Alex quickly nodded, and before he could figure out who to ask for a harvesting pack, the guard who had a blade to his kidney during his entire conversation with Scar was now leading him to the wagon that carried all their supplies. A few shouted words to the pack master quickly resulted in a pack very much like the one his mentor had once worn when they had been gathering priceless herbs in what now felt like an entirely different life. And perhaps it had been, though it had also been just a handful of days ago, unless time had played its tricks again.
In truth, Alex had no idea exactly where or when he was. He could only hope his beloved mentor and the girl he cherished were both safe and well, having to squeeze back bitter tears as he slipped on the surprisingly comfortable pack which might not possess any sort of preservation magic, but proved more than capable of storing the Blackcap Head, Foxglove, Wild Peppermint, Sageroot, Feverfew, and dozens of other alchemical herbs radiating the faintest Qi-infused auras that allowed the herbs to visually stand out, just as if he were harvesting in his favorite MMORPGs once more. In truth, he was amazed at just how well they popped up in his vision, thanks to the odd fusion of his interface and Biochemical Mastery perk. Heck, even his sense of the botanical names were capitalized in his mind's eye.
Of course, in this world he was no destined hero, but rather the reincarnated spirit of a young man who had found a perilous path to advancement and was now both a slave and a plaything of the gods. And should he actually survive the next month, let alone the next year, it would be something of a miracle.
You have successfully created three Basic Healing Compresses at 75% Median Potency.
You have successfully created three Sterilization Compresses at 75% Median Potency.
You have successfully created three Blood Cooling Tincture at 65% Median Potency.
By the time the caravan had stopped and made camp, Alex’s feet were throbbing, having effectively walked several times what everyone else had, thanks to his constant gathering. But the rush of satisfaction he got from successfully preparing pads and tinctures to treat fever and inflamed wounds made it worth every last step, feeling more at peace with himself than he had since he had first woken up with a boot to his kidney.
Though his equipment was crude, his interface helped him figure out how to make the best of his resources. Though they weren’t quite as effective as the tinctures and compresses he had made back at Liu Jian’s shop, he would not be ashamed to sell them to anyone.
And all of it was done under Tang Dan’s hostile glare. Or perhaps disinterested glare would be better, the man merely snorting as he ate his fare and drank his spirits when Alex tentatively explained what he was doing. When Alex’s explanations eventually lead to a smack to the back of his head with the admonition that he’d best work quietly, it was clear that the mage had absolutely no interest in the apothecary profession, and Alex was all too happy to cease his explanations.
And were it not for Tang Dan immediately grabbing Alex’s finished prizes and demanding he use one of each himself, which Alex obediently did, though he hated the waste, he would have forgotten the other man was even there.
A dangerous lapse he didn’t intend on repeating.
But Tang Dan only grunted. “Good. You’re not a complete idiot. Now go treat that stupid bitch who was slowing us down. If she’s not better by morning, we’ll probably cut her throat and be done with it.”
As the waning sun painted the impossibly deep blue skies a gentle shade of crimson, Alex met the wide-eyed gaze of the injured slave under the rustling canopy of the forest’s edge.
He crinkled his nose against the sharp reek of sickness mixed with sweat and fear, gazing into features that had once been beautiful before terror, betrayal, and abuse had taken their toll. The yellowing bruises on the girl’s cheek and a missing tooth made it clear her captors had not been kind.
And the way the poor girl flinched… the carefully banked embers in Alex’s heart suddenly flared anew.
He kept his head down, afraid his fury would frighten someone already sick with fever and terror. “It’s going to be alright,” he soothed. “Here, let me put this compress on your forehead.”
The girl visibly shook, she was so frightened of his touch.
It broke Alex’s heart.
A furtive look made it clear no one was glancing their way, the pair of guards overseeing the women were sharing dark chuckles and spirits over a nearby fire. The injured slave they didn’t even value enough to protect from elements and exhaustion in the nearby wagon and the captured Ruidian slavishly seeking his master’s approval were clearly beneath their notice.
Alex took a deep breath, forcing a smile upon his strained features, handing the broken girl a crude clay pot, mirroring the handful of junk pottery the slavers had given him to store his poultices in. And for all that she was a shattered wreck, her hands clasped it tight of their own accord. “That poultice will soothe wounded flesh, draining it of heat, sickness, and pus.” He forced himself to say the words, though he dared not meet the humiliated girl’s gaze. “It’s safe to place wherever you were hurt. Wait for complete darkness if you like, but you need to apply it daily for the next three days. Can you remove the cork seal?”
Her cheeks flushed and she wouldn’t meet his gaze but she jerked a quick nod, the clay vessel already vanishing inside the girl’s burlap attire.
He smiled with relief. “Good.” He leaned in close, his voice dropping to a whisper. “They will kill you if you’re not able to keep up tomorrow.” She paled at those words; Alex quickly spoke on. “I can only imagine how much you want to give into that despair. I pray you don’t. They’ll hurt you before killing you, just so no other girl surrenders to melancholy.” Alex said, sensitive ears picking up so many dark secrets when drunken mage or bellicose guards thought him lost in his work.
He then forced himself to meet her trembling gaze. “As bad as it is now, as long as there is life, there is hope that things will get better.” He glared at the guards. “Much better in the endless weeks ahead, who knows what could happen? But if you give up now, your fate, and death, will already be decided.”
Alex’s heart hammered even as the girl’s eyes widened with an odd mixture of fear and hope, jerking a quick, grateful nod.
Why had he said that? He shook his head as he turned away, knowing he was being a fool to give her false hope, playing on his own desperation. And worse, if she dared repeat his words, it could be his head brutally cleaved from his shoulders, and he still locked in a slave collar that would spell his doom with a single surge of an irate slaver’s will.
But before he could stumble over to the cooking pots on the other side of the camp, having yet to eat a bite that day, a soft, throaty voice that tingled against his spine stopped him cold.
“Why?”
He turned, locking gazes with the young cultivator gazing back at him with soft brown eyes radiating such a mix of fearless resolve and desperate vulnerability.
Alex clenched his teeth at the runed neck collar and heavy manacles binding her wrists before gazing back into those captivating eyes belonging to features that, underneath the sweat and grime, looked no older than his own.
“Because I want to see her live.”
The young cultivator swallowed, a flash of the terror she felt underneath her bravado leaking out. “You don’t know what they did to her, what they would do to all of us, if Scar weren’t so adamant about minimizing wear and tear on his ‘second rate’ prizes, as the bastard puts it. Some might argue that death would be a mercy.”
Alex flushed, lowering his gaze. “I’m sorry.” He clenched his fists, glaring at the laughing guards nearby, seemingly oblivious of their cowed, terrified charges, night vision shot as twilight turned to true darkness, all the deeper with the canopy overhead blocking even the brilliant starlit sky.
“Not your fault,” the girl sighed. “My name’s Yong Ming.”
“Mine’s Alex.”
She frowned thoughtfully. “A
Ruidian name.”
Alex grinned. “Well, I am Ruidian, or at least that’s what I resemble to these people.”
She tilted her head thoughtfully. “Are you saying you’re not?”
He grinned in the darkness. “That’s a complicated question. I woke up in a Ruidian ship, some years ago. Somehow, I managed to escape and made friends with an inspector and an alchemist who taught me what little I know of healing. But my actual homeland is called Earth, which I’m sure means nothing to you.”
The girl slowly shook her head. “It’s a strange name. We all come from dirt, after all.”
Alex grinned. “We thought we were clever, naming our planet after the dirt under our feet.”
Ming snorted. “Brilliant name. And what do you mean by planet?”
Alex shrugged. “Long story.”
Ming grinned. “I can’t knock your country’s odd name too much. My town's called ‘rich harvest’ in the old tongue. But we do raise the tastiest cabbage and fattest pigs you'll ever taste from any farm, second only to wild spirit boar in terms of flavor and vitality.”
Alex nodded. “Pork and cabbage stew sounds tasty.”
“Oh, we have a hundred different ways to cook pig, and we waste nothing. How Mother used to spit fry a pig every festival and prepare the skin?” She shuddered with remembered delight. “Every bite of crackling skin would send shivers of ecstasy through your mouth, the warm tangy fat perfectly accented by the sweet and sour dipping sauce and rice. Our feast days were meals fit for dukes and kings!”
Alex grinned at her suddenly animated description, for all that she was careful to keep her voice a soft whisper, quieter even than the crackling flames. “Sounds incredible.”
Yong Ming nodded. “It was. And my birthday feast was the best of all. Never did I eat so well as I did that day.” Her gaze suddenly hardened with bitterness. “Before I blacked out, waking up to that bastard Scar’s voice, promising my uncle that our town would not be bothered with flesh tithes for as long as Scar controlled the route. And my damned uncle just laughed, happy for the clink of gold I could hear trading hands, gloating about how our home was going to enjoy the change in leadership.”
Alex’s eyes widened. “He didn’t!”
Yong Ming coldly nodded her head, bitter tears of betrayal leaking down her cheeks. “He did. That bastard did! My parents had died of illness that winter, Uncle promising my father on his death bed that he would make sure I got to Yidushi in time for the Dragon Academy competition this year.” She choked back a sob. “I think Father knew that my damned uncle was responsible for his and Mother’s encroaching deaths, for all that he never said a word to me! For all that our healer was so certain it was simple infection, my parents quarantined from the rest of the town even though no one else ever sickened. Now I think back to his desperate gaze, happy to surrender governance to that bastard so long as he promised not to hurt me. That was the intent behind his oath. And Uncle had seemed so happy to give it, treating me with nothing but sympathetic smiles, knowing of my dreams of becoming a cultivator, how much I reveled in studying the old town texts, learning at the feet of the one cultivator our town had, before he passed away just last year at the age of two hundred.”
She gave a furious shake of her head. “How could I possibly think I could ever be worthy of unraveling the secrets of my chosen weapon when I couldn’t even see the serpents coiling around my own family? And my damned uncle could have been utterly free of me, forever! My heart so heavy with the death of my parents that I would have been happy to start life over in the city and put all that pain behind me. But that monster couldn’t even allow us that small mercy, twisting his oath in the most vile of ways, making sure that I would indeed make it to Yidushi… but only as a slave!”
Alex could only shake his head in horror. “Why? You were no threat to him. You were planning on leaving forever. Why didn’t he just let you go?”
She chuckled bitterly. “Why do you think? Simple greed from the soulless bastard not bothered by a lick of concern for his next life. Instead of having to pay me my inheritance, gold sufficient to see me comfortably off for years, he doubled his money by selling his own niece, the only cultivator of our generation, like a prize pig!”
Alex clenched his fists, beyond disgusted by this monstrous uncle who would so coldly butcher and betray his own kin. He couldn’t help but think of his own aunts and uncles of a lifetime ago, how tight-knit and loving his family had been. Not everyone in his family had been rich by any means, his father a self-made man from a very young age, but he had opened the doors to any number of lucrative positions within his company to everyone in their family, so long as they had the discipline and the drive to pull their weight, Alex’s father as understanding a boss as any young father or expecting mother could want, putting the needs of family above all else, an attitude which in turn earned him the undying loyalty of his employees, who all thought of him as family, whether or not they were related by blood. And that incredible loyalty, as well as his father’s uncanny ability to pick the best and brightest in any field or graduating class to work for him, had assured his family’s fortunes for as long as he and Alex had both lived.
Alex shook his head, forcing away the melancholy reflection, taking quick stock of his surroundings, the air redolent with the scents of roasting meat, wood smoke, and the pungent stench of sweat and fear.
He was relieved to see no one looking their way, but sensed he had best return to where he was expected before anyone thought to look for him.
But before he left… he gazed into those desperate brown eyes. How they widened with a gasp when his hand gently touched her arm.
“It doesn’t end here,” he promised.
She gazed intently at him for endless seconds. “You’d best head back,” she whispered.
He nodded. “We’ll talk again,” he said, before slipping through the shadows and grabbing a plate of rich fare from the desultory slave serving everyone from the large stew pot, ideas racing through his head as he reseated himself by his makeshift lab and filled the gnawing hole in his belly, feeling like such a desperate fool. ‘This doesn’t end here.’ What had he even meant by that? He was as much a captive as both those girls were, all of them destined for Yidushi’s slave markets.
And unless he somehow managed to free himself from the damned collar around his neck, their fates were as good as sealed.
5
Though he was just as tired as he had been the night before, having effectively covered twice the distance everyone else had with his constant gathering of plants and fungi that were either naturally infused with Heaven and Earth energy or just effective for treating various ailments, he refused sleep’s siren call. Not an easy task by any means, as he did his best to appear as quiet and still as every other slaver and captive, slumped over against a comforting trunk, his silhouetted form just out of firelight, eyes closed, yet he was the farthest thing from sleeping as he allowed the rough bark of the tree to pinch into his back, keeping him from actually dozing off.
Instead, despite his utterly relaxed posture, he was concentrating with fierce intensity upon his Dual Path purification technique, attempting to refine just the tiniest amounts of Dark and Light Qi from the massive pearlescent blockage clogging his seventh and final meridian channel, representing the final barrier between him and ascending to Bronze, and which would require more work to break through than all his other blockages combined.
Dual Path Purification Technique has reached 95.1% efficiency. Do you wish to harness Greater Spirit Beast Potency?
Alex froze in sudden alarm. “No!” he actually whispered aloud, chilled at the thought of all the potency of that boar he had been so instrumental in killing flooding into him now, with his divine artifact locked to him. He could only pray that he would be able to exude all that wasted Dark Qi, should that have happened, and the horrific stink would make it all too clear he was cultivating, the equivalent of hundreds or perhaps even thousands of hours in ju
st a handful. And he would be helpless before his alarmed captors who would like as not just kill him out of hand as he sat there, too lost in processing even to stop without risking significant backlash once started.
He wasted no time bemoaning how hard it would be to finally break through to Bronze, not having the slightest clue, as of yet, what Light Qi Cycling path he could possibly use that would incorporate all eight of his elements, to say nothing of the fact that he was the farthest thing from a candidate for Dragon Academy and the cultivation manuals he hoped to discover as he could possibly be.
Besides, other things of far more pressing importance required his focus now.
Proceeding very carefully, he focused on his ring, probing it with his spiritual sense, doing his best to feel the ring and its contents not just with his physical senses, but with his very soul.
For endless long moments he meditated upon the twisted loop of corroded copper, so plain-looking not even his captors had bothered with it, resting warmly against his finger, now seemingly as inert and worthless to him as any other twisted strand of metal could be.
Alex frowned, refusing to give up, doing his best to remember how it felt to almost flow into the ring, recalling with bittersweet melancholy the magnificent cultivating garden he had once stored within his artifact, all its prizes gone in a magnificent flash of Wu Wei that had both spelled his doom and, he could only hope, rescued a score of innocents from the darkest of fates.
He sighed bitterly. Even if he was doomed never to escape, the gods who so hated Silver Fox doing their utmost to place his pawn in the most perilous of circumstances such that Alex could never achieve his dreams of cultivation, at least he could find some solace in the virtues of his past, however bleak his future looked.
Then he gasped, brooding reflections torn away by a sudden jolt of surprise as his spiritual senses at last found what had once been a vast and majestic doorway between the physical world, his soul, and the endless dimensional space that had been his ring. A wondrous spiritual portal only sensed in that moment, that he had been utterly ignorant of every time before when he had effortlessly made the jump
Silver Fox & The Western Hero: Warrior Reforged: A LitRPG/Wuxia Novel - Book 2 Page 5