Chapter 3 - Hunting

  Today was a joyous day. Nay a glorious day. Today was the first day since Ryu recuperated his mobility, but still Ryu woke with a heavy heart. He had a lot on his mind.

  Firstly, his arm was looking worse by the day and he didn’t know what to do about it. It was starting to smell of rot. He considered returning to civilization but he doubted he would make it that far without running into some strong magical beast. It was already a miracle that there seemed to be none around the place where he ended up and even if by chance he actually made it to some backwater village he doubted he could get assistance there. There were no healers in such places. Ryu would have to go to some city and after the stunt he pulled back home he was most certainly being hunted, either to find his corpse or be put down.

  Which brought him to his second major problem. He had to grow strong. Strong enough to crush his family. Strong enough to crush his clan. Strong beyond belief. Ryu had perfect awareness that if he was to get revenge he had to grow strong, for he was pathetically weak right now, so he had to hide and bide his time and this forest was actually the best place for him to start. It was huge, which meant that it was almost impossible for anyone other that a true expert to find anything in it, and also, overflowing with low levelled magical beasts perfect for him to hunt and cultivate. There was just one problem, he couldn’t. He had blown his own dantian. It was amazing how he was still alive. Ryu had never read about anything like that before and he had read a lot.

  Ryu had been trying to cultivate this past few days. Everyday before sleep he tried. He had been racking his brain for answers, but he found none.

  As far as he knew it went like this.

  There were 10 realms: beginner, disciple, apprentice, journeyman, master, grandmaster, king, emperor, saint and god. Those were the only true barriers to cultivation. If one was to separate them even further based on strength, like so many did, then it would be like this: beginner realm could be separated from 1st level to 9th and disciple, apprentice and journeyman into beginner, intermediate and advanced. It was divided like so because in the beginning of cultivation every small increase in ki made a huge difference in a fight, but once you reached master realm what made the difference was mastery, power and efficiency of techniques as well as battle experience. There have been martial artists that spent a lot of time in journeyman realm only to completely dominate masters after they broke through. You were considered a true expert when you broke through to master realm and a cultivator or martial artist when you broke trough to disciple and that was because this world he lived in was saturated with ki, which meant everyone would eventually breakthrough some of the beginner levels, even if only two or three. As a matter of fact, he read somewhere that if you didn’t train and lived to the age of 70 you would reach 3rd beginner realm, and that was without any talent. There were cases where regular people actually broke through to disciple level before dying. Even still Ryu had talent. He knew at least that. He had broke through to 1st beginner realm at the age of 7. A child would be considered a genius if they broke through at the age of 8, talented at 9 and regular at 10, so he knew he was talented. He didn’t know what went wrong him his cultivation after breaking through, but he always felt something was wrong, like he was missing something, like he was missing a part of him and now, all things considered, he suspected some sort of foul play.

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  But all that didn’t help him because all he knew and all there was of cultivation was based of the fact that you had a dantian, a centre a core, which he didn’t. That was the thing that frightened him the most right now. That he was going to be weak like that for the rest of his life. That he would never get his revenge.

  But even still Ryu pushed all that into the back of his head for today was a joyous day. Nay a glorious day. Nay an impossibly super duper awesome day. Today he could walk and run and move through the forest for real, which only meant one thing, today he would get the thing for which all men crave, the thing that would get any half decent person salivating over.

  Today he would hunt and get meat. Meat. The greatest of all foods. Meat.

  Aye meat, Ryu was hoping that if he could eat something decent then his hunger would sate, because he was getting worried. Ever since he first woke in the middle of the forest, Ryu has been assailed by an unending and insatiable hunger. He has tried eating everything and anything he could get his hands on and nothing would help. By now the trees around his little crevice were all peeled naked, the ground was picked clean and Ryu was only growing hungrier. He was starting to suspect that it had something to do with either some sort of side effect of the forbidden technique he performed or the fact he lacked a dantian. If that were the case he was then again screwed. That was why he was excited, meat would give him strength or so he hoped and it was with that hope that Ryu set out to hunt.

  He didn’t have any experience hunting or any weapons but he had a plan. A quite simple and elegant plan in his opinion. His plan consisted in wondering the forest all quiet like and find some prey, preferably some animal and not a magical beast, preferably something that didn’t bite or scratch or well... preferably something that didn’t fight back at all. Once he had found said prey he would then proceed to throw a sizeable rock and hit said prey squarely in the head, only to then rush in and finish it if necessary. It was a fool proof plan through and through. Ryu had complete notion that he would have to get a better plan eventually in order to get bigger prey but it would be enough for some rabbit or squirrel.

  And so wonder he did and by the end of the day all that he had found was that it was not that easy to find prey.