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Luo Wei fixed her bearings and flew south toward the Misty Plains, purpose clear.
The sun glared mercilessly. The further south she went, the hotter it got.
She could actually feel the moisture evaporating off her skin. The blood that had dripped into her ears had congealed into hard little clumps.
Mountain ranges rolled beneath her in endless waves. The forests deepened in color, richer and greener with every passing minute. One slope lay in shadow while the one beside it basked in sunlight, and rain was already hammering the peaks ahead.
She flew through the curtain of rain, dropped past a thousand-meter cliff where waterfalls exploded into mist, and caught rainbow light flashing off a distant summit.
A flock of migratory birds had built nests in the great trees at the peak. The weather up there was clear and fine. They were calling to each other, hopping between branches, singing while they preened their brilliant feathers.
Chromatic Illusion Birds. They were actually here.
Luo Wei folded her wings and eased in silently. The birds chattered away in the branches, gossiping about whatever birds gossip about, completely unaware that something large was watching them with great interest.
She studied them for a moment. Unfortunately, these gorgeous creatures were too small to carry a person across an ocean. Unless they could somehow stack themselves into a bridge.
One bird with puffed-out feathers fluttered to a neighboring tree, angling for a peck at the sweet fruit growing there. It tilted its head — and found itself staring directly at Luo Wei, pitch-black feathers tucked into the canopy.
GOO-GAH?
It fixed her with a baffled look and let out its cry again.
Luo Wei stared back. ???
Seriously? That was what Chromatic Illusion Birds sounded like? They were absolutely stunning to look at. How were they hiding a voice like a dying duck?
For a brief, disorienting moment, she wondered if Theodore had somehow taken up residence inside this bird.
No. The others hadn't sounded like this. It was probably just this one.
But if it sounded that bad and the other birds still hadn't driven it off, its fighting ability had to be something.
"You're the one," she said. "Lucky you."
She moved fast. One hand closed around its neck, and she hauled it straight off the branch.
Adult Chromatic Illusion Birds ran about swan-sized, with shorter necks and a thick ruff of bright feathers around their throats. This one was a touch smaller, closer to duck-sized, but it thrashed with surprising strength.
Luo Wei clamped its beak shut before it could make a sound, spread her wings, and carried it over to the other side of the mountain.
The whole way there, feathers rained off the bird in colorful cascades. By the time she landed, its wings were nearly bare, the gray-black down underneath fully exposed.
A small flicker of guilt moved through her. She'd turned a very pretty bird into something that looked like a plucked market chicken.
"Stop fighting," she said. "I promise I'm letting you go in one piece."
The bird gave one more kick. Then it went still. Whether it actually understood her or had simply given up was impossible to say.
Not willing to risk it bolting, Luo Wei stripped a few lengths of vine and lashed its feet together, tying the other end to her own wrist.
The bird watched all of this with bright black eyes that tracked every movement. Then it leaned its head toward her chest, apparently trying to snuggle.
She pushed it away.
From her pack she pulled the arrow she'd scavenged in the alchemy town for carving magic patterns. She found a flat piece of bark nearby and scratched a message into it, letter by careful letter.
When she was done, she bound the bark to the bird's back with a stout vine.
The plan was simple. If this Chromatic Illusion Bird made it back to the Western Plains and someone found it, they'd read the message and bring the bird to Heria to collect a reward.
"Sorry about the cargo," Luo Wei said, undoing the vine from its feet. "If you find me alive, I'll cover your food, shelter, and everything else for the rest of your life."
Chromatic Illusion Birds were low-tier magical beasts. Most people ignored them. The ones who did bother catching them were only after the feathers. And since nearly every magical beast carried potent toxins — these birds included — nobody was going to eat it.
"Go."
She opened her hands. The bird launched itself into the sky.
Luo Wei stood up and noticed several iridescent feathers had drifted down onto her clothes.
She stared at them. The bird wasn't even fully grown, and it was already losing feathers at that rate?
She pocketed them and flew on south.
The air had turned thick and brutal with heat. Sweat ran freely down her neck and back. She was probably approaching the Tropic of Cancer.
Half an hour later, the landscape below transformed completely.
A primeval rainforest spread out in every direction, dense and ancient. The trees were enormous, soaring columns of bark and heartwood, their drip-tip leaves thick with mosses and ferns. Massive hanging vines draped between trunks, and strangler plants coiled around everything they touched with slow, patient violence. It was stunning. Strange, dark, alive.
Luo Wei dropped down into the canopy. Tiny creatures she couldn't name darted above her head and scurried past on all sides. Walking through this place felt like stepping into another world entirely.
She hadn't gone far when she spotted a clump of long, pointed green grass growing in the understory.
Lemongrass.
It was everywhere. Stands of it spread through the rainforest floor as far as she could see.
That lemon-bright scent hit her before she even crouched down. Lemongrass , staple ingredient in tom yum soup, in Dai-style grilled tilapia, in French foie gras, in Hainanese chicken rice. The citral in it was a natural antimicrobial too, useful for keeping food fresh without refrigeration.
If she could ship this to the Western Plains, she wouldn't just get good prices. She'd get obscene prices.
Luo Wei fixed the location in her memory and went deeper.
She kept finding things. More and more of them, one after another , all familiar from Southeast Asian jungles back home.
Nutmeg. Pepper. Cinnamon. Ylang-ylang. Litsea.
Then, tucked into a patch of loose, acidic soil, half-hidden beneath a fallen trunk, she found the vine she least expected.
Vanilla orchid.
She crouched there for a long moment, just looking at it.
This was a treasure trove. A living, self-replenishing cornucopia of value.
Gold mines ran dry. Spice plants didn't. These things could be harvested year after year, and spices moved fast , people burned through them constantly. She didn't need to manufacture anything. She just needed to be the one doing the moving, and the money would never stop coming.
And it wasn't only spices. As she pushed further in, she started recognizing the ancestors of tropical fruits she'd grown up eating: jackfruit, guava, lychee, longan. With even basic cultivation, these could be worth a fortune.
The ache of not being able to use any of it right now was genuinely painful.
But Luo Wei made up her mind on the spot. If this wasn't some dream she was going to wake up from, she would replicate the teleportation array even if it killed her, seven orifices bleeding and all.
She did the numbers.
Including the infants, she had nearly two hundred living people. Add the undead and she could barely scrape together five hundred. More dead than living , hardly something that could be called a fighting force. Most of the living were former slaves, their bodies wrecked, struggling just to stay alive. Combat power was essentially theoretical.
In practice, she had two fighters. Troy. The Dark Elf. And the Dark Elf wasn't even in the Western Plains.
Her population project was still an infant itself. Eighteen children collected so far. She needed millions.
Any nation worth calling a major power needed at least thirty million people.
She set a small, practical goal for now. One hundred children recruited this year. Total headcount past three thousand. After that, double it every year until the numbers were something real.
➤ Next: Devil's Tooth and Death Fruit
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