Chapter 20 | A Growing Tide

The forest south of the White Clover Flame Sect’s former territory was far more foreboding.

The trees grew thicker here, the canopy denser, the undergrowth more committed to the project of being undergrowth. Streams ran in directions that suggested they had consulted a map and chosen routes specifically designed to be inconvenient. Ridges appeared without warning, wide valleys, and the general terrain operated on the principle that anyone walking through it should earn every single yard through a combination of effort and swearing.

Calid led sixty-two disciples through this terrain in a column that had, over the course of a few hours, developed a certain rhythm of silence that indicated that the students were either thinking about the traveling itself or thinking about everything besides it.

Which was, in his experience, when the real problems began.

The first straggler appeared forty minutes into the march.

A boy, perhaps sixteen, stumbled out of a thicket on the column’s eastern flank with little coordination, stumbling and falling over themselves. His white robes were more green than white and his face wide with pale fear. He likely thought he had stumbled across a demonic force by mistake before he noticed the ragged robes and the sigil on their chests.

Lin Shui’s sword was at his throat before he finished stumbling.

“White Flame Clover,” the boy shouted in shock and raised his hands. “I’m an outer disciple of the White Flame Clover sect. Please.“

Lin Mei verified his identity through the simple expedient of asking him to name a few elders, two training forms, the name of the outer sect library building, and the location of the sect’s kitchen, which he did with desperate accuracy.

He was added to the column after succeeding.

The second straggler was a girl who dropped out of a tree directly onto Chen Bao’s shoulders, which produced a sound from Chen Bao’s knees that several nearby disciples would later describe as haunting. She had been living in the canopy for two days, eating bark and drinking condensation. Her spiritual sense had picked up the column’s passage and she had made the reasonable decision that falling on someone was preferable to spending another night arguing with squirrels and the occasional monkey about her hiding spot.

The third and fourth were a pair of inner disciples who had been hiding in a streambed. Their technique for masking their Qi signatures with running water was, Calid noted with professional interest, actually quite clever. Their technique for staying warm in a streambed for forty-eight hours was less clever, and both of them were shivering so hard their teeth chattered.

By the end of the first day’s march, the column had swelled to seventy-three.

By the middle of the second day, eighty-one.

The additions came in ones and twos and, on one memorable occasion, a group of seven who had been led by a Foundation Establishment cultivator named Gao Shan, a broad woman with a broader, stronger jawline than most of the other Foundation Establishment cultivators Calid had seen so far. She had kept her seven charges alive through a combination of competence, intimidation, strength, cultivation, and a knack for fishing and foraging she learned before entering the sect a decade ago as a child.

Gao Shan took one look at Calid and fell into a deep bow. “Elder Wen–”

“Patriarch Wen,” Lin Mei corrected her.

“Patriarch Wen,” Gao Shan did not miss a beat. “Gao Shan, Foundation Establishment, mid-stage. Reporting.”

“Welcome, Gao Shan. Fall in, you’re on rear guard rotation with Fang Yue.”

“Understood.” She paused. “Patriarch?”

“Yes?”

“I have more fish that I gathered with the junior brothers and sisters I’ve collected. Do you want some?”

“…Later, perhaps.”

By the third day, the column numbered ninety-four disciples, fourteen of whom were Foundation Establishment cultivators in various states of recovery. The healing arrays Calid maintained on the critically wounded had stabilised everyone to the point where dying had been removed from the immediate agenda and replaced with hurting considerably but ambulatory, which was, by the standards of the week, a triumph of medical science.

It was on the morning of the fourth day that the news arrived.

Gao Shan brought it.

She had been running a rear scout patrol with a few of her original seven, and she returned to the column at a pace that was faster than her usual purposeful stride and slower than emergency sprint..

“Patriarch. The demonic forces have withdrawn.”

Calid stopped walking.

The column rippled to a halt behind him.

“Withdrawn?”

“Pulled away and gone. The sweep teams, the patrols, the hunting parties, the elders, all of them. I tracked their trail signatures for two li northeast. They’re heading back toward the Crimson Fang’s territory at speed. Not marching formation. Fleeing formation.”

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“When?”

“Based on the trail degradation and residual Qi patterns, the elders left first. Nearly a week ago. The rank and file followed within a few days.” Gao Shan’s jaw worked for a moment. “Something scared them, Patriarch. The elders bolted first, and whatever made them bolt, the rest figured out pretty quick that staying behind without elder support in territory that had just experienced—”

She stopped and glanced at the sky.

The sky was grey, overcast, and entirely ordinary.

But everyone in the column knew what she was referring to. The golden thread of heavenly lightning that had pulsed through the clouds on the morning of the first day. The pressure that had made every disciple in the corridor grip their knees and every Foundation Establishment cultivator stutter at their formation nodes.

Heaven had looked down at something that garnered its attention.

And the demonic elders, who were apparently possessed of the survival instincts that their subordinates so conspicuously lacked, had taken one look at heavenly lightning flickering over territory they were currently occupying and had made the collective decision that being somewhere else was a priority that superseded all other priorities, including the completion of a genocide they had been winning.

The rank and file, deprived of their elders’ protection and leadership, had done a little thinking on the matter.

Dozens of their sweep teams had gone silent over the preceding days. The territory was producing heavenly phenomena. The survivors they were hunting had, based on the evidence of the bodies left behind and the uniformity of the damages, acquired a protector who could kill fifty cultivators with techniques that nobody could identify.