Chương 24: Seol-Ainu

Seol-Ainu announced itself first as smoke. Zero saw it before he saw the village itself: thin grey columns rising from a cluster of low rooftops nestled in a fold of the mountains, visible from a ridge two hours out, the only sign of human settlement in an otherwise empty white-grey landscape. The cold here had teeth in it, sharper than anything in Shenhua, and the wind carried a mineral edge that suggested the high passes were not far above them.

"That has to be it," said Yukito, looking at the smoke.

"Confirmed by the map's positioning," Zero said.

"We are within the expected margin." They reached the village an hour later, descending a switchback path worn into the mountainside by generations of foot traffic. Seol-Ainu was smaller than Shenhua by an order of magnitude, perhaps thirty buildings arranged around a central well, the architecture squat and heavily insulated against weather that Zero suspected was considerably worse most of the year than what he was currently experiencing.

A woman tending a fire near the village's edge looked up as they approached, her expression carrying the particular wariness of someone who saw outsiders rarely enough that each one registered as an event.

"Travelers," she said. Not quite a question.

"Yes," Yukito said.

"We're looking for two others. A woman with silver-white hair and fox features, traveling with another woman, with pointed ears, and violet hair." The woman's expression shifted, recognition arriving visibly.

"They came through yesterday. Asking about the mountain den." She pointed toward a building near the village's far edge, smoke rising steady from its chimney.

"Staying at the lodge. You'll find them there, unless they've gone out again."

"Thank you," Zero said. The woman looked at him for a moment longer than she had looked at Yukito, her gaze settling on his eyes, his hair, the particular pale stillness of his features. But she did not ask the question Zero could see forming behind her expression. She returned to her fire instead, and they continued toward the lodge.

Miho and Viria were inside, seated near the lodge's central hearth, a pot of something that smelled of root vegetables and fragrant smoke simmering between them. Viria looked up first, and her face did something complicated and fast before settling into the expression Zero had learned to associate with relief she was choosing not to perform too loudly.

"You're alive," she exhaled.

"We're alive," Yukito confirmed, settling onto the bench across from her.

"Not surprising. Both cores?" Asked Miho without looking up from the pot.

"Both," confirmed Zero. He set the pouch on the table between them.

"Boar and ram." Viria slid two cores out of her subspace across to match it.

"Ox and horse." She inspected the cores that Yukito and Zero had acquired, then scooped all four of them back into her subspace. Then, Viria pushed the stew pot toward the center of the table, an invitation.

"Eat. You both look like you walked through several mountains to get here, which, I suppose, you probably did."

The catching-up took the better part of the evening. The four of them gathered around the hearth while the lodge's other occupants, mostly local hunters and a single merchant passing through, kept a respectful distance that Zero suspected was less about courtesy and more about the particular caution that small mountain settlements extended to anyone who arrived asking about beast dens. This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

Miho recounted the horse hunt in clipped, efficient terms; Viria, predictably, added the parts Miho had omitted, including a detailed and somewhat embellished account of her own satisfaction at the strategy's success. Zero and Yukito gave the boar and ram fights in turn, Zero's account precise and structural, Yukito's brief and outcome-focused, the two versions together forming something closer to a complete picture than either alone would have.

"The journal mentioned the den cost its author a hand," Zero said, once the recountings had settled.

"We should ask the locals what they know before approaching."

"Already started," Miho said.

"There's a hunter here, older man, lost two sons to something in that mountain fifteen years ago. He won't go near it himself anymore, but he talks about it readily enough, if you buy him a drink first."

"Tonight?" Yukito asked.

"He should be here within the hour."

The hunter's name was Nikolai, and he arrived precisely as predicted, settling onto the bench with the unhurried care of someone whose joints had opinions about cold mountain weather that he had learned, long ago, to negotiate with rather than fight.

"The white-stripe tiger," he said, once Miho had set a cup in front of him and he had taken a long, unbothered drink from it.

"Lives in the upper den, third peak from here, the one with the split face where the old rockslide took half the mountain down sixty years back."

"You've seen it?" Zero asked.

"Once. From a great distance, and that was enough for a lifetime." Nikolai's expression went distant, the particular look of someone revisiting something they had spent considerable effort not revisiting.

"My boys went up there fifteen years ago. They were young, foolish, and thought they could take a pelt worth a season's living in one trip." He shook his head slowly.

"Found one of their packs at the den mouth a month later. Never found anything else." The lodge had gone quiet around them, the local hunters listening without pretending not to.

"No one's gone back since," Nikolai continued.

"Not for the pelt, nor for the bounty the old lord used to offer. The mountain's left alone, and the tiger's left alone, and that's been the arrangement for fifteen years."

"We need to break that arrangement," Miho said. Nikolai looked at her, then at the rest of them, his weathered face doing a slow assessment that Zero recognized as the same kind Meilin had given them on the first morning at the Heavenly Cloud Sect: not hostile, but carefully measuring whether the people in front of him understood what they were proposing.

"You'll die," he said simply.

"Most who go up don't come back. The ones who do come back are missing something."

"We've fought spirit beasts before," Viria said.

"Not like this one." Nikolai finished his drink.

"But you'll go regardless. I can see that already. Foolish young people always do." He set the cup down with a soft, final click.

"The den faces east. There's a ledge below it, maybe two hundred meters down, where the rock's stable enough to camp. Past that, I can't help you. I've never been further than where my boys' last camp was, and I won't be going back to look."

"Thank you," Miho said.

"For the information, and for the loss it cost you to share it." Nikolai looked at her for a long moment, something in his expression shifting slightly, softening at the edges in a way fifteen years of careful distance had not quite managed to prevent.

"Don't thank me now," he said, standing slowly.

"Thank me if you come back." He left without further ceremony.

They spent the rest of the evening preparing. Miho went through their supplies with the same methodical precision she'd applied to the original packing list in Shenhua, checking each item against the cold and the terrain they'd be facing. Heavier cloaks were purchased from the lodge's keeper, along with traction spikes for the icier stretches of the upper paths.

Viria ran a final check on her sword, the space-severing technique now familiar enough in her hands that she barely needed to think through the motion before testing it. Zero spent the evening with the memorized map, turning the den's location over in his mind, cross-referencing it against everything Nikolai had described.

"Split-face mountain," he said to himself.

"Rockslide damage. East-facing den."

"You're building a picture," Yukito said, settling beside him.

"Am I right?"

"I am trying to anticipate the terrain before we're in it. Nikolai's description gives us the general shape. I want to understand the approach before we commit to it."

"Can you?" Zero considered the question honestly.

"Partially. There are details I won't have until we're there. But partial preparation is better than no preparation." Miho, finishing her supply check, looked over at the two of them with an expression Zero had begun to recognize as her version of approval that didn't require words to be approval.

"We leave at first light," she said.

"The climb will take most of the day. We camp at Nikolai's marked ledge, and approach the den at dawn, when the tiger's hunting cycle should put it at its most predictable."

"Have you studied tiger behavior?" Asked Viria with a mix of confusion and respect.

"I've studied predator behavior in general. The principles transfer, even to something this far outside normal classification." Miho looked toward the window, toward the dark shape of the mountains beyond, the third peak indistinguishable from the others in the night.

"Rest. Tomorrow will require everything we have."