He had the distinct, specific impulse to simply eliminate the creature.
He let the impulse pass.
The dog knew things. This border territory was new, the local cultivation hierarchy was opaque, and the information the creature had been so eager to provide earlier still had significant gaps. Killing it now, while emotionally satisfying, would be strategically wasteful.
He would deal with it later.
He returned his attention to the woman still pressed forehead-first into the pine needles at his feet.
Then the text arrived.
It did not appear to eyes that lacked the capacity to see it — Jingwei, face-down in the dirt, saw nothing. But to Tianlong, floating slightly above the ordinary visual register of the world, a line of script assembled itself in the middle air before him, written in the kind of absolute, cosmological authority that needed no specific alphabet because it spoke directly to the comprehension of whatever was reading it:
