The dust from the distant explosion was still hanging over the northeastern ridge when Lin Tianren and Xia Qing left their sheltered hollow, and neither of them started toward it.
Lin climbed a nearby outcrop instead and watched the sky above the ridgeline fade from rose to ash. The dust was already thinning, and from this distance there was no way to tell what had caused it. A battle could have thrown it up. So could a failed refinement, or a trap sprung by someone clumsier than its builder, or any of a dozen things he had no evidence to choose between.
"Should we investigate?" Xia Qing asked, joining him on the rock.
"Not tonight."
"You think it's a fight."
"I think it might be, and if it is, there may be several participants nearby, and they may be in the middle of deciding who's hunting whom." He didn't take his eyes from the ridge. "Walking into that without knowing what's happening would be reckless."
She nodded, and they went back down. They spent the night in the hollow beneath her small warding ring, taking turns on watch, and when the grey light came they set out in a different direction from the one the explosion had pointed toward.
---
He kept thinking about the number as they walked.
Five days. Five days since the tournament had begun, and by any honest accounting he had spent far too many of them on things that were not the tournament. The first stretch had gone to an illusion he hadn't even recognized as one until he walked out of it. The days after that had gone to searching for Gu Chen, reading the mountain's scars, and finally, last night, refining a single pill.
None of it was wasted. He could argue that to himself with perfectly good reasons, and mostly believe it. But when he set it beside the actual purpose of the tournament, which was to produce the best pill he could and bring it before the judging formation, he couldn't escape the feeling that he was falling behind.
*I have one Low Grade Basic Tier Healing Pill,* he thought. *That's everything I've made.*
And he didn't know what anyone else had. A hundred and fifty participants had entered, some of them permanent cultivators with decades of accumulated knowledge, some of them born into backgrounds that had handed them herb lore and alchemy training from childhood. Nobody had told them how the scoring was going. There was no board to check, no announcement of leaders, no way to learn which pills had already been refined or at what grade. Somewhere in this mountain, someone might already be holding a Mid Grade pill. Someone might have found a rare herb and turned it into something considerably better than anything Lin Tianren could make from sedge and marrow-leaf.
If that was true, then going on the way he was going would end badly.
*I can't spend the rest of this tournament gathering low-grade herbs and refining ordinary healing pills,* he thought. *I need better material. High-grade herbs, rare ingredients, something that earns real points.*
He looked at the mountain rising ahead of them and made a quiet decision.
*I have to change how I'm doing this.*
A Different Strategy
"Lin Tianren."
Xia Qing's voice pulled him out of the thought, and he realized how long he'd been walking in silence.
"You've been quiet for an hour. Are you worried about the tournament?"
"Something like that."
He told her, plainly. The unknown scoring, the pill he'd made, the sense of having started late. She listened to all of it without interrupting, her eyes on the ground ahead, and when he finished, she glanced down at the Golden Spirit Vessel at his belt.
"You want to know where you stand."
"Yes. And we can't. We don't know how many points anyone has, or what they've been making."
"Then maybe we don't try to know it directly." She stooped and picked up a pebble, turning it over in her fingers. "Everyone in this mountain still needs herbs and materials. If someone finds something valuable, they won't leave it where it grew. They'll come back for it, or guard it, or fight for it. That leaves traces."
"You're suggesting we look for places where people have been."
"Abandoned camps. Harvested herb fields. Anywhere a group has gathered recently." She tossed the pebble aside. "We won't get a ranking from them. But we could learn which valleys have already been picked clean, which herbs are being fought over, and whether any group is claiming a region as its own."
It was a good idea. He turned it over and could see the shape of what it would give him: not a scoreboard, but a map of the contest, drawn in the places where people had stopped being careful.
"There's a problem," he said. "Even if we find a rare herb, someone may already have used a hundred like it. We could be too late to matter."
"Then we shouldn't go looking for places where herbs grow." Her mouth curved slightly. "We should look for places where ordinary herbs *don't*."
He stopped walking.
"The ordinary ones grow wherever the soil is kind," she said. "The rare ones need something harder. Poor ground, strange stone, concentrated energy, anything that kills what's common. Most participants will be combing the green valleys because that's where herbs obviously are. Not many will think to look somewhere ugly."
He smiled, slowly, the first real smile of the morning. "That's a much better idea."
---
"There's one other thing," he said, as they turned toward higher ground. "Gu Chen."
Her expression softened. "I've been thinking about him too."
"If we find him, a lot gets easier. With three of us, we could cover twice the ground when we search, and he's the only one of us who can really hold a line if we run into anyone we can't avoid." He paused. "And I'd rather know he's alive than keep guessing."
"Higher ground still leads north," Xia Qing said. "If he's heading the way the tracks went, we're not moving away from him. And the better position we have, the better chance we spot him before he spots us and mistakes us for hunters."
"He'd cut first and ask questions after," Lin said.
"He'd cut first and ask questions after," she agreed, with the faintest trace of fondness, and they climbed.
The Mountain's Hidden Resources
The mountain was enormous, and its medicinal wealth was spread unevenly across it. Some valleys held nothing but common plants, thick and green and picked over. Others, in the places where the stone changed color or the air grew faintly warm, carried the kind of energy that could support something rare.
Xia Qing took to the high shoulders of rock and read them, pausing at certain boulders and trees to listen to the spiritual currents running through them, searching for unusual structure or pockets of natural concentration. Lin read the plants. They worked in a rhythm that needed few words, one of them watching the ground for the shapes that mattered while the other watched the air.
After nearly two hours of climbing, they came to a narrow passage between two huge rock formations, and Lin stopped.
"Something's different here."
Xia Qing came up beside him. The air in the cleft was a little warmer than it should have been, and a faint medicinal fragrance drifted out from somewhere beyond the stone, green and cool and unfamiliar.
He crouched and studied the vegetation along the entrance. Most of what grew there was ordinary. But a few plants didn't match, and between two flat stones he found a small patch of grass with silver threads running through each blade.
He recognized the general shape of it. He did not recognize its spirit. The energy in the blades was far denser than anything he'd gathered the day before, concentrated the way water concentrates when it's been boiled down.
He crushed a blade lightly between his fingers, tasted the smell of the sap, and let the sensation settle into a judgment. Healing, certainly. Spiritual recovery too, he thought, though the edges of the property felt strange to him and he couldn't be sure of them. Only then did he ask.
**[System Analysis Initiated]**
**[Unknown Medicinal Herb]**
**[Spiritual Energy Density: High]**
**[Medicinal Properties: Incomplete Analysis]**
**[Potential Use: Healing and Spiritual Recovery]**
It agreed with him. That was reassuring, and it was also not the point. The point was the density.
"Xia Qing. Look at this."
She knelt beside him and ran her fingers close to the blades without touching them. "That isn't an ordinary plant."
"Can you identify it?"
"Not completely." She pointed at the cracks between the stones beneath the grass. A faint silver pattern ran through the rock there in thin, branching lines, almost like roots. "But look at that. This place has been drinking spiritual energy for a very long time. Whatever grows here would have had generations to change."
He looked around again, and began to see more. There were other plants growing under overhanging stone, others hidden behind the thick roots of nearby trees, each of them just a little off, a little too dense. He collected a few samples carefully and set them in the vessel.
Then the system flared.
**[Warning: Unidentified Spiritual Energy Fluctuation Detected]**
He stopped moving.
"What is it?" Xia Qing whispered.
"Someone's close."
She raised her artifact. They went still, listening, and for several seconds the only sound was the faint trickle of water somewhere in the rock.
Then, from deeper in the cleft, came footsteps.
---
He sealed the last of the herbs in the vessel and caught Xia Qing's eye. Together they slipped behind a large boulder at the passage's edge and held their breath.
Two figures appeared at the entrance a moment later, both wearing tournament pendants, both moving with the loose, unhurried confidence of people who thought they were ahead of everyone else. Lin read their numbers off the pendants as they passed, seventy-three and ninety-six, and committed them to memory beside the forty-one he'd found scratched into a broken spear.
"Are you sure this is the right place?" one asked.
"Of course I'm sure. The energy here is concentrated. There's got to be something valuable deeper in."
"What about the others?"
"Already combing the northern valley. We haven't got long."
They moved on into the passage, and their voices faded.
Lin let out a slow breath. *So someone found this place before us.* He looked down at the silver-veined grass in his vessel. *And they may not be the only ones.*
He had caught something else, too, and he turned the phrase over before he said it.
"Northern valley," he said, very quietly.
Xia Qing's eyes lifted to his. "That's where the tracks went."
"Where everyone's heading, apparently." He thought of a limping footprint on stone, a short, stubborn cut in the bark of a tree. "If Gu Chen's alive, and he's moving north, that's where he'll end up. And if other participants are converging there, he might not be alone."
"Or he might be in a lot of trouble," she said, and neither of them said anything for a moment.
A Valuable Opportunity
When the footsteps had faded completely, Lin turned to her.
"You heard them."
"They're after something deeper in the passage." She was frowning at the stone. "Probably a rare resource. The energy's getting stronger the further you go."
"Do we follow?"
He thought about it carefully. Following two unknown participants into unfamiliar ground was dangerous, and there was no guarantee they were as unaware as they sounded. But letting them strip the place of everything valuable and walk away was a mistake of a different kind.
He studied the entrance again. The medicinal fragrance was stronger here than it had been when they arrived, stronger than anything he'd smelled in the mountain so far.
"We don't follow them directly," he said.
"Then?"
"We find another way in."
Xia Qing was already looking at the rock formations with the focused, absorbed expression she wore when a structure was starting to make sense. She walked along the base of the western wall, slowly, her fingertips trailing a hand's width from the stone, and stopped where the cliff doubled back on itself.
"There," she said. "The wall isn't solid there. It's a seam, and I think it opens into a narrow path. I can't promise it's safe."
"I only need it not to take us through them."
She nodded, and bent to examine the seam more closely, searching for any trace of old formation-work that might have been laid across it, any sign it had been watched. Lin turned back to the herbs.
The silver-veined grass was promising, but he knew better than to trust a promising herb. He had learned that much last night, in the cold sludge at the bottom of a vessel. A rare plant wasn't automatically useful. Its properties had to be compatible with everything else in the mixture, or even the best ingredient in the mountain could ruin a batch and take the rest of it down with it.
*First I need to understand what I have,* he thought. *Then I decide what to make.*
He closed the vessel and rested his hand on it for a moment.
He wasn't going to settle for another ordinary healing pill. Not now. Whatever he made next had to give him a real advantage, something that would stand up when the judging began, and somewhere deeper in this mountain, beyond a passage he wasn't allowed to walk through, there might be exactly the ingredient he needed.
He thought, briefly, of how much easier this would be with three of them. Gu Chen watching the passage entrance while Xia Qing worked the seam, Lin free to read the herbs and nothing at his back but the people he trusted. It wasn't a comfortable thought, because it was a thought about something missing.
*Find him,* he told himself. *Then do all of it properly.*
"Ready?" Xia Qing said, from the seam in the rock.
"Ready."
They slipped into the narrow path together, and the mountain closed around them.
**[Tournament Day: 7] Complete**
**[Participants Remaining: Unknown]**
**[Host's Current Alliance Status: Xia Qing — Provisional | Gu Chen — Missing]**