By noon of the second day, the people of the city had finished the construction of the shelter’s walls. Tall, three-meter high stone barriers scrawled across the ruined street to form a rectangular enclosure fifty square meters in area. From the young girl’s vantage point, the entire building seemed to resemble a rectangular prison yard, with the walls of barbed wire replaced with towering blocks of dense, roughened stone.
The men and women had labored unceasingly overnight, disregarding the torment of their bodies and the exhaustion begging for their brains to cease and rest. Now, they lay sprawled in a chaotic heap on the cracked and pummeled stone road, forming small piles of exhausted, semi-conscious humans.
She and the elderly man had not left from their shelter from the night before. The rain had failed to seep through the remnants of the jewelry store, leaving both young and old relatively awake and energized.
An Fei had not slept in the Sanctum.
The presence of an unfamiliar middle-aged man prowling the Archives of Time and a heavenly, crimson dragon snoozing atop her bedchamber caused the young girl to instantly throw the mere premise away from her thoughts. She suppressed a yawn as she stood and stretched her body, yet crumpled into a wincing mess as the sore and fatigued muscles refused to cooperate.
When she had mustered the courage to glance at the elderly man to her right, she found the latter gazing at her with a compassionate smile.
“Stretching so quickly after sleeping in the outside is detrimental to the health. Perhaps this is your first time sleeping in such conditions?”
The young girl twitched her lips, but merely shook her head. Her mind slowly but surely processed the unfamiliar words of Bei Tang’s language and converted them into a relatively understandable translation. An Fei fought hard to form the words necessary for a casual reply, but froze in surprise and shock.
He spoke to her, just now, in Bei Tang’s ridiculous language that combined Japanese and Korean tonal structures. Last night, he had utilized the modern Mandarin’s rendition of vocabulary. Then, before that, the words were in Cantonese.
Great Yan, Great Yong, and Bei Tang…
Those were the nations he mentioned since their initial encounter, no? Similarly, those were the identities that she adopted when she first woke up…
A bead of sweat trickled down An Fei’s back, and her gaze towards the withered and thin elderly man became unpleasant. The more she thought about how the seemingly simple and virtuous elder had baited her into revealing herself through the use of different languages caused discomfort and fear to bloom in her heart.
“Who are you?”
She had somehow fallen for such a simple trick…
The elderly man merely stood, and walked towards the fringe of the street. As he stepped onto the cracked stones, he gestured for An Fei to follow with a light wave.
“I am merely someone who knows of the past,” the elderly man sighed.
“There is nothing to be afraid, young lady. You will have a permanent crease on your face if you continue to frown like that, however.”
Now it was even in English…
The young girl immediately loosened her brows at the suggestion, but the caution in her heart continued to brew at an exponential rate. She followed behind the elderly man as they explored the decaying streets, seldom responding to the latter’s statements. Suddenly, An Fei glanced back towards the piles of slumbering people and then the blooming skies above.
“They have worked so tirelessly during the night. How will they settle the problem with sustenance?”
The elderly man merely raised the wooden stick in his hand and gestured towards the abandoned ruins of a nearby house. There, the silhouettes of a few children could be spotted as they wrestled with a few earthenware jars. They excavated the container from the depths of the crumbled planks and bent their backs, carrying the heavy clay pot with both arms.
An Fei inadvertently glanced downwards towards the elderly man’s outstretched hand, and remained standing in her place. The children grumbled and groaned in discomfort and pain as they lugged the jars along the jagged stone path towards the massive walls of stone. They brushed past An Fei as they trod with shivering steps, and the former had to step aside to avoid bumping into a jar larger than her torso.
“They cannot see my presence?”
The young girl crinkled her lips in confusion, and muttered to herself. She waved a hand in the direction of a young child, only to retract it moments later to avoid an unnecessary collision.
“Wine and dried jerky. All accumulated meat gathered during the year was to be preserved, all for these three months of consumption,” the elderly man reminisced, and commented with a glance towards the young girl’s perplexed expression.
“Do not bother trying to gain their attention – they cannot see your presence. Only when it is the time for sacrifice, will your presence be revealed.”
“Time for sacrifice? Then your presence is also hidden from them?”
An Fei sneered at the ominous words from the elderly man’s lips. The young girl quickly glanced through the mental visualization of the internal composition of her body, finding no change compared to its previous state. Given that the circular diagram combining Yin and Yang attributed spiritual essence was not present, her suspicion and caution continued to grow without restraint.
Who was the elderly man? To be able to blot out her presence without her activating the <Steps of Underlying Shadow> and forming the diagram…
…was he an Immortal Being?
“Indeed. When it is my time to sacrifice, I shall stand before them as well.”
The elderly man merely briefly nodded towards the young girl’s doubtful remarks, and clasped both hands behind his back. The wooden stick was tossed to the ground, and the hunched back was straightened to reveal the presence and aura of a long-lived, experienced scholar of the world.
“The progress of life requires sacrifice. The people struggling for life will relinquish, as will us observers.”
“Sacrifice, sacrifice, sacrifice,” the young girl repeated with a pained leer.
“Of course, there will be sacrifice for progression. Only, who will determine those chosen to relinquish? The strong? The weak?”
“The strong devour the weak – is that your conviction? Then, if the strong dominate and devour the weak during these seven days of turmoil, what will happen the next year?” the elderly man twitched his lips into a crude retort.
“What will become of those who were formerly strong during the coming year? Should they transform into the weak, then who will become the strong?”
The children raced towards the stone barriers with staggering steps, and exhaustedly placed the earthenware jars onto the ground. Having expended their meagre strength and stamina scavenging and foraging for the stored jars of wine and jerky, the children toppled to the ground. The adults soon roused themselves from unconsciousness, and made their way across towards the proud jars of earthen clay.
They cracked the seal with great difficulty, and soon the wine and slabs of dried beef were distributed amongst the people of the city.
The physically strong and able-bodied expended their strength in constructing the community shelter as soon as possible, and the agile and small-statured children explored the ruins of the city for sustenance. The remainder took the task upon themselves to maintain the morale and stamina of both groups. The elderly women quickly wrestled the unopened jars from the children and adults’ grasp, and set them aside to be stored within the stone compound.
The young girl and elderly man watched from afar, standing silently at the fringe of the battered road. As she witnessed the young and old, men and women desperately gnaw at the thick and dense slabs of crudely dried meat horrifyingly lacking of salt, An Fei noticed that she wasn’t experiencing any hunger pains.
It was well over thirty hours since she last remembered eating, but her stomach remained silent and unresponsive. She glanced over towards the elderly man, discovering that the elderly and stalwart figure that resembled no more than a bag of skin filled with bones hardly displayed a single sign of exhaustion or fatigue.
“What have you done to my body?”
“Your body? Nothing,” the elderly man gently smiled.
“We are observers. Our only task is to silently observe and witness the passing of time and civilization. For observers, there is thus no need for hunger, thirst, and fatigue.”
Illusion?
An Fei immediately thought of the rumors she had once heard during her stay at the exquisite pagoda, the Plum’s Grove. Several of the Buddhist cultivators had quietly discussed the possibility that cultivator specializing in illusion arrays had settled in the city. It had been rumored that the unknown figure was a member of the Haunted Buddhist Sect – the same sect as Chang Jungyoon.
The young girl immediately ignored the elderly man’s warning and rushed towards the unfinished shelter of stone and timber. An Fei agilely weaved through the small gatherings of those seeking either wine to slake their thirst or dried beef to chase away their hunger, and stopped once she stood before the three-meter tall enclosure. Without hesitation, she planted her hand against the stone wall.
It was cool to the touch despite having received a day’s scorching heat from the sun’s rays. She could distinctly feel the thin grooves and grains of the stone that had yet to be polished after cutting, and the dampness of a night’s cursed rain.
It felt real, not like an illusion.
She could feel the contours and cavities along the surface, as well as smell the slightly putrid and stale odor of reconstituted ash. An Fei withdrew her palm and glanced downwards, only for her brows to form another unhealthy crease.
