Ivor was back at Samsara City after his arduous journey; carrying over 100 pounds of wolf corpse on your back isn’t that easy. Over his trip, he had begun to ponder certain things about humanity’s situation. Ivor assumed that the 10,000,000 humans had been spit out in one group, as he didn’t find anybody else on his trip. The maps he had looked at showed that the three sects that had been recruiting at the beginning had cities set up at the edge of current human territory; not to protect the other humans, but because the people outside of the triangle they formed weren’t able to fight against the beasts, especially the stronger ones. Ivor had plenty more questions, but he didn’t have much information and wanted to cultivate as much as he could before the beast tide, which he couldn’t do while researching.

He had read some of The Basics of Cultivation to alleviate his boredom on his walk back, as he couldn’t cultivate without a method to absorb the qi in his large intestine, although he figured that once he got his pills, he could eat them and send the qi through his digestive system into his bowels. After he finished opening and filling (the terminology used for enhancing a meridian with qi) his meridians, he would enter the qi infusion phase, where instead of just pumping his meridians full of qi, he would pump his full body full of it, not forcing it to store it like with qi attunement, but aligning it to his body as he did with his meridians. The book said that this had to come after because he needed his meridians to gather the qi he would use in the rest of his body.

After reflecting on his trip, Ivor arrived at the slums and checked out the scene of his fight with Big Stain. He found a multitude of corpses, people who had died fighting for the energy pills. Ivor was dumbfounded, not at the violence, but at his own foolishness. He could barely register that he had caused these deaths as he spoke in a soft voice. “I really should have expected this, huh? I mean, I would definitely have for these pills, although I’d like to think that I wouldn’t have killed anyone. No, who am I kidding, if I had been in their situation, I definitely would have. Huh… I wonder why I’m not freaking out? I read some articles about shock and guilt from killing others being delayed, so I guess that’s true? Wait… thinking about this logically, if you chose to fight for this, you knew you were risking your life. This isn’t my fault. I definitely didn’t indirectly kill anyone by trying to help them. I’m a 100% guilt free man.”

Ivor successfully deluded himself before going to look for the girl he had seen before, wanting to get in the city quickly to get some clothes to replace the hoodie and sweatpants he had been wearing in a fire-aligned environment for three days. He wanted to check up on her and see if his intuition was right, but he also wanted to get out of his sweaty clothes and take a shower. It was then that a look of horrified realization dawned on Ivor’s face. “Oh… oh no. The sect might not have showers. Oh shit.”

Temporarily pushing his worries out of his mind, Ivor found the girl who had surprisingly managed to reach the peak of qi attunement in only three days. Was it the pills that helped her? Did she eat someone? Eh, what I don’t know won’t hurt me. Ivor pushed that idea out of his mind mainly just to avoid the picture of the eight-year-old girl only standing at 4’1 eating a human entering his head. He bent down to address the little girl and smiled in an awkward, slightly scared way while trying his best to look nice. “It seems like you hit peak qi attunement. That’s pretty fast. I know you’re not supposed to go with strangers, but I’m betting that you were separated from your parents during the transportation.”

Ivor held out his hand to the girl, who hesitatingly started to reach towards him before pausing and asking something that surprised Ivor, looking up at him with an excited smile in her eyes. “Do I really get a pill every day? If so, I’m in. I might be young, but I’m not a coward. I had to fight for those pills, and getting them for free would definitely be appreciated.”

Ivor liked the cut of this girl’s jib. She seemed just as shameless as him, if a little too trusting. If there was anything Ivor had learned by working himself to death, it was that you can’t trust the system. A job might seem enticing, but you could end up having hours of unpaid overtime to go with it. “Yeah, you get one daily, if that’s your concern. Although I’m not sure why you’re trusting me. Is it intuition?”

The girl chuckled in a manner resembling Ivor in its shamelessness. “Yeah, something like that. My name’s Edwina. Edwina Connor.”

Ivor giggled childishly; Edwina’s resemblance to him personality-wise contrasted with her innocent appearance in a way he found amusing. “Then follow me to the sect, Edwina.”

Ivor and Edwina walked through the gates of Samsara City, his service disciple status allowing her to pass, before dropping her off at the branch headquarters of Samsara City’s outer west district and recommending her as a service disciple. They exchanged goodbyes as Edwina went to be tested and Ivor walked over to the request desk a few feet away after being told that Edwina’s testing would be done tomorrow. He slammed the wolf he was carrying on his back down onto the request desk, along with the harmonic lily. “This is the full intact corpse of a feralfang alpha, besides the useless intestines, and the valuable parts of eleven normal ones, as well as a harmonic lily. That’s 20 energy pills, 2 contribution tokens, and two treasures made with the alpha’s corpse. Please assess it.”

The man at the counter flushes red, seemingly flustered by Ivor’s straight to the point attitude, but he’s been at the sect for a while longer than the apocalypse. He quickly regains his composure and replies to Ivor. “I’ll have to test the materials, but I’ll be back to you in ten minutes at most.”

The nondescript man walks off, leaving Ivor to collapse into a chair and stares into the empty air. Ivor’s eyes close in exhaustion, and he falls asleep, grateful to be able to take a rest after multiple all-nighters in a row. As his consciousness fades, Ivor has one last thought: I hope someone wakes me up. Dammit, why didn’t I set an alarm?

* * *

Ivor is shaken awake by a blonde, fair-skinned, slim figure: Daoist Silkpants. His first reaction is to scream at the young man. “WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL ME THE ALPHAS HAD ABILITIES?!?!”

Silkpants tilts his head to the side in confusion. “Daoist Treasury, I don’t appreciate you screaming, but did the alpha you faced have an ability? They shouldn’t according to the sect’s divinations, and we’re quite good at divinations, I assure you. This is troubling, to say the least. It’s possible that the beasts are using cultivation techniques not innate to them. How they would have gotten or understood them, I’m not sure, but this could be a major problem for the sect. Junior Apprentice-Brother Treasury, I’ll give you some face and ignore your outburst as thanks for this important information, but it’s very frustrating, and I’d appreciate it if you’d reciprocate the face I’m giving you and refrain from it in the future. Here are your rewards; you can request the treasures later. I’m going to go report this to the sect now.”

Silkpants placed a pouch full of energy pills in Ivor’s right hand and two engraved bronze tokens, what Ivor assumed were contribution tokens, in his left, before briskly walking away. Ivor turned beet red in shame. He might have been shameless when it came to profits, but he had just screamed at someone who didn’t tell him something he didn’t know.

Ivor pushed his sadness behind him, opened the pill pouch, and threw six pills into his mouth. The pills went down his gullet and dissolved in his stomach, releasing their payload of qi. Ivor directed this bursting energy down and out of his stomach, through his small intestine, and into his large intestine, at which point it easily flew into his meridian. He expected that to fill the entirety of his maximised capacity (the boulder was a fairly high-quality treasure for Ivor’s level), but it only filled a little more than half of it, with the rest of the qi being lost while reaching Ivor’s small intestine. After realizing this, Ivor ate six more pills, repeating the process to fill his meridian up all the way.

After the extremely satisfying feeling of improving his cultivation faded, Ivor got out of his chair and left the branch headquarters behind before walking to his room. He had only napped a little, and was looking forward to more. On his way back, Ivor decided that he wanted to save up his contribution tokens for another shot at the Treasure Trials, but all of his thought was swept up into a wave of exhaustion as he collapsed into his bed.