As of writing this, the date is fifth of Spring, year nine-hundred-fifty-four, Unified Calendar. It is midway through the twentieth hour, and I intend this to be a private journal which I will continue until such time as I have completed my current job, at which point I will consider if it will be useful to continue keeping a log. Due to the reasons I'm writing a journal in the first place, I will address it to a stranger, just in case the worst should happen, and I either die or I forget, which is not that far off from being the same thing.

They say that the skin of a cultivator can't be cut by mortal blades.

Now, that's often true of the higher ranks, the ones at the heads of the sects, and certainly it's true of the near-immortals that you see wandering through the world every now and then like a runaway cart through paper.

But cutting open your average low-rank cultivator? Well, that's just a matter of precision. You have to know where to slice, and you have to bring a very sharp blade, and keeping that blade sharp is a task all its own, but if you do it right, stabbing them in the heart works as well as it would on anyone else.

Not that I typically go for the chest—it's too risky. I don't kill cultivators just for the fun of it, I do it for a reason, and that reason is typically placed within a few inches of the heart, and I can't really tell you more specifically than that because you can't always predict which precise cultivation method your target uses, much less how that has affected the placement of their qi organs. The qi core might be to the left of the heart, or to the right, or maybe it's right behind the thing, and if you guess wrong, the whole thing is liable to shatter and you'll be left with no product and only a dead cultivator to dispose of.

No, it's a far surer bet to slit the throat. Most cultivators require blood as much as any wholly mortal human, and making that blood go from inside the body to outside, especially at a rapid rate, is usually a decent way to off them. There are exceptions, because when it comes to cultivators, there are always exceptions. You have a few strains of blood cultivators that can rope their blood back into their body as quickly as it spills out. One of those strains even lets them do it without conscious effort, so that you can cut them all over and the blood just won't spill out. Then you have more esoteric exceptions, like desiccation cultivators, who generally still have blood, technically speaking, but it's more of a chunky red sludge than a proper liquid, and even if you actually remove it all, they don't seem to care.

For those, of course there are other ways to kill them. Blood cultivators, while they receive many of the benefits to health that cultivators generally do, sometimes develop excessive vulnerability to any allergies they had in their previous life. Failing that, certain poisons that most cultivators would shrug off will in fact have an increased effect on a blood cultivator, for instance lotus-of-stone, which actually empowers itself on blood qi as it travels through the body.

As for the desiccation cultivators, all you really have to do is pour a bucket of water on their head when they're sleeping. It's not pretty, I'll tell you that, but murder rarely is.

I do most of my best work when my victims are sleeping.

Look at that, I call them "victims" like I'm a serial killer or something. I suppose I might be at that, but I think first and foremost I am a robber. I steal things—a very particular type of things, in fact—and if those things happen to be commonly stored inside the chests of living, breathing people, well then that's just a matter of circumstance.

I killed a cultivator very early this morning, between the fourth hour and the fifth. He was single-aspect—most of them are. His aspect was passion, which I'm not sure would have actively helped him much even if he were awake. As it was, the greatest challenge in killing him was crawling over the two women he had in his bed. I considered killing them first, but my policy is to avoid needless death, and it was also possible that the 'passion' they exhibited as they died might impinge on the cultivator's awareness and serve to wake him up. It was a coin toss as to whether any given cultivator had that annoying sense for the presence of their aspect, and you never knew how far their aspect really extended.

So, the angle wasn't ideal, but I opened his carotid artery with no particular complications, at which point he woke up and gurgled, hands going up to his throat. For a moment I tensed, as that could have been the motions of a healer intending to close their wounds, and then I might have an honest fight on my hands, which I never liked my chances of. But no, he only clutched at his throat as air hissed through his windpipe.

He did thrash quite a bit, and if I were a bit more compassionate I would have winced as his movements almost certainly broke the arm of one of the women. I'm a professional, of course, so I reacted to this with the necessary action, opening a hole in the throat of that woman with the knife just before she tried to scream. I stabbed instead of slashing here, for which I blame the fact that I was leaning far over the bed.

Not wanting to get caught in the death throes of the cultivator, I quickly rolled away as well as I could, my back hitting the floorboards of the inn. I worried for a moment that the noise would invite attention, but I scoffed at myself a moment later. The cultivator and the women had probably been making thumping sounds the whole night. Hell, I probably could've let the woman scream her heart out and it wouldn't have raised a flag.

The woman with two intact arms was waking up now as well. She was on my side of the bed, so I yanked her down with me and set the knife to her throat. "You scream and you know what happens," I said matter-of-factly, and evidently she did understand the consequences well enough, because she was quiet as a mouse.

It took a few more minutes for the cultivator and the injured woman to die, and I had the sense to turn my captive towards the wall while they did, as I am aware that most people aren't accustomed to looking at that sort of thing. That didn't stop the gurgling sounds, of course, which continue in a fashion even a bit after death, although they certainly do get a lot quieter before that point.

The woman let out a stifled sob. "Pretend it's clogged pipes," I said, bringing out my best attempt at a soothing voice. No, that didn't seem to help, I noted. She shuddered violently at whatever the advice had brought to mind, seemingly not within her conscious control. I had to move the knife away lest she cut her own throat. I abandoned the attempt at crafting an approachable voice. "Alright, well, if that doesn't help…" I wracked my brain to think of anything that other people would use to ignore this sort of stimulus. "I don't know what to tell you," I admitted. "But still don't scream," I reminded her.

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She seemed like she was going to say something to that, but she held it back.

By the time the gurgling stopped, she was looking a bit ill. "Good job," I said, because I've been told you're supposed to reinforce positive behavior. I'm not very experienced when it comes to captives. If I'd had my druthers, I'd have picked off this cultivator when he was alone. Unfortunately, it had become clear over the past week that the man was never alone. Ever. And he certainly never slept in any circumstances resembling solitude. "What's your name?" I asked the woman.

"Asura," the woman choked out.

"Alright. Asura, you're going to survive the night, unless you do something stupid." I figured I didn't need to add 'don't do anything stupid' to the end of that, because Asura seemed sharp enough. "I imagine that you'll carry some amount of trauma with you for a long time after today's events, and that's perfectly normal. You'll work through it, and then you'll be stronger." I'd heard someone give a speech similar to this once, and although at the time it had seemed both unnecessary and unhelpful, I'd come to understand the ways it connected to how most people think. "Now, before you can get to processing all of this in a presumably safer environment, you have to actually live through the night, which like I said is easy enough, but you still have to participate in it. I'm going to tell you what I'm going to do next, and what impact that has on you. Do you think you can listen to me, or do you need to take a moment longer to pull yourself together?" I wasn't hearing any steps from anywhere in the inn. Nobody was coming to check on this room. "We don't have forever, but we can take some time if you need it."

"I can—" Asura began, then her breath hitched. "No, hold on," she said. She took a few deep breaths in and out. Squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them wide. "Okay. Okay. Yes. I can listen." Her voice was remarkably calmer now. Not really calm, but certainly more so than before. "What are you going to do?"

"Asura, I'm here to harvest this man's qi core. Do you know what a qi core is?" She shook her head, and I nodded patiently. "Right. It doesn't overly matter to you at this moment, but the important thing is, I'm going to have to essentially carve a piece out of the man's corpse."

"It's starting to smell," Asura said, not in the sobs from before, but in a voice that was impressively restrained, although there was still that little bit of a quaver.

"Right. When people die, all their muscles relax, and if they're holding in any feces or urine, it releases shortly after the time of death," I said without inflection. "It's not a pretty smell, but it shouldn't get much worse than it is now, at least not until hours from now." I continued talking. "You didn't react well to the sounds of your two companions dying. I can't imagine you'll react well to the sounds of harvesting the core. It's…squelchy," I described it as succinctly as I could, then waited for Asura to speak.

"The other woman is dead as well?" Asura finally spoke after a minute or two. She had made an effort to breathe through her mouth for a moment, but had evidently given up now and was choosing to ignore it. Which she was doing with impressive efficacy for a civilian.

"She was going to scream," I said. "Loverboy here broke her arm in his death throes. I don't think she'd even seen me yet." I paused. "Don't you know her name?"

"I don't know her name," Asura shook her head. "And I still haven't seen you yet," she added.

"There's not that much to see. It's a dark room, and I'm wearing a mask."

"I sort of feel kind of floaty," Asura noted idly. "Is that from the shock, do you think?"

"Maybe, but stay with me for a bit longer. I've got a few options for you here. I have a sedative, here, in my belt, but I'll be the first to admit it's not designed as a sedative." I pulled the amber vial of lockleaf at my side and showed Asura in the dim light, still holding the knife at her throat but giving her a bit more leeway. "It's a poison, it just so happens that in low doses it just knocks you out. I can administer this to you, and you'll fall asleep, but I can't promise there won't be any damage. You'll almost certainly lose some dexterity in your limbs, or in the worst case you might outright suffer some paralysis, although it shouldn't be permanent unless I really mess up the dosage."

"I play the harp," Asura said quietly, her voice a bit faint. "I can't…I don't…"

"That's why I'm giving you a choice here," I continued. "And take deep breaths, Asura. In, and out. Normally, I'd say to breathe in through your nose, but that's probably not ideal right now."

Asura giggled more than the comment probably merited, but she did as I suggested, and while a new set of tears sprang up in her eyes, she seemed to come back to herself. "What's the other choice?"

"The other choice is that I remove this knife from your throat, and you cooperate with me with the understanding that if you try to bolt or scream, I will still kill you, and possibly with a different one of these vials on my belt," I said as pleasantly as one can say something like that.

"One of them probably causes immense pain or something like that," she guessed in the same tone, and inwardly I noted that she was adjusting quite quickly to her circumstances. She'd needed the reminder to keep her breathing under control, but other than that she was doing quite well.

"Several of them cause pain," I honestly said. "I wouldn't give you the most painful one, even if you turned around and tried to kill me. But I might give you the runner-up."

"You won't need to. I'm calm. I can cooperate." It was true. She'd conquered the quaver in her voice.

Actually, at this point I did a quick reassessment to make sure she hadn't been pretending before. She might have been a fellow professional, pretending to be affected by the whole situation.

No, it was too genuine. Or she was just that good of an actor.

I decided to give her the benefit of the doubt.

"Alright," I said. I removed the knife from her throat, and took a quick step back.

She took several more deep breaths, and I don't think she was even registering the smell of shit anymore. "You should open the window for the smell to escape," she said, then covered her mouth in surprise.

I quirked an eyebrow. "Giving me advice now?" I kept my voice quieter than hers. "You can do that if you wish," I said, "but then no talking. Only whispering." I considered raising the knife to make an implication, but she got the idea by now. Besides, she was basically on my side at this point. Funny, I wasn't trying for that result.

"Alright," she whispered, and did her suggestion.

"If you want to close your eyes and plug your ears," I whispered to her, "now's the time."

She began to do so, but paused. "It's not going to be worse than what I'm imagining in my head," she finally said softly, and stared at the knife in my hand.

I looked at her with not a bit of confusion. Asura was…interesting.

I shrugged. "Alright then," I thought aloud, and got to work.

For the sake of a detailed account, I should say that the qi core of this particular cultivator was slightly anterior of the heart, as well as a tad superior. As such, extracting it was a less messy affair than these things usually are—although of course that's relative. Asura watched the entire time, and while at the start she seemed queasy, that expression was quickly suppressed and overlaid by something that might've been genuine interest.

I find myself wanting to keep tabs on the woman. It's unfortunate that commoners do not maintain surnames in this corner of the world, but she does have green eyes, as well as being rather tall, so that should narrow things down in the event I need useful identifiers. I wouldn't be surprised, though, if as a result of this experience she makes a name for herself all on her own.

I have been writing for longer than I expected, and I have barely tracked through the earliest events of this morning. The kitchen in my own inn is closing soon, so I must set this notebook down, but the events of the day proper certainly still need notating, so I will return quickly, not that timing matters overly much when writing a journal.