Another week, and another visit to Wayun village. Jin is much peppier this time, and she barely needs to slow her walking pace for him to keep up. Whether it’s talent or Blacksteel being more effective than she thought it would be, his cultivation has grown by a decent amount, and though he can’t generate much Qi of his own, his cycling is getting closer to that point. Close enough that he’s started using some of what he’s got.

It… seems like that’s helping? He’s not just accumulating Qi to further his realm, he’s also actively burning some of what he has and recouping it later. The experience is one thing, but… she wonders if there’s some kind of merit in it, as perhaps the Qi made to replace rather than build on what’s already there might be higher quality?

She had no such big ideas when she was cultivating. She just hated being still and listening to advice.

They make it into town at a record pace for the kid, and she nods to the guards as she passes the main door. They nod back, but immediately, she can tell something is off. It’s minor, but both of them have the slightly bitter taste of stress hormones in them.

As they walk through town, she notices the same scent more and more often. It doesn’t smell like the stress of exercise or combat, but like something more ambient, more sour.

She pauses before setting down her bundle at their usual spot. Jin looks up at her in confusion as she doesn’t begin to unpack anything.

She expands her senses, same as she did last week, awakening all her subminds. Her awareness spreads, sensing the town piece by piece- the bitterness isn’t universal, but she can feel the added stress having a general impact on people. There’s some hushed conversation, but for the most part, the streets and homes are surprisingly empty.

Her awareness expands again, overtaking the school and village leader’s huts-

There. Half the townspeople seem to be congregating there. The village is small: a few homes, a little town center, a school, a warehouse, and the village leader’s hut, seemingly big enough for some group meetings. Outside that, just the dirt roads and the farms, which-

The stressed rice paddy from last week. There’s cracks in it. It’s not broken, but it’s easy enough for her new processing power to track the impact sites, the bits of muddied water that taste faintly of blood, the trampled plants.

And in the schoolhouse, the scent of pain. A mix of spices, sharp and dull, like dread and terror refined into sharp-edged notes of iron, sweat and crushed vitality, some of it minced like meat, some of it cut open and bleeding colors into the world.

She picks her bundle and starts walking towards it.

Jin follows along, though he shoots her a confused look.

“Something bad’s happened,” she says, low and quiet in the village’s heavy air. “People got hurt. I’m going to go see them.”

He lets out a little gasp, but firms himself right after and nods forcefully. For all that he’s clearly turned anxious about the idea of something bad happening here, she can smell the determination on him. No fear. He follows behind her, his own stress-tinged scent adding to the ambiance- but he stays firm.

She’s not sure if it’s trust in her that does it, or if he’s just a pretty solid kid. She prefers to think the latter.

It takes less than five minutes to cross from one side of the village to the other in a straight line, and with her pace, she makes it in three. No running, but long steps. Even without keeping her higher senses active now she could smell the pain, the scent of it rich and tinged with sharp little pops of Qi and fear from the building across from her.

A dozen villagers move in and out of the schoolhouse, holding bloodied rags to wash in buckets of what used to be clean water outside. They don’t pause, their steps heavy, their eyes tired, but every one of them is either washing bandages or getting fresh water. She can see the chunky outline of the scent where more than one of them has vomited, some of it still on their clothes, and most of them have some amount of blood on their hands. They work in near silence, clipped sentences occasionally emerging from them to ask for something or give direction.

On her left, a few houses away in the larger home that she views as the “leader’s” home, the sound of conversation is almost overwhelming.

She cancels her synesthesia and higher senses again, shaking her head and letting the Flesh take over handling their perception. No need to start bleeding out the eyes in the middle of some sort of village meeting. She goes to enter the building, then pauses.

“Jin, go see if you can find some more buckets of clean water for the schoolhouse,” she says. “Don’t go inside unless they ask you to, just ask them where you can get the water. Go.”

He hesitates. “Are- what about-”

She stops him with a raised hand. “You can’t do much in the conversation in here, and they need aid over there. I’m going to figure out what happened and I’ll be right back out. Be safe, but go help.”

He takes a deep breath, and for a moment she worries she’s asking too much of him, but… he breathes out, and some of his Qi stirs as he firms himself.

“Ok. I’ll… I’ll go fetch water. I can do that.”

She nods. “You can.”

He turns and runs over towards the schoolhouse, getting a few surprised looks from the frazzled villagers there. They’re not in a position to reject aid, though, and tired enough that any judgment for the local urchin seems to fail to cross their minds. In seconds, he’s given two buckets of dirty water to go dump out, and told about which well they’re using.

Raika opens the door to the village center and walks in.

Almost immediately, half the yelling voices quiet. Even without Qi and with her prosthetic covered, she’s still a full head taller than the tallest man in the village, and her presence demands attention. She gives a short bow, focusing on the few conversations that are still ongoing.

She recognizes Nan Su, though it comes as a bit of a shock. The old woman looks almost shriveled, shrunken, as if suddenly crushed beneath a great weight, and the smell of grief drowns the smell of distant loaves her little drops of Qi exude. She sees the one of the two young mothers that often visited her standing off to one side, her face tear-streaked and her voice silent, two other women holding and patting her, speaking in quiet tones.

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In the center of the room, there are four of the stronger, younger men facing a grizzled older gentleman, wearing a blazer and heavy salt-and-pepper muttonchops. Beside him is an even older man with a beard turned near white and his head shaved, and behind him, two more men that give off the energy of “guards”, tall and strong but with the muscle of farmers.

“It’ll come back!” one of the young men growls. “We need to-”

“Do nothing!” growls the older gentleman with the muttonchops. “We need everyone here, at home, fixing the damage, not wasting time chasing their own asses through the woods!”

“Where are the cultivators?” a woman yells from a bit further back. “What do we pay tithes for if we’re not even being protected?”

The muttonchop guy whirls out to the crowd with a gravelly growl. “None of that talk! If not for the Empire, we wouldn’t even have a village, this whole damn forest would be drowning in spirit beasts! Attacks happen, yes, and we’ll send a letter and go out for a hunt- but not yet. There are wounded who need help, fields that will go to ruin if we don’t fix things, and I’m not intending to waste lives on a fruitless hunt!”

“This same beast has been harassing us for too long!” the younger man at the front of the group of four says. “If we’d gone out to hunt it months ago, we wouldn’t have lost so many animals and certainly wouldn’t be in this situation now!”

“Or we would’ve lost more men to the woods for nothing!” the white-haired man with the shaved hair says. “The past teaches lessons, but its easy to say that we had already learned the lesson looking back. We cannot fight what was, only what is now!”

“And I say that now, we need to get out there and kill that thing!”

“What did it look like?”

Almost thirty pairs of eyes swivel to look at Raika, holding her bundle under one arm and looking forward at the central discussion.

“Who the hell are you to speak here?” asks the younger, more aggressive man. He has a thick farmer’s tan and a rough-shaven face, but he’s not bad looking- if only he’d stop scowling so much.

She shrugs. “I sell bone charms on the street sometimes. What did it look like?”

She hears murmurs go through the crowd, some of the voices ones that she recognizes, many not.

“She’s a cripple, but I heard she used to be a cultivator…”

“She’s massive! She probably has some beast blood…”

“What can she do? She’s missing an arm, too…”

“Why is she asking? Why is she here? What is she planning?”

That and more ripple through the room, and she ignores them wholesale. Her eyes stay focused on the people in the center of the room, her expression carefully neutral as the Mask falls back into her old role.

“Why do you want to know?” asks the man with the mutton chops, his gaze… inquisitive.

“Want to know if I’ve heard of its type.”

Some of the men and older women in the chamber scoff. “What, you have a bestiary stored away somewhere? This isn’t the second ring. Spirit beasts are spirit beasts, they can take any shape.”

“But what shape they end up taking says a lot,” she counters. “What species they began as, what their weaknesses might be, if they’ve touched on any Dao or special abilities. What did it look like? When did it attack? Did it have claws, a beak, a shell? Was it alone? Did it have claws, a beak, mandibles?”

As she lists off questions, the tone in the room begins to shift, curiosity beginning to take over. Some of them are curious of the beast in question, but more and more the eyes on her start to change.

The situation partially defused with a new focal point, the group of four back down a bit, though she notices they don’t leave the central circle that has formed. The mutton chops guy, who she’s tentatively identifying as the village leader, sighs and takes a seat on a chair close by.

“Most of the people who saw it are either dead or wounded in the school house. It had… too many teeth. Digging out of its mouth, out of the side of its face. It… maybe looked like some kind of boar, but I’m not sure, it was so fast.”

“I got a good look,” says one of the men with the belligerent guy. “Taller than a man on all fours, with something weird on its belly. Had skin so thick it looked like dried clay. Saw He Bin get… get all cut into just from its hairs.”

She frowns. It sounds… weirdly strong for this area. The third ring isn’t the second, that’s true, but there shouldn’t be anything this big just roaming free. Spirit beasts are rare in both rings, but rarer in the third, despite their less predictable forms, supposedly due to millenia of active hunting by the Empire. Someone should have killed a beast like this by now… but at the same time, anything as strange as what’s described should, in theory, have turned the whole town to rubble rather than retreating after messing with the fields.

“Who drove it off?” she asks.

“...We think it got annoyed by the fire,” the village chief admits. “When we heard the screaming yesterday, we ran out with torches and weapons. It saw the fire and gave this… I thought it was roaring, but it might have just been a snort. And then it just left.”

Raika nods. “I’m no expert,” she admits, “but you’re probably right. Might have been it was just passing through and got curious.”

“Curious?” the belligerent guy yells. “It killed my brother! Ten more beside him! We’ve got almost half the village wounded or trying to help with those wounds, and we’ll probably lose more before night falls. And it was curious?”

She doesn’t rise to the challenge in his tone, just looking at him dead on.

“Yes. If it was hungry, it would have eaten more of the wounded. If it was scared or angry, it would’ve ruined more of the town. If it was as big as you said, then it might just be that it wasn’t interested in a big meal or a fight.”

“So… so it’s gone?” asks one of the younger men in the crowd.

She shrugs. “Might be. It’s all guesswork, though.”

“So… what do we do?”

She blinks. Realizes the whole damn building is looking at her for guidance now, even the village chief.

She just… sighs.

She pauses. People look at each other in the awkward silence, but she ignores them.

The Want sighs, exhausted but determined, and asks if the others agree.

The Mask asks the whole if this is worth it.

The Flesh sort of wanders between wondering if all this pain tastes as spiced and interesting as her senses say, and if they could kill the beast if it came back.

The Mask says that would probably ruin any attempt at keeping their location obscured.

The Want says that, compared to the option of staying hidden and letting this village die, that’s a good trade. Not something that any part of them wants, but deep down, they want people to be hurt less than they want to “guarantee” a hiding place.

The safe thing isn’t always the right thing.

She stands tall.

She opens her eyes again just as someone reaches out to touch her.

“I’m going to go help the wounded. I need your two strongest fighters to come with me.”

And she leaves, off to do just that.

She sees Jin outside, already sweating after only the few minutes since she last saw him. His clothes are dirty, the scent of stress has grown a lot, but she can’t smell much blood directly on him, so she doesn’t think he’s gone in the building.

As some of the people in the leader’s tent start to trickle out towards the schoolhouse, she kneels down in front of the kid.

“Hey. I’m gonna stay in town. I want to make sure that if the spirit beasts come back, they have someone here who can help, and I can do more with the wounded. I need you to guide a few people with you through the woods. Can you do that?”

Jin looks up at her, out of breath and confused. “But… I thought it was like a hidden place or something?”

She nods. “Take them to the bamboo, but you go through alone. I don’t know if the bamboo will let them through without us. Find Li Shu, tell her the village has a ton of wounded, and then come right back. I don’t think there are any beasts out there, but I’m sending them with you to make sure. You come right back after. Can you do that?”

She can smell the hesitation. The fear. The moment where he wonders if he can.

But she can see the moment where he tilts his head up to meet her gaze.

“Yes. I can do it. I know the way there.”

She nods. “Good.”

Five minutes later, he and two of the belligerent guy’s crew are off on their journey, and she’s walking into a building full of wounded that smell delicious.