The morning mist still clung to the damp shingles of the Third Herb Shed when the rooster crowed.
Kaelen Vance wiped pine sap onto his trousers. In his left hand, he held a flat pine plank from a broken crate. In his right hand, he held a rusted hammer and two bent nails.
He placed the plank against the timber post at the edge of the herb patch and drove the nails home.
The soot-ink on the wood was barely dry:
Third Young Master is still convalescing. Drop herbs by the bucket. Zero cultivation talk.
“What in the hells is that?” Barnaby Holt barked from the shed door.
The one-armed herbalist stood on the threshold, clutching an iron kettle. His singed eyebrow twitched as he squinted through the gray dawn light.
“A labor-saving device,” Kaelen said. “It saves four conversations every morning.”
Barnaby scuffed over in his cloth shoes and glared at the wood.
“Zero cultivation talk?” Barnaby asked. “This is a martial house. The servants can’t sneeze without shouting about pulse gates.”
“Then they can sneeze by the horse stables,” Kaelen replied mildly. “My ears are fragile. Shouting about pulse gates ruins my liver digestion.”
From inside the shed, Mina poked her small head around the doorframe. She held a warm bowl of bitter-grass broth, a wool shawl wrapped around her shoulders.
“Brother,” Mina whispered, glancing toward the main path. “If First Madam’s stewards see that sign, they’ll tell Father you’re disrespecting clan discipline.”
“Father is meditating on a rock three miles uphill,” Kaelen said. “He won’t walk down here unless someone burns a barn. Drink your soup, Mina.”
Mina took a sip, a small smile touching her lips. “The paint smells like cabbage.”
“Soot mixed with cheap tallow,” Kaelen said. “It repels garden beetles. Go sit by the hearth.”
Mina nodded and slipped back inside. Her step was light, the cold stiffness in her ankles steadily fading under the warmth of the Supreme pills.
Kaelen kicked off his slippers and climbed into the hemp hammock slung between two cedar posts.
The rope creaked under his weight. He pulled his straw hat down over his brow, shading his eyes.
Sixty days until the solstice, Kaelen thought. Sixty days until Evelyn tries to ship my sister to a fortress butcher. If I train like a madman, they will notice my pulse changing. If I do nothing, my tally compounds in silence.
Beneath his ribcage, the dark stone tablet shimmered.
[The Fallow Slate] [Current Abstinence: 24 Hours, 05 Minutes] [Current State: True Fallow State] [Current Multiplier: 25x (Stage 1: Mortal Tally)] [Next Milestone: 25 Hours (26x Ready)]
Twenty-five times efficiency was substantial. But against an Iron Bone cultivator like Magistrate Vane-Locke, it was a pebble against a mountain.
Kaelen closed his eyes and breathed slow, shallow breaths. He let his limbs go slack, matching the wind in the pine boughs.
Fifty-five minutes later, the chime rang softly in his skull.
[The Fallow Slate] [Current Abstinence: 25 Hours, 00 Minutes] [Current State: True Fallow State] [Current Multiplier: 26x (Stage 1: Mortal Tally)]
Kaelen didn’t move. He reached into his gray tunic, pulled out a dog-eared booklet, and rested it against his chest.
It was Book 2 of The Bandit King’s Secret Bride.
On the cover, a rugged man with three swords jumped off a horse to rescue an apothecary’s daughter. The prose inside was atrocious, filled with absurd adjectives and lovers crying into puddles.
It was magnificent. Reading it required zero mental strain and zero martial intent.
Down by the washing trough, Barnaby chopped dried bitter-root with a rusted cleaver, grumbling about stubborn boys.
Kaelen turned a page. The bandit king had just discovered that the apothecary’s daughter was secretly an exiled princess with a stolen jade hairpin.
Fascinating, Kaelen thought. Truly, high-stakes literature.
By noon, the timer ticked to twenty-eight hours. By dusk, thirty-two.
Night fell over the valley, cool and damp. Mina brought him a cold rice ball wrapped in kelp. Kaelen ate it with one hand, never leaving the canvas.
When the following late morning arrived, the sun stood bright above the roof.
Inside Kaelen’s mind, the Slate chimed with a golden ring.
[The Fallow Slate] [Current Abstinence: 40 Hours, 00 Minutes] [Current State: True Fallow State] [Current Multiplier: 41x (Stage 1: Mortal Tally)] [Next Milestone: 41 Hours (42x Ready)]
Forty hours. Forty-one times multiplier.
At that rate, a five-minute cash-out would yield over two hundred hours of baseline cultivation.
He wasn’t going to touch it yet. He wanted at least sixty hours before he bothered sitting up.
Heavy boots crunched against the gravel path.
Two young men in white martial robes rounded the drying racks. Both wore the bronze tiger badge of Cassian Vance’s personal courtyard.
The taller one was Brant, a Mortal Pulse Rank 3 disciple who carried Cassian’s spare scabbards. Behind him walked Cole, slightly shorter, clutching a wicker basket.
“Look at this dump,” Brant said, kicking a rotten drying frame. “Smells like swamp water.”
“Eldest Brother needs ten pounds of dried fire-ginger before sunset,” Cole said. “Where’s the old cripple?”
Brant stopped five paces from the porch steps. His eyes dropped to the fresh pine plank nailed to the post.
He read the soot-ink warning aloud with a sneer, mocking the line banning cultivation talk.
Brant let out a loud, ugly laugh.
“Listen to this, Cole,” Brant jeered. “Third Young Master is resting his delicate bones. He doesn’t want to hear about cultivation.”
“What a tragedy,” Cole sneered. “The clan feeds a third son who gets sick from hearing the word Qi.”
Brant kicked the pine sign with all his strength.
The dry wood cracked. The nails tore free from the post, and the plank tumbled face-down into thick mud.
Brant wiped his boot sole on the bottom porch step. “There. Now the sign matches the master.”
In the hammock fifteen feet away, Kaelen lowered the romance pamphlet until his eyes peered over the paper edge.
A brand-new pine sign, Kaelen thought. I spent twenty minutes planing that edge. The ink alone cost eight copper bits from Barnaby’s separate shed-supplies box, not my personal purse.
“Hey, invalid!” Brant barked. “Get out of that sack and fetch the shed keys. Eldest Brother’s fire-ginger won’t weigh itself.”
Kaelen didn’t move. He rested the pamphlet back against his chest and crossed his ankles.
“The sign said no cultivation talk,” Kaelen murmured through the straw of his hat. “Fire-ginger is a martial herb. That counts as cultivation talk. Leave thirty copper bits in the jar and come back next Tuesday.”
Brant’s face darkened with rage.
“You insolent worm,” Brant growled, stepping forward with his fist clenched. “Do you think having the surname Vance protects you? If you won’t move, I’ll drag you through the weeds.”
Cole laughed behind him. “Break his other shoulder, Brant.”
Two Rank 3 lackeys, Kaelen calculated behind his straw hat. Circulating Qi right now would shatter my forty-hour tally. A full sixty-minute burst at forty-one baseline hours per minute would hold two thousand four hundred and sixty baseline hours. Wasting that window on two boot-lickers would be a financial crime.
Violence that required personal effort was the mark of an amateur.
Kaelen’s right hand stayed under his blanket. His fingers found a thin strand of hemp twine tied to the underside of the hammock rail.
“Last warning,” Kaelen said lazily. “The porch has a strict maintenance policy.”
“Die, cripple!” Brant roared.
Brant lunged forward, boots thudding against the porch planks. Cole followed right on his heels.
Kaelen gave the twine a sharp, three-inch jerk.
Ten feet above the porch, an iron hook slipped from a greasy wooden notch beneath the eaves.
A six-foot cedar log, coated in sticky pine tar, swung down from the rafters like a pendulum. Tied securely to both ends were two massive, dried clay nests belonging to mountain red-tailed hornets, each the size of a pig’s bladder.
The swinging log slammed straight across both men’s shoulders with the dull crunch of seasoned timber.
The impact knocked Brant and Cole backward off the porch steps, sending them sprawling into the gravel.
The impact shattered both dried clay nests into a cloud of brittle gray shards.
A low, angry drone rose from the dust, sounding like spinning iron wheels.
Thousands of mountain red-tailed hornets erupted into a dense, buzzing cloud.
“What is that?” Cole screamed, wiping pine tar from his cheek. “AH! MY EYE!”
“Hornets!” Brant shrieked, flailing his arms wildly. “Get them off! GET THEM OFF ME!”
The hornets found bare necks, open ears, and sweaty forearms, sinking their venomous red barbs into every patch of skin they could reach.
Brant rolled in the dirt, howling in agony. His nose swelled to the size of a turnip in three seconds.
Cole leaped to his feet, slapped himself across the jaw five times, and bolted toward the main path while screaming like a scalded hog.
The back door of the shed banged open.
Barnaby Holt charged onto the porch, clutching a long iron shovel in his single hand.
“Thieving rats!” Barnaby bellowed, raising the shovel over his head like an axe. “Trying to rob an old man’s drying racks? I’ll take your ears off!”
Barnaby swung the flat of the shovel with terrifying one-armed momentum, catching Brant square across the backside with a resounding clang.
Brant let out a high-pitched squeal, scrambled to all fours, and fled through the thistle patch on hands and knees, leaving a trail of lost slippers and buzzing hornets behind him.
“Come back, you miserable whelps!” Barnaby roared, chasing them down the dirt road with his shovel held high. “I know your faces!”
Kaelen didn’t move from the hammock.
He turned the page of his romance pamphlet. On page forty-two, the bandit king had crossed the rope bridge by cutting the guide ropes, sending his pursuers into the canyon.
A sound tactical decision, Kaelen noted. Simple, clean, and requires no footwork.
He glanced down over the edge of the hammock.
In the mud where Brant and Cole had rolled, two embroidered cloth pouches lay half-buried in the crushed gravel. They had torn free from the disciples’ silk sashes during the hornet frenzy.
Kaelen reached out with his hookless bamboo fishing pole resting against the wall. With a flick of his wrist, the blunt brass tip caught the drawstring of the first pouch.
He dragged it across the dirt, lifted it onto the porch, and snagged the second.
He untied the drawstrings and dumped the contents onto his lap.
Bright white metal tumbled across the wool blanket. Heavy silver ingots, stamped with the official mark of the Vance clan counting house.
Ten silver taels in Brant’s pouch. Five silver taels in Cole’s pouch.
“Fifteen silver taels,” Kaelen murmured to himself.
He gathered the fifteen silver pieces and slipped them into his inner tunic pouch next to his existing coins.
Fifty-seven silver taels and thirty-two copper bits in total.
Not bad for a thirty-second log swing, Kaelen thought. A fair fine for vandalism. Replacing that pine plank will cost four copper bits. The remaining fourteen silver and ninety-six coppers are purely for emotional distress.
Five minutes later, Barnaby returned, puffing heavily and wiping sweat from his forehead. He rested the shovel against the post and looked at the cloud of hornets still circling the clay fragments.
“You rigged that log,” Barnaby accused, narrowing his single eye at Kaelen.
“Gravity rigged it,” Kaelen replied smoothly. “I merely provided the counterweight. If they hadn’t kicked my sign, the tripwire wouldn’t have slipped.”
Barnaby snorted, a smirk touching his rough mouth. “Cassian’s boys will be swollen like melons for a week. Brant looked like he had six chins when he hit the orchard gate.”
“Good,” Kaelen said. “Then they can’t shout about cultivation.”
The story of the hornet-rigged porch spread through the lower quarters of the Vance estate like wildfire through dry pine.
Within two hours, every servant and errand runner knew that the Third Herb Shed was guarded by swinging timber, sticky tar, and thousands of red-tailed hornets. Rumors claimed the third son slept surrounded by deadfall traps and poisoned wire.
Nobody came near the herb patch.
For twenty glorious, uninterrupted hours, the lower valley remained completely quiet.
Delivery boys dropped their baskets of dried leaves at the wooden bridge fifty yards away and ran. Courtyard gossips stayed clear of the fence. Even the stray goats avoided the garden path.
Kaelen remained in his hammock.
He read halfway through Book 2 of The Bandit King’s Secret Bride. He slept through the night. He let Mina feed him warm ginseng porridge and sipped three pots of roasted barley tea.
As the golden light of late afternoon bathed the quiet porch in warm amber, his twenty-hour stretch of uninterrupted rest reached its mark.
In Kaelen’s mind, the Slate chimed with a deep tone that vibrated through every meridian in his chest.
[The Fallow Slate] [Current Abstinence: 60 Hours, 00 Minutes] [Current State: True Fallow State] [Current Multiplier: 61x (Stage 1: Mortal Tally)] [Next Milestone: 61 Hours (62x Ready)]
Sixty hours. A sixty-one times multiplier.
Kaelen smiled beneath his straw hat, feeling the smooth weight of the silver in his pocket. Sixty-one times efficiency was a formidable engine.
Up in the main manor’s eastern courtyard, however, the silence was shattered by the ringing crack of iron.
Cassian Vance slammed his practice broadsword into the rack with enough force to crack the oak timber. His handsome face was twisted into a dark scowl.
Before him on the stone flags knelt Brant and Cole. Both disciples were wrapped in grease-stained bandages, their eyes swollen into narrow slits and their lips puffed out like bruised plums.
“Hornet nests?” Cassian hissed, his voice trembling with rage. “You two let an invalid third brother run you out of the shed with bugs and a log?”
“Eldest Brother, it was a trap,” Brant whimpered through his swollen lips. “The whole porch is rigged with mountain venom. We couldn’t even draw our blades.”
“Useless trash,” Cassian spat, turning his back on them.
He stared toward the lower valley, his fists clenching until the knuckles turned white. He didn’t care about two beaten lackeys. But his own disciples being humiliated by the clan’s resident cripple was a slap directly across his face.
“He wants peace to sleep in his hammock?” Cassian whispered, his eyes narrowing with cruel malice.
He turned to his courtyard steward standing by the stone steps.
“Send word to the manor supply office immediately,” Cassian commanded coldly. “Starting tomorrow morning, freeze every single caravan herb delivery to the Third Herb Shed. Not one leaf of bitter-grass. Not one root of fire-ginger. Let that lazy dog starve in the dirt.”