Before we got going again, Zin Long's wife came up to me, and she looked determined to actually talk to me this time. "Honored Disciple?"
"What is it?"
"I just wanted to thank you."
I raised my eyebrows at her. "For doing my job?"
"No—I mean, yes, that, but I mean—thank you for—for being so reasonable with us on this trip."
"Okay? I do try to be reasonable, as long as others don't try to mess with me…which has happened pretty often before."
"Even so, you are a cultivator—of the 8th Realm, no less, as you told us when you introduced yourself—and we are mortals. You would not even need to lift a finger to kill us, we would die to your spiritual pressure alone. It is as though you are of heaven, and we of earth. Many people in your position would treat us as something to scrape off their shoes, even if they would still see us to our destination safely."
"Miss, I'm a man of simple tastes when it comes to other people. You leave me alone, I leave you alone. That's not just how I do things, it's how I prefer it. I thrive best alone in peaceful wilderness. Part of the attraction of becoming a cultivator, for me, was that they often spend a great deal of time—you guessed it—alone. If you want to thank me, then the last thing you should be doing is disturbing my solitude."
Her face fell. I sighed. "Look. You and your husband knew you were risking being treated like that when you sent the request to the Library. And you did it anyway. Why?"
"I—you said you weren't interested in our story when I approached you before."
"I'm still not, sort of. Tell me anyway."
"It's for a business opportunity. We were able to secure property for a larger shop in the neighboring city, property we weren't able to find back in Zaluc. Our goods should be following us by a few days back, in one of the regular caravans, and this way we'll have time to set up before they arrive."
I nodded. "In other words, you took a risk to grasp an opportunity to make things better for yourself. I figure that's the sort of reason most mortals would have for leaving the safety of their city walls.
Where I came from has a lot of people like that too. I saw a lot of people there take a lot of risks, and fail in the taking. I was one of the lucky ones. I turned out to have enough talent to become a Disciple of the Library. Some of those people who failed would have deserved to be one of the lucky ones a lot more than me.
So if I can take what I've been given, and be a good outcome for someone…I guess what I'm trying to say is—I'm glad I had that chance for you. You're welcome."
She would no longer meet my eyes. "I'm sorry. I was too curious about you, since you acted so different from how I expected. I—I hope you can be a good outcome for others still, in the future."
"Ah, thank you."
She left me to my solitude without fail, after that. Neither was it disrupted by any more magical beasts on the way to Corin. Still, that only made me more suspicious of the one incident we had experienced. Zin Long's theory was out—the wards at both way stations were in perfect order, and even if they failed, both were captained by a low Spirit Rank cultivator who could turn away any number of Earth Realm bison just by releasing their spiritual pressure.
The one I'd faced had needed quite a number of Spirit Arrows to take down, and I'd received enough Qi from the Experiential Physique to advance to the 2nd Stage, so it was clearly of the 9th Earth Realm just as was indicated. Anyone capable of placing it in my path had to be so much stronger than it that they'd be able to kill me either. It was technically possible that a Beast Tamer could have commanded it without this being the case, but then, I would have sensed them nearby. Then again, someone strong enough to simply cow it should have been sensed too! Nothing about what happened back there makes any sense!
As soon as I was back to the sect, 10 Contribution Points richer, I contacted Shokoya to see if maybe he had any other ideas. "It sounds like it might have been just a freak accident," he said, "but we can't ignore the possibility that ways to conceal someone from Aura Sense exist that we simply don't know about. If you've been targeted, it might be an idea to stay at the sect for a while and concentrate on building yourself up."
"Yeah, maybe. I'll at least see what I can do before I'm due for another mission. There's a chance this was some one-off tamer, but it's not a good idea to push my luck."
"Well, I have good news on my end, sort of. Let's meet up at the Invigoration Pavillion and I'll tell you what I've found out so far."
"Oof, come to think of it…"
At the 8th Earth Realm, my physical needs had decreased, but they were still there. In fact, they'd continue to be there for quite some time, all the way until the 7th Spirit Realm, when a cultivator's Spiritual Body had been fully formed and thus could sustain itself on spiritual energy alone. I'd had rations with me while I'd been on the road, of course, but I was pretty hungry. The Invigoration Pavillion was more or less a giant cafeteria, with a larger section that offered normal food and drink, and a VIP section that served dishes made with special ingredients high in spiritual energy that could fill you with energy and even improve your cultivation base a little.
The normal restaurant was one of the few places in the sect that accepted gold, though since I was planning on staying in the sect for now, I went ahead and paid a single contribution point for their best meal plan— up to 3 meals a day for 30 days. Like everything else, it got recorded on my ID badge.
The food looked very tasty, even if it was nothing special to a cultivator, so I piled quite a bit of food on a tray and found an empty table to wait for Shokoya—the Invigoration Pavillion was closer to the Reception Gate Hall than the dueling courts where he'd been working, so I'd gotten there first. After a brief conversation using the communication stone to help guide him to the general area of the pavilion where I was in, Shokoya sat down with me after getting food for himself. "You are good to be here right?"
"Yeah, you had good timing," said Shokoya, "I was just finishing at the dueling courts anyway. I mean, it is past sundown."
One of the rules of the dueling courts, according to the Guide, were that no sparring or duels were allowed to take place at night. The sun had nearly set by the time I'd seen Zin Long and his wife and child into the city gate. Still, I'd thought after the fact that there was a chance he'd been assigned some kind of cleanup duty or something.