The child of Shadow and Light

How Many?!

After getting the idea for what they were going to do next Redson sent all the bull clones he could to their treasure room deep underground where they kept spoils, gold and jewels, and old keepsakes which included a ton of maps. After finding as many as they could and placing them in one pile in the centre of the room there was over 100 different maps so it was going to take longer than expected to find the few they actually needed. The maps they needed were the most up to date, about 5 years old, a decade old and from just under 14 years ago, and with all these they could compare the new stuff to the old stuff and see which had the biggest difference in a short period of time.

They already knew it was going to take a while so they took them one at a time and checked the date then placing the map in a pile with others from the same year, because if they found a new landmark in-between 5 to 10 years ago then they'd need the ones from that time period and they could narrow it down to just 2 maps with the before and after the landmark appeared. However it took up most of the day sorting them out and with all the maps now in their correct piles, there was now 10 different piles so that was about 10 or more maps per pile, and since it was so mentally exhausting just sorting them out they took a break and Xiaotian took a pile of maps that were the most up to date with him, as he had seen a few maps from when he was younger and his dad's showed him the places they had rampaged through or attacked so he knew some locations already and wanted to compare.

During their break they went to the throne room where food was already prepared for them on the table so they ate those so restore mental energy and chatted about anything that either might have a clue to Wukong and Macaques whereabouts or just some small talk to fill the silence and make it less awkward. Their food was more or less different from the night before, except instead of a bowl of just peaches the bowl also contained mangoes, and the selections of meats was now also accompanied by a large bowl of salad. The bull clone chef really out did themselves but Xiaotian couldn't really focus on the food and basically just ate a peach and a mango without paying any attention to it, all his focus was still on the maps.

For the rest of lunch the talks were a bit stale and Red did attempt to make small talk with Xiaotian, but he was met with either simple answers like Yes, No, Maybe, Possibly, or just no answer at all and was basically ignored. It did sort of hurt when Red was ignored, but DBK just placed a hand to his shoulder and tried to reassure him that it wasn't completely intentional and he was just really focused as Macaque was just like that when he was writing his plays. He'd start writing a play then you wouldn't see him for a minimum of 3 days. So it was almost uncanny how much Xiaotian was like his parents and even if DBK wasn't the sworn brother of the 2 and only knew rumours then he'd still be able to say without a shadow of a doubt that he's their kid. It was quite impressive and quite a ominous thing to think about.

When the bull clones came back for the plates, bowls, etc, they also cleaned the table whilst the bull family and Xiaotian left to go back to the vault in a long silence and back to the piles and piles of maps. To make the atmosphere less awkward Red caught up to the focused monkey to see if he had found anything useful yet in his search.