Night had fallen over the indigo forest, a sliver of moonlight peeking through the tree branches now the primary illumination. The wood was alive with the sounds of frogs and crickets and the occasional call of a nocturnal bird. High in the branch of a tree, a figure crouched in repose, watching, waiting.

Strong River's exposed skin pebbled in the night's chill, the fine hairs standing on end, but the young warrior did not shiver. He did regret the flimsiness of his current wardrobe, a torn-down pair of tanned hide breeches that covered his essentials and not much else, but this too was training he had to endure to continue on his path. As Mister Black had emphasized, while cultivators could enjoy luxury beyond the imagination of mere mortals, the way of cultivation itself was harsh, brutal, and unforgiving. A little night's chill on bare flesh was nothing in the greater fabric of his aims.

Shrouded in his Dusk Aura Concealment, his passions and anxieties channeled into the Passion Sublimation Technique, the young man was waiting for a very special encounter.

"So this Moon-striped Sabermaw is the same kind of beast Blue Ripple and the others took down, then, Mister Black?"

"Almost," the spirit advised. "The one they faced was a juvenile just entering its adult phase. This one will be an adult, young man. It'll do for your needs while presenting an appropriate challenge to your current capabilities."

"It's almost too bad that I'm missing out on the bragging rights, then," River mused. "But, there'll be a time when everybody will know my strength, right?"

"Indeed. Your strength will become undeniable soon enough, my young pupil," Mister Black reassured him. "But now, incoming!"

River stilled his extraneous thoughts and his breath in tandem as he spotted the new arrival on the forest floor. It was a tusked feline whose shoulders stood taller than the top of River's head. Its coat was black slashed with white stripes that glowed in the moon's light. The creature prowled through the forest floor with practiced ease, leaving no trail and making no sound despite its enormous paws treading on leaf-strewn grounds.

Examining the beast in silence, River surmised that the creature had three particularly dangerous weapons: its tusks, its claws, and its brain. A beast reaching the latter part of sixth-grade capacity and thriving as an adult no doubt was accustomed to nightly battles of life and death. Faced with creatures with similar attributes, it needed some amount of cunning to survive here.

The sabermaw's physical weapons could best be circumvented by a flanking or rear approach. But how quickly would it react, how long would River have to engage before it brought its natural weapons to bear? That was something he would only know by seeing the beast in action. Not wanting to wait all night, and definitely not wishing to maneuver against many creatures of its level, he came to the conclusion that this would only be borne out by attacking it.

Slowly, carefully, he resumed his breathing. A painful encounter with another feline earlier in the day had taught River that sudden changes in his breath were enough to alert some of the more sensitive beasts, which this sabermaw indeed was.

The world was plunged into a crimson blur as he activated Blood Ignition Acceleration. He launched himself at a nearby tree trunk, using his accelerated perception to angle his landing at a rear flank of the feline. It was not flying, but the feeling of floating down like a feather instead of plummeting like a rock was still a sensation he enjoyed.

Reaching the forest floor while the sabermaw was only beginning to twitch in reaction, River reached out with his right palm and slapped it onto the feline's flank, drawing in its vitality to replenish that lost in activating the acceleration art. Each time he activated the art was much like the very first time: a rush of euphoria, a need to pull on that thread of blood that much harder, to draw it all in. He embraced the first while tempering himself against the second, cautious to not lose sight of the fact that he was engaged in physical contact with a creature capable and willing to retaliate.

But not cautious enough, as it turned out this time, for the sabermaw had a fourth weapon at its disposal that River had wholly overlooked: its tail.

Even as the rest of its body moved at a glacial pace in reaction to the assault, the tail moved at a speed that was fast even to his enhanced perception. The moon-striped tail, club-like, swiped at his head. He disengaged from his devouring and made for a retreat, but pain bloomed as the appendage brushed his cheek, splitting open the skin with the force and pressure of the air it displaced.

Maintaining his acceleration, River hurled himself back up into the trees. Retreating into the branches above, he engaged Dusk Aura Concealment before shutting off the blood acceleration. He swiped at his cheek with his fingers, a smear of blood appearing there. The wound itched, but he could feel it closing thanks to the excess blood vitality he had obtained.

The sabermaw spun around, confused. There had been something, and its tail had brushed against it, but when it turned nothing was there but a breeze. Confirming that the creature did not suspect his current whereabouts, River took a moment to re-center himself and consider his options.

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"So you have two problems," Mister Black offered, "you neglected the tail and, with the tail added into the calculation, you have a serious lack of reach."

"Mhmm," River agreed. "How did it respond so fast with the tail when the rest of it was so slow, though?"

"Reflex." Mister Black offered his insight. "The tail doesn't only move under the conscious control of the beast but has itself a very tiny sliver of awareness. That sliver allows it to react to things within its small range of detection without the sabermaw needing to think about it first. Rather awkward for their mating cycle, but effective for dealing with would-be ambushers."

"Well thankfully I'm not looking to mate with it, I'd just like to kill it." River was only half-annoyed at the prior omission of the information about the tail but understood it was because Mister Black wanted him to be self-reliant. "While I could break its back if I fell from high enough, I'd rather not shatter my legs in the process. Hmm..." River surveyed the surrounding area.

"Come up with a plan?"

"Well, I can't very well fall on top of it myself, but what if I found something heavy enough -- like a boulder -- and threw it?" River offered. "I'd go for something lighter that I could make faster, but there's that tail. If I get up there high enough..."

"Well..." Mister Black considered. "It's awkward, clumsy, and brutish... but it's also workable. You're learning! Sometimes you can't make an elegant or beautiful kill, and in some places and situations your preferred weapons may be outclassed."

Keeping an eye on the feline and maintaining his concealment technique, River dashed through the branches as quietly as he could manage. There were plenty of nocturnal fowl in the forest and so some light sounds that could be taken for their movements wouldn't alert his prey. Locating a prime specimen of a boulder, he lifted it on a shoulder and clambered back up, monkey-like, into the heights of the forest.

River ascended his way up a tree, mindful of the terrifying height to which he had never before climbed and that a single mistake could spell his doom. The sabermaw from this great distance was nothing more than the figure of a small toothy housecat.

Looking around, River could not help but appreciate the beauty of the scenery about him. The moon, a mere sliver opposite to the one in the sky back when he had meditated before the lotus, hung in the sky over a forest canopy that stretched as far as the eye could see in every direction.

Shaking himself out of the reverie, River prepared himself. He pushed the Passion Sublimation black hole to its maximum rotation, feeding it his newly discovered awe at the forest's immensity along with the rest of his feelings. He activated Blood Ignition and dyed his perception in red. Bolstered with the most that Passion Sublimation could offer, sped up as much as Blood Ignition could go, he braced himself against the tree trunk, wrapping his legs around the stable branch underneath him. And then he hurled the boulder.

The missile flew true, pushed by all the augmented strength from River's arms and pulled by the inexorable acceleration of gravity, descending down with a whistling of wind that alerted the sabermaw far too late of its peril and doom. The boulder smashed into the center of the cat's back with a crunch audible even at River's precipitous elevation.

Slammed into the forest floor, the sabermaw gave out a cry that was part yowl, part scream, a banshee wail that echoed through the indigo forest. The feline twitched, and its front paws scrambled, throwing about leaves and debris, and the boulder was flung away to rest against a tree's trunk, but the beast did not rise. River's plan had succeeded: the sabermaw's back was broken.

Maintaining his arts of concealment, River clambered down the tree. Blind to its aggressor, the sabermaw howled out a couple more painful yowls as River landed on the forest floor nearby. Confirming that the beast was still down, he deactivated his arts.

Slowly, inexorably, River approached the creature. Moving at a normal speed and visible in the pale moonlight, his eyes met the hateful glare of the cat. It knew. It knew that he was the one who did this to it. It recognized that its end was nigh. It knew, and it hated, and snarled, all the defiance it could muster to fight its inevitable demise.

River almost felt remorse at that moment. Here it was, a majestic Moon-striped Sabermaw, a powerful creature that lorded over the forest interior, that if set loose in a village could devour every last scrap. Since its birth, it had fought endless battles, defeated countless foes, turned predators into its prey. And now came its turn.

The young warrior circled around the beast and approached its midsection from the side. River's sentiment did not extend into sentimentality, and he remained vigilant to the threats the creature could still offer. Stepping up to the beast's now-bloodied side, he reached out with his right hand, stroking the fur. The act was strangely purifying, the stain of blood disappearing from the coat and leaving it its pristine natural black and white. And then he pressed his palm into that softness.

The sabermaw's muscles twitched as the floodgates opened, its powerful blood now all coursing into River. He felt that euphoria, and that need to consume all of it, but even in the midst of that torrent he forced himself to think about the absorption process. Devour. Condense. Nourish. Strengthen. Without directing the flow of the blood energy, River ran the real risk of taking in the blood energy directly and exploding. Even harnessing the torrent, he almost felt ready to explode, his skin reddening and his veins bulging under the pressure.

And then the pressure lifted, even as the last of the sabermaw's blood coursed through his palm and into his body. The power that threatened to crush him from within and without, painful and pleasurable all in one, released as he broke through his bottleneck.

Seventh-grade Human Realm. The peak of body tempering below the Earth Realm. A level of power that, known, qualified him to sit with the elders of the clan, that allowed him to now face any one of them with confidence in his survival. In a little more than a week, with Mister Black's miraculous help he had gone from a weakling stranded at a level barely above that of a human being that did not practice at all, to a high-level expert in the entire region.

A euphoria akin to that of the blood devouring washed over him at the realization. Clenching his fists, he rose from the drained corpse of the beast and turned, leaving it along with the remnants of his previous weakness.

His hair, now long enough to drape on his shoulders rather than only reaching them, flew back in the turbulence as he raced forward. River needed to test his new limits, see where his new boundaries lay.

And then, he could return.