Li Wei woke up to the sound of footsteps from above.

Rubbing the sleep from his eyes, he rolled off the battered hay-stuffed mattress and got himself dressed. He had stripped down to his underclothes when going to bed last night. It was uncomfortably warm down in the restaurant's cramped basement, probably due to all the cooking going on upstairs, he figured. Thankfully he would only have to spend a single night down there.

Stretching, he gathered his possessions, which at this point were only his small animal-gutting knife, empty leather waterskin, and a few silver coins he could keep in his pocket. After he was all ready, he headed up stairs and thanked the restaurant's owner again for letting him stay.

"Catch me some more ducks and I'd be happy to let you spend the night again," the man had said, working busily to prepare some food in advance for the people who'd be coming in for lunch. A woman Wei guessed was his wife worked alongside him, kneading and pulling out sheets of noodle dough. "Any friend of Hong Meirong is a friend of mine."

Hong Meirong. Wei figured he owed her another thanks for all the help. He also just wanted to say goodbye to her too. After leaving the restaurant, he drifted around Tengmay a bit in search of her, but to no luck. He guessed she was sleeping in. If he had drank as much as she did, he'd be out for a while too.

The young man stopped by the town square to gather a few supplies for his journey. He didn't have much money but a man let him fill up his waterskin for free, so he was able to afford some bread. It would last him probably the whole day. If he got hungry again, he could use his knife and a tree branch to make a spear which he could catch some fish with. Wei couldn't begin to count all the dinners he and his father had got that way.

As he went around from stall to stall looking for anything useful and cheap, Wei noticed something. The Holy Crane guardsmen - who all wore the same kind of blue sash the man last night did - seemed to be searching for someone. They roamed around in groups of three, stopping people to ask them about something. Didn't seem like behavior they'd engage in on a normal day.

Maybe they were looking for him. Maybe they were looking for someone else entirely. Wei didn't know which, but he knew it was time to beat it. Making a line for the trees, the young man decided to move in the opposite direction he had arrived from. Probably the best way to avoid any more run-ins with the Holy Crane.

As he passed into the forest, he looked back at Tengmay Town for a minute. Meirong popped into his mind.

He knew he'd regret it if he never saw that strange one-armed girl again. Maybe he could drift through this place again some other time. Or maybe she'd decide to become a wanderer again and they'd cross paths someday. Who knew what the future held?

Sighing, he took off into the woods.

---

Wei had only been walking about twenty minutes when he spotted something strange.

There was a line across the ground where the grass was patchy, revealing areas of compact dirt. There were some shrubs and weeds around the edges of the flat, compacted spots, but it was like someone had razed the place of all plants, laid down a path, then just left it to get overgrown.

On second thought, that was probably exactly what happened.

Led on by curiosity, Wei decided to follow this overgrown path. He wondered how long it had been since someone else had taken it. Judging from the amount of tall grass that had sprung up, it had to have been years. It lead away from Tengmay Town, weaving through the forest and towards the stony gray mountain that went unnamed on the map. It only took about ten more minutes for Wei to reach the end of the trail.

The path ended up going past the edge of the bottom of the mountain, where the earth and soil gave way to hard gray stone. It wound up further, up the part of the mountain that had a gentle enough slope to easily walk, but ended where the rock became a steep cliff. There, carved into the stone of the mountainside was a massive set of stairs. It trailed upwards to a high spot on the mountain.

Wei craned his head, trying to pick out where the stairs ended, but past a certain point the mountain was shrouded with thick white fog. It seemed unnatural. He had traveled through the wilderness all his life and had never seen anything like it.

The young man approached slowly. A wooden barrier blocked off the entrance to the stairs. Two words were scrawled across it in peeling red paint: NO ENTRY. The barrier was half-rotten and covered in moss, clearly just as old and forgotten as the path he had taken here.

For a moment, Wei considered turning around and heading off. But his curiosity got the better of him. He drew his palm back, tensed up, and struck forward. His hand impacted the barrier lightning-fast, shattering the old wood into pieces. Stepping over the fragments, he started his new journey up the mountainside.

---

Oh, how he regretted that decision.

Stairs. Stairs. Stairs. So many stairs. He kept climbing them and there kept being more. It felt like he had been at it hours, even though he knew it couldn't be longer than his trip from Tengmay to the edge of the mountain. When the muscles in his legs were just about to burst, he finally reached the top. Huffing for air, he looked around.

He couldn't see anything. He couldn't see a single damn thing. The fog was so thick anything past a foot or two was completely hidden.

It was unconfortably warm as well - usually fog was cold, but whatever kind this was, it was hot. A few minutes wandering around and he was sweating harder than he had been climbing those stairs. The ground here was hard stone, but it was damp. The thin sheen of moisture made it just the littlest bit slippery. Not enough that he was tumbling with every step, but enough to make it stress-inducing.  

Wei shook his head. This was such a bad idea. Half-blinded by fog, on a slippery mountain, no way he wasn't going to accidentally tumble off a ledge and crack his head open. It didn't seem like there was anything interesting up here, either. Crouching close to the ground, he probed forward with his arms to try and find his way back to the stairs.

But just then, the fog parted away. Without the blinding white shroud, he was able to see that there had been a woman standing right in front of him.

She was gorgeous.

Wei had never seen a woman like her before. The woman's soft skin and long waves of hair were both pale white, giving her an ethereal, almost ghostly look. If the fog had still been there, she would've blended in like camouflage. Her face was round and kind, and while it was marked with lines of maturity, they subtracted nothing from her beauty. In fact, it just made her more alluring. The gown she wore was as white as her skin was and tied around her slim waist was a wide pink sash. It was marked with a red pattern of a flowing stream dotted with flower petals. She held a folding fan in one of her hands, with another tucked away in her sash.

Wei shot up straight. The woman nearly had a head on him in height, and it wasn't like he was short. Acting instinctively, he backed up to give her some space.

"Hello." Her voice was even, but Wei could pick out an edge in it. Just then, he noted that the edge of her hand fan glinted with razor steel. "Who are you?"

His mind was so occupied by her beauty that it took him a few seconds to remember what words were. "My name is Li Wei," he replied quickly, trying to appear friendly and lost. That razor fan probably meant she was some kind of guard.

"I'm Qing-ge," she replied. More of the fog was fading away and Li Wei could now see they were standing near both a small wooden shrine and a large stone temple. There were small hot springs everywhere, the warm water bubbling up with steam. Alright, that explained what she was guarding, and where the fog was from... but how it had just magically vanished was another question. "Why are you here, Li Wei?"

Wei explained himself quickly. At the end of his story, she pursed her lips. They were the same shade as a pale rose, and Wei couldn't help but stare at them.

"Did you not see the sign?"

"I don't remember a sign," he lied.

The woman rose one of her pale eyebrows briefly, but seemed to buy it. Just as Wei had hoped, she realized the rotten old thing was due to collapse any minute.

"Okay." She studied him for a second, then folded her fan back up and tucked it away. She gestured towards the wooden shrine in the distance, a small structure built against a natural rock wall. Carved into the wall were ancient symbols, as well as a large engraving of a woman. White jade inlay was used for her eyes and as decorations on her flowing dress. Probably some ancient goddess, Wei figured. She looked as beautiful as Qing-ge did.

"This is my family shrine," she said. Her voice had lost its paranoid edge and now ran through with reverence. "I have been taking care of it my whole life. I live alone here on this mountain, I have a small cabin nearby."

Wei hoped she was about to ask him to stay. But she didn't.

"If you want to pray here or rest in the hot springs, you can," Qing-ge continued. "Camp out in the trees for a night if you wish. But I ask you leave in the morning. This is sacred ground."

"Is the temple part of the shrine?" Wei asked, pointing to the large stone structure. It reminded him of the Plum Orchard Sect's temple, and was about the same size or a little smaller. It could easily house a few hundred people. With the fog pretty much all gone except for the light steam rolling off the hot springs, he could now see that all the entrances to the temple were boarded up. The wood was just as rotten as the barrier at the stairs had been.

"The temple?" The woman's caginess returned. "Do not mind it, and do not enter. Some cultivators used to train there, the Hazy Spring Sect. A disease came through and they all passed away."

"All of them? Then who boarded it up?"

Qing-ge folded her arms across her chest. It took a few seconds for her to formulate her next words.

"I believe there were a few left behind. They cremated their dead and moved from the mountain."

Oh. Wei wanted to slap himself. This was a historical event she was describing, not something she had lived through.

"I see. Maybe that's how Tengmay Town was formed, huh?"

"Maybe," she said. "Is that where you are from?"

"Well, I came from there. You see, I'm actually from the mainland. Barely been here in Pangu a week."

"The mainland!" Qing-ge was surprised. "Oh, that is very far. You are not from any of the sects then, are you?"

"Nope."

The woman smiled at him, her guardedness disappearing once more. "That is good. I was hoping you were not one of those thugs... their presence would defile this holy ground."

"Ah, you've had run-ins with them before?"

"Of course," she said. "They have perverted what cultivation is all about."

"Tell me about it," Wei said. "I've only really met some guys from Holy Crane, but they seem more like criminals than anything else."

Qing-ge stared at him for a second, just nodding slowly. Had he said something wrong?

"Well, I am going back to my cabin," the woman said finally. Wei still couldn't tell what was going on in her head just then. It was like she was rolling a thought around in her head and it got stuck. "Remember, you can camp overnight if you want. But please leave in the morning."

"I will. Thank you."

She left after that. Wei watched her walk away, eyes moving automatically to her hips. He snapped himself out of it, then turned to the old shrine.

Praying was okay, she had said. So while the temple may be off-limits, nothing was wrong about checking out that spot. There were a few small wooden steps that lead up inside the little shrine. After the trip up the mountain, they were nothing to him. The place had walls and a roof, but also wide windows that left it mostly exposed to the outdoors.

A musty smell hung in the air. There wasn't much of interest inside the cramped room, beyond a few small stone statues of the same goddess depicted on the rock wall. They were decorated with strings of wooden beads carved with symbols that represented nature and peace, hung around the figures' necks like jewelry. Ceramic urns full of what Wei could only guess were Qing-ge's ancestors lined the walls, which he was careful not to knock over.

With Qing-ge gone, Wei was left alone with his thoughts. He felt an odd connection to this place. He always preferred older, more rural buildings like this one. It reminded him of the little town where he had grown up. There were only about twelve buildings in the whole place, and all the old people were super-religious. There was a shrine just like this one there, but to the local river god.

A small, rectangle shaped woven mat was laid down in front of the largest of the stone statues. Wei got down on his knees, then shifted to sitting with his legs crossed together: the traditional pose for meditation and prayer. He shut his eyes and focused.

The bubbling of the hot springs faded. So did the wind through the trees, and the sounds the birds made flitting through them. Perfect silence surrounded him. He focused on his qi, the inner energy that flooded out from his core and weaved through every part of his body, physical and incorporeal at the same time. It felt stronger in this place.

He let his qi flow freely, practicing turning it over and molding it into shapes inside of himself. Cultivation - it reinforced both his body and his connection with nature. So many people had tried to put it to numbers: newer sects had established "levels" of cultivation, points on a timeline you could reach with set amounts of work. But the truth was, it wasn't something simple enough to mark down on a chart or a graph. There was no measuring stick, no scale, no formula that could accurately represent it.

As Li Wei fell into the trance of cultivation, someone watched him from far away.

---

After a half-hour of meditation, the young man opened his eyes. It was like a workout for the whole body: he felt stronger, but exhausted too. Staying in position, he worked out a kink in his neck.

Suddenly, a noise came from outside. His head whipped to the source. From the shrine's window, he could see that the wooden beams which had barricaded the stone temple were broken into pieces, and one of the massive double doors was open just a crack. The wind blew through the opening and out of a window, making an odd, low whistling.

Someone had broken in.

Whoever had done it, they could've been inside for a long while by now. No time to get Qing-ge. Springing to action, Wei leapt up to his feet and burst through the shrine door. He ran at full tilt towards the stone temple, careful not to slip on the stone or fall into any of the hot springs. The slim opening was too tight for him to fit through. He had to throw his entire weight against the massive wooden door to budge it any further, but when the gap was wide enough for him to fit through, he entered.

Sconces on the ancient stone walls flickered with the flames of tall candles. Whoever had broken in had surely been the one to light them. The temple had a wide, square-shaped central chamber, along with two hallways that split off from it, and an opening to a courtyard. The layout was similar to the other cultivator sect temples he had visited.

Squinting to focus in the dim light, Wei's eyes scoured the room for any sign of where the intruder had gone off to. When he couldn't find anything, he decided the best course of action would be to go through the place room by room.

There were wide group bedrooms for the disciples, and smaller ones for the sect elders. The mattresses were still there and hadn't been picked apart by bugs, though they were clearly old fashioned. No sign of anyone passing through here, at least not in the past decade.

The courtyard was a wide area where the rocky ground had been smoothed out into tiles. It was open to the air with no roof, but high walls boxed the area in. Littered around were martial arts training tools, like woven mats, padded staffs, and wooden dummies to practice strikes on. Still no sign.

A kitchen was the next area he passed by. There was a wide area with tables where the disciples would've sat down to eat, then a closed in area for storing and preparing food. In there, withered-up vegetables and spices hung on threads dangling down from the ceiling. They were probably a lot more appetizing before they had decayed.

Finally, Wei found a set of stairs that lead to a small basement library. There was a lock on the old wooden door, but it hung open regardless, and looking past the doorway he could see the faint orange glow of a candle.

That's where the intruder was. It made sense... they were probably trying to take the sect's manuals. Cautiously he headed into the room. Bookshelves loaded with dusty tomes and scrolls ran along the walls. Some of the shelves stood in the center of the room too, large enough to act as walls in a small makeshift maze. Wei made his way through it, searching for the thief's light. He soon ended up at the far side of the musty room.

No one was there. But a single candle was. It was placed down on a wooden desk that was pushed against the wall. Two scrolls were laid across its surface, spread open for him to read.

When he realized what they were, his eyes went wide.