“Sure. I’ll hold you to that offer,” Lydia smirked, snapping Victor out of his brief descent into internal pondering. “I was already planning on taking a hike down south anyway. You just gave me a reason to do it a little sooner. Turns out, the Sangers don’t like it much when you’re walking around using their techniques and mixing them with a rival sect’s teachings.”

“What rival sect?” Jorfr asked.

“Yours. Who else?”

“Oh? I was not made aware that either of Ikesia’s two major Dark Age sects considers us a rival,” the draugr said. He added in a facetious tone: “What an honor.”

“I’ll make an off-handed guess: They conveniently took no issue with or happened not to notice Idda’s gang,” Victor chimed in.

“Of course not. Their backer is a high-up sect member. I want to say it’s the same nobleman who ran me out of the sect, but that feels… Paranoid.”

“I’ve read that the World of Cultivation is small, and that was in books from the Three Kings Era… I also remem- er, heard it from people who were alive back then. I imagine it’s even smaller now, after what, six hundred years of Cultivation Dark Age?”

The redhead squinted as if he was trying to remember something, his strange pupils briefly contracting to almost form pointy plus signs. “...Actually I think it’s closer to seven-hundred if you count from the point the Emperor went against the Three Kings. I think.”

“He is not wrong. The number of cultivators in this country is tiny compared to mortals; even low-level ones like our bandits. A proper cultivator’s grudge can last centuries, especially if their primary means of immortality is of the unchanging type,” Jorfr said.

“As I said, I was already planning on leaving this place, too much trouble. I would stay if I was concerned for its future, but… So many rogue cultivators have been coming and going lately, I don’t think it’ll be easy prey even for a proper sect. They’ve even had geomancers build fortifications around the alkasnail farm, proper geopolymer ones that can hold up to a cultivator. Place just needs a barrier.”

They remained at Fort 57 for some time, waiting to reunite with Zelsys and Zefaris.

A woman chastised her husband as he went on his way out of the house.

“I’m going for my morning walk.”

“The old road again?”

“Yeah.”

“Why do you keep going up there? I’m telling you, nobody uses that road.”

“Call it a gut feeling,” the man smiled, flipping a golden coin between his fingers.

“So you found some tracks and a ten-gelt coin up there months ago, what do you expect, that whoever lost it will come back the same way and give you a sovereign if you keep dutifully walking the same trail every day?”

“At this point, I think I just like the trail.”

That wasn’t entirely true, of course. He still felt a strange sense of comfortable longing when he walked that road, but he couldn’t place it.

“Morning, Franz!” a neighbor greeted him. “Could you ask Kaira if she’d be willing to fix some blueberry jam for me? We’ve got a huge harvest this year and I don’t have enough glassware to turn it all into wine before they rot.”

“Sure, we can get the Haurlosens in on it too. I hear they’re fixing to slaughter a pig next week!” he replied.

Franz passed through a shimmering, faintly iridescent bubble at the hamlet’s edge, walking over a line of wooden slats embedded in the ground. He still remembered the face of the old man who had put them there; upon his arrival he had regarded even the hamlet as if it were an overpopulated city. Franz thought back on that day as he reached the top of the hill and sat at the edge of the road, watching over his home from there.

The man’s shriveled, hunched-over frame and antiquated clothing only served to highlight the huge bundle of swords on his back. Without even introducing himself, he demanded to be given wood from a tree at least fifty years old. Franz was the first to come out and question who he was and what he wanted with the hamlet of Arthal, despite feeling as though he might be cut down at any moment when the old man squinted at him. When the old man narrowed his eyes, He was certain the end of his goatee was cut at that moment.

“Troubled times ahead. Tian-” he started, only to shake his head as he corrected himself. ”The Pateirian Emperor has lifted his Cultivation Suppression Edict. The continent will soon be set ablaze with new cultivators’ rise and old cultivators’ re-emergence. I am here to offer the protection of the Free Cities Alliance; Willowdale, Rigport, others. To carry out my work, I require old wood. Spiritual wood. I will create a barrier for your hamlet; one which shall render it invisible to those with malign intent and protect it from direct attack. A very small Blackwall, if you will.”

“Why?”

The old man’s blade-like gaze drifted to the statue in the hamlet’s center, then back to Franz.

“I am merely on a journey to another place, and it so happens that this hamlet - or rather, this forest - was on my way. Consider this repayment for giving me access to the woods. I will only take some herbs from deep within it.”

He glanced at that statue again.

“I would speak with your wise-man, or failing that, the elder of your village.”

Arthal was run by a group of elders, Franz being the youngest among them, and so they gathered, and spoke with the stranger. There, in private, he said: “What I said to you upon my arrival was entirely true. I have been journeying across Ikesia for the better part of a year, creating rudimentary magical defenses for unoccupied villages and towns such as yours. The forest of yours is old, and holds precious resources - precious not to mortals, but cultivators. It will be easier for me to acquire these resources if I ensure that this hamlet continues to exist. The forest has acknowledged the legitimacy of your presence here, and in turn, by rendering my aid to you I will enter the forest’s good graces.”