Chapter 128: The Compass in the Bamboo
My Dao to Eternity — Chapter 128
Chapter 128: The Compass in the Bamboo
Three days south of the ruptured mountain, the refugee column began to thin enough that Li Fan judged it safer to leave it than to stay.
Too many people crowded too close together made for too many chances that someone, somewhere, might get a proper look at his face and remember it later to the wrong listener. He waited until a stretch of the road cut through a bamboo forest thick enough to swallow sound, let a cart of grain sacks pass him on the path, and stepped off into the green shade between one stride and the next without anyone behind him noticing he'd gone.
The bamboo grew close and tall here, pale green stalks creaking against each other overhead in a wind Li Fan couldn't feel at ground level, the light coming down in narrow moving strips that shifted across the packed dirt path with every gust. It smelled of wet earth and crushed leaf litter, cool and green after two days of road dust, and for the length of perhaps thirty paces Li Fan let himself believe he'd found a quiet stretch to rest in before rejoining the road further south.
Then he heard the compass.