Zhao Feng and Su Qingwan walked up the main street for a while and found an inn near the mountainside's halfway point.
The inn had a modest frontage. An old wooden plaque hung above its door, carved with the words "Halfway Mountain Inn." The wind had worn most of the carved strokes smooth and rounded. Clearly, this was an old establishment too.
They pushed open the half-closed wooden door and entered a small front hall furnished with several square tables and long benches. Dark blue coarse cloth covered the tables. Behind the counter stood a woman in her early thirties, dressed in short, gray-brown homespun clothes, her hair pinned with a wooden hairpin. Her face was ordinary, but her eyes were sharp.
She glanced at Zhao Feng and Su Qingwan and recognized that they came from another domain, yet showed no surprise. Clearly, she had seen plenty of outsiders.
Zhao Feng paid ten taels of gold for a room and led Su Qingwan upstairs by the hand.
Su Qingwan set her luggage on the table and stood by the window for a while. Her gaze settled on the patches of moss covering the rock face outside. After observing them for a moment, she said, "The moss on the rock face is moving. Very slowly, but it really is moving. It's gathering in a particular direction along the cracks in the rock, and there's a pattern to where it gathers."
Zhao Feng walked to the window and followed her gaze. The moss on the rock face was indeed moving slowly. It was not swaying back and forth in the wind, but gathering from all sides toward a central point along the cracks in the stone. It moved so slowly that it was almost impossible to notice unless one stood still at