The hoofbeats outside the tea stall faded into the distance. Chen Wuya still crouched beside the woodpile, half a cold flatbread clenched in his hand, his knuckles faintly white. He did not look up toward where the black horse had vanished. Instead, he stared at the tea bowl the gray-clad man had pushed away—the water stains at its bottom were pale bluish-green, with a faint oily sheen around the rim.
This was no ordinary coarse tea.
He slowly loosened his fingers, letting crumbs of bread sift into the dust. Old Wu Tou from the refugee camp had once said that Northern Desert spies often mixed a certain herb into their drinks to conceal the fluctuations of true qi within their bodies. The gray-clad man appeared calm, but in truth, he had been suppressing the leakage of his inner breath all along.
The gray-clad man rose, flicked his cloak aside, and headed west through the city at an unhurried pace. Chen Wuya waited a moment before rising from the shadows. His rough clothes, worn inside out, slid along the base of the wall. The Misaligned Practice Connects to Spirit system circulated silently through his meridians. He deliberately reversed his true qi to a point three inches above his ankles, making his footsteps as light as though he were treading on duckweed.
Every thirty paces, the man stopped. Sure enough, he turned back to survey his surroundings again. Chen Wuya had already slipped behind a half-collapsed chicken coop at the mouth of an alley. He casually prodded a lame old hen beside him, making it flap its wings twice and cluck. The gray-clad man's gaze swept past without lingering.
The route grew more and more secluded. They rounded an abandoned pottery kiln and crossed a field of disorderly graves. Strips of tattered