“Are you certain it’s still worth going into the mountain?” Qin Shiyin asked, it was another morning, yet he was still shaking his handmade cup. The rattle of dice never stopped.

  Hao turned back with a grin, “If you scour the whole orchard and find one fruit, you stave hunger off for one more day.” He gave the old man a kind but thorough glare. It might be the last time Hao saw the old man, even if the Shiyin left the Secret Realm alive. A single die fell from his cup as he shot it.

  “Pah, don’t act like a poet, you’re just greedy,” Shiyin wrapped his long, wrinkled fingers around the die that fell. His hand shivered just to lift it. If the swords in the secret Realm spared the old man, time may not.

  “Me greedy?” Hao laughed, pointing his finger up at the sky, “There isn’t much time left.” Time slipped from him while he stayed at the camp. He stuck to his routine, but nights vanished with the games around the campfire and the meal everyone started contributing to. Hao threw out fresh beast steaks—nothing good or high quality, recent catches, usually large lizards, no one noticed once it was skinned. Others took out odd fruits, herbs, little nuts, or grains.

  They were all from different sects and in conflict, while inside the Mid-Summer Cave. They were to be enemies. Even fellow Sect Members weren’t friends, but everyone here, in this growing camp, didn’t look at the color of the robe. Only a few did. They weren’t wrong to do so; conflict was still brewing. Already, a rumor was spreading of groups ambushing each other.

  Qin Shiyin lightly placed down his cup and made a shooing gesture, “Go, go, come back and lose a game later tonight.” He sat tall, straightening his back and turned, picking his cup back up and looking for another to take from him, bet after bet.

  Hao looked over the camp. The sunlight framed the scene, and he wished for a moment that young girl Fa was here. She could paint it. Or Grandpa He was still alive. He could tell him about it when he left. There was some light in the dim. Even in a place where people entered to kill and take. He turned away, his smile dried faster than the dew on the two-leafed braided green grass. When the peace broke again, Hao would be there to join the bloodshed.

  “The Amethysts have gone dry; no point in going in.” A group of men walked towards Hao with black circles around their eyes. Exhaustion painted them; Hao imagined it must have been a long night of nothing but hard gray stone, not a single one had luster.

  Hao feigned a smile as they got closer, “What you missed, I’ll take.” It was nice being able to speak freely to the people in the camp, but sometimes the way he saw them made his hair stand on end. They are no different from the grass they walk on. The thought stilled his tongue.

  The three laughed. When the laughter stopped, the first one added, “Good, good. Take our luck, you will need it.”

  “Don’t bother,” another clicked his tongue, then his jaw, the second louder than the first. “A waste of time and no brothels to visit afterwards either.”

  The third of their group, the last of them, nodded his head in affirmation and scratched his eyes with his index and thumb. “Work like this is only worth it if you have a pleasant woman to embrace and a good meal to eat.”

  He pulled his fingers from his eyes to look at Hao for a second, just as they passed by, “If you make it out of the Secret Realm, find love early, Junior Brother.” He went back to scratch his eye. His thumb dug down into his right eye, his index into his left. “It will keep you from doing stupid stuff like coming here again.”

  They were behind him now, but continued to call out. The Second one to speak, adding to the third one’s words, “If not love, then a farm. The only thing better than the milky white thigh of a good wife is the dark meat and fatty skin of a chicken thigh…” he groaned, his voice more clear when talking about chicken than the brothel.

  Hao laughed, “I will keep it in mind…” Embrace a woman… The thought made Hao’s heart race, and his face grew slightly flushed until he looked at his hands. He could still see them floating in vats of blood.

  Hao reached the most popular entrance into the mountain’s tunnels. He looked back at the group. There were three. When they first entered the Secret Realm months ago, there were probably five. Would everything they gained in this place outweigh what they had lost?

  *

  The inside of the tunnel changed every day. Desperation made people knock away at the stone, starting from the entrance.

  Hao saw new scuffs from the first step inside. It was easier to see because the stone was gray, unlike the brown stone that made up the Drifting Stream Sect’s mountain. It broke differently from the brownstone, too. Large gray slabs lined the walls of the tunnel like poorly carved staircases. Marks from fingernails, palms, and a makeshift pickaxe mark the ceiling.

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  You hardly had to go far to hear those still working to stone. Some had given up, then there were those desperate enough to tear callouses and the scars those wounds left behind to find one more fist-sized chunk of amethyst.

  Hao found the entire situation worth a laugh. Most Cultivators were never servants and certainly not undervalued miners. Hao had done it for a season and a bit more. Though it reminded him, the man outside was right. There was nothing like getting done with a day of mining Spirit Stones in the Drifting Stream mines, practicing foundational Martial Arts, and having enough Sect Contribution points to buy a hunk of the chicken sold in the mining hall. Just the thought of it soothed him.

  Hao went down a left-bending tunnel. It was a different direction than most others traveled; there was less noise, fewer marks on the walls in general. It was rare to see anyone this way. Not impossible.

  This morning, a group of women in the white cloaks of the Blue Moons Mountain. Dust scattered into the air as one swung the pickaxe at the wall. Small gray pebbles bounced and flew around. She set the pickaxe down and started coughing. Another replaced her, taking up the pickaxe and swung the tool with impressive strength, but little control.

  “Wait, don’t go down that way,” One of the women, with a tiny nose below her blue eyes, walked over and stood a few steps from Hao’s side. She flicked her black hair from her shoulder to her back. Dust scattered from, and again, the other shoulder, it may have been silky if not for the stone dust.

  With her hair behind her, she pointed. “It’s blocked off with a cave-in. An enormous boulder and stones had sealed off the path.”

  Another girl came up behind her, the one who was having a coughing fit. She was an oddity among land women. Her hair was curled and lighter in color, but not golden like half of Hao’s. Her skin was the same. But her eyes, too, were a grayish color, almost silver in the blue light of the Spirit Stones.

  Hao looked between them, and the one with brown hair gave him a deadly glare. “Alright, thank you. I won’t go too far down then. I will try to stay away from your area. I won’t steal everything, I promise.” It seemed the two of them didn’t appreciate his humour as much as the men outside did.

  The one with black hair put on a light smile, the hand that was pointed out fell and quietly clapped against the side of her thigh. “Go then, but don’t get too close, I will tell you if you do.”

  Hao looked between them again and continued down the way.

  The lighter-haired one continued with her glare as he walked by. She had that glare still. Her eyes were cold, not just because of the silver color — they were of a robber, a thief, and a killer. Not quite as effective as intimidation, as she sneezed, her light brown hair, nearly the same color as melted sugar candies, flung dust up behind her.

  It seemed normal for such oddities to appear amongst the Cultivators. He wondered if it was the same in mortal villages. It wouldn’t be that surprising if the stories of black hair and blue eyes everywhere you looked were an exaggeration by the old men who traded off the Island.

  Hao looked back, and the woman was still glaring. Ah, she is going to convince her friends to rob and kill me, I think… No matter, they won’t be able to find me. He knew the face well. It was something he had seen once or twice already.

  “If you want to stop your cough,” Hao called out, “you can take a spare piece of clothing, or even a bandage, and cover your nose and mouth. It will keep that dusty taste out, too.”

  Hao pulled his head away and continued. There was a bend not far from where the women were digging. He had to take a spirit stone to go further. At the end of the bend was rubble; it was the collapse that the one who spoke to him had talked about.

  The largest was a boulder that took up the space that had previously been dug into. In reality, it was wider than the tunnel. Only the bottom was visible, and it nestled down further every day. It had fallen before Hao was ever here, in camp or mine. The round thing sent a dozen more stones falling from the ceiling each day.

  Hao walked forward, the spirit stone pointed at the ground. His steps were careful, though he knew a safer route to approach the boulder.

  It seemed like a death trap. Larger stones that were never as round as the largest that caught the eye. Some were smooth, others deadly. Sharp ends from breaking in odd ways left most of them like spears, sharp enough to tear clothing, and Waters’ forbid to fall on one…

  The small ones were less dangerous. Still, Hao had no intention of stepping on one, standing up on fractured bases, the less assuming stones were little daggers pointed towards the ceiling. Every single one fell perfectly, too. One wrong step and a stone would be through your foot, and falling forward, the large one would take your stomach, chest, or throat.

  Hao danced around the traps. Some of them were new, and more would be there when he left. He had a little secret here. While everyone else was worried about the death a stone could bring and shine the light on the giant boulder or the spiked rocks on the floor, Hao put a nearly invisible door in the wall.

  His time spent mining and carving stone never seemed a waste, more than ever since he found this part of the mountain.

  He was right up close to the boulder. He turned a sharp left and pushed a hand against the wall. With a twist to the left, it popped. Like a lid to the wine jar, a round piece of stone no longer than his forearm fell loose onto Hao’s hand. He crawled in backwards.

  Hao placed the lid back while he crawled back through the tiny tunnel. It was cramped and silent, except for his breath. After a few minutes of backwards shimmying, He kicked out another lid on the other side and popped out in a separate part of the tunnel, a place that had been untouched, unexplored in weeks — Except for Hao.