Even though they were all strangers who had only just met, Rui Yifu found himself pushed to speak with them if only to partially distract from the strange howls and shrieks that echoed through the red lit lands. Fortunately, they seemed to hold a similar belief and were happy to speak.

"How often have you taken shelter here?" Rui Yifu asked, looking upwards. Despite part of it being blackened from likely centuries worth of cooking fires, he found that the carved lettering on it was still largely legible. He began to reach up to touch it when he felt pain flare up in his stitched wounds and allowed his arm to drop to his side instead.

"Me? I come here every once and a while when I can, but usually I freshen up a bit beforehand," Tiger Hunter said, lightly fiddling with a loose thread in her sleeve. Her hair was tied back and clotted with the same dried blood that marred her clothes and hands. "With that moon though, I just came here as fast as I could instead. I can clean up later."

"Every time I ride in this direction, I stay here. Monsters and lost soldiers don't come close, so I don't need to worry about my horse running away or about getting eaten alive again," the man laughed dryly.

"W-what? You've been eaten?" Bo asked from his spot sitting against one of the 'walls' with Zhu'er sleeping against him. "As in, something came up and-" he mimicked biting into something.

The man shrugged, "only once."

Rui Yifu looked over at the man's horse. It was grey color, with splotches of white on its limber yet thick limbs and its bridle was a mix of dark wood and leather that someone had painstakingly spent time tooling intricate designs on, although he could not quite make them out from his spot. He then glanced back at the man, specifically towards his boots, which were long and in contrast to rest of the man's worn clothing were still in good condition despite clearly being repaired multiple times. "Are you from the Burned Sea Steppes, by chance?"

The man's eyes widened and a smile appeared on his face, "ah, I haven't heard that name in a while. Yes, that's where I came from. I was called Khenbish there."

"What are you called now then?" Bo's curiosity was plain in his voice. Rui Yifu looked to see the young man was leaning forward slightly, head in the palm of his hand and propped up on his knee.

"Khenbish." The man slapped his knee and guffawed as Bo's curious face filled with confusion.

Tiger Hunter snorted, "I hate that joke."

"It's a good one though!" He chuckled, "ahhhh, yes though. My name is Khenbish. I was born Khenbish, and I've died many times as Khenbish too. What are your names?"

"I'm Bo, and that's Rui Yifu," Bo answered before Rui Yifu could. Rui Yifu wanted to slap him. Just simply giving away their names could invite all sorts of strange curses in this land. "And this one is Zhu'er," he nodded while pointing down at the sleeping girl. Rui Yifu groaned in frustration but Bo seemed to not notice.

"Well it's nice to meet all three of you," Khenbish nodded, "although I can't say the circumstances are good." His head turned back to the red land beyond their shelter. A strange creature was pulling itself in the distance, a long neck lifted a strange animal-like head into the air, two tongues lolling out before it abruptly dropped to the ground and continued its slow crawl with bent limbs to somewhere.

Rui Yifu looked back up to the etchings above his head. Typically steles had writing on both sides, especially those written on stone. Simply glancing over it was enough for him to see a few mentions of 'gratitude towards the Heavens and the Land for a prosperous harvest' in the something-year of Emperor Whatever, and scatterings of mentions of sacrifices of fine rare incense and red boars bled by the royal hand itself to honor a deceased parent. He wondered if, since the two steles were erected close towards the marsh, it was meant to catalogue the good deeds, filial piety, and victories of the deceased for any upon the road to read. He pondered that possibility before deciding it was ridiculous. Humans were jealous about the ability to read, how likely was it that a traveler back in those days would be literate enough to read everything inscribed?

"Can you read that gibberish?" Tiger Hunter asked, pausing from her fidgeting.

"Yes."

"Are you a bureaucrat?" She tipped her head, "my brother was studying to be a bureaucrat. Then I got sick, and we came here. If he was around, you two could probably talk about whatever's up there."

"It's nothing very interesting," Rui Yifu said as his eyes continued to sweep over the writing. His eyes then caught the words 'strange moon' and internally he immediately retraced his statement. It was a brief mention of the moon shining a brilliant white light during the night during the short reign of the 89th Emperor, enough so that it had illuminated everything as clear as day for an entire night. Madness overtook peasants, and many became ill with a disease that left them riddled with 'bone eating vines'. The strange events stopped soon after the 89th Emperor's murder. The etcher of this information included that the 90th Emperor gave his brother the funeral befitting an Emperor and had then forbid any ill comments about him.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

It also mentioned the 89th Emperor's wife had vanished shortly before the strange moon event, and despite many searches had never been found.

He frowned. There was, of course, no other information and the following etchings were more agricultural in nature.

The Lady of Calm Waters, Lady Peng... Rui Yifu had little proof besides the lunar and floral connections, but he felt that the 89th Emperor's wife had also likely been another disguise of Baichan.

But Rui Yifu still could not figure out what Baichan's true goal was. He believed nothing of the nonsense he had spouted to him as he was dying in the library. Something like that had to have another goal besides simple family reunification, and the epithet he gave himself was either just to unnerve Rui Yifu or simply more madness talking.

"Yifu? Are you okay?"

Pulled from his thoughts, Rui Yifu looked towards the speaker. Khenbish's face held some concern. "I'm fine, I was just thinking." Rui Yifu sighed.

"I was trying to ask you where you were going, but you seemed to have been entranced," Khenbish set his hands down behind him, leaning backwards and gazing out into the land beyond. "I won't make any judgements, but bringing a poor kid all this way makes me think you guys aren't pilgrims."

"We aren't going to kill her!" Bo snapped defensively, tightly holding Zhu'er to himself.

"We're going to the Bone Willow Mountain," Rui Yifu added, "something... is going to happen there." His eyes fell upon Liu Xie's sword. Bo still had not let the thing leave him once. Rui Yifu quietly wondered if he even could leave it.

Tiger Hunter whistled. "There? You're going there?"

"What's wrong? Is it worse than the rest of this land?"

Tiger Hunter shook her head and gestured to Khenbish, "I don't know. I've never been stupid enough to walk around in celestial afterbirth. But Khenbish is!"

Khenbish's eyes were staring. He was not looking at Rui Yifu, but something far more distant that sat in his memory. "I did go there once. A long time ago. I had crossed that swamp and went up the path. But the truth isn't at the top, you need to go in and down and then..." he paused and Rui Yifu wondered if it was simply for dramatic effect, but the slight quiver in the man's voice told him otherwise. "There's something below that mountain, but then there's something even farther below."

The silence they had been trying to keep away returned, laced with howls and screams in the distance that seemed just close enough to remind them of how perilous their shelter was.

"'Somethings'? What did you see, Khenbish?" Rui Yifu asked, leaning forward slightly towards the man, letting the fire highlight the strange color of his skin.

Khenbish closed his eyes, taking a deep breath before he continued, "the trees on the mountain's surface are not actually full trees themselves. They're branches. There's a much larger tree... and it's breathing."

It sounded unusual, but not something worth terror over. Although the prodigious size of the tree would likely make the scene a little more concerning, Rui Yifu thought while keeping a politely interested face.

"I was a more foolish man, so I went down the cavern that the tree's trunk had made. At the bottom was a massive chamber," Khenbish held up his hands to try showing the scope of it, extending them as far as he could. "Here I found the remains of a city."

Now Rui Yifu's eyes widened. "A city...?"

"Yes, and her people never really left," Khenbish said with a slow nod. "The ones I saw looked much like the lost soldiers wandering around, but I also saw a few who were nothing but burnt shadows. The city itself looked like it had been burned in some sort of battle. I discovered another tunnel that went further downwards, but by that point I had seen enough. I followed my path back and ran into a man, I nearly died from shock." He laughed but it sounded reedy and anxious. "He asked me what I was there for and I said I was leaving, and I asked him why he was there and he said he had always been there, protecting the royal family's altar from potential thieves. I left then. I've never been back."

"There!" Bo suddenly got up while holding Liu Xie's sword, having at some point moved Idony to sleep on the ground where he sat. Khenbish looked slightly alarmed. "That's where we need to go!" He was speaking excitedly, pointing northwards. "It's at that altar-"

"How do you know that?" Rui Yifu asked even as his eyes settled on the sword Bo clutched so tightly.

Bo opened his mouth, then closed it before looking back to Rui Yifu with puzzlement, "I... I don't know, but it's in my head."

"Hey," Tiger Hunter was pointing as well, out of the shelter and towards a pack of skinless quadrupedal creatures rapidly running towards the shelter at full tilt. Their gangly limbs ripped at the earth and their heads looked like stretched over-fleshed human skulls, writhing roots moving over the exposed musculature like fish in a busy river. In the red moonlight, they looked like running meat. "Uh, those things are coming right for us. Khenbish, do you know what those things are?"

Khenbish got up with a groan and peered out at them, "looks like trouble."

Rui Yifu stared at the monsters. They were definitely something of Baichan's creation but how did they find them? He looked back towards the sleeping child who was curled up on the ground, a small pile of limbs and red hair full of animating white flame. Perhaps Baichan was honest about wanting who he considered to be his child, but Rui Yifu decided however honest that desire was he could not stand the idea of leaving her to a mad deity's hands.

"Uh, Rui? Can those things get in here?" Bo asked nervously.

"We're about to find out," Rui replied flatly, picking up his two coral foci.