Chapter 46: Neko Station
Greenery surrounded the station, its emerald grass glittering under the sunlight.
Yuan struggled to believe in his own eyes. Unlike Bucket and the other spotters, who all used binoculars to observe the place from afar from the wagon’s roof, his new eyes let him see far into the distance without assistance.
The train station looked quite similar to the one Yuan encountered in the Thunderlands, a forgotten, multi-floor ruin of cracked walls and broken windows. This one, however, was covered in creeping vines and vibrant leaves rather than rust. Yuan had never seen anything like it outside of a sect’s compound.
That alone would have been astonishing, but the area around the station raised all kinds of alarm bells. First of all, other buildings flanked the half-buried railway alongside tall trees with twisted black bark and whose branches held pale fruits that radiated with a yellow glow. Abandoned wagons and railroad cars wrapped in moss littered the ground. A vast field of grass and blooming wildflowers surrounded them, their fragrance so overwhelming that Yuan could smell it from a wide distance.
The station was enveloped in quite a lot of qi too. Not as much as a patch of Thunderlands or Arc’s Authority, but enough to rival a sect’s compound.
“I don’t see any fence, sir,” Bucket warned.
“A Barrier surrounds the station,” Yuan replied. He could see the faint flow of qi being redirected around the flower field into a bagua formation. Either the flowers themselves served as its foundations, or they simply grew over lines dug into the earth below them. “This place is dangerous.”
Unguarded greenery in the middle of the wasteland was either a trap for the unwary, or a very powerful entity’s property. Yuan doubted it was a sect compound, since its owners would have restored the buildings and put up signs to announce their allegiance. The station probably belonged to a lonely cultivator of considerable power or a spirit.
Yuan scanned the area for more details until he noticed a strange occurrence: a big statue of a spotted cat wearing a cap nearly identical to Orient’s own stood in front of the station entrance behind a set of crimson torii gates. Its bronze body remained unblemished by the growing vegetation and it radiated no small amount of qi. Yuan focused on it with his sharpened senses, reading its fluctuations until he could identify its nature.