A New Life

Bai Sui walked away with an air of composure, leaving no room for suspicion. This bought him at least another hour of head start.

He roughly oriented himself, ensuring he was not heading toward the Uzumaki Clan Territory, and then surrendered his route to his own intuition.

He avoided all main roads, sticking strictly to forests and wasteland. Every so often, Bai Sui would glance back.

On one hand, he was checking for pursuers; on the other, he was ensuring he hadn't left any obvious tracks.

There was no helping it; he possessed no professional tracking or anti-tracking skills from his past life, and in this one, he had no way to learn them.

For now, Bai Sui could only rely on the scraps of knowledge he'd gleaned from movies and television in his previous life to perform a rudimentary cleanup of his trail.

However, Bai Sui knew that as a complete layman, the more he tried to cover his tracks, the more mistakes he would make. The longer he lingered in the wilderness, the higher the chance of being caught.

What he needed most urgently was to find a densely populated area—a large city would be best, but a small village would suffice, though he feared bringing disaster upon the latter.

Bai Sui kept up a brisk pace, lifting his spirits and stepping carefully, striding toward the unknown.

Initially, he would stop and look back from time to time, but eventually, he stopped slowing down altogether, moving forward without ever turning his head again.

Bai Sui kept his upper body steady while his legs moved with increasing speed.

He walked from noon until nightfall, through torrential rain and morning mist, traversing forests, crossing streams, climbing mountains, and wading through waters.

He went from being terrified to opening his heart, from feeling constrained to feeling free, breaking his bonds, shedding his shackles, listening to his heart, and sensing the divine.

This trek lasted for three days and three nights. Only when Bai Sui bumped into another person did his spirit return to his body, and he finally came to a halt.

As he regained his senses, Bai Sui was pleasantly surprised to find that in these short three days, the pill-bead in his dantian had grown by a third—meaning these three days were worth nearly a year of hard work.

Although he had been jolted out of that state of oneness with nature by the intrusion, Bai Sui felt no anger; in his view, this was perhaps inevitable.

If he had truly wanted to avoid these people, he would have naturally stayed away from human habitation while in that state of communion with heaven and earth. Since he hadn't chosen to avoid them, there must have been a reason.

Bai Sui was currently in a forest, and about forty or fifty meters away stood five men dressed as hunters.

Calling them hunters was a stretch; they were merely peasants with bamboo bows, clearly the poorest of their kind.

They were not hunting—or rather, the hunt had already concluded. A small Black Boar lay on the ground in the distance, but the men clearly lacked the energy to deal with their prize. Instead, they were huddled around someone sitting on the ground, evidently in a predicament.

Using his heightened senses, Bai Sui gathered the situation from their conversation and movements.

It turned out they were villagers out hunting. They had hoped to catch some mountain game, but upon discovering this half-grown Black Boar and confirming it was alone, they decided to take a gamble.

Because it was a sudden decision, they had no time to dig traps and had attacked from multiple angles using only their bows.

Initially, they had been positioned in trees or on boulders—places the Black Boar couldn't reach.

Who could have guessed that the startled boar would go berserk and slam into the trunk of the tree where one of them was hiding? The violent impact hadn't snapped the tree, nor had it caused any severe damage, but the man hiding in the branches had been so terrified by the boar's charge that he slipped and fell right in front of the beast.

At that moment, the Black Boar was too dizzy from the collision to attack immediately, but the man had taken a nasty fall and couldn't stand up.

Left with no choice, his companions emerged from their hiding spots to finish off the beast while it was incapacitated.

They had succeeded, but at a cost. They managed to drive two sharp knives into the boar's neck, but its final death throes had left them injured.

The most severely wounded man was now sitting on the ground, surrounded by the others.

Of course, all of this was being recounted by the man who had fallen from the tree, who was repeating his apologies in a tone of deep remorse: "It's all my fault. If I hadn't fallen from the tree, none of this would have happened..."

Having understood the sequence of events, Bai Sui decided to approach them to see if he could offer any help.

"Who's there?" "Who is it?" "Listen!"

The group was alert, and since Bai Sui hadn't bothered to hide, they spotted him when he was about ten meters away.

Bai Sui held his hands out, signaling he was unarmed. "I am a traveling physician. I noticed someone was injured while passing by. Do you need my help?"

The men exchanged glances. Seeing he carried no weapons, the leader nodded and said to Bai Sui, "We do have someone injured. We would appreciate your help."

Bai Sui didn't say much. Ignoring their wariness, he walked over to the wounded man.

The man's left leg was injured; the outer side of his thigh had been slashed open, likely torn by the Black Boar's tusks.

Bai Sui tore the pant leg open. Seeing this, the leader stepped forward and used his knife to help cut the fabric, and Bai Sui nodded in thanks.

Once the leg was exposed, Bai Sui's brow relaxed slightly. There was no severe deformity, and the bleeding wasn't excessive; it didn't appear that any major arteries had been severed.

Gently pressing his right hand near the wound, Bai Sui channeled his internal energy. It had no other purpose than to probe for internal injuries.

As he sensed the injury and compared it to his own internal state, he confirmed that no bones were broken; it was merely a deep flesh wound.

"This isn't the place to stay. The smell of blood might attract other beasts. I will bandage him simply, and then you can take him back using the method I describe for further treatment. Don't worry, I've checked—no bones are broken. It's just a flesh wound."

He asked for their water skin to rinse the wound. As he did, Bai Sui discovered that his energy could alleviate the man's pain by wrapping around the injury, which further solidified his identity as a physician in their eyes.

He tore the man's pant leg into strips and applied a fan-shaped bandage, starting from the knee and working upward to cover the entire wound.