Hu Shui moved through the slums outside the city walls like a girl on a mission from the heavens themselves.Which she was, obviously.Long Ti bounced on her back again, having given up on the concept of walking roughly thirty seconds after she grabbed him and vaulted the western gate. The guards hadn't even finished turning their heads before she was three hundred paces past them and accelerating. She could hear Long Ti's prayers to ancestors he probably didn't remember the names of, muffled against her shoulder.The slums hit her nose before they hit her eyes.It was the same mud, rot, and the same sour something that clung to the back of her throat and made her want to gag. The perfumed scarf helped, but only barely. She slowed to a jog, then a walk, scanning the sprawl of huts and lean-tos and bodies huddled in clusters around fires that burned things fires had no business burning. Eyes washing over the well off individuals walking around with their families and followed them because that would be the main indication for what she was looking for.Where is that old fox...Shui extended her senses. Pushed past the mortals, the weak cultivators hiding in their little hovels, the beggars that dotted every corner and intersection like mushrooms after rain, and locking onto the richest men and women she could find. She was looking for the gap. The place where someone powerful enough to flatten half this camp sat pretending to be nothing.It only took a moment before she finally found him sitting on the same patch of dirt he'd been on when they first arrived. Cross-legged, hair of red and silver catching the late afternoon sun, hands extended toward a merchant couple that was hurrying past with a basket of bread, and collecting coin from another child that had been told by their parent to give it to him. The insufferable smile plastered across his sharp features like it had been painted on at birth and never removed. (...)