Though every tiny piece of his body hurt, Anton found himself more able to actually move about after some time spent cultivating. With that, he thought of something more important to do than just moping about thinking about dying.

Anton trudged his way back towards Dungannon at a measured pace. A bit of food had given him some strength, but movement still hurt, both from fatigued muscles and whatever it was that cultivating was doing to him. Possibly tearing him apart, but it was really damaging him he felt he would already be dead. Even though he had once been quite tough… at around a hundred years old, he felt like he could fall apart at any moment. He was almost surprised he’d made it so far, but he didn’t let his mind stop on any of that.

On the way back towards town, he passed over the frozen and snow-covered carcass of the deer he had hunted. It had surprisingly not been touched by scavengers, so it was in relatively good shape. Anton couldn’t rely on Vincent to provide him food… and Vincent wouldn’t be in town regardless. So he grabbed the straps and started pulling the canvas sled towards town. He followed basically the same path he had taken before, his previous tracks barely visible under new layers of snow.

It was a long walk still, to reach Dungannon, but he was able to reach the town before evening. He stopped outside the Krantz family farm, unwilling to go closer. Instead, he gathered sticks and cleared snow to make a fire pit. He didn’t have a good table to work on the deer, so he just cut off strips of meat and roasted them over the fire, keeping the main portion of the deer away from the heat so it wouldn’t thaw and refreeze.

The meal was awful. Frozen deer didn’t cook well, and the thoughts he had harbored of sharing it with his family only brought their faces back into his mind. However, he needed to eat… and he had come back for a reason. So he ate as much as seemed reasonable to build up his strength, before setting a tent next to a ruined barn and using a bedroll pilfered from the bandit camp to keep himself warm for the night.

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Anton could only take so much cultivating. His entire body screamed as the unfamiliar energy he pulled from the world around him tore into it. Though it hurt to move after that, he didn’t feel weakness which was good enough. As long as he could move… he could work.

First he found himself digging through the rubble looking for tools. It took a day before he came up with a shovel, and then he could begin the real work. His oldest son could have reasonably been considered an old man in his own right. He was a grandfather, but like Anton himself he worked his whole life. His body still had quite a bit of muscle on it, so bringing it to the top of the hill where Janina was buried with Anton’s parents was quite a chore. Then Anton set about removing the snow and digging through frozen soil.

Eating, sleeping, cultivating, and digging graves became Anton’s life.

The venison lasted him two weeks, and after that he began on the organs, eating whatever he could despite how tough it might be. Everything was roasted over a fire, which wasn’t the optimal way to cook all of it… but he didn’t exactly have many other options.

The bodies of Anton’s family were all buried by the time he ran out of food. Digging through the rubble had been slow, but with nothing else to do all day… he kept at it. Despite the constant pain from muscle fatigue and cultivation, he felt stronger than he had in a long time. Perhaps it was just the weakness from winter rations fading, but he was able to push his way past his difficulties.

Anton knew that Vincent had been right, but seeing that only about half of his grandchildren and their spouses were dead didn’t fill him with joy. Getting carried away as slaves was not necessarily a better fate. As for his great-grandchildren… Anton knew he couldn’t fight even the weakest cultivator, but he wanted to stomp off to Ofrurg and tear down the whole country.

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Perhaps the attempt would have allowed him to die content, but it wouldn’t have really done anything productive. He still had work to do where he was. Dungannon wasn’t just his own family after all. The rest of the villagers also deserved the respect of a proper burial.

Before he could do that, Anton needed to survive. That meant food- and with all of the village’s stored food eaten, stolen, or destroyed- he had to hunt. Somehow his bow had held up through being buried in snow with him several times, though he had to replace the string with another he had fortunately stored in the quiver. Heading out far into the woods wasn’t something he wanted to do, so he looked for tracks closer. If he was lucky, he would find something smaller, since he didn’t need to feed a whole family and it would be easier to carry back.

When he was willing to settle for smaller game, his eyes were drawn to any prints he saw. After a few hours of following some rabbit tracks, he finally found one. He would have preferred to set up traps, but he no longer had the material for them. As he spotted the rabbit, he noticed his eyesight was slightly less blurry. Even with its winter coat, he had seen it from over a dozen paces away. He couldn’t say which end was the head, but he stopped and carefully drew his bow. It pulled back slightly more easily now that he wasn’t quite so fatigued, and his arrow flew true- and the rabbit didn’t notice the movement. Unlike the deer, a rabbit couldn’t even move with an arrow in its side, so he didn’t have to chase it. That would provide food for a day, at least.

-----

Whenever he breathed out, Anton could feel something being forced out of him. It wasn’t just stale air, either. Whatever it was quickly found itself replaced by new, fresh air… and in that air was the energy he was seeking. According to the cultivation manual, it was possible to absorb it directly at a certain point- but for the moment, he could only take the energy from the air inside his lungs. Each breath had a small strand of energy that he pulled down to his dantian, a place below his navel. He wasn’t sure if it was a real organ. He’d seen enough of the insides of people over the past month and a half to be fairly certain there were only guts there… but then again, the meridians this energy flowed through didn’t seem to be real either.

Or maybe… real wasn’t the right word. He could feel both, and he stored up energy in his dantian before moving it through the squiggly meridians going throughout his body. Each time he did, it strained him. He had to practically force it to move through the meridians, like water through a clogged pipe. As he did so, they opened up slightly… but he also was capable of gathering more strands of energy that he needed to circulate throughout his body.

In this particular cultivation session, his body and energy seemed to be resisting his every move. It felt like every step of the way he was dragging claws through his body. Perhaps he was making a mistake, and would destroy himself… but he still fell into the vain and stupid hope that he might actually become a cultivator and become strong enough to avenge his family- or rescue some of them.

It was the only thing that kept him going when surrounded by corpses all day. The nearby villages had likely heard about Dungannon’s tragedy, but they could barely take care of themselves in the winter. Sending people to help bury bodies was a pointless gesture that nobody would even notice… and they didn’t know that anything was being done at all. He was fine with that, but he hoped he could finish the job.

Yet he was perhaps about to kill himself cultivating. The sharp pain he felt as he prodded and pushed and pulled the energy through his body might have been a warning of danger. That was often the case, but the technique had said there would be pain. It wasn’t so verbose that it said the exact level of pain, but Anton knew that cultivators were superhuman. It wasn’t so easy to become one, so just the amount of physical pain he felt… what did it matter? He’d thought to ask Vincent for advice, but after a month he was no longer waiting for the bandits to return. He was off somewhere, hunting them down if he could.

That meant Anton had no way to know how to handle the situation. Choosing the most straightforward option of charging ahead was the only thing he could be bothered to do. Either it was a hurdle he needed to overcome or he wasn’t cut out for cultivation and should just become another body among the rest. So, despite the excruciating pain throughout his body, he pushed the gathered energy through his meridians and to all of his extremities.