Book 2 Chapter 71

"Shi Wanjun" fled northward, ever deeper into the Steppes. Behind him stretched an endless expanse of wind-swept grass broken only by the occasional ridge, forest, marsh, valley, plateau, or winding river. Under the boundless blue of the sky, the world seemed impossibly vast – so vast that a single man could disappear into it without leaving so much as a footprint. Yet he knew better – he was being pursued. Even if he could neither see nor sense them, he knew they were there.

After all, he was carrying a treasure that had just metaphorically set the entire grasslands ablaze. The moment its existence became known, it was as though someone had hurled a burning torch into a field of dry grass. The flames would spread in every direction, consuming everything in their path. They would not distinguish between friend and foe, nor care who had started the fire.

And Shi Wanjun happened to be the man carrying the torch. Naturally, he would be the first to burn.

That was fine. He had been created with precisely that knowledge in mind.

"Shi Wanjun" was meant to lead his pursuers on a merry chase before mysteriously dying. The more attention he attracted, the more safely the original and his companions could travel along their own path.

He glanced briefly over his shoulder, an action that was completely useless here. His spiritual sense – carefully unfurled to a hundred li in every direction – would alert him the moment anything entered its range. And whatever he could not sense was unlikely to be visible to the naked eye either. Yet habits and memories accumulated over a lifetime had a way of persisting, even when that lifetime was merely a fraction of the one that he was living now.

There was no one behind him. Only endless grasslands stretched beneath the sky. He hoped it remained that way.

He was taking no great pains to conceal his presence. His supply of qi was limited, and even the copy of the Heaven Enshrouding Ding that the original had lent him had to be used sparingly. There was simply no way the Khans or the scattered Yuan tribes roaming the Steppes could fail to notice him. That was precisely the point. As long as he could reach the Dead Sea, he could stretch the chase out for at least a good week. The inland sea was notoriously dangerous, and only a "desperate madman" would willingly attempt to cross it. Better yet, it was a genuine route toward the heart of the Steppes. Taking it would not arouse suspicion; if anything, it would make perfect sense for a fugitive carrying such a treasure to choose the most direct path available.

Unfortunately, the Dead Sea was still a considerable distance away.

Mo Jia– "Shi Wanjun," he reminded himself – looked across the grasslands. Here and there, mountains rose along the horizon, only to vanish almost as quickly as he flew past them. The scenery changed, but the destination remained stubbornly distant. He had to go faster. If only the original had not been so stingy with his supply of qi. Yes, yes, he understood. The original needed every drop he could get. However, they were Nascent Soul cultivators now, and their qi and cultivation resources were abundant. A little here, a little there – it wasn't as though it would make that much of a difference. To think, he could have turned the Heaven Enshrouding Ding into a massive, gilded lion carriage and traveled in style.

Perhaps it was because he knew he had an expiration date. He had, after all, been created with the intention of dying. That knowledge seemed to have made him considerably more relaxed than the original, and far more willing to indulge in harmless amusements.

Perhaps he should grow a moustache, a magnificent one, dyed gold. That would really sell the whole "Lion General" persona. He already had the lion helm, at least. Muxue had helped with the disguise and declared that, so long as no one looked too closely, and had never actually met the real Lion General before, it would pass muster. Then there was the fake Black Sulde, which had taken considerably more effort.

After much discussion and no small amount of debate, Bai Ning had contributed the Sanguine Blood Banner, a Nascent Soul artifact that had originally belonged to Fu Zhan and that she had carried with her ever since his death at Mo Jian's hands. They had painted the banner black, for which Li Kang deserved the credit. They had then slapped a bundle of horsehair around its top. Yue Shuangyi had initially been reluctant to participate, but somewhere along the way she had become so immersed in the disguise that she had taken over the task herself, finishing that part. Finally, they had wrapped the entire thing in a qi-masking talisman. They had brought one from the Palace, but Liu Rushi had generously offered one of hers instead. Surprisingly, hers was better.

Duan Cheng had also contributed some useful advice on how a soldier being hunted might be expected to move, along with a collection of choice phrases to use should he happen to be caught. You think your numbers frighten me? Only boars hunt in flocks. This lion stalks alone. And, for a more dramatic occasion: To have caught up to me, Shi Wanjun, is your greatest misfortune, barbarian horselords. Prepare to die.

Mo Jian had committed both to memory. All in all, the preparations had been remarkably harmonious. Everyone had contributed something, and for a brief while, the cave where they had hidden and rested had almost felt peaceful. That peace had lasted right up until Wei Shentong battled and killed a massive three-headed, nine-antlered demonic beast outside the cave. Apparently, the beast had been returning home, and finding a group of unfamiliar cultivators occupying its territory, had, understandably, flown into a rage. They had tried flaring their auras – carefully, so as not to attract unwanted attention – in the hopes of frightening it away. It had not worked, so they had been forced to kill it.

Mo Jian – now, Shi Wanjun – couldn't help but feel that, considering the amount of effort everyone had put into making him look like the Lion General, it would be rather embarrassing if he died before anyone even had a chance to appreciate the disguise. He had to make it to the Dead Sea, at the very least.

……………………………………….

Mo Jian was used to fighting, but he was not used to war.

By now, he had been in enough battles – most of them, he would insist, through no fault of his own – that fighting itself had become familiar. Enemy cultivators, demonic beasts, malevolent entities… he had faced enough of them to know what it meant to cross blades with someone who wanted him dead. Somewhat unwillingly, he was even becoming accustomed to a different sort of battle: the battle of politics. Whether he had made a good showing on that front remained to be seen.

All of that was to say that, while Mo Jian knew fights, he had never truly seen war. The small skirmishes he had participated in did not count. By definition, they had been small and isolated, little more than violent encounters that flared up and ended before they could become anything larger. Now, for the first time, he was seeing the true, grim reality of war.

It was surprisingly comfortable.

He was a member of the Great Xiang Empire, travelling with its princess deep within enemy territory, far from any external support, after the Empire had declared war on the Yuan over Chiggis Khan's actions. And yet, Mo Jian was feeling… relaxed. Dare he say it, even a little content. Life on the march was nothing like what he had expected. The initial plan Muxue had drafted, with support from him and the others, had relied heavily on stealth. They would enter the Steppes, remain hidden, spread word of the Black Sulde, make contact with Tayang Khan, and do all of it as shadowy figures whom no one could find. Then they would penetrate deep into the heart of the Steppes, accomplish their goals, win the day, save the girl, and so on and so forth.

It had been a perfectly reasonable plan. Naturally, it had fallen apart on the very first day. Their decision to blaze out of the Giant Step Forest had been the first crack in it, born from sheer frustration after being hunted by monstrous squirrels and forced to wade through grass taller than themselves. First, they had been spotted by a Yuan tribe and mistaken for merchants. That was not, by and of itself, an issue, but when the time came to actually prove they were merchants and present the Fatwa of Trade, they were left with no choice but to bail, enraging their erstwhile hosts and beginning a chase that would last three days.

From there, they diverted to the Glowing Pits, where a minor horde maintained a semi-permanent encampment. It was a destination they had chosen on the strength of one simple belief: no one would expect them to willingly venture closer to the enemy. To their dismay, that belief had been wholly and utterly wrong. Tsetseg Khan, leader of the Purple Horde, had not only received reports about a group of "mongrels wandering around deceiving the Yuan by posing as traders," she had taken it upon herself to kill them all.

It had taken a running battle – and Mo Jian unleashing the Netherworld Scorpion – to convince her to back off. The scorpion itself had not actually done anything. The moment it emerged from the Ding, however, Tsetseg's purple flames had turned completely grey. The female Khan had taken one look at her suddenly colorless fire and backed off. Mo Jian assumed it was some method of sensing danger, and if so, a clever one, especially compared to all the golden flames he had seen from the Yuan thus far.

After that, their group had managed to flee to an unnamed mountain pass, where they found a cave and finally carried out the entire "fake Black Sulde" part of their plan. There, Mo Jian had shared with Muxue, and with the wider group – though that went without saying, since everyone had been shamelessly eavesdropping – that his qi clone technique was now ready. Ever since he had stepped into the middle stage of the Nascent Soul Realm, he had felt that he should be capable of producing one reliably. The actual technique, however, had only manifested several days after his breakthrough. He had no idea what the delay had been about, or what to make of it. He would ask the Tiger General when he returned to the Capital.

Regardless, it worked. And unlike their initial plan, in which the clone was meant to be assigned to Muxue as a permanent guard, they instead sent it out as a decoy and bait on the line. The clone had been… weird. There were subtle differences between the technique as it manifested and the version Mo Jian had read about. The biggest was that he had been under the impression that he would maintain a permanent link to the clone, allowing them to communicate and share qi regardless of distance.

It turned out that the link did exist, it simply had a very serious distance limit. The clone could travel as far as the creator of the technique wished, but beyond a certain distance, there was no way to remain in communication with it unless they resorted to some decidedly unorthodox methods. So Mo Jian had given it as much qi as he dared, along with a copy of his natal artifact, and sent it on its way. Seeing himself from the outside had been weird. He had developed an instinctive urge to smooth his hair. And did he really sound like that?

It had been made worse when Liu Rushi had suggestively remarked that the princess "should be happy now that there are two of Lord Mo." Bai Ning had been the only one who looked as unamused as Mo Jian felt. Nevertheless, "Shi Wanjun" had soon left, allowing Mo Jian and the rest of the group to take another path and return their focus to stealth. And that was where Mo Jian had discovered the real truth about life on the march: it was extremely comfortable. They travelled by jade ship or jade chariot, concealed beneath the ghostly form of the Heaven Enshrouding Ding, while Muxue's power distorted the truth of their presence and kept them hidden from prying eyes. For the most part, they simply avoided everyone and everything.

The vistas were amazing, the air was pure, and Mo Jian felt less like an infiltrator and more like a tourist. There were nine of them, enough that anything requiring actual labor was usually handled before he had to bestir himself. Everyone was a powerful and resourceful cultivator in their own right, so no one was dead weight, and no one required excessive hand-holding. It was, in short, remarkably pleasant. Mo Jian was beginning to suspect that this was not what war was supposed to feel like. He wondered if the clone was having just as easy a time as they were. He hoped so, and wished him the best of luck.

…………………………………………………….

"Shi Wanjun" did not know who had cursed him with bad luck, but he would find them and have his revenge. Ever since he had crossed a minor trail worn into the grasslands by some unknown horde, and, more importantly, crossed their waterhole, his luck had gone downhill.

He had been discovered by a lone Yuan scout, likely out on watch for his tribe, who possessed some sort of mystical eye technique. The scout had not been able to see through the Heaven Enshrouding Ding, but he had been able to tell that something was there, following the faint marks left behind in the air. Mo Jian (2) – for he had now decided that was his name, since "Shi Wanjun" was so unlamented as to hardly seem worth keeping – had not been particularly alarmed at first. Being found and chased was, after all, part of the plan.

The following hours had cured him of that naivete. The lone Yuan had sent a fireball screaming high into the air, where it exploded into a cloud of sparks. That, in turn, had summoned every nearby Yuan like moths to a flame, and they had come pouring in. Mo Jian had been comfortably fleeing at first, but then he had been forced to speed up, then speed up again, and again, until now, when he was quite literally running – or flying – for his life. He tore through the clouds, leaving a trail of golden light behind him. He had disguised his qi in the most basic manner possible, even though there was little point in subtlety anymore. Behind him came a flaming dog, fashioned entirely out of golden fire, snapping at his heels.

Mo Jian twisted sharply to avoid it. He could not use the Divine Water Lightning Technique – or rather, he should not use it until there was no other option left – so he was forced to rely on his natural speed. Worse, behind the flaming dog was an actual Khan and his horde, their interwoven qi unmistakable even from a distance. The group had taken the form of a gigantic flaming skull. Mo Jian (2) thought that was in rather poor taste. Unfortunately, despite their atrocious sense of humor, they were quite fast. He was narrowly maintaining his lead, and even that was only because the two Yuan groups were apparently as wary of one another as they were determined to catch him.

The group with the Khan would win any direct confrontation, that much was obvious, but the politics of the Steppes were complicated enough that actually starting a fight might not be wise. So, the two groups continued their pursuit, each apparently content to let the other do the dangerous work of catching him. Mo Jian (2) continued to flee, enclosed in a bubble of golden light. He had deliberately chosen to fly through the clouds, hoping they might obscure him for even an instant. Instead, they had done the exact opposite. He had painted an extraordinarily attention-grabbing picture across the sky: a lone point of golden light chased by a flaming dog and a flaming skull, all three tearing through the clouds at tremendous speed. Mo Jian could not have created a more obvious trail if he had tried.

There was one piece of good news, though, or perhaps two, if one stretched the definition of good news far enough. Another Khan and their horde were moving toward him. Mo Jian could sense their qi well enough, and there was no doubt that the Yuan pursuing him could sense it as well. The arrival of another powerful cultivator was certainly not ideal, but it also meant that the people around him now had something else to worry about. Powerful figures were rarely willing to throw themselves into a fight when they did not know who else might be waiting to take advantage of their weakness. Each would be watching the others, weighing the risks of making the first move, and that hesitation might buy Mo Jian a little more time.

It was not a sustainable advantage, but at the moment, he would take whatever he could get.

That was assuming no truly powerful Khan decided to join the chase.

According to the report from the Ministry of Rites he had read, there were four major and eleven minor hordes currently active in the Steppes, meaning at least fifteen Khans were known to the Empire and actively being tracked. Beyond them were the lone Khans, the ones with only a handful of followers or smaller hordes, and the wanderers who travelled the Steppes without any permanent territory or allegiance. There was no reliable way to determine how many of those existed. The report had estimated that there were roughly a hundred Khans in the Steppes. Several officials from the Ministry of War had dismissed that figure as inflated and alarmist, while the Ministry of Records had apparently considered it conservative.

Muxue had simply pointed out that there was no way to know. For their purposes, the fifteen known Khans were what mattered, along with whichever unknown Khan happened to decide that they wanted to become involved. The one chasing him now – the flaming skull – felt like the latter. The presence approaching from the distance felt like the former. Its qi spread across the Steppes like burning tar, heavy and oppressive, seeping outward over the grasslands with a pressure that could be felt even from this distance. There was nothing subtle about it. A true Horde had come out to play.

Mo Jian had barely finished that thought when the flaming dog behind him opened its jaws. Golden fire flooded its throat before erupting outward in a writhing mass. The attack looked almost like a tangled ball of hair as it flew through the air, but the individual strands soon separated into dozens of long tendrils that twisted and reached for him, each one moving with a life of its own. Mo Jian had seen the technique before. Rather than waste time trying to evade it, he continued flying and allowed the attack to catch him. The tendrils struck the invisible protection of the Heaven Enshrouding Ding and immediately began to coil around it. For a moment, the golden flames seemed to have him trapped, but the ghostly fire surrounding the Ding answered almost at once. Pale flames crawled along the tendrils, devouring them from within. The strands shriveled and broke apart, scattering into a trail of dying embers that drifted downward through the clouds.

The attack had slowed him for only an instant, but that was enough. The flaming skull had closed the distance. Its hollow eye sockets glimmered as it opened its enormous jaws, and a torrent of dark smoke poured from its mouth. Instead of dispersing, it rolled outward in a dense, churning mass before gathering along an invisible edge. A curved blade gradually emerged from the darkness, enormous enough to stretch across half the sky. Then it swung. Mo Jian stopped so abruptly that the clouds around him continued rushing past for several moments. His golden aura flared as he turned to face the attack, and he raised one hand.

Lightning erupted from the clouds. It began as a thin line of silver-blue light before rapidly expanding into a vast scythe of its own, its curved edge mirroring the weapon descending toward him. The two blades met high above the Steppes with a collision that seemed to tear the sky apart. The impact produced no single sound so much as an entire storm of them. Thunder rolled outward in overlapping waves as lightning burst through the black smoke, while the force of the collision tore open the surrounding clouds and sent them racing toward the horizon. A shockwave descended upon the grasslands below, flattening the tall grass in a widening circle and raising a vast wall of dust. For several seconds, the sky became a chaotic mixture of smoke, lightning, and fragments of condensed qi.

Mo Jian remained in the center of it, his robes snapping violently in the turbulent air, before catching the edge of the explosion and letting it hurl him backward through the clouds. He twisted in midair, caught himself against the invisible edge of the Heaven Enshrouding Ding, and forced his body back into a stable position. Heat rolled over him, followed by fragments of black smoke and stray arcs of lightning that flickered briefly before disappearing. He had barely regained his balance when something golden burst through the smoke.

The flaming dog came at him with its jaws wide open. Mo Jian twisted sideways. The dog's teeth snapped shut beside him, close enough that he could feel the heat pouring from its maw. The impact of its jaws sent another shockwave through the clouds, and Mo Jian used the force of it to propel himself upward. He broke through the cloud layer in a streak of golden light. For a brief moment, the sky opened around him. Beneath his feet stretched the endless grasslands of the Steppes, their green and gold surface broken only by distant hills and the dark smears of moving clouds. Behind him, however, the tranquility was already being torn apart. The flaming dog emerged from the clouds in pursuit, followed by the enormous skull, while farther in the distance the approaching Horde continued to advance.

Mo Jian looked toward the approaching qi and then back at the two enemies pursuing him. He had been hoping the arrival of another Khan would make the situation more complicated. It appeared he had succeeded.

That brought him to the second piece of good news: the Dead Sea was close. He could already taste the salt on the wind. Ahead, on the northeastern horizon, a faint and tattered veil of mist had begun to gather, blurring the boundary between sky and earth until half the horizon seemed to have vanished behind it. The Dead Sea lay beyond that haze. If he could reach it, the situation would become considerably more complicated for his pursuers. The Yuan would have far more to worry about than a single fleeing cultivator once they entered its territory, and whatever lurked within the Dead Sea was unlikely to distinguish between friend and foe.

Unfortunately, his opponents were not idiots. They knew exactly what he was trying to do. The flaming dog was already angling across his path, while the great skull shifted behind it, its enormous form cutting through the clouds as it moved to close off the most direct route toward the mist. The other Khan's forces were approaching from the opposite direction. They were herding him.

Mo Jian's expression darkened. He had only a narrow window left before the three sides converged. If he wanted to reach the Dead Sea, he was going to have to break through someone first. A battle was coming. Indeed, judging by the pressure gathering around him and the way the Yuan were beginning to spread out, it was no longer a question of when the fighting would begin, but who would make the first move.

Mo Jian clenched his fist. Seriously, if he ever found out who had cursed him with this atrocious luck – starting with that absurdly perceptive scout who had spotted him in the middle of nowhere – he was going to take his revenge.

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AN:As always, there are advance chapters available on Patreon (up to 15) for anyone who wants to read ahead - thanks!