As soon as Booker stepped out of the tent, he was embraced by Xan, who lifted him off the ground and spun him around in a back-breaking hug. “You fucker! You did it! You’ve got to be kidding me!”

For once, Booker didn’t feel like his ribs were about to break from being squeezed by Xan. Bend, maybe, but not break. He slapped Xan on the arm, tapping out until the giant reluctantly let him go. “Did what? Oh, you mean…” He casually pushed energy into his palm, and punched forward. “This?”

Xan caught the blow with his hand, and actually went skidding back a half-step. “Yeah.” He said, grinning stupidly. “That.”

“I believe what my brother meant to say was congratulations, Daoist Northsparrow.” Fen said, giving Xan a meaningful glare. Hugging him and lifting him off the ground wasn’t exactly a subtle sign that they maybe knew this ‘Northsparrow’ better than they should know a wandering cultivator they met along the road.

But despite that, Fen was unable to hide his own smile.

“Now that you’re a cultivator, we have to celebrate!” Xan demanded. “Come on, what do you want to do?”

“Honestly?” Booker grinned. “I want to fight something. I want to run for miles. I feel like I could do anything, and I want to find my limits.”

“I know exactly what you mean.” Xan agreed. “And I have just the thing.” From his robes, he produced a bundle of wooden command slips. They were the very same command slips the Sect used to assign missions. “I grabbed every one I could. After all, the best missions are outside the Sect, and if we’re here already, we might as well make ourselves some money…”

“Ugh. Of course your celebration is working.” Fen shook his head. “What happened to a drink of wine among friends?”

“Later.” Booker said. “If you expect me to sit still right now, I’ll die. Actually, there’s one thing I need to do first… I’ll meet you both at the edge of camp.”

So saying, he turned and headed out, looking for the herbalist’s hut. He found it along the edge of the river, where customers from beyond the Lao-Hain could easily visit, either to sell their finds from the forest or to purchase rare medicines. The hut smelled amazingly fragrant, and Booker realized at once that his sense of smell had sharpened along with his vision.

“So you’ve returned.” The old herbalist croaked when she saw his mask. “And I can see by the way you’re grinning, your medicine was a success… Congratulations, cultivator.”

He bowed his head. “I owe a great many people part of that victory. But today, I feel like I could lift a mountain all on my own. It’s a feeling I want more of, so, I’ve come to buy as many cultivation herbs as I can afford.” Drawing out his coin purse, he counted out three hundred-liang silver ingots.

Her eyebrows rose, knitting together like hairy caterpillars. “That’s quite the bounty. Let me see what I have.”

For the next few minutes, she brought out bundles of dried herbs, everything from grasses to flowers. Booker only had to indicate how much he wanted, and argue over the price. In the Sect, a single basic cultivation pill could sell for fifty liang. But that cost was measured in failure – the failure of countless pills in the Sect’s furnace. The actual ingredients in the successful pill might only cost five liang.

He walked away from the herbalist with the ingredients for over forty pills. And not bottom-quality ones with only two ingredients. He had restocked his supply of beast bonemeal and seven-year flower syrup, binders that had no particular properties but would infuse some potency to any pill.

While everyone else was spending countless ingredients on waste, Booker could create pills without any failures and multiply his proceeds by several times. It was twice the result for half the effort.

— — —

Their first Sect mission was hunting shadowfoot rabbits. A pest endemic to the valley, the shadowfoot rabbit’s minor cultivation tricks were enough to make it incredibly difficult to capture, and it had multiplied to become one of the most common beasts in the grasslands.

When a shadowfoot rabbit was unobserved and in darkness, it could transport itself to another spot of darkness nearby. It had to know both locations well, but that was easily accomplished when the rabbits filled entire fields with their burroughs. Once they managed to dive inside one of these burroughs, they could easily vanish to another and hide there without any sign of where they might be – and if a predator did approach, they’d simply vanish again before the luckless hunter could look inside.

For mortals, the only way was to trap them, and the rabbits were rapidly learning to spot simple snares.

But cultivators could catch them another way – wait for a rabbit to surface, and then chase it down.

Xan, Fen, and Booker all raced through the tall grass, acting in coordination. They had the rabbit between them as they formed a triangle, closing in, darting left and right and running frantically to keep the prey cordoned off from its den. The rabbit’s paws tore up the dirt as it skidded and zigzagged, trying to escape.

But when it went left – there was Xan, stomping the ground to frighten it back. When it went right – Booker was already there, moving as swiftly as he could and feeling like a new man.

And when it went forward, that was the most dangerous direction of all. Fen had already been elected as the one who’d try for the actual catch, using his calming technique to disguise the danger.

Booker ran as hard as he’d ever run, and felt like a cloud drifting above the earth. His footfalls took no effort, his body was weightless, and the grass blurred beneath him as he kicked off into powerful strides that made the wind whistle in his ears.

The rabbit shot towards him.

Booker stepped off the ground and almost drifted into place, blocking its path. It scrambled to change course, front legs anchoring and back legs kicking as it pulled off a frantic drift into a pinwheel turn…

One that led it straight towards Fen, who was exuding calm as he followed, barely seeming to expend any effort to keep pace.

It shot straight towards him but–

At the last second, it must have caught a flash of martial intent through his illusion, because it kicked up clods of dirt as it changed direction one more time and went flying towards Xan.

The giant tried – but he was by far the worst equipped for the task, sweating and panting as he carried himself through the grassfields. His stature was a disadvantage here.

And as he lunged for the rabbit, it kicked up, leaping straight over his head and running down his back.

“Fuck!” He shouted, going tumbling across the earth and ripping a trail through the grass behind him. Booker didn’t hesitate. The rabbit was shooting towards its burrow, and Booker leapt straight over Xan to give chase, the distance between him and the prey shrinking with every footfall.

With every breath in, golden energy raced out of his dantian pool down into his legs, reinforcing the muscles and sinews. Just as his foot slammed down, the energy reached his sole and he pushed forward with such immense speed that the ground was a blur, his momentum carrying him so fast that he only had to put down a single step to cover a half-dozen feet in something that was equal parts run and short, bounding leaps that sent him skimming low above the ground.

Just as the rabbit was about to dive into its burrow, Booker threw himself forward and reached out both hands.

He crashed into the dirt, his belly raking a trail of mud across the ground and tearing grass up by the roots. His hands closed around the rabbit’s underbelly, feeling the pant of its breath and the kick of its legs as it writhed and thrashed, trying to break free. He curled his body around it and rolled, coming up on his back and, like a champion holding up their fist at the end of a fight, lifting the rabbit high for his friends to see.

“Ha-ha!” Xan crowed, bounding up. His robes were covered in mud. It wasn’t the first time today one of the tricky creatures had given him the slip – out of the twenty rabbits they’d hunted, this was their seventh success, and the last one they needed to fulfill the Sect’s commission.

“How do you feel?” Fen asked.

“Like a–” He almost said, like a million bucks, before realizing that wouldn’t really translate well. “Like a god.”

Straightening up, he grimaced and broke the rabbit’s neck, throwing the body over to Xan. The skin was soon separated from the meat. The pelt was the most valuable part of the beast, useful for creating enchantments of concealment and evasion. The meat was also mildly spiritual, and they’d be eating well tonight.

— — —

The next outing that Xan dragged them on was hunting for blood-red oaks.

The hunters of the Lao-Hain knew exactly where to find them, and avoided them like the plague.

They were, after all, carnivorous.

The tree itself was bloated and knobbly, with strange flesh-like sacks that hung from its heavy branches like swollen pustules. These sacks were its ‘organs’. Meaty craters spotted their surfaces like uneven fruit, and when the tree sensed prey approaching to eat the valuable flowers that grew around its base, it would extend tendrils from these apertures to seize and constrict the food.

There was a single mouth that split the tree in half, toothy and weeping a blood-red sap.

Within it, Booker could see the remains of the last victim, an antelope trapped within the adhesive fluids and crushed by the slowly-closing jaws.

The hunter who’d led them here took his silver and left, making a superstitious sign as he turned his back on the tree. Alone, the three of them kneeled down and watched for a moment, taking in the gruesome sight.

“Well,” Xan said eventually, “it’s no looker, that’s for sure.”

“What do we want with it?” Fen asked. “I don’t think killing it is possible.”

“Ah, that’s where you’re wrong.” Xan reached into his pockets and took out a small bag. “This is a Hellion Melting Pill. There should be a breathing hole somewhere. That big toothy thing isn’t its real mouth, just a pit for things to die in. But if you throw this down the breathing hole, and it reaches the organs underneath, the whole thing should vomit up blood and die.”

“Gruesome.” Fen commented.

“How strong is this thing?” Booker asked.

“Pretty strong.” Xan held up a finger. “It can eat a cultivator with those jaws, and the tendrils are powerful as well. It’s no joke even if you have cultivation. Worse yet, the tendrils will regenerate without end as long as the sacs are unharmed. But with the three of us, we should be able to take it on. And the rewards are great. Those flowers, they’re–”

“Blood-Night Paintbrush Flowers.” Booker said without thinking.

“You could have let me say it.” Xan grumbled.

“He so rarely gets to be the alchemy expert, Rain. How could you take it away from him like that?” Fen declared, tapping Booker over the head with his fan.

“They’re good for–” Xan tried.

But Booker intercepted smoothly, “Good for healing and body cultivation.”

Xan’s eyes narrowed. Booker grinned.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“Oh he knows everything about flowers, our brother Rain.” Fen laughed.

“Except snow blossoms, clearly.” Xan shot back.

Oof. Booker laughed aloud, stepping out of the brush and towards the tree. He cracked his knuckles and felt the surge of cultivation building in his chest. “Come on. Let’s make this tree cough blood.”

As soon as they approached, the tendrils whipped out, looking unpleasantly like long tongues barbed with toothy protrusions. One lashed towards Booker and he stepped aside, allowing Rain’s well-trained body to instinctively assume the Mantis Sect’s most evasive stance – Sailing Cloud.

As he did so, energy poured down his meridian lines, filling three particular acupoints within his body. These acupoints and the lines connecting them formed a constellation of power, and that power was amplified as it channeled through his muscle.

Without more than a slight push against the ground, Booker went flying through the air in a tall bound. The tendril lashing for his feet whipped up nothing but air and leaves, and Moy Dongbin’s stolen sword caught the light in his hand, carving a flashing trail across one of the bloody sacs growing among the tree’s branches.

But as he did, another tendril shot out and seized him by the leg. In that one moment, Booker saw the sky and earth spin and switch places, as he was rudely twisted upside down and flung directly into the ground. Right before impact, he shifted poses, drawing both arms across his chest and assuming Iron Wall.

The defensive stance took up four acupoints, and hardened his skin to iron.

He slammed into the ground with brutal force, and the air left his lungs. For a moment, he was completely without energy within his veins. His body was still resilient, but he had no more speed or power than a mortal, and everything hurt with a bone-bruising ache.

In that moment the tendril retracted dragged him swiftly towards the mouth.

With a gasp that finally forced air into his compacted lungs Booker slashed out and cut the tendril apart. But even then another was shooting out, grasping for his arm to try and break it and force him to drop his weapon. He threw himself into a roll, kicked up, and slid into the Patient Mantis. The Sect’s namesake, it was the stance reserved for a riposting sword strike, waiting to meet violence with violence.

As the tree’s tendrils struck for him, he responded in kind, yellow gore exploding out as he sliced one after another in half.

Around him, Fen was darting in and out of reach, striking the sacs with exploding needles that punctured the outer skin and left the contents slopping to the ground. Xan was simply – well, there was no describing Xan’s fighting style but wild. He was upside down and hanging to a branch by one hand to prevent himself from being lifted higher, while his other hand wielded a short knife to hack and rip apart the other tentacles attempting to constrict and crush him.

But the tendrils weren’t merely strong. As Booker cut and cut, yellow blood flying across his face, the tendrils truly were growing back as quickly as he could chop them down. But while it looked like a stalemate from the outside – in actuality, Booker was improving rapidly. As he flowed in and out of the static stance, he was learning its limits.

The empowerment of the Sect’s dancing poses lasted only for a half-second or so after he broke the stance. But the strength did last. That meant he could weave his own moves, his own free-form strikes, into combat without compromising on the enhanced strength and speed of the stances.

As the tendrils surrounded him in a storm, he began to weave in dodges, moving more and more.

Until Booker suddenly kicked forward and into Sailing Cloud, launching himself through the snaring tendrils. His sword flashed, and a sac was split in half. Half the tendrils holding Xan went slack, and he pulled himself down with a roar, folding his belly over the branch he was clinging to and then climbing up, wrapping the tendrils around the thick tree limb.

With a sudden burst of strength he dove for the ground, looping the tendrils totally around the tree’s own branch.

Another vine snaked along the ground and seized his leg, pulling him to one knee and across the ground, but that only added to his grip. With a rising sound like the roar of an engine, Xan tore down the tree branch and split the tendrils in half.

As they came loose, the vine around his leg pulled him whip-quick towards the mouth, but Booker arrived in the same instant, chopping down and then grabbing Xan’s blood-soaked hand to pull him back to his feet.

A pair of needles flew past them, destroying another sac.

“Where is that mouth?” Xan gasped out. Booker didn’t reply at first, stepping around him to assume Patient Mantis and bring down the vines extending to grab them.

“Hit it.” He gasped out. “Hit the trunk as hard as you can! I’ll cover you!”

Xan nodded, and together they shot for the tree’s center. Booker lashed out, losing his stance in the heat of the moment but still managing to cut down one, two, three vines before one grabbed his arm and ripped him off the ground, smashing him back down an instant later. His arm bent backwards, popping out of the socket with a sickening crunch. The sword fell from his grip.

In that same moment, Xan hit the tree dead on. A moment before impact he had assumed the Horse Atop the World stance, the Sect’s most pure and straightforward enforcement of raw physical might.

The entire tree shook–

And Booker saw a cough of air puff up from the leaf-strewn ground nearby.

But there wasn’t even time to shout out the location before a second tendril wrapped around his leg, and both snapped taut, pulling him in two directions at once. He felt his dislocated arm yanked until the meat of his shoulder was horribly extended, loose and drawn out to its limit. A pain burst out from his midsection – he was instants from being torn apart.

“Snips, the sword!” Snips shot from his pack, buzzed in a quick arc, and shot back to knock the sword across the ground. Booker seized it and chopped upwards, freeing his arm. As he did so he was yanked upwards, upside-down, and he only halted himself from being flung straight out into the open sky by slamming his sword hilt-deep into a passing branch. His fingers clung to the grip by all their might, but they were slippery with blood…

“Xan, throw me the pill!”

Below, Xan looked up from fighting a coil of vines. Booker saw hesitation flash across his face – then he released one hand, allowing a vine to wrap around his throat, to fling the pill upwards towards Booker. Booker swung his bag over the hilt of the blade, let go, and in the instant before the strap broke, caught the pill and flung it down into the mouth on the ground below.

In the next instant the strap gave way, and Booker was flung straight up. He saw the trees shrink away beneath him – and then he was at the height of his arc, and gravity reasserted itself, the ground flying up from below.

Iron Wall only did so much to cushion one of the worst impacts of his life.

As he lay gasping and coughing on the ground, the tree had it worse. Deep, phlegmatic chokes and meaty-sounding gurgles accompanied geyser sprays of blood exploding out of its true mouth. It reminded Booker grotesquely of a whale’s blowhole shooting off wastewater. All around him, the tendrils were writhing and thrashing in blind spasms.

Until abruptly, with a final spew, the tree gurgled and went silent.

Fen pulled him to his feet a moment later, although Booker would have liked a few more seconds on the ground catching his breath.

“You–” Fen looked between Booker and Xan, who was climbing out of a pile of dead vines. “You idiot! ‘Pretty strong’ – you could have gotten us all killed!”

“But… I didn’t… and we get paid…” Xan gasped out, holding up five fingers. One was noticeably crooked. “Two hundred liang. Each.” Then he glanced at the broken finger, and asked, “Do you uh, have any medicine for fingers, Rain?”

“Sure…” Rain groaned. “It will only cost you two hundred liang.”

— — —

As the sun went down, they departed on one final mission – although Xan had to promise them it would be an easy one. This time it was seeking the eggs of a rare bird, the blue-cloud pheasant. The eggs were a valuable reagent used for cultivation, but Booker was uninterested in spending the last hours of the day tromping through the woods. He’d had more than enough of that getting here. Instead, he offered them Zhu-Zhu’s assistance in hunting down the magical treasures, and excused himself to make medicine in a nearby cave.

Settling down, he lit the furnace and tossed in a few scraps for the smell. Having his own furnace certainly made for a convenient excuse, although he’d have to hide just how many pills he was creating each day.

Especially as his output had drastically increased. It was now easier than ever to use Dialyze and Furnace, and he could bring them forth without much effort. If it was simply a matter of how often he could use them as he had before, Booker spent almost an hour continuously calling them forth, fire in one hand and water in the other. There simply wasn’t a limit there anymore.

But now, the disc from Dialyze could fly through the air for a short distance, growing slower and less controlled the further it went from his hand. The fire from Furnace could blaze up to three or four times its previous size. These new abilities did wear him out, and quickly.

Still… for alchemy? I no longer have any limits to my productivity but raw materials. I can turn any amount of medicine into pills within a matter of minutes.

First, he restocked his supply healing pills. They were simple and effective things, made from seven-year flower syrups, bone meal, spring peony, and greenbalm root. In these lands, binders were expensive enough that you’d never use two alongside such simple herbs, but it made perfect sense for Booker, who could manufacture from the best materials without costly failures.

The fire blazed hot for an instant, and they were done…

Cricket Rejuvenation Pill (Dull)

16% Potency // 2% Toxicity

Effect:

A bright green pill with a lustrous exterior. Good for repairing minor wounds, and very low on Toxicity. A standard used by distant armies.

Ingredients:

Spring Peony

Greenbalm Root

Bone Meal

Seven-Year Flower Syrup

Next…

Processing and chopping up a prickle-furred nettle with his knife, he ground the stalks to a green mash in a mortar and pestle, then squeezed it in a thin cloth to sieve off excess moisture. The next ingredient was a flower that had to be cut into strips and soaked in alcohol to draw out the valuable properties into an acrid tincture, then heated and boiled until the alcohol dissolved and left only a sappy residue.

Combining them into pill-sized boluses, he brought the blue fire of Furnace from his palms, watching as the dark shadows within the flame condensed into perfect round pills.

They were cloud-colored and fragrant, with the scent of sweetened hay.

Vaulting Cloud Pill (Dull)

21% Potency // 4% Toxicity

Effect:

Formed from ingredients with strong connections to the sky, this cultivation boosting pill contains a yearning for flight, and causes strange dreams of flying.

Ingredients:

Ruminant Cloud-Nettle

Solar Yearning Flower

Seven-Year Flower Syrup

With that, his quest was complete. A blank page had appeared in the green book – another Apprentice Page, waiting to absorb the information of any other tome and grant him complete understanding of it.

But right now the medicine itself is even more exciting than the quest. What does cultivating with medicine feel like?

Booker took a pill and swallowed it.

As he did, the pill began to break apart, slowly dissolving into nothing but energy. That energy scattered across his entire body from his stomach, becoming sparks of golden power that hovered in remote corners of his being. Using his will, he combed them back into his dantian pool and gathered them into his cultivation.

It was an added source of energy, beyond just the influx that came with his breathing. Booker found that his pool of qi was deep, but equally, took a while to refill. The loose energy of heaven and earth that entered him when he breathed in was mostly lost when he exhaled – what little did remain, had to be compacted willfully into qi. Booker wasn’t yet at the stage where this was an unconscious act. If he wanted to recover his qi, he needed to spend several minutes slowly breathing and using all his focus to guide the energies captured by that breathing.

But the pills were a shortcut. The energy they burned into was already condensed and pure, and he could simply guide it into his dantian. Once the pool was full he could begin to overfill it, losing much of the energy he’d otherwise gain, but slowly etching the depths of his internal well deeper – permanently widening his capacity for qi.

Standing up, he began to practice the Mantis Sect’s forms. As he flowed from Gate-Breaking Bull to Cloud-Leaping Swan, from Stalking Tiger to Mountain Reflection… His qi flowed into shapes that amplified it, traveling from acupoint to acupoint in forms the Sect had practiced for decades and refined into powerhouse stances.

This was also a way to cultivate. As his energy flowed out through his meridians and returned, it also dug the well deeper.

These three methods – breathing, medicine, practice – were all paths to cultivation. On their own, all of them were slow and grinding ways to progress. Altogether, they were still slow, but not so slow that Booker didn’t find the gradual increase of his strength deeply satisfying.

There was one more amplifying factor. As Booker had originally suspected, what he was calling the ‘meditation state’ was deeply linked to cultivation – so deeply that the Sect had no word for it, beyond cultivation itself.

Whenever his thoughts slipped into the clear free-flowing and powerful state, his power to manipulate his own energy redoubled. Although the meditation state only lasted for a minute or two at a time, in those brief moments, Booker made drastic advancement.

It took him an hour to burn through the first pill. When he had gathered every last scrap of energy it had burned into, he settled down, casting more scraps into the fire…

“Haaa…” Sweat was rolling down Booker’s face. It was strange, but the focus and control of harnessing his qi seemed to bring on a unique form of exhaustion, both body and mind. He’d only been practicing his forms in a slow, deliberate manner, similar to tai chi’s meditative dance, but he felt like he’d been put through the wringer.

Taking another pill, he considered his supply.

He’d bought ingredients for seven different kinds of pills. That was because the pills had diminishing returns. The more of a given kind you consumed, the less good it would do. Eating multiple at once was possible, but wasted much of the energy and hastened the drop-off of diminishing returns…

The challenge from here on out is finding different ingredients and different combinations to keep ahead of the game. In the city, I can sell back finished pills and regain nearly any amount of money I spend on ingredients, but Mantis City is a small city at the end of the day… I’ll eventually run out of common reagents to use…

But that’s a long way off. For now, I should enjoy myself and the fruits of easy cultivation.

Tossing back another pill, he straightened up and began to practice once more.

Over and over…

With a smile on his face.