The train came just on time— as they only expected, sailing smoothly into the station with little ceremony. There was no great plume of steam or hissing brakes, or much of anything, actually— merely a smooth slide down the tracks and then… there it was. The train that would take them all the way to Chongtian, and their gateway to even further beyond.

The crowd around them shifted and then spilled forward the moment the doors opened, pushing past the passengers escaping the train’s confines. For the first few seconds it was a mad jumble of people and stuff, suitcases and backpacks and voluminous robes that couldn’t not get underfoot. Someone was shouting. Actually, Lily was pretty sure a lot of people were shouting, and the whole thing was a bewildering medley of stuff all constantly going on around them.

Lily took shameless advantage of Avyr to push their way through the crowd— not the way his mere presence tended to make people shy back, though there certainly was that, but also the way that his Shedding cultivation made him all but impossible for most of the mortals around them to push him around. They managed to get onto the train with only a little bit of trouble, and then from there, other than the occasional cultivator who could push past Avyr, it wasn’t that difficult to get to their train car.

She slumped onto her seat with a sigh the moment she could, the door snapping shut behind them with a click and a sudden, blessed silence. “I forgot how annoying big crowds could be.” She’d been excited enough to put that to the side in her planning but… “I can’t wait until we’re in Foundation Establishment. Think of it. Flying swords, and never having to use public transportation ever again!”

Avyr snorted softly as he laid down on his side of the cabin, indolently sprawled out across the entire bench. “I don’t know if I’ll even be able to use a flying sword. My architecture isn’t particularly built for that sort of activity.”

“You’ll figure out out, I’m sure.” She hummed thoughtfully, leaning back herself. “Maybe you just need an extra big sword? Then you could stand on the whole thing at once?”

“Go back to the drawing board.” Fine! Scowling playfully at her friend, she grabbed her notebook and pen, and started sketching out the various runeworks she’d need to make a flying sword. Annoyingly, she kept running into qi density issues, and if she tried to add a densification function she kept running into qi volume and throughput issues, and so on and which… She sighed, managing to pique Avyr’s interest. “Are you well?”

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“I’m fine. I just don’t think I can make a flying sword any time soon. At least not until we’re in Foundation Establishment.”

For a few long moments Avyr stared at her unblinkingly— until, suddenly, he burst into laughter. “That was what you were so worried about? You just spent half an hour staring at your notebook like it personally offended you, and it was only to figure out an obvious truism?”

She chuckled a bit herself. “In retrospect, I should’ve expected

that if people could make better flying swords for lower-step cultivators, I would have heard about it before. It was probably a bit arrogant to think that I could think of something better so quickly…” wisely, perhaps, Avyr didn’t respond to that, and she just huffed and returned to her scribblings—

A knock echoed through the cabin, before it opened to reveal the conductor— who flinched back at seeing Avyr just laid out there. “Miss…” he drew in a stiff breath, and gulped, only his nervous gaze betraying his fear. “I need to see your ticket.”

“Tickets,” Avyr stressed with a low mewl, fishing out his own from one of his bags. Lily presented hers too, trying not to be too satisfied with the bewildered surprise on the conductor’s face. She supposed anyone who worked on this train wouldn’t have seen many of the cat’s kind before… He punched their tickets, then handed them back and fled as fast as he could.

Avyr and Lily looked at each other, a faint spark of concern shared… before, together, they laughed. It had been a little funny…

Not more than twenty minutes later, the train lurched, and they set off. The station fell away behind them, its long lines vast platforms all bleeding together, a confluence of cold iron and darkness, pressing in tight around them. And the sound! Not just of their train rushing through the vast framework that pierced the gate, but all the others, an almost incomprehensibly loud roar of freight trains and cars and pipes and wires, and so much closer and closer until—

They passed through the gate—

She couldn’t feel it, but she could hear— the way the sound started to fade all but immediately, roads pulling away and pipes digging into the ground, and rails slowly spreading out, a blooming fan of long iron spars flung out in every direction. The city beyond the city, East Saffron outside East Saffron, spread out too— a sprawl of messy buildings, cheaply built housing and industrial buildings and— everything that could possibly take advantage of being built outside of the city itself sprawled out away from the city walls.