Jiang had managed to reach the North Gate just after the second bell rang, but it was a close thing.

  Between sprinting back to the inn, reading his mother’s letter until the words blurred, and then agonising over his reply, the morning had evaporated. He had spent the better part of an hour sitting at the small, wobbly table in his room, surrounded by crumpled balls of cheap paper, trying to find the right words. He had torn up the first three drafts, each time realising he had said too much or too little or something dangerously specific. In the end, he settled on a single long note that was mostly steady reassurance. He told her he was well, that he had made it to Birigawa with only a few scrapes, that he had work of a sort and money enough to stay fed for now.

  In particular, he had focused on the one thing that mattered: finding a way to see them. He had asked her to keep an ear out for any upcoming festivals or public events where servants might be allowed out, or if there were any specific supply runs she knew of.

  It wasn’t a perfect plan, but it was a start.

  Unfortunately, by the time he’d gotten the right words down on paper, it had been too late to find the courier’s office and actually post the letter. And however much Jiang wanted to drop everything and focus solely on his family, the truth was simple: posting the letter that evening instead of that morning wouldn’t change anything. And he couldn’t ignore the fact that Ren had taken a rather large leap of faith by purchasing him the bow in advance. He couldn’t just ditch the other cultivator.

  Principles were inconvenient like that.

  So, Jiang had shoved the unsealed letter into his pocket and headed for the North Gate.

  “You’re setting a punishing pace today, Brother Jiang,” Ren called out, pulling Jiang out of his thoughts.

  They were an hour out from the city, the walls of Biragawa reduced to a grey smudge on the horizon behind them. Ren was keeping up well enough, though his breathing was a little heavier than usual.

  “We have a lot of ground to cover if we want to hit your quota,” Jiang replied, slowing slightly. He glanced at his companion.

  He hadn’t said anything – Ren was too polite, or perhaps too proud, to admit he thought Jiang might have stolen the bow – but the relief on the man’s face when Jiang had shown up at the gate had been palpable. Jiang reminded himself that he wasn’t the only person facing a difficult situation, and now that he was making solid progress in saving his family, he could afford to be a little nicer. Especially when he was still going to profit off this whole thing anyway,

  “What are we hunting first?” Jiang asked, slowing a fraction more.

  Ren brightened, clearly having been waiting for the question. “Ah, well, we have a few options. I managed to purchase information on the likely locations of six spirit beasts in the second realm, all of which should be alone. Though I was warned that the second realm beasts tend to be deeper in the tide itself, so it’s entirely possible that we will encounter weaker beasts on the way.”

  Jiang grimaced at the thought. He hadn’t really considered that – most predators tended to stay out of each other’s territory, so hunting a bear meant you were unlikely to run into a pack of wolves. Clearly, spirit beasts were different, or, more likely, the beast tide was changing the rules. That could get… dangerous.

  Still, nothing they could do about it.

  “Now, the good news is that the information I purchased also included a breakdown of what raw materials can be harvested from these spirit beasts – which means we have an opportunity to… double dip, so to speak.”

  Jiang raised an eyebrow. “What does that mean, exactly?”

  “Well, basically, we can cut our costs while increasing our profit at the same time!” Ren answered happily. “See, the resources I need – specifically the Meridian Cleansing Pills – are outrageously expensive, mostly because the alchemist must either buy or personally locate every ingredient. If we bring those ingredients directly to the alchemist rather than making them source everything themselves, then it could essentially cut the cost in half, maybe more. And whatever parts we don’t need for my pills, we can sell to the Guild for extra coin.”

  He paused, his expression turning slightly sheepish. “Granted, neither of us is a trained harvester. Extracting a venom sac or a fire gland without rupturing it requires specific tools and techniques that take years to master, so we’ll likely mangle a fair bit of it. We’ll be selling the excess as ‘low quality’ or ‘damaged’ stock, which means we won’t get the best prices, but it’s still better than leaving it to rot in the forest.”

  Jiang hummed thoughtfully. It made sense, though he somewhat doubted Ren was prepared for the reality of harvesting spirit beast parts. ‘Harvesting’ sounded all neat and clean in theory, but in practice it was going to be… messy.

  “How much did the information cost?” he asked, idly curious.

  Ren cleared his throat. “It… wasn’t cheap. Still, we’ll earn more than enough to make up for it, and the quality of the information was worth it!”

  He paused, tapping his chin thoughtfully. “Actually, now that I think about it, it is a little strange that the Black Dragon provided that breakdown on resources at all. They have a reputation for giving you exactly what you asked for and nothing more. Providing a detailed list of harvestable organs is uncharacteristically helpful.”

  He shrugged, his optimism quickly smoothing over the crack in logic. “I suppose they must have some sort of arrangement with the Alchemist’s Guild – a kickback scheme, perhaps? With the beast tide bringing in so much potential wealth, it makes sense they’d want to facilitate the flow of materials. Everyone wants their cut, after all.”

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  Jiang frowned. He had his own suspicions about the Black Dragon, none of which he could properly articulate. Still, he doubted whoever ran the place would be that interested in him, Pact-bearer or not, and the information was helpful.

  “So which spirit beast are we going after first?” he asked, returning to his original question.

  Ren consulted the scroll in his hand, squinting slightly against the glare of the morning sun. “I think we should start with a Cinder-Backed Badger. Apparently, the teeth are used by alchemists because they are excellent for burning out impurities?”

  Jiang shrugged. He didn’t exactly have a preference, and one beast was much the same as the next. He rolled the name around in his head, then snorted.

  “Who comes up with these names, anyway?” he asked eventually. “Cinder-Backed Badger. That’s not a proper name, that’s just… a description. There’s no imagination at all. You’d think cultivators, of all people, would come up with something a bit more dramatic.”

  Ren blinked, then laughed, clearly surprised by the complaint. “Well, yes, I suppose they could, but that would rather defeat the purpose,” he said, adjusting the scroll in his hands. “Names like that are meant to be functional, not poetic. If you start calling it something like ‘Ember Sovereign of the Ashen Burrow,’ you might sound impressive, but you’ve lost clarity. Worse, different regions would invent different names for the same beast, and then you’d have people showing up to hunt the wrong thing and getting themselves killed. It was actually the Merchant Guilds that lobbied for a descriptive standard. You want a name that tells the buyer exactly what they’re getting. Cinder-Backed Badger? You know it’s fire-aligned, you know the heat is concentrated on the spine – hence the ‘cinder-backed’ – and you know it’s a badger, so you can estimate the size and pelt yield. It might be boring, but it’s efficient! And efficient markets are profitable markets.”

  Jiang huffed, conceding the point. “I suppose clarity is worth sacrificing flair. Still feels a bit disappointing. Actually, speaking of disappointing, why are most spirit beasts things like badgers, boars and squirrels? Why aren’t we hunting wolves, or bears, or tigers? Or, hell, something actually impressive. Dragons. Phoenixes. Something that feels like it belongs in the stories.”

  Ren chuckled again, clearly enjoying the opportunity to show off his knowledge. “I’m hardly an expert, of course, but from my understanding, it mostly comes down to numbers. There are simply far more badgers in the world than there are bears. If one animal in a thousand develops Qi sensitivity – or even one in ten thousand – then you’re going to see a lot more spirit beasts that started life as common creatures.”

  He gestured vaguely at the landscape around them. “Large predators already exist at lower population densities, and many of them are territorial. They don’t pack together the way smaller animals do, which limits how many can survive in a given area. That makes it rarer for them to appear as spirit beasts in the first place.”

  “As for dragons and phoenixes,” Ren continued, warming to the explanation, “those are either mythologised representations of extremely rare species, or they’re the end result of a long chain of evolution and cultivation. You don’t just get a dragon popping out of an egg in a random forest because some lizard happened to absorb a bit of Qi. If that were common, civilisation would never have gotten off the ground. Every village would have been burned down before someone figured out how to stack stones properly.”

  Jiang blinked, not having expected such a detailed response. “Huh. Makes sense. How did you learn all of this, anyway? Without joining a Sect, I mean.”

  Ren stiffened mid-stride, his boot catching on a root. He recovered with a stumble, laughing a little too loudly. “Oh, you know. Libraries. Public archives. One picks things up here and there if one is curious enough. I’ve always been a bit of a bookworm.” He waved a hand dismissively, clearly eager to move the conversation to safer ground. “But enough about my reading habits! You haven’t had a chance to properly test that monster on your back yet, have you? We’ve been walking for an hour, and I haven’t seen you so much as notch an arrow.”

  Jiang narrowed his eyes. That was an exceptionally clumsy deflection, especially coming from someone who, even he had to admit, had decent social skills. Then again, he didn’t really care where Ren had learned his trivia, and truthfully, his fingers had been itching to test his new bow ever since they left the city gates.

  “There’s nothing to shoot at,” Jiang said, tapping the quiver at his hip. “These arrows cost us a fortune. I’m not going to fire one into the dirt just to see if it sticks.”

  “Call it a calibration cost,” Ren insisted, gesturing toward a thick, gnarled pine standing about fifty paces off the path. “You don’t want your first shot to be against a raging fire-badger, do you? You need to know how the bow handles. Go on. Put one in that pine.”

  Well, Jiang didn’t need much more encouragement than that.

  He pulled a steel-tipped arrow from the quiver. It was heavier than the arrows he was used to, the shaft made of a dense, dark wood to match the bow. Despite that, nocking an arrow to the string felt like coming home.

  He exhaled, lined up the shot on the centre of the trunk, and loosed.

  THWIP.

  And… missed?

  Jiang blinked, looking closer. The tree stood undisturbed. There had been no thud of impact, no shuddering of branches. The arrow had simply vanished.

  “Ah,” Ren said into the silence, his voice carefully neutral. “Well. It happens. New weapon, incredibly heavy draw weight… it takes some getting used to. I’m sure you just pulled a little to the left.”

  Jiang frowned, lowering the bow. He could have sworn the release was clean. He felt the flush of embarrassment heating his neck – a Second Realm cultivator missing a stationary target at fifty paces was humiliating – but confusion overrode the shame.

  “I couldn’t have missed,” Jiang muttered, striding off the path toward the tree. He refused to believe a few months was enough to lose a skill he had worked at for years.

  “Of course, of course,” Ren said, hurrying to catch up. “Windage is a tricky thing. Or perhaps the fletching was—”

  He cut himself off as they reached the pine.

  Jiang stared at the trunk. There was no arrow sticking out of the bark. Instead, perfectly centred at chest height, there was a hole. It was small – the exact width of the arrow, if he had to guess – and punched so cleanly through the wood that it looked like it had been bored by a carpenter’s drill.

  “It went through,” Jiang said, stepping around the trunk.

  “That’s… the pine is two feet thick,” Ren said after a long moment, walking around the trunk to examine the hole himself.

  Jiang was already looking further back, along the path the arrow would have taken. Behind the pine, about ten paces further back, stood a second tree – a younger oak. It, too, had a hole punched clean through the centre, and the bark around the exit had exploded outward in a shower of splinters.

  Jiang kept walking. Another twenty paces back, a third tree had a deep, jagged scar gouged into its side, the wood pulverised. At the base of the roots lay a pile of dust and twisted metal – the remains of the arrow, which had apparently disintegrated from the sheer force of the impacts.

  Jiang looked from the destroyed arrow back to the line of trees, then down at the bow in his hand.

  Ren stood beside the first pine, looking through the hole at the second tree, his mouth hanging slightly open.

  “…Well, I don’t think we’re going to have any trouble hunting beasts in the Second Realm,” Ren said after a long pause.

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