Chapter 18: The Woman On The Road
Twenty meters.
My mind stopped racing and started working.
She could sense heartbeats. That meant hiding was theater. She already knew how many of us there were, where we were positioned, and that one of us was carrying something that pulsed with concentrated qi. Running was suicide. Fighting was a joke. Four men with hand picks against a trained cultivator with twenty-two soldiers at her back.
That left talking.
I stood up.
“Liang,” Gao Ren hissed.
“Stay down. All of you.” I stepped over the fallen trunk and walked out of the tree line with my hands visible, palms forward, no tools, no weapons. Just a fifteen-year-old boy with dirt on his clothes and ore dust on his face stepping onto open ground in front of a woman who could probably kill him before he finished a sentence.
She stopped walking.
Ten meters between us.