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The jungle is silent.
To the east, the land plunges down into the green, and to the west the mountains rise high above, but here there is foliage all around, and a game track, and a conspicuous lack of small mammals and birds.
You might even say it's too silent.
Then she can keep using bits of charcoal if she prefers, even if it is a weird beast-person sort of habit to have.
The next evening, Jing Yi would like to try and get her alone for a private conversation again.
"Some advice, as a favour I hope you will repay me one day. You aren't being paranoid enough."
"You clearly grew up with a pretty small group of people. Maybe just your family, maybe a few others. You're not prepared for how a large society will treat you. There are millions of people in the empire and some of them will mean you ill for no reason other than opportunism. You got lucky, Guo Rong is as Guo as they come and Du Ye is a guileless fool, but if you keep going around talking about how you have impossible powers to strangers you're going to get stabbed in the back by someone who thinks they can get your powers by eating your heart or something."
"It's literally ever worked out for someone, eating the heart of a powerful monster to gain its powers? But mostly it does nothing and mostly when it does do something the something it does is throwing your qi into deviation. I wouldn't recommend it, unless the only alternative was death."
"For every person who thinks like that there's going to be more people who will just want to kill you to keep down the competition, or enslave you for your powers, or who'll just think you look like the kind of rube they can ask for twice as much money from because you're too ignorant to know any better."
"...well, they can ask, I don't actually have any, but I guess perhaps you mean later on when I do."
"You will find that the marketplace is not an optional extra you can only engage with at your leisure. Also, Guo Rong is planning on giving you part of her share of the money for selling the skin and core of that jaguar, because she's excessively Guo."
"Maybe. But more likely she's going to throw herself in front of some monster or asshole and die trying to save some idiot from their own mistakes. Because she's kind, and it would be the right thing to do."
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