Chapter 19

There were many ways to find and identify spirit stones. Tan knew of six of them. The way that was the easiest, and the hardest, was just to pick up a stone and scan it with your own spiritual senses to determine whether or not it contained a spirit.

It was the easiest, because if you were right, bang, you had the stone in your hand and you knew it was spiritual.

Unfortunately the vast majority of stones were just stones, and it would take forever to actually find a spiritual stone using this method alone.

Another method was to find the spirit in the wild and ‘trap’ it in a stone. This was done by preparing a stone which the spirit would find attractive, tracking down the spirit to its home, and presenting the offering to the spirit. Or at least that’s the method which the Shen family employed. It wasn’t always successful, but providing a homeless spirit with a home worked eight times in ten, provided it was done with a humble heart.

That was the method which had been used to lure in the injured Zephyr after her escape from the Zang family’s wards, which were using a similar but somewhat more nepharious method in their pursuit of her.

A third method was to scan an area while in the Sublime State of Clarity, which would allow Tan to pick out concentrations of spiritual power like finding his way to the stove by following the heat on a cold day.

The remaining three methods were different rituals which would direct the caster to the strongest concentration of spiritual energy nearby.

Tan spent the evening, after making camp, scanning the nearby areas while being sublime. Pao spent the evening preparing for the casting of one of the rituals which the elder Shens had taught him. The twins spent the evening just wandering around and recovering from running seventy miles in a morning and an afternoon.

Tan didn’t find anything, returning to the camp at dusk with empty hands. He was quite disappointed in himself.

Pao tried to cheer him up, saying “If your parents thought you could do it all in one or two days, they wouldn’t have sent you out with a week’s worth of supplies and made you promise to return home in two weeks whether you found them all or not.”

“I know,” Tan said, trying and failing to hide his disappointment. “I’m tired. Goodnight.”

In the morning, they ate a bit of the hardtack that the adults had sent them with and finished the preparations that Pao had begun the night before. The ritual circle was drawn into the dirt with a sturdy walking stick that Pao had found the day before. They dumped a bit of water into a shallow hole that they dug and let it soak into the ground before starting a small fire over top of it.

They gave the magic some time to work before gathering in a circle around it and channeling their Qi into the magic circle. They’d practiced this at home, and the ritual had almost always led to the shed where the spirit stones were kept, unless Safron had been particularly active that day in her hiding of the stones.

The ritual was supposed to locate any stone of mid-quality or higher within five miles. Sure enough, the smoke of the small fire that they’d built in the center of the circle began to coalesce into a ball a few feet above their heads, then tendrils began extending in several directions. Six of the tendrils were pitifully small and did not lead anywhere, while the seventh was thick as one of the children’s wrist and formed a steady path off to the southwest.

Tan leapt into the air and followed it to its destination, finding a small stone perched atop a large boulder. He lifted the stone and scanned it, immediately grinning at his success.

It was an air spirit, like Zephyr. Not nearly as strong. Not even as strong as the one that his father had given him as an example of a weak spirit. But he had found it on only his second day, which meant that he was already one fifth of the way done with this task.

He grinned. Venturing so far from home truly had been the right decision. He returned to the others, and they celebrated by hooting and hollaring for a few minutes before putting the stone in one of the five pouches they had been given to seal off its spiritual emissions to keep it from interfering with their search as they looked for the next stone.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

Unforutnately, for the next three days they did little more than wander in circles aimlessly without success. They tried repeating their ritual several times, but none of the tendrils of smoke coalesced into anything strong enough to really be called a spiritual stone. More like Qi-filled pebbles, like the one that Won had absorbed some fire Qi from the day before.

They searched as they wandered and they wandered as they searched, but they found nothing but frustration.

Until they stumbled upon the den of a wild boar, which retaliated to the disturbance by chasing the children for what seemed like miles. When it finally broke off its pursuit and returned to its home, the children gathered up and tried the ritual again.

For the first time in three days, the ritual worked once more.

And led them straight back to the den of the ornery wild boar. They frowned and backed off, consulting each other in a clearing nearby.

“What do you think? Did we stumble upon another spiritual animal like the fox and the rabbit at your house?” Ko asked Tan. “Is the ritual reacting to the boar instead of a stone?”

“It shouldn’t be reacting to an actual cultivator, which is what spiritual animals are. Cultivators who aren’t human,” Tan answered. “If it reacted to cultivators then it would be reacting to us.”

“So you don’t think the boar is special?” Won asked.

“I didn’t say that,” Tan said, frowning in thought. “It might be a Spirit animal that found a second stone and is guarding it. Spirit stones are useful for more than just binding the spirit inside them, they give off Qi that can be good for cultivation or powering formations. Or that’s what my dad says at least.”

“So what do we do?” the ever practical Pao asked.

They put their heads together and came up with a plan.

They weren’t sure how strong the boar was, or even whether it was a spirit beast or not. If it wasn’t a spirit beast then it could still probably hurt Ko and Won, who had reached the second stage of the initiate’s realm but were still only moderately stronger than mortals. If it was a spirit beast, they didn’t think it was particularly far advanced in its cultivation.

Pao was confident that working together, he and Tan could kill it. But all of the children were reluctant to kill the animal for no reason other than to rob it of the spirit stone it kept in its den. Maybe if it were a danger to non-cultivators they would feel justified in such an action, but it was just a wild boar minding its own business and defending its own territory.

But although they were reluctant to killing it, robbing it of its spirit stone didn’t trouble them at all. So after coming up with their strategy, they went to work.

Three of them, Won, Ko, and Pao, marched back up toward the den and began shouting insults at the boar. The boar showed itself and made threatening noises at them, which they responded to by attacking it. Won shot his flames at the beast, Ko splashed it with water, and Pao threw a rock.

Each of their attacks struck the beast and did little damage, except for the rock which seemed to actually hurt it a bit. It chased after them, and they immediately split into different directions.

It chased after Pao, angry about the rock.

He took it on a run in circles that lasted for some time. Pao had plenty of stamina, and although the boar was faster he was able to dodge between trees and otherwise avoide the beast’s charging mass and its sharp and dangerous tusks.

The other two children chased after them both, shouting insults at the boar and slinging their elemental attacks as best they could at it. Eventually it was distracted and began chasing after Won instead. The boy was surprised to have draw it’s attention, but took over his part of the plan well, leading it on another chase until he was burnt out and exhausted, at which point he climbed a tree.

The boar circled around the boy’s tree for a while, and looked like it was about to return to its den when a rock and a splash of water struck it again. Once more the chase was on.

They kept it distracted for almost an entire hour before it collapsed in exhaustion. They watched nervously as it sat there.

“Do you think we kept it distracted long enough?” Ko asked.

“If Tan hasn’t found the stone by now then he never will,” Won said.

Ko nodded in agreement. “Let’s leave this poor animal alone now,” she said, and the children retreated, leaving the exhausted animal behind to lick its wounds and recover from its exhaustion.

They returned to their campsite and found Tan playing with a spirit stone that looked like a piece of malachite with one hand and eating the last of his mother’s prepared food with the other. They all shot him dirty looks as they realized that he had been done with his part of the plan for quite a while and hadn’t shown up to help them.

Instead he had raided their supplies.

They attacked him as one, and although his cultivation was more advanced than any of theirs, Pao was still stronger, and with the twins distracting him the fight was over as soon as Pao got Tan into a headlock. He administered a spanking, managing to make the younger boy cry out his remorse. When Tan was finally released, the oldest boy of the group gave him a serious lecture about his antics and made him promise that the next time they did something dangerous together he would stick to the plan.