Almost a day and a half later, Lily was bored. The scenery had changed as they’d approached their destination— from fields to forests of dense pines, boreal woods stretching from horizon to horizon to— the mountains, pushing up from their even journey and scratching at the very skies. The train had been forced to slow after they’d left the station at Aurete, the rail winding through valleys and past mountains after mountain, sheer cliffs above them and tiny rivers twinkling at the bottom of snowed-in valleys below them.

The sights were endlessly fascinating… to anyone except for her. “Avyr, c’mon, do something.” She flopped down against the cat, thoroughly exhausted from another long hour of watching nothing but rugged woods and even more rugged-er mountains, interspersed by the rare village or two clinging to the barest sliver of livability in the snowy valleys. It was beautiful, the scenery— she could not fail to admit, but still. Beautiful or not, there was only so much she could get out of staring at it go by, like a world rendered ephemeral and unreachable from within their little cabin. “I’m bored.”

Avyr prodded her back, voice lilted mockingly as he repeated “Lily, do something.”

She pouted. “C’mon, don’t be like that. You’re bored too, aren’t you?” Avyr didn’t respond, mostly because he was. He was better at hiding it than she was, but it was pretty obvious to those who knew what to look for.

“I’ve traveled before. The boredom is an inevitability. Weren’t you working on some formation or another?”

“I was

, but there’s only so much formation work I can do here. I’m not going to start testing them in this cramped cabin. Can you imagine the sort of damage that could do?”

Avyr snorted softly. “I can, actually. I know exactly what the poor park had to endure in pursuit of your mastery.”

“We don’t bring up the juniper incident.”

“I didn’t bring it up, did I—” he paused as the train rushed into a tunnel, eyes peeled, then grinned— an almost vicious thing, as they exited out into another valley far more expansive than the last. The mountain cliffs still rose up far above them, two faces of towering and frozen stone, but nestled deep within the valley itself, hundreds of buildings lay pressed up against the walls, a city grown between the pillars of heaven. Gayly lit streets all tangled together, so many years of growth all entangling ever further into some beast of strange color, vibrant life. “We’re almost there.”

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“Finally! I thought I was going to go mad, stuck in this cabin with nothing to do!”

Avyr patted her gently, mock-patronizingly. “Don’t worry. The actual journey into the mountains itself is going to be much, much more monotonous than this.” Lily groaned theatrically, and Avyr laughed, and—

It was a good moment, shared between the both of them. Lily enjoyed it, the atmosphere

, that gentle thing… that warmth, in herself, borne not of any cultivation but merely her self. What a strange thing…

Then, she sat up, and started collecting all the things she’d scattered around the cabin. A trip of almost two days had been well enough time for her to get a lot of work done— some musings on the taiji binding formation, a few potential forays into the seemingly impossible task of understanding why a rune affected reality, and some other things too… Mostly, though, she’d focused on how to make a qi gathering array. The easiest version would be to rely on some sort of esoteric heavenly treasure that had an insatiable qi-absorbing force, pulling in all the ambient qi with enormous pressure… but that was just the description of a Sundering-realm elder, and it wasn’t like she could pull one of those out of her pockets. So, instead, she’d been forced to figure out a way to force qi to move against its natural gradient.

That was actually a lot harder than it looked, if her calculations were anything to go by. She wasn’t even quite sure how she’d manage it— her designs seemed to at least hint at its possibility, and she knew that it had to be possible from folklore and all the various documentaries she’d listened to as a kid, but the how of it eluded her.

She gave her notes a final glance through, sighed, and shoved them into her bag with the rest of her supplies. Same with the talismans, and then finally all the other sundry things she’d pulled out over the course of the journey. Shouldering her bag, she took a breath to still her racing nerves, then turned to Avyr, and asked, so simply… “ready?”

The train descended into the city proper, stonework buildings rising up around them, crowned by smoke breathed out unto the golden sunlight— all flashing by, as Avyr met her gaze and nodded. “I have to be.”

He’d pulled on his cute little foot-glove things, though he’d not donned the also-cute stocking things she’d learnt he’d brought in case things got really cold in the mountains. Hopefully they would need them, it’d be great, she’d hold it over him forever.

Then…

At last, the train slid into the station, and they arrived in Chongtian.