Ten thousand steps is a hell of a long way to climb on an empty stomach. By the time I’d reached the small shrine at the halfway point of my ascent up Mount Shiki’s inhospitable flank, the weight of the iron war club I’d brought along for protection against peakweaver spiders had me so annoyed I was ready to heave it over the side.

Instead, I took a deep breath, rested my weapon against the shrine’s doorway, and went inside to get out of the freezing wind. My fur-lined boots had long since given up trying to keep the cold off my feet, and my toes were now as numb as wooden pegs. The traditional loincloth that was the only other item of clothing I was allowed to bring on my vision quest did nothing to protect my nether regions from the mountain’s biting chill. My balls felt like they’d shrunken into my belly in a vain attempt to escape the hellish cold. The farther I got from home, the more I wondered if my parents had been right that my quest to become a shaman was a bad fucking idea.

“Everybody wants to be a hero until it’s time to do some hero shit,” I reminded myself. Not that I was sold on the idea that the path I’d chosen would make me a hero. The rest of my little community certainly didn’t seem to think there was anything special about my choice.

There hadn’t been a spirit seeker in my village for as long as anyone could remember. It was a rough, not-very-well-respected profession in a world ruled by the God Emperor of the Sevenfold Sun and his scholarly priests, and my parents would have much rather I’d pursued life as a swordsman or scholar than be tramping up the side of the sacred mountain in search of my spirit animal.

I knelt in front of the shrine’s altar, bowed to the statues of the kami that adorned it, and carefully lit a stick of incense to draw their attention to the offering of fresh nuts, berries, and strips of fish that I placed on the sacrificial tray.

My stomach rumbled at the sight of the food I wasn’t allowed to eat. I’d been fasting for the past day and wouldn’t be able to eat until I reached the peak of the mountain. Even then, I could only eat whatever food I could find or kill. Tradition only allowed me to bring my meager clothes, a single weapon, an offering to appease the spirits who watched over the sacred grounds at Mount Shiki’s summit, and a bad attitude.

Come to think of it, that last thing probably wasn’t recommended, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. It was just after midnight on my eighteenth birthday, and instead of celebrating with friends and family, I was tired, hungry, and freezing to death on the side of a mountain no one had bothered to summit for as long as I’d been alive.

Even my foundation core, which I’d strengthened with powerful herbal teas and tinctures during the week leading up to this journey, felt raw and ragged. Maybe the priests of the Moonsilver Bat who’d helped me prepare had screwed up the recipes. I focused my spirit sight, weak though it was, on myself just to be sure.

Okay, well, that wasn’t the problem. My core looked as good as it ever had. The only level below foundation was neonate, of course, but I’d grown out of that before I was three years old. Both nodes were filled with rin, twice as much as most men had at my age. The sacred energy would harden my body against the worst of the cold and keep me from keeling over from hunger. Unfortunately, keeping me alive and moving was the limit of those two nodes. They couldn’t keep me warm and comfortable.

My core’s shell was its usual iron-gray shade of boring, and the bruised-looking connection point on its surface was still empty. I didn’t detect any threads of sacred energy woven into the center of my shell, either, which meant no spirit animal had taken pity on me and taken me under its wing just yet. Seemed like there was going to be a lot more uncomfortable climbing and searching in my immediate future.

“If you wanted to be comfortable, you should have become a scribe like your father wanted,” I told myself as I finished my prayer to the kami. Hopefully they would find me worthy of their attention and assign a spirit animal to greet me at the peak. The sooner I found one to bond with, the sooner I could climb down off the mountain and start my new life as a shaman.

Of course, the statues of the sacred spirits of the wild didn’t acknowledge my offering. The food remained untouched, and the fragrant smoke from the incense didn’t even stir to belie the possible presence of a curious spirit.

“Fine,” I muttered ed. “Be that way.”

The rest of my journey up the side of Mount Shiki was uneventful and unpleasant. It seemed to get colder with every step I took, and the moon’s light had begun to waver when I reckoned that I still had a couple thousand steps to go. To reach the mountain’s peak by dawn, I’d have to hustle.

Without any food in my stomach, I had to rely on the rin in my core for the energy to carry me that last stretch. I knew the whole point of the fast before the climb was to make sure I had to use my spirit, rather than my body, to ascend the most difficult part of the mountain. Knowing didn’t make the experience any less fucking unpleasant.

I had to constantly focus my breathing technique to draw in more sacred energy and replenish what I spent from my core to keep myself moving. It was a difficult process that had me gasping and groaning with the effort after the first five hundred steps, but there really wasn’t a better option. If I wanted to complete my vision quest, this was the way it had to be done.

“A man lives in the world of his choosing.” My grandfather, long since dead, had whispered those words to me during one of our many walks in the forests beyond our village. I’d been too young to understand what he meant, but the simple words had stuck with me ever since.

This was the world I’d chosen.

It was time to stop bitching and live in it, no matter how much it hurt, or how badly I wanted to call it quits.

The first rays of the sun greeted me as I crested the peak of Mount Shiki. The golden red light warmed my face, and its powerful sacred energy coursed through me in a way I’d never experienced before. The priests who’d prepared me for my trip up the mountain, and who’d warned me that the world had moved past the primitive need for shamans even as they did so, had told me the mountain’s peak was as far from the land of mortals as the moon was from the Earth. I hadn’t believed them at the time. Standing there with a new day unfolding before me, I changed my mind.

From the village, Mount Shiki had seemed tall and pointy, an arrowhead aimed at the sky. But from where I stood, it was wide and flat, a vast expanse of snow and exposed rock studded with copses of towering pine trees, stone outcroppings that jutted dozens of feet into the air, and hidden streams that burbled beneath a thick blanket of flawless white snow. Birds flitted unseen through the trees, the wind from their wings and the weight of their bodies on branches dislodging flurries of snow from the pine boughs. Other creatures stirred in the white powder, as well. A fox perked up its ears at my arrival, a white-furred lynx stared at me from the top of a spiny stone, and something much larger shook the forest’s branches with its unseen passage.

If I’d had any doubts about becoming a shaman, that was the moment in which they vanished. This was the world I’d always dreamed about. A place of pristine beauty untouched by the hands of mortals. It was exactly where I’d always been meant to be.

It was fucking gorgeous.

“Come out, come out wherever you are!” I called out, hoping my spirit animal would take mercy on my exhausted state and prance out to wrap up my quest with a tidy bow.

Every animal in sight fled from the sound of my voice, and the birds in the trees took flight as if they’d just gotten word a flock of hungry hawks had been spotted nearby.

Okay, I hadn’t really thought that would convince my spirit animal to come bounding out of the wilderness, but if I hadn’t tried, I would have always wondered how much easier I could have made my life by just asking.

I spent the next couple hours getting the lay of the land and looking for shelter. It didn’t take long to discover that there was something very strange about the peak of that mountain. No matter how far I walked in any direction, I never reached its edge. Instead, I found new cliffs and more peaks, ravines and stretches of dense forest, rivers that tumbled down the faces of small mountains and plunged over waterfalls that filled the air with rainbows and sprays of ice that glowed like gold in the sun’s light.

It was amazing, but it was also fucking terrifying. Small magic was everywhere in the world. The priests of the Moonsilver Bat could channel their sacred energy to heal the sick in exchange for a few coins. Sprites cavorted in the trees and played tricks on hunters who didn’t appease them with offerings of cheese or seared meat. My family had even enlisted the aid of a few hearth spirits who kept the fire going and helped out with simple chores in the kitchen. The Sevenfold Kingdoms were alive with senjin.

But nothing I’d seen held a candle to the batshit crazy world on top of Mount Shiki. By the time I found a small cave to call my home, my mind was reeling and my thoughts were plagued with doubts about my vision quest. I’d thought this would be a simple task, a quick trip up the mountain, a few days and nights in the wilderness waiting for my spirit animal to come calling, and then I could trek back to town victorious. That’d show those naysayers who didn’t think I could do it.

A week later, I really missed the company of those naysayers and their cozy homes and hot meals. I was freezing and tired and wouldn’t last much longer. I’d survived on the mountain’s plentiful sacred energy, and every morning I soothed my aching stomach by eating a single dreamberry from a bush I’d found outside my cave. But the berries would be gone soon, and I hadn’t been able to catch or find anything else to eat. I could live a few days, maybe as much as another week, with no food at all. After that, even the rin nodes in my core wouldn’t be enough to keep me alive.

That’s one of the things no one tells you about these spiritual quests. Sure, everybody’s happy to spout off about the enlightenment you’ll find, the way hardship puts you back in touch with your true self. Some of those so-called gurus might even tell you these things can be harder than anything you’ve ever imagined.

But no one, not a single goddamned person the entire time I’d been telling people I wanted to be a shaman, told me I could starve to death trying to find my spirit animal.

Thanks, assholes.

Every morning, I meditated at the mouth of the cave under the light of the new sun. Then I wandered off into the wilderness, cleared my thoughts, focused my energy, and filled my core with power from nature around me. I sat under pine trees and listened to the squirrels above me snicker at my plight. I watched deer drink from streams. I even waited patiently while a snow leopard sniffed at me as if trying to decide whether I was worth eating.

It left me alone, finally, so I must have been too skin-and-bones for even a wild animal to bother eating.

And then, hiking through a dense forest with my war club over my shoulders and my spirit as low as it had ever been, I almost fucking died.

One minute I’d been squeezing between a pair of scrubby pine trees, closing my eyes and turning my head to keep from getting my face scratched off by their branches, and the next I was confronted by the gleaming white bones of a few hundred animal skeletons.

The entrance to an enormous cave was fifty feet ahead of me. The snow in front of it was stained with streaks of red, and the half-eaten carcass of a dead buck lay steaming in the cave’s mouth. A deep, challenging rumble echoed from the darkness. The creature’s aura—big, red, and hungry—oozed from the cavern like the shadow of death itself.

“Oh. Shit.” Every instinct in my body told me to drop my war club and run like hell back the way I’d come. Far better to starve to death than to get ripped apart by whatever was about to come charging out of that cave.

But another part of me had moved beyond fear. I was too cold, too hungry, and just too motherfucking tired to spend another day tramping around the wilderness with an empty belly. That part of me wanted to stand its ground. It wanted to see what came out of that cave. And, more than anything, it wanted to see if it could best whatever I was about to face.

To my surprise, that possibly insane part of my mind won the coin toss.

“Maybe this is it. Let’s see what you’ve got, motherfucker, because I’m too worn the hell out to back down now,” I whispered to myself and hoped I hadn’t just made a terrible, terrible mistake. “If you’re supposed to be my spirit animal, let’s do this thing.”

A bear out of my nightmares charged from the cave’s mouth. Its fur was the color of fresh blood, and its teeth gleamed like ivory daggers in a mouth big enough to snap my head off my shoulders with a single bite. The bone-white scythes of its claws churned up chunks of blood-soaked earth and hurled them into the sky behind it as it raced across the ground toward me. Whatever else the creature might have been, one thing was obvious.

It was seriously pissed.

The crimson bear was on top of me in the blink of an eye. It lunged forward and snapped its jaws through the space where my head had before I’d jerked it out of the way. The beast rose to its full height with a mighty roar, and its shadow blotted out the sun above me. My spirit sight snapped into focus on the creature’s core, and what I saw there filled me with raw terror.

The bear held a moonbound core in the center of its body.

In all my life up to that point, the most powerful core I’d ever seen belonged to one of the Moonsilver Bat’s visiting priests, and he’d only had a skybound core. The bear’s core was two full levels above that, five levels above my foundation core, and it held a staggering twenty-five nodes filled to the brim with pure senjin. To top the other scary shit, the killer grizzly had three techniques at its disposal: one for attack, one for defense, and a third for healing or recovery of some sort.

If I didn’t do something real clever, real fast, I was a goddamned dead man.

A spike of adrenaline spurred my survival instincts into overdrive. I threw myself back and to the right a split second before the bear’s clawed paw could disembowel me.

I scrambled back into the cover of the pine trees. Their boles would keep the bear from charging straight into me, while giving me enough space to swing my club down between them. I did just that, smashing my weapon into one of the bear’s paws, and hoped the blow would convince it to go look for easier prey somewhere else.

The crimson bear had other ideas.

It slammed its right shoulder into a tree in front of me, splintering the thick trunk with its massive impact. The beast tore the top half of the damaged tree loose with a single smash from its paw and pushed deeper into the forest after me.

I wisely retreated to a position where the trees were older and sturdier. My gaze stayed locked on the beast’s burning-ember eyes, searching for some sign that the creature recognized me and wasn’t really trying to tear me limb from limb. It was just my luck to find my spirit animal, only to get eaten by it.

The bear tried to bowl over another tree, but the sturdy trunk resisted the attack and the tree remained upright. Enraged, the crimson beast shredded the trunk with its claws, flinging bark and pulp in every direction. It stared at me the whole time it was taking the tree apart, and something passed between us. Yes, this was my spirit animal. And, yes, it was going to kill me if it could.

I wasn’t sure what I’d expected, honestly. A cool and wise spirit would have been an ideal guide into the world of shamans. An owl, maybe. Or a raven. Those were supposed to be pretty smart. I’d have even accepted one of the meeker animals, like a swift stag or a cunning ferret. Instead, I’d gotten the most homicidal spirit in the forest, except, maybe, a wolverine.

“Can’t we talk about this?” I shouted to be heard over the bear’s demolition of the pine tree.

The bear stopped, tilted its head to one side, and then squinted at me with an all-too-human expression on its enormous face.

“No weaklings.” It snarled. Then it went right back to eating the tree.

That was an insult I wasn’t used to hearing. At a little over six feet tall I’d never been the runt of my village. And, while I was no swordmaster like my father, the lessons of my martial arts instructor, Misha, had kept my body plenty strong. If this bear thought I was a weakling, I’d show it the error of its ways. It might kill me, but not without a fight it would remember.

With a roar of my own, I charged forward and slammed my war club down in an overhead smash. The spiked iron’s five-foot length gave me plenty of leverage to bring the pain, and that’s exactly what I did. The weapon smashed into the bear’s left shoulder with crushing force that sent shock waves rippling through my hands and into my arms. That attack should have shattered even a big bear’s bones.

In response, the crimson bear knocked aside the tree it had been eating and lunged at me again. Its head shot through the space it had just cleared and its jaws clamped around my war club before I could yank the weapon out of the monster’s reach. The beast reared, dragging me off my feet, but I wasn’t about to release my weapon without a fight. I clung to the spiked club like my life depended on it, because it probably did.

The crimson bear whipped its head over its shoulder and sent my club and me sailing through the trees into the clearing in front of its cave. The unexpected maneuver caught me off guard, and I landed awkwardly, then tumbled onto my back in the snow.

That was a very bad place to be with a giant red bear trying to eat me.

I rolled away as the bear charged me again and kicked up to my feet before it could kill me where I lay on the ground. The beast was stronger than I was, and faster in a straight line dash. My only advantages were desperate cunning and years of combat training under the guidance of one of the Sevenfold Empire’s most renowned sword mistresses, Misha Aralis. I wasn’t sure those were enough to turn this fight in my favor.

When the savage animal tried to tear me apart with its claws, I dodged back, counterattacked with a slam from my club, then circled around the fucker to hit it in the back before it could chew my face off. When it charged, I dodged to one side and slammed my spiked weapon into its flank as it passed. No single attack I made was enough to drop the beast on its own, but the dozens of small wounds I opened bled the strength from its body and drained its core of the senjin that fueled its rage.

If the crimson bear wanted a fight, then I’d give it a goddamned fight.

Our battle rocked the top of the mountain until we were both half-fucking dead. I fought my murderous spirit animal until its flanks were foamy with sweat and its head sagged against its blood-soaked paws. The spirit animal’s left eye was swollen closed from a powerful blow from my war club, and its mouth was lopsided with missing teeth. The crimson bear looked like it had fought half a battalion of the Emperor’s own guards.

My foe’s wounds made me look like the most badass brawler this side of the Iron Arena. Unfortunately, my injuries were just as bad, if not worse.

My torso was covered in deep gouges and brutal bites. A flap of meat hung off my left shoulder, and my right thigh was torn open to the bone. I’d lost so much blood I had to lean on my war club to keep from pitching over onto my face. My hit-and-run tactics had worn the beast down and kept it from killing me, sure, but it had taken its toll in blood and meat from my carcass in the process.

We’d stained the snow red with our blood for as far as I could see in every direction. Hell, from the color of the sun as it set on us, we might have painted the sky with our gore. The seemingly endless battle had knocked over trees and ripped deep furrows in the earth. The fight had left scars on the mountain that would take generations to heal.

And still the crimson bear eyeballed me like it wanted to cut out my heart and eat it. To my credit, I stared right back at her, though my vision was a blurred fog and the last of my blood was scant minutes away from pumping its last onto the ground beneath my feet.

“Not a fucking weakling.” My words stumbled all over themselves on their way out of my mouth. I was punch-drunk and more dead than alive by that point. I thought I deserved extra credit for forming a sentence, proper diction be damned. My core was empty, and I was too weak and too worn out to even try filling it back up.

The crimson bear glared at me from less than a yard away. It could have killed me with a single blow, though the effort would have likely killed it, too. The embers of its eyes had burned low, and its aura guttered like a candle in a stiff breeze. The creature’s core was as hollow as mine, all of its sacred energy burned as fuel for our fight. Finally, the bear shuddered, raised its head, and leaned forward until our noses touched.

“Not a weakling.” It managed to grunt out, before we both pitched onto our sides in the snow.