Tsem’s world was one of scales. There was nothing else he could see. The pressure was too much, even his recently enhanced body couldn’t push back against this strength. There was nothing he could do but wait. A moment later, he emerged from the lair, thrown through the air. With practice, Tsem tucked his limbs and rolled. It wasn’t an elegant landing, but he managed to avoid any bruises.

  “Thanks for the wake up, honored elder.” Tsem bowed low, facing the opening of the basilisk’s lair. A loud ‘harumph’ came back in return.

  Tsem chowed down on some of the last uvarian bladebear jerky from what he’d kept and pondered his next plan. If there was an advantage to Tsem’s chosen cultivation method, it was that the challenges from eating ordinary demonic meat no longer really phased him. He just breathed in and out, cycling his qi into motion to tear apart what weak will did assault him.

  If Tsem wanted to earn contribution points, the ghalri raptors weren’t the best way to go. Their feathers fetched a decent sum, but it was pelts that the Da clan really paid up for. Since he had no interest in engaging with the surviving bladebear again, Tsem had set his sights on another demonic beast from the manual, an interella.

  The lupine beasts were almost certainly related to wolves, if quite distantly. They looked the part too, though they were slightly larger than their cousins. The biggest difference, of course, was their jaws. They had grown something of an exoskeleton around them. Along with their demonic qi, they had the ability to chew through rock, pulverize it and store it. According to the manual, they had a nasty habit of flinging said pulverized rock at whatever upset them.

  Needless to say, Tsem had chosen to steer clear of them until now. It had taken some work too. There were a lot of them wandering around the area, one of the biggest reasons he made a habit of keeping to the underbrush.

  Still, he had what he needed to hunt them now—the biggest problem with doing so before had just been that he needed them to walk into his trap and be around to capitalize on the opportunity it presented. An unlikely event.

  With the divination formation at his disposal though, the odds could be increased drastically by simply setting more traps. By setting up one formation that used interella hair, which he had already collected thanks to the summer months inducing shedding in the beasts, he could track them down. An overlapping formation could be used to keep track of the placement of each of his traps—Tsem planned on using ghalri raptor feathers as the marker for those and had appropriately found a section of forest, on the same bank as Valesin’s lair, that lacked any blue trees. He didn’t want to confuse one of his traps with a feasting bird after all.

  As for the traps themselves, the hunting manual noted the beasts reacted poorly to a particular type of wild bean, called the railant bean, common to bushes found in certain areas of the forest. When exposed to large quantities, particularly if those quantities were crushed into powder, the interella went into pretty awful sneezing fits, and in nearly every case, those fits caused them to expel the rocks they normally stored in their mouths, effectively taking away their most dangerous weapon.

  The set up took a full week for Tsem to complete. The first two days he spent setting up the formations, having to rebuild the second because his glyph placement was too poor. He eventually found a set of three trees, each having been smote by lightning. The new glyphs had activated strongly after that.

  The rest of the week was spent weaving baskets of needleroot to hold the railant bean powder in the traps and gathering and crushing the beans into enough powder. The actual setting of each individual trap didn’t take long, but he set a lot of traps. The entire time he was setting them, no interella approached one of his existing sites. Plenty of the demonic beasts had wandered around his formation though, making the whole matter of setting the traps fairly tense.

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  In the time he was setting things up, he was also cultivating each night. He continued to improve his breath technique and after so much usage, it had begun to feel almost natural, almost. What did not ever start to feel natural were his nightly battles against qi specters of ghalri raptors, though he did admit, later in the week, likely due to his improved control over his qi, the process became easier, if only a little. As far as progress went, he had cleared maybe a third of one side of the meridian. The stomach meridian stretched from his lower eyelid to his second toe, passing through his stomach along the way. His cultivation manual had guided him to start purifying in the direction of his eyelid.

  At the rate he was going, Tsem estimated it would take him about six weeks in total to finish purifying the meridian. That fit nicely with how fast his stock of spiritual herbs was depleting. He’d likely run out at about that time. When he did, he’d have to return to the city to restock. Of course, when he did, he wanted to turn in as many interella pelts as possible for contribution points.

  It was just as he finished setting up the twentieth trap that he felt two tethers drawing close to each other. Tsem moved off, grabbing his trusty spear and a net. He’d grown comfortable with having the net against the raptors and thought it might prove effective against the interella as well. Even if it didn’t, he’d just throw it away.

  Tsem moved carefully through the underbrush. These demonic beasts had pretty decent senses, and if it didn’t properly fall for his trap, he didn’t want to be seen by the beast. The tether, as always, helped in his tracking though he still had to make use of what Da Kanuk had taught him to avoid detection. Weeks spent in the shadow of Mount Ghalri had done a good job of reinforcing those initial lessons.

  Tsem found the interella wandering within feet of his trap’s trigger which was well-hidden by a particularly dense fern. He watched from a distant bush, ignoring its pricks against his skin. The wind was in his favor, keeping his smell from the beast.

  The creature moved slowly, not fearing anything, completely oblivious of the predator watching it. It moved its front paw slowly, hitting the trigger hidden beneath the fern. It felt something was off and leapt backward, but there was plenty of railant bean powder in the basket far above its head. As it dumped, the powder poured out, coating the entire area.

  The interella whined and clawed at its nose. Tsem dove behind a nearby tree trunk, making his body small. The ensuing roar of expelled stone thankfully went in the opposite direction, and after it was over, he stood up, charging with spear and net.

  The interella found itself weakened, devoid of its strongest weapon, and faced with an unknown enemy charging at it. A normal animal would have simply run away, but this was a demonic beast. Demonic qi burned inside it and it rushed forward even as tears fell from its eyes and sneezes racked its body.

  Tsem pulled to the side, waving the net around in a feint to halt the beast’s own charge. It worked; the monster was clever enough to see the danger that being engulfed and impeded by the net would put it in. A series of feints followed, neither combatant ready to fully commit.

  In the end, it was the interella that went on the attack first, spurred on by the demonic qi calling for it to rip and tear. Tsem, who had been cycling his own qi in his own pattern, managed to back up enough to block one of its claws with his spear. He tried to spread the net over the interella at the same moment, but the beast was too fast and his own skill too lacking. It backed up, ready to return to their stalemate.

  Tsem had no such interest. He tossed his net, moving his freed talon to grip his spear and pushing forward. The attack worked…partially. The interella was caught, its response to his charge faltering from a tangled claw. Tsem’s spear punctured its shoulder and it howled out its pain. Unfortunately, in that same moment, it tore with its claws and used its massive jaw to reduce the needleroot netting to shreds.

  Tsem wasn’t sure what else he could do, so he just kept pressure on the spear, using all his newfound strength to push its point deeper into the demonic beast. The interella pushed back, surging forward. Its claws nearly reached Tsem’s flesh, but fortunately he had just enough strength to push through, his spear passing through something vital and killing the creature.

  Tsem breathed a breath of relief. That had been close, too close. It seemed that among everything else he needed to work on improving, skill with a net and spear should be added. He didn’t want more fights to be like that.

  Still, even with his massive list of shortcomings, Tsem could feel he was making progress. A month ago, he had been stumped on how to hunt the creature, just a week ago, he would have died in the fight against it. Perhaps if he hadn’t gathered enough railant beans, the beast would have evaded the powder altogether. It was diligence that was keeping him alive. No matter how hard, how dangerous his life was right now, Tsem needed to keep pushing forward. If he didn’t, the frontier would pose him a challenge he wasn’t ready for.