59th of Season of Fire, 57th year of the 32nd cycle

  The deinonychus had tried everything. It flew up and slammed Newt to the ground half a dozen times, it slashed, bit, and even slapped him with its tail. Newt endured. He poured all his spiritual energy into the effort, the earthen half protecting him, the fire half cooking the deinonychus alive.

  The seconds stretched, the brief battle exhausted Newt like a drawn-out, hours-long conflict. He tried to reshape his improved Firewall to blast the fire only at his enemy, rather than in all directions. Elder Flameax had helped Newt evolve the technique, but testing it in battle for the first time revealed that over half his energy was wasted, scattered in useless directions.

  The blast of heat intensified as Newt redirected the energy from his back towards his chest, and the deinonychus shrieked like a demon. Suddenly, Newt shuddered. He kicked the deinonychus away and rolled to the side when a scythe of air sundered the earth where he lay a fraction of a moment ago.

  The charred deinonychus whimpered on the ground, most of its energy spent on the powerful last ditch attack it had performed. Newt did not know and did not care whether his enemy was dying or its injuries were serious but non-lethal. He sprinted towards the immobilized dinosaur, unsheathing his shortsword and with a swipe of his blade, severed its head.

  What was that? Newt panted, staring at the headless deinonychus leaking blood. It felt like it severed my arm for a moment.

  Newt turned around and looked at the trench the deinonychus had made.

  That would have cut off my arm.

  Elder Alabaster’s words echoed in his mind, repeating that no element was harmless, and that assuming so was folly, but Newt pushed the thought away. Instead, he focused on the flash of pain which had bitten his upper arm just before the deinonychus struck.

  Unwilling to let the sensation escape him, Newt did something foolish, something all cultivators knew they must never do. Something he knew was folly. He sat down to meditate. In the middle of a danger zone, right next to a carcass of a spirit beast he had slain.

  But that did not matter. What mattered was the tingle, the itch in his bicep, in his bone. The sensation was long gone, but the memory of it remained, filling Newt’s body with discomfort while his soul tickled. Whatever it was, the feeling was important, and Newt submerged himself into it.

  Cultivation and introspection were already second nature to him, so he had no trouble locating the source of the sensation. It was a phantom stimulus, but then again, so were most other things related to cultivation, spiritual made physical, his soul interacting with his body, and now, Newt’s newest form of perception had done something to warn him of an attack which had yet to happen.

  Wait. That’s what it was doing all along.

  Danger sense, as Newt thought of his newest sense, warned him of danger lurking ahead. Yet, how could it do that without seeing a possible future? Walking in a given direction could not be dangerous in and of itself. What was dangerous was the thing awaiting in that direction, action which had yet to happen, an enemy he had never met.

  Newt submerged himself in such considerations, exploring his past experiences. His master said the crowd subconsciously parted for her. Why? They feared a lethal encounter which could have happened, but never did.

  Various scenes flashed through Newt’s mind, first focused on himself, then the enemies he bested in battle, then everyone and everything else.

  He opened his eyes after what seemed like mere minutes, but it was already dark. The dead dinosaur, laying a handful of feet away, had attracted no predators or scavengers.

  There are some benefits to Valley of the Lost. The thought flashed through Newt’s mind, overrun by his considerations on danger sense, or precognition, as he believed would be a more accurate way to call the new sense.

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  The ability was always there, in the back of his mind. What the Valley of the Lost had done was make it more prominent, easier to sense, but it had not created it, merely stimulated it.

  And the stimulation comes from being in the wrong layer, which holds spirit beasts powerful enough to threaten me. If you’re in a lower layer heading towards the one appropriate for you, then the spirit beasts you encounter are just as harmless as the rest of your environment. If you’re in a layer dangerous enough for you, the spirit beasts are also dangerous.

  Newt’s situation was either dumb luck, or someone had set things up for him. He mulled over that thought, and the latter seemed more likely.

  Was it Master? That seemed like a reasonable explanation. As far as Newt was aware, nobody else had a vested interest in his success. While an interesting train of thought, it was useless at the moment, and Newt pushed it far back, to revisit one day. Instead, he focused on more immediate issues.

  I will need to fight against spirit beasts from now on. If I assassinate them from the rear, they don’t provide any danger, and I can’t train what I think I can achieve using danger sense.

  Newt got up. He was about to leave, to wander the darkness, when he recalled the deceased fourth realm spirit beast, and more importantly, its potential core.

  There’s no way its core survived.

  He bit his lip, then plopped his butt back on the ground. He had medical bills to pay, plus other unknown debts. Dawn was just some hours away, and he could not hunt at night anyway.

  Dawn proved Newt’s guess right. He cursed the dinosaur and himself aloud, then took a random direction in search of spirit beasts. The first one appeared two hours later. A blip of safety in a world of danger.

  Newt stalked it from the behind, coming across yet another fire-attributed hadrosaurus. The beast was agitated, staring away from Newt, waiting for the phantom to appear from the mists before it.

  Newt’s instinct told him to ambush, to kill without danger. But the purpose of his hunt was the opposite of slaying enemies from a position of safety. So, Newt hefted his glaive, coated his body and his belongings in Granite Crust and Magmin Scales, then struck the ground with the butt end of his weapon before dashing towards the hadrosaurus.

  The beast turned around and swiped with its fore-claws. Newt failed to sense the wave of fire before it appeared. It washed over him, and while the spiritual energy infused into the technique was superior to his own, the technique itself was worse than the worst of the Blazing Salamander clan’s devolved ancestral arts.

  The scorching heat burned upon contact with Magmin Scales, merely obstructing Newt’s sight for a moment. He approached to five feet from the hadrosaurus and stabbed with his glaive. The dinosaur swiped its claw at the weapon to swat it away, but Newt sent a bolt of flame straight at its head.

  Unsurprisingly, hadrosaurus had a shield against heat. It snapped into existence, blocking most of the heat, but not all. The beast screeched, and using the moment of blindness, Newt’s glaive sank into its chest, delivering a deep wound. A downward slash made the wound worse, and with his enemy crippled, Newt finally felt a bit safer.

  Given the extent of its wounds, the hadrosaurus was far from being an equal opponent.

  The rest of the battle turned into a chore. Newt intentionally left several openings for the hadrosaurus to try to take, but even when the beast attacked, Newt’s danger sense remained silent. He put the enraged, dying beast out of its misery and ended the battle.

  Why didn’t it work?

  Newt considered the matter while searching for the core. The best answer he could come up with was that he was putting himself in danger intentionally, and that sensing the danger in that case was a moot point, since it did not even exist in the first place.

  Does that mean I have to face real danger to practice danger sense? He swallowed, even forgetting to curse when he found no core in the hadrosaurus’s chest. Is it worth it? To put my life on the line just to get a little bit better? To improve my odds?

  It was a nasty thought. Cultivation was going against the heavens and natural order. If mankind hadn’t taken any risks, we would have been extinct already, overrun by the Savage Wood eons ago.

  Newt then thought of an example he knew from his personal experience. Dandelion risked death and madness to restart his cultivation, just to get a chance at getting stronger, at climbing higher.

  Newt still recalled Dandelion’s words, their meaning closer to the core of his being than ever. “Weakness, my dear Newstar, is a terminal condition. One we must fix at all costs.”

  I guess it’s like Magmin said, evolve or die. Newt clenched his fists, about to head to find a tougher fight when he looked at the dead hadrosaurus.

  “Why the hell am I even bothering searching for the cores when my luck is so rotten?”