Severing Time & Space

Spotted Snow Lion, Part I

The Wu Clan compound was located barely an hour from West Fang, which derived its name from being located to the west of Zahn City. East Fang was on the other side of Zahn City and took almost an entire day to get there by carriage. Fortunately, Wu Meiying had assured Wu Jian that the mountain they needed to travel to was West Fang.

Looking at it up close, Wu Jian decided that West Fang mountain looked nothing like a fang at all. It was gigantic and resembled a misshapen pyramid with jagged curves and steep cliffs. He didn’t know how big it was, but it was way bigger than the clan compound, so much so that it seemed like a goliath from the ancient texts. The entire mountain was covered from head to base in trees powdered white with snow. He worried if they would even be able to find any special herbs, which he expressed to Wu Meiying.

“Don’t worry. We’ll definitely find something here,” Wu Meiying assured him.

Since she was the one saying it, Wu Jian believed her. He shoved those feelings of skepticism into the back of his mind. There was no room for doubt.

They stepped onto a small path leading deeper into the mountain. He didn’t know if it was a natural path or manmade. Wu Jian simply followed Wu Meiying as she led him past trees that all looked the same. The chilly air caused his breath to fog and his arms to shake inside of his cloak. Sometimes, he caught sight of animals out of the corner of his eyes like rabbits and foxes, though they would always disappear into the underbrush whenever he turned his head.

“Isn’t nature powerful?” asked Wu Meiying.

“Powerful? What do you mean?” asked Wu Jian.

“I mean, look at this. All this snow and the dead trees were caused by nature.” Wu Meiying gestured to everything around her. “Nature is the reason it’s so cold, the reason so many animals are hibernating, why that fox following us has white fur, and why everything is covered in snow. There are some humans who can manipulate nature like this, but it requires thousands of years of training. I don’t think a single person on this planet has ever achieved that level of power either.”

“Well, when you put it like that, I guess nature is pretty powerful,” Wu Jian admitted.

“Right? Now let’s find that treasure. I think it’s a little ways further up the mountain.”

They walked through the freezing cold forest in the middle of the night for a little longer, nothing but the sparse moonlight sprinkling between the canopy to light their path, and Wu Jian tried his best to see where they were going. The ground was covered in white and everything else was dark. He didn’t know how Wu Meiying was leading him because he had already become completely lost.

“Do you even know what we’re searching for?” asked Wu Jian, shivering. The cold was starting to seep through his cloak and into his bones.

“I’ll know what we’re looking for when I see it,” Wu Meiying said. Her breath came out in puffs of white steam.

“Which means I’ll be practically useless since I don’t know,” Wu Jian sighed.

They continued to walk. Wu Meiying eventually had them stop. He wondered why, but then she turned to him, grinned, and pointed at something above them.

“Look up there. Do you see that?”

Wu Jian didn’t know what she was pointing to at first, but then he spotted it, something glowing bright silver above their heads. He couldn’t tell what it was. All he knew was that it stood out amongst everything else he had seen, like a ray of sunlight peeking out through dark storm clouds.

“What is it?” asked Wu Jian.

“That is the treasure we want,” Wu Meiying declared.

“Really? Well, okay. So, how do we get it?”

“We climb, obviously.”

“Right. I guess it is obvious. Okay. Leave this to me.”

Wu Meiying raised an eyebrow as Wu Jian stepped forward and rubbed his hands together, then performed a series of stretches listed in one of the scrolls they had borrowed from the library to limber up his muscles. She seemed skeptical.

“Are you sure?” she asked.

“Yeah. We’re here because of me, because I need to get stronger. How can I get stronger if I’m relying on you for everything? You found this plant, so now let me get it,” Wu Jian said.

For some reason, his words made Wu Meiying smile. “Okay. I’ll leave this to you.”

Wu Jian took a deep breath as he walked forward, his boots sinking into the snow. It was a lot deeper than he thought it would be. The plant he was to get had also made itself comfortable perched on the ledge of a cliff. While Wu Jian wasn’t an accurate judge of height, he knew that if he fell from that high up, it would hurt a lot and might make getting back home before his parents found out they were missing impossible.

Despite this, Wu Jian placed one hand on a crevice of the cliff and pulled himself up, then placed the other hand on a handhold he found a little higher than the first one. The cliff wall was freezing. His hands felt a chill that sent a jolt through his skin, up his arm, and straight into his brain. He wanted to jerk his hand away, but he forced that reflex down and continued to climb.

Time seemed to lose meaning as Wu Jian focused on climbing. His arms were starting to feel the strain. His legs felt like jelly hardened into ice. Yet even though his body was sore, cold, and tired, he kept climbing until, at last, he reached the plant that Wu Meiying had pointed out.

It was breathtaking.

The plant looked like a lotus. However, while most lotus sprouted in varying shades of pink, this one was pure silver. Now that he was so close, Wu Jian could see that what was glowing was the inside of the plant—tiny seeds no bigger than a grain of rice appeared akin to luminescent fireflies.

“So… I just need to grab this, right?”

Wu Jian’s arm trembled as he removed one limb from the cliff and reached out to grab the flower, but just as his hand was about to touch it, Wu Meiying screamed at the same time that something big slammed into the cliffside right next to where his hand was. Snow and rock fragments exploded everywhere. Wu Jian was so shocked that he almost let go of the cliff, but he held on tenaciously as the storm died down. Finally, he looked at what had created such a big explosion next to him.

He wished he hadn’t.