The days after Master Theron’s departure blurred into a routine of grim necessity. Kaelen’s vow of defiance needed fuel, and fuel cost coin. With Theron’s calming herbs keeping Lyra’s episodes at bay, Kaelen turned to the only trade available to a Tier 0 cripple with a strong back and a death wish: beast-hunting.
It wasn’t true hunting, not like the cultivator cadets from the larger towns who tracked beasts for sport or spiritual essence. For Kaelen, it was scavenging with a side of suicidal risk. The small villages like Dust-hollow paid a pittance for the hides, bones, and glands of the low-level spirit beasts that occasionally strayed from the deeper woods. The work was left to the outcasts, the desperate, and the doomed. Kaelen qualified on all counts.
He carried a heavy, short-handled hatchet, its edge sharpened more by his obsessive grinding than by any quality steel. His armor was his thick, patched tunic and leather bracers. His strategy was simple: avoid the larger predators, track the smaller ones—scuttling carapace-crawlers, venomous thorn-spirits, or the common shadow rabbits—and hope not to stumble into a nest.
That morning, he tracked a promising sign: deep, three-toed prints in the mud near a boggy stream. Not a rabbit. Something bigger. His heart hammered a mix of fear and desperate hope. A larger beast meant more coin. Enough for a week’s food, maybe a poultice if Lyra’s breathing grew shallow again.
The trail led him deeper into the woods than he usually ventured, where the trees grew gnarled and close, their canopies choking out the gray daylight. The air smelled of wet rot and something else, a sharp, musky scent that pricked the hairs on his neck. He followed the prints into a shallow ravine, its sides slick with moss and fallen leaves.
That was when the scent intensified, becoming a foul wave that made his eyes water. And from the shadows ahead, a low, rumbling growl vibrated in the air, felt more in the bones than heard.
Kaelen froze. He peered into the gloom. Two points of dull, yellow light stared back at him, set in a mass of shadowy fur. Not a fox. Too big. A shadow wolf. Tier 2, at least. And it had been feeding. A half-eaten carcass of a forest deer lay near its paws.
He should have run. Any sane person would have. But the ravine’s walls were too steep and slick to climb quickly, and the wolf’s gaze was locked on him, a predator that had been disturbed at its meal. It rose slowly, shaking bits of flesh from its maw. It was larger than he’d imagined, the size of a large pony, with muscles that bunched and coiled under its pelt like oiled ropes. Its aura, though weak and feral, pressed against his senses, a tangible weight of killing intent.
Kaelen backed away, his hand white-knuckled on his hatchet. The wolf took a step forward, then another, its movement a fluid, silent glide. It wasn’t charging. It was herding him. Cornering him against the steep bank.
Desperation, cold and sharp, cut through his fear. There was no escape. Running meant a snapped spine in its jaws. Fighting was suicide, but it was a suicide he could choose, a fight he could make cost something.
He let out a ragged yell, more to pump his own courage than to intimidate, and charged forward, swinging the heavy hatchet in a wild, horizontal arc aimed at the wolf’s neck.
The beast was faster. It ducked under the clumsy swing with contemptuous ease, its head snapping forward. Teeth like obsidian shards closed on his left forearm. Pain, white-hot and blinding, erupted up to his shoulder. He screamed, the sound torn from his lungs, and stumbled back, the hatchet falling from his numb fingers. The wolf’s jaws clenched tighter, shaking him like a rag doll. He felt the wet tear of fabric, the sickening crunch of bone near his wrist.
No! Not yet! Not like this! Lyra’s face, pale and shimmering, blazed in his mind.
With a guttural roar of pure animal terror and will, he drove his right fist, clutching a handful of sharp rocks he’d picked up earlier, into the wolf’s exposed eye.
The beast yelped, a sound of shocked pain, and its grip slackened for a fraction of a second. It was enough. Kaelen wrenched his mangled arm free, blood spraying, and fell backward into the mud. The wolf recoiled, shaking its head, claws scraping at its ruined eye.
Kaelen scrambled for his hatchet, his vision swimming with pain and blood loss. His fingers closed around the familiar wooden handle. The wolf recovered, turning on him with a renewed, enraged fury. It lunged, not for a bite this time, but to bowl him over with its mass.
He didn’t try to dodge. He knew he couldn’t. As the shadowy form filled his vision, he swung the hatchet upward with every ounce of strength in his body, not aiming for flesh or bone, but for the soft, vulnerable spot where the neck met the jaw.
The impact jarred up his arm, a wet, heavy thud. The hatchet’s edge bit deep, severing something vital. The wolf’s lunge faltered, its body crashing into him, knocking the air from his lungs. They went down in a heap of mud, blood, and thrashing limbs. Kaelen felt hot breath on his face, a final, shuddering groan against his chest, and then the weight above him went limp.
He lay there, gasping, pinned under the dead beast. Pain was a roaring sea in his left arm. His heart hammered against his ribs like a trapped bird. Slowly, with a monumental effort, he pushed the wolf’s carcass off him. It slumped into the mud with a heavy, final sound.
He had killed it. A Tier 2 beast. He, Kaelen the Cripple.
The realization brought no triumph, only a dizzying wave of weakness. Blood pulsed sluggishly from the torn flesh of his forearm. He needed to bind it, but his hands were shaking uncontrollably. He looked at the dead wolf, its remaining eye glassy and dull. And then he saw it.
Faint, silvery wisps of light were rising from the wolf’s body, coiling in the damp air like smoke from a snuffed candle. Spiritual essence. The life force, the power that had animated the beast, now released by its death. According to everything he knew, it should dissipate into the air within moments, absorbed by the ambient energy of the world or lost forever.
But the wisps didn’t dissipate. They drifted, lazy and luminous, toward him.
Kaelen flinched back, a superstitious dread coiling in his gut. Ghosts? Vengeance? But the wisps didn’t feel hostile. They felt… hungry. Or rather, they felt like something inside him was hungry, and they were the meal.
Before he could think, before he could stop it, a deep, instinctual pull emanated from his chest—from the dead, silent place where his crippled core resided. It was not a conscious action. It was as reflexive as breathing. His core, dormant for eighteen years, opened.
The silvery wisps of the shadow wolf’s essence shot toward him, not entering his mouth or nose, but sinking directly into the center of his chest. There was a moment of cold, a sensation of profound emptiness being filled, like water pouring into a dry well. Then, a rush.
Power flooded his veins. Not spiritual energy in the way he’d seen cultivators channel it—a controlled, refined force. This was raw, wild, and feral. His senses exploded. He could smell the individual droplets of blood in the mud, hear the frantic pulse of a squirrel hidden thirty paces away in a tree root, see the faint heat-trails of small creatures scurrying through the undergrowth. The pain in his arm was still there, but it was distant, muffled beneath a tide of vibrant, thrumming vitality.
He flexed his fingers. His left arm, mangled and bleeding moments before, felt… not healed, but alive in a way it hadn’t for years. He could feel the torn muscles, the cracked bone, but also a fierce, tingling energy encouraging the flesh to knit, to hold together. It wasn’t mending it. It was borrowing from the wolf’s vitality to ignore the damage.
He stood up, swaying. The world looked sharper, more defined. He could feel the heartbeat of the very earth beneath his feet, slow and powerful. He looked down at his hand, at the muddy, blood-stained skin, and flexed it again. He felt… stronger. Faster. More aware.
This was impossible. This was forbidden. To absorb beast essence directly, without refinement, without a proper core to process it—legends said it drove men mad, turned them into beast-like husks. It was a path to corruption, whispered about in the darkest corners of cultivation lore.
And yet, here he was, standing in a muddy ravine with a dead wolf at his feet, power thrumming through his body like a second pulse. His crippled core… had done something.
“An interesting little trick.”
The voice, dry and raspy as dead leaves, came from directly behind him. Kaelen spun around, his newly enhanced senses flaring. He’d heard nothing, seen nothing approaching. But there, leaning against the ravine wall as if he’d been there for hours, was the old man from the village.
Elder Jin.
He looked as Kaelen remembered him from that brief, unnerving encounter: stooped, his gray robes plain, his face a roadmap of wrinkles, and one clouded, blind eye. The other, however, was sharp and bright, and it was fixed on Kaelen’s chest with an unnerving intensity. In his hand, he held a simple walking staff.
Kaelen’s blood ran cold. How long had he been there? Had he seen? “I… I killed it,” Kaelen stammered, gesturing at the wolf, feeling the foolishness of the words even as he said them.
“Indeed you did. Quite messily, but effectively,” Elder Jin rasped. He took a slow step forward, his gaze never leaving Kaelen’s chest. “But that is not the interesting part. The killing was merely the prelude.”
He stopped a few feet away, his blind eye seeming to point elsewhere while his good eye bored into Kaelen. “The interesting part was what you did next. The way the veil thinned, and the essence flowed not into the void of the world, but into the void within you.”
The words struck Kaelen like a physical blow. He knew. The old man had seen it all.
“How…” Kaelen’s voice was barely a whisper.
“By watching. For a long time, now.” Elder Jin’s tone held no malice, only a dry, clinical curiosity that was somehow more frightening. “You are a peculiar anomaly, boy. A Tier 0 with a core that should be a dead seed, yet it breathes when touched by death. A void that drinks, instead of remaining empty.”
He raised a skeletal finger, pointing at Kaelen’s chest. “You think you are crippled. But what if you are merely… dormant? And what if you have just awakened to a power that the world above has spent centuries trying to erase from memory?”
The wind rustled the leaves in the ravine. The blood from Kaelen’s arm dripped steadily into the mud. The feral energy from the wolf still buzzed under his skin, but the old man’s words sent a deeper, colder chill through him. The world of cultivators he had raged against suddenly felt vast, terrifying, and far closer than he had ever imagined. He had sought a miracle for his sister. He had found something else entirely.