For absolutely no god damn reason the creature started struggling while they were nearly to the top of the mountain. Puren Ning nearly dropped him down the hill, and more’s the pity that she managed to keep her grip. That meant she had to both keep her balance and struggle against a wriggling ball of potential murder. The only reason she didn’t deliberately let go was because of the certainty that she would have to go back down there and drag the thing back up here.

“Would the master take pity on this servant and stay still? The weight makes it like carrying a bag of primordial chaos.”

“In our innermost nature, all beings are slaves to their base instincts.”

Stupid wisdom. Mercifully, that did lead to the end of the struggles. It wasn’t too difficult to drag the creature up the rocky trail when it wasn’t making it so. In fact, according to the helmet they were there. An arm, just laying on the trail. The material was the same as that of the helmet, showing it was part of the same set. She stepped closer to the arm, wondering what secrets it could hold within it; the helmet was able to show her the energy of the heavens itself, so the arm could… Reach out to the beyond and grasp the intangible? Punch really hard? She wasn’t exactly sure what it could be, but it was probably going to be great.

Letting the creature rest on a flat spot of the path, Puren Ning reaches out and takes the arm. It’s hollow, like it was meant for her to stick her own arm into. That would be an insult to the owner though; insults were not to be given lightly to those who could destroy whole towns with nary a thought toward it.

“This one offers the artifact to its rightful owner.”

“In its current form, the arm is too weak to be of any use to me. Keep hold of it, until the full glory of my armor is complete again.”

“This one obeys.”

Holding on to it just meant acting like a pack mule, not actually using it. The helmet she was allowed to use, mostly because she hadn’t been forbidden it yet, but this arm she couldn’t wear just because the creature wanted to use it later? If she wasn’t collecting for this beast, and he wasn’t a powerful master of cultivation, she would go and collect the rest herself. That would make her claim on the nebulous powers in these artifacts completely unassailable. There was a reason people didn’t do that, mainly that any cultivator so slighted would be well within their ability to simply eliminate the claimant in question.

If she had a chance to slip away with it, she could try it on though. Night was getting close, and that meant even if the beasts in the forest were to try advancing they’d be struck dead by the increased power of the tribulation lightning. Night time was fairly safe, as long as you knew how to evade the monsters. The trick was to watch the moon.