“Don’t glare at me,” said Laughing River in a hurt voice. “I gallantly left you alone after helpfully pointing out your mistake, and you wasted yet another opportunity by complaining about me. I mean, honestly, I don’t know what more I could have done to help you there.”

Li Yi Nuo had spent the last two days glowering at Laughing River and Sen, far less amused than they had been about the things they’d said to her. With a quick exchange of glances, the two men had come to a mutual agreement that they would pretend that it wasn’t happening. However, it seemed that Laughing River had run out of patience with the game. To his credit, he had lasted a lot longer than Sen had ever thought he would. The fox seemed to have a very limited attention span, although Sen thought that it was mostly a guise that Laughing River put on. After all, who would suspect clever planning from someone who got distracted by everything? Sen got around that problem by assuming that everything the fox said was a lie, a scheme, or a misdirection. It seemed to be working. Li Yi Nuo’s strategy of directing baleful glares probably didn’t protect her from the Laughing River’s lies, but it had seemed to discourage any more observations about her personality or behaviors. At least, it had been working. With the fox’s latest statement, all of her ire landed directly on the fox.

“Help me? Help me! By doing what? Calling my character into question? Suggesting that I should be promiscuous with a—”

When Sen gave her a sharp look, her voice cut off like he’d seized her throat in one of his hands.

“Do tell? A what?” asked Sen in an unfriendly voice.

“Stranger,” she said weakly, the fire suddenly going out of her.

“Sure,” said Sen, before he looked over at Laughing River and pointed. “That direction?”

The fox glanced in the direction Sen pointed. “That would be the one.”

“I’ll go scout.”

As he started moving into the woods, he heard Li Yi Nuo.

“This is your fault.”

Laughing River laughed. “Oh, dear girl, you did that all by yourself.”

Not even remotely interested in hearing any more of that conversation, Sen hid and took off in the indicated direction. He didn’t think there was much chance of finding anything as Laughing River just let him wander off alone. Sen focused on looking for signs of spirit beasts of which there were surprisingly few. When he thought about it, they hadn’t encountered nearly as many as he would have expected given how deep they’d come into the wilds. They weren’t near the true heart of the wilds. The way the kingdom had organized itself, civilization followed a loose ring around the edges of a vast area of untamed and arguably untamable land controlled by the spirit beast. Even though they had been traveling on an inward course at cultivator speeds for days, it would take weeks of travel to reach the true heart of wilds. Of course, that would also be a probable death sentence since the oldest and strongest spirit beasts in the kingdom were thought to rule there.

Sen tried to remind himself that they were likely seeing places that no one but nascent soul cultivators had seen for thousands of years. Of course, it would have been a lot easier to get excited by that if what they were seeing looked less like hundreds of miles of primordial forest with trees towering hundreds of feet in the air with trunks bigger around than a house. Not that Sen was feeling entirely sad about the journey into the wilds. He had taken the opportunity to replace a lot of the medicinal plants he’d used over the last year with their much, much more potent brethren inside the wilds. He’d assumed that the spirit beasts would have consumed most of them, but the sheer volume of them that could be found in a single section of the pristine forest had shown him how foolish that thought had been. He imagined that this kind of environment was what the earliest cultivators had braved to make their versions of modern pills and elixirs.

The experience also gave him some insight into why alchemy had become such a vital field among cultivators. He was almost dizzy with the possibilities the powerful ingredients would open up for him and dismayed with how poorly most of the ingredients he had used over the years would stand up to the new ones. If the earliest cultivators had used plants like the ones he was gathering, no wonder those pills and elixirs had become things of legend. As the medicinal herbs and alchemical reagents available to sects and wandering cultivators in the civilized world got weaker, though, alchemists would have had to refine their techniques. They would have needed ever more complicated processes to purify and amplify the benefits of those plants and reagents in a bid to replicate what had come before.If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Sen was honestly impressed by how far they had come. He also knew that it was a losing game. Yes, an alchemist could improve the potency of the ingredients to an extent. He’d done it himself with clever combinations of complementary plants and reagents. That was to say nothing of his method of manipulating the processes and even underlying structures of pills and elixirs. Even with all of that generational knowledge being passed down to him and the advantages of his unique methods, there were still limits. Try to concentrate something too much and you’d simply destroy it or, worse, turn it into something toxic instead of beneficial. Alchemy frequently had to straddle that line in its bid to offer benefits, routinely relying on the sturdier constitutions of cultivators to process out the toxins over time or through the use of body cleansing pills. Of course, those pills often left toxins of their own, simply of a different kind.

Using what he’d gathered, Sen could avoid most of those pitfalls and make things that could rival the achievements of old. Elixirs that could seemingly resurrect the dead, although he knew that they merely rekindled the almost extinguished spark of life inside someone. Treatments that could possibly restore limbs and potentially even restore damaged qi channels. A feat long considered a mere fantasy among wounded cultivators. Pills that could shatter hopelessly impenetrable bottlenecks. The more he thought about it, the more excited Sen became. He had to force himself back from that excitement, though. He knew full well that giving such elixirs, pills, and treatments to the wrong people could mean instant death. Worse still, it could mean a lingering, excruciating death as the seeming alchemical miracle overwhelmed a body that was too weak. There were new opportunities, but those enhanced opportunities came with enhanced risks. He’d need to be more careful about what he made and for whom, not less. Still, he moved through the forest with a smile.

The change happened so fast that it felt almost instantaneous even to Sen's enhanced mind. Primordial forest gave way to open ground that gently rose to reveal ancient ruins. Sen struggled to put a word to what kind of ruins. He wasn’t sure if he was looking at the surprisingly intact remains of an ancient city or perhaps a temple that had once been the size of a city. Not that it was perfectly preserved. Some of the structures had collapsed. Many of them were overgrown with vines and mosses. One building had a tree that had grown up straight through it. The branches spread over the walls like a verdant, living umbrella. Yet, most of the buildings still looked sound from a distance. There was one structure that rose up from what looked to be the very center of the city. It had a tiered tower that rose toward the sky like a supplication. Each tier was a masterwork of intricate craftsmanship that showed from even miles away.

Beyond that, though, Sen could feel that this place was holy, genuinely, truly holy in a way that most temples and shrines failed to achieve. Of course, anything that holy would also attract things that wished to see it desecrated. There was a horde of wailing ghosts and devilish creatures that looked like they surrounded the city. It was a veritable tide of evil the likes of which Sen had never encountered. He simply stood there in a tangle of reverential awe and abject revulsion. It was only harsh experience that let him drag his eyes away and stumble back into the cover of the forest. Standing out in the open with so many things that would like to see him dead nearby was like an open invitation to death. He did his best to shake off the awe and the revulsion. Then, it became a struggle to control his anger.

By the time he got back to Laughing River and Li Yi Nuo, he barely trusted himself to speak. He stormed up to them. Laughing River opened his mouth to say something and Sen just looked at him. The white-hot rage in that glance made the spirit fox take three quick steps back and raise his hand in a gesture of peace and surrender.

“No,” said Sen.

“Sen,” said the fox in a friendly, reassuring voice.

“I said, no!” roared Sen. “I owe you a favor, but no favor is worth that.”

Sen stalked over to Li Yi Nuo, who looked terrified that he was going to attack her. She looked terrified and confused when he grabbed her hand.

“Let’s go. We’re leaving,” said Sen and all but dragged her away from the flabbergasted fox.

Li Yi Nuo didn’t try to fight Sen’s inexorable momentum. Instead, she tried to get a handle on the situation.

“What is happening?” she asked. “I don’t understand what’s going on.”

“That bastard wants us to rob a temple.”

“What?” demanded Li Yi Nuo, not even attempting to hide her shock.

“You know, he wants us to just causally steal from a sacred ruin after we fight our way through an army of spirits, angry ghosts, devil beasts, and the gods only know what else. Well, you know what? Fuck that!”