The meal I just took was filling and hearty. Stew is the food of choice for commoners in this part of the world, but they often put many spices and herbs into the mix, making the flavors surprisingly diverse for what is still a mainly one-dish cuisine. I'm quite going to miss it when I leave.

I did not return to my desk to write about my dinner, though. I had left off writing as I reached an understanding with Asura this morning. If I continue at my previous rate I may take as long to write my experiences as I did to live them, so I shall make an effort to skim.

The practice of keeping a journal is certainly becoming more appealing to me as I work, but I am now a bit concerned that the notebook I bought for the purpose will not be enough to last me through my hunt for the memory cultivator.

I should continue on in time, so that get to my encounter in the early afternoon sooner rather than later.

Asura left through the door at the same time as I left through the window, with the understanding that by the time she could find anyone to tell them about what had happened, I'd be long gone. I wasn't sure if she did actually plan to raise a fuss about the bodies, or if her intention was simply to leave and let the bodies be discovered in their own time. I advised her that if the latter was her intention, she might want to lay low for some time, to which she replied that that was sort of obvious, although she didn't use those particular words. It was left ambiguous if that was actually her intent, though, but on the whole I did not care enough to ask.

From there, I moved across the rooftops to my own inn, the same one from which I'm currently writing. The name of this inn is the Dancing Fox, should you need to find it again. Here I swiftly removed my hand wrappings and slept another several hours, as is my routine after a nighttime mission. I awoke well into the morning to my alarm construct, which I carry in my bags wherever I go. It's not a complex mechanism, simply a flawed sound qi crystal in a brass tuning casing which prompts it to ring as it collects its energy above a certain threshold. It's not precise to the minute, as the more artisanal constructs can be. It doesn't even have any manner of clock face, and setting it to ring is simply a matter of closing the vent to a certain narrowness dependent on the desired duration of the timer, which one must learn from trial and error rather than having any standardized dials or levers. It is simply functional.

I awoke to the soft ringing of the alarm and stifled it by clicking the resonating wall on the side, allowing the qi to vent itself outward as I opened the top outlet all the way for several seconds. Then I closed the vent to isolate the crystal, and briefly considered going back to sleep.

I decided against it. There were places and times I could get away with that. A city, the morning after a job, was not such a place.

I had to go.

Now, I said I would address this journal as if to a stranger, and so I will. I shall explain the intricacies of my job, and what such a job requires.

I am a harvester of qi cores. No, that description places me among those hunters and cultivators who delve out into the wildernesses of the world to hunt monsters and obtain their crystal hearts. That's not what I do, although I suppose by some definitions I do indeed hunt monsters.

The monsters I hunt are a bit closer to human.

I am a harvester of human qi cores.

There. That sounds better.

Of course, humans do not grow qi crystals naturally. It's simply not a physiological quality of the species. By the nature of our birth, we are closer to apes than we are to the gods and monsters that are said to roam the heavens as well as the earth. There are, however, humans who eschew this rule, which is possible to do for the reason that qi is eminently connected to willpower somehow. That's as far as the theorists have gotten, to my knowledge, but I don't need to know much of the theory to know that my targets are cultivators. Not the high-level ones, naturally—like I hinted at before, the higher ranks have such annoyances as impervious skin and impossible strength, and that's just the bit they all have in common, not even counting the weird unique powers they all tend to get.

Well, the low-rankers have those powers too, if less of them and at a less powerful echelon. That's why I hunt them. Not just the powers, but the tendency they have to be unique powers. You can harvest a thousand Greatbadgers, and get a thousand stone qi cores with precisely the same abilities imbued within, but hunt two cultivators, even of the same sect, and you'll get two different cores, which may do things you'll never see anywhere else.

Not that I ever go for the sects. They tend to come looking for revenge, all honor-bound and whatnot. I don't take jobs that so much as smell of the sects. I just pick off the ones that nobody will miss, and even among those I carefully select the ones best suited to my skill set. Loners among loners, wanderers among wanderers, the ones that I can really catch unawares with the absolute minima of risk to myself.

Of course, sometimes you really need a passion qi core, and then I have to do my business in a city like Gardene. There are too many sects here for my liking, and I knew that well going in. If I had struck earlier, I could have caught the passion cultivator in one of the small towns he had stopped at on his way here. But I assumed a better opportunity would present itself in time, and under that misconception, I followed him for several weeks as he moved into busier and busier places.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Not that I have anything against cities as a notion. I think they're lovely. Gardene, specifically, has a beautiful museum culture, and the majority of the museums here offer free admission on the weekends. I took the time to visit the art district yesterday, and it was lovely.

There was no time for such things today. My contact would be waiting for me camped on the road to Baishan, and moreover there was no true way of knowing quite how much attention the cultivator's death had garnered thus far. Gardene is not a place that favors quick-traveling news, at least not to the eyes of an outsider, and to actively seek out that information would be to risk drawing attention to myself.

I packed quickly, for I tend to carry no more than one bag. It's very mildly spatial, a construct involving no one whole space crystal but rather several glyphs of crystal dust woven around the lip. There's no weight reduction, only a volume expansion of around twenty percent, but it's a relatively large rucksack in the first place, so it adequately carries everything I need, that being:

* a few sets of clothes in various colors and styles, selected to maximize versatility;

* an excess of the crude bandages I use for wrapping over skin and cloth if I anticipate messy circumstances;

* an unlocked wooden case for hygienic products including a spare toothbrush and toilet paper;

* my rigid mask which I used in my earlier escapade, which is not immediately recognizable as a mask when not worn;

* a pouch for coin, which is itself also mildly spatial, although this one has an additional enhancement for an increase in weight;

* a second wooden case, this one with a lock, in which I keep several useful qi-core mechanisms (such as the alarm construct) as well as any spare cores I collect and have not yet used or sold;

* a bundle of fireproof rope;

* a spare set of boots;

* A third case, this one of light plaster, which contains my poisons, antidotes, bleaches and dyes, and is treated with qi to repel attention;

* a tarp, dark green, of no particularly special quality.

At times the bag contains more or less, but the above list represents a relatively constant inventory of what I carry with me as I go from place to place. All of it has been useful to the extreme, some for obvious reasons and others less so.

I suppose this notebook should be effectively added to the list above, and we shall see if it is as useful as the rest.

My plan, as it was this morning, was this: I intended to leave Gardene. An early-morning departure can be notable, so I intended to leave closer to noon than to sunrise. I would provide the same character as I had on the way in—that of a scholar seeking to visit the museums (which I really had done)—and I'd be on my way. I had a few contingency plans for if things went wrong in certain places, as any professional should.

Obviously, seeing as I'm writing this journal in the same inn I'm describing my plans to have already left, my plans did not work out.

You can prepare for some things. It's hard to prepare for everything.

I opened the door to my room. I opened it again. I opened it a third time, and then I looked at the door and it was open but that should have happened the first time I'd opened it, not the third. Hell, I shouldn't have been able to open a door three times in succession without it ever being closed in between. That wasn't how doors worked.

I looked up, through the door that I was quite certain was now open. There was a man there, far too close, in robes that were too local to be a foreigner, and too rich to be common. By the time I'd processed this, he was already inside the room, and in fact the door was once again closed.

"I apolologize for the conconfusion." The man spoke perfectly smoothly. I knew that he was speaking smoothly. Somehow, it was my perception of it that stuttered, stumbling often from one syllable to the next with rather more ado than I should have expected from my mind. "I-it's a passpassive effect of m-my qi. It's a misistake, which is rectifified in latater iterations of the t-technique. It's all-all very technical."

He was sitting on the bed. No, he was sitting on the chair, and I was the one sitting on the bed. I reached for a knife, which I did and then did again like had happened with opening the door, but I was able to grasp the knife after only one repeat of the action.

"I-I wouldn't do thathat if-if I were you-you." The man spoke, and I had half a mind to believe him.

"Who-who aaaare you?" I slurred, my own voice coming out in the same stuttering rhythm as my perception. I was not speaking smoothly and being perceived in stutters, like the other man. No, whatever effect this was, he was swimming while I was drowning.

"Dodoesn't matter right nonow," the man said. "You'd h-hear it wrong ananyway. My naname is on the scroll, b-but in truruth I'm j-just the messengenger." He did, indeed, have a message, which had always been in his hand, but which only really seemed to have always been there from that moment on, which is a headache of a notion but which is nonetheless exactly as I remember thinking it to myself at that moment. It was a rolled-up piece of parchment, tied around the middle with a purplish thread.

He handed the parchment to me, and a moment later handed it to me again. I checked, and confirmed that I only held one instance of the thing in my hand.

"Thithis is the seeeeaaal of the—"

"Inner Names Sect," the man finished, sparing me the headache that talking was becoming. Great. A sect. Not that the robes didn't indicate a sect, but it was still not great to have it confirmed. "I will leaveve now," he stated without ceremony.

"And th-this willill stop?" I asked, feeling a little sick as I waved my hand to gesture vaguely at my mouth and ears. I was still sitting down, yes? I checked, and found that I was, but I might have stood and sat back down, I wasn't entirely sure.

"As-as soon as I s-shut the doooor," the man spoke with confidence. He paused. "It was good to see your face, harvester."

"What?" I spoke, and then realized I was speaking to an empty room.

I sat there for a moment.

A groan escaped my lips. "Fuuuuuuck," I swore in Arcaian, my native tongue. Then I decided to reiterate the notion in a few more languages, for good measure. Pargathan from the far south, Thrayish to the east, and just for good measure I tried a curse an outworlder I'd known had been fond of; I believe that language is called Italian. Finally, I tried the local tongue, but Oristanish profanity never really sounds properly emphatic. None of it helped, but then it was never going to.

I sighed, set my bag down next to the door, then reconsidered and set it against the door. I considered barricading the door further, but I was the one who wanted to be out of here sooner than later. I sighed, ran through the whole litany of swears all over again, then unrolled the scroll and began to read.

I will copy the contents of the scroll onto the following pages.