Chương 2: Young People Really Ought to Hustle

The platform went quiet for a few breaths, then filled with low murmuring. The players looked at Su Ye, some eager, some measuring. Several priest attendants in short white-feather tunics came through the crowd; the older woman at their head reached out and lightly touched the cub's forehead. The cub buried its head deeper and slapped its tail fin against Su Ye's waist. Su Ye held her shoulders rigid.

"Could you talk to him? Get him to come down first?"

"You're the one closest to him now," the woman said, a note of encouragement in it.

"Try talking to him yourself." Su Ye looked down into two wet, round eyes.

"Um… how about you get down?" The cub let out a short, aggrieved gurgle and spread its transparent wings, covering half her face. Out beyond the crowd, Wang Pu watched in open admiration.

"That's not affinity anymore. That's a shakedown." The older woman lifted Su Ye's tendril-wrapped wrist and examined the ring of pale cyan light. Then she turned toward the priests' dwelling and bowed respectfully to an aged silhouette behind the white-feather curtain. The High Priest leaned on a gray-white bone staff. The hair above her brow was worked into thin braids that hung to her waist, the ends strung with transparent scales shed by grown cloud spirits.

Wind moved through her hair and the scales knocked together with a fine, clear chime. She looked at Su Ye across the crowd for a long moment, then tapped the staff softly on the ground.

"Take her to the Sacred Spring." There was a great deal of procedure still to come after the Choosing. Su Ye was simply carried off with it, the clingy cub in her arms, a knot of priest attendants steering her toward the waterfall. On the platform, the Choosing went on. Gu Zhiwei withdrew to the stone pillar and went back to studying the cubs. They accepted food. They responded visibly to soothing sounds. They were willing to approach anyone who moved slowly.

If a candidate grabbed at them, they usually slipped away fast. The cub out on the fringe with the white blaze on its forehead had a particular weakness for purple berries. It had already conned berries out of three different people without forming a single spirit pact. Gu Zhiwei went and asked the old woman for two ripe purple fruits. This time she didn't crouch and wait. She walked a half circle along the platform's edge until she found the white-blazed cub poking its head over the vine railing.

She split the skin and let the sweet-sour juice wet her fingertips; the scent carried off on the wind. The cub turned, as expected. It swam a loop around her, nostrils flaring, eyes glued to the pulp. Gu Zhiwei lowered her hand. The cub came in. Close now, close enough that she could hear the soft wet click of its blowholes opening and closing. A soft feeler stretched toward her palm, its tip meeting the juice running off the fruit. Still one inch of distance.

Then the cub jolted, wings beating the mist apart, and dove into the cloud sea without touching the fruit at all. It moved as though what she held wasn't a sweet berry but a poison that ate bone. Gu Zhiwei brought her fingertips to her nose and sniffed. Nothing unusual. She tried another cloud beast. The second one would eat the fruit, but ate it hovering in front of her, keeping an arm's length the entire time.

When she shifted half a step forward, it drifted half a step back, blue-white tail fins swaying uneasily in the mist. The third was blunter. It saw her hand rise from a distance and turned away. Gu Zhiwei drew her hand back. Once could be chalked up to coincidence. Three times said something. Something about her made the cloud spirits unwilling to come near. The Choosing lasted until the sun leaned west. Su Ye didn't reappear. Presumably she was still at the Sacred Spring being instructed by the priests.

Shared main quest progress had climbed to 20%. The others weren't idle either. Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon. The blonde woman's name was Julie; she'd gotten hold of a length of hollow vine tube and blew whistling notes, high and low, until two cubs were circling and playing around her. Matt helped the tribe's hunters dress fresh fish, ended up reeking of it, and was thick as thieves with the head hunter inside an hour.

Maria spotted scrapes along one cub's wing edge and was crouched beside a priest attendant, passing herbs. Chen Li hadn't pushed into the crowd at the Choosing. He was talking with several older tribespeople, working the conversation sideways for anything about the Rite. Everyone was hunting an opening. Only Wang Pu had used his hunter identity to infiltrate the cluster of tribesfolk roasting meat, and he came back still chewing.

"I asked around." He passed Gu Zhiwei a piece of roast wrapped in a broad leaf and dropped his voice.

"The High Priest doesn't just raise fish, ah, cloud beasts. She's in charge of a lot. Healing, star-reading, the Rite. There might be other ways to get picked." The meat was charred crisp at the edges and dusted with some kind of pungent grass seed. Gu Zhiwei took it, thanked him, then asked, curious, "What did you trade for it?"

"Force of personality."

"In human, please."

"Split half a basket of firewood for a guy." Wang Pu rubbed his arm with the face of a man who had lived through hardship.

"Strength 9 is still Strength. System-certified. We don't shortchange the young or the old." Gu Zhiwei bit into the meat. Tender, fresh. She looked up toward the priests' dwelling. Winning a cloud beast's recognition was the fastest road. It wasn't necessarily the only one. She finished the meat and went to find Chen Li. He was standing outside a treehouse used for storing herbs, holding several leaves with blackened edges. When she'd laid out her conclusion, he pointed down through the sea of trees.

"I picked up a few things too. The priests' remit is wide. When disaster hits the tribe, they organize the evacuation. And things come up out of the ground here and hurt people fairly often. When the hunters can't handle it, the priests ask the cloud beasts to help drive them off."

"What things?"

"The tribe calls them earthcore beasts." Chen Li turned a leaf over, exposing a dense clutch of insect eggs on the underside.

"Shape isn't fixed. They're afraid of strong light. They go after the gathering grounds near the tree roots, or anyone caught alone. The tribe is reinforcing the lower vine bridges today." Wang Pu had just wandered up. He caught that last sentence and his feet made an immediate U-turn.

"Where are you going?"

"I've suddenly developed a lot of confidence in Su Ye. She's at 22% already. Round up and that's a quarter of the game cleared. Let the professionals do the professional work." Chen Li looked up.

"If one person carries the main quest and anything happens to that person, none of us goes home. Never mind that the first to complete a quest gets a bonus." He paused, and put weight on it.

"A skill bonus." Wang Pu's feet U-turned back.

"Come to think of it, young people really ought to hustle." Gu Zhiwei studied the wooden ladder down to the lower level. Whether she was first to finish didn't actually matter much to her. But her temperament made it very hard to hang her life, or her chance of getting home, on someone else. Cloud beasts could probably detect something humans couldn't perceive. She didn't know what the invisible wall around her was, and blindly trying again would only reproduce the same result.

If the fastest road was closed, take another one. Start with the lower level.

After dark, lamps came on one after another in the treehouses of Cloudperch. The lamps were made from hollowed white nutshells filled with a pale blue grease. The flames burned low, almost smokeless, giving off a smell like roasting nuts. Gu Zhiwei found the treehouse this identity had lived in before leaving. The old woman was her maternal aunt, and had kept the place up all these years so the tribe wouldn't reassign it.

The wooden bed inside was spread with large treated leaves that felt very much like a cotton blanket. A small wooden cabinet stood alone in the corner, holding a few old things that belonged to this identity: a small bone knife worn down badly, sized for a child's hand; a little ball woven from soft vine, not finely made, but someone had clearly gone over the vine with care to strip the thorns so it wouldn't prick; and a cyan feather band, half braided.

When her fingers met the cool feathers, Gu Zhiwei understood: her parents had been making it for her coming-of-age rite, and had died in an earthcore beast attack before they could finish. It caught her off guard. She'd assumed this was a life fabricated out of nothing. But standing inside it, she could feel the warmth behind these objects, and the warmth was real. She sat by the window and opened her hand. The chill the cub's wing edge had shed still lingered on her wrist.

She thought of her parents in her own world. It had been a long time since she'd thought about them. The summer she was nine, her parents finalized their divorce. Her mother asked which of them she wanted to live with. Her father stood a few steps away, talking on the phone. He did not spare her so much as a sidelong glance. Gu Zhiwei wanted to say she would go with her mother. But when she looked up, her mother avoided her eyes. So she lowered her head and said, "Either is fine."

This was the maturity they wanted from her. So she gave it to them. Outside the window, a cloud beast swam through the dark. Faintly glowing feelers hung from its belly, and it gave a long, low call as it passed the treehouse. The sound vibrated against the window frame and carried in a thread of damp, cold air. Gu Zhiwei closed her fingers. Outside, a bone whistle went off, shrill. Right behind it, not far away, came the huge crack of splitting timber. A vine bridge lurched.

A child's crying and a hunter's shout tore the night open at the same instant. Boom. A heavy drumbeat rose from the lower level of the tribe. One long. Three short. The scrap of memory this identity had filled in woke all at once in her head. That was the attack alarm. She ran out of the treehouse into a face full of cold wind. A thick smell of raw earth churned up from beneath the cloud sea, and mixed into it was a blood smell close to rust. Torches flared, one after another.

Hunters ran for the wooden ladders with spears in hand. From deep in the dark came a shrill scraping, as if countless crawling things were climbing the roots of the great tree. Wang Pu burst out of the treehouse opposite with his shoes half on.

"What's happening?" The second vine bridge snapped with a roar. Broken planks fell into the mist, and a long, black-armored leg reached up out of it and hooked the edge of the platform. The alarm sounded again.

"The earthcore beasts are here!"