Calvin did not sleep that night, and doubted many disciples who’d progressed far enough in their cultivation to go without sleep for a night did either. Instead he spent the night puttering around his home, meditating in short intervals, and occasionally nervously pressing his sect token against the bronze disk sitting on his kitchen table to confirm that yes, he definitely had more than enough contribution points saved up.

  It was the last day of the second quarter, which meant that third quarter dues were due. While there was a system by which you could pay your dues ahead of time, it required filling out a form and getting approval from a Hall Master, elder, or other high-ranking sect official, and was only really available for those attempting a breakthrough or who would be out of the sect undertaking a mission. Everyone else was expected to pay the day of—no exceptions.

  Thus, the first day of each quarter—or at least the morning of it—tended to be very quiet (unless someone hadn’t been able to scrape together enough points), with everyone staying home until after the enforcers came around. If they showed up to collect and you weren’t there, things could get messy very quickly unless you had a very, very good excuse. Calvin was just glad that stopping someone else from paying their dues was one of the few crimes the Sect did take extremely seriously and investigated in exacting detail, or else the day would have been even more stressful.

  His vigilance paid off when, just after four in the morning, the formation around his garden villa notified him that someone had just opened the gate. He was already on his feet a moment later when a knock came at the door, and had it open before the second knock.

  Standing on the doorstep was a tall, slender young man with steel-grey hair, dark eyes, and a polite, slightly mocking smile on his lips. He wore a grey-blue robe the color of a gloomy sky and had an iron token the size of a coaster hanging off a silk ribbon worn around his neck, standing with his back straight and his hands folded neatly behind his back.

  Calvin bowed deeply, clasping his hands over his chest. “This junior greats his senior brother.” He held the position for several seconds, then straightened. “What can this junior do for senior today?”

  The man’s smile gained a tinge of amusement. “Greetings, junior. I come on behalf of the great Eight Peaks Sect, may it stand forever unrivaled.” He took a deep breath and then spoke quickly, rattling off a routine he’d probably gone through countless times. “The Eight Peaks Sect is grand and powerful, but no mountain can stand without the strength of its base. The Eight Peaks shelters its disciples, feeds them, trains them, and nurtures them, but now the Eight Peaks require your support in turn. What has this junior done to support the mountains?”

  Calvin thought this whole song and dance was extremely silly, and he was pretty sure the senior across from him agreed completely, but neither of them were going to do anything but go along with it. The nail that stood out got hammered down.

  He bowed again. “This junior has completed missions for the Sect, and brought back treasures from beyond the peaks.” He presented his token to the sect enforcer, holding the piece of jade in both hands. “I present my contribution to the Eight Peaks.”

  The enforcer tapped his iron token against the jade and it hummed softly. “The Sect finds your contribution satisfactory.” Calvin withdrew his token and stood up straight again.

  “Thank you, senior.” He presented his hand to the enforcer, in which lay five small jade tokens. “This junior praises your unwavering service and loyalty to the Sect.”

  They shook hands, the five small jades vanishing into the enforcers sleeves. “To serve the Eight Peaks is a calling greater than any one man, just as the Sect is greater than the sum of its disciples. You stand on the right path, junior.” Then he withdrew his hand and flicked his wrist, a dark blue silk pouch emblazoned with the sect’s emblem—a stylized ring of eight mountain peaks on a sky-blue background—appearing in his hand. He presented the pouch and a slip of thick grey paper imprinted with his qi signature and signed with his name and the date to Calvin. “Your monthly resource allocation, junior. Use it well.”

  Calvin accepted both and bowed one final time. “This junior wishes senior fortune in his path and duties.”

  “Likewise.” And then he turned and left, vanishing from the doorstep in a blur.

  Calvin waited for nearly a full minute before stepping back inside and slamming the door shut. Dropping his goods and receipt on the table, he dropped bonelessly into a chair and slumped forward, letting his forehead rest against the cool wood.

  Dealing with sect enforcers was exhausting. Being that close to a Core realm cultivator was already hell on his nerves, before even considering the gulf in their standing with the sect. He was just an outer disciple, one of endless, replaceable thousands, and the enforcer was a true elite—the eyes, ears, and hands of the Elders and Sect Master.

  Calvin couldn’t wait to break through to the Core realm. Maybe then he wouldn’t feel quite so tiny and fragile. The Core realm was often considered the true separation point between cultivators with strength and potential, and those without. Before the Core realm, cultivators were just exceptionally strong, fast, and healthy mortals. After, they were transformed, becoming something more than mortal. It was the minimum requirement to become a senior imperial official, the starting point of any true tournaments in the Empire, and offered an immense, qualitative boost in strength and capability far beyond the breakthrough to the Foundation realm.

  A Core realm cultivator could live for hundreds of years, fly unaided, use their spiritual senses, and so much more. A Core realm cultivator could go practically anywhere, do nearly anything. They were barely beholden to the laws of the Empire, much less mortal officials and petty magisters. There were entire provinces of the Empire where a single Core realm cultivator could rule like a king, unrivaled for tens of thousands of miles in any direction.

  Calvin wanted that. He wanted that more than anything.

  Mechanically, Calvin sat up and picked up the grey slip of paper, verifying that the date was right and that the signature on the slip, Enforcer Marsh of Metal Peak, matched the other slips he’d received since he’d moved into the villa. Thankfully it did, because he had no idea what he’d do if it hadn’t.

  Only once he’d done so and put it away with the other slips he’d collected in his nearly five years at the sect did he return to the table and examine the silk bag. It was heavier this month than it had been the previous month—a good sign—but first he had a potentially much more exciting prize to claim.

  He claimed and used the token immediately, his perception of the world replaced by the great wheel. Feeling much less drained than he had the last time, he let himself look closer at it as it spun, bombarding himself with bits of knowledge and information about countless treasures the Scroll apparently categorized as ‘minor’.

  Some of them didn’t seem so minor to him, like the Royal Black-Quilled Eagle Egg, Modest quality, that spun by, or the Fragment of Tribulation Talisman, Low quality, that he thought might be able to seriously injure a Core realm cultivator and turn him to ashes and dust with a single touch.

  Most of what he learned was meaningless to him, names with no context and brief glimpses of treasures whose purpose and function he could not glean as it vanished from view, but he persevered. Perhaps it was a vain hope born of an appetite too big for his stomach to handle, but someday he hoped to truly unlock the secrets of this strange and wondrous language the Scroll used. It had so much depth and mystery, and might help him someday discover more about the Scroll that had so abruptly changed the trajectory of his life. If he ever wanted to do so however, he needed more examples to study than existed on the scroll directly, and the wheels he saw while claiming random rewards was one of his few options.

  Even if the headaches sometimes left him useless for the better part of a day or longer, though that hadn’t happened in months.

  His eventual reward ended up being something of a disappointment. A dud, even. One-hundred Stone Meridian-Opening Pills, Extremely Low quality. Calvin had found that the actual value of a reward tended to fall rapidly when it came in multiples. Anywhere between one and five was pretty good. Ten was pretty common and not too bad, but not amazing either, like the Lotus Drops that had been. More than ten was most common with hyper-specific pills, spirit stones, and unremarkable spiritual herbs.

  Getting so many pills in an Extremely Low quality reward was a very bad sign, as it likely meant the pills themselves weren’t great. How good could they possibly be if it took a hundred of them to reach the level of a single Extremely Low quality reward?

  Not very, it turned out. After examining several of them, he concluded that they were pretty much completely useless to him. The small, oval pills were dark gray and rough to the touch, looking almost like little perfectly uniform pebbles. They could help a cultivator at the peak of the Gathering realm or early stages of the Foundation realm open new meridians—create new qi channels in the terminology the Scroll used—but only if they were already aligned with Earth or a derivative element.

  Calvin was neither of those things, and thus he stowed them away with the handful of other mostly useless rolls he’d gotten over the years. Maybe someday he’d find a use for them, otherwise he’d ‘stumble across’ them during a mission and sell them to the sect for contribution points.

  With that out of the way, he finally decided to look at what the sect had decided to provide him this month. While there was a baseline of what all Outer disciples were supposed to receive, the exact contents of the monthly resource allocation could vary wildly from month to month and even person to person. The point of bribing the enforcer—something he’d started to do every quarter that he could—was for them to hopefully give you one of the better goody bags (a name the sect had tried to quash in the past but kept coming back).

  His excitement already somewhat dampened by the bad roll, he carefully poured the contents of the bag onto the table and began to organize it. He began by arranging the medicines, identifying pills, bottled elixirs, tablets, and bundles of processed herbs with a touch and laying them out in three rows.

  First came the useless ones, a category that had grown significantly as his cultivation rose and his needs became more focused. Most of the Gathering realm pills he still received for some bizarre reason went in that pile, to be traded with or simply given to the handful of Gathering realm disciples he knew. Two of the more valuable ones he earmarked for Gwen’s visit, an easy way to build some more gratitude on top of her already inflated view of him. A few of the Foundation realm pills and elixirs also went into that category, including a rather high quality (technically Very Low but that was quite good by the goody bag’s standards!) elixir designed to ease the strain of opening new meridians on the spirit that would have come in handy just a few days earlier. That one would make a fine gift or trade good and was probably worth most of his bribe.

  Then he laid out the moderately useful ones. These mostly fell in two categories—basic healing medicines and ones designed to improve qi absorption—and for each there was only a single item. A small tin of Wretched quality wound-sealing balm and a single equally awful Five Elements Rotation pill. Neither was particularly amazing, but they would go into his slowly growing emergency kit and might come in handy someday.

  Finally came what he was actually interested in: advancement resources he could actually use. There weren’t many of those, but he appreciated them nonetheless. First was a bottle of three tablets meant to be used with the stripped down version of the Eight Peaks Tempering method available to all Outer sect disciples. They could be dissolved in a tub of hot water and used for a medicinal bath with some minor purifying and body-strengthening effects. Calvin hoped to at some point get his hands on a much better tempering method, but for now every little bit helped.

  Next was a small bundle of herbs that smelled strongly of the summer sun. These too were used for body strengthening, though instead of adding them to a bath you were supposed to grind them into a paste and spread it across your body while you practiced the Eight Peaks Tempering method to greatly accelerate your progress.

  Lastly there were two pills and a small, very familiar pill bottle, only one of which was part of the usual package. The first (the typical one) was one of the sect’s signature medicines, the Eight Peaks Sundrop. On its own it offered little benefit, but when taken with most any other pill, it could both amplify its effect and cleanse some of the impurities baked into nearly all medicinal pills. That made it particularly valuable to disciples like him, with occasional access to the sorts of precious medicines where getting a few extra percentage points of value could add up quickly. Most disciples tended to trade theirs away for more immediately useful pills, but he’d begun to build up a small stockpile.

  The second pill wasn’t anything overly special, but it came as a pleasant surprise nonetheless. The Barrier Condensing Spindle pill was useful for pretty much any Foundation realm cultivator, especially him, for its ability to accelerate the creation of boundary qi. He was going to need a lot of boundary qi in the coming months, both for the Nine Rotating Gates method and to refine his Foundation, and even more as he began to prepare for his breakthrough to the Core realm. If he used it at the right time, it could save him as much as a full few days of work, maybe more. Very nice.

  The last item made him laugh. Three small pale blue-green pills rattled in their small bottle as he picked them up. Eight Peaks Meridian Cleansing Pills, Very Low quality. The very same ones Gwen had shown him several days earlier as she prepared to sell them to the sect, he reckoned, or ones so similar he couldn’t tell the difference. What were the odds?

  If nothing else, they were quite useful pills. His qi channels were refined enough that a pill like this would only offer a fraction of the benefit it could provide someone at the early stages of the Foundation realm, but every bit counted and he’d technically gotten these ones for free!

  He looked forward to showing them to Gwen. He had a feeling she’d be amused to see her work end up in a bribe-worthy goody bag.

  Outside of the medicines, the rest of the goody bag’s contents were unremarkable. Ten low grade spirit stones—a small fortune for a mortal but barely spare change even by Gathering realm standards—a few passes that could be redeemed for access to a highly limited selection of basic cultivation manuals or for short classes with a sect trainer, and a single low-grade natural treasure—a smooth grey river stone with a few flecks of orange that felt cool and damp go the touch despite being completely dry—that the Scroll identified as a Stream-Washed Salmon Stone, Wretched quality.

  Overall, a rather good month! He’d given the enforcer twenty-five points on top of the usual two-hundred-fifty point dues and in exchange built up a little more good will with the man and received a very respectable return on investment. It was slightly unfortunate that a good portion of the higher-quality advancement resources weren’t particularly useful for him directly this month, but that wasn’t unexpected.

  He carefully stowed everything away, storing the herbs in sealed containers meant to preserve their freshness, sorting the pills into appropriate bottles or writing new labels on old, empty ones, and adding the spirit stones to his slowly growing stash.

  Then, glad to not have to worry about dues for a few more months, he dropped down into his little meditation room. It was time to give his new attunement treasure a little bit of the attention it deserved.

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