“It normally takes a few weeks to get beans to dry out of pods, but we can pick some and explain that to the villagers of Anhao Luzhou. I don’t know of any other way to speed up bean drying for use, but this is still a good find.”

The words had been said with enthusiasm, as the young man from Texas was excited about that sort of stuff. His Auntie Edith kept a garden and grew some cultivars of beans for use in dishes she only fed the extended family, and given Alfonso’s long time quest to make the best chili, he had tried to learn about them. ‘Freshly dried beans feel like they’d make better chili’ he had reasoned then.

The two had gathered an entire empty rice sack full of many of the beans, both loose and in pod, which lie around the tree.

Those words were all that had been spoken when they left to gather more after their primary goal. Through the bush they went and with a hand gesture to stop Xiang Hou Gen stopped the young man when they came near a thicket and surprisingly a deer, larger than Alfonso had ever seen, strode forward into the thicket and went about its browsing through the plants.

The raggedly dressed cultivator stopped looking like a vagabond for a moment and instead changed his posture. Instead of an exhausted slump he crouched with tension and took a deep and sharp breath. Then he rocketed forward on the tips of his toes and landed a palm strike on the deer’s midsection.

There was an eerie feeling like that of static electricity down Alfonso’s spine as the strike landed, and a subtle blue glow lit the gloom of the forest. Then the deer collapsed as if shot by a hunter.

While Alfonso had seen the movement, he had no way of understanding it. Not even after a similar scene occurred with a boar the size of a Volkswagen beetle from the twentieth century, where the strike was upon the spine after Hou Gen dodged being gored by the boar’s tusks was Alfonso any more aware of what had happened.

Seeing a cultivator in action made Alfie want to speak up about what was really on his mind. To ask his looming questions about the feeling of energy from the peppers, or the cold solidity of the beans. The questions about the implication that others had levied that he was a cultivator, and his ability to keep up with Hou Gen.

Not least the questions as to why he felt existential dread about potentially being a cultivator. He had not worked for it, and that felt wrong to him - none of the heroes in the Wuxia stories got things without working for them, unless they were actually the villains. On top of that, his Mama Alma needed him and he needed to get home.

One part of Alfie’s mind urged the youth to hide from the truth and these worrying questions.

Instead, he took a deep breath and looked at the bedraggled cultivator with long hair tied with a ribbon, a perpetual five o’clock shadow, and average features aside from sharply observant and narrow eyes.

‘You don’t worry about the tears it might bring. You just cut the onion because you know you need it for the recipe,’ the young man muttered to himself. With the mantra said, he straightened his posture and slapped the sides of his leg with his palms.

“Xiang Hou Gen, I hate to ask you this, but why did you shrug at me being able to keep up with you in speed? You’re a cultivator. ”

The cultivator shrugged. “Because you are one, the same as I, Carter Alfie. You do not feel the core inside you, the very essences around you? Because they are there – and I guarantee that you could strike down a deer such as these with a single blow. There was a reason why I said you needed no hunting tool.”

“If I could, would it feel like I was holding my hands near fire when holding a chili pepper like these? Or would the beans have felt almost like iron coins?” He asked it while showing his companion one of the peppers he had gathered before they met.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

From the gasp of fear at the sight of the fruits which had burnt his face so, Hou Gen almost lost his step, but he nodded. “More than that… I actually was burnt by those… chili peppers.” he pronounced the chili as if he was saying ‘chi li’, with an audible space between them in speech and as if they were not two syllables of one word.

Alfie shrugged. “Okay, and how do we test if I really am a cultivator?”

The bedraggled older man inclined his head and pointed as another deer ambled into the field, twice as wary.

“You simply try.”

***

Hou Gen had made it look easy, and while Alfie had landed a palm strike of his own on the deer’s haunch, it was not enough to finish the job or even slow the animal. Instead, the pair rain through the wilderness for nearly twenty minutes.

Admirably, they continued their run, but had yet to catch up with their prey. For Alfie, it was because he did not have the speed to, and for Hou Gen, it was because he was carrying a boar carcass on one shoulder and a deer carcass on another. It would have looked cartoonish aside from the grin upon Hou Gen’s face and the glare upon Odiseo’s as the chihuahua hung its head out of Alfie’s oversized backpack.

“Sorry I’m not a good palanquin, Odie. But I’ll make it up to you after I finish off the test with the deer.”

All it had to do was outrun him, and he knew he was not a cultivator. All he had to do was strike it down with his bare hands, and he knew he was. So this continued, past the woods and into a clearing, and it was there that the hunt stopped.

Alfonso, Odie, and Hou Gen had just happened upon a burnt-out village not that different from Anhao Luzhou. Smoke wafted from some buildings and the smell of swampy water, rotting meat, and burned homes dominated the area. The area was covered in ruined buildings and destroyed cobblestones, burnt out riverboats and – and strung up by a metal chain across two poles were the mummified and charred remains of several people.

The boy immediately dropped his backpack and wretched up the contents of his stomach at the sights and smells. Seeing them on a screen or in a comic differed from experiencing anything like this in person. He just continued emptying his stomach and fighting a mental battle at the sight as he wondered who, or what, would have done such a thing.

Hou Gen let him, observing the scene with a frown but not having the reaction to it, and it would have continued if Odiseo had not chosen to lick the back of the young man’s cheek. Alfie forced himself to stand upright and turned to make sure Odiseo was not hurt from the dropping of his bag. Even as his left hand moved over the dog, and was licked by it, his eyes never moved from the scene before them.

“Hou Gen… Who would do such a thing?”

“The Immortals..” the cultivator said, before nodding to the chain of people. “Those husks are a clear sign it was Ding Hui the Immortal himself…”

“How… or why?”

“They likely insulted him, and he took their lives in recompense…”

“Like, typical insulted cultivator style, destroying the whole village?”

“No, more than five people lived in this village. I only see five corpses, even scanning the village with my eyes.”

“So he took them as slaves?”

“Perhaps. Or perhaps as food.”

“Food? He eats people?”

“Their chi… that is why he is called the Immortal.”

“How do you know…? And what do we do about it?”

“Because I have tried to slay him before, Carter Alfie. I tried and failed, dooming a village much like this that hired me. I could only harm his body.”

That was the man who was threatening them simply by the circumstance of fate and their defense against his men. That was the man who might threaten Anhao Luzhou and saw fit to excise such taxes upon it.

Alfie’s body trembled at the thought and he spoke up with cold fury. “We’re going to stop him.”

“If I could not, how do you plan to?”

“We’re going to get allies, and I’m going to use the most forbidden technique I know.”

“Forbidden technique? This one means no offense, Alfie, but you cannot possibly know a forbidden technique. I know why this sight would anger you… but you do not even know the limits or stage of your cultivation. How could you know a secret technique?”

“Not a cultivation technique. I’m going to teach him that he immortality is a myth by fighting him with my true path… Hou Gen, we are going to make him the most forbidden dish of food my family has ever devised.”

If the peppers and beans had chi and vital essence, it stood to reason that other plants and ingredients might as well. All Alfonso had to do, he reasoned, was make a dish with so much chi and vital energy in it that the bastard who had done this to this village couldn’t handle the energy.

“We need to get back to work gathering ingredients,” the young man said, and turned back the way they came. Memories of his grandfather’s “Make the Devil Weep” Chili and making it with the old man flashed through Alfie’s mind.

He had no idea how to save the people of Juren Wuting from the Immortal and his army with cultivation, but he wasn’t going to do it with cultivation. He was going to use his skills as a chili cook, and his budding skills and innate skill as a cultivator to do it. It was going to be done with chili and cultivation. Chili Con Cultivation.