Jiang had escaped, barely, but now he was trapped. If his qi signature flared up again he was certain to be found, and he knew for certain that those who had hunted him here would have posted guards on constant lookout and though they may or may not have had teleportation waypoints, they would certainly have be prepared at all hours to send enough cultivators to stall him while the muscle arrived.

  It was a quiet town with few cultivators, nothing but a collection of wood and dust haphazardly nailed together— a shanty-town made up of misfits and criminals with nowhere else to go. Jiang was now one of them, and he nearly fit right in. His clothes were torn, the powder-blue silk now much closer to brown and red in many places, its fine craftsmanship devastated by wear and covered in tears and scorch-marks. It was barely a step above nudity, and Jiang badly needed to ascend several more stairs. Even in a town of misfits it could raise questions to be wearing something so obviously marred by combat.

  He snuck into a dusty bar and took in the dilapidated wood construction. The dust was suspiciously brown and cracked in places, a suggestion of blood dried in with the rest.

  “Howdy, stranger.” a bartender greeted.

  “Howdy, partner.” Jiang responded.

  The bartender eyed him up and down slowly, polishing a thick-bottomed beer mug.

  “You lookin’ for some new clothes?”

  “I am.” Jiang said quickly.

  The bartender walked closer to the door, footsteps thudding loudly on the wood floor. The other customers continued loudly chatting, glasses occasionally clinking, the overwhelming smell of body odor finally settling into Jiang’s nose. The bartender leaned over the counter, resting his elbows on its polished surface and his head upon folded hands.

  “Then head over to Tina’s, she’ll hook you right up, but first, want’a drink?”

  “Sure do.” Jiang said, licking his lips.

  In a smooth motion the bartender removed his hands from their resting-surfaces and began filling the beer cup behind the counter with a tap just below its surface.

  He set the glass down heavily with a thud and the beer foam splashed, nearly spilling over the glass. Jiang walked up all the way to the counter, grabbed the beer, and slammed it down in one gulp. Even a century alive would train an immortal to slam beer like no one else. After thousands? Tens of thousands? Jiang could practically inhale a mug. It was a common pastime among elder immortals to slam shots of viciously deadly poison— a preventative mechanism against assassination.

  “Thank’ya, partner.”

  “‘Twas a pleasure. You want another?”

  “I’m good for now.”

  The bartender rubbed two fingers together but didn’t spell out his demand.

  Jiang produced a gold coin between his fingers and set it down on the countertop. The bartender picked it up and examined it with some curiosity.

  “Ya aren’t from around here, are ya?”

  Jiang produced another coin and slid it over on the countertop with his left hand. With the right he held one finger up over his lips.

  The bartender didn’t ask any more questions, even if his one had been heard surely by most in the bar. Luckily, they did not question him too deeply. The voice from heaven had called Jiang out, but didn’t say anything about his appearance and in towns such as these strangers were far more common than not. He would be in trouble eventually, but as just some random stranger in a town built of random strangers he wasn’t under too much suspicion just yet.

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  He turned around and quickly left the bar, looking around for this “Tina’s.”

  A shout came from behind.

  “Hands in the air, “partner.””

  Jiang raised his arms above his head in compliance.

  “We can be reasonable, partner!”

  “Get on the ground!” The barkeep demanded.

  Jiang complied, bending down at first on one knee and then on the other, hands still in the air. Footsteps resounded in the dirt and soon a double iron barrel was pressing deeply in Jiang’s back.

  “Now I’m not too smart, but I reckon you just made those gold coins, am I right?”

  “I did, do you want some more?”

  The shotgun jerked deeper into Jiang’s back and he suppressed a yelp.

  “Yeah I reckon I do.”

  Jiang lowered his right hand to face the barkeep and a gold coin formed in his palm, sliding down and falling into the dirt. The barkeep didn’t dare remove a hand from his shotgun.

  “Good start, keep goin’.”

  Jiang complied, producing two and then three and then four more gold coins.

  “Keep goin’.” The words were gruff and to the point.

  Jiang reckoned the barkeep was going to have him continue producing gold coins until he ran out of qi and wouldn’t have any defences left against the gun. Already the gun was potentially dangerous— not disastrous, Jiang could theoretically escape or die and return again, but both of those options came with real and potential costs— but if he spent all his qi there was nothing he could do to resist the barkeep and the town at all. It wasn’t that the gun itself was dangerous, but that the bullets could be qi-enhanced or qi-forged.

  “Listen,” Jiang said, but the barkeep pressed the shotgun harder into his back in a gesture clearly intended to silence him. Jiang produced another gold coin but kept speaking, bending his spine forward a bit to ease the pain, “you can’t kill me while I’m still valuable to you.”

  Another gold coin fell to the ground, clinking in contact with one of the others. The shotgun pulled back a little, the man knowing the words were true.

  “So?” The gruff voice replied. It was as if he was saying “I know that. Keep producing coins.”

  Another coin formed in Jiang’s palm, visibly the same as all the others.

  “So, what’s the point in pretending you’ll kill your golden goose?”

  The barkeep pondered for a moment as the coin first slid off Jiang’s palm and then began falling.

  He did not answer by the time the coin hit the ground, and when it did the coin exploded.

  A challenging technique at this level, to embed an unstable high-explosive in a pyrite coin, but well worth it.

  Jiang worked quickly, digging into the earth in the wake of the explosion, knowing in every millisecond how little time remained before the hounds sniffed him out from it. Worse, suspicions that he was Jiang Guo could have begun to build and whenever that happened there would be tyrants and above coming from all over the world to hunt him down. Ding Yi would also be particularly interested.

  The problem was that all cultivators were registered with their area’s tyrants and dreads. None were stupid enough to allow unregistered cultivators to run around with perhaps great power to disrupt their operations, power, and governance. Jiang was therefore a rogue element that would be hunted down wherever he went. Nowhere was safe. Nowhere could ever be an unregistered home, and high-sequence cultivators didn’t just appear from nowhere. The fact he was Jiang Guo would be discovered eventually, no matter how he tried to hide it.

  Indeed, it was likely any awakening cultivators around the period of the announcement would be hunted down and exterminated. When it came to the fate of a planet it was always better safe than sorry. Thousands of lives meant exactly nothing in comparison to hundreds of billions. The math just simply didn’t work out.

  The barkeeper’s greed had led to his injury or possible demise, but Jiang would not meet such a fate. He would live, and he would conquer. Short-sighted greed was mutually incompatible with these things; so what if you gained six or ten or a thousand gold coins? If you lost ten million down the line it was a foolish trade. The toad had lusted after what it perceived to be a swan in flight nearby, lunging forward into the outreached claws of a hawk well-aware of its stupidity. Jiang therefore did the only sensible thing given the circumstances: he quickly burned some qi to dig a four-foot by six-foot by four foot hole and buried himself inside it, scattering dirt into the air as if caused by the explosion. He would wait here without consuming qi until the sun exploded if he must.

  But few had as much patience as Jiang Guo.

  They would find him here, but perhaps only to the general area of the town. If he didn’t disturb the qi around him, they would not be able to determine where exactly Jiang’s body lay.