The words of Auntie No-Face had shaken him down to his heart. He felt unmoored by her prediction which seemed both as intangible as fog and as hard as stone in how she delivered it. All morning he had turned her words in his mind. The future she gave, how would he know? His thoughts raced with the possibility the time had already passed. He became absorbed into his own thoughts, needing Bo to pull him along. But gradually the cool morning air helped clear his mind to some degree, although he was confused when he realized they were beginning to leave the camp, he was not sure when they had started walking. He caught snatches of conversation of the refugees, but as they walked he heard some vaguely familiar voices. Were those the girls who had brought him down here? It may have just been his ears playing tricks on him, but he had heard their voices getting clearer and clearer as he trudged beside Bo.

"Have you seen a thin blonde woman come by?"

"There's a yellow haired lady with pointed ears, have you seen her?"

"A sick foreign woman just left our clinic, have you heard anything about her?"

Bo, Rui Yifu, and Liu Xie were all focused on other things. People he thought he had come to understand seemed to be increasingly hard to know. The things that were going on were becoming progessively hard for him to wrap his head around and it pained him. He was just the son of a merchant, what was he doing here? So far from home? What was it that he wanted? To seek some sort of penance?

The idea seemed laughable now.

He wanted to at least tell Bo. Bo seemed to have known her before. Li Baobao took a deep breath and tried to calm the ocean that was his fraught mind. How long had they been walking? He reached out to put his hand on Bo's shoulder, "uhm. Bo. Listen-"

"HEY!"

The voice was distant, but somehow unfortunately familiar.

Turning around, Li Baobao saw the tents in the distance looking more like children's toys and, more closely, a slender figure running towards them at top speed.

"Oh great. It's her," Bo grumbled, sulking.

It took a moment for the runner to come close enough for Li Baobao to mentally confirm her identity, but he felt he unfortunately already knew who it was. It was Ji Ying.

She was wearing the pale simple clothing of Lady Gu's disciples, despite the addition of light armor over her chest and the hip quiver that bounced against her leg as she continued running. She waved at them and Li Baobao checked to make sure nobody was waving back.

Liu Xie was already walking ahead. Bo called out to him, "boss wait!"

"HEY WAIT!" Ji Ying yelled. While still running she reached down and grabbed something from the ground. Her arm then suddenly snapped forward and Li Baobao felt a brief gust of air past his face as a rock hurtled straight towards Liu Xie. It smacked against the back of his head and the man did not even slow his pace.

Rui Yifu put his hands on his hips and stood next to Li Baobao as Ji Ying finally slowed her run to stand in front of them. "May we help you?" Rui Yifu asked coarsely.

"No thanks, I'm actually here to help THAT BASTARD WHO IS STILL WALKING!" She pointed at Liu Xie.

Li Baobao did not want Ji Ying to follow them but struggled to find the right polite words. Her eyes swept over him and any possible statements were incinerated from his thoughts to be replaced with a meek acquiescence. He turned his eyes to Liu Xie who had stopped walking a fair distance away from them.

Slowly Liu Xie turned around to look at them. "Then keep walking!" Then he resumed walking forward.

"Can we at least vote on this?" Bo called out, "boss! Hey! Can we vote?" Since Liu Xie was not stopping, Bo began jogging to keep up with him.

Rui sighed heavily took a drink from the flask he was carrying, then held it out to Li Baobao. "Here."

"Uh, I don't need it," Li Baobao tried to push it away but Rui Yifu shoved it into his hand before continuing to walk after the others.

Li Baobao stood still as he watched the group walk away. He ran his fingers over the carefully worked leather of the flask and felt his thumb run over an unfamiliar shape. Looking down he found a funny-looking sigil on it. "Ah," he muttered. It was a foreign flask going off the sigil which looked like a stylized hawk and two letters from an alphabet he recognized the shape of but could not read, a quite well made one at that. He wondered about the journey it had taken from where it was first made. He could imagine it stuck on some merchant's wagon, sitting in a chest containing dozens of others like it, going through distant forests and mountain passes before coming to a rest in the Southern Kingdom.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

"Fatty! Hurry up!"

He snapped back to reality right as Bo and Ji Ying seemed to materialize at his sides and grabbing his arms to pull him forward. "Li, what's gotten into you?" Bo asked as they walked. While Ji Ying's face was in a scowl, Bo's eyes were full of concern and his mouth was in a little frown.

"Nothing, I'm sorry," he replied softly, pulling his arms free to follow them. He did not have to walk for long however since Rui and Liu had come to a stop before a placid stretch of water that moved ribbon like over the land. Besides the now oddly distant mountain of Lady Gu and scatterings of trees and gentle hills, the river was all that was around. It was not a rushing river, more of a slow meandering one. The water was clear but deep and he peered in to see his own thinning face.

"Plan?" Liu Xie's voice had a bit of an edge to it.

"Wait and see," Rui Yifu's reply was equally terse.

Li Baobao backed away from the water as Rui Yifu fished two fat little stone monks from his sleeves. He lazily tossed them into the water, where they both slipped in with barely a splash.

"You guys trust the fish?" Ji Ying said incredulously, putting her hands on her hips. "He could be leading you into a trap."

"If you got a problem, leave! Nobody asked you to come," Bo spat.

Li Baobao watched as Ji Ying's face pinched and reddened, "...that's not true! I, uh, Lady Gu told me to come follow you guys! I-... I had to stop seclusion because all of this!"

There was a strange groaning sound abruptly from the river. The placid surface was parting slowly, like a yawning mouth made of blue ink. Li Baobao instinctively shuffled further back while Bo and Ji Ying both jumped backwards and nearly bounced into each other. Liu Xie and Rui Yifu stood very still however, waiting.

Then the water grew still again, floating atop was a flat white tile big enough for all of them and then ten more. Rui Yifu stepped onto it and it remained flat and solid, not dipping into the water or even causing a ripple. Liu Xie went next. "You three can stay here, if you want," he said.

"Wait, Boss!" Bo jumped onto the tile, rather inelegantly landing on both his feet. Ji Ying made a loud groaning noise not unlike the one the water made as she sprightly leaped onto the tile as well.

They all looked at him, waiting, so he stepped onto the tile as well. What was he doing? He should not be going, he thought. He should turn away, he should-

Suddenly they were no longer at the river. The entire world had suddenly changed around them. Now they were in some sort of vast dim cavern with a single even darker tunnel, lit only by strange flameless lanterns of coral buried into the wall. Li Baobao was so taken aback by the abruptness his stomach flipped and he found himself gagging. A second choking noise comforted him that he was not alone, with Bo bent down with his hands on his knees as he wheezed. Ji Ying seemed amused while Rui and Liu were going down the tunnel. Bo gargled something, stumbling forward before picking himself back up and grabbing Li Baobao's hand to pull him along. Li Baobao felt like his stomach was left behind. Ji Ying merrily skipped past them, her laughter like a clear bell as she went by.

The laughter did nothing to lighten Li Baobao's mood.

The tunnel felt cramped even though it was too dim for him to properly gauge how far the walls were. There was no echo, leaving every person to walk in relative silence. He looked over at Bo who seemed equally uncomfortable and yet still managed to walk with a straight back. A steady pressure was laying on Li Baobao's chest. It was pushing him. His body was still moving but it felt like his heart was being gradually crushed into the ground.

As the tunnel opened up, the feeling abruptly vanished to be replaced with a breathless chill as a soft light filled the landing in front of them. "Why is it so cold!?" Bo asked, wrapping his arms around himself and pushing slightly against Li Baobao, who found himself shivering.

Outside of the tunnel, on the landing they stood on was ringed platform that clung to dull blue stone walls. The light was coming from below, seeping through delicate railing that looked like it was made from coral and chunks of mutton-fat jade. Rui Yifu walked over to a crank encrusted with red rust that stood at odds with everything else. He put his hands around it, flakes of rust falling and metal screaming in pain as he pushed it. Bo and Ji Ying also contributed their own noise of distaste, Li Baobao being too weary to even whimper. "We... are going to go... to the deeper levels," Rui Yifu grunted as he threw his body weight behind the crank. A faint sound of 'click-clack' echoed from far down below. "Help me, dammit!" He hissed at Liu Xie, barely heard over the din.

Liu Xie shrugged and moved to stand across from Rui Yifu, grabbing the crank and pulling as Rui Yifu pushed. Rui Yifu let out a short shout of surprise as the crank began to move much faster with Liu Xie helping.

Li Baobao gingerly moved forward to peer over the railing while shivering in the cold.

Below were more rings that even from the great distance he was at could tell contained buildings. Small shops? Homes? The entire place was bizarrely vertical, descending up and down rather than expanding horizontally. This was a Fish Person city, he figured, but why would they decide on such an odd way to build their home? Further down was the light. In his spot it looked only as big as a fingernail. Like a brightly glowing pearl. Around it he could faintly see a dark floor. He spotted movement. A wide platform was racing up towards them, its surface a glossy black color and it was hugged with rusting rails.

It stopped right in front of them with a loud clang that made the entire group flinch, the part of the platform's railing that faced them slipped downwards. Rui Yifu stepped lightly onto the platform first, followed by Liu Xie, then Ji Ying. Bo looked around, wary eyed, before Li Baobao found his hand around his arm and was pulled with him onto the platform.

"You know, you'd think that we'd be swarmed with guards or something with how noisy this... this contraption is," Ji Ying said.

"Yeah, I was thinking the same thing," Bo agreed. "Where is everyone?"

"They're here," Liu Xie said quietly. "In a way."

Rui Yifu turned to Li Baobao and held out his hand. "If you aren't going to drink any, give it back to me."

"Wha-..." he looked down and found the flask was still in his hand, clutched in a white knuckle grip. With some effort he made his fingers uncurl from around it, little half-moons of red left deep in his palm as he handed it back to Rui Yifu. "S-sorry. What was in it?"

"Water," Rui Yifu answered. Then he stepped back to gesture over the railing, bidding everyone to come look. Li Baobao peeked over it again, and now could see that the city was in layers, buildings with empty windows stretching into the darkness, lit only by the flameless coral lanterns dotted around. "Welcome to the City of Melting Pearls."