For a moment, a silence lay between the two of them. Mingtian couldn’t himself feel it, but he knew that there must’ve been some sort of unspoken, unnatural tension— by their respective ranks, if nothing else. The cat, an outcast cultivator, and himself, the mortal that was— even if only in the most tangential of ways— affiliated with the Bloody Saffron Sect.
Mingtian thought about it for a second, then decided that he’d pull the ‘secretly an Immortal Sovereign who doesn’t know at all what the deal with this whole thing is’ card and just sweep aside all the unspoken complication of the matter. “What’s your name?”
The cat blinked, seemingly a bit nonplussed. “Um. Avyr. Pronounced like… Ay-vy-rr.” He shuffled a little— what Mingtian took as his equivalent of a shrug. “It’s not the easiest for most to pronounce, so I understand if…”
“Nice to meet you, Avyr.” He offered the cat a short bow, hiding how internally pleased he was with the brief flicker of surprise that passed over the cat’s face at his perfect pronunciation. “I’m sorry about Janus earlier. He’s usually much nicer.”
“I guess he wasn’t the worst. He didn’t even call me an animal until the end, which is better than most of the people in East Saffron…”
“Is that something you get a lot of?”
Avyr nodded. “It’s worse the further north I go. In Fenfeng, things were… alright, I suppose— my family held the local sect in contempt, but at least we got treated like people. But I couldn’t stay there, of course. Just long enough to get a ship to Xianghua, and from there… eventually, to here. They’re a lot better than the Empire, but that doesn’t make the sects any more willing to teach one of mine.”
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“I see.” Mingtian nodded. “And that brought you to East Saffron?”
Avyr perked up, nodding. “It’s been rough, but it's a nicer city than most of the others! There’s a few small populations of my kind who live outside the city walls, but I managed to scrape together enough money from doing Shedding-level work that I could move in here! Did you know that the top students at East Saffron University each year are admitted into the sect?” Yeah, of course he did— Lily wouldn’t stop talking about it. The amusing thought that the two of them would probably get along well floated through his mind—
Then, a far more grim thought. “How old are you?”
“I’m seventeen summers old.” That was… younger than Lily, disturbingly enough. Though maybe his species developed at a different rate? He couldn’t know, though… given how he acted, Mingtian doubted it. Still a kid…
For all he’d spoken so distantly of everything that’d brought him halfway across the world to Ca Cao and East Saffron in particular, Mingtian could put together the course of it— a story, a tragedy, writ out across the trials of a young cat seeking… power, probably. To get revenge? Or to get freedom? He supposed it didn’t really matter.
Either way, though… first Beixian Port, and now this? He was starting to dislike the Empire.
“Thanks, by the way.” Avyr shifted, standing back up to his full height. “For standing up for me. I… hadn’t thought that anyone would, but…” a ghost of a smile, a strange thing, a glint of happiness— “I don’t think I’ve ever been more glad to be wrong. Anyways… could I go back down to the library proper? I wanted to try and figure out what the coursework would be before the semester started…”
Mingtian nodded absentmindedly. “I’ll check in on you later, alright?” The cat nodded, looking a little embarrassed, and then— Avyr slunk out, so gracefully.
Silently.
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