Snow Empress stood there in silence for a while. Yin Wujou carefully folded the stack of mugwort paper and put it in his bosom—together with the leather inkwell and ink jar, close to his chest. The edges of the paper were rough, and the creases were very deep, clearly indicating that it had been repeatedly unfolded and folded many times.
"Thank you," Snow Empress said. This time her voice was a few decibels heavier than it had been that morning, each three words carrying Qian Jun weight.
Daoist Yun waved his hand without saying a word.
The two turned and left the courtyard. The path down the mountain was quiet. Snow Empress walked in front, with Yin Wujou half a step behind her. Their shadows were shrunken into tiny balls under the midday sun. When they reached the halfway point Yin Wujou glanced back— Daoist Yun's dusty old cotton robe was still standing under the old locust tree, almost blending into the tree trunk from a distance, making it impossible to distinguish between the person and the tree.
They arrived at the post station on the official road just past Shenshi (3-5 PM). The post station was a three-bay earthen house by the roadside, with three horses tied up at the door and a wooden sign hanging under the eaves whose writing was almost illegible. When Yin Wujou went in to rent horses, he woke up the postmaster who was dozing behind the counter. The postmaster rubbed his eyes, flipped through the ledger, and said, "Fast horses to the Capital cost two qian of silver per day, including the rider and horse. Food and fodder must be provided by the rider."
Snow Empress was waiting for him at the door. She stood leaning against a pillar, the sunlight shining obliquely, illuminating half of her face, while the other half fell into the pillar's shadow, the line of light and shadow cutting straight down from the middle of her brow bone. She gazed at the direction the official road stretched out—a bluish-gray dirt road that stretched across the autumn wilderness to the horizon, the grass on both sides mostly withered, the wind skimming the ground, swirling the withered grass and dust into tiny eddies that rolled back and forth on the road.
Yin Wujou paid and led out two horses. The horses were the common short-distance packhorses found at the post station, with messy coats and not very fat but in good spirits. The sound of their hooves pounding the mud was dull and steady. When he handed the reins to Snow Empress, she reached out and took them. Her movements as she mounted the horse were swift and clean, and her back didn't even sway when she put it on the saddle.
"You know how to ride a horse, right?" Snow Empress asked.
"I rode it when I was copying maps and delivering them." Yin Wujou also mounted the horse, put his feet in the stirrups and adjusted his posture. The horse spun around for a bit before he regained his balance.
Snow Empress watched his horse handling and her lips twitched almost imperceptibly. "Not bad. Keep up."
She gently nudged the horse's belly, and the packhorse trotted onto the official road. Yin Wujou urged his horse to follow, and the two horses galloped eastward along the dirt road covered with withered grass. The afternoon wind blew in their faces, dry and cold, carrying the smell of stubble left over from the harvest and moisture from a small river in the distance. The sound of hooves was particularly clear in the open plains, clattering and mingling with the wind, pushing the gradually shrinking Daoist temple, town, and valley behind them further and further north.
After riding for a while, Snow Empress slowed down slightly so that Yin Wujou could ride alongside her. The official road stretched out in front of them, and the sunlight stretched the shadows of every rut on the road surface very long. Those intersecting ruts appeared deep and hard in the dry autumn air, like patterns carved into the earth's surface.
"It will probably take several days to get to Capital," Yin Wujou asked.
"Six days if we ride at full speed without stopping. We'll need to change horses twice along the way. If we stay overnight at a post station, it'll be slower, about seven or eight days." Snow Empress glanced at him sideways. "Can you travel at night?"
"Able."
"Then let's try to rest as little as possible. The sooner we get to Capital, the sooner we can check Pei Yuan's records. He's been missing for ten years; he might have moved somewhere in between. The Ministry of Ministry of Personnel's archives are just the first line of inquiry. If that line breaks, we'll have to find another way."
Yin Wujou steadied his horse's speed. The moment he activated his Spirit Vision, it unfolded the scenery on both sides of the official road into two layers—the grass roots lying dormant beneath the withered grass were still slowly absorbing water from the soil, and occasionally, one or two thin veins of earth energy writhed slowly like earthworms deep within the soil. He narrowed his Spirit Vision to focus only on the road surface half a mile ahead, controlling his horse's speed while mentally tracing the sword sheath array diagram given to him by Daoist Yun. Twelve star-shaped nodes, a spiraling inward curve, and a closing node should be placed in the blank space at the center—he mentally redrawn the diagram as he walked, and by the third redraw, some details began to emerge.
The Snow Empress suddenly spoke a sentence ahead, most of it broken up by the wind; he only caught a few syllables at the end. "... I'll teach you along the way..."
He urged his horse to gallop closer. "What?"
Snow Empress turned her head, the wind blowing her hair back into a straight line. "I'll teach you a technique on the way here: altering the lines of an array. Yesterday at the bottom of the pit, you used cinnabar to reconnect the lines of the array that had disappeared, but you reconnected the original path. If one day you encounter an array that has gone astray during operation, you can't reconnect it; you have to alter it. I'll teach you the basics of altering lines."
Yin Wujou's horse caught up with hers. The rhythm of the two horses' hooves on the dirt road gradually overlapped, changing from a scattered clatter to a synchronized beat, almost as if a person were riding a four-legged beast. The open fields on both sides of the official road slowly receded beside them, and on the distant horizon, a flock of migrating birds formed a loose V-shape in the sky, their greyish-white wings shimmering at the edge of a thin layer of clouds.
"Okay," he said.
Snow Empress remained silent. She sat astride her horse, gazing ahead, one hand loosely gripping the reins, the other resting on the raised leather ring at the front of the saddle. The slanting sunlight from the west bathed her profile in a golden-red hue, and the wind blew a small, withered leaf from the tip of her hair, which disappeared into the dust kicked up by the horse's hooves.
Two horses galloped eastward along the Dao Yi. The sun sank inch by inch behind them, casting ever longer shadows from beneath their hooves, stretching both men and horses into long, thin, dark streaks across the dirt road. Occasionally, a wild rabbit would dart out of the roadside weeds, its brownish-yellow silhouette skimming the ground and disappearing quickly into the shade of the field ridges. In the distance, a shepherd boy herding three sheep turned off a side road, glanced at them from afar, and then retreated back into the woods by the roadside.
As evening approached, Snow Empress reined in her horse in front of an abandoned teahouse. Half of the teahouse's roof had collapsed, but four wooden pillars still stood, with withered wormwood growing at their base. She dismounted, tied her horse to a pillar, took out a dry biscuit and a leather bag of water from the satchel next to the saddle, and sat down to eat against the pillar.
Yin Wujou dismounted and tied the two horses to the same post. He broke another piece of bread in half, keeping one half for himself and feeding the other half to the horse. The packhorse chewed the dry bread with its front teeth making a clattering sound. After chewing twice, it swallowed and then stretched its head to nudge the other half in Yin Wujiu's hand.
"Don't feed it too much," Snow Empress said. "It's cool at night, and if you feed it too much, it won't be able to run."