Twenty days later. Jizhou, Pingyuan County.

Inside an abandoned dwelling, Tao Xiaomi crouched down and examined the scene closely. There was a pile of ash in the room, still faintly warm.

They had been tracking Yuanzhen from Qingzhou. Most people had initially believed Yuanzhen was already dead — but Qianban Ye Xiaoqian had refused to accept that conclusion, firmly and without compromise.

So the group split in two: one half remained in Qingzhou to continue the sweep, while the other pushed north into Jizhou.

After Ye Xiaoqian was injured, Tao Xiaomi had sought his approval to break away from the main body of the Tingwei Bureau’s forces, moving independently with twenty or thirty elite subordinates.

Three teams had been tracking the fugitive all the way from Qingzhou into Jizhou: one was Tao Xiaomi’s Junjisi elites, another was a blade unit dispatched by the Liren, and the third was the Tingwei Bureau’s Black Riders.

At this moment, Tao Xiaomi’s expression was not a pleasant one.

In the past seven days, this was the third time they had come this close.

Beside the fire pit lay a stone — clean, conspicuously clean. Yuanzhen had clearly been sitting on it to tend the fire.

It was already summer. Yet every one of the three locations where Yuanzhen had been found contained a fire pit. From this, Tao Xiaomi deduced that his wounds were worsening.

Tao Xiaomi closed his eyes. A picture formed in his mind: a man with a festering eye socket, pressing something heated red-hot against the wound, burning it shut.

Ye Qianban had said it before — he likely hadn’t only wounded Yuanzhen’s eye. Perhaps the injuries in other places were rotting for lack of medicine.

So Tao Xiaomi shook his head. If it were the eye wound going septic, Yuanzhen could never have fled this far.

Yuanzhen had to return to Jizhou. Only through Jizhou could he make his way back to Heiwu quickly.

And Tao Xiaomi was convinced of something else: Yuanzhen was still carrying something on his person. Something that could help Heiwu move south. Perhaps a map — one Yuanzhen had drawn himself.

During his time assisting Han Feibao, Yuanzhen had travelled to many, many places — even to the northwestern frontier, even to Jizhou itself. This man’s knowledge of the Central Plains ran deep. If he truly managed to slip back across the border, it would become an enormous disaster in the days to come.

Tao Xiaomi opened his eyes and let out a slow breath. He glanced left and right, and spotted something on the ground — a faint scatter of pale yellow powder.

He bent down, nose nearly touching the floor, and sniffed. Medicine. Wound medicine.

Another picture took shape in his mind. Yuanzhen had wound medicine on him — but only enough to dress his eye. No surplus for anything else.

So he had chosen the cruelest method: cauterising his other wounds with heat, stopping them from spreading further.

They had pressed the pursuit too tightly. Yuanzhen hadn’t dared to linger, hadn’t dared to sneak into a medicine shop.

“The map.”

Tao Xiaomi held out his hand. One of his Junjisi men quickly produced it. Tao Xiaomi studied it carefully, then drew a line across it with his finger.

“We follow this route and keep pushing.”

He handed the map back to his subordinate and strode out the door with long steps.

About ten li away, a figure wearing a straw hat — Yuanzhen — turned to look back.

His face was terrible to behold. An eye wound left untreated was a death sentence. And so, exactly as Tao Xiaomi had guessed, every scrap of medicine on him had gone to that eye.

He had more than one injury. And — almost laughably — the wound that tormented him most now was the one left by the rats. Those enormous rats.

Back in Qingzhou, he had leapt into that swift-running river to escape his pursuers. If he hadn’t crashed into that cluster of branches he might never have stopped — but who could have expected that the cluster was home to a great number of large rodents?

Perhaps they weren’t rats. Yuanzhen had never seen such creatures before. They had bitten him several times on his legs.

He hadn’t paid much attention to it at first. But two days later the wounds had begun to fester. He had gathered herbs along the road — and they had done nothing. So, with no other option, he had resorted to that brutal method of burning the wounds shut.

Just then, a carriage came up behind him. Yuanzhen bowed again and again toward it, begging it to stop.

Inside was a family. Kind-hearted, they halted and asked what had happened. Yuanzhen lied — said he was a travelling merchant who had been set upon by bandits. Badly wounded, penniless, he asked if they might take him along for part of the road.

Fortune was with this man that day, for he had met the charitable sort. They let him on and carried him sixty or seventy li before finally parting ways at a fork in the road.

By now, the corn in the fields had grown to half a man’s height. Yuanzhen ducked into a cornfield and gnawed on a few cornstalks — that passed for a meal.

Looking back over his life, he could not help but feel a hollow melancholy.

He had once been a man of soaring pride. He had set his sights on becoming the first non-Guiyue-clan Prime Minister in the history of the Heiwu Empire.

He had believed — truly believed — that he could seize power in Heiwu. And for that goal, he had been willing to sacrifice everything.

That was why he had come to the Central Plains. He needed a great achievement, one grand enough to earn the recognition of the Guiyue’s eight-clan nobility. The Khan Emperor’s favour alone was useless; even the Khan Emperor could not break the established rules on his behalf.

But this time, he had fallen so utterly, so completely.

Han Feibao was mud that could not be plastered to a wall. He had wasted so much time on that man. The bitterness of it gnawed at Yuanzhen without end.

He lay down in the cornfield to rest for a spell, not daring to travel the main road any longer. He would have to wait for nightfall.

He drifted off — shallow, fitful sleep.

Faintly, he heard the sound of hooves. Yuanzhen snapped awake at once, rolling over to press himself flat, not daring even to breathe.

Judging by the hoofbeats, the column passing on the road numbered at least one or two hundred.

He couldn’t be certain whether it was the Tingwei coming for him. And even if he were certain it wasn’t, he wouldn’t have dared to show himself.

Still a capable man, Yuanzhen thought, after the riders had passed. He lay back down and murmured it to himself — a private, solitary acknowledgment.

He thought of that Qianban.

Yuanzhen understood his own abilities clearly. An ordinary Tingwei Bureau Qianban — he could have killed one with nothing but the stones in his hand.

To have tracked me this far and still not given up…

Yuanzhen exhaled heavily.

He needed to change his route. Even if that column of riders almost certainly wasn’t hunting him, he no longer dared travel this road.

He didn’t know Jizhou well. But he knew that heading north, straight north, would eventually bring him to the Yanshan mountain range.

The Tingwei Bureau would have already sent riders ahead to every pass on the northern frontier — and they would have arrived long before Yuanzhen could.

But what choice did he have?

Once he reached the Yanshan, he was confident his own abilities would carry him through terrain that would stop ordinary men cold. He could cross it.

And if — if he truly could not — then he would go to ground in those mountains for a time. In that vast, wild expanse, even if the Prince of Ning deployed tens of thousands of troops to find him, they could not simply dig him out.

His mind wandered, tangled with these thoughts, until he slipped off again. When he woke next, it was dark.

Yuanzhen snapped off a few more cornstalks to take in some moisture — faintly sweet, not unpleasant.

Through the whole of that black night, Yuanzhen pushed forward through gritted teeth. But he had changed his plan. He was no longer heading north. He was doubling back.

By the time dawn came, he had returned to the abandoned dwelling where he had briefly sheltered before.

The fire pit’s traces were still there. New, disordered footprints had joined the old ones. So the Tingwei’s men had already been here.

He rested in that crumbling courtyard for another full day. By nightfall, hunger had made it impossible to sleep soundly.

He held out until the dead of night — midnight — then slipped out of the ruined house and crept quietly toward a medicine shop he had located earlier.

The shop had only a single apprentice staying inside as a watchman. Yuanzhen killed him. The poor boy was only fifteen or sixteen, dead without knowing why or how.

Yuanzhen ransacked the medicine stores, first changing the dressing on his eye, then wrapping up a considerable supply to take with him. He also found some food, and wolfed it down ravenously.

Then he sat himself down before a bronze mirror.

The man looking back at him was frightening.

Filthy as a wild thing. His hair had matted into clumps. His beard was a disaster.

He was quiet for a moment, then rose, drew water, bathed properly, scraped away the beard, and changed into a set of coarse cloth clothes — the apprentice’s clothes, slightly too small, but there was nothing to be picky about.

Once he had put himself in order, he stared at his reflection for a long time.

He had once been a man of such elegant bearing. But the person in the mirror now looked hideous, frightening.

Where his eye had been was nothing but a black hollow. The only thing to be grateful for was that the wound had not yet claimed his life.

He sat gazing for quite a while, and then he set about using what the medicine shop had to offer to alter his face.

He knew the Tingwei Bureau’s circulated notice would have told every frontier pass in the north: the fugitive is missing one eye. That was not something any amount of disguise could conceal.

He did what he could. When he was done, he looked considerably older. That was the limit of what was possible.

Before dawn the following morning, he left the medicine shop and wandered a wide circle through the small town, looking for something he could use.

He found it: a security escort company, wagons loaded and ready to depart.

With his skill, slipping into one of the carts without anyone noticing was nothing at all.

The escort company’s people were on familiar terms with the men guarding the town gate. They were waved through without even a cursory check.

He didn’t care where the convoy was headed. He simply needed it to shake off the Tingwei’s people.

He had barely left the city walls when Tao Xiaomi led his force galloping back into town.

Within half an hour, the killing at the medicine shop had caught Tao Xiaomi’s attention.

He had men check the register of everyone who had left the city that day, and fixed his attention on the escort convoy.

Shortly thereafter, Tao Xiaomi led the Junjisi elites riding out of the city at full gallop, chasing down the convoy.

About two hours later, Tao Xiaomi caught up with the wagon train. His men encircled it and searched each vehicle one by one.

On one of the wagons, they found signs of a hidden person. But Yuanzhen was not there.

Tao Xiaomi closed his eyes and ran through his memory. About six or seven li back on the incoming road, there was a market town. If Yuanzhen had meant to slip off the wagon, that was the right place — and that town had roads branching off in other directions.

So Tao Xiaomi immediately turned his force around, took a different fork at the crossroads, and pressed north.

At a roadside stall, Yuanzhen sat eating. He raised his head and watched that column of riders disappear north. The corner of his mouth curled — just slightly — upward.

He paid for his meal, hired a carriage back to the small county town, then hired another carriage heading north.

Once out past the city walls, he killed the driver. He hid the body beside the road, drove the cart into a stretch of forest, abandoned the wagon, and pressed on riding the draught horse.

By this circuitous, furtive route, he somehow — against all odds — reached the northernmost edge of Jizhou: the Yanshan mountain range.

Here stood a border pass. The soldiers guarding it were scrutinising every person who tried to come through with painstaking thoroughness.

Yuanzhen lurked in the shadows and watched for a good while. At last he satisfied himself that he could get out.

The checks were rigorous, yes. But the garrison at the gate numbered only a dozen or so.

He found a place to hide and rest, waiting until the sun was nearly touching the horizon before he emerged.

He mounted up. He drew a long breath. He told himself: this is the last step.

Then he jabbed the draught horse hard on the rump. The horse, startled by the pain, reared and bolted forward.

The soldiers at the gate saw it — and did not stop him. They moved aside to let him through.

Yuanzhen sensed that something was wrong. But he had no other road left.

He charged through into the interior of the pass in one headlong rush — and then he heard the gates close behind him.

In the road ahead, a black carriage stood waiting. No driver.

It was simply there, sitting in the middle of the road, as though it had been waiting for him for quite some time.

—