Barnaby Holt cursed under his breath as he tore a strip of clean linen with his teeth.
“Fifty Spirit Stones,” Barnaby muttered, pressing the cloth against the dark puncture wound in Sera’s shoulder. “That rat Garrick would charge his own grandmother for the dirt on her grave.”
Sera flinched as the rough cloth touched her skin, but she did not cry out. Fever beaded across her brow while she kept her jaw locked against the pain.
“Hold still, girl,” Barnaby warned, holding a bowl of salted river water. “This will burn like hot lard.”
Kaelen leaned back in his hammock, the ropes groaning softly beneath him. He watched the creeping dark discoloration edge higher toward Sera’s jawline.
If she dies on the porch, Barnaby will make me help bury her, Kaelen thought. Digging a six-foot hole in rocky mountain soil takes two hours of shoveling. That would break my eighty-hour streak and leave blisters on my palms.
He reached into the inner pocket of his tunic and pulled out the jade vial holding his five remaining Supreme Marrow-Warming Pills, tucked right beside the bottle of eight Frost-Cleaving Supreme Pills.
Tipping it sideways, he tapped one Marrow-Warming Pill into his palm, leaving four inside. It was round, pale golden, and wrapped in delicate white cloud veins that smelled faintly of pine resin and honey.
Kaelen flicked his wrist. The pill flew through the air in a clean arc and landed neatly in Sera’s lap.
“Swallow that,” Kaelen said, resting his head back against his canvas pillow.
Sera blinked down at the pill resting on her bloodstained leather breeches. “What’s this?”
“A cheap mud-ball,” Kaelen replied smoothly. “I rolled it together by accident from leftover pot scrapings. If you die on my porch, hauling a corpse into the woods takes too much effort.”
Barnaby glanced down at the pill, and his single eye froze.
“Pot scrapings?” Barnaby whispered, his voice cracking. “Boy, that thing has cloud veins. That’s a—”
“It’s a mud-ball, Old Barnaby,” Kaelen interrupted firmly, giving him a flat look from beneath his straw hat. “Don’t complicate simple things. Swallow it, scout, before the wind blows the dust off.”
Sera hesitated for half a heartbeat. But the icy numbness in her chest was creeping toward her heart, threatening to stop her breathing entirely.
She picked up the golden sphere and tossed it into her mouth.
The pill did not taste like mud.
The instant it touched her tongue, it melted into a stream of pure, liquid warmth that tasted of mountain spring water and roasted lotus seeds. The medicinal heat surged down her throat like a torrent of golden sunlight.
Ten breaths.
That was all it took.
The black venom lines on her collarbone faded from bruised purple to dull gray, then dissolved into faint wisps of dark steam that hissed out through her pores. The throbbing agony in her torn shoulder vanished. Across her shoulder blade, the ruptured muscle fibers and split skin knit together with an audible crackle of closing flesh.
Even the dull ache in her lower dantian smoothed out into a warm, harmonious pool.
Sera sat frozen on the porch floor, her eyes wide as she looked down at her shoulder. The puncture wounds had closed into faint pink scars.
She had taken pills from caravan alchemists before. Even the expensive Ringed-Grade remedies took days to purge beast venom, leaving the patient nauseous and feverish from Pill-Poison sediment.
This pill had left zero poison. It had left no bitterness, no nausea, and no meridian ache.
“Zero sediment,” Sera whispered, her fingers trembling against her clean collarbone. “A Cloud-Veined Supreme pill. One hundred percent medicinal purity.”
She looked up at Kaelen in utter shock.
“That pill was worth three Low-Grade Spirit Stones,” Sera said, her voice shaking. “Three hundred silver taels. You gave it to a wounded mercenary for carrying three sacks of bruised weeds?”
“Three hundred silver sounds exhausting to count,” Kaelen muttered, pulling his hat down a fraction lower. “Besides, you were getting blood on the porch. Blood stains require lye, and lye makes my knuckles dry.”
Three Spirit Stones is a fair price for peace and quiet, Kaelen thought. If she stays alive, Barnaby won’t badger me about digging graves, and Cassian’s lackeys will think twice before kicking my fence.
Sera bowed her head, clutching the splintered shaft of her spear against her breast. “I owe you my life, Third Young Master.”
“You owe me sixty pounds of sorted herbs,” Kaelen corrected her. “Old Barnaby will show you the sorting racks. But first, tell me about that spear.”
Sera’s fingers tightened around the worn ash wood. Her knuckles smoothed over the ancient spiral runes carved into the grain.
“The Storm-Pike,” Sera said quietly. “It’s been in my family for four generations. My great-grandfather was an outer captain in the Northern Vanguard. It’s forged from lightning-struck ironwood, balanced to channel wind Qi.”
“A Tier 3 weapon,” Barnaby said, nodding with respect. “Even without the tip, the wood carries faint thunder resonance. How did Briggs break it?”
“Two years ago, Garrick Vance hired my father’s mercenary company to escort five wagons of high-grade iron ore through the Red-Gorge pass,” Sera said, her jaw tight. “Hound-Lord Briggs ambushed us with thirty mounted raiders.”
Her gray eyes turned cold as winter ice.
“My father ordered the wagons to run while our squad held the gorge,” she continued. “Briggs had an iron mace coated in blood-iron runes. He swung with the force of Mortal Pulse Rank 9. He shattered my father’s chest, and when I thrust the pike at his throat, his mace snapped the steel head clean off.”
Mina slipped out from the doorway, listening with wide, sorrowful eyes. She offered Sera a wooden cup of hot water.
Sera took the cup, nodding her thanks before looking back at Kaelen.
“Four wagons escaped safely,” Sera whispered. “Only one wagon rolled into the ravine. But when I returned to Ashford to collect my father’s burial pay, Garrick Vance had already rewritten the manifest.”
“He claimed all five wagons were lost,” Kaelen guessed mildly.
“He claimed all five wagons were destroyed due to my father’s cowardice,” Sera spat, venom lacing every syllable. “He forged my father’s signature on a debt ledger for fifty Low-Grade Spirit Stones. He used the town magistrate’s seal to bind me into blood indenture. Every copper I earn goes directly to his counting house.”
Kaelen listened without moving.
Garrick never changes, Kaelen thought. He steals forty tons of clan ore, sells it secretly to Briggs, and bills the dead escort captain for the loss. A tidy profit on both ends, with zero personal risk.
It was clever, greedy, and thoroughly disgusting.
Kaelen reached over the side of his hammock. From the wooden crate resting beneath the ropes, he picked up a blank, palm-sized notebook bound in dark pigskin leather. Beside it lay a stub of pointed black charcoal.
He tossed both items onto Sera’s lap.
Sera caught them, looking at the blank cover with confusion. “What’s this?”
“Your new employment ledger,” Kaelen said. “I’m calling it the Grudge Ledger—or the Overtime Grudge Ledger if anyone bothers me after dinner.”
“The Grudge Ledger?” Sera repeated, turning the empty pages.
“Your duties are very simple,” Kaelen instructed. “First, you sit on the porch steps and ensure nobody disturbs my naps. Second, whenever someone walks down that path to shout about cultivation, threaten my family, or kick my furniture, you write down their name.”
Sera stared at him. “Just their name?”
“Their name, their cultivation rank, and an estimate of how much silver they carry in their pouch,” Kaelen clarified. “Be precise with the arithmetic. When the time comes to settle accounts, we will bill them with compound interest.”
A strange light flickered in Sera’s gray eyes. The sorrow and exhaustion seemed to lift, replaced by a cold, calculating spark.
“And my indenture?” Sera asked.
“Fifty Spirit Stones is a lot of rocks,” Kaelen said. “You won’t earn it carrying weed baskets. But guard this hammock properly, and when Garrick comes to collect, I will make sure his abacus breaks in half.”
Sera stood up. She tested her weight on both feet, feeling the smooth, unrestricted surge of Rank 5 Qi coursing through her unblocked meridians.
She planted the blunt end of the broken Storm-Pike against the porch floorboards with a solid, echoing thud.
“Consider the porch guarded, Young Master,” Sera said firmly.
She took the charcoal stub and opened the pigskin notebook to the first blank page. In neat, precise military strokes, she wrote:
Entry 1: Overseer Hobb. Rank 3. Stole 10 Silver hazard pay. Threat of whip. Entry 2: Garrick Vance. Rank 6. Forged 50 LSS blood indenture. False loss manifest.
Kaelen nodded in approval. “Excellent penmanship. Now stop talking and let me sleep.”
He pulled the straw hat over his face and let his breathing slow to a crawl.
Beneath his ribs, the stone tablet glowed with steady, unwavering light.
[The Fallow Slate] [Current Abstinence: 85 Hours, 00 Minutes] [Current State: True Fallow State] [Current Multiplier: 86x (Stage 1: Mortal Tally)]
With Sera Thorne standing guard, the Third Herb Shed turned into an impenetrable sanctuary.
Over the next two days, the mountain winds blew crisp and dry from the northern ridges. Sera sorted all three sacks of bruised herbs with lightning speed, washing the roots, trimming the bitter stems, and laying them across the drying racks in neat rows.
Whenever a nosy manor servant or snooping errand boy drifted near the lower orchard, Sera simply stepped to the edge of the fence, holding the heavy ash shaft of Storm-Pike across her forearms.
Her Rank 5 aura, sharp as a drawn blade, sent them scurrying back to the main road before they could even open their mouths.
Inside the hammock, Kaelen barely stirred.
He slept. He sipped Mina’s roasted barley tea. He read further into Book 2 of his romance serial, chuckling softly whenever the bandit king delivered a comically dramatic speech to the moon.
The hours rolled past like smooth river pebbles.
[The Fallow Slate] [Current Abstinence: 95 Hours, 00 Minutes] [Current State: True Fallow State] [Current Multiplier: 96x (Stage 1: Mortal Tally)] [Next Milestone: 96 Hours (97x Ready)]
Ninety-five hours. Ninety-six times multiplier.
Kaelen felt the deep reservoir of potential resting inside the stone tablet. At this level, a single cash-out would blast his cultivation past the bottlenecks of Mortal Pulse with terrifying force.
He kept waiting. The vessel cap was two hundred and forty hours. Every additional hour stacked another hundred percent on top of his baseline.
The fifth day arrived, cloaked in heavy gray clouds that promised rain.
The afternoon wore on quietly. Mina sat inside by the warm hearth, grinding dried earth-root into fine powder for the furnace broth. Barnaby whittled wooden pill pegs on the porch steps, his single arm moving with steady rhythm.
Sera stood near the gate post, leaning lightly on her broken spear, her eyes scanning the pine woods.
As the sun began to dip behind the western ridge, casting the lower valley into deep twilight, the Slate chimed in Kaelen’s mind.
[The Fallow Slate] [Current Abstinence: 118 Hours, 00 Minutes] [Current State: True Fallow State] [Current Multiplier: 119x (Stage 1: Mortal Tally)] [Next Milestone: 119 Hours (120x Ready)]
One hundred and eighteen hours.
One hundred and nineteen times efficiency.
Kaelen stretched his toes, feeling the cool evening breeze tickle the hem of his trousers. Just two more hours, and he would hit the major milestone of one hundred and twenty hours.
At that exact moment, two miles uphill in the manor’s rear pavilion, a heavy purse of silver clinked against a stone table.
Garrick Vance sat in a cushioned armchair, his slender fingers tapping against a brass abacus. A cup of sweet pear wine rested near his elbow.
Across the low table stood a broad-shouldered man with a scarred scalp and a jagged grin. He wore greasy wolf-hide armor and carried a curved iron machete strapped across his broad back.
It was Lieutenant Vorn, one of Hound-Lord Briggs’s senior enforcers, a ruthless Mortal Pulse Rank 6 killer.
“Overseer Hobb tells me my runaway scout is hiding in the Third Herb Shed,” Garrick said, his voice smooth and cold. “And my useless third brother paid twelve silver to shelter her.”
“A little bird told us she carried corpse venom,” Lieutenant Vorn rasped, running a thick thumb along his blade’s hilt. “She should be a rotting carcass by now.”
“She’s alive,” Garrick said, his eyes narrowing with sharp displeasure. “And she owes my counting house fifty Spirit Stones. I want her back in chains before midnight.”
“And the third brother?” Vorn asked, grinning with yellow teeth. “The invalid?”
Garrick waved his hand with complete indifference.
“Break both of his kneecaps,” Garrick commanded. “Make it look like he fell down the cellar stairs. If that old cripple Barnaby gets in the way, slit his throat and burn the shed to the ground.”
Garrick pushed the heavy purse across the table.
“Take eight of your best butchers,” Garrick added, taking a sip of his pear wine. “Bring the girl to the southern warehouse. Don’t leave a single survivor.”