Dao of the Deal

They made good time on the way to Jiulu City, taking only ten days on the road. Muchen arranged for an overnight stay so he could take care of a bit of business while he was there.

Now that his business was starting operations, he felt safe shelling out a bit of silver to have a craftsman travel to Li Village and set up a small brickwork by Muchen's section of the river. He didn't mind using rammed earth construction to get things up and running quickly, but for a factory building meant to stand the test of time he wanted proper brick walls.

He also commissioned the construction of a water wheel from a workshop. If all went according to plan, it would be complete by the time they returned to Jiulu City. Muchen would accompany it along with a small team from the workshop on the trip back to Li Village and and work with them to build his electrical mill.

With that done, it was time to set out on their journey away from civilization. As they continued moving north from Jiulu City, the forest grew deeper and darker with every mile traveled. The population dropped off quickly, to the point that Muchen and Xinyi had to start camping only a few days out of Jiulu City. They passed one small farming village every day or two.

Muchen had no memory of ever traveling so far north. To already see such nearly untamed wilds made him question if the chaos of the Northern Wastes was really so well contained as the official story would have it.

He broached the topic with Xinyi one evening as they sat around the campfire, evening exercise and cultivation complete.

"Have you ever visited the northern wasteland?"

She took her time before responding. "I visited the northern provinces."

Muchen raised an eyebrow. The histories he remembered claimed that the borders of the Qianzhan Empire had stood in more or less the same place for centuries. "What happened?"

Again, Xinyi sat in silence for a moment. Muchen turned his attention to the campfire, watching it steadily crackle away. If Xinyi didn't want to answer his question, he wouldn't get anywhere by badgering her.

Finally, she sighed. "I suppose there's no harm in explaining."

Muchen leaned forward. It wasn't every day that he got to hear a first hand account of ancient events.

"This world wasn't alway so impoverished and weak," Xinyi said. "Before, well, before everything, it was fairly average as far as such things went. A healthy number of cultivators ascended to the True Immortal stage and beyond. There was even a bit of trade and travel between neighboring worlds."

"What happened?" Muchen asked.

"An attack. By, well, speaking their name still isn't wise," Xinyi said, turning her eyes to the sky. She seemed to be looking at something that was just out of Muchen's view. "Think of them as a plague of locusts, on a size and scale to overwhelm an army of immortals."

Muchen sucked in a breath. "How is the Qianzhan Continent still standing, then?"

"Like I said, this world didn't used to be so weak," Xinyi said. "It also wasn't the main target of the scourge. In the larger scheme of things, it was nothing more than a sideshow."

"It was a valiant effort, a glorious battle," Xinyi continued. "In the end, though, the result was inevitable. There was a divide in opinion at the highest levels. Some wanted to try to cut off access to the Qianzhan Continent and turn the world into a fortress. I was with those who wanted to fight our way out and slaughter our way through to a safer world."

"The defenders would miss the fighting strength of those who left, but the fighting retreat would ease the pressure for a time. Both sides could separate and pursue their own strategy," Xinyi said. "We held a farewell banquet on the eve of battle. After that... well, I was only dimly aware of what happened while I was sealed."

Muchen could guess at what she was leaving unsaid. While the fighting retreat would have relieved the pressure, those who stayed behind would naturally prefer to have comrades who would stick with them and fight to the bitter end. When voluntary cooperation proved impossible, they must have decided to use any means necessary to add more power to their defenses, willing or not.

It was a despicable act. Of course, with the fate of the whole world at stake, it was easy to think that the end justified the means.

"If they built a fortress," Muchen said, "then what happened in the Northern Wastes?"

The plan to fortify the Qianzhan Continent had obviously worked to some extent. Even if the cultivators weren't as powerful as they used to be, at least the continent wasn't being overrun by alien invaders. Or, at least there was space for ordinary people to live, untroubled by any invasion force.

"There's no perfect defense," Xinyi said. "In order to protect the core, they were willing to sacrifice honor and dignity, let alone some territory at the fringes of civilization."

Muchen frowned. "Then why did the invaders stop at the border?"

If the invasion force was as powerful as they seemed—enough to make the normally irrepressible Xinyi avoid speaking their name out loud—then Muchen figured defense should be an all or nothing affair. If there was no magical boundary keeping the invaders off of the Qianzhan Continent, he didn't see why they would show any respect for natural borders.

"A war on this scale isn't just about the clash of armies," Xinyi said. "The enemy wants to transform this world into their home, so they enjoy the support of the dao and all of the natural spiritual energy. Without that, the small fry that slip through the dimensional cracks are easy enough to clean up."

It was a relief to know that the locals enjoyed an overwhelming home field advantage, at least on the lands of the Qianzhan Empire. On the other hand, Muchen didn't like the implications.

"So the wastes would be hostile to normal human life?" Muchen asked.

"Exactly," Xinyi said, huffing in frustration. "I told those fools that their plan meant nothing but a slow death."

Muchen cast his mind back to the dim memories of the geography lessons he'd learned from old Wangpai. He had mostly focused on learning the practical details of useful trade routes, rather than any kind of serious examination of the movement of the border over time. The Qianzhan Empire itself obviously wouldn't publicize that kind of information. Now that Muchen thought about it, though, they had occasionally sold some goods "from the north" when he was a child, but such things had vanished by the time he was a teenager. It could have just been a coincidence.

If the Qianzhan Empire's border was in a process of slow, inevitable retreat... well, Muchen didn't consider himself a patriot, but he did live in the Qianzhan Empire at the end of the day. If the whole world was overrun by cultivating locusts, there was no reason to think that they would spare him.

"How long can the Empire hold out?" Muchen asked.

The initial battle Xinyi described had taken place hundreds or thousands of years ago. There was still plenty of land left in the Qianzhan Empire even now. Even if those long ago defenders hadn't managed to do anything but buy time, they had at least managed to buy quite a bit of it.

If the border was going to continue to roll back at a pace of a few feet per year, Muchen could toss the issue to the back of his mind and focus on building up his personal strength. He couldn't help but remember the old joke, though. How do bankruptcies happen? Slowly, then all at once.

If the Empire was facing some kind of imminent collapse, well, Muchen might still have to focus on building up his own strength as quickly as possible, but he also wouldn't mind getting a head start on fleeing to a safe haven, if such a thing would even exist. Even after buying Flower Mountain, he had enough silver left over to start over somewhere else if he absolutely had to.

"I don't know," Xinyi said. "I'll have to see the situation with my own eyes. I thought I understood the defenses those old bastards were going to put up, but obviously they held back some of their plans."

It was a good thing they were already on their way to the border. In a way, it was a double happiness: they had a chance to not only make Xinyi stronger but also gather vital information. Still, considering the overall context it was hard to be too cheerful.

"Could you still break through the encirclement and flee to safety?" Muchen asked. If the Qianzhan Empire was doomed, he ought to start working on a backup plan.

"At full strength? Of course," Xinyi said, then frowned. "Probably. Maybe. It depends on how the restriction was set up, and what happened after the fighting died down."

Muchen could imagine that breaking out through whatever defenses had been set up would be a challenging endeavor. For that matter, it probably wouldn't do any favors to the Qianzhan Continent to be put through such a thing. And of course it was impossible to predict the results of a battle without knowing what kind of enemy forces were in the vicinity.

"How strong would I have to be in order to tag along?" Muchen asked. He couldn't expect Xinyi to build him a life raft, but at the very least he could try to improve himself so that he could swim along in her wake as she fought through the sharks gathered outside.

Xinyi laughed.

Muchen turned his attention to the campfire and tried not to take it personally.

A moment later Xinyi finally quieted down. "Ah, you were serious?"

Muchen held her gaze, doing his best to keep his emotions on an even keel.

"To survive in the space between... if you formed your Nascent Soul, it might be possible," Xinyi said. "If you bring out the potential of the Storm Dragon scripture and lay your hands on some decent defensive treasures."

As far as Muchen knew, the Nascent Soul cultivators on the Qianzhan Continent could be counted on the fingers of one hand, with room to spare. There might be another handful who spent all of their time in closed door cultivation, trying to breach the gates of true immortality, but that kind of thing was impossible to verify.

Any sect that ever boasted a Nascent Soul cultivator among its ranks would reap great benefits for every day the outside world believed their great elder was even possibly alive. Thus, old cultivators never died. They just went into secluded cultivation and never came out.

Progress at that level of cultivation was measured in terms of decades. Planning to reach the Nascent Soul stage wasn't any kind of realistic escape plan. Of course, the Qianzhan Continent certainly didn't look to be in danger of being overrun in the next few years. And Muchen's cultivation progress had been fairly brisk so far, though it was hard to extrapolate to the higher levels when he hadn't even started building his foundation.

He'd probably be better served trying to extend the time that the Qianzhan Continent had left, rather than trying to build up the strength to run away. At least that approach would see others standing beside him. As much as cultivators fought and bickered with each other, they'd all lose if the world was overrun. Presumably, at the upper levels the disparate sects all banded together to protect the Qianzhan Continent.

Although, if that were true, it was strange that they didn't publicize such efforts. Propaganda had been part and parcel of every war that Muchen had ever heard of. The people of the Qianzhan Empire might not have the capability to produce propaganda films, but they were more than capable of making posters exhorting the citizens to band together and fight off extra-planar invaders.

Maybe it was just that mortals and lower level cultivators didn't have anything to contribute to a war waged at such a scale. There wouldn't be any need to get the populace worked up about a war they couldn't affect. The government wouldn't want to rule over a populace constantly caught up in end-of-days panic.

Ultimately, such things were still well above Muchen's pay grade. Someday, that would change. Someday he'd have the cultivation base—not to mention the wealth and resources—to sit at the table and contribute to the war effort. For now, he needed to focus on making sure he lived long enough to at least be alive when the world came to an end.

A few days later, when Muchen first laid eyes on Jiaoqu Town, he knew he had to revise his plans for the future. Rather than trying to survive until the end of the world, he needed to focus on surviving until he made it back to Li Village.