Chapter 128 - Moving On

"Wen," Feng Xi said softly on the cold carriage ride back to the City Lord's manor. "She doesn't really know. She doesn't understand. Once we explain to her," Feng Xi started to say, only to be interrupted by Ao Wen. 

"Xi, she's not wrong," she said numbly. She'd sat in a puddle for long enough to steep a pot of tea before Feng Xi had managed to get her up and moving again but her mind hadn't been frozen that whole time. "Look at how much I've changed. What part of me is still the daughter she knows?" Ao Wen said, holding up an arm and gesturing at her elegant brocade and silk outfit. "Maybe I shouldn't have taken the City Lord's offer to move into a courtyard at the manor but I thought that it would be good to have a lab to work in and I… I was still so lost and running that I also ran away from home. I ran away from her and Father because I didn't know how to tell them any of this and now… now it's just too late."

"No, Wen, it's not too late." Feng Xi insisted. "Your mother is hurting, she just needs time to process things. Once your father has recovered and she sees that you really did help heal him, she'll understand and then we can make things better." If Hou Jia had felt like a tangled ball of tightly wound strings sounding discordantly, Ao Wen felt empty, flat, and hollowed out, like she was an unstrung zither being knocked on to produce a dull echoing sound. 

"Can we?" Ao Wen asked uncertainly. "Xi, we're leaving in the spring. Maybe we should leave sooner now, I don't know. But this way…"

"This way you have a clean break?" Feng Xi said, looking at Ao Wen in disapproval. "Now who isn't the Ao Wen I know? That's a coward's answer and you know it," she chastized. "We don't have to leave in spring. There's no reason why we have to go now or later. You can take the time to work things through with your parents before we leave," she suggested. If Ao Wen folded now, if she walked away while things were still broken, wouldn't it just be that much harder to put things back together again in the end? 

"Maybe," Ao Wen said, too uncomfortable poking the tangled ball of hurt that had settled into her heart to say more than that. How would explaining the truth help anything? It would only confirm her mother's feelings that she was no longer her daughter because, in so many ways, it was true. "Right now… I just want to run from it all. Being here, it's not helping me ground myself in the familiar… it's making everything that should be familiar feel more alien. Like I can't possibly fit in here anymore."

"And that includes getting away from the people who know you, like your parents?" Feng Xi prodded gently. 

"I was thinking about my dream of being hunted and chased. I feel like I became too big here," she said, gesturing at the town passing by outside the carriage windows. "Everyone knows me, everyone expects things from me, everyone's trying to put me into some kind of a shape and box and I can't meet everyone's expectations all the time. The City Lord wants me to make elixirs for powerful people so the Alchemy Consortium leaves me alone but that just pulls me into Cong Daiyu's life all over again," she said with a heavy sigh. "I don't mind fighting to help people but seeing Qing Chen with Long Ma made me realize that I'm getting involved in some of the wrong kinds of fights here. It shouldn't even be a big deal," she said in frustration. "I'm just a tiny little Novice. It should be fine to get into arguments with other cultivators and sort things out with our fists or contests if we need to but out here, second-stage cultivators are 'big fish' in the small pond and third-stage cultivators like Wai Dan stand at the local summit. I need to be somewhere big enough that I can actually grow up as Ao Wen without having everything I do shake the foundations of my home."

"Maybe we should leave sooner then. Half a moon do you think?" Feng Xi asked. She wanted Ao Wen to stay longer and work through the issues here but was that really what was best for her? Maybe if they spent the winter in one of the other small towns nearby they could all take the time to practice together without worrying about the things that could distract them in Turning Leaf town. Perhaps, if they spent the winter away, they could come back for a visit before going on a longer journey. It might give Ao Wen the time she needed to center herself after living the life of Cong Daiyu without cutting things off completely. 

"Okay," Ao Wen said, burrowing deeper into Feng Xi's warm embrace. "Xi," she said softly. "I'm still your Ao Wen, right?"

"You are," Feng Xi whispered, hating the way Hou Jia had torn open the wounds that she felt Ao Wen had only just begun to heal. Maybe… maybe Ao Wen was right about not trying to fix things, at least not for now. 

Elsewhere in Turning Leaf town, in a luxurious private room in the Dancing Blossom's tea house, a sharply dressed woman in black robes with crimson accents poured hot water over her carefully selected tea leaves while looking at the guard from the City Lord manor who knelt before her. The woman sat patiently, giving her tea time to steep before pouring the first steep over the smiling jade hippo tea pet that accompanied her everywhere on her travels. Only after she'd finished preparing her second steep of tea and taken the time to savor both the aroma and the flavor of the bitter local leaf did she acknowledge the presence of the man kneeling on the floor. "Tell me," she said simply. 

"My lady, most of Clansman Long Ma's work will need to be abandoned. Alchemist Ao has broken the suppression of poison that kept Feng Lieren in check and she's eliminated him as our direct agent as well. It is likely that Feng Lieren will ascend to a position as Deputy City Lord, sealing any ability we may have to topple the local ruler from within."

"All this because he had to chase after a new girl to sacrifice on the Blood Altar," the woman said disdainfully. "It's better that he die now than later if he needed a sacrifice to break through each stage. Taking his brother's power should have been enough to make him the unquestioned ruler of this place but what did we get for all the years of training him?"

"There are two pieces of work in which Clansman Long Ma's work bore fruit," the guard reported, not to defend the dead man but in the hopes of salvaging the woman's mood before she took her ire out on the messenger. "By suppressing Feng Lieren for so long, it's allowed more extreme spirit beasts to establish themselves within the deep reaches of the Thundercloud forest. While Ao Wen and her friends slaughtered the Rage Queen and her cubs that we were nurturing, we began to move several of the other apex predators to the surrounding areas. Within the decade, the rate of assault by spirit beasts on towns and villages across the region should more than triple," he reported with satisfaction. 

"That's still not enough," the woman said with a frown. "I need the hills and forests to drip with blood. What you're talking about only amounts to watering the gardens."

"The second success is not enough to address that need my lady," the guard reported solemnly. "Still, it may allow for the creation of chaos when the time is right," he added, racing into his robes and placing several jade bottles on the table. "Clansman Long Ma did manage to stimulate his bloodline enough to produce Flood Dragon Venom after he'd fully absorbed his brother's power. As I was assigned to the party searching the Long family estate, I was able to recover five bottles of venom. I was also able to purge almost all evidence of our involvement with Long Ma before it could be found by anyone else."

"Almost all?" The woman asked with a sword-shaped brow raised. "What did you miss?" She asked, her voice becoming piercingly sharp. 

"I didn't miss anything," the guard said, quickly but without groveling. "Long Ma himself made several references to us while fighting Ao Wen. He threatened that Ao Wen's family would fall to Blood and Slaughter. Ao Wen may be too young and uninformed to recognize it but it didn't escape Lady Wan's attention. Surely, with her study of history, she's aware of what this region used to be."

"Hmmm…" the woman said, pondering as she poured another cup of tea. "Then, for now, we give up on Turning Leaf. Continue your work, listen, observe, and take no actions. Until the day the door appears," she finished formally. 

"We bathe the world in Blood and Slaughter," the guard finished the couplet. Once, this entire region had belonged to the Blood Slaughter Demon Clan. Soon, it would again.