Chapter 13
Chapter 13: The Mountain Forest
Grandpa Ling’s face tightened when he saw the brand.
Pain flickered there—then calculation.
He studied the mark as if memorizing every line. Then he looked at Jin Sui.
“You two go ahead,” he said. “I’ll handle this.”
He carried small tools used by Daoists—pigment, blades, things meant for ritual and trickery. He had what he needed.
Jin An was a clever child. One glance at the corpse, and he understood what Grandpa Ling intended.
He stripped off his Daoist robe, then pulled off his inner clothes and handed them over.
“If he dies in my place… then let him at least have clothes.”
The corpse’s upper body was bare. Someone had stripped it after death.
Jin Sui grabbed Jin An’s hand and pulled him away. She didn’t want him watching.
She didn’t want to watch either.
No one came.
Fifteen minutes later, Grandpa Ling appeared, breath quick, hands steady.
“Move,” he said. “If they don’t discover the body for even one more day, it buys us enough time to slip through.”
They pushed into the dark, stumbling through brush and thorns.
There was no path—only the idea of a direction.
Clothes snagged on brambles. Feet slid into gullies. More than once, Jin Sui caught Grandpa Ling before he could fall.
From deeper in the forest came the roar of something hungry.
Jin Sui made the decision.
“Grandpa. We hide until dawn. Too many beasts in these mountains. If we blunder into a tiger’s den, we’ll die faster than any soldier can catch us.”
He nodded.
This time he didn’t bother with divination. He found a sheltered rock wall by experience, tucked into the lee of stone.
The three of them squeezed behind it.
No fire.
Fire meant smoke.
Smoke meant soldiers.
With no blanket, Grandpa Ling took off his outer robe and wrapped it around Jin An. He pulled the boy against his chest and let him sleep.
Jin Sui couldn’t care anymore whether Grandpa Ling suspected her. She turned her back on them.
“I’ll look nearby for dry grass,” she said.
Grandpa Ling’s voice went sharp.
“Don’t go far.”
Jin Sui stepped just beyond the rock wall, pressed her palm, and let that familiar heat wash through her.
Inside the pocket-space laboratory, she moved fast—no time for fear, no time for hesitation. She grabbed a thick blanket from her rest room and rolled up a bedsheet too. She took three flat cakes, two bottles of sweet drink, and—after a moment’s thought—a knife she could use as a weapon.
Then she returned.
Grandpa Ling ran his fingers over the clean, warm fabric, then looked at Jin Sui. A small, strained chuckle escaped him.
“Lucky,” he said, and there was something in his eyes Jin Sui couldn’t name.
He waved her in.
“Come. Sleep while you can. At dawn we move.”
Jin Sui laid the bedsheet on the ground and sat against the rock wall beside Jin An.
She didn’t sleep.
She couldn’t.
Madam Jiang’s last gaze kept flashing behind her eyes. The promise kept tightening around her throat.
Clearing Ling Chao’s name—how?
Against the imperial family?
But then she looked at Grandpa Ling’s white hair and Jin An’s small face, still smudged with dirt and grief.
What choice did she have?
She’d taken this body.
She’d taken its life.
Now she carried its debts.
At least she had the pocket-space laboratory.
At least she had something.
Dawn came early in the fourth month, but the dew was heavy. By first light, the blanket was damp.
Grandpa Ling woke first. He checked Jin An—touched his head, his neck, making sure the boy wasn’t feverish.
Then he looked at Jin Sui.
He stared for a long moment as if wrestling with a thought.
Then something in him settled. The wary edge softened.
Only love remained.
He gently nudged Jin Sui.
“Girl. Wake.”
There was a fierce, sudden ache in her chest for her old world.
No time.
They needed distance—out of Luo City’s territory, out of the soldiers’ reach.
Before moving, they had to eat.
They gathered dry branches and sparked a small flame. Grandpa Ling split a bamboo tube to boil water. Jin Sui skewered the flat cakes on a twig and toasted them over the fire.
The smell woke Jin An.
He blinked at the blanket on his body, the bedsheet under him, the steaming food in Jin Sui’s hand.
Then he stared at her, stunned.
“Where did all this come from?”
Grandpa Ling answered smoothly.
“Someone hid here before. They left it behind.”
Jin Sui lifted the cake and added quickly, “And this—we bought it in town before. We just didn’t dare eat it.”
She felt guilty as she glanced at Grandpa Ling.
He accepted the lie too easily.
Or maybe he chose to.
Grandpa Ling folded the blanket into a neat square, then tied it into a bundle with the bedsheet.
“We keep this,” he said. “If the three of us don’t freeze to death out here, it’ll be because of this.”
Jin Sui had planned to stash it in her pocket space and pull it out later. Instead, she swallowed the extra trouble and carried it.
She softened an energy bar in the heat and spread it over the cake, the sweet fat seeping into the bread. With the bamboo-scented sweet drink, the three of them ate until their stomachs stopped clawing at them.
After finding Jin An, Grandpa Ling’s constant tension loosened. Even stranded in the wilderness, he looked less frantic.
He even cut bamboo to make simple hunting tools, smiling wryly.
“You two are too thin. Pastries and cakes won’t do. We need meat.”
When the fog thinned, the mountain route became clearer. Easier, but still slow.
In the deep mountains they had to watch for snakes and insects.
Jin Sui divided insect repellent into three portions, wrapped each in cloth, and hung them at their waists.
They found fruit trees along the way. Grandpa Ling showed them what to pick and what to avoid.
“If birds eat it, you can try it. If birds won’t touch it, don’t. That’s poison.”
Spring made the mountains rich with life.
Even so, they didn’t catch a single rabbit or wild chicken. They did find gnawed carcasses of large herbivores—sign that bigger predators were close.
They moved on fast.
They caught fish in streams. Jin An climbed trees for bird eggs. Jin Sui gathered wild mushrooms she recognized as edible.
Grandpa Ling even shaped mud into a pot and fired it successfully. After that, they could stew soup instead of roasting everything over flame.
Morning and night, a bowl of hot fish soup warmed them through. Nights stopped biting as hard.
Jin An started noticing something strange.
Sister’s food bag never seemed to empty.
He couldn’t hold his curiosity.
“Sister… how do you keep finding all this?”
Grandpa Ling laughed and backed her up.
“Good thing she hid food ahead of time. Otherwise we’d be living on wild fruit and prayer.”