"You," Tirunesh pointed at Bo. "Come help me find her."

Bo looked at the imposing woman with a sheepish irritation. He was beginning to feel that she was purposefully picking on him for some reason. "Well, I did get water yesterday, and I'm still recovering from traveling-"

Tirunesh pointed at Rui Yifu, "that is a man in poor condition." She pointed then at Zhu'er. "That is a child." Then she pointed her finger at Bo's face, "you are the only one in any state to go wandering the forest. The ground is uneven off the paths, and while there are not any aggressive animals, who knows what else wanders the forest?"

Her argument, Bo found himself admitting, was based on very sound reasoning. Rui Yifu was still pale and his fingers fumbled with the heavier books, Zhu'er was an actual child who was also looking rather wan. He wished Li Chunning or Liu Xie were still around to help and his lips twitched slightly with a spasm in his heart.

His fingers wrapped around the sword's atrocious looking hilt, his fingers pressing so hard against the irregular jagged skeletal shape he thought it might pierce through his palm before he got to his feet and made a show of cracking his back loudly. "Agh, okay, I guess I can't really uh... disagree with that. But where would we even look? Also are you sure there's no bandits or anything in the forest?"

"There are none," Zhou Feng said and Bo had to control every single muscle in his body to not jump in surprise at the man's presence abruptly appearing beside him.

"Can you come with us?" Bo asked.

"No," Zhou Feng replied with a light shake of his head. "I will be watching over your friends."

Rui Yifu looked up, "oh, babysitting me are you?" He laughed before it turned into a wet cough. Bo caught glances of something on Rui Yifu's neck opening and closing and quickly averted his eyes.

"Just think of it as assuring your health continues to improve," Zhou Feng said as he kneeled beside Rui Yifu, "I will need to check the stitches later. I have not worked on Fish People much before so I suspect there may be a different reaction of some sort."

"Come now, we cannot wait," Tirunesh was already following the path the crazed woman had taken, and Bo with some mild nervousness followed after her as Rui Yifu and Zhou Feng started talking about the complexities of different stitching types.

The walk out of the house was short and thankfully they had a trail to follow, unfortunately the trail was one of blood. Small little drops that stood out against the small stones set up to mark a small pathway to the house's front door. A gentle breeze whistled past them, scattering leaves into looping swirls. Even with all the red from the maple leaves around them the blood still managed to stick out until the leaf strewn ground covered it up.

"You go that way," Tirunesh pointed westwards, "I'll search in the other direction. If you find her, just bring her back to the house. Zhou Feng will tell me if you do."

"What if you find her first though?"

"I'll come find you."

"How?"

"Don't worry about that. Worry about finding her instead. When you do, don't run over to her. Approach calmly and slowly." Tirunesh then turned around and walked swiftly away from Bo. Left alone, Bo shrugged and tried to figure out where to go from there. He knew he had to go look around the westward section of the forest but other then that he had very little clue on what to do. How big was the forest anyway? He could end up spending days searching for this lady.

He picked a direction and walked. The mass of red leaves and dark colored tree trunks blended together in his brain into a smudge after a while, the sunlight above filtering downwards from a lower and lower angle, changing the fragile shards of light that made it through the red canopy and twisting shadows in shape.

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

"Hello!?" He called out.

Nothing.

He walked more, peering down short hills, climbing over fallen trunks, pausing occasionally.

"Hello?"

"...Ah... ah..."

The sound did not seem like something an animal would make and so Bo began walking quickly in its direction. "Hello?" He called out again. "Hello? Lady? Hello! Where are you?"

"...hurts..."

The voice was weak but close by. Bo followed it to a large maple log that looked like a giant had punched its base so hard it exploded into a thousand pieces. Insects crawled along the congealed sap, and the wood itself was laced with rot and squirming with all sorts of verminous bugs. Nothing that Bo had ever had trouble handling however and he clambered over it to see a pale curled up figure against a tree, rocking back and forth like a child.

"There you are!" He said. "Hey!"

She did not reply, whimpering softly instead.

Bo slid down the rotting maple log where the woman sat and rather impressively managed to flip off of it and not land on his face. The woman did not seem to notice his moment of acrobatics however, her hand clutching her empty eye socket and her legs pulled to her chest. Just as Tirunesh had advised, he walked slowly and softly up towards her, "hello?" He called out gently, "we've been looking for you. It's not good to stay outside in your state."

The woman whimpered, shaking, then she slowly turned her face to him.

Bo felt like his mind had been struck by lightning, lighting up memories of a passing figure. Someone whose journey had crossed over as a thin thread, and yet he still remembered her. An inferno summoned through floating strange glowing symbols in the air, illuminating her form in a glowing aura of mortal fire. But he knew her from before then...

What felt like a lifetime ago, he had been living like a dog inside of a town in the Southern Kingdom. Something had happened and it had been experiencing an influx of bizarre foreigners, each one carrying scars, weapons, or the looks of hardened soldiers or killers in their eyes. He had slunk around the back alleys and the trash heaps, seeing a strange foreign woman going down the street, the scent of food wafting from the box she held.

He had followed her, subtly at first, but then more obviously once she seemed to have been out of sight of others.

But when he came to accost her for her money and food, she had simply offered him some with a smile.

He did not remember anymore what it was she had given him.

Shortly afterwards he met Liu Xie, The memory of which was as sharp as the pain in his back had been.

And yet...

"A...ah? It's you... yes, I... I remember you," she spoke in a trembling voice. "I'm... I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to be rude."

"It's fine, it's okay," he assured her, taking another step closer.

"The... the things in my head, they really hurt," she mumbled, tears coming down from her remaining eye, jaundiced yellow with the purple iris unnaturally large. A white root was squirming right under it. Her cheeks were gaunt and sometimes Bo saw a pulsating root flash downwards beneath the skin. "The ash... there's so much of it... I hear someone talking to me... they mention things, but I don't really remember what they are. I feel I should remember, but I don't. I..." she winced and shook her head. "My name, my name, I... what was it? It's hard to think..."

Bo got closer, reaching out and gently placing his hand on her ice-cold arm. She flinched, then relaxed slightly. "It's okay, Anemone," he said.

"Anemone...? Was that it? Thank you," she smiled faintly, "please remember it, because I do not."

He moved his hand to take the one of hers that was not covering the bloodied eye socket, "of course. I'll remind you all the time, I owe you after all. Lets go back, the lady says you're still sick so you need to go lay back down." She dropped her other hand, the writhing white roots in her bloodied sockets working into a frenzy like maggots on a corpse.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"About what?"

Anemone winced, the roots, slick with blood, extended over the socket, crawling down her cheek, like dripping wax. "I cannot... I cannot... go on... my name, what was it? I can't remember... I can't... I can't... I can't.... I..."

Her flesh peeled back from her face, ash and flower roots where muscles should be as her skull toppled free, her clothing splotched with blood as the roots tore through her chest rapidly, tumbling ribs and pieces of spine as the woman fell into a pile of ash, roots, and beautiful white flowers all at once. Bo looked at the few fingerbones he still held and then back at the remains. The center of the flowers were tinged with purple, swaying lightly in the wind.

Had he ever thanked her?

He could not remember.

His hands trembled as he tightly held the bones, turning away from the ash, bones, and flowers which seemed cruel in their beauty. His legs carried him stiffly back, retracing his path and nearly running into Tirunesh who moved swiftly through the forest. It seemed as though the trees simply moved aside for her.

Bo held out his hands, but could not bring himself to unwrap his fingers from the bones. They still felt greasy and warm, and had marked his fingers with the ash that clung to it.

"I found her."