Child of Calamity

When An Jing, covered in blood, came back to the Rider Camp, the refugees around him parted in terror at once, while the One-Eyed Leader and the White-Robed Scholar, who had heard the screams some time ago, both showed smiles of appreciation. "Not bad." An Jing saw the cunning light turning in the scholar's narrow, slit-like eyes, as squinted as a Tibetan fox's, as the man looked him up and down. "Your performance was even better than we imagined." "You flatter me, my lord." An Jing bowed slightly, and the One-Eyed Leader waved a broad hand. Two riders at once led An Jing off into the camp to change his clothes and clean himself. Not long after An Jing returned to the Rider Camp in a new set of clothes, the children they had gathered reached the required number, and the riders began shouting to one another, making ready to leave. It was the hour of sunset, when the sun went back behind the mountains. The light behind the thick, leaden snow clouds grew ever fainter, and the whole world was a hazy grey-blue. Standing on the road at the edge of the refugee camp, An Jing turned and looked up. He saw a boundless white wilderness, endless towering mountain ranges, and a great city that spread from the mountain's foot halfway up its slopes, encircled by a long river. The grandeur of the Northern Frontier's scenery was truly the finest in all Great Chen, and Mingshan City, majestic and towering, well deserved its name as the greatest city of the Northern Frontier. But now there was the Frost Calamity, and there was human calamity. In An Jing's eyes, those mountains, wrapped in wind and snow and fading in and out of sight, seemed to come alive. Their deep shadows were like the bodies of demon gods, holding up the heavens above and treading the earth below, and the lights of the city became tens of thousands of indifferent eyes, looking down on the countless multitudes of the mortal world. He lowered his head. The parents who had sold their children were waiting on both sides of the road. Some numb, some with tears in their eyes, they watched their children and took their last leave of them. An Shen-shi was there too, waiting for her child, having taken her medicine and eaten and recovered some of her strength. "Jing'er." There were no tears in her dry eye sockets. Across the road filled with flying frost, An Shen-shi met her child's eyes. "Live." She rasped out her final instruction, and at that moment even An Jing, strong as he was, could only force a smile. "Mother, you must live too." "If I live to leave this place, I'll go south—Lin River, Beirui, the Broken Blade Mountains... Mother, live. Wait for me." "Wait for me to come back!" An Jing climbed into the wagon the riders had prepared, and looked one last time into his mother's eyes. The woman stared at the wagon's retreating shape, and her lonely figure vanished into the snow filling the sky. Inside the wagon. Parting from his mother, even An Jing—graced with Innate Wisdom from childhood, his mind far beyond others his age—felt grief. But he drew a deep breath and pressed all his feelings down, his gaze deep and dark. His mother was a Martial Artist, and she had eaten her fill. Even if she could not slip into Mingshan City, simply crossing the Huai River checkpoint and heading south should pose no problem. The Broken Blade Mountains were far away, and the land around them was rich in produce; even the frost disaster would not reach there. Perhaps she could find a few relatives and get a firm footing. —Hm? There's incense burning in this wagon? These people are that rich? Well, of course. They've been holding free clinics to cure refugees. They can't be short of supplies... His thoughts wandered far. When he reeled them back in, An Jing found that the wagon he sat in held eight people, and was quite a bit roomier than he had expected. He looked around: all children about his own age, boys and girls both. He also saw the girl whose frostbite had been so severe, the one the physicians had cured. So they must have been sorted by age. The children had all just left their parents and should have been noisy, but now every one of them hung his head, turned his face away, and kept silent. After all, they were not ordinary children. They were refugees who had lived through the Frost Calamity of the Northern Frontier and walked with their parents through the mountains and the wild wastes. Children who never stopped making noise had long since died—or been snatched away and eaten. Cruel to say, but when it truly happened, how many more words could one spare for it? Remembering, An Jing could not help clenching his fists. Exchanging children to eat was bad enough; some refugees would even hunt down and snatch other people's children to boil and eat. When a child who had been protected with such hardship all along the way, who had barely survived, was stolen away, no parent was strong enough to bear it. Their shrill curses and weeping echoed on and on in the wind and snow. At the time he had to look after his mother. Had he been alone, with nothing to hold him back, he would surely have drawn his blade and killed every one of those beasts and scum—a pity those vermin ran too fast, and he had only been able to kill one. Pulling back his memories, An Jing looked around. These children riding in the wagon with him had most likely seen such scenes too. Having seen them, even if they had once been cheerful children, they were all silent and sparing with words now. Even having left their parents, after the first grief their thoughts would quickly shift to the simplest mode. —Will I get enough to eat at the next meal? At least I won't be eaten. In that case, better to save my strength for the inspection by the 'Great Household' to come. Smelling the faint scent of the wood inside the wagon and listening to the wind outside, An Jing thought again of the look of the wagons he had seen earlier. These were not ordinary wheeled carts but Snow-Track Wagons like sledges, able to carry far more people and supplies than ordinary wheeled carts, and especially suited to travel over snow. The horses were extraordinary as well—they must be Northwest Frost Steeds, unafraid of ice and snow. Wagons like these could never be built in a short time; they must have been prepared well in advance. Had these mysterious people foreseen this Frost Calamity? Was that why they were so well prepared—waiting for nature to sift out those whose 'Heaven's Mandate was insufficient,' and then coming to buy up Children of Calamity like himself, survivors who had escaped the disaster? As An Jing thought this, he gradually grew sleepy. His physical foundation was excellent and his Innate Constitution remarkable, but in the end he had gone hungry for a long time. Having eaten his fill for the first time in ages, his body, as it digested, produced an irresistible weariness... "Hm? This doesn't seem like ordinary sleepiness!" An Jing finally noticed. There was something off about the incense in the wagon. No matter how tired he was, it should not be a fatigue that left him unable to control his own thoughts. An Jing looked around the wagon again, and, really looking, went slightly blank. No wonder the other children were all silent—they had fallen asleep long ago. He was the one who had held out the longest! But even he could not control his eyelids now, and he sank into deep sleep. Outside the wagon. One rider glanced back at the wagon and said in surprise, "He's finally asleep. This kid—Soul-Calming Incense puts an ordinary person into a sleep as deep as death within two breaths, and he held out for a quarter of an hour!" "Now I understand why the lords above set such store by this recruitment. The talent of this Child of Calamity is truly out of the ordinary!" "Don't I know it." Another rider cut in. "I thought these refugees were all scrap metal, but it seems there's real material among them!" "Quiet." A more seasoned rider beside them snapped, shaking his head with a faint smile. "Those who fail to gain entry may one day be our colleagues. And those who do... heh." The old rider clicked his tongue and said meaningfully, "Those martial lords—if they remember your careless contempt and your looking down on them, what do you think will become of you..." He did not need to say more; the meaningful silence was frightening enough. "U-understood..." The rider shivered, jolted out of his excitement, and went back to his former state of silence, betraying no feeling at all. "Keep it up," the old rider said softly. "Let's keep moving. Save your strength." After that, the whole snowy night was silent. For the next several days, apart from coming out to camp and eat, An Jing and the other children pressed on in their sleep. Perhaps this was to keep them from knowing how far they had been sent or where—or simply because it made them easier to manage. On a long journey, after all, better to let the children sleep all the way to the destination than to look after them. Along the way, many different convoys gathered from all directions, some coming and some going, and the White-Robed Scholar took his leave halfway. But on the whole the column kept gathering and growing. By the later stages it had become a great convoy of more than twenty wagons. An Jing tried to work out where he was, but even he could only be sure that they were now moving southwest, that they had left the area affected by the Northern Frontier's Frost Calamity, and that they had switched to ordinary wheeled wagons. But exactly what region of Great Chen they had reached, he did not know. "The forest back home was a cold-temperate coniferous forest, and the one I saw last time was a temperate mountain coniferous forest." An Jing was not certain. Great Chen was vast beyond his understanding—this was, after all, a world with Heaven's Mandate and the Martial Path, with tremendous power and long life. "We probably haven't left the Northern Frontier entirely. Could this be the borderland between the Northern Frontier and the Northwest?" "Speaking of which—words like 'cold-temperate coniferous forest'... what did I do in my past life?" With such doubts, in a wagon where his sense of time and space were both muddled, An Jing could only roughly estimate. After about a dozen days, the mysterious people's wagons finally reached their destination. A manor deep in the old mountain forests. White mist filled the spaces between the ridges; a nameless tributary flowed along one side of the mountain road, glinting with ripples. As the mountain road went on and on, it began to fall into disrepair, and for days no inhabited village was seen. Soon the landscape, where traces of human habitation had still faintly shown, gave way to dense vegetation and towering rock. Layer upon layer they formed a dense forest like a labyrinth covering the whole mountain range. Patches of low, vivid green shrubs grew overlapping on the steep cliffs like the scales of dragons and serpents, so that these towering Northwest mountains seemed to be parts of some colossal creature's body. The mountain road had its end after all. Before the deepest part of the forest, the road that allowed easy passage broke off abruptly, as if even the laborers who built it had been powerless against that ancient forest. Only narrow mountain trails were left, running into the trees like blood vessels, as a final compromise. By then almost every trace of humanity had vanished, leaving only the most primeval, savage scenery. The wagons jolted along the rugged mountain road. Along the way, everyone had in fact vaguely realized that those who had bought them were probably not retainers of some rich household. No proper great family would transport them in such a secretive way; and even if they had a secret manor, it would not be so deep in the mountains. In Great Chen, even a three-year-old knew: when you come to a mountain, do not enter. In the mountains there were Sprites, Aberrations, Evil Demons, and Ancient Beasts; and countless bizarre, strange places that could stir the great forces of wind and water and give rise to many marvels. Within Great Chen, the mountains that had already been cleared were tolerable; at most there were some newly born Sprites that had not yet gathered power. Great Chen did not discriminate against such Sprites: so long as they kept the laws, respected the Human Way, and spoke human speech, they were treated as equals. But the borderlands... too many strange things, too many evil and uncanny beings; too many people had walked in and never come back. When they learned they had entered the deep mountains, even the somewhat cleverer children turned grim, because there was no chance of leaving this place alive on their own. Whoever built manor grounds in such deep mountains, whether of the righteous path or the evil sects, belonged to a hidden organization; they could no longer return to the world under normal identities. But whatever the children thought, the facts were what they were. They were already in it. "Get down." After a long jolting ride, the wagon stopped and a rider's voice called out, "We're 'home.'" An Jing let out a long breath. The moment had finally come. He calmed himself and prepared to meet his future 'home.' An Jing glanced at the seven others in the wagon, still groggy, then turned and was the first to step down. A strictly laid-out mountain manor came into view. But before An Jing could look closely, he heard a familiar voice. "Not bad." Turning his head, An Jing saw that the lead rider of his convoy, that one-eyed Martial Artist, was watching him. He laughed in his rough voice: "You're the best of this batch of newcomers."