The duo headed to the center of town after a productive day of hunting humans for their shards. Eres had been selective about her targets. Not too weak that their time would be wasted, and not too strong that their absence would be missed.

  “Why don’t we keep hunting humans?” Banda asked. It was beneficial to them after all, or so he was told. And it was easy.

  “That old herbalist told us, didn’t she? Otto doesn’t like his income being disrupted.” Eres walked with her gaze set forward, sparring barely a glance on but a few they passed by. “It won’t be a problem this one time, but if we keep doing it, he’ll see as a burdens.”

  As they spoke, the two walked into a large open area bustling with activity. A crowded stone-paved space half an acre large, centered around a dusty foundation covered in weeds.

  The bazaar gave off quite a different atmosphere than the largely sullen and depressing alleys they had spent most of their time in thus far.

  Peddlers lined the outskirts of the square and the dry foundation in the center. Some had wooden stalls draped with cloth to shield the murky orange light of the sun. Others simply sat on the ground with a few items spread out on cheap cloth. All sold their wares to the several hundred hardened residents walking around, the buzz of arguments and haggling filled the air.

  Eres glanced around as she walked with purpose. Only a few moments passed before she turned towards a middle aged man sat on the ground behind a few dozen thin books arranged neatly on a sheet of white cloth.

  He was short, with a lazy eye and missing more than a few teeth. He wore dirty cheap cloth, and bore the weathered look of someone who had spent too long in place like this.

  “How do martial arts books work?” Eres asked.

  The peddler glanced up in silence at them for a moment, his expression unchanged. “Put your aura intah one. Puts the circle in your mind.” He tapped the side of his head once with his finger.

  “That’s quite convenient.” She commented.

  “Have to keep drawing it everyday, or ya’ll lose it. Takes a while to master, too.” The man continued.

  “What kinds of arts do you have?” Eres asked.

  “All kinds. Only low grade. Name’s on the cover.”

  “Hmm.” Eres glanced over them. [ Stoneskin ]. [ Glare ]. [ Earth Spike ]. The man certainly seemed to have a range of arts, though none in particular appealed to her. She settled on one that would do for now and reached for it.

  “Don’t touch ‘till you buy.” The peddler spoke up. “Rules. Use the books here, then leave.”

  Eres registered the norms and customs of the bazaar without offense and turned to Banda “Which one do you… Ah, can you read?”

  “No.” Banda didn’t know what 'read' meant.

  “If you could have any of your spells right now, which would you want the most?” Eres asked.

  “Mountain.”

  “Something that reinforces the body, soul and mind.” Eres told the peddler.

  “Nothin’ like that.” The peddler responded. “Only low grade.”

  “...then Sharp Claw.” Banda settled for his second choice.

  “Beast Claw and Palm Blast.” Eres told the peddler.

  “120 Shards.”

  “That’s a lot…” Eres commented.

  “120 Shards.” The book peddler repeated.

  Eres paused a moment then handed over a worn leather pouch containing nearly all they had gained before they came to the bazaar. The peddler glanced in as he opened the pouch and stuck his hand in.

  A green glow enveloped his hand and spread to the shards. The majority of the small fragments melded together into a darker blue crystal, far too small for the mass of shards that made it.

  The peddler jostled the pouch of the remaining 20 shards and pocketed them all, handing over the two martial arts books in return.

  “How did you do that?” Eres asked with interest, as she took the books, handing Beast Claw to Banda.

  “Put your aura into Shards. They’ll make a Mana Crystal on their own. Hundred Shards to a Crystal. Can’t undo it.” He answered plainly. “Use the books.”

  Banda glanced at Eres as she gathered her aura to focus it into the pile of strange leaves she had just obtained, and did the same.

  A strange sensation filled him immediately, as though someone had imparted wisdom on him without speaking. His consciousness was made to focus on a dark sea he could tell instinctively was his mind.

  A white light started to carve itself on the surface of the sea. The lines twisted and swirled and jotted, leaving behind a glowing white trail that soon became an intricate pattern within a circle. A pattern more complex and mysterious than anything he’d ever seen.

  The moment it was complete, Banda understood what the circle could do and how it worked. Without hesitation, he channeled aura into the circle. It was slow and clumsy at first, but soon the circle shone brightly.

  Banda flexed his hands as the muscles and tendons tightened with strength. His nails grew twice as long in sporadic and difficult bursts, and gleaned with a mystical sharpness.

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  Banda opened his eyes and glanced at his transformed hand. It was more straining than the Sharp Claw he had become accustomed to all these years, and he could tell it was not as good.

  He still didn’t understand how he understood this ‘martial art’, but he did. And he could feel his aura slowly draining as he used it.

  He stopped pushing his aura into the circle within his mind, and his hands returned to normal. Eres walked off without using her art and Banda followed.

  “Doesn’t work?” Banda asked.

  “It’s not the type of art I can test in a crowd.” Eres answered.

  “...It wasn’t hard to get those Shards.” Banda spoke again, harkening back to Eres’ response to the price of their arts.

  “I was lying.” Eres said bluntly. “If everyone knows we have a lot of shards, they’ll try to rob us.”

  “We kill them.” Banda offered an easy solution.

  “That wastes time and aura better spent elsewhere. This is only the first floor, we should try not to stay too long.” Eres led them out of the wall’s open gate and towards the murky forest once more. She looked at Banda with a smile. “You take the lead for this part.”

  ---

  A giant scorpion scurried out from the dark trees towards Banda with hissing clicks. Banda hopped from side to side out of the reach of its large pincers. He feinted forward and lurched his upper body to the side, dodging the blurring strike of its stinger.

  That was the true main weapon of a scorpion, as Banda well knew. It struck fast and stretched further than what seemed possible.

  The shelled segments of its tail were bonded together by a dark sinewy flesh that couldn’t be seen in its resting state. A deceptive design of the monster.

  Banda gripped its tail just below the stinger, and whipped its body against a tree to shatter its hard carapace. The giant scorpion squirmed and twitched but Banda turned his focus away, knowing that was nothing more than the death throes of a creature who would not rise again.

  A short distance away, Eres faced off another scorpion. She wielded a sword in her right hand and a simple round shield on her left, different from the ones she had used to fight against him. Far worse in quality.

  The stinger pierced out and she turned her shield, letting the sharp long stinger scrap by harmlessly as she cut through the vulnerable sinew with a single swing.

  Eres switched the grip of her shield to hold it by the edge, baiting the frantic scorpion to grab hold with both pincers. The moment it did, she slide her sword inbetween its brow straight into its brain.

  Two more giant scorpions scurried out towards her. Her shield vanished into the air as she gathered a violent swirl of aura in her palm. She thrust her hand out and the aura exploded, blasting the scorpions away with concussive force and shattering small chunks off the creatures.

  “Any more?” Eres asked.

  “No.”

  She walked over to one of the three monsters she just killed and used her sword to pry open the shelled segments of its torso. Banda did the same for his, though he more simply ripped them away and pulled out a rough dark red stone from the corpse.

  Banda had seen them before many times but had no use for them in the past. Only on this very day had he learned what they were. The core of a monster, the source by which mana flowed through them.

  He infused his aura in and the red stone crumbled away in fragments, leaving behind a single small blue shard. These so called ‘low-grade’ weak Rank 1 monsters gave only one shard each, meaning they had five more days to kill 200 of them. More than enough time. Banda could easily gather twice as many Shards by himself.

  “Let’s call it a day.” Eres spoke casually, then noticed Banda’s annoyed expression. “Don’t give me that look. My base strength is that of a normal human without my priesthood. And most of us don’t have a costless enhancement ability. Palm Blast seems decent enough, but it takes too much of my aura. 7 or 8 is probably my limit.”

  “Use your avatar.” Banda interrupted as she started to ramble off.

  “That costs half of my mana. Or I suppose it’s aura now. Even I conjured a single arm, it would still cost a tenth. Plus it wouldn’t be good if anyone saw it. Not something I can use carelessly.” Eres’ sword disappeared as she talked.

  “How do you do that?” Banda asked a question that had been on his mind for a while now.

  “A spatial ring.” Eres held out her left hand to show a silver ring on her finger. “It can store a great many things within it. It wouldn’t be good if anyone found out about this either.”

  “I thought about this when we fought, but you really don’t use any weapons, huh? Not even a crude club?” Eres changed the topic to something she was interested in.

  “Things break. Or get lost. Or taken. I only trust myself.” Banda only had faith in his own body in a fight. Mere things would surely let him down as they had done in the past.

  “Well, we agree on that at least.”

  “You use weapons.” Banda pointed out.

  “Nothing I’m attached to.” Eres walked off in the direction of the town. “We should try hunting somewhere else tomorrow.”

  “Yeah.” Banda agreed. The monsters near the town were weak. If Shards gave them strength, then he would hunt as much as he could.

  ---

  Banda sat in meditation in the broken down shack they’d claimed as their home. Mana cycled through his body as deeply and precisely as he could manage, converting into strength and aura that was his own.

  The two of them took turns meditation. His senses and instincts worked just fine in meditation, but it required his full focus. Something that could dull his response to danger, which meant he was more vulnerable. That fact still bothered him, but Banda was not about to delay his pursuit of power for that small risk alone.

  “I didn’t think you’d put so much effort into this right away. Or sit still.” Eres said as she watched him.

  “It makes me stronger.” Banda opened his eyes as his grip on the world’s mana dispersed with his limits.

  “Well, I’m glad you think in the long term about your power. Cultivation is different from divinity. We can only reach our full potential by making our foundations as deep and firm as possible.”

  “Did the lying human teach you that?” Banda asked without a shred of tact.

  Eres’ expression flattened slightly in response, the look in her eyes as she glanced down became colder and more complicated. “...Montu was my guardian since I was young. Maybe the closest thing I had to a father, but I don’t really know what that’s like. He was to be my Sukkal for all of my journey in Eden and beyond.”

  Eres looked straight at Banda with a serious expression. “Betrayal is common on a path like ours. You should get used to expecting it. The only ones we can trust are each other.”

  “I don’t trust you.” Banda declared, which made her laugh for some reason.

  “...What do you want in this life, Wild?” Eres asked with a sense of intimacy.

  “Survive.”

  “To do what?”

  “Live.”

  “So boring…” Eres seemed a little disappointed with his answers, and seemed to want to convince him otherwise. “Life is more than just living, you know.”

  Annoyance boiled within the pit of Banda’s stomach. She took something as unpromised as survival so lightly. “You are greedy. Fat beasts get slower, make mistakes. They don’t last long.”

  “Savage wisdom is so profound…” Eres smiled in partial mockery at his insulting warning, and closed her eyes against the building wall. “Guard the door properly then, lean beast.”

  With the former priestess selfishly settling down to sleep, Banda turned his focus to the surroundings just outside the house, as he would have done whether she asked or not.

  The silent moments dragged by and he found himself glancing up through the holes in the roof at the sky above, only realizing just now that it had been a while since the last time he had.