In Yun Jieshi's opinion, the only thing worse than facing a monster was the prospect of facing one.
He squinted in the direction the hag pointed. The blizzard almost seemed to make an effort to keep whatever she wanted to show him hidden. The vicious wind and its white impurities almost turned everything in view into a blank, white canvas.
But whatever it was that Qui Tian wanted the little monkey to see seemed determined to be spotted.
At first, Yun Jieshi perked up.
He noticed a single, bright golden beacon of light about twelve meters away. It wrestled through the blizzard, persisting against its might somehow.
'Is that…?' Yun Jieshi thought, confused. 'What?'
It hit him. The beacon wasn't gold. Instead, it was orange, and it didn't pull on his sight as mystically as the golden spots of light – the Complete Dear Treasures.
What was it then, and what did it have to do with a monster?
The hag must have sensed his confusion. She inched closer in the direction of the glow, pulling the little monkey forward. Soon, they were a mere five meters away, and the orange gleam intensified. The hag didn't have them proceed any further. The blizzard was breaching the instruction she had applied around them.
Yun Jieshi frowned again as he took a sharp draw of air to claim some composure. He was equal portions fear and curiosity.
Something teased his ears right then. Straining them to the limit, he thought he detected a faint hiss, but he couldn't be too sure. He closed his eyes and focused on the sound. He heard it better. Slowly, it became a bit more distinguishable from the howl of the monstrous winds.
The orange light was hissing like a serpent, or rather, it was the cold that hissed when it came into contact with it. Billows of steam could be seen pouring outward while orange light remained radiant – refusing to be hidden – like some mystic red jade fallen from the heavens.
'It's not a light,' Yun Jieshi realized. 'It's one of the coals from the cabin!'
The hag, realizing that he was starting to understand, pointed further than the lump of coal in front of them. Four more of them could be seen ahead, much harder to detect than the first. The closest was roughly twenty meters away; Yun Jieshi could only guess exactly how far the others were. He couldn't be sure if he was even seeing right. His eyes were not immune to tricks.
But what then?
Were these coals the enemy? Were they related to the monster?
No. Yun Jieshi shook his head. What was he thinking? It was obvious what the hag meant with this.
Unfortunately, the answer wasn't quite as satisfying as he would have liked, and worse yet, it instilled within him a dreadful bit of terror with what it implied.
'The monster – the monster Hua Dongmei mentioned – is probably somewhere leagues in this direction,' the little monkey thought, his eyes squinted. He turned to the hag, complicated emotions racing within him. 'She has some grudge against this monster, but I guess it's difficult for her to reach it because of these conditions. She's marked the greatest distances she's managed to travel towards his monster with the coals!'
The mystery behind this old woman's story suddenly became a gnawing curiosity in Yun Jieshi's head.
What kind of grudge could drive her to struggle through this horrid weather advancing little by little?
Just how many times had she tried? Unless he counted each of the coals, he could never know.
Did his arrival derail the hag from her mission?
Her fury just now had made Yun Jieshi's furs stand on end. It still did, in fact. It transcended reason.
"So, the real monster is there," he said carefully, pointing in the same direction as the hag's crooked finger. "Can it… come here?"
The answer he received wasn't quite what he had expected.
"…Won't."
'What?'
What did she mean it won't? Did that mean it could, but just didn't feel like it?
The little monkey gulped. That was horrifying. If he considered it along those lines, did that not imply that this monster wasn't threatened by Qui Tian at all?
…Or was it that it wouldn't dare come here to face her?
'Pluck my life!' He cursed.
Why did this remind him of Bei Jun and his so-called claim that he could defeat the Imp King easily if it weren't for the fact that he was afraid of traveling during the daytime?
The hag gave a meaningful – meaningfully hateful– look in the direction she had been pointing and then abruptly, she began back the way they had come. Yun Jieshi followed. His head hung low, heavy with deep contemplation.
If the hag could properly tell a story, he wouldn't have minded to hear her tell it. He wouldn't say he was the worst listener, after all. But the old woman couldn't express herself fully.
Was her speech impaired now – broken – because she'd been through some fierce trauma caused by the monster?
Who knew?
Soon, the blizzard began to wane.
Yun Jieshi was all too pleased to escape its loud howling and vicious jabs, some of which had begun to pierce through the protection around him and Qui Tian.
The two were once again surrounded by the odd flowers, or rather, they had traveled enough of a distance backward to where they could see them again. The flowers kept doing their lively little dance, oblivious to everything… until Yun Jieshi and the hag appeared in their midst.
They stopped their happy activity and faced them with plain pistils and colorful petals. It was uncanny to Yun Jieshi as it had been before. The attention felt like hundreds of pins pricking the skin under his furs.
The hag had cooled off somewhat. She steered them back towards the mountain of ice and snow where she had been about to exposit something to the little monkey before he so rudely interrupted her.
The flowers were fewer here and the great, black frozen feather remained atop some of them.
'So does that mean that there are two monsters? Is the one that owns this feather just insignificant to the hag?' he thought. He had been so sure it was a big deal.
Qui Tian hunched and cleared the snow on the ground below her feet. Yun Jieshi paid close attention. It was easy now that the snow and wind didn't whip about them as ruthlessly as before; the effectiveness of the earlier talisman's instruction had been restored.
The hag pulled a handful of cold, wet dirt from under the snow and showed it to Yun Jieshi. She then pointed ahead of them – where they had been headed initially before the detour.
"Very… fertile," she said and she pointed at the flowers. The intensity of their focus on them was fading for some reason. "Grow… any."
The little monkey scratched his head while squinting and then snapped his fingers.
"You can grow anything here?" he said as he scooped the dirt from the hag's hand. "Anything?"
She nodded, but then she turned to the flowers. They were going back to dancing and doing little leaps to catch the flakes of snow, not minding them at all.
"Flower… dangerous," she said. "Touch…" She shook her head vigorously. Yun Jieshi got the meaning.
Don't touch the flowers.
He didn't have any plans to pluck a few for a sweetheart anyway.
To his surprise, the hag went on about these flowers.
"Emotion… No. Flowers…feel… attack," she said grimly.
Yun Jieshi would be lying if he said he managed to glean anything more than 'flowers bad', from the hag's sentences. He could only interpret so much. He did his best though. This felt important.
"Are you saying they can… sense emotion?" he asked after a little while.
Qui Tian nodded.
The little monkey felt his blood turn cold. He remembered how the flowers had snapped in their direction when the hag reacted to his question about the monster.
So that's what that was about? The flowers had sensed her fury?
These sentient plants had continued to follow him and Qui Tian with their 'gazes' until she calmed down.
Yun Jieshi gulped. He assumed that there was something that followed after the flowers sensed emotion – heavy emotion. But perhaps the hag was too strong for the flowers. They never did anything to her, after all.
But Qui Tian was warning him with a taut degree of seriousness. That must have meant that Yun Jieshi was a target that the flowers would find doable if he were caught on his own, sobbing.
He didn't like that prospect.
The little monkey nodded vigorously when the hag shook him by the shoulder, inquiring if he really understood.
"I-I understand," he said.
Qui Tian nodded and then sighed. She then beckoned him, and together they waded between the colorful flowers. The little monkey made sure not to let so much as a strand of his furs graze any of the flowers. Luckily, they didn't care for him at the moment.
As though to further prove that land here was very rich, more of the flowers bloomed in every direction along with species of trees and shrubs that seemed rather… special, moreso than anything Yun Jieshi had seen so far.
The little monkey spotted types of vegetation that would baffle ecologists, but whatever shape they took or what properties they had didn't seem to matter at the end of the day. Most of them were fighting a losing battle against the black-stalked flowers.
The damned flowers multiplied, taking over most of the land as far as Yun Jieshi's eye could see. It was a pitiful sight, but all was not lost.
While other pieces of flora had no choice but to surrender their existence for the sake of these bizarre flowers, there were some that didn't have to.
Qui Tian had made sure of that. She had a little garden smack-dab in the middle of enemy territory.