No Beasts Within the Circle

The live-cage wagon did not leave the inner mountain pass overnight.

The next morning, it was still parked at the quarry, but two rings of boundary stakes now surrounded it. Gray cord was wrapped around the inner ring; the outer ring had no cord, only white powder smeared on top of the stakes. The gray-robed man had left the wagon as bait while he began clearing ordinary demonic beasts from the area.

When Helian Yuan saw the first short-tailed deer driven out onto the southern slope, he thought the guards were merely clearing a path. Within half an hour, a second and a third came charging out of the same direction, followed by people banging iron sheets. Farther away, startled mountain birds took flight in flocks, and even stone badgers that normally refused to leave their dens ventured onto open ground.

They did not hunt the beasts, only drove them away.

By the afternoon, the area within two li of the quarry had suddenly fallen silent.

There were no birds calling, no small beasts digging in the earth, and no low growls left by demonic beasts patrolling their territory. The wind swept through the gully, carrying only the bitter smell of wooden stakes and medicinal powder.

An artificially created empty circle.

Helian Yuan quickly understood its purpose. If Number Seven was still hiding on Sunken Bone Slope, it had to drink, forage, or avoid people. Once the ordinary demonic beasts had all been driven away, any new footprints, droppings, hairs, or signs of a kill would stand out. Even birds suddenly resuming their calls in one spot could indicate that something had passed through.

The gray-robed man was no longer looking for a number.

He was looking for the one change in the blank space.

Helian Yuan had planned to follow the live-cage wagon into the inner mountain pass, but now he could not approach. Every patch of mud in the empty circle was like a sheet of paper laid open. The moment he stepped inside, he would write a line on it for the other side.

He retreated outside the circle and spent half a day making his way around it before finding a stretch of jumbled rocks left by a mountain flood at the northwestern corner. There was no soft mud there, but a colony of red-bellied rock rats lived in the crevices. The people driving away the beasts had come through once with their iron sheets, frightening the rats underground, but the rats had never actually left.

Helian Yuan lay on the upwind side, smeared three small stones with the hemp grass oil that had gotten onto the scrap from the quarry, and tossed them into three different rat holes.

The rock rats grew restless soon after the medicinal scent entered their holes. The first group emerged from the southern opening, the second ran east, but the third rushed straight into the empty circle through underground cracks. Dozens of small beasts crossed the powder-marked stakes, leaving a tangle of paw prints in the deserted area.

The guards responsible for checking the area rushed over at once.

"The rat holes weren't all sealed!"

"Check for other footprints first."

They crouched among the jumbled tracks for a long time, inspecting them more and more slowly. The rock rats were light and left shallow prints, but they carried white powder everywhere, and the once-clear boundary soon became a gray blur.

Helian Yuan took the opportunity to enter from the other side of the empty circle.

He left no footprints of his own. At the end of the rocky stretch, a withered vine spanned a shallow gully. He tied a hemp rope to its base, gripped the rope with both hands, and swung across, then stepped forward over several bare rocks he had picked out earlier. At the one point where he had to touch the ground, he stepped on the lid of a powder bucket knocked over by a rock rat, keeping a piece of wood between his sole and the earth.

The empty circle was not impossible to cross.

He simply had to make use of the existing chaos with every step.

As he neared the quarry, Helian Yuan discovered that the gray-robed man was not beside the live cage. He stood on a raised platform to the north, watching the inspection team deal with the rat prints. Only three guards were beside the wagon, one of them holding an iron whistle.

Helian Yuan did not approach the wagon any further. Instead, he moved northward within the circle.

The gray-robed man kept his eyes fixed on the ground. He trusted the empty circle to tell him who came in, but it was hard for him to imagine at the same time that someone would use it to get close enough to observe where he directed operations.

Helian Yuan paused for half a step as he passed a young badger driven from its den. It was curled up behind a bare rock, its nose and mouth smeared with bitter powder, but it did not dare move with no scent of its mother nearby. He did not pick it up; he only pushed a piece of damp moss untouched by the powder in front of its nose. The young badger licked up the moisture, caught its breath, and scurried toward the jumble of tracks made by the rock rats. The extra trail of small footprints would slow the inspection further; for the young badger, it was simply a direction in which it could find shelter again.

Using beasts to create chaos did not mean every beast had to become expendable.

Iron sheets, braziers, and several medicine pouches used to drive away the beasts were piled below the platform. Different symbols were written on the pouches: a circle, a slash, and a double cross. The circle pouch scattered bitter powder, the slash pouch contained hemp grass, and the double-cross pouch had yet to be opened.

Just as Helian Yuan got a clear look, the gray-robed man suddenly turned around.

More than ten zhang and a row of low stone walls separated them. The gray-robed man did not recognize him immediately; he saw only a dark shape behind the wall that did not belong to the stone. He raised a hand, and a guard beside the wagon immediately blew the iron whistle.

The shrill sound pierced the empty circle.

The rock rats beneath the rocky stretch all froze for an instant. Then, instead of scattering, they scrambled desperately toward their holes. Farther away, a level-one horned deer driven from its territory suddenly fell to its knees, its forelegs twitching.

It was not merely a warning.

The whistle, combined with some medicine scattered in the empty circle beforehand, could briefly cause beasts that had smelled it to lose their bearings.

Helian Yuan had already begun retreating before the whistle sounded, yet he still felt a throb at his temple. It was not that the medicine worked on humans; Tiger Shadow had reacted with instinctive revulsion to the shrill sound, and his shadow had abruptly contracted beneath his feet.

The gray-robed man on the platform saw it.

His gaze shifted from Helian Yuan's face to the ground. For the first time, he did not order his men to seize him, but shouted, "Blow it again!"

The iron whistle sounded a second time.

Helian Yuan gave him no chance to observe. He kicked over the double-cross medicine pouch, and the wind swept gray-black powder toward the platform. The guards thought it was poison and covered their faces. The gray-robed man also took a step back, breaking his line of sight.

Helian Yuan vaulted over the stone wall and withdrew the way he had come. By then, the inspection team had noticed something amiss at the rocky stretch and had begun blocking him from both sides. He did not head for the northwestern corner, where the powder prints were most chaotic, but went instead toward the southeastern part of the empty circle, where the ground was cleanest.

No one believed there would be a way out there.

Beyond the southeastern boundary lay the Blue Rock Panther's territory. When the search party drove away the ordinary demonic beasts, they had deliberately avoided that side for fear of disturbing the level-four demonic beast. Helian Yuan slowed at the boundary stakes, took out a small piece of level-three split-tooth lizard meat, and tossed it from a distance beside an old claw mark left by the panther.

As soon as the scent of meat spread, a low growl came from the forest.

The pursuers stopped.

Helian Yuan moved sideways along the edge of the territory without truly venturing inside. The Blue Rock Panther emerged from behind a rock wall, looking first at the meat, then at the men raising crossbows beyond the boundary. The old iron ring beneath its neck lightly struck the rock with a crisp clink.

The gray-robed man's guards did not dare shoot.

The dangerous gap they had deliberately left open became Helian Yuan's way out of the empty circle.

After returning to the northern slope, he did not rest. He first drew three circles on his map: the beast-driving zone, the medicine-powder zone, and the iron whistle's effective range. The circles did not completely overlap. The iron whistle had to be used with the double-cross medicine or hemp grass to make demonic beasts lose their bearings; if the scent was disrupted beforehand, the whistle was merely grating.

The gray-robed man had also gained a piece of information that day.

When the iron whistle sounded, something unusual had happened to Helian Yuan's shadow.

Next time, his opponent would not use the whistle solely to drive away beasts.

He would use it to test people.

Before leaving the northern slope, Helian Yuan drew the three medicine-pouch symbols along the edge of the map and marked the wind direction and the beasts' reactions for each. The circle pouch made small beasts lose their bearings, the slash suppressed restlessness, and the double cross worked in combination with the whistle. The next time he encountered similar tools, he would not have to guess all the rules again. The gray-robed man had used the empty circle as a sieve today, while Helian Yuan had memorized the size of its holes.