“Hmm….” Sun licked her lips. “Intriguing!”

“Ever had fried Greatslug cocoons?”said Dorian. “Dip them in heartfire sauce and it’s like a symphony in your mouth.”

Sun’s stomach growled, and she grinned. “Well, my belly certainly likes the idea. Buut—“

She crossed her arms. “If you were me, would you agree?”

“…” Dorian sighed. “…No, probably not.” He’d thought about lying, but with how many bonks he’d taken he wasn’t sure he could survive another Jingu smack.

“And why not?”

“I’d probably kill you at the first opportunity.” He shrugged. “Nothing personal, of course! Times are rough. You understand.”

“Yeah, I get it. But you see my conundrum here.” She crossed her legs, tapped her Interspatial Ring, and out popped the most orange carrot Dorian had ever seen. It was massive—the size of her arm, fringed with vibrant green leaves, not a speck of dirt to be seen. She started nibbling on the leaves with the utmost nonchalance.

“Convince me to trust you.” She said, mouth half full. “You have ‘till I finish these leaves.”

“Err—“ He said the first thing that popped to mind. “Soul contract?”

“No way,” She wrinkled her nose, then slurping down a leaf whole. Three clovers remained. Suddenly Dorian was nervous. “Too… restrictive. Too finicky! Too high-stakes.”

“We can keep the terms simple, then.” He held up a finger. “Just one condition. We don’t betray one another. And we can make it a limited contract, if you like—it’ll end when we reach the end of our journey together.”

“Hmmm…” said Sun again. She squinted at him. “Hmmmmm….”

Another leaf vanished under her rabbity gnaws.

Dorian forced down a swell of bile. “So?”

“A few tweaks are in order, methinks.” She thrust the carrot at him like a spear. “First! No betrayals is too narrow. No acting with ill intent toward me.”

He winced. That’d make things much harder to finagle, but he could work with it. “Done.”

“Second—I have the final say on the journey. I decide when and where we end things.”

Once more he winced. But still, it wasn’t so bad. He could work with this. Surely with the right talk he could steer her toward his plans. “…I see,” he said, making sure to exaggerate the hesitation. “Well—alright. I’m sure we can come to a plan that’ll suit us both. Let’s draw out the contract, then—“

“Not so fast! One more thing.”

He had a bad feeling. “…Yes?”

“Make it one-way.” She snapped up another leaf. “The terms only apply to you.”

…Shit. He’d really been hoping she wouldn’t say that.

“No, no, no. That wouldn’t work,” he said, trying for a pleasant smile. “If we’re to be partners in this endeavor, we ought to share the burdens too! How else can we truly function a team—“

“Mister,” said Sun sternly. She gave him some half-lidded stink-eye. “I’m the one with the big pan, remember? Do you have a big pan?”

“…One-way it is,” he said with a sigh.

It was a fool’s contract. Then again she seemed mostly harmless. If she had malice in her heart she could’ve acted on it ten times over by now.

“Huzzah!” She cheered.

He was already imagining a half-dozen ways he’d off this annoying little critter. He’d shed her the first chance he got, of course. Perhaps he’d do it at the Swamp of the Damned, the first stop he had in mind. He needn’t act with ill intent, after all. He could simply fail to act, turn a blind eye, and let her walk into some carnivorous flower-demon. He grinned at her.

“You’re thinking of killing me, aren’t you?”

He winced. “How could you tell?”

“You get that look on your face,” she said around a mouthful of carrot. “That I’m-up-to-no-good look.”

“This is how my face looks all the time.”

“Exactly!” she said, grinning back as she waggled her carrot at him. “See, this is the trouble with trying to be nice. There’s always asses like you around to punish you for it.”

“Can you really blame me?” He said with a sigh. “You would hardly blame the beetle for rolling up a ball of dung.”

“Yes, I can.” She nibbled the last leaf. “And I do.”

He rolled his eyes. “You don’t get any extra head pats from the Multiverse for being a good person.”

“But I give myself head pats for it all the time! And that’s what matters in the end, isn’t it? Anyways.”

She tapped her Ring, drew out another giant leafy carrot. “Enough with the unpleasantries! Here: to commemorate our new friendship!” She wrinkled her nose. “That’s not quite right, is it? Our new…contractually mandated mutually beneficial nonaggression pact!”

She wrinkled harder. “Doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, does it? Anyhow. These are Wukong Carrots, my all-time favorite snack. They only grow these in the Conclave of the Stone Monkey. Take it! Go on.”

Cautiously he did. He took a sniff. It smelled of heady spices and dewy grass.

“To an awesome and tasty and deathless adventure!” She said, holding hers out to him.

Rolling his eyes, he tapped it. They cheers’d.

Then they munched. He drew up the contract in qi on parchment she had lying about, thought about trying to sneak in some tricky wording, thought better of it. They signed, adjudicated by Fate. New strings tied them together. So it was done. So began their fateful journey.

***

The most immediate consequence—the thing for which he was most grateful—was, at last, freedom from the Jingu’s horrible spell. She fed him a bowl of Clear-Eye soup. He downed it gulps, and instantly felt a crisp coolness trickling up his temples, pooling around his eyes. He sighed. “Finally…” he croaked. Blearily he glared at the Jingu.

“So!” said Sun. She was climbing down from one of the upper shelves, a dusty yellowed scroll in hand. She splayed it out against the floor. Inscribed on it was an oval disc. The Ninth Circle of Hell. At the center of the disc, marked bright red, was the Heart of Hell—a giant volcano where the worst of Hell’s demons stewed. Around it, scribbled out in various colors, were mountain ranges and lava lakes, molten rivers, demon kingdoms, deadlands, and a smattering skulls. The skulls, according to a tiny legend, marked the lairs of particularly heinous Godbeasts.

She handed him a brush pen. “What’s the plan? Where are we headed?”

“We’re near here.” Dorian tapped a flurry of white spurs near the bottom. “Bone Forest.” The spurs wound in a lazy arc up the map.

“Here’s what I’m thinking. First stop, Swamp of the Damned.”

He traced the brush up, stopping at a region pitted with pools of black ink. “I know just where to find a grove of Dao Fruit there that’ll do us both some good. It’ll boost me to Demigod, and you’ll get a pleasant appetizer. Pair it with some choice Tar-eel larvae and we’ll make a feast of it.”

“I like it.”

“After that we’ve a choice of next stops. I’m thinking the Three-King Kingdom. It’s the epicenter of trade in this realm. There’s bound to be all sorts of delicacies there, and it’ll be good to stock up for the rest of our trip.”

This was all true, of course, but he did have some ulterior motives. The Three-King Kingdom was the biggest demon Kingdom in the land—and old as sin to boot, a chaotic mess of an empire, burned down and rebuilt and burned down again, over and over, each time regrowing like a wound scabbing over that simply would not heal. Secreted away in its depths were some of the juiciest treasures this land had to offer, particularly with regard to the Laws of Fire. Some that would make even Godkings salivate. Dorian had a certain prized Jewel in mind—a Jewel that, it was said, held the power of a sun in the space of a stone. A Jewel borne of the Torchdragon lineage that might just let him leap an evolutionary stage in a gulp.

Ordinarily it would’ve been impossible to snatch. But maybe, just maybe, with good enough cloaking there was some fruitful heisting to be done…

Sun shrugged. “Sounds swell to me.”

“Then we have options. I’m sure we can reassess and decide on a route once we’re there.”

Who knew? With some luck, he’d be rid of her by then.

“Alright!”

She seemed a little too nonchalant about all of it. Almost suspiciously so. He squinted at her. “You don’t have any suggestions?”

“I’ve lived in a pocket dimension in the mountains my whole life! I don’t know things. I’ve barely been outside the Molten Plains,” She scratched her chin. “Which… might not be the best thing to admit… eh. I just want to go out and eat yummy things. So long as you help me do that, we’re good! If you pick good spots I’ll go along. I just want to have a good time while I’m here, y’know? I’ll go where the wind blows me. As long as it’s not off a cliff.”

“Hm.”

“I just want to eat things and be left alone! I don’t have any grand plans.” She wrinkled her nose. “But everyone else does. Everyone else wants to be the strongest, own the most, that sort of thing. And they’re always in a hurry to meddle in my business. That’s where the trouble starts.”

“Improbably,” said Dorian, “I actually do get that.”

***

First, dinner. First, healing. They made plans to set off on the morrow. Sun cooked them both a steak meal. It was rare, but rather than blood it oozed with a strange, faintly rainbow gelatinous substance. Wyrm flank, apparently.

“Ooh…” Sun grinned at him like an idiot as they ate. “I’ve never been on a road trip before. This’ll be so fun!”

Dorian still wasn’t sure if she was very dumb or very smart.

She went about stocking up on seasonings, and utensils, and unhooking slabs of meat from the ceiling. Dorian went about fixing himself up. Most of the night passed like this—or whatever passed for night, anyway. There weren’t really day-night cycles in Hell, but the ghost-flows did lighten and darken, making for a vague approximation. Only some ‘days’ were a few hours short, some a few long.

A handful of hours before the closest thing to dawn there came a piercing wail from high above. Sun cursed, scrambling up the walls, and wrenching something chunky off the wall. The shrieking stopped as she landed nimbly. In her arms was a vaguely dinner-plate-shaped object, though it was so caked in dust he could hardly tell what it was.

“What is it?”

“Nothing, probably.” She wiped it off with a sleeve, revealing that it was in fact a scrying glass. What looked to be bone spurs peeked out between lines of dust. Dim shapes moved between them. “Just an alarm system I set up! One time I thought I shook off this Roc mom when I stole her egg, see, but it turns out she’d tracked me the whole time! So I figured it was a good idea to know what’s nearby. Usually it’s only a passing lesser demon, or a Roc overhead—oh.”

She paused, blinking. “Huh?!”

Frowning, Dorian craned his head for a closer look.

Shuffling between the bone trees was a very pale, very tall man dressed entirely in black. His irises were black, his nails were black, his teeth were like onyx bricks. And from the way the Demigod Rocs perched on those trees fluttered away from him as he passed Dorian could guess a thing or two about his power level.

“What’s a Jiangshi doing here?!”

Jiangshi, or Hopping Vampires, were a particularly nasty breed of undead. They could use the powers of whatever they absorbed. You never knew what surprises one had up their long, flowing sleeves. They also, in theory, lived thousands of li away.

But Dorian knew exactly what it was doing here. For he saw something she didn’t.

On its neck, glowing faintly, was a golden infinity.