Orange-crest sat alone in the shade of his favorite willow, watching dusk overtake the day. His toes were half submerged in the cool water of the fishing pool. Every so often, a particularly brave fish would dart forward, mistaking them for especially ugly worms, and discover what monkeys tasted like.
Bad apparently, from the way they recoiled. But they kept giving his toes nibbles all the same. He was keeping very still, and fish had short memories.
Normally, orange-crest would have given nibbling them in turn the old Mount Yuelu try. It was something of a rule of his. If a being tried to eat you, you should try to eat it in return. Maybe not try very hard, if it was terrifying or smelly. But fair was fair. Besides, some especially stupid predators only ever learned certain things were not food when their erstwhile prey sought to eat them in turn.
Unfortunately was already full, and fishing was hard work. Humans should invent some device that allowed one to catch fish without needing to spend hours standing in uncomfortable positions and futilely stabbing at fish that had already moved away the moment you tensed to strike.
Oh. Wait.
"Nope." Orange-crest whispered.
The unfortunate carp that had chosen this moment to sample his toes froze in place, trapped as surely as if the pond had iced over around it. Orange-crest's qi blended with the light of the dying sun, shining like fire on the water.
"Up here."
He caught the flying fish easily, wrapping his thumb and forefinger around its head. He squeezed, and struggle and suffering alike ceased.
Orange-crest pondered the dead fish. How many times could he do that in a row? Six? Eight? Maybe twelve if he drained his dantian to the bottom. The fish had not put up much resistance, and he was stronger now than he'd ever been before. Would a bigger fish be more work? He wasn't sure. He was coming to see that spiritual strength was very different from physical strength, even though both allowed one to strike harder. The cost of immobilizing something seemed to have more to do with its spiritual power than its size or might, though he was pretty sure the latter was still a factor on some level.
If orange-crest spent his time in meditation, he could recover from such an exertion in a couple hours. He could harvest perhaps forty or fifty fish a day then, if Mount Yuelu had as much ambient qi as the Azure Mountain. He did not think it did. His qi-eyes had not opened in truth until after he'd left his first home. But if his first home had been as blessed as this one, orange-crest suspected he would have awoken to the powers of cultivators far earlier. A curious case of absence of evidence becoming evidence of absence.
The lifeless fish twitched. Orange-crest took a bite, fullness be damned. One did not waste food.
Orange-crest did not usually do math of his own free will. It was interesting, but decidedly not enjoyable. A tool, but no more intrinsically engaging a tool than a knife or cauldron. But the question wouldn't leave him. Just how much of Mount Yuelu could he feed, if he turned all his strength to the goal of obtaining meat?
The numbers might change depending on particulars. But however he sliced up the matter, he could certainly feed his pack. Even big-butt rarely ate more than a dozen fish in one sitting. Fifty fish would fill all their bellies to bursting. Mount Yuelu had five packs of similar size to his, and a dozen smaller ones. He probably could not feed every monkey on the mountain enough to satisfy them. That would take several hundred fish. But if the lakes did not become bare of fish, he could certainly catch enough food to stave off a season of hunger on his own. With such a bounty added to whatever the others could forage, no monkey would starve.
It would require a level of cooperation that normally took either the king, or big-butt and red-eyes speaking in unison. But as he was now, would not orange-crest's voice echo as loud as any of theirs? He could manage it, he thought. With force and guile, and a big enough external threat, he could compel his kind to get along for a time.
Orange-crest took another great big bite out of the carp. Sometimes a little taste was all it took to spur an appetite thought sated. The fresh fish was delicious. A little earthy, and the scales and bones were not great. But fish was fish.
Orange-crest was powerful now. He mattered. He was not simply one small monkey with a sometimes-useful interest in fermentation. Big-butt and red-eyes might be mightier than him. He was not sure, a fight with either would still be a close thing. But neither of them could do what he could, produce that much food. At best they could bring down a bear or a fearsomely large hog. Assuming luck was on their side to find one, and no small risk to themselves. Maybe a stag would be easier prey if they had help to herd it into a blind valley.
Any of those would feed many monkeys, none were a reliable source of food.
Only orange-crest and the Monkey King could simply exert their will and drive off hunger like an unwelcome wolf.
"Huh."
Orange-crest paused in the middle of spitting out a particularly thick bone. The Monkey King could easily feed every monkey on Mount Yuelu. Orange-crest's powers were nothing compared to his. But he didn't. He oft saved them when the years were terribly lean, but the only time he provided the rest of his kind great quantities of meat was after he slew an invading beast.
Orange-crest wondered why. He did not doubt the Monkey King. That would be like doubting the life-giving sun for the years it hung too low and cooked the land. The king did not justify himself to his subjects, he had saved too many of them too often to ever be so questioned. But orange-crest could see so much further than he ever had before. And he wondered what it was he was missing. What did the Monkey King see that he still did not?
He flinched, as the crunching of leaves heralded company.
"Well. This is even more remote than my yew." The young man said. "I suppose Daoist Scouring Medicine doesn't exactly live that close to the outer sect proper in the first place."
"Human." Orange-crest chirped in greeting.
"Monkey." Yang Wei returned, his face an inscrutable mask.
"Fish?" Orange-crest offered, holding up his catch. There were only a couple bites taken out of it.
"I'll start with the wine. That's enough culinary adventure for one evening I think."
"What?"
"I've never drunk more than a cup or two."
"No." Orange-crest cried, aghast. "I thought your family was rich."
"They are."
"And they don't drink wine?"
"My uncle does. My parents disdain it, except during ceremonies, and as their child I saw no reason to do otherwise."
"Huh. Gourd?"
Yang Wei carefully accepted the copper gourd. He sloshed it around, eyeing it dubiously.
"Is this what you were drinking during our fight?"
"No. Just monkey wine." Orange-crest snickered. "That stuff might kill you."
"What?"
"Probably not. Daoist Scouring Medicine just likes being safe. Also I only have half a jar left. This just wine. Fruit wine. Much better than rice."
The face Yang Wei made was equal parts not reassured and darkly curious. He stared back at orange-crest, seeking something in the monkey's eyes. Orange-crest just smiled at him.
Yang Wei raised the gourd to his lips and took a deep draw from it. His eyes and cheeks bulged, but he refused to spit. Face reddening, he forced himself to swallow.
"Wow. Big mouthful." Orange-crest snatched the gourd back and took one of his own to match him.
"Blackest Hell, that tastes like fruity lamp oil."
"My master thinks it is too sweet."
"It's too something alright." Yang Wei muttered under his breath. "My whole chest feels warm."
Orange-crest took another bite of fish. There. Now he had two friends who were not from the senior generation. He just wished the other one would reappear. He was beginning to worry for the strange little fox. That without his moderating influence, formless-gleam might have gotten into some sort of trouble she couldn't disappear her way out of.
They sat in silence for a time. Orange-crest wasn't quite sure what to say to Yang Wei. Orange-crest had once seen a rosefinch slowly pick at a precarious plum. The tiny bird had taken the better part of half of a day to peck through the branch supporting the fruit. But when the fruit finally fell to the ground, the bird found itself at a loss. The plum was easily twice the tiny thing's size, and there was nothing it could do with the fruit on the ground that it could not do with it when it was still on the branch.
He felt a little like that finch. He'd spent so long trying to get disciples not to like him, but to merely tolerate his company beyond what the sect mandated of them. And then, if his master's words were to be trusted, and they usually were, everything had changed in an instant.
"I don't know what I expected, when you invited me to drink with you. Gloating, or commiseration." Yang Wei said suddenly.
"I expected you to say no." Orange-crest answered honestly. "The others did."
"Others?"
"Wu Yingjie. Jiang Yan was too angry to even try. Never even tried the hunters, except Ogre Wu."
"Hm." Yang Wei left the second part of that statement alone. He'd noticed the monkey liked doing that, teasing some sort of interesting fact and then offering up some glib evasion if you actually asked a follow-up question. The monkey especially liked to do that whenever he mentioned his mysterious king. Apparently that small mob of disciples that had tried to recruit him had eventually worked up the courage to do something more than curse the monkey's name. He'd heard something about a tragedy with a Sun-Swallowing Bear, but the disciples in question hadn't exactly been keen to spread around the details of their shame. "Wu Yingjie is... Prickly. I would not hold it against him."
"Why?" The monkey asked immediately.
"Why is he prickly or why would I not hold it against him?"
"Yes?"
Yang Wei sighed.
"It is not my story to tell. His family desires much from the future, but expects little from him. It is not an enviable combination."
This time it was orange-crest who did not leap upon the subject Yang Wei had left hanging. He was quite curious. He was always quite curious about the strange ways in which men organized their tribes and packs. But until Wu Yingjie decided he was no longer interested in strife with orange-crest, the monkey saw no need to seek out information that might make his foe sympathetic.
He offered Yang Wei the gourd again instead. Yang Wei grimaced, but took another deep drink. His face was definitely beginning to flush. Orange-crest wondered if he was as unfamiliar with his limits as he'd been that night he tried to drink an entire jug of wine. That could be fun.
He wouldn't give Yang Wei a hangover and then toss him in a half frozen lake of course. He wasn't half as cruel as his master. But he wondered what drunken Yang Wei might let slip.
"Oh. I'd almost forgotten. I have something for you."
Yang Wei pulled out his storage treasure and reached an arm inside. He withdrew the same white staff he'd already given orange-crest.
"Yes!" Orange-crest hopped to his feet, happily snatching the weapon. "I was wondering where that was!"
"Someone put it back in my bag, after they carted us off the field. I suppose neither of our masters cared enough to intervene. That was a gift from my mother, you know. Though I expect my father chose it. It is white oak, cured in a wash of lime and silkworm cocoons. An ancient dynasty once used the technique to make their ceremonial implements. Mere white waxwood was apparently not good enough for the Young Master of the Yang Clan."
Orange-crest met Yang Wei's eyes. He was watching, expectantly. Orange-crest was pretty sure the socially appropriate thing for humans here was an expression of gratitude. But he was also pretty sure that was not what Yang Wei was looking for.
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"You know," The monkey began. "One day, I'll take that belt of yours too. Fairly, in an honest wager. No more giving."
Yang Wei snarled like an angry monkey, all teeth. But his eyes were filled with joyous anticipation.
"You do know this lighter shade of blue is not the same color as the sect's? It is the color of the Yang Clan's banners. Tongues would wag, were you seen wearing it. Cultivators might wonder whether the Yang Clan adopted a monkey, or allowed it to marry into our line."
"That seems like a human problem I am too monkey to care about."
Yang Wei's grin grew somehow wider. His face was practically the color of a plum now. Orange-crest didn't take another sip from gourd. He was pretty sure this man would drink himself into a stupor trying to match him if he did not pace himself carefully.
"Are you sure about that?" Yang Wei asked. "What if I asked for that beautiful gourd of yours to be wagered opposite it."
"Then I'll win. Again."
"Hah! Your victory was a fluke. Had I preemptively taken an antidote, or learned techniques to suppression poisonings, your petty trick with the spear would have hardly slowed me down. Next time I will be-"
"Yeah. Probably." Orange-crest agreed, interrupting him.
"Ready with techniques to clear your illusory clones and keep you from-" Yang Wei stopped. "Wait, what?"
"You should have beat me." Orange-crest repeated. "You are stronger than me. But you didn't. The first time we fought, you were so strong I had no chance. The second time, you were close enough to grasp. The third time, I will be the mountain, and you the climber."
Yang Wei burst into laughter, rolling backward a little. Oh wow, he was quite drunk.
"What? What's so funny?"
"Two things."
"Oh?"
"The first," Yang Wei said with that tiger's smile, "is that it was not a fluke that you won. Not really. Do you know what I sought from our battle?"
"Victory?"
"No. I sought the point of the spear. To pierce the silence, and enter into the place where all that I am might converge to a single truth. The thread-wide path that enters onto the road I will one day walk. It is why I spent my might so profligately, why I ever met your strength with my own, heedless of strategy."
"I don't get it."
"I sought to breakthrough upon the battlefield, monkey."
"Oh. That would have been really bad for me. Glad you didn't get it."
Yang Wei burst into wild laughter.
"Not a word of sympathy. As it should be, between equals."
"What's the other thing?" Orange-crest asked.
"You agreed to a rematch." Yang Wei said, flashing that vicious smile once more. "I will hold you to that. Even if the earth should split, and the heavens tremble. It does not matter how high you climb, you will never manage to leave me behind."
Orange-crest thought about it.
"Okay." He agreed. "Sounds fun."
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Orange-crest was discovering many new things this night. Disciple Yang Wei was not merely a lightweight. He was a sheaf of loose paper in his uncle's wind. The wine hadn't loosened his tongue, it had set it free entirely.
"We should go find other disciples!" Yang Wei shouted into the night.
"No."
"Yes!" Yang Wei insisted, slurring his words a little. "I see the outline of the mountain now! You were right! We humans govern our tongues too strictly! How can my peers ever improve if I don't tell them what I think of them?"
"That is not what I said." Orange-crest insisted. "You can be more honest and still not say things you know will make other people angry. The sect just began thinking I'm a real person. I don't want them to jump right to hating me."
Yang Wei's eyes narrowed. Orange-crest wasn't sure if the motion was motivated by sleepiness, ire, or both.
"They offend me. Their very existence. The way they treat cultivation."
"No. Don't tell them that." Monkey King's terrifying leavings, why was orange-crest the voice of caution. That was supposed to be someone else's job.
"They act like talent is destiny." Yang Wei hissed. "The nobles are the worst, but the talented commoners are not much better. They act like Foundation Establishment is a thing that will simply happen to them! They look at the quality of their spirit roots, the speed of their initial progression, the allotment they earn, and then they accept where the sect tells them their road will take them!"
"And that's bad?" Orange-crest ventured. The more Yang Wei ranted to him, the less likely it would be necessary for orange-crest to trick him into wandering in circles across the mountainside.
"What is cultivation if not change? Improvement! We cultivate the self before we cultivate qi! Have they forgotten why the traditional age of entry to the great sects is seventeen? Why so many clans still forbid their talents from consuming cultivation resources before then? What can their foundation be built upon if not effort! What determines our progress if not who we are?"
"Hmm."
"I accept their paths are not the same as my own. However it is not the daos they would seek that I disdain, but the half-hearted resolve with which-"
"Shh!"
Orange-crest blew into two of his fingers. He still couldn't whistle, but the noise of rushing air and mild spray of spit was just as effective as shutting people up.
Yang Wei's face darkened from fresh-blood to ripe-plum as he wiped his face with a sleeve.
"I am thinking." Orange-crest explained. "About your thought."
Yang Wei said nothing, but orange-crest could see him stabbing him with his eyes. Tallying up punishment for their next encounter. He was very much like red-eyes in that way. Uncompromising, with a love of harsh and stark things. Orange-crest found he rather wished to introduce the two of them. He was pretty sure Yang Wei would come out on top in the inevitable scuffle, but a wise monkey never counted a sufficiently motivated red-eyes out.
"I am not sure." The monkey eventually said. "I sometimes wonder, what sort of monkey I might be, if I tried to cultivate human-knowings on Mount Yuelu. Maybe I make a shirt-robe from bark or reed. Wear it and follow around my brothers, shouting nonsense sounds. Maybe I make a house, put logs in a cave and call it floor. Cover the opening with woven reeds and name it a door."
"I don't understand."
"I don't understand either. Words are hard. But maybe effort isn't enough. Maybe sometimes you need to know there's a better way to be cultivated in the first place."
This time it was Yang Wei's turn to take a moment to think.
"I am too drunk." He eventually said. "To know if that is a profundity or a truism. But I still don't think it applies to our peers. They have seen enough examples of a better way, in their seniors and elders. It is not blindness that holds them back, but sloth and fear. It is as my uncle says."
Yang Wei stood up abruptly, turning to face the night sky. Dark had long since fallen in full, as they drank and talked. Orange-crest stared up at his new friend with curiosity. His grasp of language was not perfect. But he was not ignorant of the subtleties of the human word 'brother'. He called Daoist Scouring Medicine and Daoist Enduring Oath brothers. But he knew that was not what they considered him. Master and uncle, they thought themselves respectively. They tolerated his insistence otherwise from a position based as much in their affection for him as it was their certainty of their own correctness.
They loved him as pack. They heard and considered his words as a fellow on the great-dao-hunt. But they did not consider him their equal.
Orange-crest could not help but hope that one day, Yang Wei truly might. He would make for a strange brother, but if orange-crest shied away from strangeness, he would not have approached Daoist Scouring Medicine that fateful night.
"Struggle is not effort. Nor is practice." Yang Wei suddenly spoke out into the night. "Strength cannot defy the Heavens, for only our wills exist beyond its scope. We do not practice to overcome the shape of the world. It is the shape of the world that the warrior who practices cannot help but improve. And the warrior who practices as if he would overcome all others cannot help but attain the strength he cultivates."
"Huh?"
"The words of my honored uncle." Yang Wei explained. "Words that I live by."
Orange-crest felt something. A thread-wide path, as Yang Wei had described it. A thin glimmer of the strange state of enlightenment that had come over him a week ago. He did not seek to follow it. He was having a good conversation, cultivating now would interrupt that. He would breakthrough to the fourth stage this week. He had the understanding and the resources, he did not need good fortune as well. He believed that, with all the certainty of knowledge.
"Only one person can overcome all others. Be the very best. But lots of people can beat the one who is the best, if the conditions are right. Maybe your way is the way of the one who would be the best. But maybe the rest of us just need to be the best us that we can be."
The idea wasn't quite right. But there was something there, orange-crest could feel it. An idea that might become part of who he was, one day.
Yang Wei's face contorted as if he'd bit into a worm-ridden persimmon.
"I hate that I am drunk enough those words make a modicum of sense to me."
They were still sitting next to the fishing pool. Orange-crest did not allow the anticipatory-glee building behind his eyes to show on his face.
"I know a solution for that." The monkey said, rising to his feet as well.
"You do? I thought one simply had to wait to sober up. My father says the only true hangover cure is knowing how to use your cultivation to purge poisons. That, or waste true healing pills."
Orange-crest kicked Yang Wei into the water. Maybe he was as cruel as his master. He could not help but smile as the flailing disciple splashed around trying to find his footing. Yang Wei wasn't too bad when he stopped acting like a judgmental statue.
"You furry bastard!" Yang Wei roared, rising from the chilly waters like some sort of demon of drowning. "Let's see how you like it!"
He lunged for orange-crest, dangerously sober after his dip.
"No!" Orange-crest screeched, wrapping his fingers around a tree branch. "Wet fur smells bad!"
His pleas fell upon deaf ears, as Yang Wei simply pulled hard enough to yank both him and the branch free, before hurling the struggling monkey into the same waters.
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The two of them lay side by side beneath the sky. Yang Wei had shed his outer robes, hanging them to dry. Orange-crest had just shaken himself furiously, watering every tree in the glade in the process.
It was a cold night, but true frost was still some weeks away. Neither of them were really dry, but they had the constitutions of cultivators and wine to warm them up. Plus the bed of woody-shrubbery they were laying on was surprisingly comfortable, a mixture of junipers and some other plants orange-crest did not know. The little sunburst flowers and water-green berries were very fragrant, if not sweet enough for proper snacking.
But more importantly, both of them were too stubborn to ever plead the desire for a fire's warmth first. They would yield to the elements in unison, or not at all.
"Winning means crushing the dreams of others." Yang Wei insisted. "Accept it. You cannot rise without stepping stones. How madly arrogant can you be, to think that you can simply change the nature of others through sheer force of will? The way we choose to react to our circumstances is the one thing nobody can take away from us." The source of this content ɪs NoveI★Fire.net
Orange-crest sighed. Telling Yang Wei about his desire to attain friendly relations with the rest of their initiate year was a mistake. One of the things about him that orange-crest least liked was how dismissive of them he was. Plus it was transparently hypocritical for him to declare that he shouldn't expect his defeated opponents to be open to him extending the hand of friendship. He had done exactly that with Yang Wei and it had worked.
He told the irritating young master as much.
Yang Wei just shrugged in answer.
"Why should I take defeat to heart? My dreams are too vast for you to ever impede in any way that matters."
"And I'm the arrogant one? That's stupid. They should just have dreams that don't rely on beating me. If I lost to them, I'd just try something different tomorrow. We all must live together. We should get along. Why do all the humans hate each other anyway?"
"What?"
"Why don't the elders just hit you until you stop plotting more and more revenges. Your uncle could do it."
Yang Wei turned his head toward the Li Hou, struck dumb for the first time in this entire surreal conversation.
"You cannot just make people lay down their grudges through overwhelming violence."
"Overwhelming power." Orange-crest corrected.
"The difference is immaterial. And that's not how it works."
"But why? It works for the Monkey King."
"What, just be a tyrant who crushes all dissent? Force people to get along."
"No, only crush dumb dissent. Be a good tyrant."
"A good tyrant." Yang Wei repeated, rising up on his elbows. "That is simply not how life works."
"Works for the king."
Yang Wei took a deep breath.
"I am not going to argue about government with a monkey."
"You are arguing about government with monkey. Right now." Orange-crest noted.
"No. Perhaps monkeys are different than men. But that would never work for us. Even the unassailable heavens do not condescend to simply declare our rightful grudges quashed."
Despite orange-crest's best efforts, that was all Yang Wei would say on the subject. He let the matter drop. He was starting to get cold. They should head home soon. It had been a wonderful night, one worthy of long memory. But all nights and days must end.
He was just about to voice that sentiment when Yang Wei suddenly spoke.
"Does it ever chafe at you, how small our world is?" The young master asked.
Orange-crest thought about it.
"No? Only seen two mountains. But only see little bits of two mountains. And my master says the world has lots of mountains. And rivers and seas and valleys and cities and islands. He doesn't know how many. Just knows there are more than a thousand-thousand of them combined. Doesn't seem small to me."
"Not like that. The people in it, not the world itself. They raise us up on these tales of heroes and demons. But most of us are not allowed to even start to cultivate until sixteen or seventeen. I see the rationale of for that rule. It is all to easy for a child to fall to deviation or demonic urges. But then they lock us up in the sect, like bugs in a jar. I was forbidden from leaving at all for my first year. Even now that I am a full disciple, I will be forced to travel with an inner disciple as dao protector at minimum. Every mission I take pass through some elder's desk, the level of danger assessed, for unlike so many others, I am too important to lose. I understand why our entry into the world of cultivation was delayed. What I don't understand why the sect coddles its talents so. I know of precious few legends worth the name that did not rise to those heights through bloody strife. Ren Yuhan forged his crystalline body and mastered his saber in the skirmishes with the Wu. Yang Shui found his spear standing opposite the Three Shadows of the West. Even the Qianlong Emperor earned the title of crown prince by placing his life upon the line, standing against guai and dragons."
Yang Wei fell silent. Orange-crest waited, before prompting him.
"And?" The monkey didn't understand the question here.
"Our seniors might be impossibly far beyond us. But how are we to build a foundation that will allow us to surpass them if we wait until we are old before risking true danger?"
Orange-crest sat up. He reached over, and cuffed Yang Wei across the head.
Yang Wei immediately slugged him back. But orange-crest dipped into stone for a moment, returning to the sight of the man nursing a bloodied fist.
"Just don't." He told the idiot-prodigy.
"Just don't? Don't what, don't travel?"
"Don't follow their rules. If you see a better way, walk it."
"Unlike you, I respect my elders. Who they are, what they have done. I don't want to break their rules. I want to understand the reason they laid them down."
Orange-crest sighed. He wasn't getting it. He tried once more.
"You ask me how you can be free, without breaking rules. You miss the point. The Monkey King crushes dissent. But sometimes we fight anyway. He saves us from calamity. But sometimes we walk headlong to our doom. Is how I got here, after all. Do. Or don't. But don't complain about the laws you choose to obey."
Yang Wei fell silent. Eventually he shifted, laying back down in the thick juniper hedge.
"I am tired. I am going to go to sleep now."
"No! Go home first! Don't want your scary uncle angry at me if a bear eats you."
"I don't think I will." Yang Wei said, lying back and closing his eyes. "If my uncle didn't want me sleeping in the rough, he would have said something."
"I meant stop listening to other people! Not stop listening to me. Obey me!"
Yang Wei smiled, his eyes remaining firmly shut.
"No."
Orange-crest thought about kicking him. Or throwing his robes back into the mountain pool. But instead, he settled on walking home. You could show a human good sense, but apparently you couldn't make them embrace it. He had several long days of cultivation ahead of him after this. He was going to sleep in a warm place tonight.
But... Orange-crest didn't like not having the last word.
"You know... If you're looking for danger. I know where you can find it, without ever leaving the sect."
"Yes?" Yang Wei asked, not opening his eyes. "Do share."
"The caves beneath the Azure Mountain are filled with terrible things. I once fought a centipede spirit beast that weighed as much as a dozen men."
Yang Wei bolted upright, sleep forgotten. That was everything he'd ever wanted from his time with the sect. A true hunting ground, unlike the placid surface where he might comb the mountain for days and never encounter anything above the third or fourth stage of Qi Condensation.
"You better not be playing tricks on me." He warned, excitement undercutting the resolve he sought to convey.
He turned to the monkey, but there was no response. The damnable thing was already bounding down the mountainside back in the direction of the sect proper. It wasn't until he'd chased it halfway back to it's masters dwelling that he realized he'd left his outer robes behind, still drying on that branch.