Chapter 93: Goldriver
Ten days after the wyvern encounter, the caravan finally saw Goldriver.
Nobody cheered.
Under ordinary circumstances, Yun Che suspected they would have. After nearly a month on the road, after forests, mountain passes, villages, Rivergate, thunderstorms, bandits, beasts, sect cultivators and more problems than Yun Che cared to count, the first sight of their destination should have brought shouting and laughter. Instead, the Wolf Cavalry simply slowed as the road climbed the final hill, and a tired silence settled over the group as one of the great cities of the Cangyun Kingdom spread beneath them. They had spent the last ten days moving with an urgency that bordered on desperation. Elder Ruan had shortened rests, changed routes whenever possible and refused every unnecessary stop. The damaged carriages had been repaired enough to survive the journey rather than restored properly, and everyone had learned to sleep whenever the opportunity presented itself. Nobody complained. After meeting the wyvern, a hard bed, cold meal or long day on the road had stopped feeling like genuine problems. They simply wanted walls around them again.
Goldriver provided plenty of walls.
The city occupied a vast stretch of land between two enormous rivers, one approaching from the northwest and the other flowing past the southeastern side before continuing toward distant provinces. Centuries ago, someone had apparently looked at those rivers and decided that going around the city was an unacceptable waste of time. The result was a network of enormous canals cut directly through Goldriver, connecting one waterway to the other and turning the metropolis into a living bridge between two halves of the kingdom. Ships did not merely arrive at Goldriver. They passed through it. Broad commercial canals could accommodate vessels carrying hundreds of tons of cargo, while smaller waterways split from them like veins, winding between districts until streets and canals became so thoroughly intertwined that Yun Che stopped trying to determine where one ended and the other began.
From the hill, Goldriver glittered beneath the afternoon sun.
Thousands of buildings crowded its islands and banks, rising from pale stone foundations reinforced against centuries of water. Bridges arched across the canals in every direction—stone bridges, wooden bridges, iron bridges, suspended bridges and several strange movable constructions whose central sections could be lifted to allow ships through. Towers rose above tiled rooftops. Merchant banners fluttered from warehouses large enough to swallow Mistforge's market square. Cranes turned slowly beside the docks, lifting crates, beast carcasses, ore containers and bundles of timber from ships. Waterwheels churned along industrial channels. Formation lights shone beneath the surface to mark shipping lanes. Long passenger boats slipped beneath bridges while tiny personal craft darted around them with the confidence of locals who had apparently decided collisions were something that happened only to tourists.
Lin Xia stared.
"So that's Goldriver."
Bao Kun grunted tiredly. "Unfortunately."
She glanced at him.
Bao stared suspiciously at the thousands of boats below.
"I remember."
Despite everything, Yun Che smiled.
It was the first city on their journey that made Rivergate look provincial.
Even the gate through which they entered seemed designed around commerce rather than defense alone. The land road passed beneath an enormous fortified arch while a canal entered beside it through a separate water gate. Guards inspected wagons on one side while customs officials boarded arriving vessels on the other. Merchant caravans crowded into marked lanes. Porters shouted numbers. Boatmen called destinations. Cultivators flew overhead along designated routes while several enormous aquatic beasts pulled barges through the water beneath them. Yun Che saw humans, Waterfolk, feathered races, scaled races and several beings he could not identify at all. One family simply jumped from a passenger boat into the canal and swam toward their home rather than waiting for the vessel to dock.
For perhaps ten seconds, Yun Che forgot everything else.
Then something crashed behind him.
He spun immediately.
His hand was already raised before his mind caught up.
Nothing.
A porter had dropped a crate.
The man cursed, another worker laughed at him, and the crowd flowed onward.
Yun Che slowly lowered his hand.
Lin Xia had noticed.
She did not say anything.
Neither did Lei Zhenyu.
That had become common over the last ten days. Yun Che was better. Considerably better, in fact. He slept normally most nights now. He could eat without examining every bite first. He no longer jumped whenever someone entered a room unexpectedly. But better was not the same thing as before. His eyes moved constantly. Rooftop. Canal. Alley. Bridge. Cultivator. Beast. Window. Another cultivator. A group standing too close to the road. Someone reaching inside his coat. A bird suddenly taking flight. He had become aware of the habit after the third day and had tried to stop it. That had lasted perhaps half an hour. Somewhere beneath conscious thought, his mind had apparently decided that the price of not checking something was death.
So he checked.
Again and again.
Goldriver, unfortunately, contained far too many things to check.
Lin Xia rode beside him and looked at completely different things. Her attention jumped between clothing shops, bridge mechanisms, decorated rain capes, boats, runes carved into canal walls and several enormous advertisements projected above merchant buildings. Every few minutes she pulled out her notebook and wrote something down. Lei Zhenyu, meanwhile, displayed an almost impressive indifference toward one of the greatest cities in the kingdom. He glanced at the canals. He looked at a ship. He acknowledged an elegant formation-powered drawbridge with a nod.
Then a swordsman passed them on the opposite side of the street.
Lei's head turned immediately.
Yun Che caught him watching the man's footwork.
"You really don't care about the city, do you?"
"It is well constructed."
"That's your opinion of all this?"
Lei considered the question seriously.
"There are many skilled people here."
Lin Xia laughed.
That, apparently, was high praise.
The Azure Wolf Consortium occupied an entire commercial compound near one of Goldriver's central canals, and Yun Che finally understood why Jin Wei had always spoken about his family's business with such confidence. Calling it a merchant office was like calling the Heavenly Sunfire Tree a particularly successful plant. A blue-and-silver wolf emblem hung above enormous gates wide enough for three loaded wagons to enter side by side. Beyond them lay warehouses, offices, workshops, beast stables, private docks, guest residences and storage yards divided according to cargo type. Barges bearing the same wolf emblem waited along the canal, while workers in blue uniforms moved with the frightening efficiency of people who knew precisely how expensive every minute of delay could become.
The caravan had barely entered before the place swallowed it.
Clerks appeared with manifests. Warehouse supervisors began inspecting seals. Healers checked the remaining Mountain Chargers and injured guards. Cargo was counted, sorted and moved. Damaged equipment went toward workshops. The surviving carriages were taken away for repairs. Even the wreckage they had stubbornly carried from the wyvern attack was catalogued rather than thrown aside.
Jin Wei transformed the moment they entered.
The cheerful merchant's son who spent half his time annoying Yun Che vanished, replaced by someone who knew people's names, answered questions quickly, checked documents without being asked and apparently understood exactly which departments needed to receive which cargo. Yun Che watched him direct three workers toward a damaged shipment, correct a clerk's destination record and then disappear into the administrative building with Elder Ruan and Elder Liang.
Reports had to be made.
Not only about the lost cargo.
The Stormcrest Thunder Tiger. The sect confrontation. The warrants. The wyvern attack. The injured personnel. Everything that had turned what should have been a difficult but ordinary escort mission into something considerably worse.
Yun Che knew his name would appear frequently.
That thought did not help his mood.
Shen Rui and Bao Kun remained with them, but neither suggested sightseeing. Ten days earlier, Bao would probably have dragged them toward the docks simply to prove that he had recovered from Rivergate's ships. Now he merely helped them settle into the Consortium's guest quarters. Yun Che's legal situation had to be resolved before anyone began wandering casually through Goldriver. They were no longer being treated as demonic cultivators, thankfully. Reports from witnesses had clarified what had happened at the stormlands: two young cultivators had interfered with a hunt without understanding the full circumstances and had helped a dangerous beast escape. Stupid was considerably better than demonic.
It was not, however, the same as innocent.
For once, Yun Che did not mind being confined somewhere.
He wanted a room.
A chair.
A workbench, preferably.
And several days during which nothing attempted to kill him.
Lin Xia apparently felt much the same. Once they had washed, eaten and changed into clean clothes, she sat beside an open window overlooking one of the smaller canals and began writing to her father. Yun Che could hear her occasionally muttering as she decided what should and should not make it into the letter.
He understood the problem.
His own blank page sat before him.
Dear Mother, Father and Brother,
Yun Che stared at those words for a long time.
How exactly did one summarize the last month without causing Yun Jian to personally travel across half the kingdom to drag him home by the ear?
The journey has been educational. I was nearly executed by several sects, psychologically destabilized by an Abyss Seed, almost killed by a wyvern, suffered a mental collapse and destroyed most of the equipment Father helped me build.
No.
Definitely not.
He started again.
He wrote about Rivergate. The canals. The strange food. The Waterfolk. He mentioned meeting Lei Zhenyu and described their duels without explaining quite how badly the first had gone. He told them that Lin Xia's rune work had improved tremendously and that Jin Wei remained Jin Wei, which his family would understand perfectly. He described Goldriver and promised to send sketches once he had explored it properly.
The dangerous parts became considerably smaller.
There had been a difficult beast encounter.
Some equipment had been damaged.
The caravan had needed to change its route.
Everyone was now safe.
All technically true.
Yun Che stared guiltily at the page.
"I've become my parents."
Lin Xia looked up from her own letter.
"What?"
"Nothing."
He folded the letter before honesty could ruin everything.
A flutter of blue light passed his shoulder.
Yun Che looked up.
Mirage landed on the edge of the table.
Both wings were whole again.
Not illusion-whole. Actually whole.
He knew because she had finally stopped hiding the injury two days earlier, and he had watched the torn portion slowly regenerate under medicine, rest and Whisper's careful treatment. She stretched one wing toward the sunlight and turned it slightly, inspecting herself from three different angles.
Perfect.
Yun Che smiled.
"You've checked them seventeen times today."
Recovery must be inspected.
"Of course."
And admired.
"Naturally."
That was closer to the Mirage he knew.
The relief he felt at hearing it was embarrassingly strong.
Amon had recovered faster. Whisper had recovered physically as well, although Yun Che had begun noticing weaknesses he had previously ignored. Mirage was fragile. Extremely fragile. Her illusions made her difficult to hit, but when something actually struck her, she had little protection. Whisper was stranger; many physical attacks passed through his spirit-like body, yet elemental techniques could injure him badly. Amon was durable compared with either of them, but the wyvern encounter had demonstrated how meaningless ordinary durability became when the gap in bloodline and cultivation grew large enough.
They needed equipment.
All three of them.
Which brought Yun Che to his newest problem.
Money.
Or rather, the impressive absence of it.
Yun Che opened the storage pouch at his waist and looked at the small fortune he did not possess.
His latest creation had devoured it.
He still had not settled on a formal classification for the weapon system, but he had finally chosen a name:
Myriad Arsenal.
Two thousand five hundred small enchanted metal plates currently formed a dark segmented cloak over the stand beside his repaired white-and-gold armor. Individually they were unimpressive. Together, they could become shields, blades, chains, wires, lances, barriers, a rifle frame and dozens of other structures Yun Che had only begun testing. Half carried lightning, durability and attraction runes. The rest carried weight, barrier and attraction. With sufficient Ki and concentration, the entire system flowed from one configuration into another.
It was the most versatile thing he had ever built.
It was also nowhere near finished.
His original plan called for far more pieces. Better ores. Improved runes. Replacement components. Dedicated formations. A method for recovering scattered plates if his control broke. He wanted specialized pieces for Amon, Mirage and Whisper as well.
And he was already in debt.
A great deal of debt.
Yun Che looked at the Myriad Arsenal.
It looked expensive.
Mostly because it was.
He sighed.
"I need a job."
Lin Xia did not look up.
"You needed a job before you spent all your money."
"I had a job."
"You left it to travel."
"I was pursuing personal development."
"You were unemployed."
Yun Che looked offended.
Mirage nodded sagely.
She is correct.
"Nobody asked you."
For a few seconds, the room almost felt like Mistforge.
Then Yun Che's gaze wandered toward the window.
Boats moved along the canal below. Merchants shouted from opposite banks. Somewhere farther away, bells announced the passage of a large ship through one of the central waterways. Goldriver waited beyond the Consortium walls—enormous, unfamiliar and filled with possibilities.
A month ago, that thought would have excited him.
Now it made something tighten quietly inside his chest.
He had wanted to travel.
That had been the entire point.
His first life had disappeared without warning, leaving behind a collection of ordinary regrets. Places he had never visited. Things he had postponed. Relationships he had never built. Experiences sacrificed to the comforting lie that there would always be another year. When this life gave him another chance, he had promised himself he would not repeat that mistake. He would see the world. Meet people. Build impossible things. Learn. Explore. Live.
Yet now, when he imagined leaving Goldriver and walking onto another unknown road, he did not feel excitement.
He felt tired.
And afraid.
Yun Che hated admitting that.
For once, however, he did not immediately try to argue himself out of it.
Perhaps he didn't have to.
He had reached Goldriver.
He had survived.
There was no rule saying that seeing the world meant he had to cross it without stopping.
He could remain here for a while. Work. Pay his debts. Repair what had been lost. Improve the Myriad Arsenal. Build protection for Mirage and Whisper. Arm Amon. Study the techniques that had failed him. Let his mind recover instead of treating fear like another enemy that had to be defeated before sunset.
Maybe eventually he would look at the road again and feel curiosity instead of dread.
Until then, Goldriver was enormous.
There were worse places to stop.
Yun Che leaned back and listened to the water moving through the canals below.
For nearly thirty days, every horizon had meant another destination.
For now, he was content not to have one.