Alex sat in the carriage at nighttime slowly carving away at the metal place on his hand. His inscription pen danced along the plate as he carved strokes on it.
The woman in red looked at him with a glaring eye from the side, but said nothing.
Last night, when the bandits were all killed, She had returned to call him a coward for not killing the bandits and the conversation that followed it annoyed her.
"You are a coward," she said.
"Sure, you can call me that," Alex said paying no heed to her words.
"Don't you know how bad the bandits are? They kill, pillage, r*pe the people on the road. They are the worst people living in the empire," she exclaimed.
"I know," Alex said.
"Then why did you let them live?" she asked confused. The conversation was not going the way she had expected to. He didn't deny a single accuse of her.
"When did I let them live?" Alex asked as he looked at her. His eyes didn't show the same cowardice from the first time that led him to getting depressed for the rest of the night.
"You let them live! I had to kill them!" she said.
"Yes, and I was the one that brought them to you. You have the most authority here, so I will let you make the decisions. That was how I was raised, and it's ingrained onto me. This world will have to try harder if it wants to change me. Even then, I doubt it could ever do so," Alex said.
The woman was confused what he saw saying, so was Ying Wu who was to the side.
"Don't worry! I'm not daft enough to think letting bandits live is ever the way to go. If I'm ever alone and I encounter them, I will make sure to do what is right. I may not necessarily kill them, but I won't let them go away with their crimes either," Alex said.
The woman was very confused. She almost believed that she was talking to a different person right now. However, when she saw the resoluteness in Alex's eyes, she realized that something had changed in him.
Alex closed his eyes and started contemplating the formation from the chip to see if he could find anything from them again.
The night ended and the sun showed its face again. The caravan, however, however didn't stop moving. It wouldn't stop moving until it reached its next destination, Rosewood City.
Alex wondered if the name of this city was a coincidence or not, given that it was similar to how the cities in his own world were named.
However, he soon saw the red walls of the city from faraway and was disillusioned. Similar to how his cities in the real world were named after plants, the cities in this world— or at least this Empire— were named after the color Red.
Scarlet, Cardinal, Rosewood; Every single one of these major cities were named after a shade of red.
They finally reached the Rosewood city around late afternoon and stopped. Since this was a bigger city, they were going to stay here until tomorrow morning.
Alex hadn't expected that, but he didn't mind. The distance from Rosewood city to Scarlet city wasn't that far. If the map was accurate, at their current speed, they would reach sometime around 8 pm if they left early morning tomorrow.
Alex got out of the caravan and looked at the lush green trees of the Southern Forest. They were once more right next to the forest. He then turned around to take a look at the massive walls of the Rosewood city.
'So, this place suffered an attack as well?' Alex thought as he saw the constructions taking place around the wall. He walked up to the gate and entered.
Rosewood city had the First Grade sect called the Honor Sect, so Alex could see people wearing golden robes of their all the time. The other people seemed to be acting the same way they would always do.
'So the beasts didn't affect as much huh? That's a relief. Hopefully the Scarlet City didn't suffer much either,' he hoped as he walked amongst the streets.
The city itself was beautiful and vibrant, and he took his time exploring it to its fullest. He learned that the Honor sect was located at the southern end of the city, while a lesser known sect called the Noble Truth sect sat to the north.
The placement of the sects were surprisingly like that of the Scarlet sect. 'Was that a coincidence?' Alex thought.
He walked through the city and bought a few formation materials that he thought he would need. He also bought as many alchemy ingredients as he could.
Finally, as it got late into the night, he returned back to the caravan and got in the carriage where Ying Wu was looking after her mother.
"Oh, you're back," she said.
"Yes, I had to get a few things and lost myself to the beauty of the city," Alex said with a smile.
"Oh wow! I have never been to the Rosewood city. I wanted to come here once with my father, but he didn't bring me. I was quite mad at him at the time. But then I also asked him to take me everywhere so maybe that was the reason," Ying Wu said as she laughed.
"Your father?" Alex asked.
Ying Wu's face immediately changed. "Let's not talk about him," she said.
Alex didn't ask any more questions but secretly wondered if he was either dead or did something that made her agnostic towards him.
He quickly changed the topic and asked, "Why don't you go inside now?"
"I— I have to stay here and looked after her," she said. "Besides, I'm not allowed to leave anywhere without my— my master."
Alex sighed and was a little disappointment towards the woman in red. They talked for a little while, but then the woman in red came to tell them to rest.
Ying Wu was quickly embarrassed as she had forgotten that it was her time to sleep. She quickly said good night and went to sleep, leaving Alex with nobody else to talk to.
So, he took out a random metal plate and started carving the formation from the metal plate onto it.
He assumed that making the strokes would be quite simple and it wouldn't even take him a few minutes to completely finish it, but he hadn't realized how naive it was.
With 5 to 10 strokes, it was easy to carelessly carve onto the formation plate and make a working formation. However, with over 140 strokes, he had to be careful with each stroke.
If he made a single stroke in even the slightest wrong angle, the whole formation would start having problem. The other lines in the intersections wouldn't cross properly, the places that was supposed to leave small space would instead be covered, and in certain occasion, too many lines passing close by would have greater chances of making nicks in the formation.
So, he had to make sure to follow the pattern slowly and surely. He was very afraid to make mistakes at the start and he even did make mistakes, but over time, he gained more confidence with each failure.
Each one of the failed formations were a stepping stone towards a better, successful formation.
It took him the rest of the night to carve a pattern that was accurate to the ones on the chip. He made the final stroke and looked at it.
Aside from not using golden lines in green plate, everything else was the same. Even if the plate was different however, he should be able to tell if the formation was real or not.
He took a deep breath and passed his Qi onto the formation. He didn't need an energy source as he only wanted to tell if the formation was real or not.
The Qi went through the stroke and started filling them. Alex was looking forward to checking the formation but soon started getting scared as the strokes took forever to fill.
The more strokes there were the better the Qi they required. With his common Qi that hadn't even turned to True Qi had to work way more than what the other Qi would have.
Fortunately, his Qi was dense and robust, so he managed to fill every nook and cranny of formation. Once it was all filled, Alex looked at it with bated breaths.
For a moment, the Qi did nothing. It didn't move or show any signs of being in use, but then suddenly, it pierced through the plate to look for an energy source. It didn't find any, and so the Qi on the formation dissipated.
However, that was all Alex needed. 'It works!' he thought. He couldn't get excited or cry out about it. Instead he took it in as another piece of evidence that his theory was true.
He was all but absolutely convinced that he was currently in an actual real world. 'Now, I will just have to learn about what the formation actually does,' he thought.
There were other people who had tried this daunting task of carving a 145 stroke pattern before and Alex had seen them 'not activate' it. He was quite disappointed at the time, he had now realized that they were never going to ever activate it.
The metal and Qi quality just wasn't enough. Instead, what they should have explained that the formation was real.
'Better late than never,' Alex thought.
It was morning now and the carriage started moving as the caravan moved towards the Scarlet city. He asked the woman in red and she said that it would take about 10 hours to reach the city with their current speed.
That was more than enough to go to his classes and returned.
He took Hannah's car and drove himself and Emily to their classes. Once again, he entered to the empty classes.
The professors finally started giving out their assignments that would carry over marks for the exam. Alex couldn't keep playing games all the time now.
Once the classes were over, he went to the car with Emily and drove back home. He was very proficient in driving now and quite liked it. He even thought of buying his own car, but that felt too much of an impulsive decision right now.
He wanted to go on a little detour with Emily, but he had important things to do in the game now. Emily was understanding of that and supported him fully.
Once back, he had his lunch and immediately went back to the game.
He logged in and felt the carriage moving, they hadn't arrived yet. He stood up and walked up to the door and saw a vast expanse of meadow that reminded him of the forbidden fields.
Only these meadows didn't have grasses as tall. "Are we in the Gap?" he asked.
"Yes, We will soon reach Scarlet City, maybe even in less than an hour," she said.
The Gap was a name people gave to an opening in the southern forest that didn't have trees growing on them. According to some records, there were wars fought here before and so the land was mostly destroyed with no trees growing here anymore.
'The war from back when the Crimson Empire was shattered maybe?' he thought. That was the only explanation he had for the wars. He couldn't think of any other wars mentioned in the records.
The caravan kept on moving and soon they could see a queue of other similar caravan and carriages on the road waiting in front of a giant gate.
There were cultivators wearing mostly yellow, and sometimes green coming out of the southern forest. Alex saw all of this and smiled.
He had returned. He had finally returned to the Scarlet City after over a month.
