Chapter 598: Mirror-of-the-Sky Blood (2)

Qinghai Lake spreads as a richly vegetated grassland, about twenty-five li wide and two hundred fifty li long, tucked between the long east-west ridge that walls off its southern side.

Between those, several waterways flow into Qinghai Lake, and around each of those mouths small hamlets have taken root where fields have been widely reclaimed.

That is why little villages keep appearing along the lake’s south. The lake is brine and cannot serve as drinking water.

Sect Village was one of those hamlets.

Given the season, this is also the last stop one can reach on horseback in winter.

Because the fodder sheds for feeding horses exist only up to here.

“Ugh, my butt.”

Qing slid off the horse and, rubbing the numb ache in her backside, was wobbling when Hee-mae, as if it were the most natural thing, scooped her up.

Everyone’s breath puffed white; on top of the waterside damp, a sudden chill came tearing through.

Well, we are on high ground to begin with.

If not for the range to the south breaking the gale, it would be worse; over on the far side they say spit freezes before it hits the ground, or something like that.

And Chaka Lake lay right over there.

Sect Leader Cheon Bija’s doubt—“Are you really going to see Chaka Lake in this season?”—was exactly about this cold.

Even in winter it’s worth a look, but not enough to warrant braving the night chill.

(By day it’s just ordinarily cold.)

So the plan was to hole up indoors.

“Lady Ximen, the moon is truly beautiful. The night view of Qinghai Lake is a solitary splendor.”

Clueless Bungsain wants to go look at the lake at night.

Peng Daesan’s eyebrows twitched hard. Then twitched again.

Mm. The kid really is sensitive to cold—looks like he truly doesn’t want to go.

But... mm. We came all this way, didn’t we?

Qing may sprawl, be carried, and—if someone saw her—look like the laziest layabout under heaven, but in truth she’s a dyed-in-the-wool walker, a travel-on-foot enthusiast who bounces off on her own.

It’s just that when it’s allowed to be lazy, she collapses very seriously; if someone says there’s something to see, she goes, “Eh, that’s a hassle. But let’s go right now!” and springs up.

“Who wants to go see the lake at night!?”

“Hee-mae, do you want to see it? Shall we go?” “Me.” “Tch.”

Those two were a given; Peng Daesan clicked his tongue and pried himself off the stove bench.

“What, San. You’re coming?”

“Is there anywhere I can’t go?”

“No, it’s just—you’re ridiculously sensitive to cold. You could just rest inside, you know? This isn’t mandatory. We’ll just give it a quick look, go ‘Ah, so that’s how it is,’ and come back.”

“Ladies, do you enjoy liquor? One sip while looking at the moon floating above and below the water—now that is life, that is living.”

“Oh. Bungsain, you do know a thing or two.”

“Weren’t you saying we’d take a quick look and be back?”

“We’ll look quick, look quick, then have a quick gulp and come back.”

“Mmm.”

Grumbling all the while, Peng Daesan put on a fur coat, then another fur coat over that, then threw an outer cloak on top.

What is this? Heading out for a night shift?

Anyway, the lake was pretty and the moon was pretty.

Nothing special—just a moon-bright seashore-like lake with a knife-cold wind roaring through.

So we blew on a bottle before the night water and came back to sleep.

Breakfast was six side dishes and a bowl of fish porridge.

Wait, what? Is this some tasting event?

How is a person supposed to work on just one bowl of fish porridge? No, surely they mean just to taste?

Of course, that was Qing’s foolishness talking; Qing fully understands the stomach affairs of ordinary folks.

Her stomach is small and the capacity limited, that’s all.

There are few like me with a great stomach.

Thankfully, there’s almost nothing money can’t solve; only after making the idle villagers rub their eyes vacant, wondering whether this is a human or a hungry ghost and whether I’m really eating it and not secretly tossing it out—only then did the second day’s journey begin.

Thanks to driving the horses hard the day before, the distance left was about a hundred and eighty li.

With the cold biting, if we ran enough to warm the body, it wasn’t far at all.

Back in Qing’s homeland, a long-run race means going one hundred twenty-five li without stopping; why would a party of two at Pinnacle, two super-transcendents, and one expert be unable to go about thirty percent farther than that?

Besides, it’s not like race runners who must go all-out and finish in a double-hour and a half.

We had the leisure to take two double-hours in the morning and two in the afternoon, moving unhurriedly with plenty of time.

Bungsain expressed regret that running during a tour meant staring at your feet and not sightseeing, but at “Don’t we need to be back before the Spring Festival?” he nodded readily.

Thus, around the time the sun started to show its true colors and get cranky—about four in the afternoon.

At last, Chaka Salt Lake! My salt lake!

My salt lake...

Qing’s brows drooped into a forlorn 八.

“Bungsain, what is this?”

“Oho. Truly a grand sight, is it not?”

“I mean, it’s not that it isn’t grand...”

A broad salt flat spread out, and knee-high salt pillars thrust up toward the sky like icicles—grand to look at, yes.

But that’s not what I was expecting.

Where did the fantastical scene go—the shallow water sheeted like one enormous mirror?

With human-beyond eyesight I did catch, here and there, water puddles; but the wind was slicing past in knife-edged gusts, and instead of reflecting the sky the surface just shuddered and fussed.

Like this, it’s a salt field, not a lake.

Still, Qing recovers from disappointment with the same wasteful full power as her body does.

Oh, but still? I thought it would be all whitish, and instead it’s bluish here and there—some places very blue, some less blue, and some blazingly white, all jumbled at random.

It looks like mold on a cosmic scale—mm. Even so, coming to see it was worth it.

It looks like a landscape not of this world.

“The salt is blue?”

“So it is.”

Bungsain nodded as if that were obvious.

Qing’s eyes narrowed.

What? Usually when someone says “The salt is blue,” the next line is “Why is it blue—did someone beat it black-and-blue?”—i.e., asking for the cause.

Why the unprompted affirmation here?

Well, Bungsain is the type who just enjoys the scenery; and people who live in a place take the local sights as a matter of course and don’t dig for reasons.

The answer, however, came from an unexpected quarter.

“In Qinghai, Blue Salt is considered one of the choicest local specialties. They say it isn’t overly salty, has deep savor, and no bitterness at all. Looks like those blue parts over there are exactly that Blue Salt.”

“Oho. Peng, you picked that up on the way?”

“Hmph. Over the shoulder.”

“Ohh. Mm. We’ve basically seen it. We’ve been running nonstop, and I’m getting hungry. Where are we eating dinner?”

“If we go roughly thirty li to the northwest, there’s a small village called Chaka Village tucked in a hollow. We can lodge there, watch the sunrise over Chaka Lake in the morning, then head back.”

Bungsain is obsessed with sunrise and sunset.

Even this morning he woke the party in the dark, insisted on seeing the sunrise in that cold, and let fall two teardrops—strictly speaking, two beads of ice.

We circled Chaka Lake and turned northwest; the sun was already sinking.

A cloudless sky burned in hushed tones.

Qing is naturally strong against cold, and with layers thickly piled on, it almost felt warm.

Beside her, Hee-mae and Gunyeong had their arms linked; the crisp crunch of salt underfoot was unexpectedly jaunty.

Inside the fur-hood mask, Qing’s lips curved in a satisfied arc.

When we go back it’ll be Spring Festival—play a bit hard, then amble back.

Grandpa Heavenly Martial Emperor told me to stop by the Hollow Mountain Sect next; Hollow Mountain is on the way if we loop through Gansu, so we can drop by, then head home.

I’m getting hungry; what will dinner be? It’d be nice if we can get bath water.

Humming, Qing’s mood floated higher and higher.

Her voice by nature slips straight into the ear and steals attention—a peerless beautiful timbre—and the home-soil melody that slipped out of her without thinking is a cadence whose very pitch of joy is a cultural import that will hit the Central Plains much later.

So smiles spread to all; with faces slack under their masks, spirits buoyant—

At last, the village edge of Chaka Village. When we topped a gently rising knoll—

For some reason, countless birds had settled en masse before the village, flocking in dense clumps.

The high-flown mood, as if doused with ice water—as if beaten by ice—went out all at once.

The plateau folk of Qinghai practice sky burial.

Sky burial means leaving the body out in the open so that birds can feed on it—a funeral custom.

It is an ascent not into the earth but into the sky, and a yielding of one’s remaining flesh to the birds to keep accruing merit even after death.

This sky burial takes far more labor than one might think, because the corpse must be finely prepared so that the birds can tear and eat it.

People of the Central Plains point and call it a savage custom.

The smarter ones suppose that digging into the ground quickly hits permafrost so burial is impossible, and there is no wood—villages burn dried yak dung—so cremation is impossible in such places; thus only this method remained.

It was not the party’s first sky burial.

They had already seen several; while it’s hard to share the feeling of gazing at a body being eaten and reminiscing about the deceased,

the mood was the same—mourning the dead and consoling the living.

But look at the flock gathered here.

As if every bird in Qinghai had converged, they blackened the village approach; how many corpses lay out there?

Thankfully, the path into the village did not have the flock clustered upon it—that meant someone had collected the corpses so that birds would not be startled when people entered.

So the party carefully, slowly stepped forward—not to frighten the villagers, for clearly some disaster had befallen this hamlet.

Yet Chaka Village was quiet, with no sign of life, like a place abandoned.

There must be people who gathered the bodies; even if frightened—even because they were frightened—one would expect quickened breaths and shaking gazes to brush us, yet only cold air flowed.

“Hello!? Is anyone there?”

They called out, and it was the same.

The party traded stiff, hardened looks.

“Something big has happened. It can’t possibly be good. It’ll be dark soon, and there isn’t even smoke from anyone lighting a fire. We should spread out and look for survivors. There could be hazards, so let’s split into two groups.”

Qing, the highest expert among them, took the most hopeless—Seol Iri—while the next strongest, Hee-mae, took the super-transcendent Peng Daesan and the second most hopeless, Bungsain, to sweep left and right.

“It’s so quiet that if anything happens we’ll need to shout loud. Open your ears, so fold back the fur hood that covers them.”

Bungsain swallowed a sigh of admiration.

She was the Heavenly Flower Sword who always wore a bright, friendly smile; but when the moment came, wouldn’t you know it, she had that natural power to lead people.

Youngest super-transcendent or not (Bungsain didn’t know about Qing’s Harmony, and Qing hadn’t put on her nonsense before him), indeed—she was the chair of that oddly named but formidable society everyone covets, each member heavy as a boulder: the Short Blade & Twin-Swords Society.