There was just something… ungraspable, indescribable about the glory of East Saffron, he couldn’t help but think. As the Dragon Gate rose high overhead the river waters, an enormous emplacement so grand the very weather seemed to wait timidly for passage, clouds swirling around the ruby-jade bright walls, immense void that was the portal between East Saffron proper and the jurisdiction of Ca Cao called East Saffron…

  He shivered as he felt the wards peeling back from him. He only but barely been able to feel it the first time he’d come to the city, not too long ago, what felt like ages ago… but now, spirit reinforced by his cultivation, tempered in whatever way he still did not quite understand, he could. It was too grand to grasp, too enormous to see, too monumental to so much as begin to grasp the fringe-edge, frayed tassels of its immensity… but he could see the shape of it. Feel the touch of it.

  East Saffron was more than merely a city, he knew— had known, yet now felt down to his sinew and bone as the small, flat-bottomed ferry he was resting on languidly floated out of the city— it was an almost living thing, and the absence of it was noticeable. He wondered what greater cultivators than he could sense. He wondered what his parents would have, if they’d…

  He shook his head, banishing such grim thoughts to the murk waters beneath him. One of the ship attendants stepped up to him— a bit nervously, as most East Saffron people tended to be when Lily wasn’t with him, and even sometimes when she was. “Excuse me… sir,” it was a bit amusing how hesitant he was about that. It wasn’t like he was going to bite his face off for that. “The ferry will be landing soon. If you’re feeling cold, we have the…”

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  He waved his paw, and fought the urge to sigh as the deckhand flinched back at the innocuous gesture. “It’s fine. I’ll stay up here until the ship lands.” He wouldn’t even need to go down to disembark— he wasn’t a powerful cultivator by any means yet, but he was a cultivator. A twenty foot fall was nothing. “I’m not cold.”

  “Of— of course, sir.” The man sounded doubtful, but he left him alone quick enough— no doubt eager to put distance between them. He did sigh, at that… it was annoying. Annoying, and a little discouraging, at times, how clearly they feared his kind. What had they ever done to them, but bleed and die and suffer for their war…

  It was a bitter situation all around. He doubted that any of his kin really wanted to be in East Saffron… he was lucky, in a sense— at least he got to stay in the city proper, where conditions were a little better. Looking off the side of the boat as it cut through the river, it was clear that not everyone was so fortunate. It was not an obvious difference… until one really looked. Then the differences were so glaringly obvious that the very idea of missing them seemed laughable.

  So it went, he supposed. It was the course of things, unchangeable by man or cat. Maybe— he thought wryly to himself— once he became an Immortal Ascension cultivator, he’d be able to make a real difference.

  Right. As if he’d manage that…

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