We left in the middle of the night with the bad fake-cultivators' horses as well as a caravan carriage for all of our stuff. I would have felt bad about taking the city's property, but apparently Mayor Shan did us dirty and my guilt was dramatically lessened. He knew we'd get in trouble if the imperial inspector found out about us and, to hear Ken explain it, he probably wanted to get all cultivators out of his town, even if they were the presumably good kind.

"If he wrote a letter to the legate saying 'the same bandits that have been bothering us for years continue to be a nuisance', nothing's going to get done. I imagine he's written a hundred letters like it to little effect," Ken said as he hitched the horses. "But if he writes, 'a group of mysterious cultivators swept into town, defeated the local cultivators, and set up shop in the big mansion', then they've got to investigate. For all they know, we're a rogue sect or demonic cultivators…"

"Which are… bad?" I inferred.

"Yes," Ken sighed. "Those things are bad. The legate doesn't want an acceptable status quo to be disturbed, so he'll have no choice but to send somebody out. Most inspectors are cultivators of considerable power, and most of their men-at-arms are former soldiers…"

"Just like the Dark Riders of Ieyasu," I said.

"Just like them. And it won't take much snooping for the inspector to discover that we're unregistered cultivators - none of us belongs to a sect, clan, house, or prefecture. At that point, they'll take us into custody and punish us… and inspectors are given broad discretion in these matters. Maybe they'll charge us a small fine and tell us to be more discreet. Maybe they'll order us publicly executed. Probably, it'll be somewhere in between…"

"That's a, uh… pretty broad scope of punishments," I observed.

Ken tested the harness on the nearest horse and found it to his liking. "I don't care to find out how kindly-disposed the inspector is feeling, and neither do the others - hence the decision to leave. You're welcome to take your chances, of course…"

"Yeah… nah," I said. "I'm gonna make one last sweep of the house to see if there's anything else worth taking… unless we're in that big of a hurry."

Ken shrugged. "We're good until sunrise at the earliest. If the inspector flies over right away, he may not be able to spot the town in the dark… I doubt he'd risk coming until dawn."

"Flies over? Like in a plane?"

"In a what? A plane, like for smoothing wood? No, it would be with an artifact or technique… I've never heard of a flying wood plane before."

"Right, yeah. That's definitely the kind of plane I was talking about," I said awkwardly. "Okay, one last sweep."

There wasn't much left in the mansion worth taking - the looters had seen to that - and what remained was mostly too heavy to take on the flat-bottomed cart we'd commandeered. The writing desk was very nice but was bulky and weighed about three hundred pounds. The bedframe was even bigger. But the mattress… Hmm…

"We're not taking that with us," Ken stated as I hauled the mattress out, carrying it over my shoulder like a sack of flour.

"Lynn, we're not taking a mattress," Ichika agreed.

"Why not? All rolled up, it's smaller than any of our tents, and we don't have to keep it forever. We'll toss it the moment it becomes inconvenient. Whoever sits in the cart can use it as a cushion, too. It's multi-use. We'd be idiots not to take it!" I stuffed it in next to the rolled-up canvas for the tents. "Look - we still have plenty of room!"

Big Shilei slid Ichika's wardrobe onto the cart and then latched the cart's back to secure it. "Let's see a vote of hands - who feels like it's worthwhile arguing with Lynn over this one? Okay, looks like we're all for keeping Lynn happy…"

"You don't have to frame it like I'm being a child," I huffed. "If we're really going to go riding off into the wilderness, I don't see why we can't take some comforts with us. Hell, I'm surprised Ichika and Monkey don't want a mattress for… you know… activities."

"I'll be right back," Ichika said.

"Lynn!" Ken snapped. "This… this is my karma catching up with me, isn't it? What terrible sins have I committed that now I have to put up with two women and their obsession with, of all things, mattresses?"

"Nothing wrong with a good mattress," Monkey Yang said noncommittally.

"Easy for you to say, you get to share one with your Iron Flower!"

"Come on, guys, stop being cranky," I said. "We're all just annoyed that we only got to stay in our mansion for one day. But I'm sure there are other mansions out there. Ken, don't you think we earned some good karma from saving a fucking town? You just have to envision the positive and the positive will enter your life - that's what I believe."

"Yes, very deep, madam philosopher." Ken bowed… a bit sarcastically, if I had to guess. "Let's see if you sing the same tune living out beyond civilization, mattresses, and ice grain beverages."

"Smoothies," I said.

"Right. Out past that…"

"You can make smoothies almost anywhere," I added. "Oh! Ichika's back - let's see if we can fit the big mattress in!"

--------

We did fit the big mattress into the cart, and it wasn't even all that hard to do or take up all that much space despite Ken's grumbling. It was probably just after midnight when we finally rode out.

More accurately, Ken, Ichka, and Yang rode out, I rode in the cart, and Big Shilei jogged alongside - we had five horses and needed two of them for the cart. We thought it might be cruel to have them carrying Shilei for the first leg of the journey, since he probably weighed more than Ichika and me combined, and the big man had no problem with jogging for miles and miles.

We took the road northeast, through the peaceful nighttime farmland, the moon and stars passing silently overhead, their pale light matched with the soft pulse of celestial qi. I sat on my rolled-up mattress and watched the country pass by. Gradually, as the night passed, the farmland became sparser and copses of hardscrabble trees and outcroppings of rock that jutted up like jagged monuments became more common. The road became more gravelly and more tenuous.

Eventually, we passed a tiny sleeping hamlet that barely qualified as a town nestled along a small, dark creek. I'd have been surprised if it had more than a hundred inhabitants. Not far beyond, the road deteriorated into an unreliable game trail, the orchards became hardy pines, and the signs of human inhabitation dropped to nil.

"Wow… it really is wilderness out here, huh?" I said. "Does it go all the way to the ocean or what?"

Still jogging, Shilei glanced at me in astonishment. "You really know nothing of the world, do you?"

I shrugged. "Pointing it out every time I say something ignorant doesn't make you smarter. It just makes you more of an asshole. If you don't want to answer next time, just ignore me."

"It's fine," he said eventually. "I apologize. I know nothing of your upbringing, and it's clear you're not simple."

"I'm not," I agreed. "Apology accepted."

"I assume, then, that there's a good reason that you don't know what young children are expected to memorize and hope that you'll confide in me some day. Until then, I hope you'll forgive my demeanor - I, too, have a past that isn't a dance to Kulun-Lhas. Very well… the wilderness we head into is the sparse-qi zone surrounding the Heaven's Abyss mountains - our empire completely encircles the wilderness except for a fairly small stretch where the mountains meet the sea."

"And it's uninhabited because the qi is low?"

"It is uninhabited because neither the emperor nor any other power choose to protect settlements in the area. The qi is not low, per se, so much as it is diffuse - there are no strong sources, no fonts welling up from the earth, and even strong local sources are scattered. It makes cultivation slow and difficult, so why would a sect or clan ever take up residence there? That is why false cultivators like the emperor's enlisted have such power here - they care little for the problems of tigers but are powerful enough to stake their fiefdoms and enforce their rules upon the mice."

"Tigers being cultivators and mice being regular people?" I asked.

"Yes. I don't know why the Heaven's Abyss is the way it is, only that it forms a band eight hundred li east to west and two thousand li northeast, within which only hunters and hermits live, along with whatever stranger things lurk out in the wild."

"Huh. And we're riding into it."

"And we're riding into it," Shilei agreed.

"Hey… you've been jogging for a while. Hours. Want to swap spots? I bet with my cultivator body, I could jog for a while, too."

He wiped a few droplets of sweat from his heavy brow. "It would be much appreciated."

So I got down, Big Shilei got up, and the horses snorted in protest over the fact that their human cargo had just doubled in weight. I'm not sure whether horses can be cultivators… I think it's a humans and spirits only kind of thing… but these horses had been working with fake cultivators for a while and seemed to have endurance to match. They kept clopping along at about ten miles per hour…

Which meant I had to jog along at ten miles per hour… through tall grasses and rocky fields, over rivulets and tracts of marshy mud, up and down hills for what seemed like hours…

"It's been fifteen minutes," Shilei chuckled when I glanced in his direction.

"Just, uh… just looking to see where the moon is," I lied, and I kept on jogging. "I'm not even winded yet…"

"Wouldn't be much of a cultivator if you were. In my sect, they had the initiates jog up and down the mountain, ten li each way, three times every morning. The path wasn't much better than what you're jogging along now…"

"Yeah, but I don't have running shoes…"

"We did it barefoot," he added with a smirk.

"Yeah, yeah, I get it. I'm a shit cultivator."

Big Shilei shook his head with a seriousness that I didn't expect. "You're not a shit cultivator, Lynn. I think you may be a very, very good cultivator. But you've had shit instruction, and you will have to unlearn it…"

"Can't unlearn what you don't know," I said, hopping over a rock the size of my torso.

"True enough."

I ran along like that for a while, not wanting to sully what little pride I had left by giving up too soon. Meanwhile, Ichika and Monkey Yang rode side by side up front, occasionally leaning over to whisper to one another or kiss. Ken 'the Rainbow Phoenix' rode just behind, occasionally looking over his shoulder to make sure we kept up, but never offering to let me ride the horse, the big jerk.

So I kept on jogging, occasionally exchanging words with Big Shilei, or otherwise just enjoying the wild country. We entered a pine forest, which was the easiest going yet. There wasn't much undergrowth, the hills were shallow, and the dry nettles underfoot couldn't do a thing to my cultivator's feet, even though I was only wearing sandals. Amazingly, I was barely even tired. My ankles were a bit sore from pivoting and leaping to avoid obstacles, but I felt like I could run until the sun came up…

Which made it a little bit weird that my heart was hammering away in my chest… wait… no…

"Are you okay, Shilei? Your heart rate is all over the place," I said - I still wasn't used to the fact that I could see perfectly well beneath a forest canopy on a half-moon night, let alone that I could hear somebody's heartbeat eight feet away aboard a big, jostling cart.

"My heart is just fine, girl," he said. "Giving up on the run already?"

Hmm… he was right. I could hear the steady lub-a-dub of his heart, could feel and hear the slightly faster pulse of my own, and easily made out yet a third, weaker, much faster beat… oh, and the two horses pulling the cart, but theirs couldn't really be confused with a human beat. Which meant…

"Shit! Stop the cart! Shilei, stop the cart!"

The big man frowned but didn't second-guess me. He clicked his tongue, gently tugged on the reins, and the well-trained horses eased to a stop in a pool of moonlight. I leapt up onto the cart, tossing rolled-up canvas and mattresses aside until I had Ichika's big wooden wardrobe chest uncovered.

I tugged at the latches, but the thing was locked. Instead of waiting for Ichika to ride around and for me to take time explaining the situation to her, I simply grabbed the hinges of the box and lifted, bronze cracking and wood tearing under the force of my panic. A hailstorm of splinters and bits of metal shot off into the woods, where they disturbed about a dozen sleeping birds, which flapped and squawked and took off into the night.

I hadn't been hearing a rapid heartbeat in my chest. I'd heard a fluttering human heart inside Ichika's chest… her wardrobe chest to be specific.

I pulled the person out - a young woman, unconscious. She wasn't breathing, either. I laid her out across Ichika and Yang's big mattress, tilted her head back, and gave a puff of breath…

She promptly coughed and vomited into my mouth.

"Fuuuuu," I said. I promptly turned and threw up my own dinner, dragonfruit mango mint cultivator smoothie included. I vomited it all over the rolled-up canvas of Ken's tent and then proceeded to cough and spit the rest off the side of the cart and into the night.

My spittle barely missed Ichika as she dismounted and rushed back to see what the commotion was about. She first noticed the ruin of her wardrobe chest, missing its top and splintered to hell. Then she noticed the coughing, slowly-rousing young woman supine on the mattress she'd claimed for herself and Monkey Yang. "Is… is that?"

I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and nodded. "Yeah. It's Mayor Shan's daughter."

"Well… shit…"

--------

There wasn't a very big window of time where it could have happened - maybe two or three minutes when all of us were outside and fussing over the cart before carrying our things out. Then we'd loaded the cart up, argued about mattresses, and left for the wilderness. Sometime in that golden window of opportunity, Kin Cui Hana, the daughter of Mayor Kin Shan and his wife, Kin Cui Fen, had stuffed herself into Ichika's wardrobe at the expense of half of her clothes…

It was a travesty, really, all of those clothes now abandoned in the mansion in Rushing Rivers. If Hana had asked very nicely, maybe we'd have let her come with us… well, I'd probably have let her. I doubt anybody else would.

"The wilderness is no place for a mortal," Ichika stated. "We need to bring her back…"

Ichika was also a little piqued about half of her wardrobe going missing. She couldn't exactly replace it out in the middle of nowhere.

"We can't take her back," Shilei stated. "If we head back now, we'll make it an hour or so after dawn… if the imperial inspector isn't already there, I don't think he'll be too much longer. And if we're caught bringing the girl back into town, it'll look like we kidnapped her. Kidnapping a mayor's daughter? Not something I want to be judged before the inspector for."

"That doesn't give us many options," Ken said. "Either we take her back and face imperial 'justice' or she stays with us and, despite our protections, probably dies out here."

"Wait… why would she die out here?" I asked. "It seems pretty safe…"

"It is pretty safe to you and me," Ken said. "If a spirit beast approaches, simply run away. If a bear or a tiger attacks you, you just kill the beast and we have good meat for a week."

"Ew. Bear? I bet that's all kinds of gamey," I said.

"The point is… if one gets too close to the young miss, it won't take long for it to do what predators do - and, even if we kept a careful vigil over her, there are snakes, spiders, hornets, and any number of other things that can kill a mortal out here. And we'd be too busy protecting our own skins from a spirit beast to defend her. It's why we cultivators are tasked with protecting towns and cities, after all. Or they could drink bad water, eat a poisonous mushroom…"

"Okay, fine, I get it," I said. "There are lots of dangerous things. We could take her to that tiny village right before the wilderness. She could probably make her way back from there, right?"

"Hmm… maybe…"

The whole time we discussed it, the girl, Hana, gradually recovered from her ordeal in Ichika's wardrobe. Apparently, things had been uncomfortable but survivable inside the chest for the first part of the trip. Then, when I switched spots with Big Shilei, he'd draped the big mattress right over the wardrobe and snuffed out what little air transfer was there. It had gone from barely enough air to… well, less than that. Hana had struggled to get out, but found herself unable to move or even cry out in the confines. At least that's what she'd told us…

I almost forgot that she was there, drinking from Ken's canteen and sniffling to herself. And, to tell the truth, I was still a little annoyed that she'd vomited into my mouth.

Obviously, she hadn't meant to, but still… not cool, Hana.

As Big Shilei and I discussed what to do with the girl, Ken scrubbed my sick out of his tent, and Ichika and Yang kept an eye on the girl while enjoying the night… Hana listened to us deciding her fate, her eyes wide with disbelief.

"I… I don't want to go back," she said in a small voice.

"Haven't you heard a word we've said, girl?" Big Shilei said, rising up to his impressive height. "It's death for non-cultivators out here!"

"Or…" I said… "we could train her to be a cultivator!"

"Yes!" Hana squeaked.

"What? No!" everybody else replied.

"What yes," I replied. "You wanted me to show you my cultivation technique anyway, right? I'll teach you guys how I do what I do, you can teach me and Hana how to do kung fu-"

"Kung fu is actually a very specific set of techniques," Shilei interrupted. "We call the broader set of combat arts the martial dao."

"See? I'm learning already," I said. "Martial dao. Got it. I'll teach you my inner light cultivation, you teach me about the martial dao, and Hana can teach me how to read and write Yu characters. Everybody wins!"

"If you want to make the girl your project, then you're in charge of her, meaning you're responsible if anything happens to her," Ken said. "And if anybody asks, she begged us to stay, and you insisted that she stay, and the rest of us had nothing to do with it. Are we clear?"

"We're clear!" Hana and I both replied. I shot her a thumbs-up, which garnered a confused response… I guess thumbs-ups aren't a thing in the empire.

Big Shilei began to unharness our horses. "Despite my better judgment, it sounds like our course is decided. I say we rest for a few hours, at least until dawn - the horses could certainly use it and there's water nearby. I've had enough of tonight."

"Enough of what?" I asked.

"Everything!"

What a grumpus!

With everybody seeing to the horses and setting up their tents, I took Hana to the side and sat her down to see where she was with regards to meditation. Apparently, a lot of people practiced meditation in the empire but, just like in California, not many people did it right. I could tell that there was a lot of room for improvement in Hana's technique - she thought that steady breaths and a fidgety semi-relaxation constituted meditation. And, just when I thought she was starting to improve, she drifted off to sleep.

Poor girl. She'd had a rough night. I dragged my mattress into the only unoccupied tent (well… unoccupied except for a bunch of luggage) and, not having the heart to make Hana sleep on the ground, I set her carefully on the mattress and sat in front of the tent to meditate the rest of the night away. The forest round me hummed with life and the mortal girl behind me softly snored, her ordeal from the day far behind her.