Try No. 6

The people below looked so small.

They milled from house to house, from shop to shop, from person to person, all talking, chattering and making merry despite their situation.

And the shops themselves couldn't even be considered shops, merely hollow rooms with their entrances wide open, selling hand crafted items or services.

There was not a single morsel of food to be found, and there didn't look to be any kind of rent system either.

Lee gazed down hollowly, his stomach rumbling, remembering the food that he had left in his travel pack, including the steamed buns that were ready to eat.

He sighed, beginning to nod off from the exhaustion of the day, deciding to put off apologising to Zhang Yuan until the next night, vowing to sleep the day away so he could do so.

The God of Strength was busy below, handing out the bags of sand that he had spent the day making to all the peoples of the lake for them to weigh down their buildings and wooden panels.

Lee squinted to try and see where they would be used, spying on one particular man beating his sand bag to try and flatten it out slightly to cover one particular panel of wood, before becoming quickly distracted by the growing line of people who had queued up to enter the underwater hotel beside him.

Lee realised that the man was trying to stop individual pieces of wood from floating upwards and to the top of the lake from his floor with the sandbag, and thereby keeping whatever was underneath the floorboard hidden, as if a secret compartment was there.

He pushed the discovery away in favour of examining the hotel.

From the hole in the roof, he could see that the line of people extended throughout the main lobby and leading towards the large dining room where the skeleton had sat, in the day time.

Shuffling over to the side to try and see inside from a better angle, Lee suddenly felt a rush of cold run through his arm.

He shivered and recoiled back, throwing himself to the side to avoid falling off the cliff, into the empty lake.

Lee threw the arm that felt as if it had almost been frozen off to the side, towards the town above the lake, and pushed himself up, each and every individual blade of grass sharp and clear against his too tender and too sensitive skin.

Lee looked up to see a man wearing dark blue robes, a dark blue hat, and pale skin, tinged blue, standing in front of him.

He sported a greying beard which reached the middle of his upper chest with a strand of beads surrounding one particular lock of the hair on his right side.

His hands were folded behind his back and a distinctive scar was visible from the top of his robes, running down his neck on towards the rest of his body.

Lee's eyes narrowed as he noted the paleness of the scar, fully healed over as well, slightly raised: an old wound inflicted before death and carried around for potentially years until the body that it was attached to stopped functioning.

Lee's eyes flickered back to the man's face for a split second, before he stood up properly, bowing down and greeting his senior.

The man waved his hand, accepting the greeting.

"Sit with me, boy," he called out, inviting Lee to sit back the way he had been before.

Lee followed his instructions gladly, making himself comfortable once more.

He didn't say anything, contented to look down at the village of ghosts below him.

"Did you enjoy looking around my office, child?" Zhang Yuan asked politely, his voice sedate and calm, not a single trace of resentment nor grief present within it.

"Yes, elder. The tomes that you kept were extremely... illuminating. I was attempting to i- investigate the lack of th- inhabitants within this town. I apologise for any undue harm caused by actions, and I apologise for the i- invasion of privacy," Lee sincerely tried to enunciate as clearly as he could, wincing over every stumbled over word and awkward pause.

Lee bit the inside of his mouth - hard - for all his failures when it came to his speech.

Why was he so confident when speaking to the God of Strength, but managed to mess up every single sentence in some way with others?

He didn't even feel nervous or scared right now.

"Your apologies are accepted. If you feel the need to provide me compensation, then you are free to tell me your thoughts on the drawing that you had found," Zhang Yuan replied with the grace of a seasoned practitioner of speech, his words flowing off his tongue as smooth as honey or silk, as if his voice had some sort of innate quality within it to calm anyone and everyone who heard it down and instil a desire to follow whatever words that were carried upon it.

"The crane... the crane is a regal bird, representing know- knowledge and wisdom. It is framed well... by the river and the trees, placed in the middle of the card. It's head was looking downwards, not towards the H- Heavens. It was looking down upon humanity," Lee stuttered out, hoping that it was a passable analysis of the drawing.

He didn't particularly want to reveal his real, inner thoughts in regards to theology, especially with the God of Strength within his sights.

"What did you think of the brush strokes? What did you think of the placement of the feathers? What did you think of the placement of the river rushes? What did you think of the thickness of the lines of the trees, compared to the legs of the crane?" Zhang Yuan shot back, turning his head slightly to face Lee, a teasing glint in his eyes.

"I- er... uh... I- er... no," Lee mumbled out in response to the sudden barrage of questions that he had no answers for, " I don't know."