I cursed and swiped the saber across my body to deflect the wooden training spear Temüjin was wielding. I had messed up my footwork and he was going to make me pay for it. His spear moved back less than an inch and then shot forward like a snake, hitting me solidly in the chest with a whump that knocked the wind out of me. I backpedaled frantically, using air qi to force air into my lungs while healing the bruising on my diaphragm with a small trickle of water qi, before regaining the proper stance and counter attacking with the saber. It left a trail of fire arcing through the air as I sliced, only to be blocked by the wooden spear.
This had been my routine for the previous six days. Temüjin had been working me to exhaustion each day with both the saber and the spear. We started training as soon as the light of false dawn allowed us to see and continued until darkness had fully fallen. Temüjin only allowed three five-minute breaks per day for water and healing before continuing to mercilessly drill me on forms and stances with both weapons.
The third and fourth days had been pouring rain, and Temüjin had considered it an excellent training opportunity for me. Slipping and sliding in the mud had been miserable. It had sucked at my feet, taking off my sandals several times, before I had gotten angry and used water qi to rip the moisture out of the ground and fling it at him. Far from being mad, he had applauded my resourcefulness and complimented me on an excellent elemental manipulation. Then he had promptly forbidden me from using external manipulation on anything other than a weapon during training.
His spear dove in at me again, but I batted it away with the tip of the saber before executing my own lunge. Temüjin flicked his hand against the flat of the blade to knock it off course before kicking out at my knee. I barely avoided the kick and tried a short slash, attempting to stay within the effective range of his spear. It didn’t work, of course. The difference in skill, not to mention speed and strength, was simply too great. I was learning, though. When we started that kick would have dropped me.
“Enough,” he said, stepping back, “You’re still dropping your left shoulder when you lunge, and your footwork is barely passable. Go clean up and prepare our supper. I will lay out the required supplies for our journey.”
The next day dawned and I was outside to see it. The sky was a riot of color, pushing back the purple curtain of false dawn, as I followed Temüjin to the large menhir that marked the edge of the homestead.
“Give me your hand,” he said. When I did he made a quick slice on my palm, before doing the same to his, and planting both of them on the standing stone. I could feel the pull on my qi as the stone drank in my blood. A shimmering dome formed over the homestead for a few seconds before flashing brightly and fading.
At this point, a simple questioning look was enough to elicit an explanation from him.
“I don’t want rabbits eating my garden every time I leave,” he said, “And if we leave the cow unattended something will try to eat her. So, I set up a crude, but very powerful ward to make beasts think twice about crossing it. It should stop any beasts in the valley from bothering the place while we’re gone.”
“Why didn’t you raise it when you left to make your rounds last time?” I asked.
“Because you were here, so I didn’t need to. Spirit beasts are not what we would call intelligent, but they do have a certain amount of cunning. They associate the homestead as a place of danger, and if they’re weak they avoid it completely. Other beasts, like the Whitewater Tiger that scared you so badly, know enough to not cause trouble when they do drop by.
“With you here,” he continued, “there was movement and noise coming from the homestead. Beasts learn to associate that with danger. With us both gone, I instead raised what is effectively a warning flag to tell them to keep away.”
“Interesting. Are wards something you’re planning to teach me?” I asked.
“I can teach you the basics, but you’ll need to increase your cultivation base to at least Elite rank first. If you choose to remain here until then we’ll cover what I know,” he replied, hefting his much smaller pack and starting to trudge away.
The valley was a broad oval shape, running from east to west. Gladewood was at the southern part of the oval, about a third of the way from the eastern border. Temüjin’s cottage was almost a straight shot north of Gladewood, butting up against the mountains there. We were heading to the very western edge of the valley, the elevation rising slightly the entire way. Late spring floodwaters were in full effect, swelling the streams we came across into raging torrents that I wouldn’t have dared to cross before breaking through.
We set a slower pace than I had anticipated. Temüjin was using the trip as an exercise in fieldcraft, which was something I was sorely lacking. There’s a difference between taking hiking trip with gear like nylon tents with graphite poles, dehydrated food, and GPS, and the primitive gear we were using. After a refreshing hour in the morning air, he called a halt and led me over to a small flower.
“Just as some humans and beasts have the ability to use qi, so to do some plants. This is a Sunbloom Lotus. Note the three-petal arrangement and how the colors fade from the center to the tips of the bloom. They are an excellent cultivation aid to any fire or air aligned cultivator and sell for a good price if properly harvested,” he said.
It was a pretty flower. The center of the bloom was a dark orange, fading to a light yellow at the tips, and the leaves were a dark green with a glossy sheen to them.
“Unlike qi infused animal parts, plants must be properly stored before processing,” he said, pulling a small box out of his pack. “Each plant is different. When your qi sensing is practiced enough you will be able to find the largest concentration of energy in the plant. That is what you should harvest. For these, it is the flowers that are useful. The box will stop the qi in the bloom from degrading before it can be processed into a pill or a poultice.”
Passing me the box and a small knife, he motioned for me to harvest the flower. I did so, and when I moved to harvest another he stopped me.
“The plant has three flowers. Take only one, so that the other two can live. Harvest the abundance of Nature, and always allow time for it to regrow. To do otherwise is an insult to the world we live upon,” he declared.
“I can agree to that,” I said, truthfully. I was never what you’d call a tree hugger back on Earth, but good stewardship of the land was a tenet of farming and something that my Grandparents had always tried to instill in me.
We continued west, stopping every time Temüjin saw something interesting that he thought I should know. Most of the plants he didn’t have me harvest, stating that they were common in the valley and rightly stating that carrying them with us was senseless, when we would have plenty of opportunities to find them when we were closer to reaching Gladewood.
We stopped for the day a few hours before sunset. Temüjin had selected a small forest clearing our camp, where he taught me how to set up the basic canvas tent he had packed for us (and which I had been carrying all day) and I made a simple stew and flatbread with the supplies we had brought. After eating he sat on a stump and had me run through both spear and saber drills before telling me to rest.
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The next day dawned with clear skies, but by the afternoon larger storm clouds had begun to move in and sprinkles of rain had started to fall on us. Temüjin never stopped pointing out useful plants and identifying the various animals we saw. After lunch we spotted a small herd of the Three-Horned Breeze Stag I had eaten as my first true meal in Gladewood. They were stockier than I had expected, but true to the name they had an imposing rack of antlers with another smaller horn between them. Upon catching sight of Temüjin they fled rapidly, using visible bursts of air to speed them along or to bounce themselves off of any obstacles in their path. Temüjin motioned for me to wait and sped off after them. A few minutes later he returned with one of them over his shoulder.
“Venison is on the menu tonight!” I exclaimed.
“Are you familiar with cleaning a kill?” Temüjin asked me.
“Back home, I’d say yes. Deer and pig hunting were a big part of my life growing up,” I said.
“Good, the basics are the same here.” he replied, tossing the corpse down in front of me, “Show me.”
Kneeling, I laid a hand on the deer’s flank, and thanked it for the sacrifice it had made to feed us before hanging it and beginning to field dress the carcass. Once I had removed the viscera I turned to Temüjin, “This is normally where I’d stop for a field dressing. I’m not as comfortable with skinning. We never saved the hides for use.”
“We will not save this hide either. It makes for poor armor and is difficult to tan. I am curious why you did not set aside the liver and heart, however,” He said.
“They weren’t organs we ate back home,” I answered.
“Bring them with us. The heart and liver of the Three-Horned Breeze Stag are some of the tastiest morsels! It’s a shame to leave them to rot,” came his rebuttal.
Knowing full well that it was futile to argue, I wrapped the two organs up in leaves that Temüjin handed me and gave them to him.
“Supper,” he said, grinning.
He halted us that evening at the edge of one of the numerous small streams, this one barely a trickle, that crisscrossed the valley floor and helped drain the seasonal runoff. I built a fire while Temüjin broke down the deer further and started slicing it to make jerky. When the fire was going I took the scraps from the meat and carried them a few hundred yards downstream to dump them.
The forest was alive around me as I picked my way through the undergrowth next to the tiny rivulet of water. Thick green moss covered the ground, sucking up the abundant moisture in the air, while birds whistled in the trees. Large ferns draped themselves over the little trickle of water, giving the area an almost primeval feel.
I had just dumped the scraps and hide a few hundred yards downstream, when a scuffling beneath one of the large ferns drew my attention. I gently drew aside a few of the fronds and saw a small lizard, no more than a foot and a half long, huddled beneath the cover. It would have been a pretty little lizard, covered in rough silver scales with a blueish pattern zig-zagging across them, but it was emaciated to the point that it was almost skeletal. What drew my eye, though, was the mangled leg it was struggling to move. Something had torn the little guy up pretty good, its front left leg was a torn mess of flesh. Whatever had happened, it had been recent. The bleeding had stopped but the wound was still raw and inflamed.
Trusting in my animal boon, I slowly reached down and ran my finger over the lizard’s head. Almost catlike, it leaned into my touch, and hobbled painfully closer to me. I picked it up carefully and carried it over to the offal pile that I had just dumped. Setting it down a few feet from the pile, I smiled as the little guy looked up at me, then back to the pile of viscera that was towering over it. It squeaked pitifully as it limped over to the pile and started to eat ravenously.
I scooted a little closer and let a tiny trickle of energy run through my hand as I stroked its back. There was an infinitesimal thread of water-aligned energy running through the injured limb, but from what I could tell with my limited abilities it was struggling to do more than keep the infection that had taken root in the wound from spreading further. I tried to bolster it with a bit of earth, but the qi wouldn’t take hold. When I tried water, though, the little lizard drank it up like a parched flower in a desert. It stopped eating and chirped as I ran energy through my hands into the mangled leg.
I held the qi flow steady and tried to project comforting thoughts as I murmured, “Easy there, little dude, I’m just trying to help.”
The lizard writhed in pain as the bones that had been crushed when it was hurt started to reform and straighten and broken scales began to flake off the leg and regrow. A few drops of yellowish puss were expelled from the wound as the flesh finished knitting back together. As the healing completed, I retracted my qi.
“There you go little guy, all better. You have to be more careful, ok?” I said, giving it a final scratch under its chin.
Used to docile behavior from the few animals that I had encountered around the cottage I was startled when the lizard turned around and very deliberately bit me, hard, on the webbing between my thumb and forefinger. It let go right after biting and turned back to the pile of scraps.
“You little bastard! That hurt!” I exclaimed, jerking my hand back as the sting caught me off guard. The bite hadn’t hurt nearly as bad as a light training session at the cottage, but it was enough to bring blood, and I rubbed the small wound while using earth qi to close it. The wound sealed easily, and I stood up to leave.
I looked down at the lizard, now contentedly gnawing on a piece of viscera larger than it, “No good deed goes unpunished, does it, little dude? That’s your one freebie, don’t fucking bite me again.”
Feeling content, and suddenly hungry, I started making my way back to camp. The contentedness and hunger faded as I made my way back and were replaced by a feeling of anxious fear. The world suddenly seemed huge and I started to feel like everything in it was out to get me. I felt tiny, miniscule. I found myself scanning my surroundings warily and moving cautiously through the forest. Every bird that chirped and leaf that rustled in the breeze seemed to hypercharge my awareness of the surrounding area that passed through it. As I moved closer to the camp we had set up for the evening the irrational anxiety became steadily worse. It was like I was six years old again, and truly convinced that there was a monster under my bed just waiting for me to sleep so it could grab my leg and eat me.
I took a few deep breaths and tamped down on the feeling. The feeling was completely irrational. This wasn’t the valley of death, but if something did dart out with an intent to do me harm I was pretty sure I could stay alive until the baddest motherfucker in the valley came to save the day. There was less to fear here than there was on my commute home back on Earth. I quit sulking behind trees and ferns and starting walking straight back. Oddly enough, the fake it until you make it approach seemed to work. Once I had asserted my will, and recognized how unreasonable I was being, moving forward over the last hundred yards was simple and within a few minutes I was strolling into camp while singing the lyrics to Jet Airliner.
Temüjin glanced up from his jerky preparations and asked, “Everything ok?”
“Yeah,” I replied, “I just had a very strange feeling on the way back. If I didn’t know better I’d say it was a panic attack, but I could think too clearly. Once I recognized what was happening it stopped. Are there plants or animals that have a mental influence like that?”
“There are a very few,” he said, “but none that can be found in the valley. I was actually referring to the Snowsquall Drake hatchling that is trying to hide behind you.”
“Huh?” came my intelligent response as I stepped to the side and looked at the ground behind me. Sure enough, the previously injured lizard, or drake apparently, had followed me from the gut pile back to camp and was currently scrabbling to reposition itself so that I was between it and Temüjin. It was putting full weight on the limb I had healed, I noticed with offhanded pride.
“I found it under a fern when I was dumping the scraps. It had a hurt leg, so I healed it. I’m not sure why it didn’t stay to eat, though. It clearly needs the food,” I said, before a thought started to bloom in my head.
If I were an eighteen-inch-long lizard this valley would be hellish. Between larger animals and the struggle for food the threat of death would be ever-present. And if I was walking, willingly, toward the aforementioned “Baddest Motherfucker in the Valley” I’d be scared out of my wits. It hit me when a voice whispered through my memory, “you’ll form an emotional bond...you’ll know if they’re hurt, tired, hungry, bored.”
“Son of a bitch,” I whispered. The weird, anxious, fearful feelings I’d had on the trek back weren’t mine. They were the drakes.