Hunger was a cosmic atrocity, a plague. However, its answer, a full belly, was a cosmic wonder of equal proportion.
Perhaps Yun Jieshi was just a lot more psychopathic than even he knew. With the hunger gone, he scarcely remembered his mental breakdown from minutes ago. It could just have been that the emotions and needs of his new body overwhelmed the state of his mind.
The accomplishment of its needs propagated relief and joy so intense that Yun Jieshi could very well have truly earned the designation of a simple, little monkey.
Bubbling with joy and curiosity, Yun Jieshi scaled the wall of the pit. Chunks of ice connected his fingers to everything he touched, and he had to pull his hands free to rise further. It took an outrageous degree of focus, he found, primarily because of one annoying factor.
'This damn tail!' Yun Jieshi complained. He had no control over it. It swished to and fro, violently, messing up his balance. Perhaps if it were shorter, it might not have been a problem, but the darn thing was as long as he was tall – half a meter.
It was strange just how powerful it was. Or… was it that Yun Jieshi himself was very strong, but couldn't tell with such a small body that he had yet to push to its limit? It was hard to tell.
Still, he climbed with well-paced uses of Bonding Touch. Pulling them away was a little challenging at times, but Yun Jieshi remembered having two other limbs at the base of his body. The erratic footholds behind the snow, ice, and shrubs helped him rise.
It was only after he had climbed one hundred and ten meters – which took nearly an hour, as he estimated – that Yun Jieshi saw the gloomy light from the surface finally brighten up the pit.
'This is a safe angle. I think.' He alternated his gaze between the visible mouth of the pit, and a great, crooked indentation to its wall just three meters above him.
Before the convenient surprise of the Shuang Fingers, Yun Jieshi's solution to climbing back up had, of course, been to use the ruan; he had hoped that at a decent angle, he could engorge the ruan enough to where its head could spill out of the pit while the end of its belly was held by the wall, keeping it immobile.
In retrospect, this wasn't a bad plan at all, since he was just about to use it.
'I had hoped to use the shrubs to climb until I reached the perfect height, but…' Yun Jieshi shuddered. Some of the shrubs were very weak. Even with Bonding Touch, they were likely to snap once he imposed his full weight – however modest it was.
Yun Jieshi climbed to the indentation. When he reached it, he retrieved his daruan from under his tongue, restored it to its normal size, and wedged the bottom of its belly deep into the indentation. A portion of the neck stuck out from the indentation. Yun Jieshi held it up, and had it face the opposite end of the pit high up.
With a thought, he made the ruan grow. It steadily increased in size until its head reached and passed the neck of the pit. The base sat comfortably in the indentation… and then outgrew it. Still, it was held in some fashion. The ruan was stable, just as Yun Jieshi had hoped. He climbed onto it. His weight barely mattered, but he climbed up the ruan with haste regardless, using the enlarged strings to steady himself. It helped that his little feet felt magnetized to the neck of the ruan under them.
'That was… interesting,' Yun Jieshi thought after he climbed out of the pit. He gave it one last look before trekking away. He grabbed Shuang Fingers from the shrubs he was lugging and threw them in his mouth. They were so good!
They made his next objective much easier to grapple with.
'Shelter. What can I use for a shelter?' he thought again. He had acquired food, but in this unknown place, eerily quiet, save for the whispers, anything could happen.
Yun Jieshi had chosen to continue his way opposite the stream when he suddenly gripped his nose.
'Arghh!'
The Stench!
It blasted his nose without warning, and Yun Jieshi's eyes teared up. He weathered through the onslaught though.
'This must mean…' he thought, a little alarmed. 'The Jade Imps!'
Sure enough, muffled footsteps and distant screeches came down the way he had decided to go. The little monkey's ears pricked. He suddenly heard the muffled footfalls as great thumps, and there were many of them – a lot more than the ones Yun Jieshi had to finish off after escaping the fog.
The Imps weren't his match in any capacity, but Yun Jieshi decided there was some benefit to not diving into a fight with them. Seeing as more of them appeared, they likely had some kind of territory nearby, or so he hoped. If he tailed and observed them, he would most certainly learn something.
Thus, as quick as he could go while lugging his burden of shrubs, and with his tail starting to wag excitedly, Yun Jieshi rushed up one of the trees. The ice lathering it would have made it hard to climb if Yun Jieshi didn't have cold, sticky fingers. After an hour of 'practice', he had learned a few tricks to quickening his climbs using Bonding Touch.
By the time the Jade Imps reached where he had been, Yun Jieshi had scaled several trees, ultimately landing near the top of one which was roughly ten meters away from the first.
'Even though I don't leave usually footprints in the snow, I forgot to check whether or not I had left some other traces of myself at the base of that first tree,' Yun Jieshi thought as his vision focused on the Jade Imps.
There were twenty-two of them, and half were armed with spears, crude swords, bows, and daggers. Six of them held up torches burning with yellow flames while others carried large, thick sacks behind their backs. Given the way they scoured the snow, they were definitely looking for him. The Imps that fled had undoubtedly told others of the queer little monkey they had met.
They screeched, communicating while divided. Yun Jieshi had to give them credit. They were thorough. Some of them beckoned the others when they found some of his faint prints. Some searched for him in the trees, but it was no easy feat to spot a small monkey like him in the thickets covered in snow.
One of the Imps had sent an arrow into the frozen canopy of a tree next to where Yun Jieshi was hiding. This drew the attention of the others and they started to search the trees. Unfortunately, unlike Yun Jieshi, they couldn't scale up them because of the iced, slippery barks.
The Imps eventually gave up. They screamed and screeched at each other before rallying in another direction.
'Finally,' Yun Jieshi had thought, but a part of him wondered. 'Do they not know about the Shuang Fingers?'
It was unlikely. The fragrance of the Fingers had pulled Yun Jieshi in immediately.
'But… I have better senses than them, I think. Maybe they can't smell them?'
That mystery would have to be left unsolved for now, Yun Jieshi decided. The Imps started West of the stream. They seemed to be in a hurry, spurred by an alternate cause.
They rushed up the rises and depressions of snow which spotted more cold-resistant bushes and even grasses. They crossed frozen lakes, howling and cackling and screeching.
Yun Jieshi followed them steadily and carefully. He didn't have any difficulty hopping from tree to tree, but the need to increase his pace made him make a few mistakes that, thankfully, went unnoticed by the Imps. They were too far away to hear him fall in the snow or comically crash into the trunk of a tree.
The nature of the trees changed two kilometers into the journey. Shorter, broader trees with a strange warmth to them populated the West side of the stream. They had great, unfrozen, heart-shaped leaves and they very subtly seemed to sway their trunks to and fro.
Yun Jieshi thought he hadn't seen right at first until he took a moment to focus. Indeed, the trees did a slow dance. They appeared to be cheery.
'That might as well be a thing here, I guess.'
Yun Jieshi didn't feel comfortable leaping onto their branches, so he switched to stalking his targets from the ground while maintaining sufficient distance.
'My little… legs are already… growing tired. Too…much…activity,' Yun Jieshi thought, panting. It was bizarre. Just like his tail, he felt an abundance of energy in his little body, but he couldn't utilize it. Was he just too small?
The farther the little monkey went, following the company of Jade Imps, he found that the snow and ice waned and smaller, richer trees grew around the fat, warm ones. They bore only two variants of fruits, akin to mangoes and leeches.
Yun Jieshi was forced to stop right when the Imps did. They grabbed a few of the fruits and began eating them hungrily – nastily. They were violent when retrieving the fruits, breaking branches, staining the barks, and… pissing on the roots.
'So extra.' Was all that necessary?
After the Jade Imps hurried on, he approached a relatively unviolated tree and pulled down one of the fruits.
"Sweet Mongue," the old sagely voice informed. Yun Jieshi reeled.
"Mongue? What language is that?" He sniffed the mango-like fruit and took a bite. There was nothing sweet about it, that was for sure. It tasted like how dough looked. The same was true for the leeches, which the old, sagely voice called Sour Mongue. They weren't sour at all, just bland.
Disappointed, Yun Jieshi hurried to catch up to the Jade Imps.
'Is it just me and my taste buds? Despite how violent they were, the Imps seemed to enjoy the… Mongues,' Yun Jieshi stressed. It wouldn't surprise him if his sense of taste was also… odd.
After a little more than two hours, the Jade Imps seemed to finally reach their destination.
It was a lone, large pond with glowing, sky-blue waters, rippling without pause. Entities known dwelt within, yet unseen.