Honger landed with us, and thankfully, no one was hurt. The sand storm around us was still going on. I checked over Kiyoshi. He hid his face in my neck and my hair.
"A cave!" Feng Ling cheered as she knelt beside Nan Feng. Mu Yoong Yoong was kneeling with her fist in the sand and her knee in the sand, while the other rested on her bent knee. I looked at her, then looked over my shoulder. There indeed is a cave, one made from digging tools and dynamite.
"Let's get inside." Mu Yoong Yoong said this as the others noticed the cave too. She and Feng Ling were the first of our group to rush towards the opening. The storm continued harder and grew more persistent. Once we were safely inside the cave, we stopped to take a breath.
"Why did neither of you use the thousand-pound technique back there?" I asked while kneeling.
"Uh-" Nan y- Nan Feng hesitated. He must have thought of something I would not have approved of. "We tried."
I raised a brow at his mess of words as I slid off my mask. He hesitated.
"We are..." Fu Yao trailed off, seeing the look on my face.
"It's too far from either of our dads' territories for them or us." Mu Yoong Yoong said as she sat on the ground with Feng Ling beside her. I gave them a look, and they both nearly laughed, since I had teased the girls about them being sisters if their dads got together.
"Do you mean shared dads?" Both tried not to laugh as the deputy gods looked to me with odd faces. I remember in Xianle, I would tease the two about eventually being together after hearing them fight for the first time. They sounded like an old married couple.
"Dad and Nan Yang are not together!" Mu Yoong Yoong managed to calm down enough to speak. all in the while, Feng Ling was holding her stomach and nearly rolling around the floor.
"That would be a surprise," a feminine voice sounded. Feng Ling froze and grew silent as did the rest of the group. I looked to the deeper reaches of the cave.
"Snake?" I asked. The name of the young woman, who lived in New Xianle after I found her starving on the streets of a distant kingdom I travelled to for trade. She hadn't changed a bit. tall and slim. pale green eyes. faded brunet hair. light skin, and an outfit of dull pink and faintly aged black. around her right ankle was a bracelet with a pink thread of yarn and magenta round beads. Her face is young and would be said to be an almost perfect face of a young beauty in many people's eyes. What they would see as setbacks would be the scar just below her mouth's right corner, the snake-like nose, and the snakelike slits in her eyes. She wore no shoes, but carried a scarf around her neck and wrapped it around her arms.
"snake!" Feng Ling shot up and ran to her. Snake greeted her with an open-armed motion. She always enjoyed being around her. They are similar; both get agitated in sunlight. It isn't anything new for Snake since she became a ghost after she was run over by a runaway carriage. She doesn't have much resentment, and she could have moved on. But she chose to stay. She has said before that it isn't worth leaving the world to be fixed, to someone else to accomplish. I internally gag at those words I said so long ago.
"Ugh! Why haven't you two visited new Xianle?" I look up after hearing this.
"It's still standing?" I asked. The three girls look to me.
"Shoot, that's what we forgot to mention!" Mu Yoong Yoong exclaimed as she looked at me. "We were supposed to tell you about how new Xianle is finished with repairs and is back to how it was a little over thirty years ago."
I couldn't understand. The fight that transpired, it should have destroyed it just like in Xianle. The only real difference I can think of is that there were other deities and half-ghosts alongside humans.
"I'll guess you are Xie Lian?" Snake asked. Kiyoshi hugged me. He must have felt that I wasn't thinking right.
"Yes, how did you know?" Flower Sword asked.
"Aside from General Xie's description," she began to explain, "you also are the only one who's stronger than her here."
Brother gave an odd look. He is stronger than me. It's why I couldn't protect him, and asked Honger to protect him when I couldn't.
"Gege," Honger spoke to my brother. "There are characters written on that stone."
"Oh?" my brother stood from the stone to take a better look. Snake and the girls moved to sit beside the stone. I lifted Kiyoshi and moved to the girl's side. We were beside Xie Lian while Honger stood on the other side. Fu Yao and Nan Feng stood behind us. From what I could tell, it was too dark.
"Nan Feng, we need light. Think you can make a torch for us?" I asked. more like ordered. With a quick crackle of a fire being lit, a spark was formed in his palm.
"What does the stone say?" he asked. He and Fu Yao don't know the Banyu language. So they can't read it. "It looks like a big mess of words."
"It's Banyu," I said as I could see some words. "I remember from my last trade visit."
"Trades visit?" Fu Yao asked.
"While I was in New Xianle," I said. The trip was enough to learn basic trades, not enough to create a peace treaty between our homes. "So I am limited with the language, more so than my brother probably."
"I know this language, since I have collected scraps there," Xie Lian said while I held Kyoshi in my lap with my arms around him to keep him in a safe barrier.
"I'm curious where you haven't collected trash." Fu Yao commented. I shot him an icy glare. He backed off and looked away. Brother cleared his throat and began to read it.
"General," he said. Both deputies were stiff and panicked.
"What?" both asked.
"I think this is a general's tombstone," I said, looking at the stone.
"Oh?" Xie Lian sounded.
"That's what I can come up with as to why this would say 'General'," I said. "Let's-"
I stopped when the face of a stranger could be seen from above the stone.