“So, I was thinking.” said Mae, floating over to Shen. “Isn’t the formation on my needles and the sword the same?” Mae had gotten used to flying on a sword over the last thirty minutes and now that they approached the field she had finally relaxed enough and gotten used to it enough to fly while having a conversation.
“Well, they are really similar. I’m not sure which one was created first, but the two are close enough that I was able to use the Flying Sword formation I was familiar with to modify the Accurate Shot formation. The difference is that the Flying Sword formation has an extra circle to make you stick to it if you want, so you don’t fall off. In the Accurate Shot formation this circle is removed and another is added to make your control work at much greater range.”
“Wouldn’t the Accurate Shot come first, as it is useful in combat? I could see people developing combat uses, then making it a way to travel.”
“Maybe.” Shen said, thinking about it. “You can actually control your chi after it leaves your body, but it works much better when there’s a solid object inside it. That’s the basis of the Kinesis techniques, which those two formations are based on. I could see people realizing that and going from hard to curve chi bolts to easier to curve rocks or arrows, then working their way up to both flying dagger attacks and flying sword transportation.”
“Wait, you can curve chi bolts?” Mae asked. She hadn’t practiced magic that much, but she had never heard of that.
“Yeah, someone told me one time that you just have to want it to curve to make it do so, but I’ve also heard that you should imagine a rope coming from the target to it to pull it in. It’s not really complicated enough to call that a technique, but it’s not something everyone seems to know.”
They entered the valley at that time and Shen lead them to the part of the field where the Moon Lilies were most common. After landing Shen and Mae explained to the boys what they were looking for. Shen had learned about them when researching which spirit plants were native to this region years ago and Mae had learned about them from a book on plant based alchemical ingredients. After explaining the proper way to pick them, they all set out to look for them. Shen had made sure to tell them to try and sense the chi inside the flower. There were similar non-spirit flowers in this valley, but all of the Moon Lilies should have dark chi inside of them. If in doubt, though, any spirit flower would likely be worth gathering in small amounts, assuming it was gathered properly. If they happened to get any special plants, Mae was certain that the Sisters she worked for would be willing to pay something for them if only to expand what they had available.
After an hour they all met up at the spot where they had landed to compare what they found. Mae noted that many of the Moon Lilies looked like someone had gathered them before. “I wonder if someone else took this mission as well, and just didn’t do so officially. Or maybe it’s a recurring quest.”
Shen looked at some of the grass nearby and noticed that several of the stalks on it had been cut off near the ground. She noticed that this was true for many of the nearby flowers, including the Moon Lilies. She looked carefully at the plant but couldn’t tell if it had been cut or broken, so she touched her divine sense to it. She quickly realized what had happened. “It wasn’t harvested. It was eaten. There is saliva on the stalk that looks cut. Probably something with sharp teeth.”
“Do you know which kind of animal?” asked Danka. Some of the larger herbivores in the area could be dangerous, and sometimes wild boar liked to eat plants as well.
Shen shook her head. “Unfortunately I don’t really have a way to figure that out. My divine sense is still really weak, and I don’t have any special sense techniques, so I’m limited to extending my own senses slightly. I just know it was saliva from a spirit beast because my divine sense lets me smell it and detect the small amount of chi in it.”
They nodded. None of them had tracking skills, so it would be difficult to figure out which of the animal tracks in the field matched the animal that ate these, even with the ground being a bit muddy due to all of the snow melt entering the valley from it being slightly warmer here than outside the valley.
They checked on the other plants they had found as well. Shen found a Fire Fern. It was only Middle Cleansing realm currently, but she had dug it up rather than removing the fronds so that Mae could replant it and hopefully keep it as a house plant. Danka had found Sword grass. This grass had sharp edges and contained a tiny amount of sword chi which further enhanced this sharpness. He had to use his own sword chi to cut it down, as trying to pull the blades from the plant would have cut him. Ponma found Snow moss and Earth Root. The first was like normal moss, only it could grow even in snow. It contained little Ice chi, as it essentially used what it could for body cultivation, increasing its own cold tolerance. It could be eaten to temporarily make a person more cold resistant as well. The second was an edible root that contained Earth chi. He had gathered several of them, from early Cleansing to Early Gathering in strength. The roots weren’t really used in pills other than to enhance the chi levels, but they were delicious and filling. Mae had seen a few other spirit plants, but as none were properly mature yet she didn’t pick them.
Now that they had more than enough Moon Lilies to fill the mission, the got back on their swords and flew to the mines. There they lined up according to their role on the team. Shen and Danka would be in the front, as both could fight with a sword, and Ponma and Mae would stay at the back, as Ponma was using arrows and Mae would be avoiding most of the combat so that their healer didn’t need healing themselves. At least Mae had one of Shen’s better quality recovery rings on, so she could recover from minor injuries quickly enough, but serious injuries would mean that no one would know how to treat her. All of them had removed what Body Cultivation bracelets and rings they had, but not the chi recovery bracelets, so their body’s stress shouldn’t be slowing their recovery rates. Shen had forgotten to make everyone Recovery rings, but if they got even a small amount of Spirit Copper she would be able to make better ones, so they just needed to finish this mission and she could provide them with better equipment.
They entered the cave and Shen held out her hand to produce a light. Next time they would need to remember to bring cheap chi lights so that they could see. The necklaces could be bought for a stone each at the shop, and would be very useful in this situation.
Any time they reached an intersection, Shen spent a minute drawing a small chi light formation on the walls in chalk followed by an arrow pointing towards the exit. It barely produced any light, but it would be enough to show them the way back if they got lost. For now, all of them knew how to make a light bolt, so they did so.
Ten minutes later they were traveling down one of the branching tunnels. They had gotten bored and stopped paying attention to their surroundings, which is why they suddenly found over a dozen rats the size of small dogs jumping on them, biting them. They immediately started trying to kill the rats or knock them loose. Shen and Danka were only annoyed by the rats, as the rats were unable to penetrate their shields, but Mae and Ponma were getting bitten every few seconds.
Not trusting that her sword skills were good enough to not hit her friends, Shen ran over to Ponma, as he was the closest, and started grabbing rats before throwing them at the wall. With her strength there was a sicking crack followed by the squeals of death every time one impacted, but both sides ignored the sounds. When Ponma looked clean Shen moved to help Mae, but Danka had just finished the last one off. Apparently he had learned to send out sword chi to the area near him, targeting anything he wanted it to hit within that area. This had allowed him to cut the rats without needing to swing a weapon near Mae.
Once Mae managed to calm down she sat down, closed her eyes, and started meditating. A few seconds later she opened her eyes. “No venom, but a few diseases. I also stopped the bleeding, but I can’t do that with another person.” While Mae handed an anti-biotic pill to Ponma and started bandaging their wounds, Shen pulled out her paintbrush and a few pieces of paper. She quickly started placing arrays on them to gather the ambient chi and create light. All but one of them were placed in her pocket, where she would occasionally pull out one and throw it on the ground to light their way. These simple relics should stay lit until they were damaged, and as dry as it was down here that would likely mean that a rat or some other beast had damaged them.
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Danka started collecting rat corpses. “Seventeen.” he said after counting them. “Some of them look a bit different, though. They are solid black.”
Shen looked them over. She wasn’t an expert on spirit beasts, but she had never heard of this variation of rat type spirit beast. “Anyone know anything about these?” Shen asked. “They don’t seem to be normal spirit beasts. For one thing, they should normally have chi in their blood. Only the black ones do, and it’s weak Dark chi. Also, I suppose it isn’t conclusive since they aren’t common in Cleansing phase beasts, but none of them have beast cores.”
There was a few seconds of silence before Mae spoke up. “Maybe they are False Spirit Beasts?”
“What do you mean?” asked Ponma as she wrapped his arm.
“Well, you can give any beast some of the traits of spirit beasts by forcing them to cultivate.”
“But how would you do that?” asked Danka. “They aren’t intelligent enough to use the technique and they don’t have the instinct to do so like spirit beasts. Did someone use mind control magic on them?”
“I suppose you might be able to do it that way, but no. I read in a book that if you fed any animal cleansing pills it would purge the toxins from their body. If you did that until no more toxins could be removed, then gave them a Gathering phase Breakthrough pill they might become Gathering phase, and you could use them like a trained spirit beast. This is somewhat popular among nobles in some kingdoms, but not popular around here, as the herbs needed to make Breakthrough pills don’t naturally grow in the Mountain region.”
“So, someone fed them cleansing pills? Did an alchemist or other cultivator drop some and the rats found them?” Danka wasn’t too sure about that theory.
“Maybe. But maybe they ate Spirit Grass out in the plain.”
“There is a lot of it out there.” said Shen. “We just overlooked it because it isn’t worth picking at this time of the year.”
Mae nodded. “It would also explain why some of them are black. They are the ones that ate the Moon Lilies out in the field.” The others looked confused. “The lilies contain Dark element, right? Well, if they ate too much of it they would need to either adjust to it or learn to use it, or it would kill them. It doesn’t really work that way with humans, but spirit beasts tend to look like their element if they have one. So a black rat might be a rat that can use the Dark element.”
“Oh, I get what you are saying.” said Ponma. “That might also explain why they could ambush us. Other than how dark it is down here, I mean. Dark element is good at hiding, especially in shadows. And the whole cave is basically a shadow.”
Danka nodded. “In that case, we need to keep the area lit to make them easier to see.”
“Not sure if we can.” said Shen. “I only have so much paint and talisman paper on me, and both are kind of expensive. I could try doing it in chalk, but the array will need to be big and I’m not sure there are enough flat areas available to make them very often.” She handed two self-lighting talismans to each of the others so that they could use one to light their way and keep one as a backup. The bundle of talismans she had briefly made barely put out more light than one of them due to how much of the ambient chi they used, so every one she handed out made the area brighter. Now the cave looked like a room with low light, not a dark area with only a few bits of light in it.
After a minute they noticed that their lights were getting dimmer. Suspecting that something was interfering with the chi in the air, Shen stretched her divine sense out a few heights in front of her, about the width of her bedroom. She could go a bit further if she wanted, but even at the current distance she could only feel things the width of her hand or bigger, and didn’t want to risk missing an enemy because she couldn’t feel it. The actual distance she could see with her eyes was only arm length, but she could see the slight glow of the other’s talismans so she could at least tell where they were.
She barely had time to react as she felt something rapidly move towards her. She stabbed her sword towards the object and it suddenly got heavy. The area got brighter, but not as bright as it should be, and Shen saw a rat the size of a large dog pinned on the end of her sword, dead. The rat was pitch black except for its eyes, and she could feel its chi start to move towards its chest as it stopped breathing.
“Shadow Rats.” she said. “Be on guard.”
Suspecting that the rats were running at the group from the front, Ponma drew a fire arrow and shot it down the pathway ahead of them. There was an explosion ten heights ahead of them which briefly lit up the corridor, showing at least six rats before setting two of them on fire. As he couldn’t see well and wouldn’t know where the enemy was coming from, however, he knew that it would be dangerous to fire exploding arrows in this situation. He put his bow away and drew his flying sword.
Now that their cover was blown the rats rushed at them. Danka knew that unintelligent rats should have been frightened by the explosion and at least partially scattered, so these rats must be more intelligent than normal. That meant that they were likely Spirit Beasts benefiting from the intelligence increasing effects of chi.
Seeing how effective fire seemed to be Shen threw several fire balls down the corridor. They exploded, killing a few rats and lighting three more on fire. The shade effects the Shadow Rats relied on to ambush their prey was mostly gone as few of them could concentrate, and through the light of the fire Shen could see several more rats running in from behind the first group.
Danka managed to throw three sword strikes down the passage before they were close enough that he had to use his shield to block them. Shen swung her sword at the incoming rats and Ponma and Mae added in attacks of their own whenever they saw an opening, either a chi blast from Ponma or a flying needle from Mae, which would immediately return to her hand, usually after hitting something sensitive.
It took five minutes of continuous combat before the last of the rats fell to one of Danka’s sword strikes. “Is everyone okay?” he asked, and everyone responded that they were fine.
Shen threw several light talismans around the area, careful not to drop them in blood, as that could stop them from working. She could tell that several of the rats had all of their chi gathering in the center of their chest, rather then spreading through their body. She went back to the corpse of the first rat she had killed and pulled a jar from her magic bag. “Hey, Danka, can you help me drain their blood? You’re taller than me, so you can lift it higher without flying.” she asked. The ceiling was about two heights high in this area, but carrying something while on a sword was difficult, as it threw off your balance.
“You want their blood?” he asked, walking over. He was tired from the combat, but thanks to his chi he could keep going.
“Making more talisman ink?” asked Ponma as Shen slit the beast’s throat while Danka held it over the jar. Shen was surprised that he asked it, but he explained. “One of the merchants in town told me that he saw you leaving the mission hall with a jar of Beast Blood. His best guess was that it was to make talisman ink.”
“Oh,” Shen said. “Well, there are versions of talisman ink that use it, and it’s possible to use it like it is. In fact…” She stuck her finger in the blood and started drawing on a fairly smooth section of the ceiling. She drew a large version of the light formation, dipping her finger in the blood several more times, and when she finished it the area lit up like there was a lantern hanging there. “That should last until the blood dries completely and the chi it draws it starts damaging it. Maybe two or three days.” By the time she finished with the formation the rat was drained and she went to the next one, having Danka lift it as well. “I need as much spirit beast blood as I can get to make Blood Iron and Blood Steel.” She looked at Mae and Ponma who were shocked that she would just put her hands in blood like that. “We can take a break here, if you guys want. I’m going to be draining blood for a while, and you can probably make decent leather armor from their hides if you want to skin some of them. Just start with the ones that have been drained.”
The two younger people looked at each other and Ponma shrugged. He wasn’t opposed to cleaning animals, but had never done so before, so he let Mae, who had some medical training, show him how to do it. Medical training might not have taught her how to remove skin, but it did mean that she knew far more about where they should cut.
As they worked on the first one Mae noticed something was off about it. “Hey, Shen, this one has almost no chi in its body.”
Shen paused and sent her divine sense into the blood in the jar. “You’re right. The blood from the one I’m draining now has a good bit, but the blood in the jar has a lot less.” She then remembered the weird feeling she got from it when she killed it. “Hey, can you check the center of its chest, right behind the rib cage?”
“Where its middle dantian would be if it were a human?” asked Mae.
“Exactly.”
Mae nodded and cut open the meat under the sternum, then stuck her hand in. After feeling around for a few minutes she pulled out a small black marble. “Is that a beast core?” she asked.
“Exactly.” Shen responded again. “No idea why, but they formed when some of the rats died.” She walked over to Mae and held out her hand, and Mae handed it over. “Early Gathering.” she said after touching it with her divine sense. “At least if I compare it to the Fire one I bought.” She moved her hand and it moved from her ring into her hand. The one from the rat was smaller and a different color, but other than that they looked very similar. “The fire one is Middle Gathering, but this is almost as good. Not sure how much they are worth, though. Probably more than the hides, and definitely more than the blood.” Shen went to the other corpses and felt inside their chests with her divine sense. The three that felt like they had a stone in their chest were thrown into a pile. She checked to see how much chi their bodies contained and found that they were almost completely depleted. “Those have cores, if you two want to harvest them. I won’t be draining them, because the blood needs to have as much chi as possible to make good Blood Iron.”
They worked for another hour before Shen had gathered almost two jars of blood from the rats. Theoretically, their entire bodies could be refined into useful materials, but she didn’t know how to do that, so she only took a few extra organs from the strongest rat so that she would have the charcoal to turn all of the blood into Blood Steel.
Mae and Shen had gathered the three other beast cores and all of the pelts, minus the ones on the drained rats. Shen wasn’t sure if the hide would still work as armor, but didn’t want to waste time gathering them unless she knew they were worth taking. After they finished with their job Ponma gathered some water from the air and used it to wash his and Mae’s arms. Shen did the same for her and Danka when she was finished draining the rats and they stored everything before heading deeper into the cave.
