The double doors closed behind me and I waited to poke the butterfly until we were a little way away from the cultivators. The butterfly fluttered beside me and I wondered who it could have been from until I finally poked the glittering aura and it exploded into the words.

  Sorry, my contact said they couldn’t wait. If you’re up for it, send me another message and I’ll have the man get in contact with you.

  I sighed and frowned with a roll of my eyes. Well, whatever this is, what the job is all about, right? I shot off another message, letting Norimoro know I was interested.

  “Man, we are going to charge this guy SO much money,” I told Betsy. I gave her the signal to stop so we could wait for another message on where to go and what to do.

  Betsy made sure we were out of the way as much as we could be on the narrow, busy road. We were right in the downtown area and it was full of people who rushed around. People getting to shops, people going back with their wagons full of produce or other farm goods. I thought it might give a busy New York City intersection a run for its money the way people were moving around.

  Just like the Big Apple, the streets, though busy and full of people, was also filled with trash, making it difficult to avoid. The city had its fair share of homeless people. Random men and women on the sides of the street. Some even had signs to try to get some coins from people.

  I couldn’t help but chuckle and shake my head at one of the older men’s signs. Dressed in old, worn robes, he held a sign on his lap that simply said, ‘It’s for wine.’ I may have given the man a few of the silver coins.

  There was a family sitting there on the corner of one building. The man was missing part of his leg, and his wife sat there beside him, nestled into him. Two children were there as well and played with some random broken toys they had. For them, I climbed down and gave them a few of the more expensive golden shus with the etched design in them. The woman almost jumped to her feet to thank me and the man just looked up with a wide smile when he realized how much I had given them.

  “You’d think the locals would be more kind to someone who served the army and protected the streets here,” the wife whispered to me.

  “They don’t care. If it’s the emperor’s army, they’re a pariah,” she said this louder and spat on the ground towards a man on his way to the shops. He just looked at her sheepishly and then scooted away along his business.

  I didn’t know what to say to her, so I just nodded my head. “Try to be well.”

  They gave their thanks again and then she helped her husband up. The man didn’t even have a cane, and they all were all skinny, including the children. I sighed and watched them walk off with the husband leaning into his wife. I hoped they were going to get a good hot meal and maybe a room somewhere for the night. The man was coughing a wet, deep cough that made me grimace and sigh as I walked back to Betsy.

  “Mrr,” she said and looked over at me.

  “Man, what’s going on down here?” I asked and leaned against her.

  Betsy just shook her head and gave another soft bellow.

  “No wonder there're bandits on the roads leading north. If the entire region is like this..” I trailed off and remembered what I had heard about rebels. “I got a bad feeling about this.”

  Betsy gave another bellow and nodded her massive head.

  It was just another few minutes past that when another butterfly finally came fluttering towards me. I poked it and let the words explode in front of me.

  The outskirts of the south side of the city in the warehousing district is a business called the Hua’Yao Group. I believe it’s a group of alchemist merchants. They have some cargo that needs to go north to the southeast part of the empire. They’ll tell you exactly where, but I think they’re sending stuff to help with the village of Toya that just had some kind of massacre hit it. As for pay, I’ll let you know when I’m in the city and we can meet. We’re close.

  “I’ve always wanted to do some kind of disaster relief,” I said to Betsy as I waved away the sparkling letters. Even when I was directly with BuyMart and they sent trucks of water down after hurricanes, I never got to for one reason or another.

  Betsy nodded her head, and I hopped up onto the driver’s bench. Betsy pulled off and hauled me and the now empty wagon towards the southern part of the city. We were pointing the wrong way and instead of trying to u-turn it, we just took a few extra turns. Once we were facing the right direction, I let Betsy go down the road and I looked over my map.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  “Toya is going to be another long haul, I think,” I said as I looked it over. “It’s on the exact opposite southern side of the continent. This is where Niku went, so maybe she’ll still be there when we arrive,” I said hopefully.

  Betsy just gave a grunt.

  I didn’t worry about figuring out where to go or how to get there. Betsy seemed to have an innate sense of how to get places. She probably could have taken us right to the arena if I had let her. I stared at the ox for a minute and wondered if she had absorbed my old gps somehow when she turned into an ox? I thought about asking her about it, but I figured she’d just roll her eyes at me. The sassy damn ox.

  We left the more crowded, narrower heart of the city to a more spread out area that held large buildings. It was much more comfortable driving around here. The roads were less populated and only really had other wagons and not pedestrians. It was most definitely the industrial part of the city. Or well, as industrial as an ancient Chinese city could be, I guessed. Just like the rest of the city, a lot of the buildings had missing windows and were vacant.

  Eventually, we rolled up to a smaller building that had a large dirt lot in front of it. I looked up and saw the name on the side of the building. It even had the little Rx symbol, and I smirked. It was quite a bit smaller than the rest of the large buildings on this side of town, but it was still bigger than the alchemist shop I got the pills and messaging crystal from.

  Was this a historical version of a pharmaceutical company? I climbed down from the wagon and looked over the building. With the size of it, I wondered if these guys were really alchemists. Maybe they were just the lesser apothecaries I heard about back in Shanjiao. I shrugged and figured just because they weren’t actual alchemists didn’t mean they didn’t have stuff that could help, right?

  “Hello?” I called as I walked into the open doorway.

  The building looked as abandoned as all the other ones, but I heard some movement in a room further back. I narrowed my eyes and got a bad feeling about all this, but I pressed on. I heard some people speaking, and I walked into a large open room that was full of packing crates.

  “Can we help you?” One guy turned and looked at me as soon as I walked in.

  There were about a dozen people in the room and most of them were just standing around talking.

  My nerves calmed a little when I realized he was wearing the robes of a cultivator and I smiled and gave him a little wave. “Hey there. Norimoro sent me. I guess you guys have some things that need to go to Toya?”

  Two of them were wearing cultivator robes, I realized. They must have been management, I thought as I looked at the rest of them. They were all just dressed in pants and shirts. Nothing really stood out about any of them, even the cultivators were just kinda people. I should have found this as odd, but I just wanted to get my cargo, get paid and get the hell out of the depressing ass city.

  The cultivators grinned broadly and nodded their heads. “Excellent! I’m Hou Meng and this is Xiong Min,” he said as he pointed to the other cultivator. He didn’t bother introducing anyone else.

  “Thank you so much for helping us out. Things have been a little rough around here lately and we can’t really spare the people to get the cargo so far out. You have a wagon, right? I’m told an extra long one with lots of room?” He asked.

  I nodded my head and pointed my thumb at the front of the building. “Yeah, it’s right out front with my ox.”

  He nodded and pointed to a large opening in the back of the wall. “Do you mind bringing it around back here? I’ll get the guys to load you up and I’ll pay you half the coin now. Our contact in the village will pay the other half.”

  Once I answered in the affirmative, I went out and Betsy and I got the wagon around the back of the building. It took us a bit of time because there was some fencing separating property lines between this building and the next, but we could manage. Definitely had to swing wide was all it took. When we got out back, the people made room for us to come in and we went all the way inside.

  I hadn’t even climbed down from the bench and the men had grabbed long wooden crates that were piled up along the sides of the room. They carried them over and carefully loaded the wagon.

  “So, you guys can go fast, right?” Min asked me.

  I nodded. “Probably the fastest wagon in the Empire.”

  They frowned with mention of the empire, and I grinned nervously. I didn’t want to lose the job.

  “Yeah, well, as long as that ox is fast,” Meng said and gave Min a soft cuff on the back of the head. “Ignore my friend. He’s…. Well, it’s better to just ignore him.”

  I cocked my brow and then shrugged. There seemed to be a lot of mistrust and dislike towards the Empire, so I let it all slide. The Emperor’s mistreatment of these people was clear, even to an outsider like myself. I wondered if high taxes caused this, or if they truly were treated as second-rate citizens. I was going to have to look more into it.

  “So, like I said, we pay half now, and you’ll get the rest in Toyo. That work for you?” Min said and walked towards me with a small sack that jingled.

  We never talked about amounts, but he handed me the pouch that was left open. From the weight and amount of golden coins I saw in there, I figured it was going to be well worth it.

  “Yes, uh, we will have the freight there yesterday,” I said with a grin. With this much money, I envisioned paying off the wagon immediately. I didn’t open the pouch and investigate how much was inside of it. I just closed it and put it in my pocket.

  Min and Meng both laughed and clapped me on the opposite shoulders.

  “Good, good. Get it there yesterday. I like that,” Meng said.

  I grinned and nodded and watched Min walk away for a minute before he came back. “You’re all loaded up and good to go.”

  I thanked them for the hurry loading up and me and Betsy made our way out the way we came. We had just headed back to the center of the city when another butterfly told me Norimoro and Amber finally made it and I looked up at the sky. Sun was setting, and I realized I was starving. He told me to meet them back at the arena and he’d pay me.

  “Girl, we probably should stop with how much they’re paying and how fast they want it moved,” I said as we plodded along, going back the way we came.

  Betsy gave an annoyed but resigned below and nodded her head.

  “We’ll get you some feed while I talk to Norimoro and Amber and then we’ll blow this popsicle stand.”

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