Feng Ying and Yu were still leaping and sprinting through the mountains and forests, fleeing for their lives.
Crossing mountains and ridges as if walking on level ground, Yu led the way, because only she had seen the Abandoned Divine Temple in the illusion. Miraculously, the scenery along the way matched what she had seen there, strengthening their resolve to head for the temple.
Now and then, they encountered small villages and mountain stockades hidden in the forests, where mortals who had migrated here at some unknown time farmed, fished, hunted, and lived out their days.
Neither of them stopped.
A gust of wind swept over a village. Using Water Walking, they left a long trail of spreading ripples across a lotus pond.
They landed atop an unnamed, precipitous mountain peak to rest briefly.
Panting hard, Yu opened her mechanical crossbow and aimed it in the direction they had come from, pressing her eye to the sight as she scanned slowly up, down, left, and right. Suddenly, she spotted something. She shifted the sight back to its previous position, magnified the image, and centered it on a tiny black dot above the clouds.
Feng Ying wiped the sweat from her neck, sat down, and deftly tightened the cuffs around her trouser legs.
"What did you see? Pursuers?"
Yu, still peering through the sight, curled her lip and carefully studied the shape of the tiny black dot.
"The good news is, it isn't a pursuer. The bad news is, it's a spiritual bird responsible for tracking and searching. It probably hasn't found us."
Once the black dot slipped into the clouds and vanished from sight, she lowered the mechanical crossbow and silently calculated the distance. The result was far from encouraging.
Though they had only seen one spiritual bird, there were