Wit and Confrontation

West of Cloudscreen Wall, the mountains gradually tapered away, peaks like a giant hand closing around a winding goat trail in its palm.

Chen An walked at the front, his pace neither hurried nor slow. The hem of his azure robe brushed past the grass stems, yet not a drop of dew touched it.

They had already traveled for more than an hour. Heading west from Eagle-Sorrow Cliff, they crossed three mountain hollows, skirted a dead iron fir forest, and arrived at a gourd-shaped mountain pass.

The cliffs on either side narrowed inward. Moss lay thick upon the stone walls, and dampness that never dried seeped down through the cracks year-round, gathering into trickling streams at the foot of the cliffs before silently vanishing into the earth.

Deep within the pass stood more than a dozen wooden huts built against the cliffside. Their roofs were covered in coarse thatch, with stones weighing down the edges, each stone carpeted in gray-green moss.

The clearing before the huts was small. A narrow path had been laid with broken stones, and several bundles of shaved arrow shafts lay scattered beside it. One end of each shaft had been sharpened, while the other still bore the patterns of bark—fresh wood hacked down from the forest at random.

Lu Chen followed behind with a bamboo basket on his back, stuffed with several stalks of Purple-Patterned Grass. The dirt clinging to their roots had already dried hard.

His steps remained tense, his shoulder blades slightly raised. Every so often, he looked back at the road behind them, as though something might leap out of that dense forest at any moment.

The terror the Winged Tiger had left him had not yet faded. The feeling of being watched by a predator was like a thorn lodged in