“Mister Yagami Hiro! I finally caught up with… you… you’re not going into the forest, are you?”
Guess what Khada Jhin is doing.
“Oh, no! Mister Yagami, you can’t—”
“I’m sorry, Mister Yagami, but you mustn’t go in there. It’s possessed by a horrible spirit. All the townsfolk won’t dare to go near.”
Khada Jhin, who is today Yagami Hiro, celebrated painter and landscape artist of Zhyun’s Kaijn, is an excellent actor. To put on another face for him is like second nature, an instinct so honed that ‘breaking character’ is inasmuch unthinkable as physically impossible. It just wouldn’t happen.
Which is why, when he very nearly laughs in this caravaner’s face, it must have been the most absurd thing he’s been told in years.
“Keep your warnings to yourself,” he says. “I did not come to the borderland simply as a sightseeing journey. There are dyes here irreproducible anywhere else in Ionia, and I will harvest them. Seeing as the last time I sent for someone else to do this simple task came back with little more than weeds and dandelions.”
The caravaner is aghast. “There aren’t any dyes in… Mister Yagami! I must come with you!”
“You don’t understand. If something were to happen to you, that would be it for our caravan. The least I could do is ensure your safety, even if you don’t believe the stories.”
I think it is you that doesn’t understand, Jhin almost hisses, but stays his tongue, instead saying, “Very well. Do not slow me down.” Off with a flourish, he sets into the forest without another word, caravaner desperate to keep up behind him. Typical. The next he employs a caravan to the northern reaches, he’ll be sure to pack double in gold such they might stay put.
(And there is dye here, though not the kind to color some philistine’s fabric.)
The caravaner says something about how fast Jhin is, and he’s well beyond deigning to hear it. Potentially if he’d been in a better mood he’d tell them that in another life—which had not been another life—he’d been a dancer, an acrobat, before settling down in Kaijn once he got older. But then he imagines that the caravaner would then again state the obvious like how ‘Mister Yagami’ does not look that old at all, and Jhin says nothing. Better the silence than…
… there’s something here.
Jhin steps down where he is, covertly picking up a small stick. Enough to slip into the sleeve of his tunic and, once kissed with the breath of magic, emerge out a knife. There’s shuddering in the trees and Jhin whips around, ready to strike.
Nothing. There’s nothing. Nothing except that the caravaner, too, is gone.
“Ah,” Jhin says with a harrumph. “Well, now, I owe you my gratitude.”
Jhin comes across a stream, as expected. It is soot-dark and brackish, informed by the strange salt of the riverbed underneath. Bulbous cattails rise from within, glowing a hard, cool red. He smiles, and picks them one by one as a farmer would a plum. Finally.
Under his obi are countless vials, and Jhin begins the delicate process of squeezing the bulbs until they secrete liquid to bottle them with. His motions are practiced—he’s done this dozen of times. There’s no common name for these cattails, but their poison is infamous throughout Ionia, the model of limitless imitation by two-bit ‘alchemists’. Jhin does not settle for anything but the best. He accepts only straight from the source, and so.
Something is with him here again.
“If you must know, I make for poor prey,” he says, unbothered, still working. “But, please, do enlighten me.”