by Charles Dean
Chapter 1
“Ugh, what do I do now?” Lars grumbled as he leaned back against the tree and shut the book that he had just burned two years of savings on, Tao’s Beginning Guide to Cultivation. He had hoped that the answer he was looking for would be somewhere in its pages, but all he had found were vague references that he couldn’t make heads or tails of. It talked about centering one’s Qi before entering the Lesser Clay Brick Phase, but there wasn’t anything related to why he couldn’t cultivate. Nothing in the book honestly made much sense, but there was truly no way for him to be certain. He had never personally succeeded at cultivating, and he wouldn’t have been buying books if anyone else in his nearly illiterate town had been able to describe how to do it successfully.
Well, you could always get yourself hurt like you did the first time you got your hands on a cultivation book.
The blue message box appeared in front of him, accompanied by the voice of the ever-present woman with an accent unlike anyone’s in the area. Her voice filled his ears with the same words that were written on the screen.
“Do you really need to bring that up?” Lars grumbled as he remembered the humiliation that had come with his first attempt at cultivating when he had finally managed to buy a book after a year of saving. He had tried concentrating on his every movement and doing exactly what the book said word for word and in exactly the order the instructions had appeared. The steps involved posing in ways that had gotten him ridiculed more than usual, and he could still hear the insults today: “Can’t balance without a tail, can you, you worthless bastard?” and “Did your father teach you that one? Oh, right. What father?” and “Oh! There is a good idea! Maybe, if you learn to look stupid enough, people won’t notice how freaking ugly you are.” They hadn’t been the most creative insults, but they had stuck with him. The mocking and criticism repeated in his head over and over again at night when he tried to sleep.
That none of his efforts paid off didn’t help either. That combination of being desperate to finally not feel worthless and just wanting the jeers and taunts to end had driven him to ignore reason, the woman’s voice in his head calling him an idiot, and the warnings about what cultivation level you should be before proceeding written clearly in the back of the book, and he had begun to attempt the basic alchemy described. He had mixed up a concoction of Qi-containing berries and herbs, distilled it, and then consumed it under a roaring waterfall a few miles from the village. If the book had been correct, it would have leap-started his cultivation and granted him the strength of a dozen men.
Instead, he had nearly died. He had woken up two days later in his bed with his blanket soaked by his mother’s tears as she sobbed quietly over his stomach and begged over and over again for him to “please wake up.”
I’m just reminding you that, if you had listened to me, none of that would have happened. Didn’t I tell you not to do it? I did, didn’t I? And now I’m telling you again: Stop dreaming. That book holds no answers for you. Just find a merchant to pawn it off on . . . Or, if you really wanted to grow stronger, you know . . . you could . . .
Lars didn’t take the bait. He already knew what she was going to say. Rather than ask her what he could do, he prepared himself to tune her out.
If you want strength, you could just kill! Kill people. Kill people, animals, monsters, any living being with a significant amount of Qi flowing through them! The answer to all of your problems is that easy: just kill the strong when they’re at their weakest.
He would always be grateful to whomever his text-generating companion was, as the combination of her voice and the written words was how he had learned to read and deal with the loneliness that came from the fact nearly no one in the village had a kind word to spare him. What he hated, however, was the fact that she had always insisted on him killing people from the very moment the blue boxes first appeared. She had informed him that killing people even counted as “quests,” and completing every quest in one’s journal was the duty of any good adventurer.
Just yesterday, one of the blue boxes had instructed him to kill his friend Dawn. The so-called quest had been labeled “Childhood Friends Deserve the Best Ending,” but its contents were little more than instructions for him to sneak into her room at night and kill her while she slept.
“I don’t care how many times you ask. I’m not killing anyone just so I can cultivate,” Lars muttered back at the woman. Despite feeling let down and a bit hopeless, he was actually glad that he had chosen to go to the forest to read alone. While he hated the fact that he’d occasionally end up with a patch of mosquito bites, it was still nice to be able to talk to the random voice in his head without anyone bothering him for being crazy; and, truthfully, he enjoyed conversing with her. After all, as much as it pained him to admit it sometimes, she was the one he talked to the most.
Fine. Then at least eat something besides rice later. That rice is disgusting. No bacon, teriyaki, chicken, eggs, or even sesame oil with carrots and peas. It’s just plain white rice. Who eats plain white rice? This is why you’re still Level 0. You should have used your savings to buy bacon and meat from Apollos instead of that useless book.
“I still wish you would explain what you mean by ‘Level 0,’” Lars said before standing up, dusting himself off, and heading back.
The village wasn’t very large, and while he knew everyone, almost everyone treated him like trash that had already begun to smell thanks to his being a no-stage, Qi-less human. Still, those cold eyes and resentful stares when they noticed that he, the worthless trash of their village, was near or the occasional spitting when he walked by as if his presence alone were a taste they couldn’t get out of their mouths thankfully never went too far. He had to deal with harsh words every now and then, but those incidents had grown rarer as he grew older, and they were almost never followed up with a few kicks in the ribs or a punch in the gut for looking at the wrong girl like they had been in the past. The people seemed to have grown bored with bullying him, much less acknowledging his existence.
The town’s relatively small size and the people’s general indifference were why his mother had picked this particular town. He had no doubt that someone at the “Lesser Clay Brick Phase,” as Tao’s book described it, might just kill him for being annoying, or because they could, if he and his mother lived in a larger town or an actual city. After all, anyone who couldn’t cultivate was considered trash by the entire world, and he didn’t have the strength or power to disagree with anyone about it.
Until you kill something that has a lot of Qi, I can’t explain it. That’s why I am telling you this for your own good: Just slit someone’s throat at night. Make it nice, quick, and painless. I promise your life will improve. Just kill. Kill. Kill. It’ll all be better.
If you calm down with all this “kill” talk—because you know I’m not going to do it—then I promise to see if Anneliese has any leftover milkshakes. I’ll even add in your favorite flavor, krowenberry.
She remained silent for a while, as if contemplating his offer, before finally relenting.
Fine. Two krowenberry milkshakes, and I’ll suspend potential quest notifications for a prolonged period of time.
“There you go,” Lars said, chuckling a little. Even if she was a bit of a murderous psychopath, at least she was easily managed. Although, he had a feeling that she wouldn’t be so readily agreeable if she knew that he had been planning on getting one of those milkshakes anyway. He needed one, as far as he was concerned, and Anneliese was the only proper adult who would give him a treat without charging him, not that it cost her very much to make. She was a Stage 5 ice-attribute chef with bovine blood, and even though she was only a demi-human and not a full minotaur, she had an uncanny familiarity with cows and an unnatural control over dairy products. Her ice attribute paired perfectly with her love for delicious frozen desserts, and she could practically make as many of them as she needed in an instant at little more cost than the materials she needed to freeze.
We should try to find some purple zednauts to mix in with the milkshake too.
Lars shrugged noncommittally. Zednauts were a type of giant husk fruit filled with white beans that turned purple when heated. They had a beautifully rich, bitter flavor with faint but unmistakable hints of sweetness. The only problem was that he hated actually putting in the effort needed to make them edible. Harvesting the beans was the easy part since they grew at the top of the taller trees that skirted the town’s borders, but he wasn’t keen on humoring her request. Without fire-attribute Qi, he actually had to gather wood and tinder to start a fire, put the beans in a pot, fill the pot with water so the beans wouldn’t scorch against the metal when the fire started to heat the pot, wait for the beans to cool down after draining the water out, and then clean up everything. His mother had repeatedly drilled it into him that “no self-respecting servant should ever let a mess sit for more than a minute,” and cleaning up after himself was a habit at this point as much as a chore.
No zednauts, no deal.
As if reading his hesitation to put in the extra effort, the voice began sealing off his roads toward apathetic laziness.
You can’t back out now. You already agreed to two milkshakes and suspending the murder-happy notifications.
But I didn’t say for how long. If I don’t see zednauts, that length of time might suddenly become only a few minutes. Maybe even a few seconds. It’ll be easier to get more milkshakes from Anneliese if you prep the zednauts, and you could even make one for Dawn or your mother.
How is it that you go from telling me to kill Dawn in her sleep one minute to suggesting I make her a krowenberry and zednaut milkshake in literally the very next? Lars didn't understand how anyone could flip-flop between two seemingly opposed ideas so quickly. One minute she wanted him to kill Dawn, and then she wanted him to treat her incredibly nicely in the next. It was a conversation he had with her often, although he never received a satisfactory answer. She believed that Dawn and everyone else in the world were going to be farmed for EXP one day, so by her logic, Lars should be the one to do it. Even though Dawn was destined to die, however, that didn’t mean that she should be treated poorly before her time came. At least that was what the voice said when he pestered her.
Lars already knew that he’d be put to work the moment someone saw him, and he really wasn’t in a rush since it was his day off, so he took his time heading into town. As one of the Qi-less adults, just like his mother, he had been forced to pick up the only job available to his kind: a servant to one of the town’s higher-stage Qi warriors. In his case, that higher-stage Qi warrior was Katie. It was a thankless job that involved endless cooking, cleaning, doing small repairs around the house, and fetching stuff all the time.
Once Katie found out that he was back in town, it was only a matter of time before she would have him tending her garden without a shirt, serving as the target of her inappropriate remarks, and then reading books to her about a filthy-minded lizard lady sleeping with people while Katie cultivated.
Whatever. Being a servant isn’t a bad job. Lars had to remind himself that things could be worse. Even if he was a servant, at least he wasn’t stuck working for one of the nobles in the larger towns. Stories ran rampant about how they often took things too far and abused those underneath them. Not to mention, he had plenty of downtime to work on his own money-making side project: writing.
“RUN!”
“What?” Lars asked, snapping out of his self-absorbed state. “What’s going on?” He spun around and spotted the owner of the voice barreling toward him.
“RUN, YOU FREAKING QI-LESS HUMAN BASTARD! THEY’RE GOING TO KILL US ALL! GET RUNNING BEFORE THEY GET YOU TOO!” Ramon the porcupine-blooded Stage 2 water attribute scout shouted as he rushed toward Lars.
“Huh? Who? What’s going on?” Lars dumbly looked around for any sign of a threat, but the woods were empty.
If I can smell the smoke and blood, that means you can too.
Lars’s senses prickled at that remark. “Wait. What’s happening in the town?” he asked Ramon. “Why are you running? Where is everyone else?”
“Everyone else? They’re either running, or they’re dead, or they’re slaves! We gotta get rolling, man. We GOTTA RUN, MAN!”
“They’re dead? Slaves? What the hell?” Lars felt his muscles tighten up and his throat constrict as he imagined the worst. “What about my mother? What about Dawn? What about Anneliese and that bull-headed husband of hers?”
“Them? They’re probably dead, man,” Ramon replied between ragged breaths as he braced his hands against his knees to hold himself in place. The young man, like nearly all demi-humans, looked mostly human except for the ears and tail that indicated his species. Since his tail had quills, he always had to wear funny pants with a massive butt flap that kept the tail from stabbing him in the back, the sort of accident that had once cost him a week of being able to sit down.
Even though Ramon was close enough now that he didn’t have to yell, he was also clearly worn out from having sprinted out of town at full speed. Ramon could use Qi, but he was still only Stage 2. As a result, he didn’t have the seemingly endless supply of stamina that higher-level cultivators did. He couldn't run forever like a Lesser Clay Brick Stage cultivator could, so he struggled to speak after sprinting for so long. “I don’t know. I mean, they’re girls, and Dawn’s a looker, so maybe she’s a slave? Who knows? We gotta . . . We gotta get out of here.”
“What? Crap!” Lars’s eyes popped open in horror as it truly sank in that Ramon was serious. Something about the desperation in his voice and the fear written across his face made Lars believe him. Without further thought, Lars took off running at full speed toward the town. Ramon was right, and fleeing wasn’t the wrong decision. But Lars couldn’t do that. As long as his mother was in danger, there was no way that he could ever run away like Ramon.
“Dude! What’s wrong with you?! I told you the town is being attacked! There are bandits everywhere. They’re taking everything, looting everyone, and burning what they can’t carry! We need to leave!” Ramon called out after Lars.
“You can run. I’m not stopping you!” Lars shouted back without so much as slowing down. He realized that Ramon was actually following after him now rather than continuing to run away.
“Like hell I can leave! You’re going to die too fast, you Qi-less bastard!” It didn’t take long for him to catch up to Lars, and the two ran side by side. The difference in the abilities of a Qi cultivator and the Qi-less were too obvious. “You need to turn around and scram before it’s too late.”
Glancing over at Ramon, who had been blessed with the ability to cultivate, Lars only felt even more convinced that his decision was the right one. Ramon might have a future outside of the village, but Lars didn’t. He was a nobody. A nothing. Garbage. He didn’t have a bright career or some peerless future to look forward to. He only had his mother and one or two friends, and if he let them die now, he’d have nothing.
“Don’t just ignore me! Turn around, man. We can still escape!” Ramon begged.
Yet, all the while, Lars noticed that the porcupine-blooded cultivator stayed with him.
Since when were we friends enough for you to do this for me? Lars wanted to ask, but he didn't want to check the gift ruepin in the beak. If he had a Stage 2 Qi-Gathering Cultivator helping him, his chances of rescuing his mother were that much higher.
“What the hell?” Lars gasped as they reached the town. As far as he could see, every single one of the dozens of oak houses with thatch or bark-shingled roofs was on fire. There were screams coming from different parts of the village, and the sounds of metal clashing against metal and waves of striking Qi reverberated from every direction. The smell of blood was thick in the air, and Lars could see at least two bodies that had been butchered in the street. The signs of people, weapons, and Qi smashing against wooden house frames were everywhere, and the roofs of many buildings were burning, likely a product of figh
ts with fire-attribute Qi. The flames were clearly spreading outward from long, distinct lines drawn across the buildings and large yards from whatever technique or skill the fighters were using.
I may have agreed to suspend quest notifications, but I feel the need to let you know that there are a lot of pending quests appearing. I just can’t tell you about them unless you let me. Please let me tell you to kill people. I’ll walk you through it. Please, can we kill people? They’re bad people. We should murder them all. You’ll enjoy it as much as I will. I promise.
Lars read the message, listening to her voice as he stared at the burning town in front of him. “If I accept your stupid quests, can you help me kill some of these bastards?” Lars asked, staring at the flames blazing across the rooftops of his home.
“Who are you talking to?” Ramon asked as he came up behind Lars. “Man, don’t tell me you’ve already snapped and gone crazy. Come on! It’s not too late. We need to run. Let’s get out of here already!”
To be honest, you’re so pathetically weak that I can’t even guarantee you’ll live long enough to complete a quest, and there’s no way that I can promise to help you kill any of the “bastards,” as you label them. But I can tell you that you’ll be better off if you follow my quest and kill them than if you don’t. Just give in to the temptation. Just kill them. Do it for me. Do it for me, and I’ll help you out. I’ll give you something good: a special “first-time” present.
“Fine,” Lars agreed out loud, not even bothering to hide what appeared to be a dialogue with himself from Ramon. “Give them to me. Undo the quest notifications suspension and tell me what I need to do.”
Quest: First Blood.Objective: Kill anyone. The porcupine behind you maybe? Or a barely breathing citizen dying in the street? That counts too. Like I said, kill anything. Just take a life.