Destiny in Cinders

When An Jing returned to the riders' camp, bloodied from head to toe, the refugees around him backed away in fear. The one-eyed leader and scribe, on the other hand, were smiling; they had heard the shriek of pain moments before.

"Not bad," the fox-like scribe said, cunning flashing across his squinted eyes. An Jing noted that he was being studied thoroughly. "You performed far better than we had expected."

"You flatter me, Sir." An Jing saluted them politely. Then, the leader waved two other riders over. They took An Jing into their camp to be bathed and clothed. After changing into new clothes, he returned to the previous area and saw the riders announcing that they were about to leave. They had already gathered enough children for their purposes.

The sun was already setting westward in these twilight hours like a golden crow returning to its mountain nest. The dense, lead-colored clouds of snow glistened with the final traces of waning sunlight as a curtain of dark blue began to descend upon the world stage. An Jing stood by the road along which the refugees camped and looked ahead, seeing the endless stretch of white wasteland, boundless roiling mountains, and a great city by the foot of one of the mountains around which a large river looped. The vastness of the northern frontier was unrivaled in Grand Chen, with the magnificent presence of Brightmont to match it.

However, the trials of the snow calamity had not been kind on them. To An Jing, it seemed like the snow-covered mountains had come alive, much like asuras that cast their titanic shadows over their puny mortal forms, standing so tall that they could support the skies themselves with their massive feet standing firmly on the ground. The lights from the city seemed like countless eyes that indifferently observed the myriad beings going about their daily lives.

Looking down, he saw the parents who had sold off their children waiting by the sides of the road. Some appeared numb, while others tearfully bade their children one final farewell.

"Jing'er..." Madam Shen had recovered some strength from the food and medication. She was waiting there for her son like the many others. Her dried eyes had no tears to shed as they looked at her son's eyes across the frost-covered road. With a hoarse voice, she urged him one final time, "Survive."

No matter how resolute he was, An Jing had to force himself to smile. "Mom, you must survive too! If I am able to leave with my life, I will head south to Riverside, then go to the city of Northauspice near Brokeblade Mountain. Please live on and wait for me, Mother. Wait for me to return!"

He got on the carriage and gave his mother one last look as her lonesome figure gradually faded away into the snowscape. Though An Jing had awakened the Spark at a young age, his mental age wasn't far off from his peers'; even he felt a melancholic pang from separating from his mother.

He took a deep breath to calm himself as he fell into deep thought. His mother was a martialist who just had a restorative meal. Even if she wasn't able to find her way into Brightmont, she should have no issue making it through River Embrace Pass. Brokeblade Mountain was far enough to be relatively untouched by the snow calamity, not to mention being surrounded by rich natural resources. Perhaps she would be able to find some relatives to help her get back on her feet.

Huh... They even have incense in the carriage. Are these people that rich? He supposed it was to be expected, considering that they even bothered to treat sick or injured refugees. They definitely didn't lack resources. When he snapped out of his train of thought, he realized that there were only eight people in his carriage. There was more space in it than he had expected.

Looking around, An Jing noted that most of the children were about his age, boys and girls alike. He even saw the frost-burned girl that the physician had helped treat. It seemed like they had been sorted according to their age. Though one would think that children separated from their parents would cause lots of commotion, all of them here looked down and to the side, mouths shut without a word. They were anything but normal children, having experienced a crisis like never before and forced to flee into the wilderness with their parents. The noisy or restless ones had long died off; some had even been captured and eaten. It was cruel, but it was the unvarnished truth.

The mere recollection of this caused him to grip his fists. It was one thing for the refugees to trade their children with other parents to be eaten, but some of them would even kidnap other people's children and make meals out of them. The tough parents who had struggled to keep their children alive through all the hardship were utterly wrecked when that happened, their curses and cries echoing at length through the wind and frost. Had An Jing not needed to protect his mother, he would've slaughtered those pieces of animal scum himself. It was a shame that they scurried away too quickly. He’d only made it in time to get rid of one.

He snapped out of his recollections and looked around once more. The children in this carriage had more or less experienced the same things he had. Even the brightest and most optimistic of them would be reduced to quiet musing after going through all that. After the initial sorrow of leaving their parents, their minds settled into a default mode of simple operation that only held one thought: Will I be able to eat well during my next meal?

At the very least, they wouldn't be eaten anymore.

He decided to save his strength and began to assess his situation, his rich benefactors in particular. He sniffed the light fragrance in the carriage as he listened to the winds outside it. Then, he tried to recall how the carriage had looked. It was definitely not an ordinary carriage, but rather, a wagon with proper shielding from the elements and optimized for travel across snowy terrain thanks to the sleds. It was capable of transporting many people or supplies. The horses seemed special too; they were probably the Northwest Froststeeds that didn't fear the cold.

There was no way they had constructed a carriage like this in that short a span of time, so it had definitely been prepared much earlier. Had these mysterious people predicted the snow calamity somehow? Was that why they had prepared so many resources, waited for nature to cull the weak, and swooped in to scoop up the rest of the "lucky" survivors?

The more he thought, the more fatigued he felt. Even though he had a really good constitution, he had starved for quite a while. His body probably couldn't quite handle the sudden filling meal he just had.

Wait, this fatigue doesn't feel natural! He suddenly snapped to alertness. No matter how tired he was, there was no way the fatigue would be enough to even interrupt his thoughts. He scanned his surroundings and was shocked to find that the other children had fallen asleep! No wonder they were so quiet! As for the reason... There was definitely something wrong with the incense!

He was still awake, but he was the only one, and even for him, force of will wasn't enough to keep his eyelids raised. In spite of his best efforts, he was dragged into the depths of slumber all the same.

One of the riders said with some awe, "He finally fell asleep. Most people won't last two seconds after breathing in sleep incense, but he lasted a whole fifteen minutes!" 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

"Well, now I know why the lord was so keen on this round of recruitment. The disaster children this time around are far from average."

"Not really," said another rider. "We all thought that the refugees would be nothing but scrap iron, so finding anything good at all was unexpected!"

"Quiet down," said another more experienced rider, shaking his head. "Any of them who aren't able to go through initiation might end up as our colleagues. Those that do, on the other hand... Hehehe..."

He clicked his tongue in deep thought. "I'm sure you all know what happened to those who looked down on talented youngsters or insulted them without thinking. When they become proper martialists..."

He didn't even need to elaborate to strike fear into his fellow riders.

"Fair... fair enough..." The other rider shuddered at the thought and snapped out of his excitement. He assumed his former quiet, emotionally detached mindset.

"Make sure to stay this way," the old rider said. "Don't waste your energy and let's make haste."

For the rest of the night, they traveled without uttering a single word. In the coming days, An Jing and the other children would travel in a sedated state apart from the times they stopped to camp and eat. Perhaps this was done to ensure that the children didn't know how far or where exactly they were being brought to, or maybe it was just easier to manage sedated children. It was probably much easier to let them sleep the whole way than to have to keep an eye on them throughout.

As the journey went on, more and more convoys joined them. Sometimes, convoys would break from the group; the scribe in white left midway with one of them. Even then, the convoy swelled up to twenty carriages, the size of a proper caravan.

An Jing had tried to devise where he was, but despite his best efforts, all he knew was that they were traveling southwest. They were already out of the areas affected by the snow calamity and had switched to riding normal wheeled carriages.

The snow forest of my old home was a cool-temperate coniferous forest, but the one I saw last time was a temperate highland coniferous forest. Maybe we're not fully out of the northern lands yet. Are we at the border between the north and the southwest?

An Jing wasn’t too certain about this. Grand Chen was vast beyond comprehension; all he knew was that it was a kind of magical world, with destiny, martial arts, immortality and the like.

Come to think of it, how do I know terms like "cool-temperate coniferous forest?" What was I in my past life? With such questions in mind, all he could do was make some guesses during the blur of time spent sedated within the carriage.

Some ten days later, their convoy finally arrived at its destination: a manor deep within an ancient forest. White mist filled the gaps in the mountains while nameless streams branched and flowed along the many paths, glistening faintly. The mountain paths seemed to appear older and more decrepit the closer they got to the seemingly uninhabited manor.

Soon, the scenery transformed. Before, they would occasionally see signs of people, but now, the landscape had morphed into one of tall rock boulders surrounded by dense tree growths that layered up to form a labyrinthine forest. The northwestern mountain ranges seemed to have transformed into a gigantic organism, with the small but green trees looking like serpentine scales.

Right before the deepest parts of the forest, the smooth pathway stopped abruptly, as if even the road builders themselves were helpless to traverse these ancient woods. Instead, small, arterial pathways stretched throughout the depths almost as if at a compromise with the forest.

Along the way, the children were gradually starting to realize that the ones that had purchased them weren't from some rich household. Proper households or clans would not have to transport them in such a secretive manner, and even if they had secret manors, they wouldn't be located in the deep wild like this one was.

Everyone in Grand Chen, even three-year-olds, knew that the mountains weren't welcoming places. It was often said that fiends, ancient beasts and eccentric fey creatures lurked within the ominous terrain, capable of causing all sorts of magical mischief.

Across the land, mountains that had been developed and settled were much better off. At most, there was the occasional newly manifested sprite, which the state tolerated as long as it spoke the human tongue, didn't break laws and acted humanely. The same couldn't be said for the frontier regions, where these creatures were far too numerous to account for. Many a traveler ventured into the wilderness only to never return.

When the children learned that they were already deep within the mountains, the expression of the sharper-witted ones turned dark, for they knew that there was no way they would be able to survive and leave this region on their own. Whether the faction that set up base in such an area was a righteous or evil group didn't matter; it was undoubtedly some kind of clandestine organization, and once they were involved with it, they could never return to the world as ordinary people.

Well, not that it mattered what they felt about it. They were already deeply involved.

After a while, the carriages and horses finally came to a stop.

"Alright, get off now. We're home," said a rider.

An Jing breathed out deeply. The moment was finally here. He calmed and readied himself to welcome his future home. He gave the other seven somewhat drowsy children in the same carriage a look before being the first to disembark. The first thing he saw was a strict-looking mountain manor, but before he got a better look, he heard a familiar voice.

"Not bad."

An Jing turned to the speaker: the very same one-eyed man who had led his convoy.

Smiling, the man said, "You seem the most promising among this new batch."