Ivor stood up after his breakthrough, now thoroughly ignoring the black metal boulder out of sheer force of will and walking out of the clearing in the forest before breaking into a light jog, which although slow for him, hit 30 miles per hour. He was vigilant for pings on his treasure radar and nearby monsters. “Now where could those lilies be? ”

Half an hour of running aimlessly later, Ivor felt a mental tug in a certain direction. It felt like his treasure sense had activated, but when he focused on the sensation, he noticed that there weren’t any qi fluctuations in that direction. Ivor smiled a smile of satisfaction, not a smirk or shameless grin this time. “That’s either the lilies or something rarer that does the same thing, so it shouldn’t be bad either way.”

Ivor pivoted and turned 190 degrees to his right, coming to a complete stop before kicking off the ground towards the treasure. Realizing his carelessness, he quickly slammed his feet into the ground, sliding a few meters before stopping once more with a bead of sweat coalescing on his forehead. “God, I need to be more careful. What would I have done if there were monsters on my route? I mean, if there were, they probably just heard me, but at least I won’t run into their mouth.”

It was at this point when Ivor realized that he was simultaneously very lucky and not lucky at all. A growl rang out from around ten meters away, in the direction Ivor was running. Ivor was lucky to find the lilies so fast, but unlucky because they were surrounded by monsters which were hidden by the tall, volcanic trees and the thick, blue foliage. He was lucky he stopped on time, but unlucky because these monsters had good ears and heard him stop. As a group of charging wolves became slightly less obscured by the foliage, Ivor noticed one more of these contrasts of fortune. He was unlucky because a pack of monsters was charging at him, but lucky because it was a pack of feralfangs, the monster he was supposed to be hunting.

After considering his options and realizing that this wasn’t exactly the easiest situation to kite the feralfangs in, Ivor did the thing most people would do in this situation: he started running, accompanied by a beautiful melody: “FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCK!”

Sadly for Ivor, despite his cultivation, humans aren’t made for going quickly. Wolves aren’t either, but they’re faster than humans, and they’re built for a marathon. His cultivation let him easily surpass most of the feralfangs, but there was one he couldn’t escape… it was the biggest, fastest, and strongest among the fangs, the alpha.

It was crowned as the alpha because it had reached meridian opening, and it was dashing at Ivor faster than most cars, knocking down an entire tree in its pursuit just by running into it, which Ivor found curious. “It shouldn’t be able to do that with just its cultivation, or it would’ve caught up to me by now. Wait… damn the heavens! I shouldn’t say that, should I? I’ll get smote. Ah whatever, I’m going to make Silkpants regret saying that these things didn’t have innate abilities. He seemed pretty nice, so I guess I could hear him out, but I’m going to yell in his ear for hours on end. Oh, the alpha is starting to catch up. I should really do something about that, shouldn’t I?”

Ivor sank deep into his own mind, letting his body run on autopilot, and desperately tried to come up with a way to kill that monster. I’m thinking that my best bet would be poison. I’m guessing I can breathe it out for fifteen seconds total now, considering my qi capacity, but how do I get it into the alpha? Maybe I could fart, but I have no clue how my large intestine ability actually works, so I don’t want to rely on it. Maybe I could backflip onto it and breathe in its face? Yeah, that could definitely work. Sounds like a pl- OH SHIT A TREE!

Ivor’s limbs flew forward as he impacted one of the larger volcanic trees, which he thought was far harder than a tree had any right to be. Whether it was because of urging from his physique, or just pure survival instinct, Ivor did two things: he breathed out his blood red poison gas, as much as he possibly could in a short amount of time, before starting to climb the tree, even as his chest was cut all over by the jagged obsidian. He felt a sense of deja vu, remembering his last tree climb, one which was nearly as painful as the current one, albeit with the pain far more spread out across time, and egged on by that memory, began to Breathe, allowing him to ignore the pain to at least some degree and keep climbing.

The alpha rammed into the tree, expecting to knock it over like the trees before it and reach its prey, but even as it shook, the tree stood tall. The tree was different from the others. It was taller and had more girth, but more importantly than any of that, it was older. One of the defining factors of a natural treasure is its ability to draw in qi over time, and the volcanic trees dotting the island just barely counted as natural treasures. This volcanic tree had lived for over a millennium, and was far too sturdy to be knocked over by a meridian-opening dog.

The alpha would have normally realized that and moved onto another method of attack, as aggression isn’t the same as idiocy, but it had been going too fast to avoid running into the tree once, and by this point, it had already inhaled Ivor’s poison, a neurotoxin that damages the nervous system over time and incites uncontrollable rage in those without firm enough control of their emotions, which the feralfang alpha, as suggested by its species, was lacking. Its tree-ramming was scratching its head, letting the poison enter it even faster, a vicious cycle that the alpha could no longer stop. It was doomed to bash into the tree until it was killed by the neurotoxin. Ivor watched from above, having recovered from his panic, looking down on the alpha, both figuratively and literally, as it hurried to end its life faster. “That was… concerning, to say the least, but I guess it worked out. Oh, now that I think about it, this thing’s pack is probably still coming, so I guess I should prepare for that.”

Ivor inhaled until his chest swelled and then a little bit more, before looking to his right and then swiveling his head to the left while exhaling. The qi in his lung meridian was exhausted, but a cloud of red began to descend, covering half of the tree. The pack of feralfangs came into view soon after the alpha let out its last pathetic breath. Their already potent natural aggression increased multiplicatively when they saw their leader’s corpse.

The horde of feralfangs tried to scramble up the tree instead of charging into it, but they sealed their own fates the moment they inhaled Ivor’s poison despite their new method. The pack’s newfound bloodlust clouded their already rage-addled mind, causing them to slip and even tear into each other when climbing. They lacked the already measly self-control and intelligence of their leader, and even that didn’t suffice to resist Ivor’s gas. The pack quickly forgot about climbing the tree and devolved into quite literally ramming their heads against a wall until they died.

A few minutes later, Ivor had breathed enough to partially refill his lung meridian and climbed down the tree to inspect his kills. He had killed eleven feralfangs and the alpha, an amount worth 28 energy pills and two contribution tokens, as all of the corpses were in mint condition after being poisoned to death, doubling their value. Ivor only had one problem: carrying them all. But before thinking about that, Ivor went to find the harmonic lilies. There weren’t any further complications, but he only found one, less than he was expecting. “Maybe they’re pretty rare? Or maybe they don’t grow in groups.”

Ivor began pondering how he would carry all the corpses while walking back to the killing ground before realizing something: “I can’t carry this all. There’s way too much. I guess I’ll carry back the alpha’s full corpse and take the important parts of the rest. I guess that must be the normal approach, only taking back the full corpses of the most valuable creatures.”

Ivor pulled out his knife and started to butcher the corpses, getting the most qi-rich cuts of meat, the livers, the hearts, the teeth, and a portion of the brain; the one that governs emotions before disemboweling the alpha, bleeding all the meat, and stuffing the goods inside the alpha’s stomach before sealing it up with some adhesive sap from the strange blue foliage. He could do all of this because of his Dao. It didn’t only help him find treasures, but harvest them too. These corpses weren’t anything too special, so he breezed through it. Ivor set out for the sect with the alpha on his shoulders, preparing to receive his reward. It took him a full three days to get back while carrying the astoundingly heavy alpha and having to hide from any beasts that might attack him while he was weighed down. Relief touched his gaze when he entered the large clearing around the sect, spotting the slums and the large wall. In a faint voice that could almost be called a sigh, he uttered a few words: “Thank god it’s over. I haven’t slept for days.”