Chapter 103

  Spiritwood Grove (I)

  To catch you up really quickly, the appearances they chose to take up on are rather... well, I don't want to say predictable, but they're predictable.

  Dai Xiu elected to remove the baby fat she had in her face, somehow elongate herself two inches, 'smush' her rounded eyes into a slanted variant, dye her brown hair fully black, and give her eyes a peculiar red sheen.

  Xi Zhao, too, seems to have grown up a couple of inches; all of his 'baby' features are gone, too, replaced with a chiseled jaw and brows that did not belong with that childlike look in his eyes begging for praise.

  Light, surprisingly, didn't change all that much--she mostly just 'normalized' herself, as it were, turning the strange hair and eye pair into black and brown, accordingly. She rounded out her face slightly so that it's not recognizable but hadn't changed her body at all.

  Long Tao... well, he kind of looked like a horse breeder, to be honest. Look, I've been around horse breeders enough times to recognize when someone's business is breeding horses. And he looked like the guy breeding horses, trust me.

  As for me?

  Well, I mostly just made myself younger. Not necessarily in the 'wrinkle' department so much as in the hairdo and black-circles-under-the-eyes departments. I'd dyed my hair black, removed those wretched circles, aged myself down to look as though I was in my early thirties, and changed the bone structure of my face just enough that it made me seem a bit 'sharper'.

  Altogether, we looked like a strange yet ordinary band of travelers.

  "Have you guys rested enough?" I asked, and they all nodded.

  Thus, we continued the descent down the gentle slope and toward the plains. Our first destination was the town Elder Qin mentioned north of where we'd exit the mountains--which really meant just continuing in a straight direction as we emerged on the northern side of the mountain range.

  I figured we'd stay there for a couple of days and see if there's any news or rumors about the sect and such, alongside figuring out our mode of transport.

  Walking was out of the question, and I'm not just saying that for me. It's one thing to hike a couple of dozen miles, but I knew enough about this world to recognize the journey would be closer to a couple of thousand miles.

  And ain't nobody hiking that shit.

  I actually already had something in mind--I wanted to disguise us as merchants. It's a rather broad-strokes sort of cover that wouldn't make us seem suspicious no matter how long we stay in one place. We can always peddle some of the ordinary herbs that we've got in spades between all our spatial treasures, and it'd make the journey more comfortable, as the kids could rest in the wagon while I could take in the sights from the coach.

  Issue?

  Though I knew a bit about horseback riding, I knew nothing about, uh, wagon driving? Whatever it's called. And though I was tempted to hire a coach, it was only so for a moment.

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  None of it would matter, however, if the town we were heading to was far too small so as to not even have horses for sale, let alone wagons. To the best of my knowledge, this small 'closed-in' partition they called Innominate Edge had two major cities--one was far up in the north, at the edge between two regions, called the Eternal City.

  Lots of names with 'Eternal' and 'Heavenly' and 'Spiritual' in them, I recognized.

  The other one was to the far south, south of the Fire Sun Sect even, but, regardless, neither really was within the scope of our destinations.

  There are a lot of smaller towns and villages littering the terrain between the two edges, hundreds of them, but most aren't even marked on the couple of maps that I managed to stash from the library. Including the one we were heading toward.

  "... do you think they all died, Master?" Xi Zhao asked abruptly, breaking a rather lengthy silence just as we reached the flats.

  "I don't know," I replied honestly. "Elders of our Sect are really strong."

  "Even if they were a thousand times stronger, nothing was surviving that pillar," Long Tao chimed in from the side. "The good news is that there's nobody left alive who may know we've escaped, which means nobody will be looking for us."

  "You don't know that!" Dai Xiu protested. "Brother Hua is very strong, and he went back to help!"

  "..." Long Tao merely glanced at her and shrugged.

  I have a teensy bit of a feeling that her dear brother Hua was the cause of that massive pillar.

  "Is he not, Master?" She turned toward me and asked; it was a bit awkward, getting used to their new faces, especially now that her pleading expression wasn't so much 'cutesy adorable girl' and was more akin to 'teenager trying to wring ten bucks out of you through pity'.

  I know that expression 'cause I used to be the master of it.

  "Yes, he's very strong. Nobody knows what happened in there; for now, we'll proceed with the notion that we are being hunted. Once we reach the town, we'll settle down and listen in for any news about the sect."

  About four hours later, we all rushed toward the singular tree and sat in its shade, heaving and sweating bullets.

  It was a serious hell, and the flat terrain was just knee-high grass with constant bug bites and no freakin' tree in sight. There wasn't even a river; hell, not even a slightly oversized shrub. Just an endless field that nobody has walked through in decades, clearly.

  So, when we spotted a tree about a mile away from us, we all ran over like mad and quickly cleared the grass around it, sitting in its shade.

  "... my family will probably be annihilated, won't they?" It wasn't thirty seconds later that I heard the words that sent a chill down my spine.

  Glancing to the side, I saw Xi Zhao, his head trapped between his knees, with the latter pressing hard into his chest.

  "They are known affiliates, and... and they proudly publicized when I got accepted..." His voice was cracking.

  I'd found it odd, to be honest, how... repressed Xi Zhao had been when we went to his hometown. In the chaos of it all, he'd even forgotten for a moment about his family. It led me to believe that he wasn't particularly close with them, but maybe it was just a kid trying to be strong. Not an unknown form, either.

  I had no words of comfort because he was probably right--in the war of extermination, only those of supremely high status were ever taken as prisoners. Auxiliary families supplying disciple robes?

  No. They were executed brutally as to send a message.

  It could be that they got wind of it and ran, though it's doubtful. Most people in Xi Zhao's family were mortals, and even if they had a month of a head start, they wouldn't get far before being caught.

  "It's okay," Light, of all of us, stood up and walked over, patting his head. "My mother and father will look out for them, I promise."

  He tried to stifle his sniffling, and the rest of us pretended he succeeded.

  It's always in moments like these that I realize just how ill-equipped I am for this whole damned thing. I mean, there's a child in pain right there, and I'm sitting here awkwardly as though I got a stick up my ass rather than offering anything--even just some empty words of comfort.

  "We'll pay this debt," I eventually managed to finally open my mouth and speak. "No matter how long it takes."

  How comforting, if at all, those words were, I don't know. I just... felt I had to say them, even as an empty gesture.