After Lei Keung had returned to the place he'd last seen his master, Harutoma city, he decided to ask aroud about the whereabouts of Master Fan Gang. With no letter or parting words to speak of, the best he could piece together was that his master had left for the summit of Mount Wua-Sho, to the fabled City of Jade. A place most people had never seen and returned from, to a point many weren't sure it even existed in the first place. Though few, like Lei's master spoke of it with certainty and kept the legends of its existence alive.
Master Fan Gang had spoken of the place many times with Lei, and had even said he would one day return to the City of Jade, but Lei never believed his master would actually go through with it. After so long of not hearing back from his master, and now learning where he had headed, Lei decided it was time to pursue him and if nothing else, to reclaim his master's remains from the perilous mountain. After all, no one had heard from him in a couple years now.
It was a quiet night with inclement weather the night Lei Keung reached the base of Wua-Sho mountain over two weeks ago. Lei had decided it best to take some time to meditate at the base of the mountain in the rain to clear and focus his mind for the strenuous trip ahead of him. He rested beneath a thin slab of stone overhang that barely covered him, a calm in the middle of the storm. It was a peaceful place where you could hear the rain pattering against the thin stone above you, but could still feel the water dripping all around you. The sight was like a thin mist being cast over the surrounding surfaces by each droplet. The smell was that of the pure earth around.
The boisterous thunder would occasionally cause small scale landslides at the base of the mountain, mid-way up the mountain's surface however was another story, the landslides were at least one-hundred fold the size and constantly changing the terrain of the mountain. You could hear and feel the earth rumble from all directions when the stones gave way higher up.
Lei would use those images, the sensory intake as an anchor of sorts as he scaled the mountain later on, it was all in mental preparation. Though no amount of training could prepare him for this journey, no matter what kind of physical or mental endurance he had built up over the years under his master's teachings. Still, day after day, week after week, he would push on as the journey became more and more perilous each hour.
The beginning of the journey wasn't all that challenging, it was just some steep hiking here and there, some run-ins with bandits, smaller beasts, and scavengers, which could all be easily killed for food and supplies to save for the rest of the trip. No, the problem didn't lie in any one battle alone, it was what it all added up to; each encounter took a little more out of you, each missed opportunity for food or water added to your fatigue, each miscalculated step led to a small fall or trip-up.
Lei had trained in the mountains before, as per his master's strict training regiment, but one thing you could never seem to train past was the thinning of the air as you ascended. No matter how you tried to control your breathing to get more oxygen into your body and keep your muscles from weakening, nothing seemed to work indefinitely. It was all-too easy to over-exert yourself the higher you climb, even the simplest task becomes seemingly impossible. Yet you were trained to maintain mental as well as physical strength, no matter what the circumstances in front of you.
Between the meat gathered and the fleshy fruit, it was important for Lei to sustain some sort of balance between the two, but over the course of weeks and how early on he had encountered creatures to kill, the meat had gone bad with no way to preserve it. Lei wondered if his master had somehow managed to survive at the top of this mountain, how he could do it for so long. Surely, there must be something else? Maybe he'll find out once he reaches the City of Jade.
In the first stretch of grass he had seen in a while, Lei sees an opening as he's nearly at his limits and needs to rest, thinking this as good a place as any. As he gets closer, the fog sort of clears enough to show some paper lanterns hanging from pillars. 'How peculiar.' He thinks to himself before he hears voices clearing through the fog and sees the shadows of two other people sitting on the rocks. Lei stands and waves from a distance but decides not to interrupt their conversation and lays in the grass with a sigh of relief.
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