The Long-Legged Sprinting Lizard moved at speed that made terrain irrelevant — ridgelines, cliffsides, and steep drops all treated as minor inconveniences rather than obstacles.

Setting aside the acrophobia issue, Fengji was genuinely good at what he did. His vision was exceptional: crisp resolution on targets a dozen kilometers out, enough to count wingbeats on individual birds at distance. More valuable was the instinct — the moment something wrong registered in the landscape ahead, he was already adjusting course before he’d consciously processed what had triggered him.

His skills in concealment were equally solid. The lizard had its own contribution: instant chromatic adaptation, body and scales shifting to match whatever surface it was moving across, becoming part of the environment while still moving through it.

“He’s decent as a pathfinder,” Qianqian allowed, watching the lizard and its rider disappear into a hillside’s coloring from a kilometer away. “The acrophobia is a remarkable flaw for someone of his cultivation level. I don’t know what to do with that information.”

She and Yueyang were flying at a comfortable altitude, hand in hand, following at an unhurried pace that occasionally left Fengji several dozen kilometers ahead before they felt like catching up. When the landscape offered something worth stopping for — an unusual rock formation, a view that happened to be good — they stopped.

Qianqian had, at some point during the third day, made the pragmatic decision to treat Yueyang’s back as a personal transport platform and was riding it with her cheek pressed between his shoulderblades, eyes closed, occasionally commenting on things she sensed through the six-sense talent without bothering to look at them directly.

“Childhood trauma probably,” Yueyang said, regarding Fengji’s condition. He delivered this with the confidence of a man who considers himself a credentialed observer of the human psyche.

“Is that what caused your particular affliction? Childhood trauma?”

He processed this. “Mine is natural aptitude.”

“You’re proud of it.”

“Consider the alternative. A man without the relevant interest has a ceiling on his life that a man with it doesn’t. He’s reached the end of his journey. Whereas I still have considerable distance to travel.”

“I notice you made this about yourself very quickly.”

“I usually do.”

She tried to pull her hand away. He didn’t let go. She’d known he wouldn’t — she’d been studying him long enough to know the hand-pull was a test that he consistently passed, and she’d stopped being annoyed about it passing and started being mildly satisfied instead, which she was also not going to say out loud.

“Speaking of owing explanations,” Yueyang said, pleasantly, “there was a certain promise made last night about a bath. I waited until I resembled something that had been left to soak. No one appeared.”

“True or false answer?”

“False.”

She blinked. “Who wants to hear a false answer?”

“I find it tells me more about the person giving it. The true answer is whatever it is. The false answer tells me what they’d prefer the truth to be.”

“You are,” Qianqian said, “genuinely unpleasant to argue with.”

“Is the compensation question for tonight still open?”

“Possibly. Conditional on a certain cat not being positioned on certain laps.”

“That was accidental. She came to use the bath because she was exhausted from cultivation. She didn’t know I was already in it. I was simply being helpful with a shoulder massage. Nothing happened.”

“The helpful shoulder massage I observed, from the doorway, for what I estimate was six seconds before I decided not to continue observing, did not particularly look like a shoulder massage.”

“You’re mixing up what you saw with what you imagined seeing.”

“I have six-sense talent,” Qianqian said. “I don’t mix those up.”

He laughed.

She hit him.

He absorbed it comfortably and kept flying.

“And I heard the conversation,” she added, after a pause. “The whispering. About using a suitable moment to help with a certain oblivious princess.”

Yueyang felt the temperature of the conversation shift slightly.

“The Drunken Cat Imperial Lady wasn’t acting against you. She was—”

“I know she wasn’t acting against me. She cares about me, which is somehow worse, because it means she genuinely thinks this arrangement would make me happy.” Qianqian gave him a look that contained too many things to catalog quickly. “And the most infuriating part is that she might not be wrong, which I am absolutely not admitting to you, and I’m going to hit you again if you smile.”

He did not smile with his mouth.

“How did you manage to take someone who was originally very protective of all of us,” Qianqian continued, with resigned exasperation, “and turn her into a co-conspirator?”

“Shared values.”

She punched him off his flight path.

He caught himself, came back, and reached for her hand again. She let him take it.

“You’re absolutely insufferable,” she said, which was as close as she was going to get to the thing she was actually saying.

Fengji had noticed, over three days of travel, that his employers defied reasonable assessment.

He could push the lizard to what was functionally top speed — the animal, well-fed for the first time in months, had recovered to something close to its best — and they would fall behind by fifty kilometers. Then one of them would transit, and they were alongside him again. No preparation, no visible effort. Just a shift in position, across distances that should have been meaningful constraints.

The spatial interference in Tianhua was real and well-documented. The long war had done things to the ambient energy of the domain, and the distortions accumulated. Precise long-range transit in this environment was something that most country-level powers struggled with. Fifty kilometers, through that interference, to an exact location?

He was genuinely uncertain what category of cultivator he had signed on with.

The Long-Legged Sprinting Lizard made a sound it didn’t usually make.

Low, sharp, directed forward. Its head came up, then turned fractionally, nostrils active.

Fengji read it immediately. The lizard had caught something in the air that registered as threat — not animal threat, human threat, with the specific quality that came from cultivated killing intent rather than predator instinct.

He reined in and waited.

“What is it?” Yueyang and Qianqian arrived alongside him in the way they arrived everywhere, without apparent transition from where they’d been.

“Something ahead. It smelled something that worries it — cultivator-level killing intent, probably Sky-rank. Can’t see anything yet.”

Qianqian was quiet for a moment, head tilted slightly.

“Close to a thousand people moving in this direction. Two of them carrying that killing intent you’re describing — the others feel different. Not hostile in the same way.” She frowned. “There’s something strange about the composition. Mixed energies.”

Fengji stared at her.

He had the best eyes of anyone he’d personally encountered. He couldn’t see anything in that direction. She was identifying individual energy signatures at that distance, in the middle of Tianhua’s notoriously polluted spatial environment, without apparently doing anything visible.

“Are you—” He stopped. “What tribe are you? Are you from the Heavenly Eye people?”

“I don’t have a third eye,” Qianqian said, not unkindly. “It’s something else. Don’t worry about it.”

Yueyang had been extending his own awareness more carefully. “There’s a weak presence and a violent presence. They’re tangled together somehow. I can’t get a clear reading at this range without fully expanding my Sovereign awareness, and I don’t want to do that unnecessarily.” He paused. “There’s crying.”

“I heard it,” Qianqian said. “Women and children.”

Fengji turned to look at the distance, then back at them.

He could hear nothing. He could see nothing. He had exceptionally acute senses, and he had nothing.

Dozens of kilometers. She was hearing women and children crying dozens of kilometers away, describing it as casually as one would note that it looked like rain.

“I’m a very mediocre addition to this group,” he said, mostly to himself.

Yueyang and Qianqian were already accelerating, still hand in hand, moving toward the sound she could hear and he couldn’t see.

Fengji urged the lizard forward and concentrated on keeping up.