Chapter 7: Chapter 5: Boat Ride

He was used to waking in the earliest hours, yet somehow he felt quite sluggish against the frenzied burst of activity he had been dragged into by the tall willowy man who had taken him under his wing the night before. Liu Xie had somehow managed to procure new plain clothes for him and some shoes, dragging him all over town in the process of looking for anyone that was open, allowing Bo to actually feel close to being a semi-decent member of lower society once again.

All this before the bitey little sister woke up!

He sat outside the inn with still sleepy eyes while he ran a finger over his bandaged hand with a wince before patting his belt to make sure his sickle still hung there. Then he returned to staring at the bandaging. Bo had been bitten by various animals before, having worked on numerous farms as briefly hired help but somehow being bitten by a foreign little girl seemed especially painful. Maybe it was because she hung on, or the wild aggressive expression on her face that looked so out of place on a child. It looked more like something one would find on a starved dog.

Whatever it was, he was not going to let her within biting distance again.

A hairy little set of trotters appeared in his vision and he looked up to see Liu Xie holding the tiny piglet out to him with one hand while he held the bitey child in his other arm. She was wrapped up in the pale white robe so that she was essentially swaddled with hands and feet restrained, her head was resting on his shoulder where her dark red hair spilled over his chest. Her eyes were still shut with sleep. “You wrapped her up like she’s a dangerous animal,” Bo observed and half-nodded his agreement with his own observation as he took the pig in his hands.

Liu Xie’s eyes briefly looked at Bo’s bandaged hand, then he turned to point ahead with his free hand. “We’re going to the docks and taking a boat up river-”

A cold chill of fear trickled over his heart, “are we going to the tombs!?”

“What? No,” Liu Xie made a face, “we’re going to a village that’ll put us closer to the mountain roads.”

“So where are we going then, if I may ask, sir, master, please?”

“To the First Palace,” Liu Xie replied, beginning to walk forward on the mostly empty town road. Most people were only just beginning to awaken in their homes and the gradual shift in the air from near silence to the murmurs of life was rather peaceful.

Bo was quiet for a moment, turning over Liu Xie’s words in his mind as he held the sleeping piglet. Were they going to visit a king or something? He felt he had heard the term ‘First Palace’ before, but could not place where. He then followed after Liu Xie while making sure he was a few respectful feet behind like a nervous dog. He eyed the sleeping girl in apprehension, “is she… always like that? Vicious?”

“Only when awake,” Liu Xie replied. Bo recoiled slightly while also admiring the bravery of the taller man in handling what was clearly a ferocious animal in human flesh.

Bo carefully considered the words of his next question as they began descending a wide set of rough-cut stairs that led into the actual docks of the town. He had to be tactful with this question, avoid sounding overly curious, “where did you buy her?”

“What?” Liu Xie snapped his head around to look at Bo with an irritated scowl, “is everyone going to assume I bought her or that I’m going to sell her?!”

“N-no! I was just-” Bo anxiously held the sleeping piglet closer to himself as though it was some charm that would absorb any further anger from Liu Xie.

Liu Xie sighed softly and shook his head, turning away to look back at the rough docks of the town that the Black River embraced.

The Black River itself was a massive band of water that flowed through three of the Four Kingdoms and had gained its name for the curious amount of silt that constantly tumbled through it that left the river a deep ink color. According to a story an old man had told him after a poorly paid day of harvesting barley, the river had turned black after the Empress of Hell bathed in it once, tricked into doing it by the Jade Prince who brought a bunch of other gods to hide and watch her. She was so angry and ashamed she turned the lowest gods into fish, which was allegedly why even the flesh of the fish that swam within it had shifted to shades of grey. This had no negative affect on their taste, at least in Bo’s opinion from his few desperate forays into eating whatever poor fish had accidentally flopped onto the banks and his brief occasional stints as a fisherman.

From where they stood, Bo could not even see the other side of the river, instead only an endless shifting expanse of rippling black where a scattering of boats of various sizes drifted down in the light morning wind.

The docks themselves had a few groups of fortune hunters strong-arming or paying their way onto boats. Liu Xie was near one such boat far from Bo, already speaking to one rather languid looking man who briefly gazed at Bo, then back at Liu Xie and held up six fingers. Bo sucked in a deep breath of air and darted down to Liu Xie’s side while holding the now slightly wiggly piglet under his arm.

“Come on,” Liu Xie used his free arm to point up a plank that led onto the boat while the boatmaster cheerily held the sack of coins he had just been given, weighing them in his palm. Several heavily armored, and not-so-armored, foreigners and mercenaries sat upon the boat already. He could hear snatches of different languages, and the occasional mumblings of all the riches that surely sat within the tombs. Liu Xie had already walked on and Bo went after him, peering down briefly into the black waters before another sliver of fear dripped down his veins and he instead directed his gaze back at Liu Xie and kept walking.

When they were on the boat itself, Bo felt an intense feeling of nausea briefly overtake him before it passed just as quickly. He still found himself leaning against the side of the boat regardless. “I hope the ride isn’t going to be long…” he mumbled to himself.

A small cranky grumble issued from the little sister, and Liu Xie quickly put her back onto her feet. She wobbled on the dock, clinging to the fabric wrapped around her as she blearily blinked in the early sunlight. She turned her face to Bo and narrowed her eyes in groggy anger and he in turn felt his bitten hand ache in phantom pain. Liu Xie placed a firm hand on her shoulder and leaned down to whisper something into her ear.

She stomped up to him and held up her hands towards the now frantic pig, “Uncle Bo.” She said curtly, a thick accent slathered in the simple name she had spoken.

Bo, not wanting to incite her anger, quickly offered her the piglet that just as quickly calmed once in her arms. She turned away to walk back to Liu Xie, then past him to the other side of the boat where she promptly sat down and placed the piglet in her lap, rubbing its belly.

“She’s just going to be angry all day, isn’t she?” Liu Xie muttered to himself, and Bo turned to find the tall man had… partially undressed. Bo nearly choked on his own saliva. The relatively loose folds of his clothing had hidden a shockingly well muscled chest and arms that made Bo feel a bit relieved that all he got from the encounter in the alleyway was some bruising on his back and scratched knees.

“Excuse me, bo-...master, what are you doing?”

Liu Xie sat down where he was, then carefully made sure his long hair was going to be out of the way of any feet, and laid down. “Resting,” he replied. “Getting you cleaned up and her out without waking her up is tiring.”

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Bo looked around the boat and noticed nobody seemed to be paying them any mind. There were much stranger sights to gawk at than some disheveled noble disrobing. So Bo sat down next to Liu Xie and felt the fiery glare of the girl piercing his back. He shuddered and spared her a glance over his shoulder. She was curled up into a little ball, holding the piglet close to herself and had wrapped both herself and it in the fabric of the robe like a little white cocoon.

“So mad…”

“...Don’t judge her too harshly, Bo,” Liu Xie spoke softly as he stared up at the sky. His skin seemed to have the faintest of greenish tints to it if Bo stared at it too long, but he also found it hard to take his gaze off the gentle rise and fall of the chest. “She’s scared.”

“So she bites people?”

“Oh she kicks them too,” Liu Xie chuckled.

There was a cry somewhere further up the river, one taken up by others on boats. Bo and Liu Xie both looked in the direction of the yelling. Bo saw nothing but he could still hear more panicked shouts. “Is there a boat sinking ahead?” He ran to the forward bow where others clustered to peer ahead.

There were six more boats visible ahead, all of different sizes with various amounts of people. Finally someone cried out, “look to the sky!”

Dozens of heads simultaneously turned upwards and loud gasps rippled through the passengers. Far above a dark winged shape flew, coming closer and closer to the boats. Bo could make out two large outstretched wings that reminded him of a bat, a long neck with a spade shaped head and an even longer tail. Bo gawped at the being as it suddenly banked, turning in the sky to move northwards with a few heavy beats of its massive wings. “M-Boss! Boss! Look!” He yelled, pointing at the thing as it flew away.

Liu Xie was also standing up, gazing at the thing with a troubled expression on his face.

“What is it!?” Bo asked.

“Hm,” the taller man folded his arms together. “It’s hard to tell with it so far away, but I think it’s a dragon from the west.”

Bo frowned incredulously. “A dragon? Boss, that’s not a dragon. Dragons don’t have wings. Dragons live in rivers or clouds.”

“There’s many kinds of dragons in the world, Bo, the ones here are just the eldest of all. The story goes that the ancestor of all dragons became the land and sea. The scales in the water became the dragons who live here while the ones that were in the earth became other kinds. Some scales were even sent adrift on the early winds and turned into other sorts of dragons,” Liu Xie explained in a patient tone. Then his mouth quivered with a slight smile. “Or at least, so they say.”

“Well, if you say so,” Bo replied doubtfully. “But why is it here then?”

Liu Xie shrugged. “I heard sometimes they move into the mountaintops here to get away from territory disputes or people with swords for a few decades. But they never bother anyone when they’re here.”

“Eh… boss when you phrase it like that, it sounds like they do bother people elsewhere.”

“They do,” Liu Xie shrugged. “But that’s sort of out of our hands, isn’t it?”

Bo had nothing to say to that since it really was out of their hands. Instead he moved over to the other side of the boat and looked down into the silty waters that flowed around the boat. A limp bloated form surfaced, bumping against the boat. Bo’s eyes widened as it rolled over, revealing a face bitten away and full of wriggling water creatures. “H-hey! There’s… there’s something here!” He called out. But the only person who acknowledged him was Liu Xie. The other man moved to the side of the boat with him and looked into the water.

“There’s nothing here.”

Bo looked back into the water and found the bloated corpse was gone. “I, I swear I saw something here. It was a body! With no face!”

Liu Xie’s face turned mildly thoughtful, “no face?”

“W-well, it looked like something had eaten it.”

“Hm, maybe it was a flood victim,” Liu Xie suggested. “Fish tend to eat the softer bits of the face first.”

“Fish eat what?”

Liu Xie idly nodded, "fish start with the softer bits when possible. Sometimes though a Fish Person might come to steal the soul of the dead and feed the body to strange fish monsters further down, and occasionally they don't even wait until they're dead."

Bo sat down as he tried to process that information and after deciding he did not want to think of anything eating him alive to steal his soul he instead pretended to be interested in a scab on his leg.