's back he realized there was a hole there too, "h-hey! We need to-, someone, uh, Zhou Feng!" As he spoke, Zhu'er let out a loud gasp and smushed her little hands against the hole in Rui Yifu's back.

The quiet man gestured to one of the bedrolls, "put him there."

Bo got to his feet, pulling Rui Yifu with him over to the bedroll. He knocked against several stacks of books and bamboo slats, scrolls toppled downwards as Rui's blood smeared across the ground. Finally he rather inelegantly rolled the man to lay on it. The hole he could see was a little shorter but as wide as his thumb, the dark red oozing out atop torn tissue. Zhou Feng stooped beside Rui Yifu's body and pulled away the fabric from around the wound. "Ah, he must have tried healing it himself," Zhou Feng observed as he placed his fingers on either side of the wound.

"Is he going to be okay?" Bo asked, hovering worriedly. Zhu'er was standing close to the bedroll, wringing her little hands as fat tears poured over her face, but it seemed she was too tired to cry out. "Wh-...that's a lot of blood..."

"Hm, he's a Child of the Ancient Ocean, isn't he?" Zhou Feng looked up at Bo.

"A what?"

"A Fish Person."

Bo nodded.

"Hmm," Zhou Feng turned to look at Tirunesh, "can you get some more water?"

"I can't," she shook her head. "His entrance ruined the last kettle full that we had, and we still need to clean the roots out from this girl's eye. I was going to fetch more water earlier, but..." she looked over at Bo. "I had other duties to attend to."

Zhou Feng sighed softly then looked towards Bo, "outside the back of this house is a short pathway to a creek. If you could fetch some water, I can start making a balm to help it heal and seal it from further bleeding and infections." He was already reaching to a pile of books and jars of ingredients, pushing away some of the books to grab from a pile of linen wraps that had been carefully covered in maple leaves. "There's two buckets and a carrying pole-"

"Me?" Bo pointed at himself in confusion. They had all just met and now he was being sent to do chores? A maggot of suspicion crawled into his mind quickly. "Why me? We just got here, and it's not like your wife there greeted us like friends."

"My hostility to you is not based on personal dislike. We have felt the knife of more than one person willing to take advantage of our kindness," Tirunesh frowned while holding a bloodied piece of linen, still crouching near the yellow haired woman. She was a bit too far for Bo to see but he thought she looked a little familiar. Yet he did not want to get too close to Tirunesh and risk possibly getting to feel how sharp her sword actually was, she did not seem terribly friendly.

"I'll go!" Zhu'er held up one bloodied hand.

"No." Three voices answered in union.

"You can help me," Zhou Feng suggested gently, pushing Rui Yifu to lay on his side. He handed Zhu'er some folded cloth, "hold this against the wound on his chest. We can't stop the bleeding fully yet, but we can staunch it. Make sure to press firmly. I'll press against his back."

Bo looked at Rui Yifu's pale face, his eyes were closed and his lips had no color to them anymore, the wet black hair was tangling in strange slits on his neck that struggled to open and close beneath the matted hair.

"So the buckets are right outside, right?" Bo asked.

Zhou Feng nodded.

The buckets were indeed right where Zhou Feng said they would be, a carrying pole had been leaned up against the wall. The pole was old but refused to bend as he slipped the rope handles of the bucket over its ends. Then he set the pole over his shoulder and could feel the slight dip in the wood where it had likely worn against Tirunesh's shoulder. There was a visible well worn yet thin path that snaked away from the house and through the maple trees. As he walked he thought he could even feel the boot imprints that had dug themselves into the path over years of usage.

Somehow it felt familiar.

Nostalgic even.

When he was much younger he recalled having stumbled into a town and had taken to eating the scraps tossed out of an official's house. He remembered the wife of the official had felt bad for him and paid him a copper a day to run down to the 'nicer well' across the town to bring back buckets of water. It was hard and laborious, since she required no less than twenty trips to the well a day. He never knew why the house required so much water from such a location but he never questioned it. The saved coppers afforded him new shoes and pants, and even some handfuls of food.

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He found himself briefly wondering what became of that lady, and the town. He left but he could not recall why, perhaps it was to follow the harvests. He was good with his hands. If he could not find anywhere to hire him he would scrounge the trash for food and sleep under trees for brief periods. He hated sleeping alone, he always smelled smoke when he would wake up.

Rui Yifu had a tendency to call him a dog, he paused in his step. Thinking about his life now he could not help but agree to a slight degree, even though it annoyed him. Like a dog he wandered from place to place, barking at the feet of the wealthy for jobs or money and scavenging in the trash when he could get neither.

The red leaves above him seemed to cast a vague reddish tint to the shadows as he walked to the creek. It's width was as long as his arm and the roots of some trees could be clearly seen digging into the creek's bed. The water was brisk and he experimentally dipped his hand into it, letting some of the dirt and blood wash away in the cool liquid.

"Young man." The voice came from a nearby tree that Bo warily turned his head towards. An older man was sitting on its thick roots, wearing poorly maintained armor and holding a dingy looking cup. His beard was greying and looked unkempt as he stroked it while eyeing Bo. "You look new to this forest."

"We stopped to rest for a bit," Bo answered, pulling the buckets off the carrying pole. The river looked just barely deep enough to submerge the bucket entirely.

"Ah, so you met Zhou Feng and his wife, I assume?"

Bo looked back over at the man, "yeah."

"Nice people, they took me in for a bit after my men betrayed me. Zhou Feng patched me back up and when I was well enough to walk he said I was free to go. But where?" The old man stared into his cup looking more like some historic relic than a person for a brief moment, "my men had abandoned me to die, I dare not show my face to them again."

Having no idea how to respond to the old man's babbling, Bo just politely went, "mmhmm."

"I thought about asking Zhou Feng if he needed another guardian, but honestly his wife terrifies me," he chuckled. "So instead I just ended up wandering in and out of this forest. The water here is safe from monsters, and not many things wander the forest that a man can't take out. Haha, to think I used to be hired to hunt monsters."

Bo was beginning to feel the old man did not actually care to make a conversation and instead just wanted to speak. He pulled up the first bucket from the water. He felt some pity for the old man, being betrayed by his men and left behind. "Hunt monsters, huh?"

"Yes, I was the leader of Zhang's Banners, we were famous across all Four Kingdoms for ridding the world of things like man-eating ogres and soul stealing fish people," the old man boasted. "I thought we would all become immortal with all the merits from heaven we were surely accumulating. Then I came here and my dreams turned to ash. We were led to believe that an even grander victory could be had, but all we found was madness. We can't even die properly, but some still seek death anyway just for the brief period of peace it could give us. One of my lieutenants had consumed poison, he died but then came back. The poison was still in him so he suffered again as he died... eventually we cut out his stomach to try helping him..."

Bo was no longer looking at the water or the old man. Instead he found himself gazing at the red leaves of the numerous maple trees, the rustling red becoming squirming conflagrations in his mind. The bubbling creek became the thrashing noises of bodies and screams.

"Truthfully, I cannot blame my men for coming to hate me..."

"Have you ever been to a village in a forest, one that stood by a river?" Bo asked, trying to look past the leaves to see smoke.

"Hm?"

"Have you ever been to a village in a forest, one that stood by a river?" He repeated.

"...Thinking about it, yes. A few times," the old man spoke. "Once it was to eradicate a nest of fish people, but usually it was just to get rid of things like overgrown salamanders mistaken for something else."

Bo felt the muscles in his hands tense and fought to keep them from clenching. "I know you, sir."

"Many people know us, young man," the old man said. "Or knew us. I don't know how long I've been here anymore, in all honesty. I had not even planned to come back to this place for a bit, but that red moon-"

"No, that's not what I meant. I mean, I know you," Bo turned slowly to look at the old man. "That village of fish people? That was my home."

The old man went quiet, his eyes widening slightly. But Bo did not see any fear, or anger, or shock. No, the old man looked relieved as he stared at Bo and then the sword at his hip. "Ah... I thought we had killed everyone there. So there was a survivor after all, did you come for revenge, perhaps?"

Rui Yifu was still bleeding, and Zhu'er was basically alone. Bo stooped down to place the second bucket in the water, "no. I have to get water."

"Really?"

"Yeah, my friend is hurt and Zhou Feng says he needs clean water to help him. So I'm getting clean water."

"How did you escape, boy?" The old man asked, getting up from his seat on the tree to come stand beside Bo. He looked shrunken in his armor, or that his armor was too big for him. There were numerous poorly made patch marks covering up broken parts where weapons had bit into it. "We had swept the entire place and burnt down all the structures we could find."

"My sisters hid me under some trash," he said. There he had laid, helplessly watching them die. The painful ember of that memory had kept him motivated for years, but now it was a dull pile of ash. He could not change the past. If he lingered much longer, who knew how much worse Rui Yifu's condition would get?

The old man leaned closer to Bo, "do you want to kill me? It would only be fair. My life for your sisters."

"You're a waste of time," Bo hauled up the second bucket and placed them both back on the carrying pole. He crouched and pulled it onto his shoulder, then he stood up, keeping his body steady to prevent any water from sloshing out.

"Wait!" The man had lunged to grab his leg as he moved away, stopping Bo in his tracks. "Please, you don't understand! This place, this place has done strange things to me. I cannot sleep, I cannot eat. I cannot go far from this forest unless I want my men to find me."

Bo looked down at the haggard old man, with his body covered in deep scarring, his ruined armor, and his slack jawed face. He looked nothing like the imposing soldier that had existed in his nightmares that had made it hard for Bo to sleep, fearful of the memories that had burned themselves so deeply into his spirit that he could not even dream properly until he had met the others. Now the man was trapped in his own hell and utterly alone. The old man's eyes were hopeful. "I don't have time for you," Bo said, yanking his leg free of the man's meager grip. Moment by moment, drop by drop, Rui Yifu's life was ticking away.

"W-wait! Your sisters! I killed them, don't you want vengeance?"

"I need to go help my friend." Bo turned around and started walking, ignoring the desperate pleas of the broken old man which grew fainter and more distressed as he left the relic behind.