“Weeks of monster guts,” Qen Hou moans. “If I never see a spirit beast again in my entire life, I’ll be happy. I’d even settle for never seeing a pelt again.”
“Shameless, brother Qen Hou!” Hao Nera cries from across the clearing, decorated in guts and holding up some kind of gizzard triumphantly. “When there’s so much money to be made? Shameless! Would that the beasties might hold off rotting another week that we might indulge in even more of this beautiful venture.”
Li Shu laughs at the antics, even as Qen Hou scowls and tosses a partially cooked gobbet of meat over in Hao Nera’s direction (and scowls further when the former bandit snags it out of the air with his mouth and howls). It would be one thing for Hao Nera to be so jovial on their first day into the clean-up duty surrounding the little village of Vera’s Hallow, but even now, weeks after they arrived, the fact he can sustain this level of enthusiasm is infectious.
She can’t blame him for it either. It’s no exaggeration to say that the haul they’ve harvested has been absolutely stunning. To say that this is a surprise is an understatement; for some reason, the beast tide surrounding the village turned on itself rather spectacularly at some point, or ran into a series of events all around the village rather than at its borders, and the resulting bloodshed and chaos attracted more of their kin for miles around, their migration summoning yet further beasts. Between the fact that most of the spirit beasts had some degree of cultivation rather than just mutation, and the rather aggressive approach to terminating magical diseases that can easily consume said corpses that the Empire promotes, most of the bodies lay here, decomposing far slower than mortal equivalents, even as new beasts arrived and died on the mounds.
They didn’t get here first, unfortunately, but whoever did had only a passing interest, and besides a few gutted carcasses of the most powerful of the beasts, left behind the “dregs” for others to find, showing generosity to their lessers. And what generosity it has been.
Teeth, claws, pelts, eyes, breath organs, horns, antlers, bones, even meat, all lasting for weeks longer than mortal equivalents would in the wild. The same properties that preserve the truly ancient carcasses of the oldest monsters as great bone monuments throughout the continent hold firm here, and make it so that any enterprising soul, beast or man, are able to take from the bounty of the dead.
And hot fucking damn is it a bounty.
Hao Nera, of course, hasn’t stopped celebrating his good fortune since they arrived, partially due to a lack of imminent violence from Qen Hou when he proved that his plan was real, and partially due to the sheer amount of wealth on display. Qen Hou’s reaction has been more sedate about the whole thing… until he saw Li Shu’s reaction.
She places another carefully extracted bile sack off to one side, careful not to get covered in any pus or venom even as she’s painted crimson, mauve and bright pink up to the shoulders. Her scalpel is getting a bit dull, and she knows that they should go back into town or back to civilization proper, but… “One more field?”
Hao Nera pops out from where he’d ducked to carve like a rabbit out of a burrow, eyes bright, even as Qen Hou turns to stare at her, eyes haunted.
“We agreed to one more,” he moans. “One! I don’t care if we stumble into a pile of phoenix ashes or a dead dragon, I am not digging through a single other pile of guts for the next year.”
“Don’t be like that, brother!” Hao Nera cackles. “You can’t say that these resources aren’t worth a little mess! Didn’t they ever give you garbage duty in that high and mighty sect of yours?”
He sidles over closer to Li Shu as she puts up her supplies, using her Qi and its incredibly delicate control to write with the tip of a stylus in her journal as she does. “Come on, honored sister. You and I can go! It’ll be fun, and I promise, unlike our shameless senior brother, I can keep going as long as you like.”
She laughs as he waggles his eyebrows at her, making a rather impressive dance across his forehead. “I’m sure you can, Hao Nera,” she says, “but… I think Qen Hou is right. Our eyes are hungering for more than our stomachs can hold, and we really should start heading back. My preservation techniques are for normal medicines and ingredients, and I doubt they’ll hold up much longer, even with how slowly these beasts degrade. There’s no reason to get greedy, especially since there are others likely to arrive here soon.”
Qen Hou snorts. “Soon? They’ve been here. I can sense at least two other groups at the far end of the village, probably from somewhere more central, southeast towards the second ring. We’re lucky there’s such a bounty here; it’s not going to be long before a proper sect comes to harvest all this. Maybe even our sect! Better to leave with our bounty now, rather than lose all of it to someone with greater strength.”
At this, Hao Nera finally relents, letting out a long sigh. “Far be it from me to ignore good sense when I hear it. Let it be said, Hao Nera may be jester, bandit, or a vagrant, but let none call him a fool.”
“I’m glad for your wisdom, brother Hao Nera,” Qen Hou says with a smile. “Since you are the one carrying back all we’ve harvested.”
Hao Nera lets his mouth fall open, before pointing angrily at Qen Hou and performing the most dramatic gasp Li Shu has ever heard. “You would betray me like this brother? After I’ve led us all to such riches?”
“Qen Hou is here as a guard, and I as a simple researcher,” Li Shu says. “We’re more than happy to assist you with harvesting the goods that your excellent nose has guided us to, but we’re hardly required to help you carry it all once it’s in your possession.”
He gasps again, clasping a hand to his chest, slapping wetly against the crimson he’s drenched in. “Even you, honored sister? Oh, this is too cruel.”
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Still, his heart isn’t in the complaint, and for all that she can say about the former (and arguably current) rogue, he’s not someone who stays disheartened for long, or who doesn’t embrace challenges. In that, he almost reminds her of Raika.
As they walk, Hao Nera dragging a sled of meat and bits behind them, she wonders about that. Wonders about how she’s doing, about how she’s feeling, if she’s alive after all that’s happened. They swore they would see each other again, and that promise weighs on her, even now. She isn’t harvesting these creatures just because they’re interesting. Medical practice is fine and good, but learning herbal remedies and treatments for humans, or for cultivators, aren’t going to help her friend. She needs to learn about the flesh, the minutiae of it, of how strange existences can alter their bodies beyond just the use of Qi or their souls, and these beasts… like it or not, there’s nowhere else that she could have found tutelage like this in the third ring, even if she still has no idea what half of the pieces she’s found and taken really do.
She’s advancing.
Qen Hou, of course, is at the beginning of his journey into Core Formation, and stands a height above her again, but Hao Nera is still her match in the Foundational realm, even if her fine control is leagues beyond his and gives her advantages and disadvantages both. There hasn’t been much time for cultivation, but even with her limited training, making incense out of powdered bone and blood ash from these creatures is within her abilities, and it’s helped make up the difference. Adversity crafts excellence, or so Qen Hou likes to say, and she can’t help but admit that she’s grown as a cultivator more in the last month and a half out in the wilds than she did in years as a medical student.
She comes out of her introspection to the sound of the two boys bickering yet again, the sound more a comfort than an annoyance at this point.
“Brother, you speak from the perspective of the honorable indeed!” Hao Nera nods sagely. “Truly, your perspective as one born unto untold riches makes you the best of all of us to understand the suffering of your lessers!”
“That’s not what I said,” Qen Hou grumbles. “Even if it were, I was not born into silver spoons and golden flowers as you seem to believe, bandit. I am an honorable and noble son of a minor family, no richer than any other. We ate rice and poultry for our meals same as any other.”
Li Shu rolls her eyes. “Senior brother, with all possible respect, not every family got poultry with their rice.”
Hao Nera spares a hand to point triumphantly at her. “Yes! Indeed, honored sister! I don’t claim that there aren’t those far above you whose very asses were wiped by gold sheet, but by their nature, they trick you into thinking yourself poor, when you don’t know what it is to be poor.”
“And I suppose your poverty justifies your constant positivity?” Qen Hou asks.
Hao Nera throws his head back and laughing, brief and sharp. “I need no justification to be jubilant, brother, but me? Oh, I was born into a wealthy noble house in the second ring, and only after bedding a thousand thousand virgins before my twentieth birthday and eating my way through the winter reserve of the nearest city from my manse was I exiled, to wander the meager pickings of the third ring. Surely you can see by my bearing my noble lineage?”
“If you’re a noble, then I was born from the plume of a dragon’s crest,” Qen Hou replies. “You’re better than most when you think it suits you, but I’ve seen you eat, and there are pigs with more natural grace than you.”
“And what delicious meals they make for us, blessed with privilege, eh brother?” Hao Nera chuckles.
Li Shu smiles as she listens, as they make their way past old corpses that still lay bloody even as the trees grow into and consume them, as the greenery overtakes them and lesser beasts and animals make meals of their bodies, darting away or forcing them to skirt past whenever they get too close. Despite the horror of the bloodshed, the forest is not ruined, and in this place there are seeds of new growth sown. She wonders how many new cultivators or tools might be made with the supplies they bring now, and how many of the beasts and plants around them might gain new qualities from the corpses that abound. She can’t help but laugh at the thought that the village of Vera’s Hallow might become someplace both very dangerous and very noteworthy sooner rather than later.
She almost chokes as the laugh freezes in her throat.
Her companions are both alert instantly. For all Qen Hou’s heightened cultivation and Hao Nera’s significantly more combat-experienced instincts, neither one reacts before she does, neither one sees as she does. Qen Hou can sense much further out, but more often than not when finding hidden details or an ambush it is Li Shu’s instincts that have carried them to safety.
The world shifts.
She can see in how they move they did not sense it, in how they fail to stutter that they do not feel it. It is minute, a miniscule shifting, but… it’s like if the ground beneath her feet moved a quarter of an inch to the side abruptly as she was walking, even as nothing else changed.
The ground didn’t shift, though. The air did. A sudden dislocation of pressure, so precise yet so vast, like a ripple in a pond except the pond is… everything.
They are minutes away from the cavern they’ve been using at a base. It might take them closer to an hour to reach it with the cart, but if they drop it they can run-
This time all three of them shudder.
The ground trembles, and the crackling of breaking wood comes from the direction they’re heading in.
It steps out past the trees.
It’s maybe twenty or thirty feet tall on all fours, and as it moves through the landscape the world bends around it. Even still, there’s not enough space for it to move, and more of the trees crackle, break apart, become splintered dust as they brush against it and are simply moved.
As Li Shu tries to breathe, feels the heat of flickering flame coming from Qen Hou, she sees the eyes of the beast focus on them.
If she were generous, she might call it a tiger. Some sort of large feline, but one not built for stealth in the same way as a panther or lynx might be. It’s not a perfect analogy, of course; this thing is not orange, black and white. It has more than four legs. It has more than two eyes. When it opens its mouth to exhale, it has more sets of jaws than it should be able to fit.
And she’s never seen a tiger, even one that has evolved to a spirit beast, have fur made of liquid, dripping light.
Its colors fluctuate like an aurora between purple, crimson, orange, green and silver, every shade holding another deeper pattern of colors, and as its many legs step into the clearing, bending the ground like soft bedding around its weight, they move. Every time its body shifts, sinuous and muscled and massive, some of that light sloughs off, like oil or skin being shed by its every movement, dripping onto the floor behind it and collecting into puddles of oozing, shimmering viscosity- that begin to move themselves, slithering towards the carcasses all around and beginning to burrow impossibly into them.
It looms over them, tall enough to blot out the falling sun and bright enough to eclipse the moons, saliva and oozing, hungering light drooling from its maw, and it looks, above all else, at her.
It opens its mouth wider, and from inside, a distressingly human voice begins to whimper and hum.
“You smell. Like. It,” the not-tiger yowls quietly, in a voice that sounds like a man in pain.
“Speak, morsel. Make. Words. From your. Air. How do you. Know the thing. Which bleeds. The blood of the world. And cast the bodies. Of my nieces and nephews down. In this place?”