Volume 2- Chapter 9

Chapter 9

~~~~Tai Su~~~~

Most of the territory of the Empire of the Blazing Sun is devoid of human life. It would take a mortal man nine months at the very minimum to go from one end of the empire to the other and despite all that, I was told that the population of the Empire is estimated to be around forty million people.

In my past life there were urban areas composed out of multiple cities boundaries blurring until the line where one city ended and another begun were arbitrary. Those cities were more populous than the Empire of the Blazing Sun despite occupying a fraction of the space. There were islands with several times the population of the Empire, an empire that spanned an area I was starting to think was the size of Eurasia.

The population wasn't even terribly dispersed either, my people instead living in a few population centers in areas where the spiders didn't fill with more species of poisonous plants than there are people to be killed by them.

I was thankful for our rations, we would not be able to eat anything here, and unlike the tropes of my past life military rations tasted good.

crunch

The meat-biscuit cracked softly beneath my teeth, the crunch being something I would normally associate with high end fresh bread and not long-lasting military rations. You couldn't even feel the meat texture, only the bread's, but the taste was undeniably salted beef.

The red meat-tasting loaf was as long and wide as my hand and about twice as thick. It was enough to feed a first tier cultivator for an entire day of back-breaking physical activity and three days if weren't doing anything.

"I'll never get used to it." Ya Xue declared as she finished her own ration.

The Xie, which was the name of the wolf clan that settled in the Prefecture, were migratory. They were moving across an established dirt path that was laid by dozens of wolf clan generations walking the same path all their lives.

We were standing in a stone circle near the forest path the wolf clan was taking in their migration, one of many in our vicinity which served as waypoints the wolf clan has created in their attempt at taming this hostile wilderness into something approaching habitability.

"What's wrong with it?" I asked.

For all that she was complaining, she ate the fastest out of all of us. I myself was only halfway done and the others were a bit further behind while she was nearly done. The thing was dense and despite its soft interior once it grew a bit wet from our saliva it would start to slowly swell and become stickier, and all but demanding us to drink some water to have it go down our throats.

"You can't live off salt, beef and bread, because you'll eventually get scurvy. You need to eat some fruits like oranges or lemons to prevent it and these rations have none. Somehow our cultivation allows us to miss an important building block of our bodies like citric essence and still have us be fine." She explained.

"Maybe it's there already and we don't feel the taste? This thing was created with alchemy, as there's no way for something to still be this fresh after months since it was made." Mei Lin said reasonably and offered the most likely explanation.

"I made some with elder Shen Xifeng, Haoran Lin and Cheng Lin as part of their training. The only thing that went into these was wheat, yeast, water, beef, and a pinch of salt and some strange concoction made out of plants and Qi that did not have any citric essence in it to prevent scurvy." She denied vehemently.

I took another bite of the meat-biscuit, not caring in the slightest for the fact that the thing shouldn't be able to actually feed me the way it does.

"Qi tends to be like that." I declared with a shrug.

Cultivating removes or reduces your body's needs until you no longer need anything but Qi. It removing our need for vitamin Cm as my past life called it, or citric essence, as my new life calls it, was unsurprising and uninteresting as far as I was concerned. Of course cultivation removed your need to eat and gather nutrients, it was the sort of thing that was obvious, as the reduced need to eat for cultivators was well known.

"If you don't like it you could always try the local cuisine." Da Xiu said with the seriousness of a grave.

The three of us looked at him as if he was crazy, before he started laughing. The rest of us quickly joined in, albeit our laugh was closer to a chuckle.

The 'local cuisine' looked appetizing. Some of the trees were filled with red juicy fruit, the mushrooms looked appetizing, and there were some small rodents scurrying around unbothered by our presence and even a small water deer.

None of it was edible from what I knew and the few things that could be edible, assuming the wolves managed to make them so, were not something I wished to risk.

"We are no spiders Da Xiu." I corrected jokingly.

Most of the plant life around the Seventh Yellow Hill Town was left unmolested by the spiders, but we are hours of walking from the last human settlement, and the only place we can trust that the food won't kill us.

According to the texts I read most of the continent was eaten by the Rabbit clan. Trees, grass, animals, insects and even dirt, none were spared wherever the rabbit clan reigned supreme. Once they were hunted to extinction and the spider clan rose to rule most of the continent they went on to terraform the barren hellscape most of the continent became.

The issue is that they did so mostly with an ecosystem hostile to humans and really anything that is not a spider. The grass makes animals slightly poisonous, the mushrooms are almost universally poisonous to humans, the fruit trees do not produce anything we can digest, and what little we can draw nutrition from is rare and often times has another species that looks eerily similar to it that will kill us if we try and eat it. This has also turned most of the animals inedible too to add insult to injury.

What the spiders needed two hundred years to build, haunts us even one thousand years later. Outside of the few areas the spiders did not mess with, the Empire has barely managed to reclaim one fiftieth of the land that the spiders turned hostile to us, and that land we reclaimed is always a few years away from being invaded by a biosphere hostile to humanity.

There is a reason the Empire of the Blazing Sun considers Nature to be Evil, and that's because for most of the empire, untouched nature is poisonous to us, with the only spots where one can enjoy the fruits of nature being places with a heavy human presence.

"I know that, you know that, but it seems someone's stomach does not know it judging by how she complains about the only edible food around." Da Xiu snorted

This was getting a bit heated. Da Xiu had no filter and would take jokes a bit far. I knew that and Ya Xue knew that, but it's one thing to intellectually know something and have your heart follow it.

"As if you have anything to talk about, mister 'I only eat bread crust'. Ya Xue told me plenty of how you were a picky eater!" Ya Xue hit right back before I could intervene.

"Bread crust?" I asked curiously.

That's a first, I've never hear of people that don't like the bread crumb, the crust yes, but never the crumb.

"Old Lao bakes the most vile black bread you've ever tasted. The crust you can use as a bowl for soup, but the crumb? A dog tried to bite me when I gave it some, they wouldn't touch it even when you gave them some meat with it." He defended himself.

"Dogs not eating something? Now I've heard it all, are you sure you are not spinning some tall tale to hide the fact you are the pickiest eater out of all of us?" I accused jokingly.

Da Xiu snorted at my words.

"As if, when we go visit my home I'll treat you to some of old Lao's bread, then you tell me if I am being picky." He said.

We rose up from our 'seats' and started walking the path laid down by the wolves. We continued bickering as we walked through the deadly forest wary of the dangers but with the knowledge that if we weren't the most dangerous thing in this forest, then we most definitely had the thing too wary of us to attack us.

It reminded me of our Trial, in the general sense, where we walked through a forest to reach our objective but the details were off.

We didn't carry backpacks for once, but leather fanny packs, We weren't massively burdened with water skins, instead carrying a single water skin each and we were far more mentally stable. We were no longer raw from cultivation, the mental scars it gave us healing into something functional over the months of peace since. We were also fewer now, four of us being back in town.

"Something is off." Mei Lin interrupted us.

Ya Xue and Da Xiu were in the middle of some sort of boasting contest in which they tries to claim that they had to eat the more disgusting foods, a contest Da Xiu was winning handily and that I had to bow out of 'in disgrace' because I was only ever cooked good food in this life.

Who knew that having your own mother learn her recipes from a woman decades her senior without complaint, would teach her how to cook well when I was young and not require her to experiment on father and I to learn how to cook well. Or that it would somehow make me lose a contest to my subordinates.

"Ya Xue." I said simply.

Both of us immediately stopped feeding the formations in our robes and the world exploded into strange smells.

There were the normal sound of nature, but there was something else, the urgency of something human, yet not and something muted unlike everything I've ever heard before.

Da Xiu was behind Ya Xue in flash, and I quickly noticed why, she was swaying and shortly after I noticed that so was I.

I started feeding the formations again and noticed Mei Lin was at my side. I didn't even notice that she was keeping me from falling off my feet.

"Thank you Mei Lin, I can walk now. Ya Xue, feed the formations again." I ordered.

She was already doing so, whatever she just felt hitting her stronger than it did me and she instinctively closed it off, but making her feel like she wasn't breaking my orders was more important than me being redundant with my orders.

Mei Lin let go of and I awaited for my dizziness to subside.

"There's a fight somewhere nearby, a chase or something of the like. I think the wolf tribe is hunting something, but whatever they are hunting is not something I've smelt before." I explained.

Ya Xue needed a few more moments before she calmed down, small steady breaths helping her center herself back to her own thoughts and feelings. She was always hit hard by her physique, far harder than me, and while I would sometimes suffer nose bleeds from my senses being assaulted, she had to face her own thoughts no longer being solely her own, which was far harder and slower to recover from.

It didn't take her long to recover this time thankfully, as she only was without protection for a few seconds

"About what I felt as well, albeit I was able to determine a direction to where the hunt was going to. It does take us away from the path though." Ya Xue said, her voice starting unsure but slowly regaining its certainty with each word.

She also pointed to my left, in a direction I think was the east, which meant deeper into the forest.

"What do we do with this information?" Da Xiu asked.

All three of them looked at each other and then to me as I considered what we knew.

This hunt wasn't happening too far from us, judging by the fact Mei Lin was feeling echoes of it, and there was little chance of anything too dangerous being nearby, considering that the wolf clan was meant to keep their territory safe from the rare Cultivator beast. The issue came that this hunt was probably hunting just one such beast and if we interfered in it we could cause the wolf clan to fail in it and the last thing we wanted was to worsen relations and let a Qi Beast run rampant.

Then there's the fact it would take us away from the path and we knew nothing of the local forest. This forest did not operate by the laws of those near my home. The plants did not grow the same, landmarks I knew to look after were not present and whatever landmarks the wolf clan knew to follow were unknown to me. There was a small chance that we could lose ourselves in the forest as we searched for the hunters, while just following the path meant that we would eventually meet the wolf clan.

Then there was whatever the unknown thing the wolf clan was hunting and whether or not it was linked to the reincarnator.

"Ya Xue, were you able to get a clue as to what the thing we both felt was? I do not recognize the scent." I asked her.

Our water meridians may have been helping speed up our cultivation speed immensely, but it came with debilitating sensory issues. Issues our master refused to allow us to stagnate in mastering our physiques, but great issues nonetheless.

Each of us were trained to recognize a wide variety of beings, ranging from cultivator rats, cats, dogs, other types of rodents, birds, boars, pandas, lizards, frogs and even certain insects that were proven to know how to cultivate. I've learned to recognize them and so has Ya Xue, but what I felt was nothing like I've ever felt before.

Ya Xue shook her head

"No, it's nothing like I've ever felt, its intent did not feel like that of any animal or insect I've ever felt before." She answered.

That settled it then, we had to investigate. If this is some new horror from inside the forest then we needed to figure out what it is.

"Then we go towards the hunting party. Da Xiu to the left, Mei Lin in the center, I stay on the right and Da Xiu will cover us from behind." I ordered.

Da Xiu as the largest will be the one to respond to any threat the rest of us are distracting, his physical blows capable of punishing most things. Ya Xue and I can react the fastest and thus we are on the flanks ready to interpose ourselves in front of anything for the other to assist and for Da Xiu to intervene and Mei Lin will serve as the warning system and be kept safe in-between the rest of us, as she is unfortunately the weakest link.

Part of the reason I decided to go through was simply my burning curiosity as to what I was feeling was, the other was a much less selfish reason. I wanted to see how the wolf clan fought, they are a known force in the prefecture and their circuit serves as a safe route for travelers and news across the Prefecture, the small clan being one of the connection points between the north and the south, albeit serving as such in an unofficial manner.

The officials naturally know of it and the wolves serve to inform us of what the black markets and criminal elements are getting up to as we have cultivated them as an intelligence tap that allows the sect and the Auditors to start off investigations, even if nothing they manage to get from the wolf clan is being used in the construction of the cases.

The others nodded at me. They trusted my judgement and my resolve to not prove their trust in me misplaced was rekindled.

We started walking at a fast pace through the forest, the uneven terrain filled with roots, fallen trees and strange plants. We could run, but the Cloud Stepping Walk is more suited for flat surfaces and the risk of stumbling would be too great if we decided to run through uneven and unfamiliar terrain.

"The disturbance is getting louder." Mei Lin said simply.

"I can hear some noise." Ya Xue said shortly after.

I looked to Da Xiu and he shrugged. Neither of us could hear it, but Ya Xue even with her physique suppressed had the sharpest hearing out of all of us.

We started walking faster, with Ya Xue and I moving a further from Mei Lin. Da Xiu will be able to interfere if she is attacked and if we are we'll be able to avoid the attacks for enough that everyone else can intervene.

Minutes passed and we started hearing the shouts. No they weren't shouts but cheers? Whatever they were, they were certainly energetic.

"Yang An Lu, Yang an Lu, Yang An Lu!" The chorus kept repeating excitedly.

We left the trees to enter a small clearing, in it a young pale human man was fighting some abomination made out of a mix of mushroom and many animals.

The abomination had eight legs it's body was roughly spider shaped, if spiders had legs with ends similar to that of elephants and had eight different animal heads serving as eyes on their bulbous head. I could make out a human head belonging to an elderly man, a tiger's head, a horse head, and a panda head but the others were too covered in moss to tell.

The thing was made out of a mix of moss, bone and still living flesh and it's fangs were made out of what looked like old and weathered animal bones sharpened until they could cut flesh.

"What is that ungodly abomination?" I muttered.

"Abyssal Spiders. Old creations of the Zhizhujing that they let out into the wilderness decades before the Empress Ascended. Those things are living demons and are born and bred like that." Ya Xue answered.

Those things can breed? What in the name of the heavens were the spider queens thinking to create such things?

In front of us, what should have taken an entire hunting party to hunt, was instead fought against by one young man armed with nothing but a spear, a sturdy pair of green pants, a white shirt and some leather shoes.

"Should we intervene?" Mei Lin asked.

It seemed that the man we were meant to meet was fighting this abomination, and more importantly it was fighting it alone.

"No, I doubt our intervention would be appreciated by either party." I answered.

In front of us the strange fight continued, as the young man fought an abomination as tall as an elephant and many times wider and looked to be winning, much to the cheers of the wolf clan.