Sleep was not yet a luxury for me as it was for those of higher cultivation levels. However, it was also not a daily necessity. Luli had burrowed down into a pile of old blankets in one of the bedrooms. Her haggard look told me that she had not shirked her cultivation training.

I could not yet tell if her persistence in the face of overwhelming pain was due to natural diligence or desperation. I suppose the answer did not matter. I left the food I had bought in the kitchen for when she woke up in the morning.

I chose to forgo sleep. I might not be entirely free from the need but skipping a few nights would not bring me to my knees. Besides my instincts told me that solving this massacre case was a time-sensitive matter. Change was coming to Asani and this slaughter could either be an opening salvo or a footnote.

The defences of my house snapped back into place as I shut the front door. I started walking without a destination in mind. Atrophied detective brain cells started to work through the problem. Shu had said that Chalk-bone was found in deposits in the ground. This cultivator from up north might have been able to find the stuff by smell but to get a sample of the substance so quickly it could not have been far from the surface.

He might have been in town for months and slowly whittling away to find the Chalk-bone, but tedious mining work was not often the province of wealthy out-of-town cultivators. From the desperate demeanour of the out-of-work miners in town, no long-term or large-scale digs were underway.

More likely this fur-cloaked stranger had been south on other business and caught a whiff of the Chalk-bone by chance. So, the only place in town where deep digging had been done was in the old quarry. Now occupied by the slum.

I decided my best bet was to start at the deepest point of the quarry and work my way up. On some subconscious level, I must have worked it out by instinct because my feet were already pushing me further south and deeper into the exposed rock.

I had my cultivation circulating to keep my nose sharp. Perhaps I could not divine a fresh Chalk-bone deposit like that northern tribe could, but fresh mining work should leave a smell I could track.

Houses became increasingly scarce as I made my way down the quarry. At its deepest point, the hole of the quarry was almost a kilometre from the surface. Century-old rude staircases carved into the rock were replaced by rotting wooden ladders.

Eventually, I found what I was looking for. The smell of fresh tool oil brought me to an out-of-the-way offshoot from the main work area. Somebody had been working the quarry without the Sun Gate Sect’s permission. It was not uncommon. The easily available marble to be found had long been extracted but now and then desperate stonemasons would dig into the walls of the quarry hoping to find an unexploited deposit.

The small work area I found had all the markings of one of those unofficial digs. A small side passage had been dug into the stone concealed from sight by an overhang. A whiff of dried blood prompted me to pull out my pistol.

An unlit lantern was lying knocked over at the entrance of the tunnel. Half of the oil it contained had been spilt onto the ground. I picked it up and held up the lantern. Hands full I lit the wick with the cigarette clutched between my teeth. Cultivation had done many things to improve my body, but it had not granted me night vision. The light of the moon had been enough outside, but the interior of the excavation was pitch black.

Stealth was not an option. My footsteps had probably echoed down the entire quarry and the smell of my spirit herbs would have given me away to anybody inside anyway.

The walls of the carven were rough. Annoyingly they were also not tall enough to fit my height through. Luckily the tunnel did not extend for long before it intruded into a massive hollow.

The scale of the cave was visually indeterminate. My tiny lamp light did not extend for long out into the darkness before it tapered off. I could tell the cavern was expansive by the feeling you get when you enter a large room.

I slowly wound my cultivation into circulation, instantly heightening my senses even further. The smell of blood was coming from a few meters in front of me. I walked forward into the black expanse.

It did not take me long to find the body. A middle-aged man was sprawled face down in a pool of his blood. Judging by his ragged work clothes he was most likely the unauthorised miner.

I rolled his body face up with my foot. The man’s jugular had been ripped out. Just as in the tavern, there were no tell-tale techniques that had been used. His throat had just been pulled out with brute cultivator strength. There was no way to tell if the out-of-towner had done this or his business associates had come done after their meeting.

Just next to the body was what looked like a large stalagmite. It was pure white. Several different tools were haphazardly strewn about. A pickaxe, file and even a water-lubricated saw. The metal of all the tools was blunted or broken.

I knocked against the Chalk-bone to test its strength. I left a small fracture on the surface, but I had used my qi-enhanced strength even if it was just in a knuckle. There was no way the miner could have removed any Chalk-bone with his strength. He must have been madly trying to extract some of the bone when someone came upon him.

I moved the lamp closer and saw that there were a few scrape marks marring the bone. The man in the cloak must have taken his powder from here.

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So, the chain of events went, a man starts to illegally mine in the old quarry. He finds this cavern and the Chalk-bone deposit. Whilst he is desperately trying to extract some of his find a cultivator from the north smells the deposit and interrupts him. That cultivator takes a scraping and connects with some local business contacts. Those contacts, whoever they are, killed him and the entire tavern full of people to keep their secret.

Now the only questions I needed to answer were why and who. Asani was not a town with a large number of potential business partners but who knows what contacts this man had with the surrounding sects or local administrators.

Having satisfied myself I turned to leave. I would have to notify someone about the body. Just before I strode off, I decided that it was worth taking a look at the entire cavern. Judging by the size of the piece of Chalk-bone I had seen the skeleton of the creature it belong to must be truly huge.

Trusting myself to be able to find the exit without a light I pulled the weak lamp flame into my cultivation and dropped the extinguished lighting device. My technique was restricted to metal Qi by the necessity of density, but I could technically pull in any kind of Qi. My self-taught system was a remarkable success in that way. An unknowing boon to my dangerous self-experimentation. Only the truly powerful sects had multiple-aspect cultivation methods. Unlike them, I could not meaningfully convert Qi of any aspect into useable Qi of my cultivation's preferred aspect or aspects. However, I could do something that they could not. I felt the tiny mote of fire qi swirling in my meridians. With well-practised concentration I separated the quality of light from the fire and in the process dissipated the rest of its potential to the universe and the great Dao.

I gathered the fleck of light qi and a fistful of metal qi into the meridians of my left hand. If qi of a lesser density is expelled violently enough while in contact with Qi of a high density, then a reaction can take place. With the Qi in place, I raised my hand above my head and pushed it out as quickly and as forcefully as I could.

The mostly metal qi shot out upward at great speed. Rapidly the less dense light qi started to consume the metal qi to try and sustain itself. What had been a tiny fleck quickly became a flare growing in brightness.

The cave was bathed in bright white light. I managed to catch a glimpse of the sprawling skeleton of a long snake-like creature. The stalagmite was a giant tooth at the front of the mouth. Despite its size, it was a relatively small example of the other teeth on display.

I would have been awed by the scale and majesty of it all. It is difficult, however, to summon a sense of grandeur when a dagger is plunging at your neck. I leaned back and to the side allowing the dagger to miss me by inches.

The man swinging the blade failed to adjust his strike because my flare had blinded him. My assailant was dressed in all black with only his eyes showing. He looked like a stereotypical ninja from a bad 80s action movie. He certainly was as quiet as a ninja. My hearing was better than most people’s, but I still had not heard a sound as he approached.

I flared my cultivation to get started. My internal qi circulated for a second and then ground to a halt. I gasped sharply in pain as the metal qi scraped the inside of my meridians. The assassin’s vision was returning. I could see him blinking back tears. It would not be long before he made a less circumspect attempt at my life.

Without the aid of my cultivation focusing my intent was not an option so when I cocked the hammer back on my pistol there was no slowing effect. I fired from the hip as I stumbled away. My foot caught on part of a skeletal tooth, and I fell backwards into the giant maw.

My wild shot managed to graze the man on his left side. It was not a direct hit, but it still slowed him down. I saw the man draw a throwing dagger from somewhere on his person. I made another attempt to get my cultivation going and after a brief stutter, it flooded back into motion.

The now bleeding ninja whipped the throwing knife at my head. Still, on my back a pushed out an unnecessarily large wave of metal qi from my flailing left hand. The knife pinged off the metal qi like a shield and buried itself into the ground two feet from me. I cocked the hammer back on my gun to take another shot, but the ninja had already dodged behind a tooth. Using the brief moment of respite while I was out of his line of sight I rolled to the left and back to my feet. The motion did not entirely save me. Another knife came whistling out and pierced my calf muscle.

“Fuck,” I screamed.

I took another shot to give myself some cover and limped as quickly as I could to put a tooth between me and the ninja’s last position. I needed to end this quickly. There was no telling when my cultivation would give out again and now, I was injured. He could outlast me if he needed to.

I whipped an explosive round out of my ammo belt and chambered it. I spun the wheel so that the explosive round would be the next one that I fired. I focused deeply and closed my eyes. The ninja would be moving waiting for my flare’s light to die. It was already starting to dim. He would use the darkness to strike me while I was blind.

My only chance was to catch the sound of his movements while the heightened focus of my cultivation lasted.

For ten seconds the only sound I heard was my own breathing. It sounded like forge bellows in the ancient cave. Once the light of my flare completely faded, I heard a small rustle of cloth to my right. Wasting no time, I aimed in the general direction of the noise and fired.

I had no idea exactly how Old Chen had made the rounds, but he could have warned me of just how powerful they were. The sudden explosive wave that rushed through the cave knocked me off my feet. I had aimed the bullet slightly down so rather than being knocked sideways I shot off at an angle into the air.

I caught a glimpse of blue flames licking the part of the mouth I had hit. I saw the surprised ninja flying through the air in a similar fashion to myself. He had not been directly caught in the blast, but some flame had caught his clothes. He was flutily trying to put it out with his hands.

While we were both still airborne and could not dodge, I drew back the hammer of my pistol for the last time and felt my intent sharped. Time slowed to a crawl, and I sighted on the man’s chest. Centre mass just like they taught at the police academy.

The bullet hit the ninja like a truck slamming his body to the ground. I continued to fly like a kite with its strings cut. My right shoulder hit the ground first and I tumbled end over end until I hit the cave wall. My bones were hard enough at my stage of cultivation that I had not broken anything. I was feeling battered though and my leg was still bleeding.

I slowly stood up and made my way to the body of my assailant. It was not hard his corpse was the only thing still burning. He was most certainly dead but I shot the corpse a few times just to make sure.

I breathed out before saying to the darkness, “Okay whoever you are. You just made this case personal.”

I started my slow limp back home and lit another cigarette. Someone with enough clout to hire an energy storage assassin wanted me dead. My forced retirement to this little corner of the empire was not going to be peaceful.