Samantha observed her regrowing fingertips with impatience, willing them to be whole faster. Nearly a week had passed since she holed herself up in the cave, and she felt that she had enough of the Eastern Reaches to last her a lifetime. She missed her home and her family after 3 months away, and she could hardly wait to get back to them now that the goals she set for herself were nearly met. She reflected on the past days as she watched the flesh reform.

The first day, after getting the rough cave defenses set up near the entrance, she briefly stopped by the place where they had killed the Spitting Viper to see if anything could be salvaged. She didn’t expect much, considering the notification had informed her it destroyed its own beast core, so it didn’t surprise her when all she found at the spot was a crater. If something useful had remained after the initial blast, nature and scavengers had already cleared it away.

So, she set her sights completely on learning the techniques detailed in the manuals. It took her several days to become competent with the material, but with her new insight into Sage’s Rumination the process was much faster than she expected. By the end of the fourth day, her labors had borne fruit and she had a qi pool of 18 and a base qi regeneration rate of 0.8/hour. With Sage’s Rumination active she could feasibly gain up to 8 qi points in 5 hours, but in practice this wasn’t necessarily the case. Due to the difficulty of always maintaining the right state of mind, she often lost the concentration required if she were too engaged with any task more thought-intensive than walking; However, she had confidence that this would improve with practice.

So, practice she did. She cancelled her automatic qi allocation from earlier and reset it to fill her qi pool, and then walked the area of the cavern. She worked diligently on maintaining Sage’s Rumination while simultaneously moving and changing her qi flow to activate Flawless Regeneration. She repeated the act until her successes began to outweigh her failures, and by the end of day 6 her arm was nearly whole again.

During this time, she found that, unfortunately, Flawless Regeneration did not negate her need for sleep. When she was wholly mortal, Samantha required around 8 hours a day to be in peak condition. After becoming a cultivator this halved to 4 hours a day—though cultivating in high qi areas such as the fount allowed her to stay awake for a few days at a time so long as she slept for longer after she finished. Using Flawless Regeneration, she only needed about 6 hours every other day without any significant drawbacks that she could tell. It didn’t give her a ton of time back, but every little bit helped. Sleep was the one time where she didn’t think she’d be able to sustain Sage’s Rumination no matter how much she practiced, so the less she needed to rest, the better.

Samantha stilled her wandering thoughts as the last details began to reemerge from her healing flesh, and she found herself holding her breath while she watched. Regrowing her arm had not been painful exactly, but it was irritatingly uncomfortable. The sensation that her arm was asleep never went away, and she occasionally had itching or pain where her phantom limb should have been. She couldn’t wait to feel ‘normal’ again.

When her fingernails finished growing in and settled into their rightful place at the ends of her fingers, she clapped her hands together with vibrant glee. She whooped and cheered, punching the air with both fists and doing a cartwheel for good measure. She was more than ready to get the heck out of here.

“Silas, I’m fully healed! It’s time to head back to Yivesh. Are you far?” she sent excitedly.

“Nope, I’ll be there in a minute!” he replied.

Silas’s grasp of human language had been another thing that greatly improved during her week here. With the long gaps between qi point generation and nothing much else to do, she had taken some time to try and actively teach him about ‘human’ things. Language, laws, societal norms, and generally what to expect when they returned to town were all topics that she covered in her mini lessons. Nothing too in-depth, of course, since thinking too hard would cause her to lose focus and her meditation bonus, but Silas soaked up all the information she threw at him like a sponge. Beyond his mischievous and gluttonous nature, he was actually quite curious and clever.

Seeing him pick up things so quickly made her confront some uncomfortable truths about how she had viewed Spirit Beasts, and him by extension. Despite being willing to die for Silas, she realized that she had never truly viewed him as her equal. There was some part of herself that still viewed him like he was a primitive animal, but the past days had shaken up that belief. Sure, no amount of education would ever change the fact that he was a Spirit Beast, but that didn’t mean that he was inherently less intelligent or capable. It just meant that he had a completely different knowledge set than she did. And this, in turn, made her question if all the ‘beasts’ she had slain during her time in the forest had been… more? She revisited her experiences of cultivating beast cores and fighting to suppress the flow of the memories within. Did the lucidity of the memories indicate that they were as sentient as any human? Or was heightened sentience something that Silas had gained after they formed a bond? She had been too afraid to ask at the time, not knowing what she’d do with the knowledge either way.

“I can feel your sadness and doubt. What’s wrong?” Silas inquired.

“Sorry, I was just thinking about…” Samantha stopped herself, briefly debating whether now was the time to get the answer to her dreaded question. “I’ve been worried about something lately,” she continued, switching directions, “but I don’t know if now is the right time to talk about it. Can we discuss it later if it’s still bothering me?”.

“Okay, just let me know. We’re a team now, after all!” he finished brightly, trying to lift her mood. The feelings of comfort and affection he sent along their bond did just that, and she resolved to ask him about it after they made it back to town. She quickly regained her previous good cheer, and she packed up everything in their makeshift camp as she felt his energy draw nearer to her location.

Samantha met Silas at the cave mouth after finishing her packing, and they retraced their steps back to where they had fought the Alpha Iron Boar. Silas scouted ahead and had to guide her around one spirit beast that would have crossed their path at one point, but it was a relatively uneventful stroll overall. It appeared that many animals were already beginning their hibernations.

As she had estimated earlier, the dead season would be upon them soon. The countless fallen leaves crunching under her feet and the ever more barren branches above her were a testament to its nearness. It was now chill enough for the puffs of her breaths to be visible in the air, and she knew that it would only get colder by the day. She was glad that they were able to start the return trip now rather than during the full force of winter as her worst-case scenario planned for.

Before long, they arrived at the artificial clearing that the boar pack had made. The Alpha’s carcass was unrecognizable, the small bits that were left behind, anyway. She mentally patted herself of the back for taking the extra time to cut free the pelt and some meat, because now only a few shards of bones lay scattered around the site where the Iron Boar had fallen. The one thing that remained intact was his skull, still suspended in place by the tree trunk and his tusks, just like she had hoped.

She initially tried maneuvering the skull free of the wood, but it was well and truly stuck. Since she needed the tusks to make a weapon, and she didn’t have anything suitable for cutting through the thick tree, she got creative. She found a large rock nearby and smashed it into the skull over and over until it broke into pieces, leaving only the teeth behind. From there, removing the embedded tusks was simply a matter of patience.

Of the six tusks that she gathered, only the two that grew after the Iron Boar’s evolution to Rank 3 would be suitable for her purposes in their raw and unprocessed state. The other four had significant curves that would be more suitable for scimitars than spearheads. Unable to distinguish a notable difference between the two straight tusks, she chose one at random and pulled out the grapevines that she had originally stripped for their leaves from her pack. She then looked for a sapling of some kind to use for the spear shaft, finding a patch of growing hickory trees a way off. Chopping it down with a very carefully held tusk, she brought it back to the clearing and started refining the shape with her skinning knife. She spent some time notching the wood and carefully wrapping the vines, and then began the process of making pitch glue.

She pulled her cooking pot out from her pack and filled it with a decent amount of pine resin from nearby trees. She cleared a small area of forest debris to prevent a wildfire, and started a small fire to heat the resin and melt it. Taking the charcoal that formed as the wood burned, as well as some of the dried leaves that she had just cleared from the area, she crushed both into dust and blended them into the liquid. Once the glue reached the consistency she desired, she smeared it over the wrapped portion of vines to better hold everything together.

*Ding* Crafting Success!

Primitive Bone Spear (Average Quality)

This six-foot-long spear was made from the remains of a Rank 3 Alpha Iron Boar, a hickory tree sapling, grape vines, and pine resin glue. Utilizing your previous experience with making bone spears, you’ve improved your design and increased the quality of construction. Still won’t win any beauty contests though.

Samantha rolled her eyes at the notification, dismissing it as soon as she finished reading and ignoring the jab at her craftsmanship. If it held together in a fight, she couldn’t care less what it looked like. She figured that it couldn’t make her look any worse than her ugly robes and barely regrown hair already did.

She looked down at the monstrosity she’d sewn together and cringed. In the light of day, it was impossible to ignore how the bright blue and green detailed silks of house Granvich badly clashed with the deep red of her original cotton cultivator’s robes. She sighed and ran her hands over her scalp to check her hair’s regrowth, feeling the beginnings of stubble on her head and eyebrows. Apparently, losing hair didn’t count as a physical injury that Flawless Regeneration could fix, so she’d have to be careful in the future to protect her locks or get comfortable with the bald monk look she currently sported. She couldn’t complain too much, she knew, since having her hair burnt off was a much better alternative than being scarred head to toe, but she did wonder if anyone would even recognize her when she got back.

Samantha cleaned out her cookware thoroughly to get the sticky substance out, and took advantage of the still hot pot and coals by roasting herself a cut of Iron Boar Steak. She didn’t want to miss out on the +2 to Resilience that it gave now that her trip was going to truly be underway. That done, she and Silas made their way West towards Yivesh.

The trip that originally took her nearly 3 weeks was now managed in one with her heightened statistics and Flawless Regeneration keeping her afloat. Her heavy equipment weighed down her steps, but the occasional point put into healing let her hike through the entire day without stopping. She still was sure to make camp at night, not wanting to run into any of the Spirit Beasts that prowled the dark, but she made fast progress across the forest regardless.

She found that although her progress was objectively fast, the days often seemed to stretch on as she repeatedly restored her tired and torn muscles; but, once again, the universe proved to her that there was always a Silver Lining somewhere. Her exertions did not go unrewarded, and she gained +1 Strength and +1 Endurance on the 3rd and 5th days of travel respectively, all from lugging around her 350 pound pack day in and day out. Admittedly, it wasn't all totally boring either, since Samantha took this opportunity to get to know her companion a little better.

“Hey, can I ask you about what it was like to live here? Before the fount, I mean.” she queried. “We’ve spent a good amount of time together, but I feel like there’s still so much I don’t really know about you or Spirit Beasts in general.”

“Like what?”

“Like… I don’t know. How old are you? How did you survive around here during the night when the more dangerous beasts come out? Oh, and I’ve been meaning to ask this for a while now: do you know why you’re listed as a Rank 4 Spirit Beast?”

Silas was silent for a few minutes, but Samantha could feel that he was just thinking about how to answer her, not ignoring her. So, she waited for his reply.

“My earliest memories are from the last dead season. So, by human calendars, I believe I’m around 1 year old? I survived by hiding, mostly. A lot of the night beasts are larger, so they can’t reach into burrows well. It also helped that I was the fastest of my brood. You usually just have to be faster than the others if you want to escape an attack.”

Samantha was about to apologize for making him remember something unpleasant, but he sensed her intent and cut her off before she could begin.

“It’s alright. In this forest, death and life go hand in hand, so there’s no point in being sad or bitter about it. In the end, I survived, and with you I feel that I will survive even longer!”

Samantha could feel a small twinge of sadness coming from him through their bond, but she decided not to press the issue and continued listening.

“As for why I’m ranked highly… it’s hard to say. You know that ranks are not purely given on physical strength?”

Samantha sent an affirmative.

“Not all Spirit Beasts start at Rank 1 and have to work their way up either. Some, like myself, start higher and rank up very slowly. Others start low and gain power quickly. It depends on a lot of things. I believe I started at Rank 4 because I have access to an unusual number of abilities.”

“You have other abilities?”

“Yes and no. You’ve seen me use all the ones I currently have access to, but I can tell in the future that more will unlock if I get stronger. I don’t know what they will be or how far off they are, though.”

“I see. You must have a large qi pool then, because I’ve seen you use abilities a lot back-to-back.”

“Oh, Spirit Beasts don’t really have qi pools. I can see why you would think that though since that’s how it is for you.”

“How do you use abilities then?”

“We can use any ability so long as it’s not on cooldown. Maybe it’s because our skills are more closely tied to our nature than humans? I mean, humans can learn all sorts of new arts that are foreign to what they can normally do. Qi fuels those abilities and allows you to become ‘more’ in a sense, but the abilities we Spirit Beasts have are limited by our species. If we rank up or evolve, like the Iron Boar did, we sometimes get new abilities added, but they’re always related to what we are. For example, I’ll never learn how to fly unless I get some crazy evolution with wings.”

“Well thank goodness for that, you’d be impossible to deal with then! You’d probably have a blast dropping things on my head when I least expect it.” she teased.

“You know, I hadn’t planned that far ahead yet… but I’ll definitely be adding that to the to-do list now!”

They continued their banter as they traveled and learned more about each other, and Samantha familiarized herself with the cooldown times for Silas’s abilities so she could plan around them more efficiently.

His version of Swift increased his agility by 50% for 10 seconds and had a cooldown of 3 seconds. He would get fatigued if he overused the ability, however, so he had to be careful to ration his energy usage in a fight. His version of Translucence gave him up to 30 minutes of pseudo-invisibility at a time, but the cooldown increased by 1 second for every 5 seconds the skill was active. There was also a “Thump” attack that had a cooldown of 30 seconds. She didn’t have an equivalent to the skill in her Bond Abilities list, but she figured this was the attack he’d used on the Boar’s eye during their battle. His passive skills such as Herb Hunter, Prey’s Perception, and Poison Connoisseur had no cooldowns. “As One” did not appear in his list of abilities at all.

“So nearly all the bond abilities I have access to are related to your own skills, but there are some skills we have that don’t appear for the other? That makes as much sense as anything else, I suppose.” Samantha noted.

They were less than half a day’s journey from Yivesh now, and Silas had become more animated as they neared her home. He’d never seen a human town before, and all the stories she had conveyed about the buildings, history, industries, and people excited his curiosity. Perhaps she should’ve also warned him more extensively about their capacity for trap-making.

The jaws of the steel trap snapped cruelly around his foot, biting deep and rooting him to the spot.

*Ding* Sprung Steel Trap has activated “As One”. Moderate wounds for Silas have been transformed into Light wounds for Silas and Samantha.

Samantha yelped at the unexpected pain, jagged cuts and bruising blossoming near her right ankle. Nothing was broken, so she put a point of qi into Flawless Regeneration, dumped all equipment except for her spear to get more speed, and hobbled over to the place up ahead where she knew Silas was trapped. As she approached, she could make out the sound of male voices growing louder.

“…like a Lunar Hare. Haven’t seen one of these before—normally they’re nocturnal.”

“…eating well tonight! And we didn’t even need to fight it.”

“…tougher than he looks…”

She broke through the tree line to see three hunters circling a snarling Silas, and she shouted out in barely contained rage and panic, “Get away from my bond now!”

They turned to look at her, looking surprised at her sudden appearance. Samantha guessed that the sight of a 5’4”, filthy, bald, eyebrow-less woman, wearing the most atrocious robes they’d ever seen would cause anyone to gape.

She wasn’t keen on waiting for them to get it together and respond, so she dismissed them and ran forward. One of the men tried to get in her way, but a mere 2 points/second into Swift allowed her to quickly sidestep the unsuspecting hunter and she reached her target. Before anyone could do anything to stop her, she reached into the trap and wrenched the jaws apart, freeing her companion. She could see the men unsheathe their straight swords and start to approach her with her Prey’s Perception, and she turned to face them. With spear in hand and righteous anger flooding her system, she released the full force of her killing intent towards the group.

“I won’t warn you a third time. Get away from my bonded companion.”

The men stopped, all three becoming deathly pale and sweating as her killing intent hit them like a tidal wave. Killing intent was an interesting thing that cultivators could do, though Samantha had never tried it until this moment. A cultivator could create a powerful aura with their spirit, and the higher their cultivation rank the stronger it would be. If you believed the rumors, the leader of Yivesh (a Peak Bronze) could exert a killing intent so potent that any non-cultivator would be at risk of dying. As a Mid Copper, Samantha couldn’t do anything quite so extreme with hers, but she could, apparently, make people feel exceptionally uncomfortable. The fact that her aura affected these men at all meant that either they were mortals—unlikely since they were outside the city walls—or Low Copper cultivators, a rank below her.

The three of them looked between her and Silas, the Hare baring its teeth at them from behind her legs. A long moment passed as they calculated their odds of winning, but then they stepped back while sheathing their weapons. In unison, the three lightly bowed in respect to her, but she didn't dare let down her guard while surrounded by three potential opponents. The one who had tried to stop her earlier spoke up.

“Forgive us, sister. We were unaware that this… Spirit Beast was claimed. It is an unusual choice, as so many typically gravitate towards companions that increase their fighting prowess.”

It was a backhanded compliment if she ever heard one, and she resisted the urge to return a scathing retort. As angry as she was, she could acknowledge that it would’ve been difficult to tell that Her and Silas were travelling together since he was scouting ahead alone, and she also knew that many would find her choice to be odd, so he wasn’t wrong. She couldn’t let the comment pass unaddressed though.

Cultivators fought almost as much with their words as with their bodies, the complex dance of saving face and building reputation deeply intertwined with their place in society. She was somewhat familiar with the game because merchant houses like hers had to dance to a similar tune when bargaining and making deals, so she knew the stakes. Being too aggressive would make enemies, but being too lenient would portray her as a pushover to be taken advantage of. So, she settled for mildly scathing instead.

“And yet, I return triumphant from my cultivation quest as a Mid Copper, reaching heights in months that some take years to achieve. Of course, I do not mean to imply you three in this comparison, brothers. I can sense that you all will be nearing the next stage yourselves, soon.”

It was difficult to tell the age of a cultivator, since with each cultivation stage lifespans extended and aging slowed, but it wasn’t difficult to tell that all three were older than her. The hint of wrinkles played around the corners of the speaker’s eyes and mouth told a likely tale of at least a decade of unsuccessfully trying to break through.

Her comments hit home, as she expected, and she only received a grunt from him in reply. He lowered his head briefly before looking up and giving her a crooked smile.

“So, not quite as green as you look then! Not a bad first showing for a new cultivator, not bad at all. My name is Liam, and perhaps we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot here?”