The chestnut horse's gait became noticeably more cautious. It lowered its head, its ears darting around to detect the sounds of the road, and deliberately softened the landing of its hooves, as if testing the ground for each step. Yin Wujou didn't urge it on, letting it choose its own path. He noticed that although the road was narrow, it had some very old ruts—layers of cart tracks and hoofprints pressed together, some cracked and others half-buried by freshly fallen soil, indicating that this road had been frequently used in the past, but fewer people had traveled it in recent years.
"Where does this road lead?" Yin Wujou asked.
"There's a small ferry crossing," Snow Empress said. "More than ten years ago, someone set up a private ferry there. From there, you could cross the river and directly Capital, bypassing all the checkpoints on the official road. Later, the authorities investigated for a while and shut down the private ferry, and the road fell into disrepair."
"You walked by?"
"I've walked that path once," Snow Empress said. "The person who led me down that path said that many paths in the world are like this—when people walk on them, they become paths; when no one walks on them, they turn back into wilderness. But the path itself doesn't disappear; it's just covered by grass."
Yin Wujou recited the sentence in his mind. He recalled the diagrams on the mugwort paper of Daoist Yun. Those lines and nodes were like a road covered by grass. As long as someone remembered its direction, it would never truly disappear.
A night wind blew from the depths of the wilderness, carrying the damp, fishy smell of the river. When Yin Wujou caught this scent, he realized he was not far from the river. Sure enough, after running for less than a quarter of an hour, the road began to slope slightly downwards, and the wild grass on both sides was gradually replaced by low shrubs. Behind the shrubs, a large expanse of grayish-white water appeared—the dim light reflected from the river after the moonlight was obscured by thin clouds. It wasn't bright, but it was bright enough to be seen in the darkness.
The ferry crossing was completely abandoned. Half of the stone steps where boats used to be moored had collapsed, leaving only a few crooked bluestone slabs extending into the water, covered with dark green moss, slippery and glistening wet in the moonlight. On the bank lay an overturned wooden boat, its bottom facing upwards among a pile of rocks, the planks rotten and cracked in several large places, like a huge dried fruit that had been slicing open. The river was about thirty or forty feet wide, the current not swift, but the water was murky and dark, its depth indiscernible, with several slow eddies in the middle, and fragments of the moon shimmering on the surface.
Snow Empress reined in her horse at the riverbank, dismounted, and squatted down by the water, testing the water temperature with her hand. As she squatted by the water, the flow of her spiritual energy suddenly accelerated. Yin Wujou, watching from afar, could feel the Spiritual Power around her being drawn towards the river's surface by something; the light traces in her meridians shone for a moment before returning to normal. When she stood up, she shook the water off her hands, and the water droplets scattered like a string of broken silver pieces in the moonlight.
"This river has a very strong spiritual energy," she said. "There's something beneath the water."
Yin Wujou spurred his horse a few steps closer, his Spirit Vision sweeping across the river. He saw that the spiritual veins at the bottom of the river were indeed much denser than those in ordinary waters—several thick streams of spiritual energy intertwined and flowed underground, coiling like tree roots and extending downstream. In some places, the concentration was so high that it almost condensed into semi-solid crystalline clusters of light at the bottom of the riverbed. These clusters of light swayed slightly under the refraction of the water, their color a deep, dull shade, not the clear, pale blue of flowing spiritual veins, but a grayish, turbid white, as if they had been mixed with or diluted by something.
"The underground spiritual veins have been damaged," Yin Wujou said. "They were severed and then reconnected, but the interface is uneven, and the spiritual energy seeping out is impure."
Snow Empress glanced at him, a hint of surprise in her eyes. "You could even see that? Has your Spirit Vision deepened yet?"
"Maybe." Yin Wujou himself wasn't sure. He dismounted and stood on the bank, looking down at the riverbed for a while. The grayish-white orbs of light pulsed slowly in his Spirit Vision, like a wounded heart beating unsteadily. He followed the direction of those spiritual veins upwards and found that one of the branches extended from the riverbed, through the bushes on the opposite bank, and stretched northeastward, directly towards the western suburbs of Capital.
"That spiritual vein leads towards the Imperial Astronomical Bureau," Yin Wujou said.
Snow Empress also crouched down to take a closer look. Her Spirit Vision wasn't activated, but she could sense the distribution of Spiritual Power —this method of perception was more indirect than Yin Wujou's Spirit Vision, but it was superior in its subtlety and accuracy. She closed her eyes and sensed for a while, then nodded. "You're right. There's an old spiritual vein underground that leads to the foundation of the Imperial Astronomical Bureau. The Spirit Vein Bureau considered this when they chose the site to build the Imperial Astronomical Bureau —building the government offices at the confluence of spiritual veins would facilitate both the charging of spiritual artifacts and the monitoring of the spiritual vein's movements."
"So this is buried underground at the Imperial Astronomical Bureau?"
"It's not just the Imperial Astronomical Bureau. Many old government offices in the Capital were built on spiritual veins. When the previous dynasty built the capital, they specially invited geomancers to draw up a map of the spiritual veins, and the locations of key buildings were all chosen precisely at the nodes of the spiritual veins. The advantage of doing this is convenience, but the disadvantage is that once there is a problem with the spiritual veins, the entire area will shake."
Yin Wujou squatted on the shore and stared at the grayish-white orbs of light for a while. A thought suddenly popped into his mind: if a spiritual vein is the trunk of a tree, then these injured nodes are like scars on the trunk that have been cut and healed. The wood at the scars is warped, water flow is obstructed, and over time, the accumulated stagnation worsens. The grayish, turbid energy accumulated at the break in that old spiritual vein might be a lingering effect of that damage, accumulating there for ten or twenty years, unchecked, becoming increasingly solidified.
"Can we wade across this river?" he asked, standing up.
"We can wade," said Snow Empress, "But the horses can't. The water doesn't look deep, but there's silt and collapsed stone steps at the bottom; the horses will easily get stuck. We have to leave the horses on the other side."
"Then how do we get there?"
"Swim across." Snow Empress said, already taking off her outer robe, folding it neatly, and stuffing it into her satchel, which she then tied tightly to her back. "Take off your outer garment and wrap it up securely, making sure everything is tied up tightly so no water gets in. The water isn't too cold; you can swim to the other side in fifteen minutes."
She was the first to enter the water. The moss on the flagstones was incredibly slippery, so she steadied herself on a stone at the edge and slowly slid into the river. When the water reached her chest, she paused, adjusted to the temperature, and then began to swim forward. Her movements were very light, making very little splash; she was like a fish gliding across the surface, making almost no sound. The resonance with the water's essence made her movements exceptionally smooth, and the ripples flowing around her body carried a tender, yielding quality, as if the water itself recognized her.
Yin Wujou stood on the shore watching her figure grow smaller and smaller, took a deep breath, and began to take off his outer robe.