The contract from Butcher Tu sat on the iron-maple block, written in greasy charcoal on a scrap of dried marsh-boar skin:
Twelve clean bile sacs of the Iron-Toothed Marsh Leech. Two undamaged dorsal hard shell back shells. Delivered in sealed cold salt water. Bounty: thirty-five spirit shards upon proof.
It was a contract that ordinary rogue fighters avoided like plague water.
In the social hierarchy of Red Mist Valley, the “Swamp Dredger” sat at the very lowest tier of the proletariat. Above them were the market shopkeepers, the magic charm scribes, the pill peddlers, and the butchery apprentices. Below them was only the mud. A dredger was a man with neither the capital to open a canvas stall nor the martial power to hunt high-tier horned beasts on the open steppe. They survived by wading through the stale, toxic margins of the world, trading their health for fractions of a spirit stone.
The Iron-Toothed Marsh Leech was not an apex monster. It didn’t breathe fire, manipulate frost, or command flying daggers. It was a blind, segmented horror of the outer wetlands, growing to eight or ten feet in length, burrowing in the black, anaerobic muck beneath the roots of weeping corpse-cypresses.
