The journey back to Biragawa felt significantly shorter than the walk out, though that was likely due to the fact that Jiang’s mind was occupied with the fact that he’d just willingly agreed to spend the next few weeks with another cultivator. A chatty one.

  Despite his plans of keeping his distance from other cultivators until he’d freed his family. And for as long as possible afterwards as well, if he was being totally honest.

  Is there something about cultivators that forces them into proximity with each other? It was an idle thought, but to his faint alarm, not one he could actually dismiss. He’d gone almost fifteen years without encountering a cultivator, but the second he became one himself, he could barely make it ten paces without running into them. Granted, he was spending far more time around big cities and such, but still.

  The enormity of his situation was slowly dawning on him as they walked down the main road back towards Biragawa – mostly because Ren was chattering away about the logistics of their new partnership with an enthusiasm that bordered on manic.

  “So,” Jiang said, cutting through Ren’s speculation about the current market value of Iron-Hide Boar tusks. “You said you needed money. A lot of it. If we’re going to be risking our necks for the next two weeks, I think I deserve to know the specific number. How much is ‘a lot’?”

  Ren hesitated, his stride hitching slightly. He looked at the road ahead, chewing his lip as he seemingly performed a rapid mental calculation. “Well, market prices fluctuate, of course, and auction houses are notoriously unpredictable during tournament seasons due to bidding wars. That said, with the surplus of people in the city there should be no shortage of resources up for sale, so factoring in the necessary supplementary pills to stabilise my foundation during the rapid advancement…” He took a breath, then let it out in a rush. “Five thousand gold. Give or take.”

  Jiang actually stopped walking. He stared at the other cultivator, waiting for the punchline, or perhaps for Ren to laugh and say he meant five hundred. When neither happened, Jiang felt a cold pit open in his stomach. Five thousand gold. His mind did a brief, useless scramble for scale and came up empty – it was a number so large it ceased to have meaning. In Liǔxī, a single gold coin was enough to buy a small farm. Five thousand could probably buy the entire valley, the village, and every person in it, with enough left over to bribe the local magistrate.

  And then do it twice more for good measure.

  “That’s…” he started, and couldn’t find an ending for the sentence that didn’t sound stupid. He settled for bluntness. “That’s impossible. That’s not a goal, Ren. That’s a fantasy. We just risked our lives for eight cores that you said were worth maybe three gold total. You want to earn five thousand in two weeks? We’d have to kill every spirit beast in the province.”

  “It’s not as impossible as it sounds!” Ren argued, though his voice pitched up slightly in defence. He waved his hands, as if trying to physically shape the air into a more favourable reality. “You’re thinking linearly, Jiang. You’re thinking in terms of First Realm, early-stage beasts. Those are nothing. They’re common, they’re weak, and their cores are barely dense enough to hold a formation together. The value of a spirit core doesn’t scale linearly with the beast’s power; it scales exponentially.”

  He held up a finger. “A First Realm, third-stage core? Maybe ten gold if it’s perfect and has a useful Qi alignment. But once a beast crosses the threshold into the Second Realm? The core undergoes a qualitative change. It solidifies. It becomes a vessel for genuine elemental intent. Even a basic, early-stage Second Realm core can go for a hundred gold. If it has a rare alignment, or if it comes from a species known for potent bloodlines, it can go for three, maybe four hundred.”

  Jiang frowned, doing the math. Fifty beasts. If they hunted beasts exclusively in the Second Realm, they would need to kill roughly fifty of them in fourteen days. That was… well, it was still absurd, but it was physically possible, in the sense that there were enough hours in the day to do it. The problem was that fighting a Second Realm beast was likely to be terrifyingly dangerous, and doing it fifty times in a row without making a single fatal mistake seemed like a statistically poor bet.

  “That’s still three or four kills a day,” Jiang pointed out, resuming his walk. “Against beasts that are theoretically stronger than we are – especially considering I can’t use any techniques. And that’s assuming we can find them, track them, and kill them without getting killed ourselves. You saw what happened back there with the… squirrels. If we run into a pack of Second Realm beasts, we’re dead.”

  “Why do you think I was starting to get desperate?” Ren asked dryly. He clearly saw that Jiang wasn’t entirely happy with the response and continued hastily. “But I assure you, it is possible. And if we get a little lucky and can take down a beast in the third or fourth stage of the Second Realm, particularly if it has a decent alignment? We could be looking at almost a thousand gold right there. Besides, as I advance, I’ll be more useful, so we can hunt bigger beasts.”

  Jiang narrowed his eyes. He didn’t know enough about the market rates for cores to comment with any real degree of authority, but something told him it wasn’t going to be that simple. If nothing else, he doubted the prices Ren had mentioned were taking into account the current glut of cores being sold by all the other cultivators trying to get rich off the beast tide.

  Still, his reasoning for accepting the partnership was still entirely valid. Ultimately, it didn’t matter to him if they weren’t able to make enough money for Ren to make it to the Second Realm in time for the tournament, and while the hunting might be a bit more dangerous than he’d initially assumed… well, back when he’d started hunting any random wolf may as well have been a spirit beast for how quickly it could kill him.

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  Danger didn’t bother him, as long as it had a purpose.

  “Fine then,” he said, hardly believing the words even as he said them. “Five thousand gold in two weeks. That’s… the goal.”

  Ren winced a little. “Ah, well, actually, we’ll have to be a little faster than that. I’ll need to sign up for the tournament before it actually starts, and we’ll probably miss a few days here and there while I actually break through, so… probably more accurate to call it a week and a half. Ish.”

  Jiang threw his hands up in exasperation. “Sure. Why not. Any other changes you need to let me know about? Should we try fighting blindfolded, or with both hands tied behind our backs?”

  Ren laughed, the sound a little strained, and rubbed the back of his neck. “I’ll admit, when you say it like that, it does sound somewhat unreasonable. But unreasonable doesn’t necessarily mean impossible. It just means we need to be careful about how we go about it.”

  Jiang shot him a flat look. Ren took the hint and hurried on.

  “What I mean is that we need to decide what kinds of beasts we’re targeting before we even think about numbers. There are essentially two viable approaches for wandering cultivators in a situation like ours. One focuses on quantity, the other on quality, and trying to straddle the middle tends to get people killed.”

  He gestured vaguely toward the forest behind them. “Quantity means hunting late-stage First Realm beasts that tend to move in packs. Alternatively, we can go from quality – finding solitary Second Realm beasts and hoping that they aren’t too dangerous for us to take on.”

  “Quality,” Jiang said without hesitation, not even having to think about it. The memory of the clearing was still fresh in his mind – the chaos of forty moving targets, the way they had swarmed from every angle, the sheer impossibility of tracking that many threats at once.

  Ren looked surprised. “Really? I would have thought you’d prefer the safer route. A Second Realm beast will have active Qi techniques, and, well… without techniques of your own…”

  He trailed off leadingly.

  “Sure, it’ll be a more dangerous beast, but there’s only one of it.” Jiang shrugged. “Back there, the problem wasn’t that the beasts were strong. It was that there were too many of them. I can dodge one attack. I can’t dodge forty. If we fight a single target, we can control the engagement. We can set ambushes. And if things go wrong…” He shrugged. “It’s a lot easier to run away from one beast than it is to run away from a swarm. We can split up. It can’t chase both of us.”

  Ren stopped walking again. This time, however, the expression on his face wasn’t fear or confusion; it was genuine affront. He looked at Jiang as if the hunter had just suggested they strip naked and dance in the town square.

  “Run away?” Ren repeated, saying the words like they were dirty. “Brother Jiang, we are cultivators. We are walking the path of the Heavens. We do not ‘run away’ from beasts. We might perform a tactical withdrawal, or a strategic repositioning to more favourable terrain, but we do not turn our backs and flee like frightened rabbits. It’s… undignified. If word got out that we fled from a spirit beast while outnumbering it – while you are in the same realm as it, at that – we’d be the laughingstock of the tournament.”

  Jiang stared at him, blinking slowly. For a moment, he thought Ren was joking. The man was weaker than Jiang, had nearly died less than an hour ago, and was clearly aware of the dangers. And yet, the mere suggestion of flight – a basic survival instinct that any sane hunter would embrace – was offensive to him?

  “Ren,” Jiang said slowly, “dead people don’t have dignity. Better to be a living laughingstock than a dead hero.”

  “It’s the principle of the thing!” Ren insisted, straightening his torn robes with a huff. “Cultivation is about overcoming adversity. If you run every time you face a challenge, how will you ever temper your Dao? No. We will hunt the Second Realm beasts because it is the most efficient path to our goal, and because it will sharpen our skills. But we will do it with the intention of victory, not escape.”

  He marched forward, chin held high, radiating a fragile, haughty confidence that was completely at odds with his earlier panic.

  Jiang watched him go, feeling oddly… relieved. It took him a bit of thinking before he understood why he felt that way.

  So far, Ren had been an anomaly. He was friendly, helpful, surprisingly humble about his own lack of strength, and seemingly devoid of the murderous arrogance that Jiang had come to associate with cultivators. It had been unnerving. It had made Jiang wonder if he was misjudging everything, or if Ren was playing some deeper, more dangerous game.

  But this? This stiff-necked, idiotic pride? The refusal to accept reality because it conflicted with his self-image as a ‘warrior of the Heavens’? This was familiar. It was the same madness that infected the disciples of the Azure Sky Sect when they had constantly challenged him to duels because they were offended by the fact that he existed. It was stupid, yes, but it was predictable.

  Jiang shook his head, idly musing on the strangeness of the situation. He had fled Li Xuan and Mistress Bai to escape arrogant cultivators, yet here he was, finding comfort in the arrogance of his new partner. He would have to be careful – it would be all too easy to let that mindset seep into his own thought patterns, to start believing that he was above the basic rules of survival just because he could punch through a tree. Hell, to a certain extent, it was already happening – it was the middle of winter and he hadn’t even bothered to wear a cloak.

  He hurried to catch up with Ren, falling into step beside the determinedly marching cultivator as he turned things over in his mind. Two weeks. Or rather, a week and a half, if Ren’s frantic timeline was accurate, but probably better to assume he would be busy for at least two weeks. That was going to be… intense, but manageable. Honestly, the biggest logistical hurdle would likely be his own quest to get in contact with his family. He still needed to meet Mai at the service gate tomorrow at first bell – which was thankfully early enough in the morning that it wouldn’t interfere with the day’s hunting – and potentially more times after that if she managed to establish a line of communication.

  He’d have to tell Ren he needed days off. He wouldn’t explain why – family business was a vague enough excuse that most people respected – but he needed to make sure their schedules aligned. Thankfully, it shouldn’t be too much of a problem coordinating the meet-ups with Ren’s downtime when he tried to break through.

  Jiang adjusted the strap of his sword belt, a faint, unfamiliar feeling warming his chest. Optimism.

  It was cautious, fragile optimism, but it was there. For the first time since leaving Qinghe, he had a concrete path forward. He had a way to earn serious coin – even if they fell woefully short of Ren’s insane five-thousand-gold target, half or even a tenth of that sum would solve all of Jiang’s immediate financial problems. He had a potential lead on his family.

  He looked up at the distant walls of Biragawa rising against the grey winter sky.

  Maybe, just maybe, things would all work out.

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