Book 3: Chapter 13: Hunter/Prey
Lo Meifeng was tired. No, she thought, I’m exhausted. She hadn’t been this worn out since before she’d become a core formation cultivator. It wasn’t that she hadn’t slept in six days, although that was wearing on her a little. It was that she’d spent most of those days running from people, chasing people, and killing people. Part of her was frustrated by the whole thing, but part of her exulted in it too. As necessary as bodyguarding the kid might be, she wasn’t built for that kind of work. It was too hands-on, too public, and called for far too much personal interaction. She certainly hadn’t become a wandering cultivator because she liked people. In her opinion, interacting with most people wasn’t worth the energy it cost.
Although, as much of a pain in her ass as the kid was, she supposed she had developed a vague fondness for him. He was still so fresh, and so new, that he hadn’t really figured out who he was going to be yet. Lo Meifeng had never had or sought out the opportunity to watch someone become a person before. Right now, he was like bits and pieces of other people all jumbled up together, but they were slowly fusing into something else. She thought she’d seen hints of the future person he would become recently. If she’d seen correctly, he was going to be interesting. Not interesting in the way some novel invention was interesting but interesting in the, “may you live in interesting times,” kind of way. Give him another few decades, and he might even be someone that Lo Meifeng wanted to know.
Most of the time, though, he was a bit like a puppy, racing from here to there, crashing into things left and right, making messes, and cheerfully running off in some new direction without a care for what he left in his wake. Much like a puppy, it was difficult to stay truly mad at him. Of course, that puppy metaphor only went so far. On those rare occasions when the kid got serious about things, he got deadly serious about them, and he had the power to back it up. No puppy in the history of ever had single-handedly driven off a spirit beast tide or backed a major sect into a corner the way he had. Lo Meifeng was still pretty confident that she could take the kid in a fight if it ever came down to that, but she was less confident about now than she had been before.
Plus, there was that business with the divine turtle. What kind of foundation formation cultivator gets a helping hand from a divine turtle, she wondered. That was the stuff of myth and legend. People heard about it happening, but it was always Cho Jun’s friend’s cousin’s brother-in-law who supposedly wandered away from a caravan and found some ruins that no one could ever find again. There were never any witnesses, let alone a ship full of them. Lo Meifeng shook her head and leaned against a tree for a moment. She was losing focus and getting distracted. That would get her killed if she was too careless. Not that she was particularly worried about the people she was looking for now. She’d dealt with the real threats back in the city.
She’d thought she’d spotted a couple of people who were a little too interested in them in the city on their way out. It had only been a feeling, but she’d honed those intuitions over centuries and learned to rely on them. Leaving the kid and that girl at the inn had been a calculated risk. Lo Meifeng had needed to send in a report, but she could have conceivably taken them with her. Still, her intuition had screamed at her that taking them back into the city would have meant disaster. So, she’d left them behind. She had managed to make her report without getting spotted, but everything had gone to the hells after that.
She’d been heading for the gate again when her intuition warned her, that telltale tinge on the back of her neck that always meant someone wasn’t just watching her but targeting her. She’d immediately launched herself into a nearby alley. That had spared her from the spear of ice that would have probably wounded her, but probably not killed her. She’d led them on a chase through the city’s least desirable areas, only to switch gears and cut through a busy marketplace, then through a shop and back into the alleys. She was an old hand at these kinds of games, even if she was usually on the other side of the chase. She knew what worked, what didn’t, and what would get her killed. Most people eventually got tired of the chase and decided to make a stand.
It could work, but it was a desperation measure, usually taken by people who were getting tired. Lo Meifeng wasn’t going to get tired, at least not nearly soon enough to help the people who trying to box her in. She was patient and perfectly content to keep running for as long as it took for her pursuers to get frustrated and make a mistake. She knew, if you could keep them chasing for long enough, they always made a mistake. It took hours. Night had fallen before it finally happened. The people who were out there looking for her were professionals, but even professionals had limits to their patience. When that moment came, Lo Meifeng finally got to put her real skills to work.
She couldn’t hide the way the kid could. Gods, what she wouldn’t give to be able to do that. She’d even grilled him on the technique for hours at one point. What she’d initially read as a cultivator’s mere reluctance to share a hard-won skill turned out to be a legitimate failure of knowledge. He truly didn’t know how it worked. That had been a crushing disappointment, but it wasn’t an entirely unknown phenomenon. Young cultivators, especially ones who had stumbled into cultivation without knowing it, often crafted these kinds of techniques with a combination of luck, instinct, and what Lo Meifeng had to assume was divine assistance. Even so, she had her own ways of avoiding notice. She could suppress her qi and spiritual sense enough to get close to most people, even other cultivators. For her, getting close was all she needed.
When her pursuers had finally lost patience, they made the mistake that every group of frustrated hunters make. They split up under the very bad assumption that the prey was running because they were too weak for a direct fight. The fools. The first one had died without even knowing they were under attack. Lo Meifeng had simply stepped out of a shadowed alley and drawn one blade across their throat while sliding another between their ribs. She couldn’t be sure, but Lo Meifeng suspected that woman died confused. Cultivators were hard to put down, but almost no one walked off having their throat slit and getting a blade in the heart. She’d only stopped long enough to grab the things she thought might be useful in the future. Storage treasures and a pouch. She’d even left the weapons behind, as they weren’t even close to the level of quality that Lo Meifeng required.
The second had clearly sensed that something was wrong because he was warier. The man had his spear in hand, poised in a defensive stance. It didn’t help. An arrow in the eye from less than ten feet away ended his participation in the fight…and life in general. One by one, she stalked and ended them. It did descend into a fight once or twice, even though Lo Meifeng hated direct combat. It was loud. It drew attention. That made the odds of reinforcements arriving much higher. Most importantly, though, it made luck a much bigger factor. It was a sad truth of combat between relative equals that luck decided the outcome at least as often as pure skill or qi mastery did. A slick patch of ground, a distracting noise, anything could divert one’s balance or attention in the middle of a fight. For the competent opponent, a moment of distraction was all they needed. Lo Meifeng had enjoyed the benefits of such moments more than once in her life and had almost been killed by them on three separate occasions. No, given the choice, she’s much rather avoid the direct combat and skip right to the other person simply being dead. It was more practical.
She’d also made a point not to use her qi techniques until she was sure she’d gotten down to the last one. Fire was incredibly useful, but it was another one of those things that tended to draw the eye. The last thing she needed was a bunch of well-meaning and wholly useless city guards showing up and cluttering the field. She wasn’t above the occasional bit of collateral damage if it simply could not be avoided, but it wasn’t how she liked to operate. Cultivator fights should stay between cultivators, in her opinion.
The last of the people who had been hunting her was another core formation cultivator. He was a hard-faced man with a pair of jian, one on each hip. She’d gleaned his general cultivation level but didn’t dare try to get a read on the type of qi he used. Doing so would expose her exact position, and she wasn’t particularly inclined to do that. It would have made the obscuring formation she was standing inside of pointless. Instead, she finally started putting some of her own qi techniques to use. One moment, the man was stalking down an empty street, glaring into alleyways and every shadow. The next, the entire street was blindingly bright. Twenty small fireballs had appeared in a loose circle around the man. The man cycled up his own qi. With him actively using it, Lo Meifeng could finally identify it.
A metal qi cultivator, she thought. How unfortunate for him. Metal qi had a lot of utility value, but it wasn’t particularly good against fire qi techniques. It also suffered from a basic lack of range. It could make the man’s swords all but unbreakable, but that only mattered if someone got close and he noticed them. For the next few minutes, fireballs harassed and harried the man, slowly driving him to where Lo Meifeng wanted him to go. She’d been slowly ratcheting up the brightness of the fireballs in preparation. The man had been desperately sweeping the area with his spiritual sense. She’d felt it pass over the formation a half dozen times, but it seemed he wasn’t adept at spotting them or was too distracted the notice it. When he stepped within range. She dropped the fireball technique and tossed a rock. There was nothing special about the rock. It was just a rock she’d found sitting on the ground. It did have one very useful quality, though. It made a loud noise when it hit the street. The half-blind core cultivator spun toward the sound. Lo Meifeng struck, and a wetter, meatier sound followed as the cultivator’s head joined the rock on the ground.
She repeated her quick looting of useful items, then left the city as fast as her legs would carry her. The only true saving grace of that entire series of events was her discovery that the kid had actually done what she’d told him to do. She couldn’t believe it. She’d been certain that she’d find him at the inn or even coming back to the city in some ill-considered attempt at a rescue. Instead, the inn’s owners informed her that the kid and that girl had left at very nearly the moment of sunset the previous day. She could have kissed him for finally doing the smart thing. She knew perfectly well how hard he was to find out on the road, and that was when he was only sort of trying to keep a low profile. If he was really putting some effort into it, nobody was going to find him. Well, nobody short of a peak core cultivator or a nascent soul cultivator. Of course, that thought brought a sigh to her lips. While she was happy that he’d done as instructed, it also meant that she’d have to try to find him. She didn’t really give herself better odds than anyone else. Still, now the exciting stuff was over, it was time to get back to doing her job.
So, she’d spent the last six days looking for him. Of course, so had the demonic cultivators and their lackeys. It had been an ideal opportunity for her to hone her woodcraft, and she took it. She’d left a trail of corpses in the forest over the last two hundred miles or so. Part of her was a little happy that she hadn’t found the kid yet, because it let her do things that she was good at. Yet, she thought that was probably just about over. The numbers had dwindled substantially after the first few days. She suspected the five cultivators in the little camp she’d found were probably the last. She was tempted to just let them be. Three qi condensing cultivators and two foundation formation cultivators had precisely zero chance of finding the kid, let alone beating him in a fight. But that was just the tiredness talking treason in her mind. She rolled her head to loosen up the muscles in her shoulder, stepped into the camp, and got back to work.
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