They spent a whole day in a panic, but Lord Xia Ya's luck stat must have spiked, because the pursuers never did catch up.
Gradually, the farther they walked, the farther the danger seemed to fall behind, and the unease in the group's hearts eased a little.
While there was still light, Xia Ya gathered some dry grass, burned it to ash, and carefully smeared the ashes over his wounds. Everyone who lives out in the wild knows the trick: when you're hurt and short of medicine, you pack the wound with burnt grass ash — it stops the bleeding and keeps the wound from rotting.
By the middle of the second night, Xia Ya's luck had peaked: they ran into a jackal that tried to make a meal of them.
The beast died a wretched death under Xia Ya's fire fork, and then became chunks of fragrant roast meat. The meat that was left over became the group's rations — except that the poor goblin consort's burden grew a good deal heavier.
Showing not one ounce of sympathy, Xia Ya turned Oakes into a slave.
The goblin consort had no objection to this at all. To a goblin, once your status becomes "suosuo," you have no human rights to speak of — oh, right, goblins probably don't know what human rights are in the first place.
They walked a full five days across the wilderness before at last, on the far horizon, a rolling stretch of blue-black appeared...
Mountains! They had finally seen mountains!
The group burst out cheering, and Xia Ya pounded his chest and roared.
Those two or three days had nearly stifled him, and the farther they went, the more even he — an experienced hunter — had begun to worry that he himself was lost.
After all, they had left the river behind to shake off the pursuers, and that river was the best landmark for finding their route.
And according to what the goblins had told them, three days' walking should have brought the mountains into view. They had walked five.
If two more days passed and there were still no mountains, then the poor goblins would have to face Xia Ya's fury for lying about the route.
They had spotted the mountains in the distance, but as the saying goes, "a mountain in view will run a horse to death" — it took them a full half day more just to reach the woods at the foot of the slopes.
At the sight of the green, green woods, Xia Ya turned a somersault in his excitement and let out a few shouts.
To Xia Ya, who had grown up among mountains and forests, the sight of them brought an indescribable sense of familiarity. In the mountains, food was everywhere, game was everywhere, resources to be put to use were everywhere.
Just as Xia Ya was shouting for joy, the wretch couldn't resist pouring a little cold water on him.
"Hey, Xia Ya." The wretch sighed. Ever since the day Xia Ya let her eat the red ant eggs, the only food they had, she had not squabbled with him once, nor called him "bumpkin" — thinking it over, she had even spoken to him a few times quite gently.
"What?" Xia Ya turned his head and threw his chest out. The wound on his shoulder had already closed — another thing that had astonished the wretch and the goblins.
The fellow's constitution was practically that of a monster... enough to make a person wonder whether he was some freak that a human and a magic beast had spawned between them. At the very least, a human with a constitution this outrageously, infuriatingly good was something you almost never saw!
Of the wounds on his body, the oldest — the claw marks the bloodthirsty mad wolf had left on his back — had healed long ago, the scabs already shed, and the arrow wound in his shoulder had healed seven or eight parts; a small part of the scab had fallen away, showing the new skin grown in beneath, and apart from being a shade darker, there was nothing unusual to be seen at all.
It really is infuriating! The wretch's foot, mangled by the trap, still wasn't healed, and now she needed someone's arm just to walk, while this bumpkin was already hopping around as lively as could be.
After hesitating a moment, the wretch couldn't help reminding him: "Look, such a huge mountain — where are we supposed to find the dragon?"
Xia Ya froze.
He raised his head and looked at what lay before him...
The woods at the foot of the mountain alone looked endless, covering the slope from bottom to top, lush and dense, and above the woods the mountains themselves ran on ridge after ridge, one peak joined to the next without a break... If they really had to search peak by peak, they could walk two or three years and still not finish.
Xia Ya wasn't the sort to get stuck on one thing. He sighed. "Anyway, hunting treasure is always a matter of luck to begin with. If we don't find it, so be it. We'll poke around the mountains for a few days — best if we turn something up, and if not, the pursuers should be far away by then, and we can turn around and go back."
He paused, then grinned. "Or we just cross this whole range in one go. A month or so of walking, I figure, should take us over. I hear the far side of these mountains is Odin Empire territory. I've only got my own mouth to feed, so I can go anywhere; worst comes to worst, I'll just go scrape a living in the Odin Empire."
The wretch smiled gently at that. "Ha, and back then you said you'd signed a magic beast contract with someone in Wildfire Town. You went on about a man's credit, and how nothing would make you break it."
Xia Ya gave a sheepish laugh. "Credit is credit, naturally, but... look, if a man really did go and sell his life for five coppers, that's not heroic spirit, that's a screw loose. Even heroic spirit has to know when and where it applies."
See? This bumpkin really isn't any kind of decent fellow.
Then Xia Ya paused, raised his head and puffed out his chest. "Hey, wretch, seeing as you pulled me out of that river, as repayment I promise you this: if we run into a dragon, I absolutely will not use you as bait!"
"Oh?" The wretch's eyes lit up, and her gaze softened a shade more.
But then came Xia Ya's next sentence...
"If we run into a dragon, I won't use you as bait — we each run on our own merits. Fast legs live, slow legs get eaten by the dragon, and each of us leaves the rest to fate — so long as you can outrun me, that is..."
The wretch: "..."
Outrun you? Never mind that my foot's hurt right now — even when I was skipping around healthy, how was I supposed to outrun a freak like you?!
The wretch's teeth were starting to itch again.
You rotten bumpkin! You bastard bumpkin! He lets me get a little bit touched, and then he opens his mouth and says a thing like that!
But once her anger had passed, the wretch couldn't shake a certain feeling — it was as if... looking at Xia Ya, coarse and sly as the fellow's mouth was, if real danger came, he most likely wouldn't leave her behind and run.
She had no idea why, but the wretch simply had that confidence.
Once they were in the forest, Xia Ya immediately got a forked branch to serve as the wretch's walking stick; for himself he sharpened a branch to a point with his fire fork to serve as a spear; and poor Oakes went on playing the porter, except that its load was much lighter now.
They had been in the woods most of the day, and toward evening Xia Ya was searching around for dry branches to build a fire when he suddenly heard a strange sound come from deep in the forest.
At first the sound was indistinct, but as Xia Ya pushed a few bushes aside, it became clear.
The wretch and Oakes, following behind Xia Ya, heard it too.
It was a thin, drawn-out sound, like a voice stretched long — a weak, dying-struggle sort of moan, or like an owl hooting at night.
The wretch's hair stood on end and she hunched her neck. "Hey, Xia Ya, could it be some magic beast?"
Xia Ya listened carefully for a while, then turned his head and grinned. "Nope! Sounds like a person screaming. Come to think of it, when I first picked you up, you were making a sound like that too."
The wretch's face went red. She was just about to say something when Xia Ya had already strode on ahead.
A few hundred paces on, a small clearing opened up in the trees ahead. People had obviously been here before — the turf all around was trampled and crushed.
And the three of them had no sooner pushed through the bushes than they saw, in the very middle of that clearing... the source of the sound!
It was a person!
A man, his long golden hair matted with grass clippings and dirt, was weakly thrashing in his death throes.
The three of them walked closer and clearly saw the man's face... and...
His face was all they could see!
Because the poor bastard had been buried in the ground whole, the earth packed up to his neck, with nothing but his head left above the surface.
At the sight of that head — for all that he was screaming so piteously — Xia Ya couldn't help but find it funny.
He strode over, stood in front of the poor fellow, and nudged the man's head lightly with the toe of his boot. "Hey!"
The head perked right up. It lifted its eyelids and looked at Xia Ya with desperate hope, and cried out, "The gods be praised! Praise the great Lord, the Lord's radiance is everywhere! Someone's finally come to save me..."
"You're..." Xia Ya crouched down and studied the fellow.
"I'm a man!" The head sounded a little exasperated. His face was covered in dirt, but his eyes shone astonishingly bright — Xia Ya had never seen anyone with eyes so full of life! Wretched as the fellow was, his tone had a strange ring to it: "Can't you see I'm a man? No more nonsense, dig me out, I'm really about to suffocate."
With that, he spat hard, spitting out a mouthful of muddy saliva. "And you'd better get me some clothes. Those bastards stripped every stitch off me before they buried me..."