Zhao Bing looked up into the void of space that was the sky. Every time he came in here he saw it, the universe before his very eyes, it was humbling. It really spoke to the fact that even if this land looked exactly like it was in the real world, this was in fact not the real world. He couldn't sense or see the queen or his nephew from here, or anything living or dead for that matter, the void was weird like that.

  Zhao Bing did not walk for very long before he saw the exist, looking exactly as the entrance had looked, two trees intertwined to form a doorway. Crossing the doorway gave a weird feeling to put it nicely, even though the door way was large and seemed empty moving through felt like pushing past a wall of mud, oddly constricting. It left a weird after-feeling, he had gone through the experience twice and still felt uncomfortable. Outside, Zhao Bing watched as what had been a doorway made of two huge tree in the void was just one tree amongst others, looking a little wider than normal. He watched as that one tree died and decayed within seconds leaving nothing but the fact that he was here, in a different location from where entered the void as proof it had existed.

  He looked around trying to get his bearings, the sun was up already peeking across the horizon. Time and space was weird in the void, he had only walked a short distance in the void and yet it felt like a long time had passed, not very long, if the morning dews were still present, it should have been at least one or two hours since he left his nephew with the sage, three hours at most. That made things easy, the sun rose from the east and sets in the west -accounting for the rotation of the earth-. According to the map which he had bought and was now useless due to a lack of visible land mark. Going east was his best, if he wanted to see civilization sooner, north and south will take him parallel to the indus valley forest -where he might eventually find a road- and westward would just take him backwards and he did not want to go backwards. That left eastwards, toward the morning sun.

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  He sensed the boundary before he saw it, the border between the Koi province and Henan province, it was aether, it was less a real aether construct and more a reshaping of the flow of aether to mark a boundary. You could liken it to a river with a man-made branch for plant irrigation or some other similar use. It was called a ward, this ward in particular did not stop people from entering or do anything fancy like that. In that aspect, it was less useful than a fence but entering the country unnoticed was impossible. So, as Zhao came up to the ward he reoriented himself moving along the boundary of the ward, toward the highest concentration of aether closest to his senses. The last thing he wanted was to be mistaken for an enemy and forcing his way through the ward looked like a good way to do that. So instead he would give himself up to the proper authorities.

  "So you know that the source of the earthquake yesterday?"

  "Yeah, I thought we were being ambushed."

  “Can you imagine it was just captain Altan Niraj

  "All that from a breakthrough, the 5th tier is no joke!"

  "Another promotion is around the corner for him, damn I am jealous."

  The ear piece of the man that just spoke came alive as soon as he finished speaking.

  “corporal, there is a man headed your way, from the Indus valley. Tall, fair, in his thirties.”