The silverine’s greed ultimately saved Hudson.

When he smashed the rock into its head, he only blinded it on its left side and dazed it slightly. He had hoped to crush its head, but the chitin protecting its body was harder than the rock it dug through. If Hudson had been able to use his breathing technique, he would have been able to deal a lot more damage.

The silverine reeled back in the small space. Its body, about the size of a long, skinny dog, took up most of the free space in the small chamber that Hudson was lying in. Hudson himself couldn’t move much at all, with his legs completely trapped.

Its scrabbling front legs landed on top of Hudson’s head, and he screamed as the sharp pincers cut him in a few places. The silverine’s curved foreclaws were still wrapped around the rucksack, and it refused to let go. A few strikes from those knife-like appendages would take out Hudson, but to do so it would have to disentangle them from its prize.

Hudson’s arms and chest were screaming in pain, but he gritted his teeth and pushed the silverine up and off his head, slamming it into the rubble. He grabbed the segmented tail of the nasty bug and tried to swing it into the rock walls, side to side. But the bulky rucksack attached to the front of the silverine’s claws, and the tight dimensions of the enclosure, prevented Hudson from really doing much damage to the silverine.

In severe pain and growing desperate to kill the thing, Hudson tried to swing his left arm over and use it to pin the silverine down. Its many legs scrabbled all over the rock, clicking and scratching sharply, and it almost slipped away, back down its tunnel. Luckily, the bulky rucksack was too large to fit in the small tunnel, and prevented the silverine from fleeing.

Hudson grabbed the tough canvas bag and pulled hard. It ripped slightly, but the reinforced canvas material held and the silverine was pulled back into the chamber. Hudson let go of the bag and grabbed one of the antennae on the silverine’s head.

The chitinous appendage broke off. Before the silverine could back out of the chamber again, Hudson stabbed the piece of chitin at the silverine’s head, managing to stick it into a beady black eye.

All of its limbs spasmed, and Hudson pushed the sharp piece of chitin deeper into the silverine’s head. The makeshift weapon pierced its brain and the silverine collapsed, dead.

Hudson shook from the effort and the pain. He dry heaved a few times and just laid on the floor, struggling to control his excruciating breaths until his heart beat slowed. The silver glow emanating from the silverine’s claws gradually faded, and Hudson was left in the dark once again.

He’d won, if barely. The silverine had almost gotten away, but he’d been lucky. He’d been lucky not just to have stabbed the silverine through the eye, but also extremely lucky that the silverine had found his rucksack and brought it to him.

Gingerly, he pulled the silverine’s corpse free of his rucksack. The forearms of the silverine were only sharp on the outside edge, and were actually more like very broad chisels than knives. There were bits and pieces of the crushed box the medkit had been packaged in falling free through the holes in the rucksack and onto the floor of the cave. Thankfully the metallic water bottle was still intact, with only a small dent in it.

His thirst had only grown after the fight with the silverine, and he was desperate for water. He struggled to get the cap open, but eventually did. He couldn’t sit up completely, and a brief attempt spilled a little of his limited water supply. He managed very slowly and carefully to tip the bottle and pour water into his mouth.

The flat, stale water tasted like freedom, and hope. Maybe he could survive long enough until someone could come and find him.

After slaking his thirst, the next thing Hudson wanted was one of the pills he knew should be in the bag. When he’d first exchanged trial merits for the basic medical kit, he had wondered what the magical pills could do – it was time to find out.

He fumbled through the rucksack, digging around the as-yet useless pieces of armor he had purchased with his trial points, and the broken pieces of the medkit that had been crushed by the rubble and rock in the explosion. He felt the broken shards of the jar that a pill had been in, but not the pill itself. After carefully feeling through the dust, bits of rock, and detritus littering the floor around him, Hudson eventually found the round, perfectly symmetrical pill. It had been shaken loose from the bag during his fight with the silverine.

Raising it to his mouth, it smelled vaguely of cinnamon and other unknown spices. He popped it in his mouth, and with some difficulty and a little more water, managed to swallow the pill.

He didn’t know what to expect, and for the first minute or so, nothing happened. Finally, Hudson noticed a gradual heat in his stomach that was expanding gradually into the rest of his body. At the same time, he began to feel energized, his fatigue and general soreness lessening bit by bit.

The heat kept growing until he began to feel uncomfortable. The pill was working, he could feel it, but it was starting to become too much of a good thing. It was like he had eaten a fiery coal, and it was now trying to burn its way through his stomach and out of his back. The waves of energy had moved beyond refreshing and were now making him jittery, like he had just consumed three cups of coffee in one go.

He started to worry that he had made a mistake. The burning sensation was now incredibly intense. The alchemical concoction was pumping energy into him at enormous rates, and he could literally feel cuts in his skin closing, and the cracks in his ribs knitting back together, itching fiercely.

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But the energy from the pill kept growing and growing with no signs of stopping or slowing down. Maybe he wasn’t supposed to swallow the whole thing. Modern medicine pills were tiny, not the size of large marbles. Hudson groaned as he realized he was about to cook himself from the inside after using a magical miracle cure. How did people from S.E.C.T. use these pills? Did cultivators use them in a different way? Weren’t you supposed to swallow pills?

S.E.C.T. were cultivators. They cultivated. It would make sense that they cultivated when taking one of their magical pills, right? Maybe that was the trick he was missing. Hudson hadn’t been able to activate his Engine Breath before; the pain from his broken ribs had been too much for him to try. He tried now; his ribs still ached, but it wasn’t as bad – proof that the pill was healing him from the inside out at a miraculous pace.

He breathed in deep and back out, increasing the tempo of his breaths. It was a little more difficult laying on his back, but he was still able to start his cultivation technique. The ball of flame in his stomach immediately eased in intensity, and the breathing technique helped to begin cycling the energy away from his stomach. The effects of the healing pill had so far been mainly concentrated in his torso, but he now started to feel the effects all over his body.

His legs were the worst. The itching in his bones as feeling returned to his shins and ankles was coupled with short, sharp spikes of pain. His legs had been in worse shape than he knew.

Hudson focused on his breathing and entered a deeply meditative state. His breathing technique was slow and steady; there was nothing to distract him or focus his senses on other than his own body.

He could feel the energy flowing from the pill, gradually repairing all of the bruises, muscle tears, cuts and even bone fractures. His cultivation technique pulled at the energy from the pill, circulating it around his body in a controlled fashion. The pill was definitely supposed to be taken while cultivating. He could perceive the changes happening to his body, but he was oddly detached, as if viewing his body from outside itself.

He wasn’t having any kind of out-of-body experience; instead it was like he had unlocked a new way of perceiving his body that had always been there, but he had never used before. His eyes were closed, and he was in complete darkness, but he could perceive the flows of energy as they moved from his stomach, up into his lungs, where they swirled, compacted, and entered into his body in orderly pulses. It was like a second set of eyes.

There was also energy coming in from outside, through his breath, but a much smaller amount compared to the furnace of what he assumed was qi roiling out of the healing pill. For a long time – he didn’t know how long – he quietly meditated, studying the flows of energy inside and outside of his body.

Eventually, he noticed something new. If he stretched this perception, this second set of eyes, to the maximum, he could sense another clump of energy, or ball of condensed qi, outside of his body.

This clump wasn’t spinning and pulsing with a fiery heat like the healing pill; it felt much colder, and slowly dissipating. His new perception colored it in a silver sheen, similar to the silver sheen of maseki. The qi from the medicinal pill was a deep crimson; the color of arterial blood. His deep breaths were pulling some of that qi into himself, but he wasn’t capturing all of it. Much of it was drifting away and gradually dissipating into the air around him.

When Hudson figured out what that other clump of qi was, or rather where it was from, the jolt of realization knocked him out of his tightly focused meditation.

That energy, that qi that I’m sensing… that must be qi from the silverine’s body.

…..

MEANWHILE

…..

George Adams, the first of his name, spun his port glass in a tight circle before bringing it to his lips. Grimacing when he realized it was empty, he set the glass down on the mantle and turned to stare once again at the glowing crystals hanging on the wall.

Each crystal was small, the size of a half karat diamond, set in a silver chain, and hanging below a name card chiseled from aged walnut. There were ten crystals, and ten names.

Nine were glowing with a faint, silvery luster. The tenth, underneath the name Guo Huang, had no glow to it.

“What is going on in that trial?” he asked himself softly. No one had died in a trial for decades – at least, none of the real trial participants: the seeded top ten. There were always casualties amongst the riff-raff needed to round out the Disciples’ ridiculous participant requirements. As if they didn’t know that the benefits were focused at the top, and that to fill a trial fully with S.E.C.T. descendants would short-change the families who had fought hard for their power.

And now, in this trial, in his great-grandson’s trial – a true participant had died. Someone who mattered.

The Soul Flame Crystals were a rare treasure received from the Disciples, and when linked to a cultivator’s qi, would burn until that cultivator’s qi was extinguished. They worked across impossible distances, through rifts, resonating through the realm of the soul and surpassing the limitations of spacetime.

He had been wary when Elder Chiang, who had so studiously avoided the politics of S.E.C.T. for so long, began appearing recently in polite society. Doubly so when she attended his own celebration for his great-grandson. And now he was even more worried – worried that he had been outflanked, somehow, someway.

He could not have turned down her “friendly” wager, not in front of so many people. Not without a significant loss of face. And why should he? There was no way that his great-grandson would fail his trial. And so he had accepted.

Should his great-grandson pass his trial, as all real participants for the past century had, then he would win. Easy as that. He had not even blinked at the terms or size of the wager either, as preposterous and potentially ruinous as they were.

He picked up a small bell and rang it. A butler appeared out of the shadows, almost instantly.

“I want the names and details of all of the First Trial participants, non-S.E.C.T. descendants included. Their life histories, extended families, the names of their stuffed animals, their middle school grades, and how many pairs of shoes they have in their closets. No detail is too small or unimportant.

“Send interview teams to shake details loose. Don’t just rely on Ux’s reports and analyses. The AI has their own agenda.

“I want to know everything about each and every one of them.”