The purple dusk deepened into black night as Pei Jing pulled himself out of the drainage ditch behind the cattail wall.
His wet linen clothes clung to his skin, dripping clear spring water onto the marsh mud.
He didn’t right away dry himself. Instead, he reached into his wicker basket, pulled out a small leather pouch containing his spare footwear. A pair of heavy, double-soled hemp sandals with distinctive cross-hatched rawhide bindings along the tread.
He strapped them onto his bare feet.
To catch a hunting beast, you don’t run away. You build a runway and light the lanterns.
Scarface Wei and his two hounds were searching the southern wetlands, relying on Thin Ghost Cao’s Scent-Hound Beetle. The beetle realized the freshwater pool had masked the sulfur animal fat. Then, Cao would begin casting wider circles. He looked for physical shifted weight in the mud.
Pei Jing stepped onto a patch of soft, damp peat thirty paces from the pool.
He didn’t walk with his zero-sound Spirit Wind Stride.
