The second person they find is on the other side of the river.
A river where Suzume's own floating corpse drifted by them at one point under the bridge.
She didn't react.
She was, technically, already dead. It was a creepy parlor trick though, and Kong Wu seemed amused by her blase reaction to it.
"Don't you fear death, girl?" he teased, flicking his tail at her nose.
Suzume swatted at it, but the monkey was too fast for her to properly catch the appendage when he was paying attention to her.
"I don't feel like grieving for my entire life and losing everyone I love. But no, I'm not really scared of death… I dunno. It's complicated. Feelings are weird."
"Humans," Kong Wu rolled his eyes. "You make complicated things seem simple and simple things seem complicated."
"Are you saying you don't fear dying?"
"I'm not going to die, so it's hardly important."
Suzume squinted at him suspiciously, while the monkey reclined lazily on the skiff that floated them steadily to the otherside of the river as dawn began to break.
She was getting tired, honestly. But not so tired she couldn't get herself moving. She didn't have very much time to get to her next destination.
Kong Wu eyed her faintly bouncing knee and arched a fuzzy brow at her.
"What are you so anxious about, oh-she-with-complicated-feelings-on-death?"
Suzume eyed the other side of the river.
"I only have so much time here before I need to return to my home. One week in these lands, and I need to return to my mother and the rest of my family."
And her life trying to be a hero and all that entailed. She was going to start throwing hands with paparazzi at this rate if that was what it took to keep them off of her. No Comment might not be good enough for long.
At the very least she was pretty nondescript and boring looking. Dark hair, dark eyes, not at all like her brothers or Izuku or Shoto. People who couldn't be missed no matter where they happened to find themselves.
Suzume was a dime a dozen.
Kong Wu snorted at her.
"You'll have more time than that," he told her, "In all the worlds time passes differently. A day in one could be a month in another, or the reverse."
Suzume paused.
So.
She was in a hyperbolic time chamber?
Great.
Awesome.
Or more like that kid from Bleach near the end of when she was watching it. The blond one with the video games. What was his name? Something weird and probably german…
It didn't really matter.
"I see," she said when she realized that Kong Wu was still looking at her. "That's good to know. I was worried the only training I would be getting in would be playing keep away with a great sage."
"Hah! You should be so lucky, girl."
"I do have a name."
"A little 'Sparrow', yes I know."
Suzume leaned back against her side of the skiff.
"You're not a very agreeable person, are you?"
"I'm a demon, what more do you expect?"
"I don't know. Someone entertaining, trying to trick me out of my soul?"
"What good would your soul do me?" He asked, eying her.
Suzume paused. "Well. Nothing I suppose."
That was a bit more western than eastern she supposed. Christian demons were obsessed with souls. Although she was pretty sure that eastern demons wanted them too. Or was that livers?
She wasn't exactly a mythology expert, nerd that she could be.
"Exactly," Kong Wu leaned back and closed his eyes again. Suzume huffed at him, but had no choice but to mimic the monkey. There really wasn't anything else to do until they reached the shore after all. She didn't exactly doze, but she was quiet for the remainder of their journey.
Until a tail started to flick her nose, and she nearly bit it.
The skiff carried them dutifully past another floating corpse of Suzume, which she ignored just as succinctly at the other one.
The entire time she was expecting some giant monster to rise out of the water and try to kill them, but instead they just reached the other side with a small bump against the pier. Upon climbing up from the pier they were greeted by the second of their party.
He was huge and hulking, not at all like he was normally depicted in movies. Instead of being goofy and stupid he was massive, a muscled boar covered in fat and thick, coarse fur that rose like a razor across his spine beneath his monks robes. His hooves dug deep in the earth where he was pacing back and forth, and hands the size of Suzume's whole torso clenched and unclenched into fists. Mighty tusks stuck out of his mouth.
At the edge of the river was a sharp cliff incline, and yet another stone conspicuously in place before it.
To Suzume it felt like watching an old scooby doo movie, and seeing the bookcase that would move standing out among the rest of the background cells.
Suzume paused, and looked at Kong Wu, who didn't seem to recognize the boar in front of them.
"...So do I need to fight him to get past or?"
Kong Wu shrugged unhelpfully. "Who knows."
"Shouldn't you know, oh great sage? Aren't you omnipotent?"
"That's 'omniscient'," he corrected. "And wouldn't you like to know?"
Suzume tried to poke him in the side, but he caught her hand in his larger one and deflected it.
The damn monkey was fast.
The boar, contrarily, was strong.
"Yo!" She shouted, gaining his attention. "We need to pass by, please. Is that rock how we go on?"
She wasn't sure she liked the idea of going into a cave. Maybe they could just scale the cliff? Kong Wu could surely climb it as easily as she did.
Easier.
The boar snorted at her, and dark eyes locked on the small teenager.
She barely reached his ribs.
"I am tasked with guarding this entrance. But, you're free to try to ply your way through."
The great board sat on a rock and looked at them expectantly.
Lazy.
Suzume glanced at Kong Wu, who shrugged. "It's your quest. Do what you want."
Suzume came to consider the stone. It was huge and flush to the rock behind it. There was nothing around for her to use to lever iit open the way she had the stone that Kong Wu was stuck behind, and he wouldn't be giving her the staff that he had finally gotten back to her any time soon.
On either side of it were huge indents that looked like hand prints with curled fingers in the stone. She tried to push and pull, but without any leverage there was nothing she could do to get the massive stone to budge. It had to be twice as heavy as the one that had held Kong Wu in place. And she had nothing she could do about it.
Suzume couldn't even reach both indents at the same time. Her wingspan was too wide.
"I need you to move it," Suzume declared to the boar.
The pig squinted at her.
"That's too much work, no thank you."
"C'mon. You're big and strong right? Just move the boulder."
Suzume paused.
"Unless you can't… You look strong, but I suppose if you can't lift it then it can't be helped."
"Can't-" he looked offended. "I am Cho Hakkai, Marshal of the Canopy, and I can move that stone with ease! I just. Don't feel like it."
"Uh huh."
Suzume mulled the name over in her mind. That was the Japanese translation of Zhu Bajie, wasn't it? So after this she was going to run into what's his name. Sha Wujin? Sha Wujing. Why wasn't he the one by the river? Wasn't he the one who was supposed to be related to sand, and some kind of water ogre? Unless they'd floated over him?
She looked back at the water.
No, she would have noticed if something more interesting than her own dead body was in the water.
"Just move the rock."
"I don't want to. What's in it for me?" The pig leered at her, and Suzume crossed her arms over her chest.
"What do you like?"
"Food, women, and wine," he listed succinctly.
"Dude." She wrinkled her nose, and tightened her arms over her chest.
The boar looked offended. "I said women! Not little girls."
Well, wasn't he a gentleman?
"Joy. Well, I don't have anything like that. So I'll just have to ask for your generosity."
"Not interested."
Suzume cocked her head to the side.
"Well we don't have food. You don't have food. So the only place that food other than fish might be is either over the river, but I don't think the skiff will hold you, or beyond that rock. So if you move the rock, we might find what you like."
Almost immediately the boar perked up. "Yes! Oh-"
His face fell. "No, I can't do that."
"...why?"
"Because you're supposed to get through the rock on your own."
Suzume squinted at him. He was serious. His shoulders slumped and he looked longingly at the rock.
"I can't lift that."
"You don't need to."
You're supposed to get through the rock.
Through.
Fucks sake.
"Alright." Suzume clapped her hands together and glared at the rock. So she had to go through the rock.
Suzume considered it.
She eyed the stone, huge and intimidating.
And punched it.
"...ouch."
It took her over two weeks to get through the stone.
She lived off of fish from the river and plants that she fetched from across the river, cooked over a shitty camp fire. She shared some with Cho Hakkai, under the condition that he show her strengthening exercises.
Suzume was not a weak person, for a mere mortal, but she wasn't strong enough to shatter a boulder outright.
Stain, though.
Stain could have done it.
He had been strong enough that with a mere swing of a chipped sword he had sliced straight through Shoto's massive chunks of ice.
He had lasted only a few days in the outside world here, and he had come out faster than anyone Suzume knew, and stronger than a base line human had any right to be.
So.
She must do the same.
She worked hard at it. She listened to Hakkai, punched the stone over and over again until even her calloused knuckles cracked and bled. She pressed herself in a small crevice in the stone and pushed against the outer walls, straining her muscles. She pushed herself up and down, over and over, and lifted anything significantly heavy she could find.
Even Kong Wu wasn't safe from her. She dragged the poor, long suffering monkey along on her back and did squats.
Finally, after sixteen days and nights, she threw a punch that shattered the stone in front of her.
What lay behind was a slot canyon that all but glowed with soft red light on the rippling walls.
Suzume, sweating and aching all over, looked inside.
It was just wide enough the Hakkai could follow when she started the long walk through. Kong Wu strode beside her, looking as relaxed as anyone ever had. He hadn't been working until he dropped for weeks.
Her whole body ached all over, and she was covered in sweat. Each step felt like walking through molasses, but she kept on all the same. There was a weight pushing on her shoulders than she didn't recognize. It was like the air itself weighed more than it should have.
"It's about time you worked up the strength to break that rock, Little Sparrow."
Little Sparrow. Her new, hated, nickname from Kong Wu. It was goofy and annoying.
And she kind of liked it.
It made her feel like she was in an old kung fu movie.
Which she kind of was.
"If you were that impatient, you should have broken it yourself."
"Hah! No, I have no need of that. This is your quest. I just want to see where it leads you."
That made two of them.
They found the next one in middle of a strange desert.
The canyon spat them out in the middle of the Flaming Mountains of the Tian Shan, and a dessert spread out before them, hot and dry and boiling.
Kong Wu groaned behind her.
"Damn it. It's going to be too hot."
"You'll be fine," Suzume shot him a baleful look.
"You're not covered in fur!"
Which was true. Thank god.
Suzume stuck her tongue out at the monkey sage, and trotted out into the boiling sunshine. She shed her uwagi and draped it over her head to keep the sun off her face. The Dudou underneath it guarded her front and her lower back, more like a halter top than anything else. It had a symbol on it that Suzume didn't recognize, but she assumed it had to do with the mysterious master she was looking for.
She was in the middle of contemplating the crest or mon, it looked like three yang's all twisting together and joined at the tails, when something bright caught her eyes.
There was a man laying on the ground in a dried out riverbed, pinned to the sand by swords. His red beard burned against the ground limestone, and his pale blue skin was blistered by the sun.
Sha Wujing.
Suzume approached.
The pitiful creature looked up at her. A necklace of skulls was draped around his throat.
Suzume got to work prying the swords out of his body.
It was hard, they came out in angstroms it felt like, and each time she had to stop to take a breath it would fall right back in.
This was going to be a test her fucking patience, wasn't it?
"Little Sparrow, you'll get to your master faster if you leave that one where he is," Kong Wu pointed out when she was catching her breath. He draped a long arm around her broad shoulders and leaned on the short girl.
She glared at the one sword she'd managed to get out of the ogre, who hadn't spoken yet.
There was a scroll tied to his mouth, Demon Slayer style. She couldn't get it free until his head could lift, and that wasn't possible until the swords pinning him were out of the way.
What fucking nerd was the master?!
"Probably."
"So why not leave him there and be gone?"
His furry tail flicked her nose, and she snapped her teeth at it again. Almost fast enough to bite it this time.
"Because I'm stubborn and stupid and I do everything the hard way," she said viciously.
Kong Wu threw his head back and laughed at her, but let her drag the blades slowly out of the ogre all the same. Her arms were shaking with effort by the time she had even the second one in.
When night fell, the three swords she had dragged out replaced themselves with the help of magical, asshole birds.
Far to the west, snow capped mountains grew into the clouds, calling to the trio.
Suzume really hoped she found a fucking horse soon.
She spent the next day doing the same thing, dragging the swords out slowly, ever so slowly, and dropped them to the side of the ogre.
One at a time.
One, two, three, four, five, six-
The sun set.
She sat with the monkey while the boar snored under shelter and poked at a fire. Fell asleep and rose with the sun.
One, two, three, four, five, six-
The sun set.
They sat around a camp fire.
The sun rose.
One, two, three, four, five, six, six and a fucking half.
The sun set. Kong Wu stole her uwagi and she chased him across the cooling sand, sprinting as fast as her leg would carry her.
The sun rose.
One, two, three, four, five, six-
She was dragging out the seventh, glaring hatefully at the setting sun in the distance, when another hand covered her and strong arms dragged the sword out with her, at twice the speed.
Kong Wu saw her gaping at him, and shrugged.
"I was getting bored, Little Sparrow."
The sword popped free.
The scroll in the ogre, Osho Gojo (seriously?!) spat into her hands was a map to the top of a snowy mountain in the distance.
They rested for the night, and in the morning all three of them marched to the west once more.
She never did find the horse, which was infuriating. She liked the horse! The horse was also a dragon, and dragons were cool!
Also, she would have killed to not have to walk for a little while.
Instead, she either missed the horse, or it wasn't there, because she actually found the temple at the peak before they could run into the horse.
It was huge, beautiful, and something out of a fantasy.
The walls stretched high, painted a deep red. The tiled roofs were black, edged in gold, and beneath their protection delicate tiles in blue and white chased the edges in fantastical patterns. The tiers of the pagoda raised behind the shanman gate, reaching ever higher in the heavens. A tree hung heavy with peaches, so tall the top crested above the high walls that protected the temple.
It was part buddhist temple, part Shaolin monastery.
And standing in front of it was a tiny old woman, holding three dates in her hand.
