"Why are you strutting around like a peacock?"

Bo ignored the question, feeling like a new man in his new clothes and new boots and even his new sickle. He could already imagine how great it would be for farming! He stopped in front of the small morose faced child nearby. "Zhu'er! Look at my boots!"

"They look nice," she said, her eyes elsewhere. She also had new clothes, something more durable, with the hempen coat and shoe coverings that Doctor Lin had delivered over the slightly nicer fabric below. She actually looked a bit like a little boy done up as she was, even after her hair had been carefully combed and wrapped into two buns with two orange colored ribbons that Ji Ying had somehow produced.

Bo crouched down, looking into her face. She was still thinking about Li Chunning, he knew. He was urgently trying to distract himself as well. "Hey, hey little sister, listen. You got some new clothes too right? Lets cheer up a bit." He got back up and easily lifted her up and onto his shoulders as they stood in the courtyard. "Lets get something to eat before we go!" He pointed to the numerous fruit laden trees around them. "What do you want huh?"

Rui Yifu was watching while sitting on a bench next to a stack of papers packed with dense jagged writing, holding a book in one hand and a paper in another that he would occasionally glance back at to chuckle. He had also gotten new clothes and had apparently taken the time to paint his nails too. His face still looked oddly inhuman but a little more flushed with life. "Don't drop her, Bo."

"I won't," he said, walking towards a cluster of lychee trees that stuck out somewhat awkwardly among the larger crowd of oranges and persimmons. He reached back to grab Zhu'er and moved her from his shoulders to his back, "hup! Alright. Hold on tight." Her limbs wrapped tightly around him as he reached up, testing branches for their sturdiness while placing a boot against the bark. He heaved himself upwards far more easily than he expected, nearly smacking his passenger's little head against another branch. "Sorry," he said as he continued moving upwards. The berries were fairly high off the ground but not far enough to make Bo feel like he was exerting too much by climbing. Even the small weight wrapped around him was not much issue, he thought to himself. He settled on a thick branch after a moment and helped shift Zhu'er off so she would sit beside him. Then he began plucking the fruits, handing some to Zhu'er while he peeled off the skin of others to pop into his mouth. "Hey, don't eat the seeds ok? They'll make you really sick," he warned.

Bo was still Bo however, and he would spit out the seeds to the ground.

Rui Yifu looked scandalized from below, "can you at least get a bowl for that?" He called out.

"Sure! Go get us one."

Rui Yifu huffed and went back to reading, returning to his earlier good humor as he laughed at what was written.

Bo looked back to Zhu'er, who bit off chunks of the white flesh of the lychee and threw the seed down instead of spitting it. It looked odd but she seemed to be enjoying it. "...I should get a bag or something. We can stuff a bunch of fruit in to take with us."

The tree shivered.

Bo straightened up and looked down, frowning when he saw Ji Ying rapidly making her way up its trunk towards them. He tried to put his foot in the way of her face but she smacked it away and grabbed onto another sturdy branch close to them, gracefully flipping herself onto it. "Give me some," she demanded while pointing at a cluster of lychee close to Bo's head.

"No, grab your own."

"You should get me them, you're closer to the juicer looking ones, and it'd be polite." Ji Ying then pointed at Zhu'er. "Listen, if you want things you should tell tall idiots like Bo to get them for you until you're bigger."

"Huh?" Zhu'er looked up from her snacking with a juice smeared face, immediately decided the conversation was uninteresting, and went back to eating.

"I'm not an idiot!" Bo yelled, grabbing a fistful of lychees above him and throwng them at Ji Ying's face, "here! Here are your stupid lychees!"

"Thanks!" Ji Ying smiled smugly, now with a small handful in her hand that she set about eating. She left Bo quietly fuming for a few minutes before she looked over at Zhu'er. "I have a present for you," she said.

Zhu'er's head snapped back upwards.

Bo watched as Ji Ying pulled a small white pendant from around her neck, where another one sat with it. She handed it over to Zhu'er, "it's a lunar stone."

"...What's that?" Zhu'er asked.

Bo looked at the round little stone. It was a glossy white thing, with an eye carved into it. It vaguely reminded him of some charms he had seen once while working on a farm for a daily bowl of soup and a somewhat dry spot to sleep in. The farmer's wife would go out to collect white stones near the river, but only on nights with full moons, and then polish them up to a glossy shine. She would carve something into them, usually a boy baby or sometimes a pig (which Bo guessed was probably also male), polish them again, and then sell them to passerbys or townsfolk from the larger town up the road.

Stolen novel; please report.

Bo remembered that when he tried asking the woman what the stones were for, she simply laughed and said it was a 'secret lady thing'.

"I'd tell you, but then Bo will hear," Ji Ying 'whispered', loud enough for Bo to still hear.

"Oh," Zhu'er said.

Bo sighed and rolled his eyes, "yeah I get the point. I'm leaving. Zhu'er, call me when you're ready to come down." He then leapt down from the branch, landing on his feet and surprising even himself by not falling right onto his behind. He then strolled over to Rui Yifu, sitting down beside him and looking over at the papers in his hands. They just looked like they were covered in squiggles to him. "What are you reading?"

"If you learned to read you'd know."

"I don't know how!" He huffed. "Tell me."

"Why?"

"I want to know," Bo said. In truth, he just wanted a distraction. Not from Ji Ying's obnoxiousness, but from the missing part of their circle. Like a ghost, absence of Li's presence had itself become a presence that he could feel. He hoped Bo was home by now.

"Fine," Rui Yifu sighed, "but I don't know if I can read it with a straight face."

"Is it a funny thing?"

Rui Yifu snorted, "in a way. Like for example this one goes 'On that day, you vanish from my eyes, is it too late to say come back to me?'" He read out the line in a weepy exaggerated voice before laughing. The laugh sounded like something rough being dragged over chunks of dried wood. "Another one goes 'the winter fragrance of your hair remains yet the warmth of your hands do not'."

Bo was unsure if he wanted to laugh too. He was not much of a poet so he could not see anything wrong with them besides the funny voice Rui Yifu was using as well as the overly melancholic lines.

A pale long hand suddenly extended over him and downwards, snatching the papers from Rui Yifu's hands. "Where did you get this?" Liu Xie's voice was just barely fighting back a flustered stutter which shocked Bo. Then Bo quickly realized that the poetry had been written by him. He was unsure if this meant he should enjoy the poems... or pretend to do such to preserve Liu Xie's face.

"You're not particularly artistically inclined, are you?" Rui Yifu laughed.

"I don't need your opinion, where did you find these?" Liu Xie asked, ripping up the papers as he spoke. They fell like little petals to the ground, bursting into flickers of white flame.

"There's an entire room full of these," Rui Yifu replied with an easy smile. "I found it when I went for a walk last night."

"I'll burn everything in that room," Liu Xie grumbled. "Why were you walking around in my house last night?"

"You never said I couldn't," Rui Yifu was still smiling.

"Boss, you write a lot of poetry?" Bo asked.

"The stacks reached the ceiling, I wasn't even able to walk inside."

Liu Xie snorted, "I wish they had fallen on you. It's very rude to just go opening random doors in people's homes."

"Hey!" Ji Ying's voice was very close, and the group looked at one at the young woman. She had leapt downwards apparently, carrying Zhu'er with her. "If you guys are going to talk about poetry, can it at least be done on the road?"

Liu Xie sighed. Bo frowned as he found himself somewhat agreeing with Ji Ying. "You're right, we probably should start moving." Liu Xie spoke, before slapping the stack of papers by Rui Yifu to the ground, where each page was quickly swallowed up by another white flame.

Bo stood back up and turned his gaze back to the trees, "hey boss, can I take a bag or two of the fruits?"

"Go ahead, it'll be a lot to eat by yourself though."

He shook his head, "I'm sharing with Zhu'er!" The shuffling feet of one of the silent generically pretty women came up beside him, and she wordlessly offered him a plain hempen bag with a string attached. Bo happily took it with a quick word of thanks and dashed back to the trees, shimming up the lychee tree to pull down handfuls of the bumpy skinned fruit, then he went over to the next tree with its persimmons, then oranges, he found plums and they went into the bag too.

He was not sure how much he had gathered by the time Liu Xie yelled they were about to leave, but the bag did not feel particularly heavy as he climbed down and raced over to stand with the rest of the group whom had already made their way away from the courtyard proper towards an eastern gate that lead back into the cold forest. "Can we take one of those horses?" Bo asked.

"Yes, those horses would be much more convenient than walking," Rui Yifu agreed, a note of sourness in his words. "It would certainly save us the integrity of our new shoes."

"We can't," Liu Xie replied as though that answered any possible questions.

"Why?" Bo asked.

Rui Yifu tipped his head, eyes briefly sweeping over Ji Ying, "it has something to do with going past the mountains, doesn't it?"

"You don't know?" Ji Ying spoke with some relish, "the Silent Mountains are a barrier. Most animals can't pass through unless heavily covered with charms and talismans, and even then that would just be a waste."

"Why a waste?" Bo's curiosity still was not satiated.

"There's already other animals beyond the Silent Mountains, if you're hungry for pig just find one running around."

Rui Yifu's thin eyebrows rose, "I'm not certain those are the sorts of boars you would want to eat, Ji Ying."

"I didn't say you needed to-"

Bo looked over to Liu Xie, who was holding Idony on his hip and pressing a bloodied hand to the side of the gate. "Boss are you okay?" He asked, concerned and confused at once.

"I'm fine," Liu Xie replied. "Usually I can open this gate without needing to do this, but I'm a bit... limited, at the moment," he admitted casually. The blood seeped into the gate, trailing like red ink up and down in a profusion of dizzying designs at a breakneck speed. Then the gate swung open as though blasted with an intense soundless wind, revealing now a somewhat well-maintained road that snaked through fields of tended to grain and towards a blue walled town that looked like a charming toy before the ominous massive jagged peaks behind it. The mountain was the color of bruised flesh, streaked with black and rivulets of white snow that hugged its tips. It seemed to curl slightly, or lean over the town below, as though to ensure its presence would always be felt within.

Beyond that, a land without death.