Page 122 of The Immortal’s Mark

Chapter 20

Run

Chapter 644: In which our heroine stops pretending she isn’t terrified. Of the monster. Of herself. Of wanting things.

Morning breaks soft over the temple ruins.

Mist clings to the broken columns, silvering the scorched stones where Tianlong’s fire left its mark. We pack in silence—bedrolls, supplies, the cache of documents we grabbed before the cultists came. The smell of ash and old magic still hangs in the air.

Dumpling supervises from a fallen pillar, orange tail flicking with the gravity of a general overseeing troop movements.

We ride out as the sun clears the mountains.

The road is narrow at first, overgrown, branches scraping against my legs. But by midday the mountains give way to farmland. Rice paddies silver in the sun. Farmers bent in the fields, tending crops that don’t know about curses or conspiracies or ancient bloodlines. A child drives a water buffalo along a paddy wall. A woman hangs laundry on a line, cloth snapping in the morning breeze.

Normal life. The kind I haven’t had in centuries.

No one’s trying to kill us.

It’s suspicious, honestly. A whole morning on the road and not a single ambush. Not one cultist leaping from the bushes with a knife and a prayer. Not even a mildly threatening stranger asking too many questions.

My knife hand keeps twitching toward my belt, reaching for threats that aren’t there. Eight centuries of survival instincts don’t just turn off because the road is peaceful and the mist is pretty and a blind monk just told me I’m meant to be a willing sacrifice.

In my saddlebag, Dumpling spots a chicken scratching in the dirt near the road.

The yowl that emerges from his tiny body carries the fury of a thousand wronged ancestors. Pure feline outrage at the audacity of poultry existing in his presence, in his world, where he might be forced to perceive it.

The chicken flaps away in a panic of feathers and squawking, utterly unprepared for the orange fury pursuing it with his eyes. Dumpling strains against the saddlebag, orange fur bristling, claws flexing with predatory intent, clearly prepared to wage war against the entire species if only I would let him out.

I will not let him out.

I’ve seen what he does to birds.

“The creature has declared war on poultry,” Tianlong observes from Ren’s wrist, where he’s wrapped himself like a very dignified bracelet. His tiny voice carries the weight of ancient mountains. “I respect the ambition, if not the strategy.”

“He’ll forget about it in ten minutes.”

“Will he?”

No. Probably not. Dumpling holds grudges like other cats hold mice—carefully, and with intent to destroy.

I scratch behind Dumpling’s ears until he subsides into disgruntled rumbling, outrage fading into the general background hum of feline superiority. The mist is lifting. The sun is burning through, painting the fields gold and green.

We keep riding.

We make camp by the river as the sun bleeds red and orange across the western hills.

The water moves dark and steady past rounded stones, catching the dying light in fragments—copper, gold, crimson—like a dragon’s hoard scattered across the current. Fire crackles. Night insects beginning their chorus. The smell of woodsmoke and river water and the dried fish and rice I threw together for dinner. Not fancy, but hot, and nobody died from it, which is about all I ask from my cooking.

While Ren builds the fire, I finally sort through the documents we took from the temple.

Most of it is useless. Cult doctrine, ritual prayers, apocalyptic ramblings. I toss page after page into the flames.

But at the bottom of the stack—newer paper. Official paper. The kind with seals and signatures and careful columns of numbers.

Military manifests. Payment records.

“Ren.”