Chapter 52: Shu Clan
The iron rimmed wheels of the merchant carriage continued their slow, rhythmic torment against the jagged stone, a harsh reminder that the structural peace of the sunflower valley was well and truly dead.
They traveled and traveled, the winding mountain trail narrowing until it was nothing more than a precarious ledge carved directly into the face of a sheer, vertical precipice.
For hours, there was nothing but the oppressive repetition of stone, wind, and cliffs after cliffs.
Slowly, the carriage rolled down a sweeping northern slope, and through the breaking fog, they finally reached the Shu Clan.
Unlike the grand stone architecture of the sect, the outer boundaries of the Shu Clan were protected by massive, interlocking wooden fences.
These weren’t simple farm stakes though, they were logs of heavy, ironwood timber, twice the height of a grown man, sharpened into brutal points at the top and bound together by thick, rusted iron cables.
A perimeter of sharp, defensive trenches dug into the frozen earth lay just before the wood, designed to break the legs of any charging cavalry.
The entire layout was built like a trap, and there was only a single, heavily fortified entrance cleaving through the spiked timber fence.
Flanking this solitary gate stood two massive watchtowers.
They rose fifteen feet in height, constructed from sturdier, darker wood than the surrounding fences, one anchored firmly on the left side of the entrance, and the other mirroring it on the right.
In the high, covered platforms of these towers, armored guards stood like frozen statues, their hands resting casually on the grips of heavy, mounted repeating crossbows.
Evan sat perfectly still on the wooden bench of the carriage, his dark eyes peering through the artificial wrinkles and crow’s feet of his merchant disguise paste.
He didn’t look at the guards directly, but his internal sensory perception was already sweeping over them, dissecting their threat level.
The aura radiating from the watchtowers was sharp, unstable, and dense, the unmistakable signature of cultivators at the peak stage of a fledgling.
Under normal circumstances, an awakened cultivator could easily kill all those guards even from a distance, but right now, a direct confrontation was suicide.
Evan, Ghost, and Peaker had thoroughly suppressed their own awakened auras, burying their liquid crimson Qi deep within the silver linings of their apertures.
To the sensory wards and the guards in the towers, they appeared as nothing more than three fragile, aging mortal traders that are entirely harmless.
Down on the frozen ground of the main entrance, four mortal knights stood in a rigid defensive line, blocking the path of the wooden gate.
They were clad in heavy, overlapping plate armor that had been blackened to prevent the winter glare from giving away their positions.
The metal clanked with a dull, heavy resonance as one of the knights broke formation, stepping forward to intercept the approaching carriage.
He was a broad shouldered man, his visor raised to reveal a face hardened by years of duty.
A massive, brutal sword, measuring roughly forty seven inches in length, hung heavy and menacing from his left hip, the pommel resting right against his love handle as he walked.
The knight caught the reins of the lead horse, forcing the carriage to a groaning halt.
His eyes scanned the interior of the wagon, lingering on the crates of basic textiles, salt, and cheap iron tools.
’State your names, your origin, and your business within the Shu territory,’ the knight demanded.
He asked the standard, formal questions with the practiced, mechanical apathy of a man who had repeated the same script a thousand times to a thousand different travelers.
Ghost, completely locked into his persona as a raspy, old trader, let out a wet, wheezing cough, leaning forward over the driver’s seat.
’Just old man Marcus and my brothers, young master,’ he slurred, mimicking the weak, trembling pitch of a mortal whose bones were rotting from old age.
’We’ve come from the lower eastern ridges. Just brought a few scraps of winter cloth, some lye soap, and salt to trade with the outer tents before the big snows lock the passes. We don’t want any trouble.’
The knight didn’t care about their story. He didn’t even look up at Ghost’s ash powdered face. He simply grunted.
’Every wheel that enters the outer ring pays the toll, entrance tax, three blood stones.’
One blood stone per person.
It was a steep price for a common mortal trader, designed to milk the desperate dry before they even stepped foot into the clan’s jurisdiction.
Evan didn’t hesitate.
He reached into his coarse wool tunic, his leather gloved hand retrieving three small, rough cut crimson crystals from a basic pouch.
He tossed them down into the knight’s open gauntlet.
The stones clinked against the dark metal.
The knight inspected the stones, gave a curt nod to the towers above, and stepped aside.
’Move along.’
With a sharp snap of the reins from Ghost, the carriage rolled forward, crossing the threshold of the wooden gate and pushing directly into the territory of the Shu Clan.
The moment they cleared they entered, the illusion of an organized, powerful clan completely disintegrated.
They found themselves navigating a chaotic, muddy labyrinth of packed dirt pathways.
The air here was foul, choked with the smell of cheap coal smoke, unwashed bodies, and the distinct, metallic tang of unrefined blood path energy.
Almost immediately, a small crowd of pale, gaunt people began to gather around the slow moving wagon.
They were desperate, their eyes hollowed out by starvation and cold as they looked at the merchant goods.
They shouted hoarsely, bartering with whatever meager possessions they had left, rusty iron nails, scraps of animal hides, and old coins.
Evan watched silently as Ghost and a half awake Peaker began handing out basic blankets, small pouches of rock salt, and dried grains.
By the time they had traveled a few hundred yards down the main thoroughfare, roughly twenty percent of their items were already sold, traded for absolute pittance.
But the profit didn’t matter.
The people living here were devastatingly poor, a direct consequence of the brutal caste system maintained by the Shu Clan leadership.
In a clan, the hierarchy was geographic, simply put, the closer a person lived to the outer wooden fence, the poorer and more disposable they were.
The elite lived deep within the clan, while the mortals were pushed to the absolute fringes to act as human shields against external invasions.
As Evan watched a frail woman exchange a broken silver hairpin for a single loaf of stale bread, a dark piece of academic lore drifted through his mind.
Back at the academy, he had read secret treatises on the biological curse of the nocturnal bloodline.
The vampires of this world were bound to the primal necessity of blood, without it, their bodies would slowly wither, their minds fracturing into a state of feral, agonizing madness known as blood lust.
People in these outer rings died of blood lust on a regular basis.
The noble houses at the center tightly rationed the distribution of refined blood path resources, ensuring the poor remained too weak and desperate to ever organize a revolt.
Because of this artificial scarcity, a dark, highly illegal trade had formed among the outer slums.
Evan knew for a fact that many of these desperate, talentless vampires regularly risked their lives to slip past the regional boundary arrays.
They would illegally cross the dimensional tears into the non magical realm, entering the world Evan had left behind.
There, under the cover of darkness, they would hunt the unsuspecting, baseline human population, drinking their fill of non magical blood before slipping back.
It was a terrifying gamble, but by doing so, they didn’t lose a single blood stone to the clan’s monopoly, and the raw essence was potent enough to suppress their desire to drink blood for another nine days.
Nine days of sanity, bought with a midnight hunt in a world that didn’t believe in monsters.
Right now, the evidence of this suffering was everywhere.
The houses here weren’t tents of fine woven fabric like the ones in the sunflower valley, they were miserable, structural disasters made of old, discarded clothes that had been crudely patched together with dried mud and twine.
The freezing winter wind ripped through the gaps, carrying the sound of hollow, dry coughing from within the canvas.
As the carriage creaked past a particularly large, dilapidated tent, the fabric flap was pulled back slightly.
Two staring, starving children looked out from the darkness.
Their skin was translucent, their eyes unnaturally large and sunken into their skulls, their tiny fangs protruding weakly over their dry, cracked lips.
They didn’t cry, and they didn’t beg, they just watched the food in the carriage with a dull, haunting emptiness that only true starvation could produce.
The sight hit the interior of the carriage like a physical blow.
Ghost stared at the two children, his grip on the leather reins loosening slightly.
His massive, muscular jaw tightened beneath the grey ash powder on his skin, and Evan watched as a heavy, genuine tear or two welled up in ghost’s eyes, tracking a clean line down his artificial wrinkles.
Even Evan, whose heart had been thoroughly hardened by a lifetime of misery on Earth and six months of cold calculation in the academy, felt a strange, unfamiliar twist in his chest, a bit of genuine heartache.
He looked at the misery around them, then shifted his gaze slightly to the left, watching ghost wipe his eyes with the back of a calloused, grey stained hand.
’Even if it looks like ghost’s mother might have sinned with a gorilla and a lion... he still has a soft place in his heart’
