Chương 16: Catching Up

The road to Shenhua was wider than the path from the sect to the Cloud Sea ridge, wide enough for two carts to pass each other without stopping, with waystones marking distance at irregular intervals and the occasional traveler's shelter set back from the road's edge. They had the road to themselves. Miho set the pace. The others followed. After the first twenty minutes, when the Cloud Sea's ridge had disappeared behind a curve in the foothills and the road had leveled into something sustainable, Viria said, "So.

We have time. Talk." It was not directed at anyone specifically, which Zero had learned meant it was directed at everyone.

"You first," Yukito said.

"You and Zero have been in the Cloud Sea for two hours."

"I know you fought a Silver Wind Serpent," Viria said.

"I got that from Zero's summary. What I want to know is what happened before that, because you two were alone for two hours and I know for a fact that both of you are worse at silence than you look." Miho did not change pace.

"We walked. We talked."

"About what?"

"The crossing. Spirit beasts." Viria waited Miho's response that did not come.

"…Do you want to elaborate on that?"

"No." Viria looked at Zero instead. Zero supplied the answer she wanted, "We talked about the Cloud Sea. About qi. About Miho's uncle, briefly." He paused.

"About trust." Viria looked at Miho. Miho did not look back.

"It was a relevant topic. We had just fought a spirit beast together."

"You didn't think that was worth mentioning?" Viria asked incredulously.

"It wasn't too hard of a fight." Viria considered pressing further, then apparently decided what she had already extracted was enough for now and stored it.

"Your turn," said Miho.

"What happened back at the sect?"

The update took longer than Zero had expected, partly because Viria and Yukito had more to report than he had expected, and partly because both of them reported in very different ways. Viria gave context and color and editorial, occasionally interrupting herself to emphasize something she felt deserved emphasis. Yukito gave sequence and outcome and very little else. Together, the two approaches covered the same events completely.

Zero listened to the section about Yuri Han and the dual-resource theory with specific attention.

"She hypothesized a recovery," he said.

"Not an anomaly."

"Yes," Yukito said.

"That was what she said."

"And the anchor adjustment you made independently was already in the theoretical record."

"As a hypothesis. Not as a tested technique."

"But you tested it."

"By accident." Zero thought about this.

"Miho."

"Yes."

"Is a technique discovered independently by someone outside a lineage the same as a lineage technique?" Miho walked for two steps before answering.

"In cultivation law, no. A technique belongs to its lineage or to whoever holds the documentation. In practice, technique cannot be unlearned." She paused.

"What you discover in your own body cannot be taken from you. It can be disputed, but not removed." Yukito was quiet for a moment.

"That is a useful distinction."

"Yes," Miho said.

"It is." Zero continued the inventory. He pulled up the team's current status in the corner of his vision and compared the four of them. Team Zero — Current Status Zero: Level 8 Viria: Level 10 Yukito: Level 10 Miho: Level 12 Team Average: Level 10"We are uneven," he said.

"We know," Viria said.

"You are pulling the average down."

"Race Evolution modifies my experience progression. The growth is differently structured, not absent."

"I know. I'm not criticizing, I'm stating a fact."

"So am I." Viria pointed at him without breaking stride.

"See, when I state facts I'm being difficult. When you state facts you're being analytical. It's the same behavior." Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

"The difference is register."

"Yes. That's my point." Zero considered this.

"I take your point." Viria looked at him.

"I was not actually complaining."

"I know. But the point was valid regardless." She made a small sound that was not quite a laugh.

"You are getting harder to argue with."

"You are an excellent teacher," Zero said. Viria opened her mouth, then closed it. Miho made no visible expression, but her tail moved once in the way it moved when something landed that she had not expected to find funny. The trees on the road's western side thickened as the foothills gave way to flatter terrain, and with the thicker trees came sound: rustling at a volume inconsistent with the wind, which was light today. Zero heard it first. He did not stop moving immediately.

He let the sound define itself over three more seconds: multiple sources, close together, moving in the canopy. Not birds. Too heavy for birds, and the movement pattern was lateral rather than vertical.

"Miho," he said.

"I hear them," she said. She slowed. The others slowed with her. From the trees: a screech, short and territorial, and then movement, and then eight shapes dropping from the canopy onto branches at the road's edge. The Ginkgo Monkeys were the color of old wood, with the dense, heavy build of animals that spent most of their time climbing and fighting. Their eyes were gold-green and their tails were long and carried high, which Zero had read in the sect's spirit beast identification materials as a threat posture.

He ran Identify on the nearest one. IDENTIFICATION ACTIVE: Species: Ginkgo Monkey Level: 9 Type: Spirit Beast Attribute: Wood Traits: Pack tactics; wood-aspected qi; high agility; projectile use Threat Level: Low (individual), Moderate (Pack)"Level nine," Zero said.

"Wood-aspected. Pack tactics."

"I know this type," Miho said.

"Viria. Yukito. Have either of you fought a spirit beast?"

"No," they said, in close enough unison that Viria looked at Yukito with mild surprise.

"You have two minutes," Miho said.

"Listen."

The briefing was quick, because time was a luxury they could not afford currently. Spirit beasts, Miho explained, were not 'animals' in the way that word was used in worlds without cultivation. They were beings that had cultivated qi, either deliberately or through long exposure, until the qi had become structural. A spirit beast's qi was not a tool it used, it was what they were made of.

This had two implications: first, that fighting a spirit beast required accounting for its qi as an active element in the fight, not just its physical capabilities; and second, that the core it carried was the densest concentration of what it had accumulated across its life, and extracting it intact required care. Miho continued while watching the monkeys arrange themselves in the canopy.

"Wood qi expresses as enhanced physical toughness, and accelerated regeneration. If it's easier for you to visualize in terms of system stats," Miho looked at Zero specifically, "Then think of them as having a higher endurance stat." Zero nodded as Miho continued.

"In pack animals, Wood qi also improves resonance between members. If they share a qi link, damaging one will alert the others to that injury. Target the lead male first. Disrupting the link's source disrupts the pack."

"Which one is the lead male?" Yukito asked.

"It's the largest male and takes the highest position." She indicated without pointing, a direction of her chin.

"Left side. Second branch up."

"So, the one that screeched?" Viria asked. Miho gave a slight nod. Zero had already identified him by size and behavior. The lead male was watching them with the specific attention of something that was deciding when to begin.

"Your abilities," Miho said.

"Yukito. Shadow disruption will work on the qi link if you can intercept it. The link is visible if you have some way to detect qi or other energy."

"I can do that," said Yukito.

"Viria. Wood-aspected qi has poor resistance to spatial disruption. If you cut a monkey's qi flow mid-movement, its body will lose coordination. Aim for the moment of impact rather than before it."

"Got it."

"Zero. Watch the ones that try to flank. They will try to get behind us." She drew her sword.

"I will hold the center. When the lead male drops, the others will reconsider." She looked at all three of them.

"We harvest cores after," she said.

"Clean extractions where possible. These are not demonic beasts, so the cores are safe to handle briefly."

"Demonic beasts?" asked Viria.

"Not the time." The lead male screeched again. Then the troop dropped from the canopy.

It was not a clean fight, because fights with eight wood-aspected pack animals in a road-width space were never clean fights. Zero handled the flankers. There were three of them, moving to circle while the main troop engaged the center. He tracked them through his enhanced hearing and adjusted his position twice to stay between the flankers and Miho's back.

When the first one reached him and found that the arm it grabbed was plated under the skin and did not give the way arms were supposed to give, Zero used its own momentum to redirect it into the road surface. The remaining two came together, which was smart for monkeys, but not quite smart enough for Zero.

He shifted his hands into the configuration he had used in the tutorial for grip and catch, intercepted both simultaneously, and held them down long enough for their qi flow to disrupt under sustained pressure from his own channels. They dissolved in the way spirit beasts did: they went still first, then the active qi in them faded. When he confirmed that all three were dead, he turned back to the rest of his team to check up on them. In the center, Yukito had found the link.

Zero did not see him do it directly, but he saw the effect: the monkeys that had been coordinating their approach suddenly lost synchrony, one moving right while another moved left, an attack that should have landed from two angles arriving from one instead. Miho was already where the gap opened.

She cut the lead male on its third pass with a precise cut that severed the qi thread in its shoulder without rupturing the core, dropping the wood-aspected reinforcement in that limb and making the arm effectively baseline. When lead male screamed in pain, the troop hesitated. In that hesitation, Viria's sword came down in the space-severing cut, extension active, and passed through two monkeys' qi flow simultaneously without touching their bodies.

Both of them dropped, coordination gone, and their wood-aspected qi dispersed. Miho finished the lead male while the troop was still reading the new information. The rest scattered, Then it was quiet. The road was unchanged. The trees were unchanged. Eight Ginkgo Monkeys lay on the packed earth, and the qi that had saturated them was already fading, and the cores were waiting to be harvested. Viria was breathing more carefully than usual.

"That," she said, "went… reasonably well."

"Yes." Viria looked at her sword.

"I want it noted that I cut two spirit beasts' qi flow simultaneously without any direct instruction on how to do that."

"Noted," Miho said. Viria smirked.

"You also left your left side open for three seconds during the extension. Something faster than a level nine would have used that." Viria's smirk faded.

"…I also noted that," she said sheepishly. Miho moved to the nearest monkey and began the extraction process.

"Help me with the cores. I will show you the technique once. After that, you manage it yourselves." Yukito crouched beside her. Zero moved to the flankers he had slew. Viria, after a moment, followed Miho's hands with her eyes and then moved to the nearest fallen monkey and tried to replicate the motion.

"Smaller," Miho said, without looking up.

"The incision needs to be smaller."

"Right," Viria said.

"Smaller." The harvesting took twelve minutes. They had eight cores by the end, four clean and four partially damaged from the messier parts of the fight, which Miho said was acceptable for a first-time team core harvest and which Viria chose to receive as a compliment. They put the cores in Viria's Spatial Inventory and continued down the road.